A-Z: West End theatre shows on now in London

‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ returns to the West End in a socially-distanced production from November 2021. ‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ is a burst of joy in the heart of the West End. This new British musical, transferring from the Sheffield Crucible, is the real deal. Watch out, tired revivals: there’s a new kid in town. Inspired by a 2011 BBC documentary about a teenager who wanted to be a drag queen, the show follows 16-year-old Jamie on his journey to be himself – out of a classroom in a working-class part of Sheffield, away from the bigotry of a deadbeat dad, and into high heels. Director Jonathan Butterell’s production is a high-impact blaze of colour, combining video projections with seamless scene changes and a live band above the stage. It captures the frenetic energy of being a teenager. Every element of this show works beautifully together. The music, by The Feeling frontman Dan Gillespie Sells, is a deft mix of irresistibly catchy, pop-honed foot-tappers – try not to hum ‘And You Don’t Even Know It’, I dare you – and truthful, heart-wrenching numbers. This is Sells’s first foray into writing for musicals, but he’s always excelled at telling stories in song. He is matched by the show’s writer and lyricist Tom MacRae. Apart from notable exceptions like Punchdrunk’s ‘Doctor Who’-themed kids’ show ‘The Crash of Elysium’, he’s largely written for TV, but this works well here. His dialogue is punchy, funny and often lands with a sting. While most of the char

In the unlikely event you were worried a leap to the stage for JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series would result in it becoming aggressively highbrow, self-consciously arty or grindingly bereft of magical high jinks, just chill the hell out, muggle.  ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ is an absolute hoot, a joyous, big-hearted, ludicrously incident-packed and magic-heavy romp that has to stand as one of the most unrelentingly entertaining things to hit the West End. Writer Jack Thorne, director John Tiffany and a world-class team have played a blinder; if the two-part, five-hour-plus show is clearly a bit on the long side, it’s forgivable. ‘The Cursed Child’ emphatically exists for fans of Harry Potter, and much of its power derives from the visceral, often highly emotional impact of feeling that you’re in the same room as Rowling’s iconic characters.  There’s also a sense that this story of wizards and witches is being treated with the respect its now substantially grown-up fanbase craves. No disrespect to D-Rad and chums, but the leads here are in a different acting league to their film counterparts’: Jamie Parker and Alex Price are superb as battered, damaged, middle-aged versions of old enemies Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. Sam Clemmett and Anthony Boyle are a fine, puppyish, sympathetic engine to the play as their awkward sons Albus and Scorpius, trying to escape their parents’ shadows. It is a bit of a sausage (wand?) fest in terms of the lead parts, although in the most

Director Dominic Cooke's stellar National Theatre revival of Sondheim's ‘Follies’ had much to recommend it, but one of its highest points was Imelda Staunton's performance as a wistful former showgirl, haunted by regrets. Now, Staunton and Cooke are reuniting for a crack at another classic musical, ‘Hello, Dolly’, which hasn't had a London revival in over a decade. 'Hello, Dolly' will have a limited (but nonetheless pretty chunky) 30-week run at Adelphi Theatre. Staunton will play s staunch matchmaker who finds a bride for her millionaire friend, then embarks on a hunt for a love of her own. It's got music and lyrics by Jerry Herman (‘La Cage aux Folles’) including the wonderful title number, plus 'Put on Your Sunday Clothes' and 'Before the Parade Passes By'. Book tickets here with Time Out. 

Following its 2019 run, the Old Vic’s production of ‘Lungs’ was revived with Matt Smith and Claire Foy, but without a live audience to be the first show in the theatre’s In Camera strand. It returns for 2021 as part of In Camera: Playback – in essence, a series of digital repeats at a cheaper price than the original live show. Talk about a play coming into its time. Duncan Macmillan’s ‘Lungs’ and its depiction of an unnamed couple freaking out over what to do with their lives in the face of imminent climate catastrophe was hardly irrelevant when it premiered in London seven years ago. But without labouring the point, our national vibes have gone a bit downhill since the year of the Olympics. In particular, fear of climate change has gone seriously mainstream. Arguably the unnamed couple’s worries marked them as having a certain right-on strand of neurosis in the original Paines Plough production; in 2019, existential dread about what we’ve done to the environment is consuming us all. Of course, there’s another reason why Matthew Warchus’s Old Vic revival of  ‘Lungs’ feels particularly zeitgeisty, and that’s a little matter of the casting: this is the next project for erstwhile ‘The Crown’ royal couple Claire Foy and Matt Smith. They’re a big draw, and funnily enough are not totally different from their recent screen roles. Not because there’s any RP going on. But because, broadly speaking, he’s the laid-back, slightly caddish one, content to go with the flow; and she’s the mo

‘Magic Goes Wrong’ returns to the stage for a limited socially-distanced Christmas season. Erstwhile young scamps Mischief Theatre have spun their pleasant ‘Noises Off’ knock-off ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ into a veritable empire: not only is the original backstage farce still going strong on the West End and off-Broadway, not only do they have another sizeable long-runner in ‘The Comedy About a Bank Robbery’, and not only do they now have an actual BBC1 TV show in the form of ‘The Goes Wrong Show’, but they’ve also won a whole host of US celebrity fans, including JJ Abrams – who co-produced this latest show – and magicians Penn & Teller, who’ve helped them write it.And it’s… okay. There is something charmingly unchanging about the core Mischief players, who are presumably now all millionaires several times over but always attack each new venture with the pure elan of a fledgling university sketch troupe. They’re both winsome and limited, and ‘Magic Goes Wrong’ feels caught at a strange crossroads between Mischief’s bumbling Englishness and Penn & Teller’s edgier interjections.The plot is pretty much contained in the title: neurotic magician Sophisticato (Henry Shields) is throwing a charity magic gala in his late father’s memory, and he’s rustled up some truly terrible acts to perform, notably Henry Lewis’s hack mentalist The Mind Mangler, and Dave Hearn’s entertaining The Blade, an amusing send-up of faux-edgy ‘alt’ magicians.That this somehow stretches on for two-and-a-ha

For the price of a ticket to ‘Mamma Mia! The Party’, an immersive Abba-themed dinner experience set in a ropey taverna on an idyllic Greek island, you could fly out to an actual idyllic Greek island and probably find a ropey taverna playing Abba songs.Okay, there are some practical reasons why you probably wouldn’t do that on a school night. And sure, it’s not like these are the only expensive theatre tickets in town. But the fact is most London theatre shows have a bottom price of £15 or thereabouts; ‘Mamma Mia! The Party’ starts ten times higher than that.Of course, dinner theatre is a somewhat different game to theatre theatre. And the fact is that there are plenty of people who can afford it: the London debut of ‘Mamma Mia! The Party’ is a roaring sellout success already. Masterminded by Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, it’s an established hit back in Stockholm. Which is not really a surprise: people love Abba, and ‘Mamma Mia! The Party’, though not formally affiliated to ‘Mamma Mia!’ (the blockbuster musical), is pretty much the same idea, except with the plot mostly replaced by food. After a prodigious wait to get in, we’re spirited away to an attractive, convivial mock-up of a taverna on the island of Skopelos, where the ‘Mamma Mia!’ movie was filmed. The wittiest touch of the whole production is to make it ‘post’ the film: the walls are bedecked with dodgy mocked-up Polaroids of the cast of the show posing with Meryl Streep et al, and the wafer-thin plot revolves around the prem

‘Six’ will be the first musical to return to the West End following lockdown. It will play a limited 11-week, socially-distanced run at the Lyric Theatre, with the plan being to return to the Arts Theatre in March 2021, subject to social distancing ending. ‘Remember us from your GCSEs?’ It’s Henry VIII’s six wives – and they’ve back, bitch, to re-tell ‘her-story’ as a slick, sassy girl band. Think Euro-pop remixes of ‘Greensleeves’, Anne Boleyn spouting tweenage text-speak (‘everybody chill/it’s totes God’s will’), and K-Howard warbling #MeToo tales of gropey employers. ‘Hamilton' looms large here, and although ‘Six’ has its own moments of clever-clever hip-hop rhymes, it’s a tough comparison: this musical started life as a student show (Cambridge, obvs). But its creators, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, have succeeded in crafting almost brutally efficient pastiche pop songs – here a ballad, there a ballsy, blinging R&B number – performed with snappy dance routines by a talented, diverse cast (and all-female band). Since inception the show seems to have been given a good lick of gloss, too; it stands up in the West End. But beneath its super-shiny surface, ‘Six’ is totes vacuous. And so basic in its feminism that it’s hard to believe it’s written by, like, actual Millennials. The whole thing is staged as a deeply unsisterly competition, each wife getting a song in which to prove they’re the biggest victim, the one who suffered the most at Henry’s hands. This is treated weirdly as

After starring in suffragette musical 'Sylvia' at the Old Vic, soul-singing legend Beverley Knight is back in the West End in Autumn 2020, and she's found an unlikely vehicle for her talents; a new musical about all-male singing group The Drifters. 'The Drifters Girl' centres on the woman behind the band, Faye Treadwell, who was the first African-American female manager and who helped propel the group to stardom over three decades. It'll be packed with Drifters hits like 'Stand By Me', 'Down By the Boardwalk' and 'Save the Last Dance For Me', quite a few of which will presumably be retooled to suit Knight's vocal talents. 'The Drifters Girl' premieres in Newcastle, before coming to Garrick Theatre in October 2020. 

In a surprise twist worthy of ‘The Mousetrap’, ‘The Mousetrap’ is back! Agatha Christie’s indestructible whodunnit will be the first West End show to return after lockdown, complete with rigorous social-distancing measures At the end of this elegant Agatha Christie thriller, the newly uncovered homicidal maniac steps into a sinister spotlight and warns everyone never to reveal his or her identity. The production recently celebrated its 60th birthday and although Wikipedia and Stephen Fry have both blown the murderer's cover, there is a remarkable conspiracy of silence over 'The Moustrap'. The real mystery of the world's longest-running theatre show is not whodunit but, in its currently mediocre state, whydoit at all? 'The Mousetrap's ticket prices are the only element of this show that isn't stuck fast in the 1950s – although the actors' strained RP does make the odd break for the twenty-first century. Otherwise, this is a walking, talking piece of theatre history and – at £39 for a full-price stalls seat – the most expensive museum exhibit in London. Christie's neat puzzler of a plot is easier to defend. It has defied the inevitably mummifying process of more than 25,000 performances and still possesses an uncanny precision worthy of the mistress of murder's chilling geriatric creation, Miss Marple. In the 60 years since it premiered, its premise, in which six Cluedo-like middle-class stereotypes are imprisoned by snow in a country house while they try to fathom which of the

The Bridge will be transformed into a 1930s dancehall for Marianne Elliott and Steven Hoggett’s production of ‘They Shoot Horse, Don’t They?’. It’s a new stage adaptation by playwright Paula Vogel of Horace McCoy’s 1935 classic novel that follows a Great Depression-era dance competition, as a series of couples gradually grind themselves down as they compete for $1,000 in a draining feat of endurance dancing. Seating in the pit will enable audience members to enter a ballot to join the dancing on the floor.

After London’s theatres closed, ‘Uncle Vanya’ was filmed in an empty Harold Pinter Theatre, with the same cast except for Roger Allam, who replaced Ciarán Hinds. It was broadcast on the BBC in December 2020, and will remain on iPlayer for one year. UK audiences can watch it here. If you think we’re all screwed, pity the poor characters in Chekhov’s ‘Uncle Vanya’. Unsuccessful, bored and desperately, desperately lonely, they’re hurtling deeper and deeper into middle age with little in the way of prospects or legacy. And of course they’re all about to be zapped by the Russian Revolution – a prescient air that hangs over all of Chekhov’s plays but here wilfully underscored by adapter Conor McPherson, who has nudged the 1898 play forward by a decade or so.  Nonetheless, Ian Rickson’s revival is a long way away from pure misery. Maybe it’s the chill touch of my own encroaching middle years talking, but I found McPherson’s take the most relatable I’ve seen. ‘Vanya’ is the most malleable of Chekhov’s plays in terms of potential for lols, and this version finds a sweet spot between companionable chuckles and icy despair. Toby Jones is terrific in a vivid, vanity-free take on the title role. At first his sadsack estate administrator comes across as a faintly unbearable pub-bore type, and yet he won me over: he’s decent, witty and has a painfully, often humorously clear view of himself – well aware that he’s far less attractive than his lifelong friend Doctor Astrov. The strapping Ri