Writing down what I think about theatre I've seen in That London, whether I've been asked to or not.
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T.S. Eliot is probably best known for The Waste Land , but for a true vision of apocalyptic despair you need only look at the stage version of his book of children's poetry Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats . It is of course his famous collaboration with His Exalted Britannic Excellency, Master of all he Surveys, The Right Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, KC, MD,…
The comparative theatrical quiet of August often means a chance for me to catch up on some digital versions of shows I'd missed, and NTatHome have just added Thornton Wilder's Our Town , in its recent touring co-production from The Actor Michael Sheen's Welsh National Theatre and the Rose Theatre in Kingston*. Sheen plays the Stage Manager, a figure who it occured to me this time I would be…
For my roughly annual trip away from Dame Theatre to Baroness Dance, it's one of the Matthew Bourne ballets I've managed to miss on its numerous previous visits to London since its 2000 debut. The Car Man is based on Bizet's opera Carmen , although only musically - the story is apparently more directly inspired by The Postman Always Rings Twice . Set in a small town in 1950s America, whose economy…
A pair of fraternal twins are separated; the female twin, believing her brother to be dead, goes to a strange and possibly dangerous place where she takes on his identity, only to reconnect with him in an unexpected way. It's one of the main plots of Twelfth Night , which Sarah Kane cited as an inspiration for Cleansed , but it's fair to say that she interpreted it in a slightly different way than…
I've got a couple of shows planned for later this week notorious for their nudity, and it feels like the theme has started early with Love's Labour's Lost : While everyone more or less keeps their kit on at the Globe, Ned Costello spends much of it in matador pants so tight he might as well be naked. It's all done for highly plot-significant reasons, honest, because Indiana Lown-Collins'…
By now I think we can take it as read that Simon Stone's adaptations of classic texts will actually be devised riffs vaguely inspired by a general theme, that share little with the original other than the title. I've had some very different responses to them over the years, and I suspect I like them in inverse proportion to how well I know the classic versions. And regular readers of this blog…
Kenneth Branagh has a long history with the RSC: Playing Hamlet there; not getting the Artistic Director job; starting a petition to ban anyone who didn't go to RADA from ever being employed there (probably.) Now he's reunited with something else he left behind decades ago: His Belfast accent, as he plays Chekhov's representative of a rising new monied middle class in The Cherry Orchard .…
Jennifer Ashley Tepper's collection of lesser-known songs by Rent and tick, tick... BOOM! creator Jonathan Larson opens with a video medley of his best-known one, "Seasons of Love," being sung by different groups in different languages, and laments the fact that Larson never lived to see the effect his music had on people and musical theatre as a whole. Although as ever I have to wonder if there…
Twelve years after the film shone an overdue light on the relationship between the LGBTQ+ and mining communities that were equally targeted by Margaret Thatcher's Britain, director Matthew Warchus reunites with original screenwriter Stephen Beresford, who provides the book and lyrics, plus composers Christopher Nightingale, Josh Cohen and DJ Walde to stage Pride the musical. In 1984, young gay…
With music by Peter Matz and the comedy pedigree of Harry Shearer and Tom Leopold on book and lyrics, Here Comes J Full Stop Edgar Exclamation Mark is a broadly comic attempt to satirise one of the most influential figures in shaping 20th century America: J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI for almost 60 years, but remembered as much for his fondness for wearing drag in his private life, as for…
