For all my scepticism about the views expressed by some characters, I decidedly think this is impressive work from a playwright to be taken seriously and it’s only very slightly too long a…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:00PMAt last, the Young Vic has come of age. Fun Home marks one of the best productions it has housed and breaks new ground for musical theatre.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMWith such an array of talent on offer, it’s a mystery why tutors chose as a graduate showcase this thinly-written early 80s spoof of 1920s girls’ school fiction long eclipsed by St Trini…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMIt’s a short run at the Donmar – take any available ticket, Polly Findlay’s splendidly-cast and nimbly directed production is a must-see. And let’s hope it has a longer life somewher…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:00AMThe ‘special relationship’ between the UK and US may be under strain at the moment but never was it stronger than in 84 Charing Cross Road, a warm-hearted rationing-era story of gnarly c…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:00AMThis is a very good production of a rather unmemorable musical. As stories about an argumentative mother and daughter go, The Rink is several farmboys short of the picnic that is Gypsy.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:00AMTartuffe was conceived in 1664 as a satire of the golden age of the court at Versailles, and in the clumsiest of updates, the excessive posturings of Louis XIV are replaced by allusions to D…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMIt’s been a bumper week for rape. Harvey Weinstein was indicted. Tommy Robinson was jailed for filming the accused in a grooming gang trial outside Leeds Crown Court. The world’s most du…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:00AMI find myself bemoaning weak material in The Biograph Girl while applauding excellent performances. In the cast of nine, everyone is engaging, focused and talented with tremendous collective…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:00AMThe Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park finally has a summer pantomime in Peter Pan they can revive with minor tweaks and cast changes forever if they so desire.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMWalking into Trafalgar Studios and seeing such a realistically dated four-star hotel suite, I thought, ‘oh, good, Katy Brand is going to satirise everything about sixties’ drawing room c…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMLorna Dallas extensively celebrates Spring in 16 tightly themed numbers at Live at Zédel and proves almost as remarkable a song archivist as she is a song stylist.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:00AMIt’s 59 minutes to Doomsday in Unexploded Ordnances, a new-one-on-me genre called ‘Forum Theatre’ where two celebrated lesbian actors recruit the 12 oldest audience members to be a cou…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMTwo groups are better impersonated on television than by theatre: the Royal Family, and East Enders. In H.R. Haitch they collide awkwardly in a royal wedding spoof musical with all the elega…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:00PMThe trouble with touring American musicals is… well, where do you start? First of all, they have to be de-skilled from the Broadway originals so that an associate director and a lower-cost…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:00PMThe unique selling feature of a $200-a-ticket Broadway musical which sets it apart from our homemade West End ones is often a vast stage filled with 40 hoofers and a dozen ginormous sets. Wh…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:00AMI have history with The Country Wife. As a drama student I learned the role of Harcourt in 24 hours when illness devastated the cast at the Nuffield Theatre Lancaster. The reviewer from the …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:00AMFearing ‘yet another’ one-woman show about Judy Garland, I almost missed out on Songs for Nobodies, but three things conspired to make it rather special.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:00PMSide by Side, Sondheim on Sondheim, A Spoonful of Sherman, a Shovelful of… Schwartz, Songs from the Shows, a somewhat unenchanted evening with – may the gods preserve us from compilatio…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMIt would be hard to imagine a play about young gay lives that speaks more eloquently to older gay men than the moving, informative and often hilarious The Inheritance at the Young Vic.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMRuthless! The Musical is a self-styled camp cult event in which the musical theatre genre, and several popular musicals, are spoofed. That they are ancient camp favourites such as Mame and G…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:00AMHas the Menier Chocolate Factory come to the end of the road? If you want to know how it feels to be trapped in some nightmare prison with no prospect of release, sit in the middle of a row …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMAt the Hippodrome Casino, in an unusual move from cabaret to a six-week run of a staged musical, Matthew Bugg’s Miss Nightingale comes up for air for at least the third time after taking t…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMThe interactive movie footage in Brief Encounter is well done, there are trains enough to satisfy the most diligent railway enthusiast, and the breaking waves motif is clever. Maybe it’s a…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:00AMThe Dog Beneath the Skin is like nothing else you’ll see in London at the moment, and as a piece of vintage theatre, as well as vintage poetry, may well be worth a look.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMA good old-fashioned play about good old-fashioned politics. Gore Vidal’s 1960 satire The Best Man is based around the Democratic convention where in reality JFK won his nomination.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMIt may be better not to have seen the movie Fanny & Alexander. Coming to the stage version untainted you’ll have a stronger chance to enjoy an exuberant energy and ribald theatricalit…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:00AMWhat shafts this production of Pippin royally in its fishnet and suspender-clad buttocks is its slavishly dated adherence to Fosse style costume and choreography as though no other interpret…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMThis new stage version of Harold & Maude says more about modern attitudes to ageing, about feminism, migration and seizing opportunities than the current slew of angry Fringe diatribes.…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMDespite Felicity Dean’s fine glint-in-the-eye portrayal of both the camp and the stern Princess, there are no fresh insights in Richard Stirling’s script for A Princess Undone.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:00AMIf the conflicting obsessions of the characters and the murkiness of the plot in Foul Pages at the Hope Theatre were more brightly illuminated, this could be a sustained and hilarious evenin…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:00AM