Theatre in Covent Garden

‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ returns to its longterm home the Duchess Theatre in a new, socially-distanced production from November 19. We’re hopeful the show’s safety measures will at least go according to plan. This comedy has, of course, actually done everything right. Produced by LAMDA graduates Mischief Theatre, the show has had successful runs at the Old Red Lion in Islington, Trafalgar Studios, and in Edinburgh; now it's made it all the way to the West End. Amid all the chatter about the overbearing West End dominance of jukebox musicals and film spin-offs, it’s cheering to see a dynamic young company land slap-bang in the middle of Theatreland.The show is a farcical play-within-a-play. Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society are mounting a production of a hoary old sub-‘Mousetrap’ mystery called ‘The Murder at Haversham Manor’. From the first moment, in which a hapless stage manager attempts to secure a collapsing mantelpiece, we suspect that things are not going to go to plan. And that, indeed, is the case, as the production shudders painfully into chaos, taking in everything from dropped lines to disintegrating sets, intra-cast fighting, technical malfunctions of the highest order, and an unexpectedly resuscitated corpse.The show sits in a fine tradition of British slapstick, and of plays about theatrical blunders: its debt to Michael Frayn’s hilarious ‘Noises Off’, about the gradual disintegration of a touring rep production, is considerable. This is, to be fair, acknowled

It didn't happen in 2020 for obvious reasons, but it could still be the biggest show of 2021, all being well: Michael Grandage’s musical adaptation of Disney’s ‘Frozen’, aka the most successful animated film of all time. Grandage’s lavish take has already been and gone on Broadway, and the general feeling is that while it doesn’t do anything to reinvent the wheel, it absolutely does enough to transport fans of the film back to their beloved Arendelle and the complicated relationship between sisters Elsa and Anna (the former being possessed of powers over ice and snow, lest we forget). As with the film, the songs are by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, and yes, that does include that song, with remarkable restraint only included once.  There are no official dates yet, but it has been declared that it will open in ‘autumn 2020’. And there’s one bit of casting now announced: musical theatre actress Samantha Barks will play frosty antagonist Elsa.

'Cinderella' was originally slated to premiere in the summer of 2020, but it's been delayed almost a year due to the theatres shutting. Carrie Hope Fletcher is set to star in the latest musical from Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. He's spent the past few years polishing his once-tarnished crown as king of West End musical theatre. ‘Joseph’ pulled in crowds last autumn, ‘School of Rock’ is deep in playground rivalry with 'Matilda', and the Open Air Theatre’s recent revivals of 'Jesus Christ Superstar' and 'Evita' have proved that his back catalogue still scrubs up a treat. Now, he's having a go at a totally new story for the first time in decades; 'Cinderella' will presumably be a bit gritter than yer average bedtime tale, thanks to a book by 'Killing Eve' writer Emerald Fennell (and judging by the amount of eyeliner in the grungy-looking publicity snaps). After playing no less than three different roles in the West End's 'Les Miserables', as well as racking up over 600,000 YouTube subscribers, fan fave Carrie Hope Fletcher is on board to play Cinders. Laurence Connor will direct, after helming both ‘School of Rock’ and last year's Sheridan Smith-starring revival of ‘Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat’. 

Well this feels strangely significant: though this all-singing version of Robert Zemeckis ’80s time-travelling classic has had try outs in Manchester and has been in the works for years (Jamie Lloyd was hired to direct a version that ultimately didn’t make it to the stage), its May 2021 start date is the most confident we’ve seen producers of a West End show in terms of belief that the era of social distancing is drawing to a close. That’s not to say ‘Back to the Future: The Musical’ can’t or won’t be pushed back, and in a concession to the current era, you can exchange tickets for another performance up to 24 hours before the performance you hold tickets for. However, delays cost money and there’s clearly a significant belief that things will be close to normal again by next spring.  In terms of the show: well you know what ‘Back to the Future’ is – ‘80s highschooler Marty McFly travels back to the 1950s in Doc Brown’s time-travelling DeLorean and gets up to sundry delightful time-travelling antics including almost having it off with his own mum. Roger Bart and Olly Dobson will reprise their Manchester roles of Doc Brown and Marty, alongside Hugh Coles as George McFly, Rosanna Hyland as Lorraine Baines, Cedric Neal as Goldie Wilson, Aidan Cutler as Biff Tannen and Courtney-Mae Briggs as Jennifer Parker.

This spectacular puppet-driven stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s bestselling novel was a massive success when it premiered in Sheffield in 2019. Festooned with five-star-reviews, a West End transfer looked inevitable, and Cameron Mackintosh is doing the honours, with the promise that Wyndham’s Theatre will be ‘transformed’ to accommodate Max Webster’s production, which is adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti and has puppets by Finn Caldwell.  The novel, if you somehow missed it, concerns Pi, an Indian boy who ends up adrift on the ocean with a small group of animals – a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan… and a giant Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

These are the new, rescheduled, 2021-22 dates for ‘The Ocean at the End of the Lane’, whose original West End transfer was scuppered by the pandemic.  This review is from its run at the National Theatre in December 2019. Tickets for the transfer go on sale March 13 2020. Considering how popular fantasy literature and its adaptations currently are, it feels like a bit of an omission that we see so little of it on stage. But Joel Horwood’s over-twelves version of Neil Gaiman’s 2013 novel ‘The Ocean at the End of the Lane’ is emphatically The Way To Do It: a heady, dreamlike whirl of story, scary and beautiful in equal parts, that looks phenomenal and makes expert use of the stylised language of theatre to cram in an entire otherworldly epic.It begins as an unnamed man runs away from his father’s wake, drawn to an old duckpond near his former family home. He is haunted by thoughts of a girl, Lettie (Marli Siu), who he met on his twelfth birthday, in the early-’80s. She is gone, but he comes across her elderly grandmother, Old Mrs Hempstock (Josie Walker), who he only dimly recalls. Her presence revives suppressed memories, of Lettie and her family being an ageless coven of immortal spellcasters; of his home being invaded by Ursula (Pippa Nixon), a malevolent entity from outside the walls of reality; of the fightback, and its consequences.Gaiman’s story is hot property: Simon Pegg, of all people, is apparently making a TV version. But it’ll have to go a long way to catch up with