Wednesday, 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 05:38AMWell, it is, but the only bits I recognised were the first act pact with the devil and the final scene, because for his arresting production of Doctor Faustus, director Jamie Lloyd allowed t…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:06AMSunday, May 8, 2016
The Beeb wheeled out Peter Capaldi for its launch of A Midsummer Night’s Dream due to air on BBC1 at the end of May. Not because he’s in it but because the entire play, adapted to an ‘…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:23AMLast night an enthusiastic London audience celebrated the end of the run of an American musical diva born in 1947 whose career has touched millions.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:10AMTuesday, May 3, 2016
‘At this evening’s performance, the title role will be played by …’ Understudy. Somewhere between a trending topic and a dirty word as arguments rage over whether or not audiences sh…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:00AMFriday, April 29, 2016
In 1927, Jerome Kern shifted the shape of musical theatre from twee operetta to a tighter fusion of music with drama. He also designed Show Boat as a slap in the face to complacent audiences…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:47AMWednesday, April 20, 2016
This is a return to grand form for Lipman whose natural comic timing is best deployed undercutting the more strident statements and hinting at the unvoiced disappointments of marital life. S…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:10AMTuesday, April 12, 2016
Haram Iran is such a brave departure from Above The Stag’s usual diet of gaydar-dating comedies and slight musicals. The execution of two teenage boys in Mashhad, the second city of Iran, …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:15PMSaturday, April 9, 2016
At the car wash today and even though it was quiet and they wanted to chat, I avoided saying ‘where are you from’ to the five guys lavishing ten minutes’ soapy attention on my bodywork…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:30AMThursday, April 7, 2016
What's Matthew Perry's play like without Matthew Perry in it? Jonny McPherson scores initially simply for not being Matthew Perry – but that’s not an insult, it’s an observation that t…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:30PMTuesday, April 5, 2016
The night after Imelda Staunton picked up her Olivier award for best actress in a musical in Gypsy, her successor is a rock solid certainty. With such tumultuous reception at the Coliseum, t…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:34AMTuesday, March 15, 2016
It’s not often theatre reviews are bad enough to make BBC lunchtime headlines, but the writers of Miss Atomic Bomb should be donning their tin hats. When London’s most enthusiastic music…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:42PMThis is a BOGOF worthy of Ben Rimalower’s beloved discount store Target: his two one-hour monologues Patti Issues and Bad With Money ran separately off Broadway – the paean of love to Ms…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:00AMFriday, March 11, 2016
This is Ben. See Ben run. See Ben play on X-Box. See Ben go to Syria. Lucinda Burnett’s clever concept, Correspondence, is smartly staged at the Old Red Lion and blessed with a credible an…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:44AMSunday, March 6, 2016
Old theatrical war horses don’t come any older, warty or horsier than The Mousetrap. The longest running show in the history of theatre has recently licenced a national tour alongside its …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:03PMThursday, February 25, 2016
When I was a student, I worked in a care home. Somewhere in a drawer I have a half-written short story about an old lady in a similar institution who remembers, through the fog of Alzheimer…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:43AMSmart and authentic writing meets a riveting West End debut in Firebird at Trafalgar Studios. In his first venture to the downstairs studio at Hampstead Theatre, Ed Hall has found a remarkab…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:30AMThursday, February 18, 2016
With such an abundance of grand guignol, it’s best perhaps to let the music propel you through the three indulgent hours. Although not peppered with telly advertising favourites, Vincenzo …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:42AMWednesday, February 17, 2016
Wayne’s ‘World’ has been kicking about since the late 1970’s when he wrote this famous prog rock album around the same time Pink Floyd produced Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall and…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:15PMTuesday, February 16, 2016
Press nights are strange. So are Americans. At Hand to God, I sat in a part of the stalls surrounded by gushy younger American men fawning over Upper East Side matrons whose combination of s…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:58AMFriday, February 12, 2016
How charming is Barnes? And how posh – even the flats above Londis have chandeliers.
Nothing but waves of goodness and gentility, then, as we find the OSO arts and performance space car…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:22AMSaturday, February 6, 2016
What do you call a biographical play which is as unquestioning in its adoration of its star subject as it is blinded by self-obsessed camp homosexual fandom? Is there a genre called fag-hagi…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:51PMTuesday, February 2, 2016
The surrealism takes your breath away. Two years ago London raved about Adrian Lester, a British actor of Jamaican descent, playing Othello at the National. Now we can rave about the same Ad…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:45PMMonday, February 1, 2016
I can’t think of another play set like One of Those entirely on a train – Hecht and MacArthur’s On The Twentieth Century is the most persistently rail-bound but starts and ends in thea…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:12AMFriday, January 29, 2016
My parents loved Marty Feldman. Given I’m no spring chicken that tells you how far back into the recesses of black-and-white television you’d have to delve for the career and admittedly …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:20AMI’m still not sure what to make of The Dazzle – in the least comfortable fringe theatre newly created in the West End, up 76 steps and with a padlocked lift the first mystery is how West…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:50AMThursday, January 21, 2016
If it tells you nothing else, The Picture of Dorian Gray reminds you Oscar Wilde was a playwright not a novelist and this, his only work of prose fiction, emerges as a script with merely min…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:09PMWednesday, January 20, 2016
Having just come back from the Nazi Documentation Centre at Nuremberg, I must be one of the few reviewers who went to Big Brother Blitzkrieg because of its fascination with Hitler rather tha…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:42AMWhenever reviewers can’t readily categorise a new play they reach for a mixture of comparisons – so The Long Road South could be ‘half Far From Heaven, half Death of a Salesman’ in t…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:30AMSunday, January 17, 2016
People, people who need people are, allegedly, the luckiest people in the world. I’d argue that those who are emotionally and financially self-sufficient have a hell of a bigger reason to …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:42AMFriday, January 8, 2016
Director and producer Thom Southerland and Danielle Tarento solidify their reputation for salvaging ancient wrecks off the American coast. Having rescued Titanic equally from the icy waters …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:39AM 
