London musicals tickets

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

The posters have been plastered around the London Underground for years – long enough for this show to become the most successful musical of all time – but nothing prepares you for the sheer impact of 'The Lion King's opening sequence. With the surge of 'Circle Of Life' reverberating through your chest, Julie Taymor's animal creations march on, species by species. Gazelles spring, birds swoop and an elephant and her child lumber through the stalls. It's a cacophonous cavalcade that genuinely stops you breathing. You'd think Noah's Ark had emptied onto the stage. For a global blockbuster, 'The Lion King's absolute theatricality is astonishing. Techniques from all over the world – African masks, Japanese Kabuki costumes, Malaysian shadow puppetry – are smashed together in an explosion of spectacle. It's perfect for a musical, allowing both distinct flavours and an eclectic carnival spirit. Admittedly, things deflate when it sacrifices this defiant originality for subservient approximation of the film. Timon and Pumba (Damian Baldet and Keith Bookman), though impressively like their screen counterparts, step into the savannah from a different dimension. The hyena-infested elephant's graveyard swaps menace for goofiness and the famous stampede scene, so delicately handled and moving in the film, is merely ticked off with a sigh of relief. The familiarity of the film is a root cause of the show's commercial success. But, ironically, 'The Lion King' can't afford such compromises. I

This review is from 2012. Check the official ‘Wicked’ website for current casting information. The film world continues its love affair with werewolves, vampires and all things 'Twilight'. But theatre types have always known witches are where it's at. After its 2006 opening at Apollo Victoria, Oz prequel 'Wicked' continues to fill this massive theatre with an international crowd of voracious consumers (glass of champagne and a choccy for £16 anyone?). But this stylish and bombastic musical still delivers, sailing over its patchy score thanks to a gravity-defying performance from its current leading lady Rachel Tucker, as the intense green-skinned undergrad who goes on to become the Wicked Witch of the West. 'Wicked' is a spectacle that rises or falls around its central performance. In the midst of a gigantic production full of bangs, bells and whistles Tucker, with her small frame and searing vocal ability, simply flies off with the show. She's closely followed by Gina Beck, who plays good girl, Glinda. Glinda and Elphaba's relationship forms the heart of this story and, as the Good Witch, Beck is a consummate clown, playing up the silliness of her character at every turn. But she can raise a tear, too, and her final duet with Tucker, 'For Good', is genuinely heart-rending. The Tim Burton-inspired ensemble oscillate between the hypnotic and grotesque and a sweet but thin voiced Matt Willis charms as the rather superfluous Prince. As in classical ballet, this is all about the

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

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

'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

I was blown away by the emotional power of this show, about three generations of incomers in Sheffield’s iconic – and infamous – brutalist housing estate, Park Hill. It’s a stunning achievement, which takes the popular but very different elements of retro pop music, agitprop and soap opera, melts them in the crucible of 50 years of social trauma and forges something potent, gorgeous and unlike any big-ticket musical I’ve seen before.  ‘Standing at the Sky’s Edge’ has deeply local foundations. It's based on local songwriter Richard Hawley's music. And it was made in Sheffield, at the Crucible Theatre, with meticulous care and attention from that theatre’s creative team. It’s been rightly garlanded with praise and awards already. But its West End transfer makes it clear that this singular show can speak beyond its own backyard. It is part kitchen sink musical, and part state-of-the-nation soap. It documents poverty, migration, hard graft, the painful decline of industry and working-class male pride, the double-edged hope offered by regeneration, the fragile joys of love in  ‘found families’ – not exactly ‘jazz hands’ themes, but vividly relatable and, more importantly, shared by communities. They deserve to be sung just as loudly as the more familiar stories of triumphant individuals expressing themselves, which tend to leave all this stuff behind.  What makes this an instant classic is the Crucible's outstanding production, a true ensemble achievement. It is the right way to a

This fresh new musical romcom is a treat - not too sickly, but perfectly sweet. The tone is exactly what you’d expect from the title: offbeat, a little bit indie, knowing its quirks. And so’s the premise. Literally. Two twentysomething strangers cross paths in NYC. Their meet is not especially cute. Feckless Brit Dougal (Sam Tutty) has flown over for a whirlwind 36-hour trip based around his estranged dad’s wedding. Extremely tired native New Yorker Robin (Dujonna Gift) is sister of the bride, and has been dispatched to meet him at the airport. The cake is a wedding cake, which she has to pick up from Brooklyn. He tags along for the ride: they take it in an Uber. Will passion rise, like the perfect sponge? Or will it prove to have a soggy bottom? No spoilers, but the answer is unexpected and totally charming, you will walk out with a very big soppy smile on your face.  Jim Barne and Kit Buchan’s musical premiered in 2023 at the much smaller Kiln Theatre in Kilburn. I thought it might have some problems scaling up to the West End – it’s a thrifty affair, with a cast of two and one ingenious set. (Soutra Gilmore’s design, as always, deserves a special mention: a series of flight cases that flip open to become a Chinatown restaurant, a fancy cocktail spot, an ice skating rink and the Plaza Hotel). But it is carried joyfully onwards and upwards by the wit and charm of its excellent cast, its upbeat music and outstanding libretto.  Streaming channels are totally oversaturated wit

Pitched somewhere between a musical and a night down the pub, Nic Doodson and Andrew Kay’s ‘The Choir of Man’ has been a low-key smash since it opened post-pandemic, clocking up several years of run at the dinky Arts Theatre. Set in a pub entitled The Jungle, the show follows nine men, each of whom embodies some notional masculine archetype – The Poet, The Hardman – but who bond via the medium of an eclectic mix of a cappella pop covers, tapdance, and ‘poetic meditations on the power of community’. 

  ‘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