The Great British Musicals- In concert
Following the sell out concert of Ivor Novello – The Great British Musical, comes a production performed in the heart of London’s West End at the Hippodrome Casino. The Great British Musicals in Concert takes the audience through a journey of British Musical Theatre. Host (Theatre/TV Veteran) Nicholas Parsons CBE was a wonder to watch […]
Picture Perfect
A simple set. A small cast. A lot of emotional family turmoil. Picture Perfect is a new musical from Scott Evan Davis and director Simon Greiff that aims to shatter the illusion of the perfect family. Josh (Joel Harper-Jackson) is having an affair with a married man, whilst watching his parents’ (Helen Hobson and Jérôme Pradon) […]
Closer Than Ever
Closer Than Ever is a lovely little 1989 Off-Broadway Musical, receiving its European Premiere at the Jermyn Street Theatre in Piccadilly Circus. The show features no dialogue but songs that all serve as separate pieces, dealing with topics from ageing/mid life crises to working couples and unrequited love. ‘You Want To Be My Friend’, ‘Miss […]
Life of the Party – a celebration of the songs of Andrew Lippa
I was lucky enough to see The Adams Family on Broadway a few years ago, just before it closed, but apart from that I have not been too familiar with Andrew Lippa’s musicals. The 2000 off-Broadway musical Life of the Party won several awards in America and his latest show I Am Harvey Milk was […]
Velma Celli
Velma Celli is the all singing, all dancing drag queen, in the body of West End performer Ian Stroughair. The Hippodrome Casino’s Matcham Room is the perfect venue for a cabaret show of this calibre because Velma Celli is unlike other drag queens – she is class not crass (well mostly), with a powerful vocal […]
Hamlet
One of the glories of theatre are those moments when new works or new interpretations sneak up and take you by surprise, although director Zoé Ford’s re-imagining of Shakespeare’s tragedy doesn’t so much sneak up as eyeball you from the word go before quickly smacking you in the face. For this raw, visceral and utterly […]
REVIEW: Bakersfield Mist at the Duchess Theatre
Eight years on from her triumphant performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Kathleen Turner returns to the London stage with another powerhouse turn in this new play by Stephen Sachs, where her brash, expletive-spouting ex barmaid proves a perfect foil for Ian McDiarmid’s eccentrically twitchy performance as a pompous New York art expert. But […]
Venice Preserv’d
Scuttling along the length of the Cutty Sark, the meeting point for Venice Preserv’d, I wonder if I am in the right place. It is quiet and overcast and there are a few small groups milling about but not much else going on. Suddenly though, there is an explosion of bells, whistles and jubilant shouts from the ship’s prow. As […]
Sandel
It has become standard procedure to scandalise even the most wholesome of relationships. Particularly in our celebrity culture, we rummage through the scraps of inconsequential evidence to piece together tales of lust and sordid deceit in the hopes of eliciting cheap thrills from our peers. Glenn Chandler’s romance Sandel controversially infuses a pair of lovers […]
Miss Saigon
Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s follow up to the 1985 West End hit Les Miserables (which is still running almost 30 years later) was the 1989 production of Miss Saigon. Based on the Puccini Opera Madame Butterfly, the musical opened at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1989 where it played for just over 10 […]