musicals
Matt Wolf
A generally grim year for musicals (Matilda and Crazy For You very much excepted) nears a belatedly emotional and rewarding close with the Crucible Theatre's revival of Company, which brings the Sheffield playhouse's artistic director, Daniel Evans, back into the orbit of the man whose work is responsible for his two Olivier Awards. That the person in question is Stephen Sondheim means that interest is keen in an onward life for a staging that results in the knockout punch one always hopes for from this piece while offering up not a few eccentricities along the way. Indeed, just as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Frank Sinatra might have come to dislike being branded as part of the Rat Pack, but the phrase stuck and still sticks. Judging by last night’s Christmas-slanted show, just as he, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr live forever, so will that phrase. Eleven years on from the first Rat Pack Live From Las Vegas show the shine hasn’t gone and the trio – even though they aren’t really there – light up the Wyndham’s Theatre.Strolling on to open the show with “Come Fly With Me”, Stephen Triffitt is Frank Sinatra. He’s been at it for over 10 years and ought to be good, but if you’re a first-timer little Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Should the people who made Tron - or for that matter James Cameron - ever decide to take on a Broadway musical, they owe themselves a trip to the Menier Chocolate Factory's ludicrous production of Pippin to find out how not to do it. Just because this long-running New York entry was the first Broadway show to advertise on American TV nearly 40 years ago, that doesn't mean it also needs to be the first in my experience to be transformed into a video game so as to accommodate contemporary tastes. I like a high concept as much as the next person (rock on, Michael Sheen's Hamlet), but Mitch Read more ...
carole.woddis
WC Fields once famously cautioned against working with children or animals. He might very well have gone crazy had he been involved with the RSC’s hit musical production Matilda, which started out in Stratford-upon-Avon last November, garnering fistfuls of rave reviews, and has just won this year’s Evening Standard and Theatrical Management Association awards for Best Musical.The animals are otherwise engaged, but this is a show where the kids absolutely rule the roost. At Wednesday night’s West End press performance they were led by a tiny sprat of a thing, Kerry Ingram (pictured below Read more ...
howard.male
It’s a song which hangs in the air like pollen or reefer smoke, before gradually rising like a never-to-be-answered prayer. It began life as a lullaby but grew up to be a protest song, a scream of existential angst and even a purred invitation to sex. It’s a song like no other song, in that it has been covered more than any other song (its nearest competitors being “My Way” and “Yesterday”), and it was written by three Jewish immigrants before eventually being adopted by African-Americans as their own. A friend of Gershwin’s said, when reminiscing about hearing it for the first time Read more ...
Nick Hasted
We first see Lucy (Emily Browning) as a receptacle, letting a medical tube snake painfully deep down her throat. Australian novelist Julia Leigh characterises such behaviour as “radical passivity”, and her Jane Campion-mentored debut as director makes Lucy find its degrading limit.Browning made her name as a juvenile lead in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), going the familiar route to adult stardom as a scantily clad assassin in Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch. Often nude here but rarely erotic, she plays a student whose sex life functions like bulimia, giving control Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Like his most famous creation, Billy Elliot, Lee Hall left his native North East to pursue what turned out to be a glittering career in the arts. Although I can’t speak for the fictitious Billy, Hall has certainly never forgotten his working-class roots, which continue to inform and inspire his work. This week sees the West End opening of The Pitman Painters, his highly acclaimed play based on William Feaver’s book of the same name which, following the original production at Newcastle upon Tyne’s Live Theatre, has enjoyed two seasons at the National Theatre, two UK tours and a season on Read more ...
philip radcliffe
The only time I saw Ginger Rogers in the flesh was by chance in a book store on New York’s Fifth Avenue. She was doing a book signing (Ginger: My Story – a good read) and was well past her dancing years, but she still had a certain allure. And somehow, looking at this legend, the years rolled back and I could visualise her again dancing with Fred Astaire in the best of their 10 musicals together, Top Hat, the hit 1935 RKO movie. It took just over two months to make and grossed more than $3 million. “They’re dancing cheek to cheek again!” blazed the publicity poster at the time.Summer Read more ...
Matt Wolf
When West Side Story won 10 Academy Awards, that was back in a Hollywood era during which movie musicals regularly garnered such acclaim. Gigi, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music and Oliver! all bookended the 1961 film adaptation of the landmark Broadway show when it came to copping the Best Picture Oscar; indeed, songs from the musicals that became films were part of the Hit Parade of that particular time to a degree that is unthinkable nowadays - though the popularity of TV phenomena such as Glee has done much to push the (comparative) marginalia of Broadway back toward the mainstream.West Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When The Lion King first opened in London in October 1999, there were cries from some quarters that it was merely following in a long line of stage shows that had been lifted lazily from films. Indeed its creator, Julie Taymor, didn't depart too far from Disney's 1994 animated film of the same name for dramatic inspiration, but why would she when the movie had been a huge hit, winning two Oscars (for composer Elton John, lyricist Tim Rice and Hans Zimmer's original score), grossing nearly $800 million worldwide on its release and selling more than 60 million DVDs. The stage version was, then Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Hooray for Hollywood! The title of last night's Prom didn't officially have an exclamation mark. But if any concert deserved a screamer, it was this one. A delirious mutual enthusiasm pinged back and forth from stage to audience all night as the slick John Wilson Orchestra and its eponymous chief (with excellent vocal support) romped through the highways and byways of the golden age of the American musical."Shall we give in to despair or dance with never a care?" sings jazzer Clare Teal early on in a number from Fred and Ginger's 1937 movie Shall We Dance? The answer is of course never Read more ...
David Nice
"Whoring after the public taste" is how Ingmar Bergman described some rather funny hanky-panky in one of his most singular films. It's what showbusiness thrives on, and it's fine if done well. Yet a decade ago Trevor Nunn crowned the National Theatre's trio of keenly observed Rodgers and Hammerstein stagings with South Pacific characters of flesh and blood, as its creators had surely envisaged. Here, despite strong delivery of a string of hits and fluid, evocatively lit designs, Bartlett Sher's Lincoln Center Theater revival too often takes us back to the Broadway whorehouse.Admittedly the Read more ...