Thursday, October 13, 2016
As this is a one-woman show, the characters are realised only through Muggleton’s scathing commentaries in the mouth of once-literary but now blowsy Deborah, a superannuated Shirley Valent…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:39PMTuesday, October 11, 2016
There’s something instantly inviting about the bench on the seaside pier where average Tom meets average Mary and the crash of the waves under the boardwalk echoes the crash of the noisy i…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:56AMMonday, October 10, 2016
Just off the Elephant and Castle roundabout, it’s no surprise to come across a grotty pub filled with strange and aggressive drunks. It is a delightful surprise to find it recreated so rea…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:45AMFriday, September 30, 2016
‘In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine … ‘It’s very hard to get Huckleberry Hound’s tone-deaf version of ‘Clementine’ out of your head in this musical where a young K…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:44AMMonday, September 12, 2016
It’s eerie that the morning after The Dover Road, I’m driving down the Dover road to a weekend in Kent, and Radio 4 is bemoaning the fact that no-one drives for the pleasure of it any mo…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:07PMWednesday, September 7, 2016
The evening is all about delayed satisfaction and when the magicians Mike Tyler and Christopher Wayne arrive, fully clothed, their act is glossed with a lot of interactive banter with audien…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:18AMSunday, September 4, 2016
Washed up in wartime, Britten, his friend and romantic obsession W H Auden, the tedious waif-like poet and novelist Carson McCullers, and stripper turned thriller writer Gypsy Rose Lee share…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:17AMWednesday, August 24, 2016
From the moment she processes onto the stage, fairy-lit umbrella held aloft, in what can only be described as a ‘gown’, to the strains of Yair Evnine’s electric cello, you know you are…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:25PMNot much you see at the Edinburgh Fringe looks totally ready for London. But this does – ideal for Park 90, Trafalgar Studios 2 or Hampstead Downstairs.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:03AMTuesday, August 23, 2016
The first thing to say here is that yet again the producer/director collaboration of Danielle Tarento and Thom Southerland has come up with a beautiful show, full of charm, of energy and of …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:40AMAmong the slew of American college circuit and chamber musicals at the Fringe, Stop the Train by Rick Guard and Phil Rice stands apart for looking nearly London-ready. Its score, orchestrati…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:32AMSunday, August 14, 2016
It is such a good idea to make a singing Hitler develop a Vegas lounge career as ‘Frank Sanazi’ with a coterie of ‘Iraq Pack’ dictators as his support acts – just a pity that the e…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:58AMI don’t have much luck in this basement venue. I once saw a one-star one-man show here with an audience of seven, five of whom left part-way through. At a time when the political tussles …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:22AMMay the gods spare us from student visions of dystopian futures. We are beyond a new ice age, in the fifth millennium when the British isles have drifted Norsewards and the people speak cod…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:32AMLikeable laddish Midlands magician Ben Hamlin fronts ITV2’s Tricked in which the general public and some sub-prime celebrities (Louie Spence, random spraytans from TOWIE) are teased with c…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:40AMSaturday, August 13, 2016
For the avoidance of doubt, this is the late night show ‘Briefs Factory’ present at the Assembly Hall. For the avoidance of further doubt, this is the same show Briefs have brought to t…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 03:48PMYou have to be careful calling any richly tattooed Glaswegian a ‘mentalist’, but it’s how Colin Cloud described himself at his bum-flashing 2012 audition for Britain’s Got Talent.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 03:12PMFriday, August 5, 2016
Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of The Secret Garden, was the J K Rowling of her day.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:20AMTuesday, August 2, 2016
So what did I really think about Harry Potter and the Cursed Child? You need to know two things – first that I went to a press night because the reviewer assigned to it got a hospital appo…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:15AMThursday, July 21, 2016
In a plot which is The West Wing: The Musical before the interval, and The Sopranos after, his Jackie Kennedy-esque widow (scenery chewing fun and tiptop vocals from Lucy Williamson) shifts …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:18AMFriday, July 15, 2016
There are some gay men through whom the word ‘Judy’ runs like a stick of cheap rock. To question their devotion to the long-deceased Ms Garland is to adopt the same dangerous stance as c…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:25AMMonday, June 27, 2016
What do we know about Rudolph Nureyev? He was the most famous male ballet dancer of his generation, defected from the Soviet Union to the West, partnered Margot Fonteyn hundreds of times and…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:11AMSunday, June 26, 2016
In April last year, the delightful Lyric Hammersmith reopened with a commendably well-structured stage version of Bugsy Malone. Great production values, props, costumes, fight direction and …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:10PMSunday, June 19, 2016
Guest reviewer: Dan Frost The long-awaited stage production of Disney’s Aladdin certainly gets an A for effort. Transferring from Broadway with much hyped attached, it’s an Arabi…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:10AMWednesday, June 1, 2016
A struggling writer has an obsessive interest in wine. I don’t know anyone who could identify with that. When the movie Sideways came out in 2004, the lead character’s preference for Pin…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:17AMTuesday, May 31, 2016
You can blame The Thick of It – Mark Ravenhill’s ferociously foul-mouthed opener revived from 2007 in which a young soldier’s wife deflects the news of his death with c*nt after c*nt r…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:05AMFive rules for survival at Threepenny Opera: ONE: It’s an epic musical on a revolve, so think Les Miserables set in London any time since, but influenced by Sondheim bec…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:00AMWednesday, May 25, 2016
‘You can’t start with a pause’ says Birdboot to Moon at the top of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, but Mike Poulton and director Lucy Bailey disprove this most successfully …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:36AMTuesday, May 24, 2016
In 1975 Emmylou Harris might have walked all the way from Boulder to Birmingham but in 1842 a weedy, tweedy small-town teacher and small-time socialist named George Holyoake actually walked …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:57AMFriday, May 13, 2016
Hot recommendations for summer theatregoing: Doctor Faustus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Toxic Avenger, The Threepenny Opera...
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:00AMWednesday, May 11, 2016
The Landor Theatre has made an occasional departure from its repertoire of well-focused chamber-sized revivals to host an original creation called Devilish. Possibly with an exclamation mar…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:38AM 
