REVIEW: Kinky Boots (Adelphi Theatre, 2015) ★★★★★
It feels strange to be writing about my hometown in the context of the West End. Indeed, besides a decent rugby team, Northampton is predominantly famous for shoes – it’s why every schoolchild visits the shoe and boots museum, and why the local football team is nicknamed the Cobblers. But sometimes what theatre is best […]
Side By Side By Sondheim (Brockley Jack Studio)
Side by Side by Sondheim; conceived and put together by David Kernan, Ned Sherrin and Stuart Pedlar, is by far one of the best Stephen Sondheim revues going. It, unlike some of the other revues such as Putting It Together and Marry Me a Little, features a narrator who introduces the songs with background and […]
Casa Valentina (Southwark Playhouse)
‘Casa Valentina’ is about a group of purportedly straight men, dressing up as women, in a guesthouse in upstate New York. Based on true events, the play by American writer Harvey Fierstein (who’s having a busy week in town after his other show ‘Kinky Boots’ opened last night), explores these men and their compulsion for […]
Ushers (Arts Theatre)
This is the fourth outing for “Ushers: The Front of House Musical”. Starting life in the final four of @westendproducers ‘Search for a twitter composer competition’ in 2013, composer and lyricist Yiannis Koutsakos (taking a drastic career change after completing a Physics with Medical Physics degree at UCL) teamed up with lyricist James Oban and […]
Photograph 51 (Noel Coward Theatre)
It’s the 21st Century and yet women are still underpaid and undervalued. We have come some way to becoming equal with men, but we’re not quite there. However, if we go back in time to the decade after World War II, women were struggling to succeed in jobs traditionally seen as male only. Like science […]
Jersey Boys (UK Tour)
It’s not every show where you are treated to a performance that warrants not one but three separate standing ovations, but Jersey Boys delivers just that. Telling the story of the Four Seasons, each band member gets a season to tell his tale. But as they say in the show “take four different men and […]
See What I Wanna See (Jermyn Street Theatre)
Three short stories penned by Japanese author Ryu Akutagawa, See What I Wanna See is an interestingly brilliant and complex musical. The first short story, set in Medieval Japan, features two lovers who wish to escape a doomed relationship with a dangerous passionate act. The second story in 1951 sees a body discovered in Central […]
Future Conditional (Old Vic)
If you’ve been on the tube recently then you will probably have seen a poster for Future Conditional, a new play by Tamsin Oglesby starring Rob Brydon at The Old Vic. A play about education starting in September, the beginning of the new school year, this play seems especially timely. One of the strands follows […]
Oresteia (Trafalgar Studios)
Oresteia is what they call a classic. A Greek trilogy that premiered in Athens in 458BC. It has been remade and portrayed differently around the globe for millennia. Most recently, Oresteia has moved to the West End after a sellout season at the Almedia theatre. Robert Icke’s interpretation has turned tradition on its head with […]
Gruesome Playground injuries – Basic Mountain
Phantom Owl are a Los Angeles-based theatre company “presenting new American theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe.” This year presenting three plays: Fault Lines by Stephen Belber, Filthy Talk for Troubled Times by Neil Labute and Gruesome Playground Injuries by Rajiv Joseph, plus three one-person shows as part of their Flying Solo series. Joseph’s Gruesome Playground […]