adaptation
Gary Naylor
An opening video montage presents us with a rogues' gallery of powerful men who have done bad things. Plenty of the usual suspects appear to stomach-churning effect, but no ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy, sentenced last week to five years in prison by the usually tolerant French. So the problem certainly hasn’t gone away with the Clintons, Weinsteins and their ilk. We all know the “power corrupts…” quote, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised and, maybe, we should be a little wary of vesting so much power in such men – that is, most men.Duke Vincentio, no stranger to sins of the flesh Read more ...
Gary Naylor
About halfway through this world premiere, I realised what was missing. Where is the sinister lift, where are the long corridors and, most of all, WHERE IS MR. MILCHICK? 50 First Dates: The Musical may indeed be the sunnier cousin of Severance, but it’s also much older, tracing its roots back to the mid-hit movie of the same name.You could be forgiven for having forgotten that 2004 Drew Barrymore / Adam Sandler romcom, but writers, David Rossmer and Steve Rosen and director/choreographer, Casey Nicholaw, hadn’t. Fast forward and, like so much else just now, what was born in a pandemic Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The impact of great art is physical as much as it is psychological. I recall the first time I saw Perry Henzell’s 1972 film, The Harder They Come. I’d been in the pub and, as we did then with just four channels, slumped in front of the television to see what was on late on a Friday night. Within minutes, I was sitting up straight, seeing an exotic, other world unfold before me in a genre I couldn’t place (was it documentary or drama?) and a performance, by Jimmy Cliff, that reached across time and space with an urgent charisma. It wasn’t the last physical surprise the work held for me – more Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Like the lighting that crackles now and again to indicate an abrupt change of scene or mood, Simon Stone's version of The Lady from the Sea is illuminated by the sense of adventure and excitement one has come to expect from this singular artist. That's the case even if the cumulative effect falls short of his devastating achievements with the National Theatre's Phaedra or, before that, Billie Piper in Yerma. Moment by moment, the play arrestingly repurposes Ibsen's mystical 1888 play for today, and not only because the text makes reference to OnlyFans, Brooklyn Beckham, and Beyoncé Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Unexpectedly, there’s a sly reference to James Joyce’s Ulysses interpolated into Act One (in case we hadn’t caught the not so sly one, naming a leading character Leopold Bloom). While that’s a nice callback from brash commercial Hollywood to the high art salons of Paris, it also links the works. If Ulysses is the book whose legend persists despite so few people having read it, is The Producers its cinematic equivalent? No matter. Like the chorus of “Yellow Submarine” it’s so embedded in popular culture that it feels like we’re born knowing it. There’s Bloom and Bialystock Read more ...
Gary Naylor
$8.2B. That’s what can happen when you re-imagine Hamlet.I doubt that writer, James Ijames, had The Lion King’s box office in mind when he set out to create a Deep South, black and contemporary version of Shakespeare’s drama of familial dysfunction, but he’s got a Pulitzer on the mantelpiece at home and now a run at the RSC. I suspect he’d have settled for that.We open on a barbecue to celebrate the marriage of Juicy’s mother, Tedra, to her husband’s brother, Rev, after the murder, in prison, of Juicy’s father, Pap. Juicy’s friend, Tio, is larking about, but sees the ghost of Pap and, soon, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
I have two guilty secrets about the theatre – okay, two I’m prepared to own up to right here, right now. I quite enjoy some jukebox musicals and I often prefer schools-oriented, pared back, slightly simplified Shakespeare to the full-scale Folio versions. There – I’ve outed myself!So when I read that Joanna Bowman’s production of the rarely staged The Two Gentlemen of Verona was "a new 80-minute edit that’s the perfect introduction to Shakespeare for families" staged in The Other Place, where the history and iconography of Stratford Upon Avon hangs less heavy in the air, I was intrigued. Read more ...
David Kettle
As shockingly beautiful as it is horrifyingly brutal, actor Armando Babaioff’s deeply Brazilian adaptation of thriller Tom at the Farm leaves a rancid taste in the mouth and harrowing images seared on the retina. It’s a show to shock and provoke, but also to deeply disorientate, blurring the boundaries between pain and pleasure, desire and repulsion in a way that stays with you, whether you want it to or not.And it’s quickly become something of a classic text, beginning life in 2011 as a play by Canadian Michel Marc Bouchard, before being filmed by Xavier Dolan in 2013. Babaioff returned it Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If you have never watched a single episode of the BBC period gangster drama Peaky Blinders, I am not sure what you would make of Rambert’s two-act ballet version. I have watched all six series, and I still left confused. Confused, but also impressed by the five-star standard of the dancing, by the inventive stage pictures created by designer Moi Tran and by the three onstage musicians. Led by lead guitarist/vocalist Mitchel Emms, this trio blast out a score specially written for the piece by Roman GianArthur, alongside tracks featured on the TV show by Radiohead, Frank Carter and the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
After 76 years, you’d have thought they could’ve come up with a better story! Okay, that’s a cheap jibe and, given the elusive nature of really strong books in stage musicals, not quite as straightforward as meets the eye.More of that later and, let’s be honest here, nobody is relaxing back into some of the country’s most comfy theatre seats expecting to attend the tale of Sweeney Todd, are they?No they’re not. Older punters – and there are a few at Chichester, especially at a matinée – will recall Fred and Ginger on the silver screen, spied through plumes of cigarette smoke, he as Read more ...
Gary Naylor
What a delight it is to see the director, the star, even the marketing manager these days FFS, get out of the way and let a really strong story stand on its own two feet. Like a late one at the Brixton Academy itself, this is a helluva night out.After a transgressive, life changing trip to London from school in Scotland to see Chuck Berry at The Rainbow, Simon Parkes wanted to be a rock’n’roll star. He was soon spitting out the silver spoon (but he never lost the easy charm and ironclad self-confidence that clings to the privately educated, a trait he cheerfully calls upon as and when) and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"It all starts with a snap," or so we're told early in the decidedly un-snappy Burlesque, which spends three hours borrowing shamelessly and tediously from far-superior sources to arrive at an artistic dead end.Preceded by acres of press heralding the results as a train crash, this summer production at the Savoy (a place-holder for Paddington, due in the autumn) may please those astonished that Nate Bertone's set can make it through the evening without toppling over. But the overall effect of this adaptation of the 2010 film of the same name is wearying in the extreme and indicative of the Read more ...