London musicals tickets

This review is of the original 2021 cast. From March 11 until June 1 2024 Cara Delevigne will play Sally and Luke Treadway the Emcee. 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 role – 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 they didn’t do… 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), Oscar-winning star Redmayne really goes for it as the Emcee. Perso

This review is from 2021. The current cast is headed by Ben Joyce (Marty) and Cory English (Doc).  This long-gestating musical version of ‘Back to the Future’ – it has literally taken longer to bring to the stage than all three films took to make – is so desperate to please that the producers would doubtless offer a free trip back in time with every ticket purchase if the laws of physics allowed. It is extra as hell, every scene drenched in song, dance, wild fantasy asides, fourth-wall-breaking irony and other assorted shtick. You might say that, yes, that’s indeed what musicals are like. But John Rando’s production of a script by the film’s co-creator Bob Gale is so constantly, clangingly OTT that it begins to feel a bit like ‘Back to the Future’ karaoke: it hits every note, but it does so at a preposterous velocity that often drowns out the actual storytelling.  As with the film, it opens with irrepressible teen hero Marty McFly visiting his friend ‘Doc’ Brown’s empty lab, where he rocks out on an inadvisably over-amped ukulele. Then he goes and auditions for a talent contest, hangs out with his girlfriend Jennifer, talks to a crazy lady from the clock tower preservation society, hangs out with his loser family… and takes a trip 30 years into the past in the Doc’s time-travelling DeLorean car, where he becomes embroiled in a complicated love triangle with his mum and dad. It is, in other words, the same as the film, with only a few minor plot changes (the whole thing about

Alas poor Marshmallow! The inscrutable, inept snow monster that ice mage heroine Elsa conjures to guard her palace is the highest-profile casualty of ‘Frozen’s journey from screen to stage. Michael Grandage’s musical version of Disney’s animated enormo-smash is almost identical to the film in terms of plot beats. But he dials down the wilder fantasy, steering the show – within obvious constraints – to something a little closer in tone to ‘The Snow Queen’, the Hans Christian Andersen tale that it’s based upon. It’s still a dazzling spectacle that the film’s legions of kiddie fans will love. But adults will note that it’s more serious, sadder and wiser than the film. Some New York critics didn’t seem to be entirely happy with this when it opened on Broadway in 2018, criticising it for being dour. But I liked Grandage’s more melancholy spin, which is written by the film’s screenwriter and director Jennifer Lee, with new songs (and old songs) from the film’s songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez. To be clear, the talking snowman and the goofy reindeer are still in it, but it does land a bit differently.  In particular, it feels like less of an ensemble piece and more focused on the relationship between Samantha Barks’s troubled, sensitive Elsa and Stephanie McKeon’s loveable goofball sister Anna. There’s more about their lives in the royal palace where they grew up, first as best friends, and then kept separate by their over-protective parents after Elsa's growing m

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

What a long, strange trip it’s been. Indie-folk musician Anaïs Mitchell’s musical retelling of the Orpheus story began life in the mid-’00s as a lo-fi song cycle, which she gigged around New England before scraping the money together to record it as a critically acclaimed 2010 concept album that featured the likes of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Ani DiFranco on guest vocals as the various mythological heroes and villains. Going through the next 14 years blow-by-blow would be time-consuming, but in short thanks to what I can only describe as THEATRE MAGIC, ‘Hadestown’ is now a full-blown musical directed by the visionary Rachel Chavkin, its success as a show vastly outstripping that of the record. It played the National Theatre in 2018, on its way to becoming the most unusual Broadway smash of the modern era. And it’s finally come back to us. Now in a normcore West End theatre, its otherness feels considerably more pronounced than it did at the NT. The howling voodoo brass that accompanies opener ‘Road to Hell’ is like nothing else in Theatreland. Mitchell”s original songs are still there but have mutated and outgrown the original folk palette thanks to the efforts of arrangers Michael Chorney and Todd Sickafoose. Rachel Hauck’s set – which barely changes – is a New Orleans-style saloon bar, with the cast all dressed like sexy Dustbowl pilgrims. It’s virtually sung through. It is essentially a staged concert, but it’s done with such pulsing musical intensity, physical dynamism

This review is from 2017.  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 Scotsman’ – led before he emigrated to Ameri

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 Schön

'My mummy says I'm a miracle,' lisps a pampered mini-me at a purgatorial kiddies' birthday party at the outset of this delicious, treacly-dark family show. The obnoxious ma and pa of its titular, gifted, pint-sized heroine are not, of course, quite so doting. But 'Matilda' must be making its creators, playwright Dennis Kelly and comedian-songsmith Tim Minchin, a very pair of proud parents. Opening to rave reviews in Stratford-upon Avon before transferring to the West End in 2011 and snatching up Olivier Awards with all the alacrity of a sticky-fingered child in a sweetshop, Matthew Warchus's RSC production remains a treat. With hindsight, Kelly and Minchin's musical, born of the 1988 novel by that master of the splendidly grotesque Roald Dahl, is a little too long and, dramatically, a tad wayward. But like the curly-haired little girl in the famous nursery rhyme, when it is good, it is very, very good. And it's even better when it's horrid. The past few months have seen some cast changes, including, alas, the departure of Bertie Carvel's tremendous Miss Trunchbull, headmistress of the dread Crunchem Hall School, former Olympic hammer-thrower and a gorgon of monumental nastiness, complete with scarily Thatcher-esque tics of purse-lipped gentility and faux concern. David Leonard doesn't quite match the squirm-inducing, hair-raising detail of Carvel in the role, but his more butch, granite-faced version is fantastically horrible nonetheless. And if Paul Kaye as Matilda's loathso

The friend who was supposed to come with me to ‘Moulin Rouge! The Musical’ dropped out because of a migraine, and honestly, hard relate: director Alex Timbers’s dementedly maximalist ‘remix’ of Baz Luhrmann’s smash 2001 film is pure sensory overload. Frequently I found myself cackling hysterically at it, on my own, for no particularly good reason, other than how *much* it all is. If you can remember any of the 2001 film’s music beyond ‘Lady Marmalade’ (here present and correct as show opener, complete with sassy, snappy choreography from Sonya Tayeh) you’ll remember that the soundtrack largely consists of medleys of other people’s songs. So we have ‘Sparkling Diamonds’, aka ‘Diamonds are Forever’ smushed into ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ or the semi-infamous ‘Elephant Love Medley’, a wilfully preposterous amalgam of the cheesiest lines from myriad famous pop tunes, a veritable one-track sex mix. You have to think that it’s essentially this that drew Timbers and music supervisor Justin Levine to ‘Moulin Rouge!’, as they’ve gone absolutely nuts with the idea, pumping the story full of pop songs old and new, fragmented and whole. Like a glittery cow jacked up with some fabulous experimental growth hormone, ‘Moulin Rouge!’ is now bulked into a veritable behemoth of millennial pop bangers. There are the ones that were in the film. There are some that were around when the film was made but weren’t included (‘Torn’; no kidding, the theme from ‘Dawson’s Creek’). Then there are

  ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ is the latest in a seemingly endless post-pandemic string of musical takes on retro movies. ‘Back to the Future’, ‘Dirty Dancing’, ‘Groundhog Day’... if you were born in the ’80s, the West End has decided that by now you're obviously loaded and ready to be milked of your money like a pantomime cow. Only this genuinely funny comedy musical doesn't feel like a cash grab, thanks to its twenty-first-century jokes, perfectly paced book, and silly voices galore.Writer John O’Farrell has worked on ‘Have I Got News For You’ and ‘Spitting Image’, and some of that topical flair can be seen here. Freshly divorced dad Daniel is a comic actor whose voiceover recording seshes ingeniously break out of the American world of the story: he begins with a witty theatre pre-show announcement, then breaks into non-naff impressions of Prince Harry and Boris Johnson. Refreshingly, this production has resisted the temptation to cast a famous funny person in the role, and musical theatre actor Gabriel Vick pulls off both the gags and the songs with impressive aplomb.This story’s serious bits aren't quite as well-handled. O’Farrell struggles a little to make Daniel’s ex-wife Miranda (Laura Tebbutt) more than a boring disciplinarian foil to Daniel's relentless zaniness (here, she gets an improbable fashion career and a 2D hunky love interest). Karey and Wayne Kirkpatricks’ lyrics don't zing with the kind of psychological insights or witty couplets musical theatre fans dream of. But wh