London musicals tickets

F Scott Fitzgerald’s estate seems pretty chill. Over the years they’ve licensed innumerable adaptations of his magnum opus The Great Gatsby, from the blockbuster Baz Luhrmann film (itself the fourth major screen adaption) to that immersive version that did the rounds a while back, to GATZ, Elevator Repair Service’s legendary eight-hour unexpurgated theatrical reading of the entire novella. Never at any point during the 1925 book’s near century in copyright did Fitzgerald or his heirs allow a musical adaptation and you have to hand it to them: they were right.  However the copyright expired in America two years ago and suddenly there are two big US musical adaptations hovering around: Florence Welch’s Gatsby and this, from Kait Kerrigan, Jason Howland and Nathan Tyson, with direction from Marc Bruni. Transferring over in double quick time (possibly to head off Welch), The Great Gatsby looks absolutely ravishing and will doubtless cater to those who see the book as a bling-encrusted parable of how being rich is awesome but also sometimes sad.  Let’s not get all lit crit though. The biggest problem here is not so much how the creatives have gone about making a Great Gatsby musical, but rather that it only takes a few minutes to conclude that the very idea of a Great Gatsby musical is inherently flawed.  On the one hand, the book is inevitably so heavy on Fitzgerald’s own perfectly weighted prose that it feels asinine when we lurch into vaguely jazzy showtunes with lyrics...

A labour of love that has worked its way slowly to the West End over the five years since it debuted at Southwark Playhouse, at its best Jethro Compton’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an extraordinary thing, a soaring folk opera that overwhelms you with a cascade of song and feeling. It is based on F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story, and shares a premise: Benjamin Button (John Dagliesh) is a man inexplicably born at the age of 70, who then begins to age backwards, leading to a strange, exhilarating, sometimes extremely sad sort of life. Writer/director/designer Compton’s interpretation is very different to both Fitzgerald’s and the 2008 David Fincher film starring Brad Pitt. For starters it’s not set in nineteenth century America, but is virtually a love letter to Compton’s native Cornwall, its story spanning much of the twentieth century.  Fitzgerald’s plot is loosely followed, but heavily tinkered with – one of the more significant changes is having Dagliesh’s Benjamin born with a full adult’s mind and vocabulary rather than beginning life as a baby in an old man’s body. More to the point, it has a joy, romance and big-hearted elan that stands in stark contrast to Fitzgerald’s cynicism and the dolefulness of Fincher’s sloggy film. Indeed, despite tragic notes from the off – Benjamin’s mum takes her own life early on – the tone is largely whimsical and upbeat, focussing on the eccentric minutiae of Cornish village life, from oddball shopkeepers to dozy sheep....

This review is from 2018. Tina: The Tina Turner Musical will close in September 2025 with a cast headed by June Karis Anderson and Fleur East, who alternate the title role.  Is a feelgood jukebox musical the absolute best medium to tell a story about domestic abuse? Put crudely, that is the problem at the heart of big-budget global premiere ‘Tina – The Tina Turner Musical’. The erstwhile Anna Mae Bullock’s eventful life and beloved back catalogue are perfect subjects for adaptation. But too often Phyllida Lloyd’s production struggles to make a sensitive synthesis of the two.Where ‘Tina’ undoubtedly succeeds is in the casting of its lead. Broadway performer Adrienne Warren is virtually unknown over here, but it’s instantly apparent why she was tapped up for this. She doesn’t so much imitate Turner as channel her: her technically dazzling but achingly world-weary gale of a voice feels like it should be coming out of a woman decades, if not centuries, older. And while Warren doesn’t really look anything like Turner, she perfectly captures that leggy, rangy, in-charge physicality. From a musical standpoint, she virtually carries the show, singing nigh-on every song and even giving us an encore at the end.Almost as good is heavyweight Brit actor Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, who brings a demonic charisma to the role of Ike Turner. Tina’s abusive bandleader and husband is monstrous in his self-pitying, manipulative rage, but it’s not hard to see the appeal of his raw wit and powerful...

This review is of the original 2021 cast.  Rob Madge and Hannah Dodd (pictured) will star as The Emcee and Sally Bowles until September 2020 2025. Come to the cabaret, old chums, and see the stage performance of the year from Jessie Buckley! Gasp at the terrific supporting cast in Rebecca Frecknall’s luxury revival of Kander & Ebb’s musical masterpiece, foremost Omari Douglas’s passionate, tender, little boy lost Clifford! Be wowed by Tom Scutt’s literally transformative design! Wonder at the free schnapps you’re offered on the way in, and nod in polite appreciation at the pre-show entertainment! Also… there’s Eddie Redmayne. Now, I have absolutely nothing against the guy. But the presence of any hugely famous, Oscar-winning star is bound to distort the role of the Emcee of the Kit Kat Club, the Weimar-era Berlin bar in which Cabaret’s tragic heroine Sally Bowles plies her trade. The Emcee is a vital supporting role: his sardonic songs set the mood of the show, and map Germany’s descent into darkness. But it’s in no way the lead part – in fact, the character barely interacts with the actual story. Putting by far the most famous actor in the show in the role would be enormously distracting even if Redmayne didn’t do… all this. Wearing a series of beautiful, subtly sinister outfits that kind of feel like they’re trying to process every single one of David Bowie’s sartorial choices from ’73 to ’83 (more on designer Tom Scutt later), the Oscar-winner really goes for it as the...

Amy Heckerling’s cult 1995 comedy Clueless feels a bit overshadowed by the funnier (but less nuanced) Mean Girls, which came a few years later and more aggressively staked its claim to the same post-John Hughes, high-school-as-a-jokey-microcosm-of-life turf. So it’s not surprising that Mean Girls was first in there with a musical adaption, currently fetching away over at the Savoy Theatre.  But finally, here’s Clueless, which like Mean Girls is adapted by its original screenwriter, a sign of a labour of love if ever there was one. Despite other major successes, Heckerling is not the name Tina Fey is, and her stage update is nothing like as coruscatingly funny as Fey’s. But she makes a strong case for the enduring appeal of Clueless, her slyly clever valley-girl revamp of Jane Austen’s Emma. And unlike Fey she hasn’t roped her less talented husband in to write a load of unfunny songs that don’t really go with the rest of it.  The songs are in fact co-written by Broadway royalty lyricist Glenn Slater and ‘00s Scottish pop star KT Tunstall – an odd choice to translate the adventures of perky LA schoolgirl Cher Horowitz, but certainly not a bad choice as it turns out.  The slightly random deployment of Tunstall does, however, feel emblematic of a frustrating vagueness at the heart of the Rachel Kavanaugh-directed Anglo-American production. It never feels as Californian as the film, and doesn’t quite know whether to play up its ‘90s setting or shrug it off. Tunstall’s tunes...

Some people are reflexively cynical about musicals adapted from movies, suggesting they’re cynical cash grabs that take money and attention away from original ideas. But they deserve a fair hearing. For starters, it’s hard and expensive to make any musical, and few make serious money – nobody does it because it’s low hanging fruit. Moreover, live musical theatre is a very different medium to film, and at best the appeal of screen to stage lies in seeing a story that was great in one medium be great in another, for different reasons. It’s about familiarity, but it’s also about discovery, reinvention, about leading an audience onto something new by way of something they already like. Heck, Stephen Sondheim’s final musical is technically a movie adaptation, and if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for you, peasant, The Devil Wears Prada had me flummoxed, though. It is, of course, an adaptation of the 2006 millennial classic about a mousy young journalism graduate who blunders into the job of PA to a tyrannical, Anna Wintour-alike fashion editor (the film was itself an adaptation of Vogue-alumnus Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel). The songs are by none other than Elton John, with lyrics by Shania Taub and Mark Sonnenblick. The director-choreographer is Broadway veteran Jerry Mitchell. There’s some serious talent involved.  And yet being turned into a musical does… almost nothing for it. It had a troubled birth. It originally debuted in Chicago in 2022 and was...

This review is from 2017. See official website for the current cast. Okay, let’s just get this out of the way. ‘Hamilton’ is stupendously good. Yes, it’s kind of a drag that there’s so much hype around it. But there was a lot of hype around penicillin. And that worked out pretty well. If anything – and I’m truly sorry to say this – Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the US Treasury, is actually better than the hype suggests. That’s because lost in some of the more waffly discourse around its diverse casting and sociological import is the fact that ‘Hamilton’ is, first and foremost, a ferociously enjoyable show. You probably already know that it’s a hip hop musical, something that’s been tried before with limited success. Here it works brilliantly, because Miranda – who wrote everything – understands what mainstream audiences like about hip hop, what mainstream audiences like about musical theatre, and how to craft a brilliant hybrid. Put simply, it’s big emotions and big melodies from the former, and thrilling, funny, technically virtuosic storytelling from the latter. ‘Alexander Hamilton’, the opening tune, exemplifies everything that’s great about the show. It’s got a relentlessly catchy build and momentum, a crackling, edge-of-seat sense of drama, and is absolutely chockablock with information, as the key players stride on to bring us up to speed with the eventful life that Hamilton – the ‘bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a...

One of theatre’s greatest mysteries is how Disney literally made the most successful musical of all time and then proceeded to learn absolutely nothing from it. Virtuoso director Julie Taymor included all the dumb stuff required by the Mouse in her version of The Lion King – farting warthogs, basically – but nonetheless crafted an audacious and iconic production that departed radically from the aesthetic of the film and is still in theatres today. Subsequent Disney musicals like Aladdin and Frozen aren’t bad, but they take zero risks – effectively just plonking the film onstage – and are not in theatres today. And here comes Hercules, the next in the megacorp’s long line of perfectly adequate, not very imaginative adaptations of its bountiful ’90s animated roster. Book of Mormon director Casey Nicholaw’s production is good looking and high energy. Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s book is appropriately big hearted with a handful of very funny gags. The show’s not-so-secret weapon is the retention of the film’s sassy quintet of singing Muses. Here turbocharged into a full-on gospel group, they’re a whole lot of finger snapping, head shaking, quick-changing fun, and also add a note of character to Alan Menken’s likeable but unremarkable Alan Menken-style score. Hercules is a unit of generic Disney stage entertainment However, the Muses are also symptomatic of the fact that the show’s Ancient Greece comes across as a reskinned small-town America, without having any comment...

This review is from the Old Vic in February 2024. Just for One Day transfers to the West End in May 2024. If you’re in the market for sexy rearrangements of AOR smashes combined with a hagiographic account of Bob Geldof’s Band Aid and Live Aid projects, then boy are you going to love ‘Just for One Day’. Directed by ‘& Juliet’ man Luke Sheppard, and with a book by humourist John O’Farrell, who did the honours for the ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ musical, it kiiiind of feels like an old man collaring you in a pub to tell you how great the mid-’80s were.  A fairly entertaining old man, admittedly: Craige Els is a hoot as cranky, present-day Geldof who, for nebulous reasons, has been collared by a Gen-Z-er called Jemma (Naomi Katiyo) to answer her questions about the concert. His pathologically abrasive manner and refusal to pronounce the project an unqualified success sort of stops it coming across as too saccharine. But Jemma’s attempts to ask hard questions of Bob are risible and easily batted away. Even if he’s ambivalent about his success, the view of the show itself is clearly that Live Aid was an unalloyed triumph, both the concert and its legacy.  With the exception of Geldof and his Band Aid co-writer Midge Ure, it omits pop stars as characters. It’s a choice that allows it to play freer with the music and not be bogged down by naff Bowie impressions. There is a notional attempt to foreground ‘ordinary people’ who went to the show. But leaving out Freddie Mercury, Paul McCartney,...

This review is from 2019. I would seriously question whether any other show on the planet bar ‘Les Misérables’ could get away with junking its original production and carrying on as if nothing had changed. But ‘Les Mis’ could be transposed to space, or underwater, or to the height of the Hittite empire and it would basically be the same show as long as the singing was on point. In case you missed it: the world’s longest-running musical that’s still playing shut for six months recently while the Sondheim Theatre (née Queen’s Theatre) was renovated by proprietor and producer Cameron Mackintosh. It has returned, not in the original Trevor Nunn RSC production, but a new(ish) one from Laurence Connor and James Powell that has already been rolled out around the globe, with London the last bastion of the ‘classic’ ‘Les Mis’. The ditching of the original has caused disgruntlement in certain quarters: hardcore stans distraught that the exact show they grew up with no longer strictly exists; and the original creative team, notably director Nunn, who understandably feel a little betrayed by the whole affair. All I can say is: yup, I really dug the old revolving stage too, but its loss is bearable. The songs are the same, the score is the same (accepting that it was tweaked to make it a bit less ’80s a few years back), the costumes are the same, many of the current cast are veterans of the original production, and the text is still Nunn and John Caird’s adaptation of Claude-Michel...