musicals
Gary Naylor
One wonders if Ricky Simmonds and Simon Vaughan pondered long over their debut musical’s title. Silvio might invite hubristic comparisons with Evita (another unlikely political leader), but Berlusconi feels a little Hamilton – too soon? They went with the surname of their anti-hero which appears a mite unwieldy on the playbill. Alas, that’s not the last unwieldy element of this sprawling, curiously unengaging, half-hearted skewering of Italy’s preening populist. We open on a stage all but filled with a bright white set of steps that half-reminded me of the Victor Emmanuel II Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It now seems an inevitability that Marisha Wallace will be a frontrunner at next year's theatre awards, not just this year’s. Having barnstormed her way to a 2023 Olivier nomination for playing Ado Annie in the Young Vic’s Oklahoma!, her Miss Adelaide, luckless fiancée of crap-game organiser Nathan Detroit, is the crowning achievement of Nicholas Hytner’s exuberant new production of Guys and Dolls at the Bridge, which itself should be a shoo-in for prizes of its own.Hytner has taken the 1950 Frank Loesser comic musical about gambling low-lifes in New York along a new route. It’s what Read more ...
The Great British Bake Off Musical, Noel Coward Theatre review - blue-chip cast lift daft confection
Helen Hawkins
If you are hoping for some harmless fun at The Great British Bake Off Musical, probably with a few dodgy jokes about soggy bottoms mixed in, you won’t be disappointed. But what you might not expect is that the show will liberally ladle on the innuendo and is so filthy at times that it’s like being at an adult panto. The audience on opening night certainly seemed a primed one, aahing when a contestant was sent home, booing when one resorted to sabotage. What else can the writers do, though, other than step up the smut when their subject is a storyless TV show set almost entirely in a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It is, perhaps, important to note that this production was first staged in London at the Young Vic, a venue noted for shows possessed of a rather harder edge than that usually connoted by the description "West End musical".On leaving the theatre after an unnecessarily gruelling evening in just about the most uncomfortable seat in which I’ve ever sat (and competition is very fierce in that category), I heard an old boy who had not clocked that provenance remark, “It was very… modern.” Quite.And why not? The old warhorse has seen 80 years of beautiful mornings, sitting in the canon of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
For many years, I would ask groups of students to vote in elections because “it’s important to honour those who gave up so much to ensure that the likes of us can”. Some would nod, others would shrug, a few might have inwardly scoffed – too cool for school, innit? Kate Prince’s long-aborning musical Sylvia illustrates how our (near) universal franchise was won and the emotional and physical cost levied on the pioneers who won the argument in Parliament and on the streets.Ben Stones’ set doesn’t give us much to work with – the dark greys on even darker greys suggesting the bleak Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Like families, nations have secrets: dirty linen that they prefer not to expose to the light of day. Patriotic myths need to be protected, heroic narratives shaped, good guy reputations upheld. In 1942, the USA rounded up Japanese-Americans and locked them away in the badlands of the Midwest and promptly forgot about them – and then worked hard to keep it that way in the decades that followed. It’s likely you didn’t know that and it’s no accident if so.One such intern was George Takei – Star Trek’s Mr Sulu and, in his extraordinary second life, liberal activist supreme on social Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’ve had 75 years to get used to Scrooge McDuck, so we can hardly complain if the Americans indulge in a little cultural appropriation and send Charles Dickens’ misanthrope to Depression-era Tennessee for another whirl on the catharsis-redemption ride. And, even if we Brits may feel a bit sniffy about Scrooge’s reinvention, he’s been kidnapped by Dolly Parton, the patron saint of country songs, for a holiday run on the South Bank - so listen y’all, there’ll be no rootin’ tootin’ about that round these parts.Expanded from a 40-minute "park presentation" at Dollywood into a full-fledged Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
What do you mean you haven’t heard of the newsboys’ strike of 1899? It’s a classic David and Goliath story: a group of New York kids selling newspapers for Joseph Pulitzer (him of the prize), who take a stand when their boss tries to charge them 20% extra to buy their “papes”.The 1992 Disney film, Newsies, became a cult classic, and was turned into a Tony-winning Broadway show in 2011 that ran over 1000 performances. The newsies have now burst onto the stage of the shiny Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre, backflipping, wise-cracking, and making the most of some mediocre songs.Director/ Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Hovering way, way above us, three aptly named high fairies, in voluminous chiffon, open a show that may not be airy in the metaphorical sense, but invites us to cast our eyes upwards continually – no bad thing to do in the bleak midwinter of 2022. But does the show, delayed after one Covid cancellation after another on its spluttering debut 12 months ago, soar as a new show should? Give or take the odd clunky landing, it does.A fourth fairy, more Cindi Lauper on Top of the Pops back in the day than Diana at Westminster Abbey, is, like Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life, hampered by an absence Read more ...
Matt Wolf
I bow to no one in my affection for Matilda the Musical onstage, which I've loved across multiple iterations, from Stratford-upon-Avon to the West End and Broadway, and numerous cast changes, too.But Matthew Warchus's screen iteration of his Roald Dahl-inspired ongoing London hit is an entirely separate triumph in and of itself, smartly adapted and ever so slightly reconceived so as to sneak the occasional nifty political reference into its universal tale of childhood angst.As in the theatre, how can one not immediately warm to material in which the mere mention of literature excites the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Just about the three toughest tricks to pull off in the theatre are making a musical, making a family show and making characters so charming that even the most cynical in the house are pulling for the little guy (or not so little in this case). So if it takes the armature of a blockbuster Hollywood movie to buttress the production, who cares?Back at the Dominion Theatre seven years on from its successful run, Elf spreads the feelgood from stalls to circle with enough warmth to chase any wintry chills away. As with all the best seasonal shows, you know your emotions are being manipulated Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Whorehouses, gay prostitution and suicide – you can see why James Jones’ bestselling 1951 novel was bowdlerised by the publishers and sanitised into subtext by Hollywood for the Oscar-laden movie released a couple of years later. As the extensive list of trigger warnings at the box office suggests, we’re very much in the world of the unexpurgated original text (eventually published in 2011) for this West End revival of Stuart Brayson’s and Sir Tim Rice’s musical.A fortnight before Pearl Harbour, the army boys are kicking their heels, thousands of miles from action, in the apparent backwater Read more ...