Aldwych Theatre

A Frank Sinatra musical is a great opportunity: a titan of the 20th century, he was a complex figure who was both emblematic of America and in many ways an outsider to it. He also had a pretty stonking songbook.  But this sauceless bio-musical manages to do the impressive job of acknowledging Sinatra’s many, uh, foibles while making him seem incredibly bland as a human being. Joel Harper-Jackson’s Frank comes across like the work experience guy in his own life, drifting through an endless stream of affairs on something like autopilot, as if he simply couldn’t see any other option other than to sleep with a stream of hot Hollywood starlets behind his wife’s back. Here’s the thing: bio-musicals are always a trade-off because they have to be approved by the subject or the subject’s estate. The route that Sinatra the Musical writer Joe DiPietro and Broadway director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall have taken is to acknowledge Frank’s philandering but just take the view that everyone was basically cool with it. Phoebe Panaretos as his first wife Nancy Sinatra does at least express some exasperation about how little he’s around for their children. But we’re never far away from somebody telling Sinatra that he’s a great dad. His mob ties are crisply raised and then shot down. He boozes and fights but there’s never any danger there. It would be excessive to describe it as gaslighting, but it does feel like the MO is to show Ol’ Blue Eyes doing a series of things that would...

Emma Thompson’s love of Christiana Brand's Nurse Matilda books is a serious business: she has previously made two film about the anarchic magical childcarer Nanny McPhee (aka Nurse Matilda) and now she returns as writer – albeit not star of – a musical stage adaptation, with songs by Gary Clark. We don”t know a lot more than that apart from the director Katie Rudd – who is very good with magical realist stuff – but it sounds like it's liable to have the same plot as the first film, following a chaotic family whose lives are turned around by the arrival of McPhee, who comes to them as an ugly hag but whose looks improve as the family’s problems diminish. So far there is no casting casting information, although the show has been announced over a year in advance so it’s no surprise.