878 stories by "Ian Foster"
It may be music that feeds love according to Shakespeare but it is lust that drives Arrow and Traps' interesting production of Twelfth Night, playing in rep with Othello at the Upstairs at t…
I think I have to rank Jason Robert Brown's The Last Five Years as one of my favourite new musicals (it was first performed in 2001) as any show with such a sequence of extraordinary songs a…
Arthur Miller's titanic All My Sons has been well served in recent years - the late Howard Davies reviving his National Theatre production to stunning effect in 2010 and Michael Buffong illu…
Simon Evans' production makes the most of the physicality of their interactions, whether slamming bodies into bedframes or doors into the shaky walls of the motel, their torment inescapable.
With book and lyrics written by Bill Russell and music by Henry Krieger, Side Show has managed two abortive runs on Broadway since premiering in 1997, so it makes sense for Southwark Playhou…
For much as I'd love us to be in a place where it doesn't matter, it still feels important to note that Hugh Maynard is the first black man to play the role of Sweeney Todd professionally in…
Richard Twyman's production of Harrogate proves to be rather unsettlingly brilliant, anchored by two expertly slippery performance from Sarah Ridgeway and Nigel Lindsay.
"Who needs men?"... In advance of the return of the real Glenda J (Miss Jackson if you're nasty...) in Deborah Warner's King Lear for the Old Vic, The Glenda J Collective proved to be most e…
Finding the magic in the mundane is the stock in trade of many an insightful piece of writing but ultimately, all This Little Life... manages to do is extract the ordinary out of the extraor…
"It would make angels mourn"Perhaps fittingly, on an evening when beautiful tribute was paid to the late Howard Davies, whose invaluable contribution to the National Theatre (36 productions …
Beach Comet have clearly found their niche in creating spoof B-movie musicals and so Apocalypse Cruise Ship Love Affair now tracks the same path that its older sibling Vampire Hospital Waiti…
As the hunger for escape-the-room games increases, so too does the ingenuity of those who come up with these activities, tweaking the format a little every time so that we keep on coming bac…
Released earlier this month, Favourite Sins is 4-track EP of musical theatre tracks written by actor/singer/songwriter Alex James Ellison with lyricists Robert Gould (whose work I have previ…
On Sunday 6 November 2016, Rodgers and Hammerstein's State Fair will be performed for the first time on the London stage as a symphonic concert by the London Musical Theatre Orchestra under …
"I'm not the sort of person to get AIDS"... Following on the success of The Chemsex Monologues, Dragonflies Theatre now turn to the world of HIV in gay men with The HIV Monologues: From AIDS…
Created by Luke Adamson and Dan Bottomley and directed by Adamson with Phil Croft, The House of Usher takes an actor-musician approach to the material and is very much its own version of the…
Written by Carl Grose and directed by BOV AD Tom Morris, The Grinning Man is a deliciously dark fairytale of a show, sharing DNA with the likes of Kneehigh and The Light Princess in its thea…
A musical about cancer? As unlikely as it might seem, A Pacifist's Guide To The War On Cancer isn't even the first one that I've seen. That dubious honour goes to Happy Ending, one of the mo…
Moby Dick's conceit is that it is a show-within-a-show, the students and staff of St Godley's Academy for Girls putting on a performance in order to save their school, and what a frantically…
Which is a roundabout way of saying that Robert Icke's production of The Red Barn was not the play I thought it would be. And that my initial slightly cool reaction was as much a response to…
The Wind in the Willows' charms are gentle, befitting any iteration of the beloved children's novel by Kenneth Grahame. Julian Fellowes' adaptation is faithful to that story and though the s…
In many ways, Ragtime is about the development of the modern American nation and identifies three key groups instrumental in that societal change in women, African-Americans and immigrant co…
"I yearn as I burn"... Stephen Lanigan-O'Keeffe and Owain Rose's Musical of the Year pops up as something of a surprise, a genuinely funny musical theatre extravaganza in the mould of someth…
A slightly odd one this, the Donmar's all-female adaptation of The Tempest opened at the King's Cross Theatre in late September, but from what I can tell won't be officially reviewed until 2…
I can't deny it, when I first heard the staging for Tennessee Williams' Confessional was 'semi-immersive', I rolled my eyes for it has become a much-abused term by arts marketeers. But on ar…
