Circus in London

Come Alive is a tricky one to review because the question here is less ‘is this a good example of a mash up of a circus and the songs from The Greatest Showman?’ and more ‘what the hell are the criteria for a good mash up of a circus and the songs from The Greatest Showman?’ Conceived and directed by Simon Hammerstein, the brains behind posh strip club The Box, Come Alive occupies a huge building in Earl’s Court dubbed the Empress Museum, formerly called the Daikin Centre and home to an immersive David Attenborough documentary.   The actual big top-style performance space is comparatively intimate: 700 seats is not tiny, but if an obvious point of comparison is Cirque du Soleil’s annual shows at the Royal Albert Hall, then Come Alive offers similarly skilled acrobats at appreciably closer range – you can see each muscle contort and flex. The rest of the building has been given over to a sort of Greatest Showman-themed mini-mall: overpriced food, overpriced drinks, overpriced fancy dress clobber - but done in high travelling-circus style and there’s a little bit of gratis pre-show acrobatics in one corner of it that’s well worth catching. Anyway. Circus. And the songs from The Greatest Showman. I think one basic point here is that presumably literally every person who has bought a ticket to Come Alive will love the Benj Pasek and Justin Paul tunes from the film already. They’re done well – performed live and with personality, but also very faithfully, ie no drastic sonic...

London’s spectacular free outdoor Greenwich + Docklands International Festival is back for 2025, taking place over three consecutive weekends starting with the August bank holiday.  Celebrating its 30th edition in 2025, the festival will kick off with Above And Beyond, a breathtaking acrobatic feat that will see eight parkour performers from French company Lézards Bleus traversing landmark buildings around Woolwich accompanied by music from the Greenwich-based Citizens of the World Choir.  The beloved Greenwich Fair (Aug 23 and 24) then returns after skipping last summer, bringing family friendly games and street performance to the heart of the borough, including all-female Belgian circus company Cie Des Chaussons Rouges’s high wire show Epiphytes in Greenwich Park. Greenwich Peninsula will play host to another sub festival, Turning Worlds (Aug 30 and 31), which will feature four collaborations between the world of technology, engineering and performance, including the delightfully named Robopole, a human/robot acrobatic act from German company ULIK.  The final weekend of the festival sees Dutch company Panama Pictures perform The Weight of the Water (Sep 5 and 6), a physical theatre piece on the subject of climate change that will take place of a seesawing platform in the middle of Birchmere Lake in Thamesmead. These are just a few highlights in a packed programme, with plenty more events to be announced in due course too. As always, everything at GDIF is free to attend,...