A wall-climbing, visually beautiful performance in a gender-defying allegory
Category: Review
Follies, National Theatre, London ★★★½
Reviewed for The Reviews Hub: The very name is laden with double meaning. Primarily, of course, the title of Stephen Sondheim’s musical about a reunion of variety performers is a reference to the Ziegfeld Follies, whose dancers would glide down stately staircases in lavish costumes designed to show off a very particular idea of feminine…
Late Company, Trafalgar Studios, London ★★★★
Reviewed for The Reviews Hub: If you were a couple whose teenage son had died, perhaps the last thing you would do is to invite one of the classmates that had bullied him to suicide and his parents for a conciliatory meal. Perhaps they do restorative justice differently in Canada. Jordan Tannahill’s taut and moving…
Salad Days, Union Theatre, London ★★★★
Reviewed for Musical Theatre Review: The 1950s musical Salad Days is, let’s face it, an odd one. Ostensibly the story of two Oxbridge graduates who rebel against their parents in the most genteel of ways – by marrying and getting a job without their mothers’ influence – the story quickly goes in directions that makes…
13 the Musical, Ambassadors Theatre, London ★★★★★
Reviewed for Musical Theatre Review: In Jason Robert Brown’s 13, young New Yorker Evan Goldman finds himself uprooted from home just weeks before his bar mitzvah, and after his parents’ divorce moves with his mother to a sleepy Indiana town. Desperate for all the school’s cool kids to attend his forthcoming party, he tries to…
Pageant, London Irish Centre, London ★★
Reviewed for Musical Theatre Review: Back in 1991, when Pageant opened Off-Broadway, the concept of a beauty pageant populated by drag queens may have seemed novel. That novelty may also have sustained it into its 2000 run at the Vaudeville Theatre, which netted it two Olivier Awards. But this is 2017. The West End has…
The Marriage of Kim K, Arcola Theatre, London ★★
Reviewed for Musical Theatre Review: Marrying classical opera buffo to 21st century pop culture will always be a risky task. The Marriage of Kim K, which opens the Arcola’s 2017 Grimeborn season, takes The Marriage of Figaro and butts it against the world of reality TV star Kim Kardashian, creating a sung-through musical which is…
Mosquitoes, National Theatre, London ★★★★★
Reviewed for The Reviews Hub: At the Large Hadron Collider at CERN’s Switzerland, two particles flung in opposite directions around the underground toroid structure will reunite and collide. Although the force involved may be little more than that of two mosquitoes flying into each other, muses Lucy Kirkwood’s dazzling new play, the repercussions are huge…
The Hired Man, Union Theatre, London ★★★
Reviewed for Musical Theatre Review: Melvyn Bragg’s 1969 novel The Hired Man was the first of three novels to chart the lives of the Cumbrian Tallentire family. Starting at the turn of the 20th century, the name derives from the head of the family, John Tallentire (Ifan Gwilym-Jones) who must endure the “hired market”, the…
Twilight Song, Park Theatre, London ★★★★
Reviewed for The Reviews Hub: Best known for his play My Night With Reg, Kevin Elyot’s writing for the stage was dominated by a sense of yearning, and the deleterious effects of love. Completed before his death in 2014, Twilight Song illustrates, in its premiere production at the Park Theatre, an echoing of the same…
Dorrance Dance – ETM: Double Down, Sadler’s Wells, London ★★★★★
Reviewed for The Reviews Hub: Tap dance has traditionally been the reserve of the nostalgic musical. In the West End right now, 42nd Street is the perfect evocation of this, its whole ensemble tap routines being the show’s biggest draw. On a smaller scale, Charing Cross Theatre’s Yank! includes several tap routines as it tells its story in…
Yank!, Charing Cross Theatre, London ★★★★
Reviewed for Musical Theatre Review: A half century before the US military service policy ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, relationships between gay men in the US Armed Forces were, if not exactly tolerated, tacitly acknowledged. In the mix of adrenaline and testosterone, frustrated men occasionally turned to each other for relief – the crime was to…
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