Menier Chocolate Factory
Abigail's Party, Menier Chocolate FactoryFriday, 09 March 2012
Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party: comedy classic or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with added sneering? Ever since its first appearance on stage in 1977 and its subsequent record-breaking broadcast as a BBC Play for Today with an eye-widening 16... Read more... |
Pippin, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 08 December 2011
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... Read more... |
Terrible Advice, Menier Chocolate FactoryFriday, 30 September 2011
Saul Rubinek is an established actor in American television programmes such as LA Law and Frasier, where he played Daphne's fiancé Donny. Now the Canadian has turned his hand to playwriting and the result – Terrible Advice – receives its world... Read more... |
Road Show, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 07 July 2011
"Onward we go," the hearty but essentially hapless Wilson Mizner (David Bedella) remarks well into Road Show, the Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical that has been slow-aborning, and then some, since it first appeared in workshop form in New York... Read more... |
Nina Conti, Menier Chocolate FactoryWednesday, 11 May 2011
You don’t see much ventriloquism these days. It’s a comedy form mostly associated with variety and Victorian music hall - although it goes back at least to the Greeks - and gives a lot of people the heebie-jeebies. I know several people who can’t... Read more... |
Smash!, Menier Chocolate FactoryFriday, 01 April 2011
If you're going to put on a show about putting on a show, you gotta get a gimmick, as a wise man not unconnected with the late Jack Rosenthal's autobiographical comedy once wrote. Put it another way: if the show/film/TV series depicted is... Read more... |
Ruby Wax: Losing It, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 24 February 2011
Ruby Wax has packed a lot into her life - writer, actor, stand-up comic, television interviewer, to name a few. But possibly her greatest professional achievement will be her work in mental health, prompted by her own experiences of depression,... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Comedian Ruby WaxFriday, 11 February 2011
Misery and comedy have always been happy bedfellows. The sad clown, the stand-up who falls down offstage – we know who we’re talking about. But for all their problems, comedians don’t generally make a habit of turning medical pathology into material... Read more... |
The Invisible Man, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 25 November 2010
“It’s this ghost they’re talkin’ about. I’m feelin’ an emanation meself. Unless I ‘ad too many pickled eggs last night.” If that’s the sort of crack that tickles your fancy, you’ll find plenty to make you chuckle in Ken Hill’s spoofish take on H G... Read more... |
A Number, Menier Chocolate FactoryMonday, 04 October 2010
There are any number of ways, it's increasingly clear, to approach A Number. Caryl Churchill's astonishingly prismatic and beautiful play about genetic cloning, nature versus nurture and the ineffable mystery of existence as amplified by Shakespeare... Read more... |
Aspects of Love, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 15 July 2010
The Menier Chocolate Factory could scarcely be on mightier form, or so it seems, punching far beyond its weight as a small, out-of-the-way south London playhouse that is nonetheless responsible at the moment for five commercial transfers between... Read more... |
theartsdesk in New York: Sondheim On Sondheim On BroadwaySunday, 16 May 2010
Broadway tends to go into overdrive in May, that time of the theatrical year when New York stages are at their buzziest in the run-up to the Tony Awards (to be awarded on 13 June). Heavyweight star vehicles (Denzel Washington back on Broadway after... Read more... |
