Theatre
Red Speedo, Orange Tree Theatre review - two versions of American values slug it outMonday, 22 July 2024
Before Lucas Hnath wrote Red Speedo, he had heard a 2004 speech at a hearing investigating baseball doping that declared the practice “un-American”. That started him thinking about the concept of fairness. After the play had been produced in New... Read more... |
ECHO, LIFT 2024, Royal Court review - enriching journey into the mind of an exileSaturday, 20 July 2024
The Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour is many things, some seemingly contradictory: a) a clever, poetic playwright who uses high-tech elements in his work to inventive effect; b) a mischievous presence who likes to appear in his own highly... Read more... |
The Hot Wing King, National Theatre review - high kitchen-stove comedy, with sides of dramaSaturday, 20 July 2024
There’s an exuberant comedy from the start in Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King, which comes to London after an initial Covid-truncated Off Broadway run which brought her a Pulitzer prize in 2021. Roy Alexander Weise’s production puts in all the... Read more... |
Hello, Dolly!, London Palladium review - Imelda Staunton makes every line a deal-brokerFriday, 19 July 2024
Jerry Herman is the king of pep. Way too much of it in the first 20 minutes of the recent revue Jerry’s Girls had me screaming for a breather, but here the opening cavalcade, gorgeous overture included, intoxicates thanks to Dominic Cooke‘s razor-... Read more... |
The Baker's Wife, Menier Chocolate Factory review - loving reappraisal doesn't entirely, well, riseFriday, 19 July 2024
The Baker's Wife closed on the way to Broadway in 1976, since which time Stephen Schwartz's stubbornly resistent if sweetly scored musical has been revived and reworked all over the map, not least by Gordon Greenberg. The American director has... Read more... |
More Than One Story review - nine helpings of provocative political theatreMonday, 15 July 2024
A stark end-title at the end of this collection of short films sums up the dire situation the UK is in: one in five people,14 million Britons, are now living in poverty. This shocking statistic is one the enterprising people of the Cardboard... Read more... |
Visit from an Unknown Woman, Hampstead Theatre review - slim, overly earthbound slice of writer's angstSaturday, 13 July 2024
Who was Stefan Zweig? It's likely that it's mostly older folk who studied German literature at A-level who have encountered this superb Viennese writer in his native language, though his short story from 1922, Letter to an Unknown Woman, eventually... Read more... |
Grud, Hampstead Theatre review - sparky investigation of a geeky friendshipWednesday, 10 July 2024
Sarah Power, the writer of Grud, now in the Hampstead’s smaller space, is a self-confessed geek who excelled at science at school. She also had an alcoholic parent, and both autobiographical strands have turned up trumps in this, the... Read more... |
Skeleton Crew, Donmar Warehouse review - slow burn that satisfyingly catches fireTuesday, 09 July 2024
For a long stretch of its first half, Dominique Morrisseau’s 2016 award-winner, Skeleton Crew, seems a conventional workplace drama, though in a much gentler key than Lynn Nottage’s Sweat. But this slow burn catches fire.The first sign that... Read more... |
Next to Normal, Wyndham's Theatre review - rock musical on the trauma of mental illnessFriday, 05 July 2024
We open on one of those suburban American families we know so well from Eighties and Nineties sitcoms - they’re not quite Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, but they’re not far off. As usual, we wonder how Americans have so much space, such big... Read more... |
Mnemonic, Olivier Theatre review - thanks for the memoriesThursday, 04 July 2024
I’m sitting in the Olivier waiting for the show to start, comfortable in the knowledge that I’ve seen the original production of Mnemonic, one of Complicité’s most lauded plays, in 1999; but I struggle to remember anything about it, the... Read more... |
Starlight Express, Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre review - freight is kinda greatTuesday, 02 July 2024
The reinvigoration of Andrew Lloyd Webber continues apace. New York is now hosting a ballroom culture, drag-inflected Cats, and the Olivier-laureled Sunset Boulevard, a breakaway hit last year on the West End, hits Broadway in the autumn.And here is... Read more... |
