THEATRE’S FAIRY GODFATHER DOES IT AGAIN We needed this. The return of the big classic shows to packed houses in the Barbican, Chichester and Sadlers Wells has been invigorating, but Lloy…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:52AMOccupied France, 1944. Two teenagers newly in love meet in an empty house. Elodie is French, Otto a German soldier. They are both endearing and annoying, as befits their ag…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:00AMNOT A REVIEW BUT MIGHT SEND YOU THERE… Take this as a report not a review, because actual work commitments made me skip at the interval. But I was persuaded to the long 70 minute first h…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:12AMThis is the Mercury rising, rebuilt over two years with a cool café and dance studio, modern eco-glazing and, to respect the town’s history, a solemn archaeological dis…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:29PMWONDERFUL OLD COBBLERS ON ABDICATION STREET (longer version of review done for Mail) You know you’re in safe hands when a stagestruck Prince Edward, diffident and excitable, �…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:04AMFLOODS OF RELIEF Ten years have passed since, in a Times Chief Theatre Critic hat, I last saw a former principal of the Royal Ballet leaping in puddles , singing his great heart out, and…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:07AMA VOICE FROM THE 90’s PREFIGURES THE FUTURE… This is a grand intellectual teaser of a show, and under Lucy Bailey’s almost mischievous direction does a good job of shaking up fas…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:49PMGUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI FINDS MORE SMOKE THAN FIRE ON THE HACKNEY STAGE Grimeborn are following up their fantastic 2019 Das Rheingold (see my previous review) with Die Walküre this …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:57AMVICARIOUS TRAVEL, JUST WHAT WE NEED The big musicals are back: two dark-edged, South Pacific at Chichester and Carousel imminent at Regent’s Park, while halfway between them flowers…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:55AMBy Libby Purves Libby Purves travelled down to the Chichester Festival Theatre to catch up with Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific. This post REVIEW: South Pacific, Chichester Festival …
SOURCE: britishtheatre.com at 06:23AMTHE DARK SIDE OF THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT. DON’T TELL JACOB REES-MOGG Hats off to James Dacre’s Royal & Derngate for bravely slapping on a brand new musical in the ver…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:41AMROARING BACK TO LIFE Almost the most magnificent part of Daniel Evans’ production is that it’s happening at all: despite the distanced glimmer of blue paper masks, Chichester …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:40AMt IF RANSOME MET ORWELL It’s 1939 in Southwold harbour (nicely resonant for me to see this in Southwold itself, on its second night). Arthur Ransome, famed already for his …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:23PMMIDLIFE, MIDNIGHT, MEMORY Fittingly, Deborah Bruce’s play is set over the night the clocks change back. It’s about Time, its reverses and attritions; and being about los…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:52AMFORMAL. INTERVIEWS DON’T END JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE DEAD The afterlife is out of fashion, at least in traditional religious forms – harps and angels, heaven and hell, reincarnation …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:50PMSHEEN SHINES AS THE WELSH WORD-WIZARD It might be helpful if critics admitted sometimes arriving bad-tempered, hot, out of tune, dreading the long masked late night train journey ho…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:03PMFATHERS AND SONS, PASSION AND PIETY Last night saw one famous victory as England kicked through to the semis. Indeed the Bridge theatre press-night audience was a bit banjaxed by emerg…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:14AMYESTERDAY’S MEN LOVING MEN The mission of Two’s Company is producing “new plays from the past”, and their talent is for treasure-hunting . Plays written now about past decad…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:04PMAMELIORATING PARISIAN LIVES ONE PUPPET AT A TIME It could hardly be calculated more finely to fulfil every post-lockdown need: a cast of sixteen nimble actor-musician-singers vis…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:14AMPINK SATIN AND A FAIRY PINATA FOR A PIMMS-Y NIGHT OUT Face it, this play’s a rom-com, a lark, a happy pretty way to blame the fickleness of young love on petulant fairies…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:04AMSPACE IS THE LIMIT AS THE WEST END RETURNS There was real excitement in a first west end moment since the November lockdown crushed the few brave shoots of returning theatre. The Sonia Fri…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:16PMAROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds INSTEAD OF TRAVEL… So what do we need, to reopen a tiny Georgian playhouse in a time of continuing uncertainty, mas…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:22AMO YES IT IS I had booked us in the very day Lloyd Webber and QDOS announced that with antiviral door handles, fogging, separating of bubbles and teeth-gritted determination,…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:31PMANOTHER ….GOD BLESS US EVERY ONE Scrooge is testy, cold and solitary as an oyster, shocking as ever in his indifference to the poor who ought to die off and “decrease the surplu…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:13PMA SCROOGE TO REMEMBER Beneath festoons of horrid chains, nimble amid strongboxes and trunks and safes, three actors bring the old text to violently emotional life. Assisted only b…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:26PMGreat journeys told in tiny windows The daily epics of the refugee crisis haunt us on every bulletin:: small boat crossings, lethal lorry journeys, arrests and detentions. It. Is r…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:09PMMINIATURE REVELS They’re at it again. And in this dour year, crowned with the financially reckless renaissance of West End theatre, Dan and Jeff – Daniel Clarkson and Jeff Turner – are…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:01AMTITTER YE NOT: IT WAS TOUGH An element of pilgrimage here: new-fledged theatre, new play, worth the long masked train to London and then a bus’s wild wanderings south of the ri…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:29AMThose who know Amy Johnson’s history well will be happy with Lone Flyer as a grippingly impressionistic portrait of a remarkable woman.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMAnd so to a real press night, an event now as rare as a mystical apparition , a shining sword rising from a dark lake. . The gallant Southwark Playhouse offers a miniature musical, Jason Rob…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:19AMTWO MORE FROM ALAN BENNETT One of the darkest and one of the merriest. PlAYING SANDWICHES is an even more than usually sombre one of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads.�…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:30AM