fri 11/07/2025

Menier Chocolate Factory

The Color Purple, Menier Chocolate Factory

A joyful noise? Hell, yes. Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-winning 1982 feminist novel set in Georgia and spanning more than 30 years is crammed with suffering, injustice and cruelty. But in its characters’ journeys towards a realisation of identity –...

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Proof, Menier Chocolate Factory

Mathematicians are a breed apart, bandying numbers about in a way that few outside their magic circle can fully understand. David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play uses this exclusiveness to investigate the complex relationship between a father...

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Merrily We Roll Along, Menier Chocolate Factory

On Broadway, Merrily We Roll Along remains forever scarred as the Stephen Sondheim musical that ground to an abrupt halt, closing after two weeks in 1981. But New York's theatrical failures often exist to be discovered anew across the Atlantic, and...

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Charley's Aunt, Menier Chocolate Factory

A revival of an old play with a broad sense of fun and a turbo-charged role for a co-star of hit sitcom Gavin & Stacey? No, not One Man, Two Guvnors, but this well-dressed production of the classy 1892 farce by Brandon Thomas starring Mathew...

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Torch Song Trilogy, Menier Chocolate Factory

If it's possible for a piece of writing to remain significant, even important, without necessarily being great, that would describe the status of the epoch-defining Torch Song Trilogy 29 years after the triptych won Tony Awards for Harvey Fierstein...

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Abigail's Party, Menier Chocolate Factory

Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party: comedy classic or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with added sneering? Ever since its first appearance on stage in 1977 and its subsequent record-breaking broadcast as a BBC Play for Today with an eye-widening 16...

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Pippin, Menier Chocolate Factory

Should the people who made Tron - or for that matter James Cameron - ever decide to take on a Broadway musical, they owe themselves a trip to the Menier Chocolate Factory's ludicrous production of Pippin to find out how not to do it. Just because...

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Terrible Advice, Menier Chocolate Factory

Saul Rubinek is an established actor in American television programmes such as LA Law and Frasier, where he played Daphne's fiancé Donny. Now the Canadian has turned his hand to playwriting and the result – Terrible Advice – receives its world...

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Road Show, Menier Chocolate Factory

Brotherly love, or not: David Bedella and Michael Jibson play the Mizners, Wilson and Addison, in Stephen Sondheim's latest

"Onward we go," the hearty but essentially hapless Wilson Mizner (David Bedella) remarks well into Road Show, the Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical that has been slow-aborning, and then some, since it first appeared in workshop form in New York...

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Nina Conti, Menier Chocolate Factory

Monkey talk: Nina Conti and Monk, one of her puppets

You don’t see much ventriloquism these days. It’s a comedy form mostly associated with variety and Victorian music hall - although it goes back at least to the Greeks - and gives a lot of people the heebie-jeebies. I know several people who can’t...

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Smash!, Menier Chocolate Factory

Seventies dilemma: Natalie Walter and Tom Conti

If you're going to put on a show about putting on a show, you gotta get a gimmick, as a wise man not unconnected with the late Jack Rosenthal's autobiographical comedy once wrote. Put it another way: if the show/film/TV series depicted is...

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Ruby Wax: Losing It, Menier Chocolate Factory

Ruby Wax has packed a lot into her life - writer, actor, stand-up comic, television interviewer, to name a few. But possibly her greatest professional achievement will be her work in mental health, prompted by her own experiences of depression,...

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