musicals
edward.seckerson
“Love and pain is like peace and war - you want one you have to have the other.” It’s a line that pretty much sums up From Here to Eternity. The title of James Jones’s novel and the classic movie which it spawned gets rather lost in the new musical from Tim Rice, Stuart Brayson, and Bill Oakes. It’s a moment that should stay with us long after leaving the theatre but having set up a promising double-duet between both sets of doomed lovers on this scary ride to the apocalypse of Pearl Harbour, 1941, Tim Rice and his composer Stuart Brayson signally fail to deliver the emotional climacteric Read more ...
kate.bassett
Once upon a time, there were two cultures, and they were at odds. A forested wilderness stretches between the kingdoms of Sealand and Lagobel, as we glean from the childishly-drawn, giant map that serves as a front cloth for the NT's new musical spectacular – directed by Marianne Elliot and opening in the Lyttelton last night. The map shows, on one side of the wilderness, Sealand’s coastal realm with winding rivers and a chateau bristling with turrets, all in shades of blue. On the other side, inland, is Lagobel’s walled city of Arabian-style domes where everything is orange or yellow-gold.Co Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There will be some who will sneer at this film, but ignore them. Director Dexter Fletcher has fashioned a wonderfully enjoyable movie from a play by Stephen Greenhorn (who also wrote the script), in which a good-natured story about family, love and friendship is set to the music of The Proclaimers.Davy (George MacKay) and Ally (Kevin Guthrie) are lifelong friends, squaddies returning from a tour of Afghanistan in which one of their friends was killed and another seriously injured. But this isn't a film about trauma or loss, as we see the two burst into a song-and-dance routine as they skip Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
They called Rita Moreno the triple threat – she could dance, act and sing. But even her spirited performance as Anita in West Side Story could not satisfy United Artists: the doomy low notes of "A Boy Like That" were considered out of her range, and the number was ghosted by Betty Wand, one of the scores of unknown singers who rescued on-stage stars from ignominy.Fifty years on, Moreno, interviewed in Secret Voices of Hollywood, is still unhappy about this. She thinks Wand’s rounder notes lack the passion that Moreno had invested in furious Anita. But at least Moreno did not turn up at the Read more ...
kate.bassett
Having boundaries actually sets us free. So Neil Armstrong's wife argues. She is dogmatically keen to stop her husband rocketing off to the moon in the first scene of The Lightning Child – a groundbreaking show in so far as it's the first musical to premiere at Shakespeare's reconstructed wooden "O", opening last night. Armstrong (Harry Hepple in a space suit) does not agree with his spouse's imposed limits, however. A lunar voyage is, he says, his chance to become sublime.Next thing you know, the 1960s astronaut of Apollo 11 fame has gone peculiarly spacey. Climbing a steel ladder, he Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s a song in the musical version of Legally Blonde, in which peroxide ditz Elle celebrates her impending good fortune. “Oh my god, oh my god, you guys,” she sings exultantly as she prepares to accept her beau’s proposal of marriage. Since leaving the role at the start of 2011, Sheridan Smith has continued hollering the words more or less non-stop. Oh my god Trevor Nunn just texted to offer her a part. Oh my god Dustin Hoffman just left a voicemail. Oh my god look who’s been cast as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Michael Grandage.Smith can make the rare claim to have won Olivier Read more ...
David Nice
Sicilian location, Irish populace, Balkan Roma music: Richard Eyre’s production of a Pirandello bagatelle could easily have turned into the kind of Europudding more common in cinema. That it fairly dances over the pitfalls is due partly to a well-calibrated ensemble, but above all to the fact that the great Italian playwright made an exception to social commentary and searching examination of the human condition, coming up instead with a piece of fluff about babymaking village-style.Happy-go-lucky local stud Liolà (Rory Keenan) – the name translates as “here or there” – breeds too many Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Over in Southwark you can currently find Rodgers and Hammerstein exploring the seamier side of life among the prostitutes and drop-outs of Pipe Dream, but in the woody amphitheatre of the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre it’s all raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Nuns, Nazis and singing children are an unlikely recipe for the most wholesome of all family musicals, but against all odds this 1950s classic is still an irrepressible hit – get out of the way or prepare to be reduced to a giddy, ecstatic wreck by a production that will send you home singing.Director Rachel Kavanaugh has no Read more ...
David Nice
Rodgers and Steinbeck: sound unlikely? Well, self-proclaimed “family show” man Hammerstein may have baulked at words like "whorehouse" when he created a play for music out of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. But by 1955 the R&H duo had already dealt with issues like miscegenation and ageism (South Pacific), domestic violence (Carousel) and slavery (The King and I), so Steinbeck’s north Californian coastal community of amiable social dropouts, drunks and whores might not have been totally unexpected territory. Tough Pipe Dream isn’t: "It’s a beautiful show," declared Steinbeck Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s all stick and no lollipop, a chocolate box stuffed with nothing but empty wrappers: what a walloping letdown this intensely anticipated musical based on Roald Dahl’s perennially popular 1964 children’s book turns out to be.With songs by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman – the team behind the irresistible feelgood hit Hairspray – a book by the highly respected playwright David Greig, and direction by the Donmar Warehouse founder and Oscar-winner Sam Mendes, it ought to be a giant peach. Instead, it’s as bland and sugary as cheap confectionery. And with so little to savour of Dahl’s delicious Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is no formula for creating a hit musical. If there were, the history of the West End and Broadway would not be haunted by the many ghosts of bygone disasters. Let us not list them here. The lack of a roadmap notwithstanding, the long-awaited version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is ticking all the right boxes.For a start, there’s the belt-and-braces title itself, much loved as a book but perhaps as widely known via two film versions from 1971 and 2005. It has a big-shot director in the form of Sam Mendes, and in David Greig a book-writer who knows how to entertain childen, having Read more ...
David Benedict
It opened with a standing ovation. And in a place the size of the 02 – the venue put on this earth to make Luton airport feel better – that’s impressive. It was that kind of evening: not so much Streisand in concert as an opportunity for worshippers at Barbra’s shrine to do a whole lot of basking in her genuinely unparalleled glory. Fifty years at the pinnacle of popular music is not to be sneezed at. That she can sing with a 60-piece orchestra and still deliver shiver-inducing money notes at the age of 71 is truly something. It is not, however, everything.Her vocal power and idiosyncrasy, Read more ...