Tom Wicker

This review is from 2022. Elf returns for Christmas 2025 with a new cast that includes Joel Montague, Carrie Hope Fletcher and Aled Jones.  ‘Elf the Musical’ rolls back into the West End with the same blunt-force charm as Buddy, its star. The last time this production was at the Dominion Theatre, in 2015, it was the venue’s fastest-selling show in nearly a century. It’d be a huuuge surprise if it’s not a success this time either. Apart from a few tweaks and a couple of excised characters, the story largely follows the smash-hit 2003 Will Ferrell movie vehicle that’s now a perennial Christmas favourite. Titular hero Buddy’s Teflon-coated cheer can’t disguise the fact that he’s suspiciously tall for an elf. When Santa Claus breaks the news to him that he is, in fact, a human, Buddy sets out from the North Pole to find his real father in New York City.    The influences on the film and this show are legion, particularly ’80s fish-out-of-water classics like ‘Big’. Buddy arrives to find a fraught New York, full of Christmas as a sales pitch, but not with its spirit. His father, Walter Hobbes, is a harried, snappy publisher of kids’ books with no time for the young son he actually knows he has. (Buddy was the result of a college romance, whose mother died without ever telling Walter.) From initially stumbling onto the shop floor of department store Macy’s, to inveigling his way into Walter’s office and then his home, Buddy’s open-handed, child-like joy shows everyone he meets the t

American writer Samuel D. Hunter’s 2015 play, making its UK debut at Trafalgar Theatre, isn’t big on laughs. Heartstopper’s Joe Locke is Jake. Just diagnosed with the degenerative Huntington’s disease and dumped by his boyfriend, he’s run away to Clarkston, Washington, so named after his distant ancestor, the famed explorer William Clark (of Lewis and Clark). Taking a job at the local Costco retail store, he meets the brooding Chris (Ruaridh Mollica), who is saving to go to college while dealing with his meth-addicted mother, Trish (Sophie Melville). The pair form a complicated bond founded on a tentative mutual attraction and a sense of both being lost in their lives. The play compares and contrasts the frontier-pushing exploration of Lewis and Clark with how people can become stuck in small-town America. At the same time, Jake’s casual disruption of Chris’s life is counterpointed by the explorers’ troubling colonial legacy in terms of the region’s Native American history. The writing pushes this larger narrative resonance to varying degrees of success as the dialogue leaves few chinks of light for its characters. Hunter’s writing is perceptive about the doubts that lurk beneath people’s hopes, but its aim at a grander poetry about life can fall short. Locke brings a baffled consternation to Jake that occasionally deepens into something more plaintive and agonised. He shares an appropriately fragile chemistry with Chris, who Mollica portrays as someone constantly wrestling w

Irish writer Conor McPherson also directs this West End revival of the play that sent his career into the stratosphere when it opened at the Royal Court Theatre in 1997. It’s lost none of its gently haunting, melancholic pull in the intervening years. The Weir is a classic example of a play where nothing really seems to happen, but then you realise you’ve seen pretty much all of life pass by. Here, Brendon Gleeson steps into the shoes of garage owner Jack, who we meet chewing over his day with publican Brendan (Owen McDonnell) in an Irish boozer in County Leitrim. They’re joined by Jim (Sean McGinley). Their conversation is as familiar as the ritual of their drink orders in designer Rae Smith’s well realised pub set, with its fading knick-knacks. But this fireside beer routine is interrupted when the man they’ve been making snide remarks about, Finbar (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), appears with a newcomer to the village, Valerie (Kate Phillips), who stuns pub owner Brendan by ordering a glass of white wine. Soon, though, she is drawn into their world of storytelling. The cast quickly establishes a believable, lived-in chemistry. An effortlessly charismatic Gleeson sinks as deeply into Jack as if he’s grown gruffly out of his bar stool – crotchety and drily funny. McGinley imbues ponderous Jim with an amusing lack of self-awareness tempered, at times, by an almost noble sincerity. Meanwhile, restlessly springy, with an ever-ready grin and eager to impress people, Vaughan-Lawlor is hila

This new play by American writer Doug Wright comes to the Barbican from Broadway heralded by a 2023 Tony Award for star Sean Hayes (Will & Grace) and is about someone you’ve likely never heard of. Oscar Levant was a pianist – best known for playing George Gershwin’s music – and a humourist, who popped up in a handful of films including An American in Paris.  This play re-imagines the events surrounding his chaotic appearance as a guest on The Tonight Show in 1958. He arrives at the NBC studio, whose boss is already jittery because of Levant’s erratic past behaviour, from a mental institution. His wife, June (Rosalie Craig), has secured a release under false pretences. Talk-show host Jack Paar (Ben Rappaport) wants to capitalise on his penchant for making controversial jokes live on air. His accompanying nurse, Alvin (Daniel Adeosun), is trying to stop him from popping pills. And Levant himself is hallucinating Gershwin.   Focused so tightly on the early days of American TV, this could potentially sound niche for a British audience. But in Wright’s assured hands, the collision of Levant’s private and public life down the barrel of a camera lens becomes a play about the beginning of so many things we now recognise as staples of celebrity culture. He’s famous for all the reasons he doesn’t want to be – as a performer of someone else’s music rather than a composer. He’s wheeled onto chat shows for controversy by people for whom his mental health is something to be exploited. Rapp

The time is once again Nye, as Michael Sheen returns to the National Theatre to reprise firebrand politician and NHS founder, Aneurin Bevan, in Tim Price’s play, after Rufus Norris’s production originally debuted last year. The state of the country’s health and that of Nye himself are intwined from the start, as we open on a huge chest x-ray projected onto hospital-green curtains behind the bed-ridden deputy leader of the Labour Party. It’s July 1960. His anxious wife Jennie Lee (Sharon Small) and childhood friend Archie Lush (Jason Hughes) are by his side and his doctor is concerned. We’re here, it’s increasingly clear, for the end of his life. Plunging us into Nye’s unconscious, Price gives us a dream-like portrait of his life, as Nye recalls its events in neuron-like bursts. There are parallels between the coal miner-turned-politician challenging schoolroom bullying in Tredegar, his working-class Welsh hometown, in the early 1900s, to upsetting the members’ club snobbery of Parliament as a new MP. Paule Constable’s ever-shifting lighting design melds beautifully with Steven Hoggett and Jess Williams playful choreography, snatching feather-light moments of humour from the darkness. The playful and somnambulant tone of Norris’s production perfectly suits the portrait of a man whose sometimes bulldozing lack of subtlety was one of his defining traits. Sheen is predictably great at combining Nye’s burning sense of belief in welfare for all and his irascibility within a single

This review is from 2024. ‘Fawlty Towers’ regularly tops polls of the best British TV comedies of all time. But in recent years, its co-creator and star John Cleese has become a lightning rod for criticism for his proclamations that so-called ‘wokeness’ is killing comedy. So, how does his stage version of hapless hotel owner Basil Fawlty – arriving ahead of his TV remake of the series with his daughter – fare in the ‘funny’ stakes? From Liz Ascroft’s detailed, 1970s-in-aspic set design – encompassing the titular Torquay hotel’s reception, dining room and an upstairs guest room – to the elaborate coiffure of Basil’s wife, Sybil (Anna-Jane Casey), Caroline Jay Ranger’s production leans so heavily on nostalgia, it’s amazing that it doesn’t crash through the stage. Ranger has form in turning iconic British TV shows that live partly in people’s rose-tinted memories into theatre: she directed ‘Only Fools and Horses The Musical’ a few years ago. As Basil (Adam Jackson-Smith) attempts to evade Sybil’s watchful gaze while dealing with barely concealed contempt with the hotel’s guests, we get a greatest hits parade of characters from the TV series’ two seasons. Theatre legend Paul Nicholas engagingly reanimates the absent-minded Major, Kate Russell-Smith and Nicola Sanderson wander in like extras from ‘Miss Marple’ as Miss Tibbs and Miss Gatsby and Hemi Yeroham gamely hams it up as the English-mangling Spanish waiter Manuel. As Basil, Jackson-Smith has the piano-string tautness of the

Well, this is certainly different: a dystopian musical tribute to the life and works of Oscar Wilde in a basement venue dressed to look like a mashup of a Berlin club and Mad Max: Beyond the Hippodrome. If you’re eagerly looking for a meaty plot, you’re in for slim pickings. Originating in New York and the brainchild of its book-writer Mark Mauriello (also playing ‘Oscar’), this is a production big on vibes: a loud confection of shiny surfaces, breathless choreography and a thumping, punky score. If the kids from Fame were queer fugitives hiding underground from a totalitarian state in a climate-wrecked near future, it might be a bit like this. That's basically also the premise. For these social renegades and misfits on the run, Noughties pop culture has become their religion, evil step-mum Julie Cooper from The OC their goddess and The Real Housewives their saints. This show is not bezzie mates with understatement, as Mauriello goes nuclear on how performance is reality. As the rise of Twitter gets thrown into the mix, it’s about as deep as a puddle and as subversive as taking a photo of your middle finger in front of Trump Tower. But in spite of this – maybe even because of its raucous earnestness – it sweeps you up. And as part of the in-show musical re-telling of his life that the characters stage every night, the re-imagining of Wilde as the original social media influencer is absurdly enjoyable. Andrew Barret Cox’s score is a frantically vibrating wall of sound into whi

  After premiering at the New Diorama Theatre in 2023 and touring the UK, Breach Theatre’s verbatim musical about Section 28 – the heinous legislation introduced in the late ’80s to prevent the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools – lands at the Royal Court Theatre after some tweaking and with a mostly different four-strong ensemble cast. It’s funnier, sharper and more damning than ever before.   Co-writers Ellice Stevens and Billy Barrett have shaped the testimony of teachers, activists and students into songs drawing on the stylings of New Wave and electronica. The production starts with the recollections of the lesbians who famously ambushed Sue Lawley during a live news broadcast in protest at Section 28. The wryly hysterical re-enactment of this event, hitting a bigotry-skewering cartoon level of energy, is the strength of Barrett’s staging, which leans even more into this now.  The first half of the production goes big to puncture the poisonous balloon parade of politicians, pundits and homophobic media outlets who created Section 28 by cynically whipping up panic over children’s book Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin and misinformation about HIV/AIDS. There’s even a show-stopping re-enactment of the moment when enterprising protestors abseiled into the House of Lords during the legislation’s reading. Stevens (also performing as part of the ensemble) has a ball as a lasciviously awful Maggie Thatcher after the interval. But where strengthening the bombast of the first

Following in the vein of 2016’s The Comedy About A Bank Robbery, Mischief Theatre – they of The Play That Goes Wrong – are now aiming their slick brand of ever-escalating theatrical farce at the spy genre in this West End premiere. When a top-secret file is stolen by a turncoat British agent, a deeply mismatched pair of KGB agents and a CIA operative and his over-enthusiastic mother collide in pursuit of it – along with an over-the-hill actor and a young couple – at the Piccadilly Hotel in London in swinging 1961. General chaos ensues. Writers and original Mischief Theatre members Henry Shields and Henry Lewis mine plenty of daft comedy from spy staples like bugged radios and improbable gadgets while paying homage to a decade in the UK rocked by the revelations of double agent Soviet Union spy rings. It’s low-hanging fruit, of course, but ramped up by Mischief Theatre’s trademark ability to spin seemingly minor mishaps into total comedy meltdowns. Director Matt Dicarlo handles these set-pieces and Shields and Lewis’s penchant for fast-moving wordplay deftly, allowing us half a knowing wink before whisking us on to the characters’ next blunder. He’s greatly aided by David Farley’s set design, a colourful cartoon of ‘60s London. A split-level cutaway of the Piccadilly Hotel is a neat visual shorthand for introducing us to the characters and snappily showing us the chaotic consequences of a bugged radio being moved between rooms. A talented cast know their mission, steering into

American writer Neil LaBute invariably takes big swings in his plays. Debuting at the Park Theatre, his first UK premiere in an age is no exception. At a time of intense debate around euthanasia and assisted dying in the real world, he collides Brad and Jodie, an American couple who are facing her terminal cancer, with Tate, the man Jodie wants to kill her. If you want nuanced debate, look elsewhere. LaBute blasts clear through this. As Jodie, Justina Kehinde brings a powerful rawness to her character’s frustration and anger at her situation. But – no spoilers – the solution we’re eventually presented with is so convoluted and elaborate that it drowns out any believable character development. This isn’t helped by a script that repeatedly circles the same points. Instead, as is so often the case with LaBute’s work, Jodie feels like a catalyst for two men to work through their manliness. Middle-class Brad and his reluctance to help Jodie end her life is juxtaposed with the working-class Tate, a mechanic with a troubled family history who went to school with her and is willing to do what Brad won’t. Morgan Watkins brings an intriguing unpredictability to Tate, bristling and coiling him like a spring as he comes into conflict with Archie Backhouse’s condescending Brad. Under the play’s increasingly ludicrous set-up, there are some trenchant themes about small-town America, classism and lack of opportunity. But these are drenched by the pissing contest the script devolves into. Th

At a time when artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be in the headlines every day, this densely philosophical techno-thriller by Beau Willimon – creator and showrunner of Netflix’s House of Cards – certainly feels timely. Computer coders Lena (Kaya Scodelario) and Sasha (Luke Treadaway) are locked in NSA waiting rooms, awaiting questioning by special agent Samira Darvish (Nathalie Armin) and their boss, Ari Abrams (Cliff Curtis). They’ve been developing a ‘kill code’ for the artificial general intelligence system, Logos, that they’ve been working on. But now it looks as though someone has tried to override the system and ‘release’ Logos into the outside world. Was it them? Or was it Logos itself? This production, directed by Ellen McDougall, jumps straight into big, ethical questions about humanity mimicking God. It’s a favoured trope of science fiction – to which Willimon brings a lot of contemporary theoretical thinking on AI and an Edward Snowdon-flavoured ‘hacktivist’ dimension. He gives Lena, a former Mennonite who is possibly, unknowingly, looking for something to replace her traditional faith, and Sasha, a Russian civil rights protestor, plenty of backstory acreage, as characters lengthily debate truth, falsehood and exactly what Logos is. This is a very talky play, to which McDougall adds movement and pacing by using Azusa Ono’s lighting design and Alex Eales’s split-level set – with the NSA agents watching Lena and Sasha from above – to weave in flashbacks and to ke

In The Lonely Londoners, Roy Williams lifts the words from the pages of Sam Selvon’s seminal 1956 novel about the Windrush generation in London and sears them onto the stage. Ebenezer Bamgboye’s hugely evocative production has secured a richly deserved upgrade to the Kiln Theatre after opening last year at Jermyn Street Theatre.  Moses (Solomon Israel) is our eyes and ears into the city as he greets – and quickly shows the ropes to – other immigrants from the Caribbean seeking a new life. This includes a swaggering newbie that Moses nicknames ‘Galahad’ (Romario Simpson), ‘Big City’ (Gilbert Kyem Jnr), dreaming of hosting a steel-band club night, and Lewis (Tobi Bakare), who’s awaiting the arrival of his wife, Agnes (Shannon Hayes), and his mother, Tanty (Carol Moses). Williams burnishes his reputation as an unflinching chronicler of the complicated and often ugly side of our national psyche. From the novel’s picaresque shape, he has crafted a story that touches on Black immigrant experiences without patronising his characters. We feel their rage in a postwar UK that has exploited their citizenship for gain but treats them like dirt.  Bamgboye’s superb staging forgoes the trappings of conventional period drama, loosening the 1950s setting to speak as much to the here and now as to the past. The blue luggage boxes that the characters carry or sit on in Laura Ann Price’s sparse set are a constant reminder of their enforced sense of impermanence in this chilly metropolis, with it