3,498 stories from The Arts Desk
Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songsread more
The New York theatre is so consistently awash in "star is born" moments when one or another British actor crosses the Atlantic to copious praise that it's lovely for a change to be able to r…
Southwark's golden triangle " the Menier, the Playhouse and the Union " has given us so many "lost" musicals which only a decade or so ago would have been lucky to get in-concert airings.rea…
Alix in Wundergarten ★★★★Think Alan Ayckbourn on acid: a commonplace (well, almost) set-up, exaggerated further and further beyond what we'd ever anticipate. In Fran�…
If you like the feeling of leaving a show, surrounded by the gently glowing faces of happy fellow audience members, then this is one for you. It's a musical evening full of joyful singing " …
"In such a night as this..." begins Lorenzo's beautiful speech in Act V of The Merchant of Venice. Watching Shakespeare's play in the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo on a balmy evening under a darken…
Billie Piper vaults to the top rank of British theatre actresses with Yerma, Australian writer-director Simon Stone's rabidly free rewrite of Lorca's 1934 play that posits its young star as …
"Yes, from life," Nikolai Ivanov (Geoffrey Streatfeild) says in passing of a painting midway through the early Chekhov play that bears his name. But the phrase could serve as the abiding ach…
The raising of a temporary structure theatre in the middle of the "Jungle" refugee camp in Calais (pictured below) has brought the issue of arts in situations of crisis into sharp focus. Thi…
Think of Holly Golightly, and it's more than likely that the face you're picturing is Audrey Hepburn's. And, while this adaptation by Richard Greenberg of Breakfast at Tiffany's is much clos…
How many genders are there? The simplistic answer is two, but if you really think that then it's time to go to the back of the class. In recent years, the rapid growth in perception of the f…
Anniversaries are lotteries. Sometimes they allow us to see the past with fresh eyes; at other times, they simply accentuate the growing distance between then and now. Because this year mark…
Watching Cameron Mackintosh's joyful revision of this Sixties musical, it's possible to believe for a moment that all the world needs now is love sweet love and a shit-ton of banjos. With a …
Harry Potter lives to see another day. The Hogwarts wizard has made his stage debut in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a two-part play that pushes JK Rowling's world-beating franchise bey…
London's West End may be the envy of the world, but when it comes to musicals the big-hitting theatres might have to up their game a bit if they're to keep up with the city's rival offerings…
Neil LaBute's exercise in self-flagellation, first seen in 2005 and adapted for film in 2013, offers his familiar misanthropic take on the battle of the sexes. This one concerns Guy (Charles…
"Children will listen," or so goes a lyric to one of the most heart-rending numbers in Into the Woods, the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical that seems rarely to be long-absent from the …
There are obvious reasons why films about the theatre outnumber plays about the movie industry, but here's a play that bucks that trend. Anthony Neilson's latest drama is located on a film s…
Womanising detectives, shapely dames, gangsters and convoluted criminal conspiracies: Richard O'Brien and Richard Hartley's 1982 musical take on Carter Brown's California-set whodunit fictio…
For those in sore need of a theatrical pick-me-up, jazz square your way over to Bugsy Malone. Last year's smash-hit opener of the redeveloped Lyric has been given a well-deserved encore, wit…
Oh dear. I could have sworn I had a book about Irish playwright Brian Friel somewhere. But I can't find it. Or maybe I never bought it. Maybe I just thought I might have bought it. Maybe it'…
How often are you charmed by one of Shakespeare's sylvan romances while literally under a greenwood tree? Even if this summer is proving rather generous with the rough weather, it is an unus…
In seeking to understand the historic, divisive and to some bewildering Brexit vote, I will turn to theatre. Through my regular exposure to it, I can number among my ever-widening acquaintan…
In the opening scene of Boys Will Be Boys, the lead character, Astrid, talks about how there's a boys' world and a girls' world. Boys' world is where you want to be. That's where power is, t…
It begins promisingly, a dark Gothic fairy tale " both Grimm and grim. The writhing witches (four, oddly) are summoned from a pile of dead bodies, Stefan Fichert's eerie puppetry all chopped…
