REVIEW: LEAVE TO REMAIN (Lyric Hammersmith) ★★★★
Leave to Remain is a play written by Matt Jones and Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke. Don’t be fooled by the title, it’s not a play about Brexit; there’s a passing reference and a Visa issue but this is a love story, with songs. When Jones and Okereke began collaborating, they wanted to tell a story […]
REVIEW: Showstopper! The Improvised Musical (The Other Palace) ★★★★★
Theatre is renowned for its risk – financial restraints, the inherent vulnerability that comes with sharing ideas and the unpredictable variables of audience respect and enjoyment. However, a forgotten line or tripping up aside, thorough rehearsals mean there is little on the line where actual performance is concerned. What makes multi-award winning Showstopper! so novel […]
REVIEW: Solve-A-Long-A-Murder-She-Wrote (Royal Vauxhall Tavern) ★★★★
Re-watching very old TV series is something that a lot of us really enjoy, but rarely ever sit down and do. Perhaps because we wonder if, in comparison to modern-day creations, it’s going to be a bit naff – after all, cameras and audio have come on a long way in the past few decades […]
REVIEW: KOMPROMAT (The Vaults) ★★★★
Kompromat is a new play written by David Thame and directed by award-winning Peter Darney at Vault Festival. Kompromat is a Russian word meaning compromising information collected for use in blackmailing, discrediting, or manipulating someone, typically for political purposes. The play is inspired by the death of Gareth Williams in 2010. The GCHQ agent was […]
REVIEW: AMERICAN IDIOT (Mayflower Theatre) ★★★★
Disaffected youth struggling to come to terms with life in a post 9/11 America may not at first seem like the usual fare for a musical but add in the music from Green Day’s 2004 concept album and it definitely works. The audience is welcomed into the auditorium by video screens showing the catastrophic events […]
REVIEW: DOCTOR DOLITTLE (New Theatre Oxford) ★★★
Hugh Lofting’s 1920 children’s book, Doctor Doolittle is on permanent re-order in Waterstones’ across the country and remains up there in popularity alongside the classics of Lewis Carroll and A A Milne. The good-natured and zany Doctor Doolittle character has extended to many films over the years as well as musical productions. This particular revival, […]
REVIEW: A Modest Little Man (Bread and Roses Theatre) ★★★
Journalist Francis Beckett has adapted his biography of the post-war Labour Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, into a short play that offers a humorous take on Atlee’s unique and understated leadership style. Told mainly from the perspective of Atlee’s wife, Violet, the play focuses on the events following the Second World War when Atlee’s Labour Party […]
REVIEW: Notre Dame de Paris (London Coliseum) ★★★★★
Based upon the acclaimed 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris originally premiered at the Palais des Congrès in Paris, 1998. With music composed by Richard Cocciante and lyrics by Luc Plamondon, the production was praised in the millennium edition of the Guinness Book of World Records for its record […]
REVIEW: VIOLET (Charing Cross Theatre) ★★★★
Violet is a multi award-winning musical with music by Jeanine Tesori (Tony Award winner for Best Original Score with Lisa Kron for Fun Home and Tony-nominated for Caroline, or Change and Shrek the Musical) and Book & Lyrics by Brian Crawley (The Little Princess). Developed as apart of Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Music Theatre […]
REVIEW: THRILLER LIVE – 10th Anniversary Performance (Lyric Theatre) ★★★★★
Whatever you choose to believe of the softly spoken icon, Michael Jackson’s global prominence is irrefutable and his music, unmatched. The star’s legacy still sells millions of records to this day and has been imagined and played out in Thriller Live on the Lyric stage for a whole decade to audiences adding up to over […]