REVIEW: WEST END EUROVISION 2019 (Adelphi Theatre) ★★★★★
Staged for the first time in the rather lovely Adelphi Theatre, West End Eurovision has raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for MAD Trust and its ninth year event did not disappoint. The Make A Difference Trust works tirelessly to support HIV and AIDS related projects in both the UK and Sub-Saharan Africa; as the Chair of […]
REVIEW: Shit Faced Shakespeare – Taming Of The Shrew (Leicester Square Theatre) ★★★★
If you’d told me that after three years of intense training at drama school, and after revising a Shakespearian script, character development and weeks of rehearsals that I must now consume about three quarters of a bottle of gin and perform to a live audience, there is no way I would assume it would go […]
REVIEW: The Picture of Dorian Gray (Richmond Theatre) ★★★★
Tilted Wig Productions present a new take on Oscar Wilde’s infamous and only novel, currently touring the country. We are first introduced to Dorian Gray, our orphaned anti-hero, via the characters of Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton. Basil (Daniel Goode) is a skilled painter, currently subdued with the task of finishing a painting of […]
REVIEW: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Rose Theatre Kingston) ★★★★★
Louis de Bernieres’s 1994 novel, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, runs to over 500 pages, divided into over 70 chapters and became a two-hour movie in 2001. So the ambitious challenge for stage adapter Rona Munro and director Melly Still, is how to tell the story which spans about fifty years of life on the Greek island […]
REVIEW: Club Tropicana The Musical (New Wimbledon Theatre) ★★
Club Tropicana The Musical is a new jukebox musical by Michael Gyngell. With a soundtrack of pop songs performed live on stage. Club Tropicana is described as ‘a summer adventure of love in the sun. It takes a fun-packed trip back in time to the electric 80’s when hair was big, shoulders were padded, girls […]
REVIEW: TWELFTH NIGHT (The Rose Playhouse) ★★★
When The Great Gatsby, Titanic and Capital FM are put into a room together you get OVO’s Twelfth Night. The Rose Playhouse was home to the 1920s jazzy version of the Shakespearean comedy on board the SS Illyria. Director Adam Nichols’ strength lies in the sheer fluidity of the Shakespearean English used. Each actor understood […]
REVIEW: AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’ (Southwark Playhouse) ★★★★★
Ain’t Misbehavin’ is a musical revue with a book by Murray Horwitz and Richard Maltby Jr and music by various composers and lyricists celebrating black musicians of the 1920s and 1930s. The show was so popular when it first appeared in the Manhattan Theatre Club’s East 73rd Street cabaret in 1978 that a full-scale Broadway […]
REVIEW: SWEET CHARITY (Donmar Warehouse) ★★★
New York, 1967. Charity Hope Valentine is a dance hall hostess who “runs her heart like a hotel – you’ve got men checking in and out all the time.” At the raw end of a long line of users and losers, she meets Oscar, a mild-mannered tax accountant, and Charity Hope Valentine once again puts […]
REVIEW: OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY (Southwark Playhouse) ★★★
Other People’s Money, directed by Katharine Farmer, has come to Southwark Playhouse. The play, written by Jerry Sterner in 1989, shows the greed and excesses of Wall Street in the 1980s by pitting it against a small town family business. When it opened off-Broadway it won an Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Play; […]
REVIEW: THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN (Royal & Derngate) ★★★★
Crime. Punishment. Murder. Revenge. Today’s readers grasp at topics such as these, devouring book after book to fuel their blood lust. These gory thrillers, now ubiquitous on Amazon, keep us entertained. Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train was the book everyone was reading. Mystery and marriage breakdowns in suburbia. But with a book so […]