Filth, farce and absurdism are individually difficult to pull off so combining all three in a ripely uncensored 50th-anniversary version of Joe Orton’s Loot is high risk, but when it works…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:00PMJordan Tannahill’s taut, 75-minute darkly comic real-life social drama Late Company draws two Toronto couples into God of Carnage country as they attempt to broker closure over the suicide…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:00AMAntic Disposition’s RayBan-and-head-mike-modernised Richard III contrasts the glorious 12th century setting of Temple Church, with a terrific crash course in modern ensemble acting and a b…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMAgainst the odds, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ is an energetic, sharp and witty triumph. I say ‘against the odds’ because, in the over-extended franchise Olympics, Adrian M…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:00AMI started to wonder whether being cast with an all Indian company – to reflect the population of a typical Lancashire street of terraces nowadays – might better highlight the characters�…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMThere's more than a touch of Bette Davis in The Anniversary in this Jamie Lloyd-directed version of Alexei Kaye Campbell’s acidulated family drama Apologia, now lightly Americanised to sui…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:30AMRevival is a strange word. It suggests something rescued from its deathbed and shocked into fresh vigour by an infusion of talent, or money, or inspiration. In the case of I Loved Lucy, th…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:00PMSadly, despite a few crisp one-liners and a catchy title I’m surprised was never used elsewhere, Twilight Song emerges as a frail Rattiganesque slice of sixties’ repressed sexuality cont…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:00AMTouch may come from the same stable as the amazing Fleabag but drops the posh and goes Welsh: imagine Stacey left Gavin for a squalid London studio, a diet of Echo Falls, microwave dinners a…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:00AMThe concentric hooped wooden arches framing the proscenium should give you a clue: made from the barrels scraped during the production process
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:00PMA ‘Privates on Parade’ for the war in the Pacific, YANK! is everything you don’t expect from the cheesy title – a cleverly-constructed and original musical about illicit gay love whi…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMI’ve been trying to remember why I didn’t go to either the 1983 original or the 2006 London revival of Blondel. Especially as its central character is King Richard I of England whose hei…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:00PMMy Country: A Work in Progress is an oral tapestry woven by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy from knitted squares of conversation collected by National Theatre researchers from pockets of popul…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMSaid it before so let’s say it again and this time hope they put it on the posters: “Jon Brittain’s Rotterdam is the best ‘gay play’ since My Night With Reg” – a clever sharply…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMThis is a difficult one. I really like Annie Get Your Gun but the 1946 original was butchered in 1999 for a US revival with Bernadette Peters and most references to ‘Injuns’ excised to s…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMI’ve said this lots of times before but you can’t spoof a spoof – when written in 1885 The Mikado was already a parody, satirising British Imperial politics and institutions by transpo…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:00PMSo why doesn’t the current production of Lettice and Lovage at the Menier Chocolate Factory push my buttons? I fear it suffers from Forty Years On Syndrome – a circumstance whereby even …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:00AMThese are the skeletons you want in your closet. In Addams Family Musical, Samantha Womack brings unexpected warmth to Morticia – is that a good thing? – and Cameron Blakeley’s Gomez, …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:00PMMadam Rubinstein focuses on her career-long rivalries with Revlon and particularly Elizabeth Arden played with venomous camp by Frances Barber dripping fox furs and acid putdowns. It’s sta…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMJordan Tannahill’s taut, 70 minute darkly comic real-life social drama Late Company draws two Toronto couples into God of Carnage country as they attempt to broker closure over the suicide…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:00AMI am inordinately fond of Forty Years On. In only my second ever trip to London, my mother took me to see the original production the year I was fifteen and therefore readily able to identi…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:00PMIt was marvellous to have RNIB guests with their dogs in the audience, and there’s a cleverness in the musical that you can enjoy it without sight.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 03:03AMShe’s joky, and open, and delightful company – and when she sings, although that Juilliard operatic training diction is ever present and the resonance of her chest cavity empowers even t…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:00AMI had high hopes for this first-full-London-staging-in-50-years production of How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMThe ultimate ‘backstage musical’ 42nd Street lifted America from the depression, and its timely arrival at Drury Lane in such majestic style is still an evening of total escapism, total …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:00AMTwo thoroughly nice chaps you’d safely take home to mother. Two Cambridge choral scholars and occasionally camp satirists at pains to remind you they’re heterosexual. One a bit shorter a…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMIn The Life, drug-dealing Guys and rent-by-the-hour Dolls walk a side of 42nd Street far shadier than the tapdancing one at Drury Lane. The daily grit and the nightly grind are underpinned w…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:00PMIt is a delightful curiosity, though, in the sense that it’s a show deliberately aiming at a long life on college and festival circuits rather than having eyes on the prize of Broadway or …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMCharacter development in Chinglish comes second to the brisk pace of the jokes in Andrew Keates’ clever and compact staging
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMIan Hislop and Nick Newman’s stage version of their more realistic television play screened by the BBC in 2013 neatly captures their schoolboy humour but is just a bit too schoolboyish in …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMI have been waiting years for a musical of this quality, of this range of imagination and musical excellence, and of this sheer unadulterated beauty to arrive in London. Happily – so happi…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:00PM
