Reviewed for Musical Theatre Review: Paul Emelion Daly’s musical comedy romance first played at the Above the Stag Theatre in July 2011. In the intervening years, the venue has changed – from a room above a now-demolished gay pub in Victoria to an archway in Vauxhall. When Harry Met Barry has also undergone its own…
Category: Musicals
The Whisper House, The Other Palace, London ★★
Reviewed for Musical Theatre Review: For its second major staging in its new rebranded guise as the home for new musical writing, The Other Palace has chosen curiously. Whisper House is a 2009 piece with music and lyrics by Duncan Sheik, whose Spring Awakening and, to a lesser extent, American Psycho marked him out as…
After You, The Crazy Coqs, London ★★★½
Reviewed for The Reviews Hub: Over recent months, Brasserie Zedél’s live cabaret space, The Crazy Coqs, has been spreading its wings with comedy performers and plays complementing the more traditional cabaret. Now, it has a commissioned musical, written for and set in the venue by Alex Parker and Katie Lam. Apart from raising one of…
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Wilton’s Music Hall, London ★★★
Reviewed for Musical Theatre Review: The self-help book may not seem like the likeliest of genres from which to birth a musical comedy. But Shepherd Mead’s 1952 book How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is a sharply satirical work that mercilessly lampoons the office culture that Mad Men would, several decades later, afford a…
The Life, Southwark Playhouse, London ★★★★
Reviewed for Musical Theatre Review: There are many musicals that deal with society’s underclass, and its criminal element. The Life is one such piece: with music by Cy Coleman (Sweet Charity, City of Angels) and lyrics by Ira Gasman (who co-wrote the original book with David Newman), this 20-year-old Broadway musical deals with prostitutes and…
Thoroughly Modern Millie, Waterside Theatre, Aylesbury ★★★
Reviewed for The Reviews Hub: Based on the 1967 movie devised as a Julie Andrews vehicle, the 2002 Broadway production of Thoroughly Modern Millie, which is revived here, expands upon the original film’s appropriation of 1920s music by grabbing and adapting songs and styles from many other places. No other musical could claim a speakeasy…
Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story, Waterside Theatre, Aylesbury ★★★
Originally reviewed for The Reviews Hub: Alan Janes’ Buddy, the granddaddy of jukebox biography musicals, opened in October 1989. Which means that, at the spritely age of 27, this musical is now five years older than its protagonist was at his death in 1959. And truth be told, that age is beginning to show, particularly at…
The Girls, Phoenix Theatre, London ★★★★★
The latest iteration of Calendar Girls may be the best yet
Newsies – The Broadway Musical, UK cinema screening ★★★★
Originally reviewed for Musical Theatre Review: As far as live-action musicals go, Disney’s 1992 film Newsies was a commercial failure. The film, which was released in the UK as The News Boys, applied the song and dance treatment to a unique period of industrial unrest: the 1899 Newsboys’ Strike in New York, where the underage…
The Wild Party, The Other Palace, London ★★★★
So farewell, St James Theatre. Hello, The Other Palace – Victoria’s third theatre being rebranded after its purchase by Andrew Lloyd Webber and repositioned as a home for the nurturing of new musicals. To help launch the venue’s new name and purpose, artistic director Paul Taylor-Mills has chosen Michael John LaChiusa’s interpretation of The Wild…
Prom Kween, The Vaults, London ★★★
Originally reviewed for Musical Theatre Review: Every Fringe festival has its shambolic musicals – those shows where the zero budget aesthetic is fully embraced, which like to project an air of being put together at the very last minute and every rough edge is displayed with pride. For this year’s Vaults Festival, Prom Kween fills…
The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin, Theatre Royal Stratford East ★★★
Originally reviewed for The Reviews Hub: The maxim “be true to yourself” forms the basis of many a musical. And so it is with Kirsten Childs’s The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin, a 2000 off-Broadway hit that follows the “protagonist learns not to succumb to others’ desires” trope so closely it is right…
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