musicals
Gary Naylor
I’ll confess to a certain schadenfreude when the American televangelists who seemed so foreign to us Brits were led away to be papped on their perp walks, ministers in manacles: One big name after another skewered on their own hubris, gulling the gullible out of their savings and shoe-horning right-wing ideologues into political and judicial office. Thank God (ironically) that we’re too smart for that kind of nonsense in Europe. How’s that turning out then? Perhaps it was the lockdown; perhaps it was the recent excellent film, The Eyes Of Tammy Faye; or perhaps it was just getting Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Who tells your story? Something of a theme in new musicals since Hamilton posed the question in those long ago pre-Covid, pre-inflation days. In Ride, the once famous cyclist who had hardly ever ridden a bike, Annie Londonderry, circumvents the problem right at the start, because she will – and she’ll also, a little reluctantly, tell the story of Annie Kopchovsky, the Latvian-born mother she once was.It was three years ago that Freya Catrin Smith and Jack Williams found Annie’s story and started to develop it as a musical, a version winning the Vault Festival Show of the Week in 2020. It Read more ...
Gary Naylor
What will get audiences back into theatres? Revivals of old favourites. Works from popular genres like musicals. Pantomimes. This production of Into The Woods kinda ticks all those boxes, but it also ticks the box that matters most. It is a unique experience – not podcastable, not downloadable, not multiplexable. Co-directors, Terry Gilliam and Leah Hausman, have worked together before and it shows in a vision that is both coherent yet also continually surprising, even a press night audience (who’ve seen it all – or think they have) going full “Wow” time and again, as the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A semi-staged concert performance of a musical is a little like a third trimester ultrasound scan. You should see the anatomy in development, the shape of what is to come and, most importantly, discern a heart beating at its centre. But you can’t tell if what will arrive some time later will be a bouncing baby or a sickly child. So it is with this iteration of a new British musical, Treason. We’re in a divided kingdom whose leader, Queen Elizabeth I, is about to die and whose successor is unclear – the audience did not need too much prompting to catch the contemporary parallels. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder!, Summerhall ★★★★★ What a pleasure to be in the audience for this terrific musical whodunnit, about best friends Kathy (Bronté Barbé ) and Stella (Rebekah Hinds), who live in Hull and have a podcast devoted to “in-depth chat about murders”, the grislier the better. So when their heroine, crime writer Felicia Taylor (Jodie Jacobs) is decapitated shortly after they meet her, they set about finding her murderer.What follows is pure joy as the cast of five (three of them playing multiple roles) sing, dance and emote their way through a story littered with Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
How old is Emile de Becque? Perhaps because my first Emile was the 1958 film version’s Rossano Brazzi, my vision of the lonely French plantation owner in the South Pacific during the Second World War has been coloured by that casting: a visibly greying, slightly stiff man with correct manners who conforms to the vague description “middle-aged”.Brazzi was actually only 42 when the film was released; another great Emile, Broadway’s Paolo Szot, was nudging 40 when he started playing the role. So why does Julian Ovenden, 45, seem almost overly youthful as Emile in Daniel Evans’s Chichester Read more ...
Gary Naylor
LJ's dream has come true - she has her very own wine bar. Unfortunately for us, it turns into a bit of a nightmare.This new musical open on a nostalgic 70s vibe. Tables and chairs fill almost all of Southwark Playhouse's smaller space, a set that conjures memories of the sitcom from that period, Robin's Nest, or the infamous dining room at Fawlty Towers; recent films such as Boiling Point have also found comparable environments fertile ground for exploring the narrow line between comedy and tragedy.Initially we focus on LJ herself, Mischief theatre alum Nancy Zamit's harassed manager Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If jukebox shows occupy one end of the musical theatre spectrum and Stephen Sondheim's masterpieces the other, Sister Act The Musical is somewhere in-between.We get songs we know (Alan Menken's score, heard first on the West End and then, in 2011, on Broadway, includes many staples of talent shows and daytime radio), stunt casting for name recognition and, best of all for a production delayed for two years by Covid, a confident showmanship that screams "entertainment"! If you can afford to be sniffy about such blatant commerciality in these straitened times, then good for you!The director Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's further training, shall we say, still needed on 101 Dalmatians, the much-delayed show that marks the second consecutive musical this summer at the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, following their revisionist Legally Blonde.A busy, bustling title that takes ages to come into focus, Timothy Sheader's production feels like a work-in-progress, even if the puppetry work from the busy Toby Olié (concurrently represented by The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) as it is could scarcely be bettered. Is the piece worth pursuing further? You bet, not least because of the enduring Read more ...
Matt Wolf
This is the summer, in musical theatre terms at least, of the revival of the revival, with several recent remountings of iconic titles (South Pacific, now in London previews) getting a renewed lease on life, alongside the likes of My Fair Lady, Crazy for You, and Sister Act on hand in or near London to swell the ranks of the familiar yet further.So it's a delight to report that England's own Kerry Ellis – a onetime Eliza Doolittle as it happens – has taken over from Broadway powerhouse Sutton Foster in Kathleen Marshall's transplanted take on Anything Goes for an encore engagement Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The 2001 Reese Witherspoon-starring film Legally Blonde, upon which Heather Hach, Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin’s peppy Broadway musical is based, was something of a Trojan horse: a bubblegum-pink comedy with a feminist spine.Now Lucy Moss, co-creator of the juggernaut Six, updates it further with progressive casting choices and a winning kitsch stylisation in this joyous 21st century revival. Malibu princess Elle Woods (Courtney Bowman) has it all: president of her sorority at UCLA, and on the cusp of getting engaged to her dream man, Warner Huntington III (Alistair Toovey). But Read more ...
Mert Dilek
First staged in 2018, Bartlett Sher’s Lincoln Center Theater production of My Fair Lady is London’s latest import from Broadway, coming here hot on the heels of Oklahoma!. In returning to the city where its story is set, Lerner and Loewe’s iconic musical from 1956 receives a dashing treatment from a cast and creative team in their top form. In particular, this revival owes the most to its gently assured lead performances: Harry Hadden-Paton’s Professor Henry Higgins and Amara Okereke’s flower-girl-turned-lady Eliza Doolittle make for a richly volatile couple whose complex Read more ...