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The Book of Mormon review
Brace yourself for a shock: ‘South Park’ creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Broadway-munching musical is not particularly shocking. Sure, there are ‘fucks’ and ‘cunts’ and gags about baby rape – but most of it is deployed ironically; beneath it all, this is a big-hearted affair that pays note-perfect homage to the sounds and spirit of Broadway’s golden age. The strapping young Latter Day Saints missionaries in ‘The Book of Mormon’ are as cartoonish as any ‘South Park’ character, with the endearing alpha-male woodenness of the ‘Team America’ puppets. In other words, they are loveable, well-intentioned idiots, traversing the globe like groups of pious meerkats, convinced they can convert the heathen through sheer politeness. And if they have doubts, then as Stephen Ashfield’s scene-stealingly repressed Elder McKinley declares in glorious faux-Gershwin number ‘Turn it Off’, ‘Don’t feel those feelings – hold them in instead!’ His advice is ignored by the show’s heroes, narcissistic, highly strung Elder Price (Gavin Creel) and dumpy, lying Elder Cunningham (Jared Gertner). The pair are sent to Uganda in an effort to convert a village to Mormonism, a religion that essentially tells the penniless villagers how great distant America is. The locals are not keen: Price cracks and unwisely clashes with a crazed local warlord; Cunningham makes up his own version of Mormonism which involves fucking frogs to cure oneself of Aids. ‘The Book of Mormon’ is, above all, very funny, breath
‘9 to 5 the Musical’ review
Backwoods Barbie, rhinestone queen and all-round country music legend Dolly Parton has her glittering fingerprints all over this musical. She’s written all the songs, bar the iconic title track, especially for the show (this definitely isn’t a jukebox affair). She’s basically in it, as thinly disguised poodle-coiffed doppelgänger Doralee. And in case this escaped you, Parton pops up in video footage to introduce this whole bonkers confection to an audience of mad-keen fans. ‘9 to 5’ is a musical theatre version of the 1980 movie of the same name, which involves Parton, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda running round an office and outwitting their dastardly male boss. And although this show started out in LA in 2005, it feels (shudder) pretty post-Weinstein, with its uncompromising focus on male shitness and violent retribution. Doralee (Natalie McQueen) can’t so much as climb a stepladder without her sleazy boss theatrically ogling her – and climbing any kind of career ladder is out of the question. Meanwhile Judy (Amber Davies, of ‘Love Island’ fame) is struggling to get to grips with some delightfully ’80s office tech, including a malevolent photocopier that attacks her with sheets of paper. And Violet – played by Caroline Sheen, subbing in for an injured Louise Redknapp who returns to the role next month – is a natural leader who’s longing for the promotion she deserves. The plot, when it shows up, is about as ridiculous as these women’s ultra-glam interpretation of ‘office wea
‘Come from Away’ review
Musicals don’t come much more low-key, wholesome or Canadian than ‘Come from Away’. Writers Irene Sankoff and David Hein cook up the straightforward world of the Newfoundland town of Gander using a very straightforward set of ingredients. The cast wear sensible shoes and lumberjack shirts. They tramp across a wood-decked stage that evokes the huge skies of their tiny island. They sing their way through a set of folk-tinged songs that tell stories of the five days after 9/11, when 38 planes made emergency landings on the island’s huge, disused airstrip. And it’s all totally, soul-feedingly wonderful. ‘Come from Away’ has been a massive sleeper hit across North America, Broadway included, and it’s easy to see why: it mixes down-home authenticity with the desperate intensity that comes in times of crisis. This is a moment where 7,000 temporary arrivals join a community of just 9,000 people. Logistics might not be the sexiest of topics for a musical, but one of the many surprising joys of this show is how gripping it makes things like the struggle to rustle up transport at a time when the local school bus drivers were on strike and had to be coaxed into crossing the picket line. Then there are beds, food, medication and interpreters to be sourced for passengers from across the world: one non-English-speaking couple communicates by cross-referencing Bible verses. Based closely on interviews with real Newfoundlanders, this is a picture of a community that stretches itself to bre
‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ review
‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ is a burst of joy in the heart of the West End. This new British musical, transferring from the Sheffield Crucible, is the real deal. Watch out, tired revivals: there’s a new kid in town. Inspired by a 2011 BBC documentary about a teenager who wanted to be a drag queen, the show follows 16-year-old Jamie on his journey to be himself – out of a classroom in a working-class part of Sheffield, away from the bigotry of a deadbeat dad, and into high heels. Director Jonathan Butterell’s production is a high-impact blaze of colour, combining video projections with seamless scene changes and a live band above the stage. It captures the frenetic energy of being a teenager. Every element of this show works beautifully together. The music, by The Feeling frontman Dan Gillespie Sells, is a deft mix of irresistibly catchy, pop-honed foot-tappers – try not to hum ‘And You Don’t Even Know It’, I dare you – and truthful, heart-wrenching numbers. This is Sells’s first foray into writing for musicals, but he’s always excelled at telling stories in song. He is matched by the show’s writer and lyricist Tom MacRae. Apart from notable exceptions like Punchdrunk’s ‘Doctor Who’-themed kids’ show ‘The Crash of Elysium’, he’s largely written for TV, but this works well here. His dialogue is punchy, funny and often lands with a sting. While most of the characters exist to orbit Jamie, they still have their own stories and these are crisply told. As Pritti, Jamie’
‘Ian McKellen On Stage’ review
Effectively An Audience With National Treasure Sir Ian McKellen, this solo show is a big, brash, old-fashioned night in which the octogenarian acting legend discusses his life, rattles through his greatest hits, and shows off a lot. True, there are no celebrity guests, but he does bring out Gandalf the Grey’s actual sword Glamdring (well, the actual prop), which is treated like a bigger star than its owner by a swooning audience member invited up to give it a heft. In many ways it’s cheesy as hell… but frankly, that’s what’s so good about it. McKellen marked his eightieth birthday by taking ‘Ian McKellen on Stage’ on an 80-date tour of the UK and Ireland, which he’s now following up with an 80-date West End run. You don’t do that if you’ve fallen out of love with the world, and the entire joyously rambling three hours speaks of a life extremely well lived. Although long established as a stage great, McKellen came late to superstardom, via Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ films. He is not precious about this: he literally starts the show with a run-through of Gandalf’s confrontation with the Balrog. It’s the very definition of giving the audience what they want. It’s also a smart piece of structuring: it begins things at a clip, and it gets the least humorous material out of the way with first. Because McKellen is a very amusing man, and much as he has some serious things to tell us – about his formative love of theatre, about his regret about spending so much time in th
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Our favourite musicals
‘Waitress’ review
Lucie Jones has now taken over from Katharine McPhee in the role of Jenna in 'Waitress'. Blake Harrison and Ashley Roberts have also joined the cast as Ogie and Dawn. The specials board in the diner in ‘Waitress’ advertises a bacon and blueberry pie. Most of the pies in Diane Paulus’s Broadway-conquering show are allegorical: their lurid lists of ingredients are flights of fancy in the mind of Katharine McPhee’s titular heroine Jenna, a pie-making prodigy who dreams of escaping her abusive marriage. However, as far as I can tell, the show is serious about the bacon and blueberry one. Bacon. Blueberry. Individually these are reasonable things, but with apologies to American readers, I cannot conceive why anybody in their right mind would even put them on the same level of the fridge, let alone lock them inside a pastry crust. Similarly, ‘Waitress’ is made from the very finest ingredients, but often they don’t actually feel like ingredients that should have been put together. Adapted from Adrienne Shelly’s cult 2007 indie flick of the same name, ‘Waitress’ is a moving musical full of flawed, morally compromised characters of the sort you so rarely get in this type of glossy Broadway show. Everyone, on some level, lets us or themselves down: indeed, the big showstopper, ‘She Used to Be Mine’ – delivered with exquisitely controlled sorrow by McPhee – is Jenna’s bitter ode to her disappointment in herself. There are no heroes here: not Jenna, not her hunky gynaecologist lov
The Lion King
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 compromis
Pretty Woman: The Musical
Every hit romcom is destined to become a musical, and while the whole it’s-about-a-prostitute-who-falls-for-her-client, er, thing possibly stopped 1990 enormo-smash ‘Pretty Woman’ being adapted earlier, the inevitable has now happened. Bryan Adams (yes, that Bryan Adams) and Jim Vallance’s take on Julia Roberts’s breakthrough hit received mixed reviews when it premiered on Broadway last year, but it lasted for a respectable enough year. That’s something the UK debut for Jerry Mitchell’s production hopes to repeat: it’s booked into the Piccadilly Theatre for a slightly unusual ‘strictly limited’ engagement of, uh, 46 weeks. There’s no word on casting at the moment, but it’s emphatically billing itself as a fun night out. Book tickets here.
School of Rock - The Musical
It is the ultimate musical about male privilege, a show about an under-qualified, over-entitled white guy who shambles his way to public adoration by blithely inflicting bankrupt baby boomer values upon a bunch of impressionable people who don’t know any better. ‘School of Rock – The Musical’ is also quite good fun. I dunno if it’s the state of the world today, the fact I haven’t seen the Jack Black-starring film, the fact that so much has changed – musically and politically – since the film came out in 2003, or simply the knowledge that it’s written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Julian Fellowes, a couple of Tory lords in their late ’60s, but I felt a bit politically uneasy about ‘School of Rock’, which follows schlubby charlatan Dewey (David Fynn) as he masquerades as a teacher and proves a hit by tearing up his sensitive young charges’ syllabus and making them play old person music. Its big, catchy number is called ‘Stick It to the Man’. Yet there’s something both problematic and ironic about the fact that in Laurence Connor’s production The Man is represented by two women – Florence Andrews’s hard-working, professional headmistress Rosalie and Preeya Kalidas’s Patty, a hard-working, professional wife-to-Dewey’s best friend Ned – while in the blue corner we have... Dewey, a self-absorbed bum who everything turns out brilliantly for. Despite apparently being somewhere in his thirties – so presumably born around 1980 – Dewey exclusively loves classic rock bands, and mocks
Our favourite plays
Uncle Vanya
Hot on the heels of the return of his Bob Dyan musical ‘Girl from the North Country’, the great Irish playwright Conor McPherson returns with a new stage adaptation of Chekhov's classic. Whether McPherson applies his full magical realist personality to ‘Uncle Vanya’ or maintains a light touch, this production is a fairly mouthwatering prospect, with Ian Rickson directing Toby Jones as the eponymous loveable sadsack and Richard Armitage as his friend, local doctor Astrov. The tone of the play tends to vary immensely from production to production – but we’re guessing from the blub here that this is going to be a pretty dark take. Rae Smith designs. Tickets go on sale Monday September 30.
‘The Son’ review
'The Son' transfers to Duke of York's Theatre on the West End in August 2019. This review is from its February 2019 premiere at Kiln Theatre. It has been five months since the last Florian Zeller play opened in London: quite a gap for the hyperprolific Frenchman, who has notched up an impressive six UK premieres since 2015, all translated by Christopher Hampton. I’m going to be honest and say that, ‘The Father’ excepted, Zeller’s success has always slightly mystified me: he seems ubiquitous without being beloved. I suspect it’s something to do with actors and directors gravitating to the efficiency of his writing – you get the impression that he’d rather hack his arm off than write a subplot. Plus, like M Night Shyamalan, there’s always a twist. Director Michael Longhurst and designer Lizzie Clachan do a genuinely beautiful job with ‘The Son’ (part of a very loose conceptual trilogy with ‘The Father’ and ‘The Mother’). The set is a sort of elegant sitting room with white-panelled walls that get trashed, graffitied, tidied up and trashed again in line with the shifting emotional state of Nicolas, a depressed teen whose continued refusal to attend school is driving his divorced parents Pierre and Anne to their wits’ end. Zeller’s sparse writing never really spells out Nicolas’s problem, or attempts to make him overly sympathetic: we see him through his parents’ eyes as an enigmatic, sullen figure, given to almost equally inexplicable moments of brief happiness. One-to-wat
Witness for the Prosecution review
It wasn’t all about Poirot’s little grey cells or Miss Marple solving murders at the vicarage. In her lifetime, crime writer extraordinaire Agatha Christie wrote 16 plays and a massive 73 novels. Apart from the immortal ‘Mousetrap’, ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ – which Christie adapted in 1953 from an earlier short story – is one of the most famous. Like most of Christie’s work, you can’t say much for fear of ruining the ending. Leonard Vole (a butter-wouldn’t-melt Jack McMullen) is on trial for murdering an older woman who has left everything to him in her will. He insists he’s innocent, but it all rests on the testimony of his wife, Romaine. What will she say on the stand? When Christie adapted her original story, she shifted the focus almost exclusively to the Old Bailey courtroom. Here, Lucy Bailey’s production has the gift of being in the main chamber of London County Hall. Big, austere and grand, it’s the perfect setting for the legal theatrics of Christie’s forensically precise plotting. Some audience members are even addressed as the jury. If the courtroom is a stage, this play is all about performance. Few are as good as Christie at leading us down the garden path, expectations-wise. She constructs her plot like Vole’s barrister, Sir Wilfrid Robarts QC (a charismatic David Yelland), builds his case, before knocking over apparent ‘revelations’ like dominoes. Bailey plays up the melodrama beautifully, in some scenes lighting the judge’s bench like something fro
The Play That Goes Wrong
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, acknowledged by the play’s marketing, which calls it — correctly — ‘“Fawlty Towers” meets “Noises Off”’. But the trouble is that anyone who has seen, and loved, ‘Noises Off’, is likely to find the comparison unfavourable
More great theatre tickets
‘A Christmas Carol’ review
‘A Christmas Carol’ returns for its third run at the Old Vic in Christmas 2019. This review is for its second run, in Christmas 2018. This time Paterson Joseph will star as Scrooge. I didn’t see Rhys Ifans in Matthew Warchus’s production of ‘A Christmas Carol’ last year and I’m glad. He’s always a bit self-consciously ‘Rhys Ifans’, and you absolutely definitely must not doubt the sincerity of this Scrooge if this big, open-hearted test of theatrical nerve is going to come off. If you reckon Dickens paints in broad emotional strokes, hold on to your (top) hat: Jack Thorne’s version of ‘A Christmas Carol’ makes ‘EastEnders’ look like Ibsen.Stephen Tompkinson’s Scrooge starts off physically and emotionally cumbersome. He’s a kind of lumbering Anti-Santa: an un-jolly old man who goes round depriving people of stuff. It’s an interesting take on the part: as the ghosts show him the errors of his grasping, wasted life, he’s all Northern bluster and defensiveness. Around him, there’s carol-singing, there’s clog-dancing, there’s handbell-ringing (and plenty of hand-wringing). It’s like the blinking Olympic Opening Ceremony or something. There are also several stunning pieces of visual theatre: Marley’s ghost dragging a huge, Lady Di-wedding dress train of clanking chains; Scrooge alone beside a coffin on a wheeled carriage containing his future corpse.It’s sort of impossible not to read it all as a Brexit parable: Scrooge is cut off from the whirl of life around him by greed and fe
Cyrano de Bergerac
This was semi-announced aeons ago, but it’s now confirmed: James McAvoy will team up with super-director Jamie Lloyd for the fourth time on stage to star as the eponymous big-nosed polymath hero of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play, in a new translation by Martin Crimp. ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ also marks the start of a brand new Jamie Lloyd Company season, its first proper one since the Trafalgar Transformed days. Nothing else has been announced yet but the season will run at the Playhouse until August 2020, which would suggest two further productions. In a major initiative, 15,000 free tickets will be given away across the entire season to secondary state schools and community organisations who otherwise would not have access to the theatre. There will also be 15,000 tickets for £15 for key workers, under 30s, and those receiving job seeker’s allowance or other government benefits. These will be for specific performances, in the case of ‘Cyrano’: Dec 2 (evening), Dec 12 (matinee), Dec 16 (evening) and Jan 6 (matinee). They will go on sale Nov 4 via a special link on the ATG Tickets website. Other tickets go on general sale September 17 at 8.30am.
The Mousetrap
At the end of this elegant Agatha Christie thriller, the newly uncovered homicidal maniac steps into a sinister spotlight and warns everyone never to reveal his or her identity. The production recently celebrated its 60th birthday and although Wikipedia and Stephen Fry have both blown the murderer's cover, there is a remarkable conspiracy of silence over 'The Moustrap'. The real mystery of the world's longest-running theatre show is not whodunit but, in its currently mediocre state, whydoit at all? 'The Mousetrap's ticket prices are the only element of this show that isn't stuck fast in the 1950s – although the actors' strained RP does make the odd break for the twenty-first century. Otherwise, this is a walking, talking piece of theatre history and – at £39 for a full-price stalls seat – the most expensive museum exhibit in London. Christie's neat puzzler of a plot is easier to defend. It has defied the inevitably mummifying process of more than 25,000 performances and still possesses an uncanny precision worthy of the mistress of murder's chilling geriatric creation, Miss Marple. In the 60 years since it premiered, its premise, in which six Cluedo-like middle-class stereotypes are imprisoned by snow in a country house while they try to fathom which of them is a raving murderer, has become a cliché, just as the authorities' response to adverse weather conditions (skiing coppers? In Berkshire?) have become a nostalgic memory. It's fascinating to glimpse the ghost of Peter
‘The Son’ review
'The Son' transfers to Duke of York's Theatre on the West End in August 2019. This review is from its February 2019 premiere at Kiln Theatre. It has been five months since the last Florian Zeller play opened in London: quite a gap for the hyperprolific Frenchman, who has notched up an impressive six UK premieres since 2015, all translated by Christopher Hampton. I’m going to be honest and say that, ‘The Father’ excepted, Zeller’s success has always slightly mystified me: he seems ubiquitous without being beloved. I suspect it’s something to do with actors and directors gravitating to the efficiency of his writing – you get the impression that he’d rather hack his arm off than write a subplot. Plus, like M Night Shyamalan, there’s always a twist. Director Michael Longhurst and designer Lizzie Clachan do a genuinely beautiful job with ‘The Son’ (part of a very loose conceptual trilogy with ‘The Father’ and ‘The Mother’). The set is a sort of elegant sitting room with white-panelled walls that get trashed, graffitied, tidied up and trashed again in line with the shifting emotional state of Nicolas, a depressed teen whose continued refusal to attend school is driving his divorced parents Pierre and Anne to their wits’ end. Zeller’s sparse writing never really spells out Nicolas’s problem, or attempts to make him overly sympathetic: we see him through his parents’ eyes as an enigmatic, sullen figure, given to almost equally inexplicable moments of brief happiness. One-to-wat
Blithe Spirit
‘Ab Fab’ star Jennifer Saunders plays a ludicrous clairvoyant in this new production of Noël Coward's vintage comedy, which is coming to the West End after premiering at Theatre Royal Bath. ‘Blithe Spirits’ is a tale of the supernatural hijinks that ensue when a man accidentally summons up his dead ex-wife, and finds she's determined to put paid to his new marriage. Richard Eyre directs.
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