Bridge Theatre

It’s been a year since Nicholas Hytner’s impossibly rousing production of ‘Guys and Dolls’ opened at the Bridge Theatre and made standing up for a three-hour show London’s hottest ticket since the sixteenth century. Now, after 12 months of stomping through Arlene Phillips’s deft choreography across constantly raising and lowering platforms, roughly half of the cast are moving on to pastures new (maybe to just counter the nightly feeling of seasickness) while the rest have found it impossible to drag themselves away from London’s most acclaimed classic stage musical in years. Shipping out are Daniel Mays, who is replaced as the swaggeringly camp Nathan Detroit by Owain Arthur, and Marisha Wallace, who is replaced by Timmika Ramsay as the sensational Miss Adelaide (with Wallace immediately popping up as a ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ contestant). Jonathan Andrew Hume is also a new addition as cheery gambler Nicely-Nicely Johnson, as Cedric Neal bids his farewell. When it comes to core cast, George Ioannides remains in place as the suave Sky Masterson, and Celinde Schoenmaker continues to operatically trill her way through the role of the unsinkable Sarah Brown. Mays was the biggest name, and while the Bangor-born Arthur might not be as instantly recognisable – he’s probably best known for taking over the lead in another Hytner-directed show, ‘One Man, Two Guvnors} – he’s deeply at ease in Detroit’s shoes. Perhaps that’s due to having already filled in for Mays for three months last

Nicholas Hytner’s visionary immersive production of ‘Guys & Dolls’ was (and is!) a truly wonderful thing. But the enormous downside of staging a show both incredibly popular and entirely technically unsuited to a West End theatre is that it couldn’t transfer out of the Bridge, meaning one of London’s most prominent new theatres has only played host to a single production for the entirety of 2023 and 2024.  That will change in February with the Bridge’s first show ‘back’, as its founder Hytner returns to his beloved Shakespeare with a new production of Richard II starring ‘Bridgerton’ hearthrob Jonathan Bailey as the dithering monarch. He’ll play a charismatic take on the king, whose lack of political aptitude and arrogant belief that he really had been appointed to the English throne by God eventually led to his imprisonment, usurpation and death. Er, spoiler alert. We don’t know any more details so far – Hytner’s previous Shakespeare plays at the Bridge have been immersive productions in the vein of ‘Guys & Dolls’ made in collaboration with the designer Bunny Christie. No designer has been named for ‘Richard II’, and pre-Bridge Hytner directed many conventional Shakespeare productions, so who knows. The only guarantee wuth Hytner is that it’ll be a modern dress production.