musicals
Rachel Halliburton
A febrile energy powers Timothy Sheader’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar, which arrives in the West End with an edgy vibe that powerfully conveys the idea of Jesus as a dangerous revolutionary. At the age of 56, the musical isn’t showing its age remotely, with its vigorous, unashamedly complex rhythms and persuasive interrogation of the Bible marking it as a resounding classic even for Lloyd Webber agnostics like this critic.You could argue that Eurovision star Sam Ryder was made for the role, a former carpenter with an impressive beard and a lion’s mane of hair, who after years of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A couple of years ago, on a drive through the picture book hills and lakes of Connemara, my pal (his car, his driving, his choice) played a compilation of Frank Sinatra’s hits on the music system. He sang along lustily, as I contemplated the contrast with the landscape and wondered about how long it would be before I could suggest a bit of Van Morrison, The Pogues, Val Doonican…Because I’ve never really got "The Chairman of the Board". I see what others see, but it’s all too clean, too consciously produced, too overweening in its sheer Frankness for me to engage. Every song was Sinatra first Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The parade of stage musicals borne from films continues with Pride, which takes the open-hearted, small-scale 2014 movie of the same name and brings it to the stage with many of the film's creatives (director Matthew Warchus and writer Stephen Beresford) along for the ride. The unbridled appeal to the emotions will be familiar to those who know Billy Elliot and Kinky Boots, two other musicals sourced in sweet indie English films that acquired a full-throttle theatrical life of their own. (Like Billy Elliot, this show, too, reserves musical pride of place for a song devoted to solidarity, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
About two hours into this big, brash Beetlejuice, the door to Hell opens up, and I felt a sudden desire to rush the stage, dash through and take my chances. Well, perhaps not on press night, when it's poor form to leave before the end.Reflecting further (and this is one of those shows in which something is always happening, but everything is said at least twice, so you can take a time out) I realised that I was breaking one of my Golden Rules. This is a musical adaptation of an 80s blockbuster movie and has a wild-eyed, leering man with green hair as its marketing image, so what did I expect Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In the 70s, a science-inclined schoolboy like me was directed to young adult oriented biographies of Thomas Edison, of which there were many. They left out the more problematic aspects of his life, the dubious business practices and some of his more Victorian approaches to demonstrating the power of electricity (don’t Google it). Instead, they favoured the legend of a lone genius beating the odds to, quite literally, enlighten the world.The iconography of his story runs deep in the human soul. But there’s always an Icarus to warn us of the dangers of hubris, lurking on our left shoulder and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As a reviewer, if you’re lucky, you get a tingle down the spine – rarely, but you know it when you feel it. It’s the sensation of seeing theatre anew, not just something good or something innovative, but something you just haven’t seen before at all.Then, you line up the pieces and, though they still don’t fit snugly into the expected picture on the jigsaw puzzle box, you find comparators, parallels, signposts to help navigate this unfamiliar landscape. Often that tempers your initial reaction, the nuts and bolts reveal themselves and you fit it the production into a matrix of shows past and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Science on stage is quite the thing at the moment with a revival of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen opening at Hampstead Theatre next week and Lifeline, a British musical, injected into Southwark Playhouse for a six-week residency.It’ll be interesting to track the difference between the reactions of audiences and the critics as too many journalists dismiss anything beyond a bunsen burner or a percentage calculation as a matter reserved for boffins. Being proudly ignorant of such subjects appears to be on the person spec for a job at the BBC, but the explosion of science-based podcasts and YouTube Read more ...
Sarah Kent
American photographer Catherine Opie took her first self-portrait at the age of nine with a Kodak instamatic she’d been given for her birthday. There she stands in the garden, a little toughie flexing her biceps like a muscle man.And there she is again, twenty four years later. This time she presents herself as Bo (pictured below right), a persona developed among her queer friends in California. Her stance – chest square on, feet apart and thumbs in pockets – makes her look like an off-duty cop, an idea enhanced by what could be a baton dangling from her belt. She looks to camera with a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If heart were art, there would be no stopping The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the 2012 Rachel Joyce novel that became a film and then a stage musical, seen first at Chichester last summer before arriving on the West End. As it is, I'm afraid I stumbled at the first hurdle of plausibility. Let's just say that if I had someone important in my life dying of cancer - as in fact has happened - I would do everything I could to get there as fast as I can.That is decidedly not the route taken by Devon's own Harold Fry (Mark Addy, inheriting Jim Broadbent's screen role) who embarks upon the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Spanning centuries, cultures and an ocean, Finn Anderson and Tania Azevedo’s new musical, Ballad Lines (say it fast and it sounds like Blood Lines) has the epic scope a big show demands. It also has an intimacy, a specificity, that may prove, for some, an issue and for others, a liberation, a chance to be seen on stage for once. One thing is for sure – it’s not like any other show I’ve reviewed.Sarah and Alix are thirtysomething New Yorkers, career women - now there’s a gendered phrase – setting up home together in their new apartment. There’s a bit of bantz early on joking about the fact Read more ...
Gary Naylor
When it comes to the proletariat taking matters into their own hands, the British working class does not have many spectacular victories to celebrate. There are glorious defeats of course, eg the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the Miners' Strike of 1984, the Stop The War protest of 2003. Even the broader coalition who marched to support a second EU referendum in 2018 made little impact, though it was a nice day out, with nice people and nice food, to be fair.Alas for artists with fire in their bellies, the considerable advances won by progressive politics in the UK tend to have been secured by Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Scottie Fitzgerald, the sole offspring of F Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, swigs from a hip flask where she shouldn’t (she inherited the transgression gene). She’s in the room that harbours her parents’ cluttered archive, and soon she conjures their ghosts who tell us the story of their lives.Or, more accurately, some of the story of their lives, continuing a trend in biopics (Bradley Cooper’s Maestro is an example) in which we’re either assumed to know the works or to accept that the artistic achievement is less interesting than the marital strife that fuels it. Inter alia, such narratives come Read more ...