I 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 12:00PMThe first thing to say about the tour of La Cage Aux Folles is it has to be Bill Kenwright’s most generous production to date: no expense has been spared in beautifully detailed sets – s…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:30AMThe plot fuses a caper like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels with Indecent Proposal where mobster types hijack the love story of Jack and Betsy by offering her a weekend in Hawaii to pay off his gamb…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AM‘Waiter, have you got frog’s legs?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Well hop over the counter and fetch me a bacon sandwich …’ – is about the only old joke not shoehorned by Nathan Lane into …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:00PMI know it’s fashionable to deride Amanda Holden – well put me on the cover of Vogue because I think she’s awful. In Stepping Out, trying to combine her tabloid image as a vapid nymph w…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMIf, as she says, Corrie and EastEnders veteran Michelle Collins wants to shed her ‘soap actress’ image, she needs to find bolder challenges than Stewart Permutt’s comic but empty two-h…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMThere are few theatrical pleasures greater than witnessing the formidable Imelda Staunton graft fresh insights onto a well-known role: it can be almost as exhausting to watch as to do since …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMIt’s Shakespeare for the Borgen generation – a slick and surveillance-heavy visual on a cool penthouse set where Juliet Stevenson’s splendid dirty dancing Gertrude can shag Claudius on…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMThere is an incredible array of top talent assembled – powerful singers, athletic dancers and intelligent actors – but The Wild Party lacks the wit and humour of Chicago so that its effe…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:00AMAnyone Can Whistle: the Sondheim flop whose signal moment in the original 1964 production was when a dancer fell into the orchestra pit, inadvertently killing a musician.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:00AMIt makes for a cold and rather soulless evening as the simplicity of the production highlights both its age and its many flaws. Gilbert’s libretto might have had them rolling in the aisles…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMThere are few divas for whom you would queue an hour in the pouring rain on a cold night in January, but it was almost worth getting trench foot to witness the extraordinary, uplifting, gene…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:05PMBest I can say about Dirty Great Love Story is it could make a great date night for Valentine’s Day because your own relationship will seem so much better than dopey Richard and neurotic K…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:00AMStuart Slade’s Black-Mirror-dark London-centric BU21 delivers six interconnected young Londoners’ reactions to a terrorist attack on the city from the burns victim to the white van man w…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:03PMSometimes, however much you like the genre, a musical fails to capture your imagination or engage you in the way it should. So maybe it’s my fault that Kinky Boots comes over as trite, der…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:00AMWould we be more ‘half in love with easeful Death’ if instead of some cadaver in a cowl with a scythe he came at us as a handsome young man? Can you love someone ‘more than life’? …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMIt won’t be easy, you’ll think it strange – but Evita in 1978 was the last show co-written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Despite their later separate successes, it remains an of…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:30PMTwenty years ago, there was a lot of it about: light comedies afloat in the West End, chronicling the disintegration of a suburban marriage while simultaneously lampooning the middle-class e…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:15AMGeorge Stiles and Anthony Drewe have given the 1963 David Henecker score a complete re-boot with new songs which fit seamlessly into the story – their ragtime ‘Pick Out A Simple Tune’ …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:00AMNeedle, meet haystack. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find one man identified only by a fuzzy faxed photograph in a city of nine million. He has a beard and a bad haircu…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:05PMI suppose what I’m driving at is that having swerved from the stage into a political career, my concern was how easily could she take up acting again? The astonishing thing about King Lear…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:30AMHugh Maynard is extremely handsome and charismatic off stage but on stage required to bury his charm beneath Todd’s persistently dour and single-minded revenge against Judge Turpin. His pe…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:00AMDespite being written in 1983, Sam Shepard’s Fool For Love never made it to Broadway until this time last year. Even then, Daniel Aukin’s production ran for a limited twelve week engagem…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:05PMI despair of two-handed musicals. Required to judge the personalities or take sides, you feel trapped. Nowhere more so than at The Last Five Years, in which the partners wail their issues at…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:18AMDaisy and Violet’s true confessions make more shocking reading than anything covered in the musical: they each married a gay man – one for ten years, one for ten days – and were allege…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:00AMIf you can’t take a joke, you really shouldn’t have joined. Some critics are up in arms that the 1979 ‘classic’ piece Amadeus has been deconstructed and, they say, dumbed down in the…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:20AMThe master stroke of the creative team at Bristol Old Vic is to re-imagine his The Man Who Laughs through the dirty lens of Tim Burton, and to centre The Grinning Man on the brutally malevol…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:00AMShakespeare 101: muck/fuck about with it all you like, the poor sod’s well out of copyright, but the acid test for any modern rendering is ‘if you hadn’t seen this play before, would t…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:04AMA dozen of Thom Southerland' excellent cast of triple threats also play the entire score as actor-musicians seamlessly blended into the action: I have never seen this done better. In a word,…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:36AMThis isn’t an exhaustive list because there’ll be a panto somewhere in practically every postcode come December, but it is a rundown of your options – financial and artistic – for a …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:00AMAs 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 06:39PM
