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 […]
REVIEW: INTO THE WOODS JR (Curve, Leicester) ★★★★
Curve Young Company Musicals 16+ group, treated audiences to an abridged rendition of Into The Woods last week at Curve. With music and lyrics by the genius that is Stephen Sondheim, this is a charming fairytale about wishes, love, the importance of staying true to not only yourself but to those you hold close. This production […]
REVIEW: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD LIVE (Pleasance Theatre) ★★★★★
George A. Romero’s unparalleled 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, is commonly regarded as one of the most iconic and influenced films of all time. Romero radically redefined the genre of the modern horror film and is widely referred to as the father of the zombie genre with his influence still spawning countless zombie […]
REVIEW: STREAM (Drayton Arms Theatre) ★★★
It is hard to collectively review these plays as they were so different in both content and style; however as they are presented as a double act I will attempt to do so. SALMON by Constance Eldon McCaig and Eva Lily is set in a small non-descript Scottish town and follows the disturbing and tragic […]
REVIEW: UNSUNG (King’s Head Theatre) ★★★★
Unsung is a new play from award winning screenwriter Lisa Holdsworth, performed by Unsung Collective, a group of Leeds-based theatre makers. They have worked together to tell the stories of important women in British history who deserve to be better known for their achievements. The production comes to the King’s Head Theatre in Islington as […]
REVIEW: QUEERETERIA TV (Above The Stag) ★★
Perhaps it was because I was unfamiliar with the first two parts of the Torsten trilogy that I found this strange collaborative work hard to follow; or perhaps it was the generously spiked complimentary iced tea we were given on arrival. Possibly a combination of both. As a concept it is certainly interesting. Andy Bell […]