ajhlovestheatre

THE PRODUCERS 

Book by Mel Brooks and Mark Heenehan

Music and lyrics by Mel Brooks

directed by Patrick Marber

Garrick Theatre, London – until 19 September 2026

running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval

https://theproducersmusical.com

“It was shocking, outrageous, insulting…and I loved every minute of it.” So reads Andy Nyman’s unscrupulous Broadway producer Max Bialystock from a review of his new show, the astonishingly bad taste “Springtime For Hitler”, which he needs to flop epically so that he can pocket the investors’s cash, having deliberately over budgeted to the tune of $2 million. That same statement pretty much sums up Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan’s The Producers, revived for the first time in late 2024 by the Menier Chocolate Factory and now happily ensconced in the West End. 

You’ve got to hand it to him, Brooks is an equal opportunities offender. This rambunctious slice of Broadway, lovingly adapted from his 1967 movie, takes comic potshots at so many pockets of humanity (senior citizens, gays, Jews, theatre luvvies, Europeans, even Jesus this time around who turns up as a loincloth-wearing cocktail server in an exceptionally camp household) that it’s hard to know what to be affronted by first. Or maybe just buckle up and enjoy the ride of this high octane tuner that is as well-crafted as it’s crazy, and was hailed at its 2001 New York premiere as a glorious example of old school musical comedy in the grand manner. 

Susan Stroman’s original staging of this tale of an attempt to create a bona fide Broadway disaster, was a glossy, huge affair; Patrick Marber, directing his first musical, goes for a much more downbeat aesthetic, leaning heavily into the innate Jewishness of the material. When Paul Farnsworth’s costumes turn on the dazzle dazzle, such as for the tap-dancing chorines or the statuesque German clichés served up as frothy flights of fantasy in the show-within-a-show section (“don’t be stupid, be a smarty! Come and join the Nazi Party!”) complete with giant pretzels, sausages and steins of beer, they’re a marvel to behold, but overall the emphasis is more on grit than glamour. 

Scott Pask’s unit set of a massive metal grid reminiscent of those lightbulb-filled advertising hoardings that sit atop the theatres of Manhattan’s west 44th street underneath a golden Broadway marquee, is mainly transformed by a few simple additions. If the show is sometimes a little underwhelming visually now it’s on a proscenium stage as opposed to the Menier’s studio space, the fun still flows freely, and Marber’s production whips along at a cracking pace. Furthermore, Lorin Latarro, currently represented recently on Broadway by the financially successful Chess revival, has created dynamic choreography, energised but mindful of tradition, that more than matches Stroman’s original work.

The treatment of the Nazis throughout is (rightly) merciless: Hitler is carted on as a golden, high camp amalgam of himself, Caligula and sundry Broadway divas (“I’m the German Ethel Merman don’t you know”); we get dancers dressed as U-boats, tap dancing stormtroopers…it’s truly ridiculous. With the global emboldening of neo-Nazis and their extreme views, the show now exists in a very different world from the one that the original production opened in, and this gives Marber’s staging a real edge, even as it admirably demonstrates Brooks’s theory that the best way of disempowering something is by laughing at it. And laugh we surely do, even while occasionally cringing.

Brooks’s tunes sound like something from the Golden Age of Broadway, and Larry Blank and Mark Cumberland’s orchestrations package them with punchy energy but finesse. The quicksilver lyrics, ranging from witty to crude, have a rare brilliance and Paul Groothuis’ sound design ensures we can actually hear them. 

This is a show that, for all its snark, is in love with the theatre, and the vivid gallery of characters Brooks created in egotistical director Roger De Bris (“that whole second act has to be rewritten. They’re losing the war? Excuse me? It’s too downbeat!“), his “common law assistant” Carmen Ghia, and their household of camp creatives are recognisable tropes. Also, for all his kvetching and bawling, Nyman’s Bialystock feels like a legit theatrical type who takes a bizarre pride in his ability to con little old ladies out of their money to put on his appalling productions.

Already terrific when the show opened fifteen months ago, Nyman’s Max has evolved into a transfixing masterclass in comedy playing. More low key than Nathan Lane and his successors in the original, he is uproariously funny but never lets us doubt that there is so much at stake for this sweaty chancer. There’s a palpable desperation and desolation, his comedy rooted in truth rather than the vaudevillian ‘business’ of his predecessors. He deservedly stops the show with ‘Betrayed’, the tour de force eleven o’clock number where the jailed shyster recaps the entire show in three minutes flat.

As the other titular producer, nebbish Leo Bloom, the put-upon accountant seduced by the bright lights of showbiz, Marc Antolin has dialled up the face-pulling and physical paroxysms several notches but still turns in a gorgeous study of somebody in a permanent state of anxiety, his body bent out of shape, his eyes wide and swivelling, his limbs somehow seeming too long for his torso. He’s totally endearing and even dances in character: his awkwardness giving way to something fleet-footed and entrancing when he gets together with his beloved Ulla. 

The Ulla character, the Swedish blonde bombshell secretary-cum-starlet employed by Bialystock mainly because he fancies her, was very much a product of the time in the movie (original actress Lee Meredith was required to do little more than go-go dance in a bikini) but thankfully book writers Brooks and Thomas Meehan gave her more agency and material in the musical. Marber and his leading lady Joanna Woodward go even further, making her more wise to Max’s lechery and amused by the idiocy of the men she’s dealing with. It’s a subtle change, but it’s welcome, and she is clearly smitten with Antolin’s charming goofball from the get-go. Woodward brings an irresistible joie de vivre, a preposterous accent and a sensational singing voice to the role, as well as a knowingness that suggests that this stunning young woman is way smarter than Leo or Max realise. She’s fabulous. 

Another interpretation that continues to improve on the original is Harry Morrison’s Franz Liebkind, the lederhosen wearing, tin helmeted Nazi sympathiser (and Springtime For Hitler author) hiding out in Greenwich Village with his pigeons and a massive chip on his Teutonic shoulder (“the führer was BUTCH!”). Morrison plays him like a psychotic manchild who turns on a dime from guileless grinning idiot to gun-waving maniac, with a booming operatic voice and an imposing presence. As before, the performance is alive to the lunacy of its surroundings but infused with an unsettling sincerity and real sense of danger that makes him all the more hysterical. Sadly, that’s not true of Trevor Ashley’s over-the-top yet oddly lazy turn as flamboyant director Roger De Bris, who’s now so divorced from reality that he’s more exhausting than hilarious.

Minor quibbles aside though, this remains a classily outrageous show, tightly drilled and constructed. A thumping good night out, guaranteed to gently offend and delight practically everybody.

INTO THE WOODS 

Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim 

Book by James Lapine

directed by Jordan Fein

Bridge Theatre, London – until 30 May 2026

running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval

https://www.bridgetheatre.co.uk/whats-on/into-the-woods/

The impact of great art can vary considerably at different moments in history. Despite the medieval picture book aesthetic of the Bridge Theatre’s splendid new Into The Woods, the 1987 Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine Broadway tuner has seldom felt more timely. That’s especially true of the post-Happily Ever After second act where the safety and wellbeing of the many are threatened by the ego and lust for vengeance of the few. Feel familiar? Jordan Fein’s dark, handsome production is no didactic slog though; on the contrary, it’s an almost constant pleasure, but it’s too raw and truthful to function as mere escapism, and the piece itself is a meditation on culpability, compromise and yearning for a happier past, that remains startlingly relevant.

As with his devastatingly good Regents Park Fiddler on the Roof, which just completed a successful national tour, Fein looks at a canonic musical with fresh eyes and produces a version that satisfies traditionalists but has a vitality and imagination that feel original. Sondheim and Lapine’s creation sends beloved fairytale characters (Cinderella, Little Red Ridinghood, Jack…) into Jungian woods to sort out their familiar stories and find their expected ‘happy endings’. That’s act one, then act two is what happens next, and the musical enters territory not just uncomfortable but downright apocalyptic. Into The Woods disturbs as much as it delights and this version embraces its duality with real aplomb and flair.

Fein and designer Tom Scutt start out by setting the storied dramatis personae, costumed like peasants in a Bruegel painting rather than the Disney-esque fairytale figures of Lapine’s own original production, in a jet black, liminal space. Dominated by a rising platform that also serves as a kitchen table and a hideyhole for Jack and his adored cow Milky White, it’s a place where witches and beanstalks can appear unexpectedly out of the gloom, and which can magically dissolve into lush foliage. Scutt’s woods, lit with breathtaking beauty by Aideen Malone, are a thing of wonder in the first half but come to resemble a devastated graveyard in the second, as the body count builds up, trees are decapitated, and a vengeful giant runs amok. The colour and warmth drains from the lighting and it feels as though we are looking at a war zone.

Also outstanding is Adam Fisher’s sound design which is loud enough to rouse and excite but nuanced to ensure that every beat and syllable of Sondheim’s deft, complex lyrics register, and that Jonathan Tunick’s peerless original orchestrations comes across with irresistible sparkle. When the jump-scares happen (no spoilers but anybody familiar with the show will know what I’m talking about), the volume level increases so dramatically and unexpectedly that a sense of genuine fear and panic ensues. Musical director Mark Aspinall’s band of a dozen, placed on either side of the stage, is wonderful, precise and crisp.

There’s a certain received wisdom with Sondheim that it’s hard to cast performers who can act the roles with the requisite depth as well as sing the (frequently technically complex and rangy) scores to an ideal level, and either dramatic finesse or musicality gets compromised. The late, great Sheridan Morley, reviewing the original London Company, noted that the cast “owe their allegiance to the stage itself rather than the orchestra pit underneath it”. Casting director Stuart Burt has done a fine job with this Into The Woods though and we get performances that are, mostly, as delightful to the ear as they are searing to the heart and pressing to the funny bone. They also throw up some interesting new insights on characters regular Sondheim viewers will have seen multiple times.

Jamie Parker and Katie Brayben’s Estuary-accented Baker and wife are gloriously relatable: practical people doing their best under less-than-ideal circumstances. Parker gives his Baker more pent-up anger than in other iterations I’ve seen but it makes absolute sense; Brayben’s pragmatic, hearty, jolly-but-tough Baker’s Wife is the perfect yang to his ying. I could have done without Brayben’s poppy vocal stylings at certain points, embellishments that this quicksilver-and-steel score really doesn’t need. She has a terrific voice, but, at least here, a tendency to push that doesn’t add anything. That’s also true, but to a slightly lesser extent, of Chumisa Dornford-May’s tomboyish, altogether entrancing Cinderella. 

Kate Fleetwood’s Witch, more humanly eccentric and sad than grotesque prior to her transformation, is a superb creation, finding the truth as well as the camp. It’s a shame that her reversal to the beauty she had prior to being cursed, isn’t a little more flamboyant. With her long black hair and flowing white robe, she looks more like the young woman who used to crawl out of TVs in the Ring horror film franchise than the fantastical glamourpusses Bernadette Peters and Julia McKenzie became in the original New York and London versions respectively. It’s still a fabulous performance though.

Gracie McGonigal’s brutal, gore-spattered Little Red is something of a revelation. Lapine has written her as a diminutive survivor but here she’s a real bruiser in a riding hood, so ballsy and forthright that when she cracks open to reveal the frightened child within during the ‘No One Is Alone’ section, it’s shockingly moving. Jo Foster’s Jack, toting Milky White around like a moth eaten ventriloquist puppet, is very effective, and Julie Jupp is a beguiling mix of sympathetic and unhinged as Jack’s exasperated mother. Oliver Savile and Rhys Whitfield as the preening, priapic but endlessly precious Princes are spot on, their competitiveness borne of ennui rather than machismo, and Michael Gould’s lugubrious narrator also makes a potent impression. I also loved Jennifer Hepburn’s gorgeous, self-obsessed Stepmother (to Cinderella): all done up like everyone’s idea of a medieval noblewoman but with the sensibility of one of TV’s Real Housewives. 

There’s a seething energy and saturnine magic to this staging that excites and disquiets. It may be because of the world we’re living in right now, but the sense of order being undone and division equalling disaster is more keenly felt than in any Into The Woods I’ve seen since Richard Jones’ original West End production, set in a gradually disintegrating Freudian nursery, and staged at a time (1990) when world politics seemed similarly to be careening towards doomsday. This is bold, thought-provoking entertainment, richly enjoyable even as the smile freezes on your face. Irresistible and essential.

OH, MARY!

by Cole Escola 

directed by Sam Pinkleton

Trafalgar Theatre, London  – until 25 April 2026

running time: 80 minutes no interval 

https://ohmaryplay.co.uk/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22983789061&gbraid=0AAAABBK72OfzT3Uw1NDWmwxJGvPKpzmIH

When a multidisciplinary artist writes a piece of work for themselves to perform, there is often a sense that watching anybody else play it is somehow settling for second best. That appears not to be the case with Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! though. The cultish New York smash about Abraham Lincoln’s troubled wife has seen a succession of big names succeed Escola as the titular Mary in the perpetually sold out Broadway production, including Jinkx Monsoon and Titus Burgess. The role’s present occupant over there, Jane Krakowski, delivers a weirdly endearing First Lady not that far removed from her Jenna Mulroney role in TV’s 30 Rock. 

London’s Mary Todd Lincoln is Mason Alexander Park, one of the current Cabaret’s most acclaimed Emcees and whose outlandish Ariel stole the Jamie Lloyd Tempest right out from under Sigourney Weaver’s nose. Park is firing on all cylinders here, and is the principal, but not the only, reason why Sam Pinkleton’s anarchic, confident production is an unmitigated West End triumph, and every bit the equal of the New York version.

Oh, Mary! remains utterly, joyfully ridiculous as it gleefully takes a queer hatchet to conventional straight sensibilities and themes, and casually rewrites American history. The Civil War is frequently referenced but pales into insignificance compared to the Uncivil War being waged between the Lincolns. Giles Terera invests upright, repressed gay Abraham with a furtive intensity and sad-eyed gravitas, forever leering at the male domestic staff when he thinks nobody’s looking and desperate to keep his wife in check. Mary is an easily triggered, vicious alcoholic with a victim complex and  a longing to return to the cabaret stage which her marriage forced her to abandon, that’s outdone only by her loathing for her husband and determination to get herself around the nearest bottle. This Mary is more than quite contrary, she’s absolutely unhinged but, as embodied by a mercurial, riveting Park, a multi-layered figure, as sympathetic as she’s screamingly funny. 

Clad in the funereal hoop dress and jet black ringleted wig (created by Holly Pierson and Leah J Loukas respectively) that have already become icons in queer theatre, Park’s Mrs Lincoln has a wildfire energy supercharged by malice and fury. There’s also a pleading wistfulness and palpable desolation that throws the comic brilliance into stunning relief: when she says she wishes she was dead we actually believe her, and her speech about her impossibly handsome acting coach (Dino Fetscher, irresistible) being a force of unattainable positivity is genuinely moving. Escola crafted Mary in their own image and as an extension of Cole’s persona, and delivered an unforgettable turn. Park is perhaps more nuanced; for all the absurdity and scenery-chewing wildness, this is an acting performance with truth and some danger at its core and elevates what can sometimes come across as a superior Saturday Night Live sketch on steroids into a full-blooded play. Two parts depressed princess to one part thug, they are utterly sensational: Park is incontrovertibly confirmed as an authentic theatre star, and a very fine actor. 

That Terera’s grandstanding, lecherous Lincoln and Fetscher as the wired hottie who ends up playing a bigger part in the unfolding history than one might imagine, more than hold their own against such a whirlwind is remarkable. I also loved Kate O’Donnell’s as a perky chaperone with an ice cream based shame that’s never to be spoken of (which means basically that Mary can barely shut up about it) and, later, a whiskery benign barkeep. Oliver Stockley is the fifth member of this merry team as the assistant that President Lincoln can’t seem to get enough of.

Pinkleton’s staging never misses a comic beat and, if its brief running time of eighty minutes leaves you wanting more, you’re unlikely to feel shortchanged, when you account for your sides and face aching from laughing. All in all, it’s a potty-mouthed, acid-and-honey mash-up of vaudeville, high camp, and twisted history lesson. The glitzy final section, where the set by dots and Cha See’s lighting design undergo a total transformation to match Mary’s mood, needs to be seen to be believed and if you’re not in love with Mason Alexander Park by that point then you probably need a hospital bed and an oxygen mask. An absolute blast.

DRACAPELLA

written by Jez Bond and Dan Patterson

directed by Jez Bond

Park Theatre, London – until 17 January 2026

running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval 

https://parktheatre.co.uk/events/dracapella/

World class clowning, exhilarating beatboxing, killer vocals, cheesy but beloved rock and pop standards, groan worthy jokes….and vampirism: welcome to Dracapella, probably one of the most unusual festive theatrical offerings in the capital this Christmas, and certainly one of the most fun. Imagine, if you dare, a benignly deranged mash-up of nutty comedy that revels in its own preposterousness (think Mischief on stage, the Naked Gun and Airplane movie franchises on screen, with a dash of improvisation à la TV’s Whose Line Is It Anyway thrown in), swoonworthy vocals and gothic horror, and you’ll have some idea of what’s sending Park Theatre audiences home on a mirth-induced high, their faces aching from laughter. 

If the slapstick comedy and heinous puns of Jez Bond and Dan Patterson’s script, which still manages to do a decent job of retelling the Dracula legend, are the calling card of Bond’s whip-smart production, the singing is the secret weapon. Ian Oakley’s vocal arrangements are exquisite and matched by septet of world class vocal talents including Olivier award winners Stephen Ashfield and Lorna Want, and stage and screen star Keala Settle. There’s no band, just ABH Beatbox (full name: Alexander Bulgarian Hackett), a one man treasure trove of beats, foley effects and sheer charm, but the sound threatens to blow the roof off the theatre. Standards like Queen’s ‘Find Me Somebody To Love’ and Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Holding Out For A Hero’ come over with breathtaking vitality and assurance.

The whole thing is infused with a sort of lunatic magic that keeps the audience on side, even when you can see the jokes coming from a mile off, and it surely helps every member of the supremely talented cast seems to be on the exact same page. Ashfield displays a fabulous gift for physical comedy as a squeamish, neurotic Jonathan Harker, prone to frequent debilitating injuries, alongside a wonderfully rangy, versatile voice. Opposite him, Lorna Want is a sparkling delight as a knowing heroine Mina, whose resemblance to Dracula’s deceased lover drives the plot, tinged with a smattering of modern day feminist awareness.

Ako Mitchell’s all-American Dracula strikes exactly the right balance between sinister and suave, and is particularly hilarious when his dignity is abandoned. Settle has a stupendous voice but also an unexpected skill at deadpan comedy as Mina’s best friend, the surprisingly voracious Lucy. Philip Pope excels in a variety of roles, and Monique Ashe-Palmer and Ciarán Dowd are gloriously gross as Dracula’s tormented domestic servants doomed to mutual celibacy until their master is set free. Dowd all but walks off with the second half as a vowel-mangling, Dutch accented Van Helsing, whose ineptitude is matched only by his penchant for coming out with impenetrable aphorisms and adages that apparently lose everything in translation to English. He’s terrific, but then, they all are.

This is exhilarating, laugh-out-loud stuff, performed and presented with imagination and technical brilliance. It is a little too long, and the interval saps some of the energy briefly, but these are minor quibbles. The low comedy works because it’s put over with so much skill and if you don’t find one moment funny, there’ll be another one along in a moment which will slay you, and there’s always the next thrilling musical interlude to look forward to. Everything gets hurled at the wall and the vast majority of it actually sticks, silliness is raised to an art form. Literally bloody marvellous.  

ALL MY SONS

by Arthur Miller 

directed by Ivo van Hove

Wyndhams Theatre, London – until 7 March 2026

running time: 2 hours 15 minutes, no interval 

https://allmysonsplay.com

So, it turns out lightning really can strike twice. I’m not just talking about the meteorological kind, symbolically hitting then tearing down the tree in the Keller family’s yard before the main action of Arthur Miller’s 1947 masterpiece (a term that gets bandied about too freely, but truly applies to All My Sons). I’m also referring to the fact that Belgian auteur director Ivo van Hove, who exploded onto the British stage in 2014 with a shattering, stark, mould-breaking A View From The Bridge, another Miller study of flawed protagonist railing at fate as the American Dream collapses in on him, has done it again. This All My Sons has its own flavour, but the sense of a classic being looked at through entirely fresh eyes, fully in tune with every nuance and beat of it but untrammelled by tradition and rich in imagination, is similarly palpable.

That earlier production transferred to Broadway, and it’s inconceivable that this coruscating revival won’t follow its sibling across the Atlantic, especially given the presence of Bryan Cranston, one of the greatest American actors of his generation. He’s delivering here the kind of work that should be required viewing for anyone studying the craft of acting but there’s not a weak link in this cast. Miller’s creation is brought roaring back to spellbinding, searing life. 

With its themes of hubris, disgrace and the sins of the fathers being visited on their offspring, All My Sons is essentially Greek classical tragedy reimagined in mid twentieth century American terms. van Hove and his long-time design collaborator Jan Versweyveld seem to embrace that with a timeless aesthetic (a giant tree in front of a monumental back wall with one door and a circular aperture like a portal through which characters watch or appear like so many deux ex machina) that could equally serve a Medea or an Electra. 

An D’Huys’ costumes are contemporary but not distractingly so. Versweyveld’s lighting sets out with a golden naturalistic glow as Cranston’s Joe Keller and Zach Wyatt’s affable neighbour Frank assess the damage to the fallen tree the morning after the storm, then stark and unforgiving at moments of high drama, before giving way to roiling greens, pinks and unsettling darkness as the play grinds inexorably toward its devastating climax. Music and sound (superb work by Tom Gibbons) thrums over, under and through the dialogue, at times soothing, at others like a dull ache and occasionally as a jarring shock. It sets mood and amplifies tension but, crucially, never undermines the urgency and muscularity of Miller’s text or the subtle brilliance of the performances. There’s real magic in the silences, when you can feel the audience breathe as one, totally wrapped up in the play: it also makes you realise how seldom that happens in the theatre these days.

If you’re unfamiliar with All My Sons, it plays out like a thriller, but if you’ve previously seen or read it, this remarkable rendering has moments bordering on the revelatory. As patriarch Joe, Cranston’s descent from measured bonhomie to snivelling wreck is charted with such precision and psychological truth that it barely feels like acting. You watch a man crumble before your very eyes: it’s painful to witness but the sheer bloody artistry is exhilarating. 

Paapa Essiedu is every bit his equal as the son whose idealism is ripped out of him as his father’s wartime misdemeanours are uncovered, in many ways his trajectory more tragic than Keller Sr.’s as he has little idea of what’s coming to him. Essiedu invests Chris with an appealing awkwardness suggestive of a sensitivity that I’ve never seen in the character before, and when his world is shattered, his rawness takes the breath away. Observe how he stares, stricken, at his father as though he has never even seen him before. 

Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Kate Keller, the mother holding it all together in a state of ongoing denial, is initially less fragile than some of her predecessors (Julie Walters’ stunning, award-winning portrayal in Howard Davies’ 2000 version at the National seemed permanently on the verge of a breakdown) but is tremendously effective. She’s savage in her aggression towards Ann (a sublime Hayley Squires, projecting a beacon of kindness and dogged determination), the daughter of Joe’s discredited business partner and girlfriend of the son Larry lost in the war, her smile stopping short of her eyes, and the look of desolation on her face as she realises what’s unfolding is utterly haunting. When she warns Joe to be smart or attempts to reassure him that he won’t be punished if he confesses to past misdemeanours, one gets the distinct impression that she doesn’t believe the words coming out of her own mouth. I’ve seen more moving Kate’s than Jean-Baptiste but few as powerful.

It’s indicative of the sheer quality of the production that every supporting performance is well nigh perfect. Tom Glynn-Carney delivers a finely tuned account of neurosis mixed with fury as Ann’s brother George, arriving from the back of the theatre like a heat-seeking missile in a hoodie, hellbent on destroying the Kellers but disarmed by his lingering affection for Kate. His brief reunion with Aliyah Odoffin’s lovely, slightly eccentric neighbour Lydia, with whom he has romantic history but who is now married to eternally nice guy Frank (a spot-on Wyatt) with young children, is heartbreaking. Odoffin has little stage time but creates a remarkably detailed picture of a sunny young woman more complicated than she initially looks. Cath Whitefield is impressive and similarly multi-layered as pragmatic, increasingly embittered nurse Sue, frustrated that Chris’ unattainable, innate goodness is having a deleterious effect on her doctor husband (Richard Hansell, also excellent). 

Intense then cathartic, and shot through with unexpected but welcome laughs, All My Sons retains its ability to rouse and to provoke thought; it raises uncomfortable questions about culpability and how far to go for people one loves. Under Ivo van Hove’s guidance, it grips like a vice then explodes like a thunderclap. There’s little else on the London stage right now that achieves this level of tension or that demonstrates so potently the magic of ensemble acting. This is an All My Sons that looks nothing like its predecessors but is one for the ages.

PADDINGTON – The Musical

Music and lyrics by Tom Fletcher 

Book by Jessica Swale

based on ‘A Bear Called Paddington’ by Michael Bond and the film ‘Paddington’

directed by Luke Sheppard

Savoy Theatre, London – open-ended run

running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval 

https://paddingtonthemusical.com

Entertainment juggernauts seldom come as cuddly and adorable as this. With Paddington, Jessica Swale (book) and Tom Fletcher (songs), in bringing Michael Bond’s most beloved Peruvian bear to the stage, have created the musical we probably all need right now. That’s not just because the diminutive ursine charmer is a fur-covered emblem of kindness and tenacity, or even that Luke Sheppard’s barnstorming production feels like a love letter to the polyglot vitality of London at a time when tolerance and diversity are increasingly coming under fire. Not since the criminally underrated Madness tuner Our House has a new musical trumpeted so persuasively the capital’s unique combination of tradition, freedom of expression and joyful strangeness, and celebrated its visual iconography (there’s glimpses of various landmarks from St Paul’s and Buckingham Palace to the Shard and the London Eye).

It’s also because 2025 has been a pretty ropey year for new West End musicals (Evita, thrilling as it was, counts as a revival): Clueless was a lot of fun but The Great Gatsby, Hercules and Burlesque were mediocre at best, Shucked lost something in its transatlantic crossing and the final Sondheim, the incomplete Here We Are, was a triumph at the National but was too esoteric for some. My favourite musicals of the last twelve months – Lovestuck, Sing Street and the current Southwark Playhouse smash Ride The Cyclone – were/are all off-West End, but now finally commercial mainstream London theatre has an outright winner…and Paddington is the absolute bear’s whiskers.

Following more or less the plot of the 2014 movie, where an evil taxidermist (Nicole Kidman on film, here on stage a gloriously scenery-chewing Victoria Hamilton-Barritt) entices Paddington away from his adopted London family in order to do the unspeakable, the musical works exquisitely on multiple levels. Sheppard’s production is grand enough to feel like the big, lavish extravaganza West End ticket prices demand. But it’s also intimate enough that the delicious eccentricities, quirks and running jokes register, as do the finesses in expression of Paddington himself, as split between an offstage voice and an onstage actor in a gorgeous bear costume (brilliant work by Tahra Zafar, also responsible for puppet design), played respectively by James Hameed and, on the night I attended, Abbie Purvis (alternate to Arti Shah). You will fall in love with this bear, and it’s impossible to overstate just how right the team here have got the onstage representation of this most adored of anthropomorphic characters. 

There is generally a lot here to love though. Ellen Kane’s choreography is sharp and propulsive, unerringly successful in building numbers to their fizzy showbiz climaxes. Tom Pye’s magical scenic creations, Gabrielle Slade’s vivid costumes, Neil Austin’s lighting and Ash J Woodward’s entrancing video designs all combine to create a world at once comfortingly familiar yet exciting. It’s a fabulous eyeful and, thanks to Gareth Owen’s full-on sound design and Fletcher’s ear-worm tunes, a satisfyingly loud earful.

Then there’s the uniformly fine casting. Amy Ellen Richardson’s Mrs Brown, as sensitive and artistic as she’s kookie, and Paddington’s most prominent advocate, is the gorgeous beating heart of the piece apart from the bear himself. Adrian der Gregorian convincingly charts Mr Brown’s journey from self-protective scepticism to full on embrace of Paddington’s uncynical world view. The writing and acting of their tricky relationship has beautiful, convincing detail where a lesser adaptation would make them more generalised malcontents. Bonnie Langford is a show-stopping delight as the housekeeper with a backstory as rich as any encyclopaedia, and West End veteran Teddy Kempner scores a joyful bullseye as shopkeeper Mr Gruber.

Tom Edden and Amy Booth-Steel come close to stealing every scene they’re in as, respectively, an uptight cab driver impervious to Paddington’s cuteness, at least initially, and a hysterically plummy aristocrat who jealously guards an elite society for geographers. Seasoned musical goers may feel they’ve seen Hamilton-Barritt’s uber-camp, statuesque ‘baddie’ performance before, and they wouldn’t be wrong, but previous iterations of this flamboyant characterisation were generally in infinitely inferior shows, and she is terrific here. So too is Tarinn Callender as her reluctant henchman.

Sheppard’s staging and Swale’s writing feel wonderfully fresh, balancing the cute, the sinister and the flat-out hilarious with wonderfully sure hands. For all the showbiz brio on display, there’s something unmistakably British in the nods to panto and old time music hall. If there’s a tiny flaw, it’s that it occasionally feels a little over-stuffed with themes and ideas all pulling focus at once: a tentative romance between eldest Brown daughter and the son of Brenda Edwards’ life-embracing next door neighbour is well played by Delilah Bennett-Cardy and Timi Akinyosade but doesn’t add much to a slightly overlong show. Neither does a second act full kick-line number for a tribe of geographers, despite being brilliantly staged and led with hilarious verve by Booth-Steel.

Fletcher’s songs sound a bit generic modern musical theatre from time to time, but at its best the score is rousing and fiendishly catchy. The Calypso-tinged anthem ‘The Rhythm of London’ is a bona fide classic, and Hamilton-Barritt’s swaggeringly nasty ‘Pretty Little Dead Things’ brings the house down and will be stuck in your head for weeks.

Crucially, Paddington deftly achieves the almost impossible in that it entrances the children while also winking knowingly over their head at the adults, generally giving everyone a fabulous night or afternoon out. Apart from the ingenuity of how Paddington himself is created, this is a pretty traditional musical, but one crafted with huge love and care by people who really know what they’re doing. If the Savoy Theatre is looking for a new tenant within at least the next five years, I’ll be astonished.

 

LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD

by Samuel D Hunter

directed by Joe Mantello

Booth Theatre, New York City – until 21 December 2025

running time: 90 minutes no interval 

https://littlebearridgeroad.com

Do we choose to engage with an increasingly difficult world or do we hide away from it? What is the cost of being there for other people even in extremely tricky circumstances, even when they claim not to need help, and at what point does one close the door to protect one’s own interests? These are some of the questions running through Samuel D Hunter’s deceptively simple but altogether engrossing new play, Little Bear Ridge Road, now on Broadway in a Joe Mantello-helmed production that originated at Chicago’s powerhouse of stage excellence, Steppenwolf Theatre.

This is Hunter’s Broadway debut (his Clarkston, a tenderly written but inferior work, is just completing a West End run) and it’s an unqualified triumph. This is one of those plays that American writers seem to excel at: terse, pared down, spiky but complex, a beating, bruised heart under a harsh, unadorned exterior, the only thing maximalist about Mantello’s exquisite staging is the craft and talent on display.

Set in rural Idaho in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, the play sees thirty-something Ethan (Micah Stock, raising gruff awkwardness to an art form) arriving in the remote farmhouse of his tough, bemused aunt Sarah (Laurie Metcalf, re-staking her claim as America’s greatest living stage actress), ostensibly to sell the nearby house of his newly deceased drug addict father. It becomes clear pretty quickly that there’s more to Ethan’s intentions than that, and also that Sarah is less invulnerable than she first appears.

Two stones rubbed together can create fire, and so it proves when Stock’s mercurial dreamer clashes with Metcalf’s flinty Sarah. Ethan is a mass of contradictions and resentments while Sarah, who is being callously managed out of her job in a local hospital, just wants to be left alone. She’s perhaps naive about how dreadful life for her nephew had been as a kid, and he never forgave her for not responding the way he expected when his ten year old self reached out, and their uneasy co-existence, full of barely expressed feelings and fuelled by shared critiques of trash television, is realised with a rare truth and economy. 

It’s grimly funny too: after a fruitless phone conversation with a medical insurance company, Ethan moans “I hate this country!” and Sarah comes right back with “trust me, it hates you more”. Ethan looks like having a real chance of happiness with good-hearted rich kid James (Steppenwolf regular John Drea, in a sublime Broadway bow) who he met online, and the first meeting between James and Sarah – he has stayed the night which she is unaware of – is a little masterpiece of comic social awkwardness and blind panic.

It’s the sadder, darker territories that the play enters which really linger in the mind though. Metcalf charts Sarah’s physical decline due to cancer with a detail and honesty that’s simultaneously riveting and hard to watch. Stock never overplays Ethan’s essential unhappiness and past trauma but when it all boils up in a howl of despair (“I DON’T KNOW HOW TO BE A PERSON IN THIS TERRIBLE FUCKING NIGHTMARISH WORLD”) he is utterly devastating. Not a single line, gesture or movement is wasted, everything counts.

Metcalf is thrilling, an artist at the very top of her game, entirely without vanity or artifice. She conveys every layer of this difficult but not unkind woman, and disappears so completely into her it’s almost hard to fathom that one is watching acting. The queen of the withering stare, Metcalf also invests Sarah with some choice comic physical touches: note the way she wryly genuflects when taking leave of the two boyfriends. Hunter has written Sarah to possess a defensive dry wit which Metcalf attacks with laconic aplomb; the whole performance really is the most flawless marriage between actor and material.

 A lesser talent might pale into insignificance next to Metcalf’s brilliance but Stock matches her. He makes no attempt to ingratiate Ethan to us but allows his tricky nature and hypersensitivity to speak for themselves, creating a figure that is at once sympathetic and frustrating; it’s a quirky but endlessly interesting interpretation, rooted in truth and real human frailties, and there are strong indications that Ethan’s writing talent is a genuine one. Drea is an understated wonder, and it’s a sign of the quality of the production that even Meghan Gerachis, another Steppenwolf alumna, who only has one brief scene as a nurse, is utter perfection.

Scott Pask’s solitary sofa atop a slate-grey disc with a fan whirling overhead is the only set but, as lit by Heather Gilbert against a black backdrop that occasionally softens into a wall of pale stone, it gives a striking sense of lonely figures adrift in an endless nightscape. Jessica Pabst’s naturalistic costumes are spot-on as is the sound design by Mikhaïl Fiksel which is so unobtrusive as to be unnoticeable, except that we hear every mutter and throwaway retort.

This is surely one of the finest American plays in decades. Tiny in stature but massive in emotional impact, it sears and haunts. I left the theatre in a state of drained rapture, fighting back tears. Little Bear Ridge Road received one of the most heartfelt standing ovations I’ve ever seen in a Broadway theatre: it absolutely deserved it.