Friday, September 4, 2015
‘Write what you know’ remains the best advice to any author and the story of how Michael Kirk picked up the plot of Hatched ‘n Dispatched from his 9-year-old observations of sexual she…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 03:13AMWednesday, September 2, 2015
In ordinary circumstances I need to be dragged to Shakespeare, and not even Hozier can Take Me To Church, but Antic Disposition’s happy coincidence of blood, bandage and badinage in a …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:38PMI hated Grand Hotel at the Dominion in 1992. It seemed confused, distant, under-scored and under-lit and there wasn’t a character I could engage with. As tickled up by Thom Southerland…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:25AMSaturday, August 29, 2015
Sometimes it’s nice to see a play near the end of its run. I’m quite a Richard Bean fan and thought Great Britain, particularly after Lucy Punch supplanted Billie Piper, wa…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:59AMFriday, August 28, 2015
You Won’t Succeed on Broadway if You Don’t Have Any Jews is a pithy, smart, hugely enjoyable satirical number from the Monty Python musical Spamalot. This show is none of those things, …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:51AMThursday, August 27, 2015
Derived in 2002 from the 1967 Julie Andrews movie, Thoroughly Modern Millie is thoroughly old fashioned. It’s sexist: all the women are actresses or typists; racist: landlady Mrs Meers…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:00PMSaturday, July 25, 2015
At a professionally-packed first night for Songs For A New World even long-time theatre diehards were squeaky with anticipation: never before have so many been longing for a ‘decent…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:50AMFriday, July 24, 2015
When backwoods trapper Adam Pontipee strides into the hay and feed store of a small Oregon town and asks “what’s the going rate for beaver?” he’s selling meat but act…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:52AMThursday, July 23, 2015
With David Suchet currently bashing Lady Bracknell’s back doors in in the West End it seems almost a logical sequence that trash drag supremo Jonny Woo should assail Katharine Hepburn&…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:52AMTuesday, July 7, 2015
The Dreamers might have fared better if it hadn’t been billed as a musical. It is hard to find a category for it – part centenary celebration, part video documentary, part commun…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:39AMWednesday, July 1, 2015
No one wants to piss on Poirot’s chips, but this really isn’t very good. David Suchet is a superb actor. Like Angela Lansbury if you set aside his television detective work he st…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:30PMFriday, June 26, 2015
This is the one where critics who spend most of their time in the theatre show off their football knowledge. In my case, it won’t take long. In fact one of the best things ab…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:15AMThursday, June 25, 2015
If I have a prediction about The Trial at the Young Vic, it’s that every reviewer will mention the conveyor belt and three out of five of them link it to The Generation Game. The auditoriu…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 03:45AMSunday, June 21, 2015
Fridays aren’t serious reviewing nights and the friend who suggested this piece to me described it as “some shit for gays” which despite our shared and enthusiastic homosex…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:47AMFriday, June 19, 2015
History Lesson: there’s no shortage of backstage musicals. There’s no shortage of musicals set in the Depression or prohibition era either – from Annie to Chicago to Windy …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:27AMWednesday, June 17, 2015
French and Saunders did a wonderful sketch, with Sarah Walker and Carl Davis, in which the pair spoof opera divas self-consciously ‘doing comedy’ and sing a piece by Kylie Minogu…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:29AMMonday, June 15, 2015
Extraordinary man. Extraordinary acts. Extraordinarily brave both of Jez Bond to commission it for the Park Theatre and Alistair McGowan to lend his immaculate skills as …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:31PMFriday, May 22, 2015
Clarke Peters doesn’t appear in the official Darren Bell rehearsal photo set for How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying which might explain why he fluffed so many times, lost…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 03:17PMTuesday, May 19, 2015
If you’ve never seen traditional opera – as opposed to the mucked-about-with stuff in pubs we also love – or never been to Covent Garden, Richard Eyre’s grandiose, be…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:45PMMonday, May 18, 2015
When is a world premiere not a world premiere? When a near-identical play ran three months in Keswick in 2012. This narking misrepresentation aside, Richard Cameron‘s piece direct…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:46AMWednesday, May 13, 2015
When I saw this at a Brighton matinee last September, my first thoughts were ‘if there’s a fire, we’re all toast: most of this lot are old enough to have known Noel Co…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:42AMMonday, May 11, 2015
Dear RSC: I’d like to return this Death of a Salesman. It just doesn’t fit. Apart from its unravelling from not being a Shakespeare play in your theatres over the 23 April ‘…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:28AMSaturday, May 9, 2015
Apart from almost soiling myself when Sissy Spacek’s hand reached out from the grave in the 1976 Brian de Palma movie, and knowing there’s a book about famous musical flops calle…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:29PMFriday, May 8, 2015
In politics, truth is stranger than fiction: given what happened last night in the General Election it would be tough for Theatre Delicatessen and The Lab Collective to conceive something mo…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:28AMThursday, May 7, 2015
Even if you can’t forgive Mark Ravenhill for leaden sitcom Vicious whose gay geriatrics are about to bed-block a prime time slot again on ITV, his movie-industry-meets-muslim-cell mono…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:51AMThursday, April 30, 2015
Everyman is about one individual’s judgment day and the harrowing evaluation of his life’s work before God. Specifically whether as new custodian of the NT Rufus Norris…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMMonday, April 27, 2015
In Bomber’s Moon James Bolam plays the kind of sharp-tongued and witheringly sardonic octogenarian most of us can only dream of becoming: and the first half of William I…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:00AMFriday, April 24, 2015
Dead Royal intertwines the stories of Wallis Simpson and Diana Spencer, one man plays two women who never quite made it to the throne despite behaving like a petulant old queen and an e…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMThursday, April 23, 2015
‘Write what you know’ has never been more apt. When a former Daily Express entertainment editor writes a play in which the showbiz section of his lightly fictionalized newsroom i…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:25AM 
