West End
Marianka Swain
Following Caroline, or Change and Fun Home, the UK is blessed with another work from American composer Jeanine Tesori; this is the British premiere of her 1997 musical Violet, which had a Sutton Foster-starring Broadway production in 2014. If not as refined as that exquisite duo, it’s still a compelling piece, thanks to a ravishing score and a dynamite central performance.It’s 1964, and Violet (Kaisa Hammarlund, pictured below right) is travelling on a Greyhound bus from her small town in North Carolina to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in hopes of having her facial scar – caused by a loose axe head – Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There's a story in James Acaster's superb new show at the Phoenix Theatre which hangs on him being the first UK comic to shoot several Netflix specials. He doesn't tells us this to boast; far from it. It's to set up another long-form gag, one of several lengthy and interconnected stories he tells in Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999, the two-part tale of the best and worst years of his life.Previous shows by Acaster – for which he has received five nominations at the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Awards – have been surreal inventions, with few personal references (or at least those you could Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In 2016 Catherine Tate performed live comedy for the first time since her Edinburgh Fringe days at the beginning of her career, and the show was deservedly both a critical and box-office success. She later took it to Australia and New Zealand and now finishes with a West End run, with some updated sketches and two new cast members.Tate's best-known characters from her television series all make an appearance; Derek Faye, the elderly gay man in denial of his sexuality (“How very dare you”), Irish nurse Bernie, passive-aggressive office worker Kate (“Go on, have a guess”), Geordie Georgie, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The scintillating, commercially bold season of Pinter one-acts at the theatre bearing his name plays a particular blinder with Pinter Five (★★★★★), from which I emerged keen to engage with its mystery and breadth of feeling all over again. Pinter Six (★★★) is worth seeing, as well, and may pay added dividends for those who didn't catch its author's world premiere of his brilliantly spiky play Celebration in 2000 – a production unlikely to be bettered anytime soon. But those keen to savour the esoteric will be richly rewarded by what director Patrick Marber's triptych in Pinter Read more ...
Veronica Lee
With the politics of hate alive and well both sides of the Atlantic, this seems a good time to revive Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's 2003 musical, which is set in Civil Rights-era Louisiana. This production was first seen at Chichester Minerva Theatre last year and transfers to the West End via a run at Hampstead Theatre and has a stand-out central performance by Sharon D Clarke.Inspired in part by Kushner’s own Southern Jewish childhood, Caroline, or Change is almost entirely sung-through and Clarke (pictured below) is the titular black maid who is paid a pittance by the Gellman family to Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
One emotional high point in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the much-lauded Simon Stephens adaptation that is back in our midst once more, comes when the teenage Christopher Boone is floated in the air as part of his dream of being an astronaut. It's a touchingly improbable, escapist fantasy – that a teenager with autism would be launched in a spacecraft – and it comes via a piece of stage magic when he is borne aloft by the rest of the ensemble cast, his pet rat, Toby, flying in tandem. Perhaps space is the solitary place where he won't panic and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Don't be deceived by Kit Harington's matted, slicked-back hair that is immediately visible the minute the audience enters the boisterous West End revival of True West. By the time the director Matthew Dunster's production has roared to a close two hours later, pretty much nothing is still intact, its leading man's locks included. That's as it should be with Sam Shepard's now-iconic 1980 play that I actually saw somewhat by chance during its world premiere engagement in San Francisco in 1980 and have returned to many times since. Now marking its commercial London debut (previous local Read more ...
Marianka Swain
There’s a welcome alternative to panto hijinks in this gem of a Trevor Nunn musical revival – more attuned to the biting hardships of winter, and to the elegiac aspect of change, than to festive jollies. Which is not to say that there isn’t rousing fun to be had in many a slick set-piece, but this intimate, sensitive staging brings out the work’s soul, particularly its timeless call for empathy and compassion.Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick drew on Sholem Aleichem’s stories for their 1964 musical, and it initially feels like a folk tale: that of Tevye the dairyman (Andy Nyman) Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This production of Tennessee Williams’ neglected classic, Summer and Smoke, arrives from the Almeida into the West End with five-star plaudits for its pitch-perfect performances and pressure-cooker intensity. In an ideal world, this should guarantee a high-octane evening – but the chemistry of a space counts for a lot in theatre – so there’s inevitably concern that a larger venue will dissipate some of the essential dramatic steam.It is a pleasure to be able to report, therefore, that Rebecca Frecknall’s boldly expressionist production – with its electrifying soundscape – galvanises the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The most thrilling revivals interrogate a classic work, while revealing its fundamental soul anew. Marianne Elliott’s female-led, 21st-century take on George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical comedy Company makes a bold, inventive statement, but somehow also suggests this is how the piece was always meant to be. Ah, a weighted paradox – Company is full of them. Successful New Yorker Bobbie (Rosalie Craig, pictured below with Alex Gaumond and Jonathan Bailey) is celebrating/avoiding her 35th birthday, amidst the overbearing friends she both loves and longs to escape Read more ...
David Nice
Its roots are in an emotional truth: Matthew Lopez saw the film, then read the book, of Howards End when he was 15 and 11 years later came across Maurice. He joined the dots between an apparent period-piece offering timeless wisdom about the human condition and the gayness he found he had in common with EM Forster. Lopez's epic two-parter The Inheritance is best when it brings the connection directly to light, dramatiSing the playwright's dialogue with his beloved author, but given the predictability of parallel lives in the characters of Forster's Margaret Schlegel and Lopez's Eric Glass, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If you're going to write a play that traffics in bafflement, it's not a bad idea to have on hand one of the most beady-eyed actresses around. That would be Dame Eileen Atkins, whose keen-eyed intelligence cuts a swathe through the deliberate obfuscations of The Height of the Storm, the latest from the ever-prolific Frenchman, Florian Zeller. More than any of his previous works, the fractured storytelling at work here adds up to an elaborate puzzle that is sure to leave audiences debating over post-show drinks what the hell actually happened. Such discussions need not be rushed, by the way, Read more ...