The unique selling feature of a $200-a-ticket Broadway musical which sets it apart from our homemade West End ones is often a vast stage filled with 40 hoofers and a dozen ginormous sets. Wh…
I have history with The Country Wife. As a drama student I learned the role of Harcourt in 24 hours when illness devastated the cast at the Nuffield Theatre Lancaster. The reviewer from the …
Fearing 'yet another' one-woman show about Judy Garland, I almost missed out on Songs for Nobodies, but three things conspired to make it rather special.
Side by Side, Sondheim on Sondheim, A Spoonful of Sherman, a Shovelful of… Schwartz, Songs from the Shows, a somewhat unenchanted evening with " may the gods preserve us from compilation …
It would be hard to imagine a play about young gay lives that speaks more eloquently to older gay men than the moving, informative and often hilarious The Inheritance at the Young Vic.
Ruthless! The Musical is a self-styled camp cult event in which the musical theatre genre, and several popular musicals, are spoofed. That they are ancient camp favourites such as Mame and G…
Has the Menier Chocolate Factory come to the end of the road? If you want to know how it feels to be trapped in some nightmare prison with no prospect of release, sit in the middle of a row …
At the Hippodrome Casino, in an unusual move from cabaret to a six-week run of a staged musical, Matthew Bugg's Miss Nightingale comes up for air for at least the third time after taking the…
The interactive movie footage in Brief Encounter is well done, there are trains enough to satisfy the most diligent railway enthusiast, and the breaking waves motif is clever. Maybe it's a p…
The Dog Beneath the Skin is like nothing else you'll see in London at the moment, and as a piece of vintage theatre, as well as vintage poetry, may well be worth a look.
A good old-fashioned play about good old-fashioned politics. Gore Vidal's 1960 satire The Best Man is based around the Democratic convention where in reality JFK won his nomination.
It may be better not to have seen the movie Fanny & Alexander. Coming to the stage version untainted you'll have a stronger chance to enjoy an exuberant energy and ribald theatricality …
What shafts this production of Pippin royally in its fishnet and suspender-clad buttocks is its slavishly dated adherence to Fosse style costume and choreography as though no other interpret…
This new stage version of Harold & Maude says more about modern attitudes to ageing, about feminism, migration and seizing opportunities than the current slew of angry Fringe diatribes.…
Despite Felicity Dean's fine glint-in-the-eye portrayal of both the camp and the stern Princess, there are no fresh insights in Richard Stirling's script for A Princess Undone.
If the conflicting obsessions of the characters and the murkiness of the plot in Foul Pages at the Hope Theatre were more brightly illuminated, this could be a sustained and hilarious evenin…
It's conspicuously worthy to try to combine elements of poverty, migration, feminism, dysfunction and dementia but neither Simon Longman's tedious time-skipping script nor Vicky Featherstone…
The gilt and red velvet box of Covent Garden, the austerity of the set, the wit of the production and the clarity of the voiceover narration clash magnificently with the romantic music to ma…
Julius Caesar really isn't Shakespeare's best play, there's very little poetry in the lines and after the assassination, the plot's far from clear, but this production makes it accessible.
It's impressively well executed " some of the performances are a bit breathless and the plot based on the illegitimate offspring of Michael Caine and Marilyn Monroe is barmy " but the appara…
I wanted to know more what happened to the boys' differing careers " banking houses in London, Paris, Vienna, Naples " and how did they get into wine? Actually, that's a fabulous story worth…
It is a complicated logistical exercise to put on stage all the elements familiar from the film, and to deliver them with an authentic sense of menace. Often it works, the bed shaking and 3…
Following critical and commercial success with last year's Cinderella, QDOS Entertainment have again invested millions to make Dick Whittington the biggest, boldest and glitziest pantomime o…
Hamilton is slick, and lavish, and a glorious parade of movement and dance: Andy Blankenbuehler's seamless choreography is a constant athletic cavalcade.
The Tin Drum is the ultimate 'Marmite' show " anyone who's read the 1959 Günter Grass novel will thrill to this enthusiastic and explosive production, as will devotees of Kneehigh's deconst…