ajhlovestheatre

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

by Arthur Miller

directed by Lindsay Posner

Theatre Royal Haymarket, London – until 3 August 2024

https://trh.co.uk/whatson/a-view-from-the-bridge/

It has been over nine years since Ivo van Hove ripped up the rule book on staging Arthur Miller with his spare, almost clinical take on A View From The Bridge, which sold out at the Young Vic, in the West End and on Broadway. Astonishing and refreshing as that was, it’s great to see a more traditional, only marginally less powerful version, such as Lindsay Posner’s riveting Theatre Royal Bath production, in London for a limited season and seriously beefing up the capital’s current dramatic offerings.

Posner lets the play speak for itself, mining it for all its rueful, tough-talking humour and aching, erotically complex subtext. The result is a tense, transporting evening in the theatre, one that grips like a thriller and which, although seasoned theatregoers will most likely know how it all plays out, has you on the edge of your seat hoping that this time it’ll turn out differently for Brooklyn longshoreman Eddie Carbone, his tragically devoted wife Beatrice, beloved niece Catherine and the Italian family members newly arrived in America in search of a better life… of course it doesn’t, but the journey to the emotionally shattering conclusion is as nail-biting here as it’s ever been.

It’s also funnier than usual iterations of this American classic, which admittedly pays mixed dividends. While Dominic West finds sly, dark comedy in a lot of Eddie’s mutterings and Martin Marquez invests the troubled lawyer Alfieri with a glorious, garrulous wit, several members of the press night audience, though it’s not clear whether from generous fortification from the bar or misjudging the mood of the play, seemed to find hilarious certain moments that are intended to shock, such as the horrible, tense kisses Carbone plants on first Catherine then the guileless Rodolpho who he believes is about to steal his niece away. They also roared inappropriately at some of the lines delivered by Callum Scott Howells’s heavily accented Rodolpho. On the upside, you could hear a pin drop later as the play hurtles towards its blood-soaked, tear-stained finale.

West is a magnificent Eddie, more amiable and youthful than many of his predecessors, and with a winning emotional openness that charts all too precisely the character’s descent into despair and distress. At the end, he’s like an injured bull thrashing about, blinded and broken by his own folly and shame. Opposite him, Kate Fleetwood struggles a bit with the accent and has a slightly uncertain act one but rises thrillingly and upsettingly to the high stakes drama of the second half. Her restless hands placating then pleading, her sharp features and glittering eyes bespeaking years of unspoken understanding, she makes something fine and urgent out of Beatrice’s loyalty and fury.

Nia Towle’s Catherine is unforgettable as she transitions from subservient, doting child to empowered woman, investing her with a sensuality, kindness and maturity that feels unforced but entirely convincing. Howells captures Rodolpho’s goodness but little of his physical magnetism, and has a tendency to ham it up. West and Towle aside, the most impressive performance is in a role that usually feels like a comparatively minor figure: Pierro Niel-Mee brilliantly charts a devastating course for Rodolpho’s older brother Marco from deference to his American relatives through brooding, contained self-belief to, finally, white hot vengeful rage. I’ve never seen the role performed with so much nuance and power, truly remarkable.

Technically, the whole staging is immaculately done, if seldom surprising, but that’s not a problem when the play itself is this good. Miller’s muscular, poetic writing is beautifully served. Peter McKintosh’s tenement setting, all metal and echoing wood, is simultaneously claustrophobic and monumental, and it’s atmospherically lit by Paul Pyant. Ed Lewis portentous music, liberally used throughout, matches the sometimes melodramatic hues of the text.

The compassion for, and understanding of, the flaws that make up a human, that course through this fine, brutal play ensure that it never seems to date. It’s about passion, jealousy, compromise, family: it’s the ‘big’ stuff boiled down to compelling domestic tragedy, and it’s wonderful and moving to experience it again in this excellent production.

FUN AT THE BEACH ROMP-BOMP-A-LOMP!!

Music and lyrics by Brandon Lambert

Book by Martin Landry

Developed with Mark Bell

Directed by Mark Bell

Southwark Playhouse Borough – The Large, London – until 22 June 2024

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/fun-at-the-beach-romp-bomp-a-lomp/

I’ve seen some fairly bizarre musicals over the years, from the rock opera about dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki (Out of the Blue at the Shaftesbury in the ‘90s), to a Norwegian saga about witch-hunts in medieval Germany (Which Witch at the Piccadilly, same decade), and more recently here at Southwark, who could forget Yeast Nation, a jolly romp set in the primordial slime and where all the characters were single cell organisms. Brandon Lambert and Martin Landry’s rather random confection is right up there with the weirdest though.

If you can imagine Hunger Games filtered through the sunny, mindless Americana that infused mass populist mid twentieth century movies and rock music then you’ll have some idea of what to except at this deeply strange new musical comedy. Fun At The Beach Romp-Bomb-A-Lomp!! marries the apocalypse with farcical comedy and a bouncy pastiche score. It’s not a long show, running at barely ninety minutes, but it still feels stretched to breaking point, despite the efforts of a talented, hard-working cast.

The basic premise is pretty straightforward: like a cartoon burst into life, the show centres on a sextet of fun lovin’, love seekin’ all-American youngsters who express themselves entirely in the gosh darnit clichés familiar to anybody who grew up with things like Happy Days and The Monkees on the telly, all locked in a battle to become King or Queen of the Beach. For all the candy-coloured brightness of Emily Bestow’s design, the competition has a sinister edge, with a Big Brother-like announcer (voiced by Landry) becoming increasingly threatening as the show goes on, and the fact that failure in each set task results in the death of the losing contestant.

What should have been bubblegum laced with cyanide feels like a comedy sketch that has been allowed to ramble on for far too long. Mark Bell’s production starts off as cute and vital but fatally loses pace as it progresses. It barely makes sense and the lack of real humour and relatable characters means that it starts to feel like a bit of a slog. The comic trope of repeating the same gag ad infinitum only really works if there was a germ of wit there in the first place and far too often this show feels as though it’s beating a proverbial dead horse. It’s neither macabre nor hilarious enough, and, aside from Francesca Jaynes’s perky choreography, the staging suffers from an unhelpful imprecision, the transitions from humorous light to apocalyptic darkness done with little finesse.

The cast are selling the material for rather more than it’s worth but there are too many sequences that are only mildly amusing where they should be sidesplitting, and the sense of threat rubbing shoulders with upbeat peppiness is fudged and never as unsettling as it should be. Janice Landry as perpetually spaced-out Chastity and Jack Whittle as the square-jawed supercool Dude (that’s actually the character’s name!) are particularly impressive, never letting their very specific characterisations drop even when the show takes ever more outlandish turns. Katie Oxman and Damien James do nice work as a couple whose primary mutual attraction seems based on an enthusiasm for raucous bird impressions (that gets old pretty quickly), and Ellie Clayton displays genuine comic and vocal chops as a boy-mad innocent who meets a sticky end before returning as a malevolent ‘Beach Ghost’ (the plot really doesn’t bear close scrutiny).

The songs are so closely and lovingly modelled on existing vintage tunes (‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ becomes ‘Mature Women Don’t Whine’, ‘R.E.S.P.E.C.T’ is transformed into ‘A.P.P.R.E.C.I.A.T.I.O.N’, ‘It’s In His Kiss’ vs ‘It’s In His Peck’) as to surely only be a few notes away from copywright infringement. They’re decent pastiches but their flimsy, derivative nature is shown up in the finale when we get an authentic pop banger (‘Rockin’ Robin’) which lifts the spirits without snark. The assertion, near the shows conclusion that “even the stupidest musical” can be turned around with one great song, suggests a certain lack of faith in the art form. The voices and Lambert’s ‘Beach Band’ are very good.

Ultimately this is a curious, frustrating evening. It’s not that Fun At The Beach Romp-Bomb-A-Lomp!! isn’t fun, at least intermittently, but it may leave you pondering what you have just watched, and why.

JUDGEMENT DAY

by Rob Ulin

directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel

Chicago Shakespeare Theater – The Yard, Chicago – until 2 June 2024

https://www.chicagoshakes.com/productions/2324-judgment-day/

I see a lot of theatre, but it has been quite some time since I heard an audience laughing as long and as loud as they did at this utterly delightful, entirely satisfying new comedy. Judgement Day hums along at the lick and pace of superior American sitcom, but also revels in the possibilities of theatre while providing a surprisingly compelling and thoughtful undertow of seriousness.

Writer Rob Ulin has created something with unexpected depth underneath the laughter, a piece that’s surely destined for a lengthy and profitable life beyond this (understandably) well received Chicago world premiere. Tony-nominated director Moritz von Stuelpnagel whips it up into an energised soufflé of good versus evil, belly laughs spiced with bracing cynicism, and a celebration of humanity in all its flawed, questioning magnificence and occasional awfulness.

If it initially plays out like a cartoon for adults, that means that when the emotional punch finally connects, it does so with a potency and piquancy that elevates the whole, glorious show to the next level. Thought provoking comedy isn’t the easiest thing to achieve in the theatre, but Judgement Day 100% succeeds.

The production’s not-so-secret weapon is Jason Alexander (still probably best known as Seinfeld’s George Costanza, but a versatile stage actor with an impressive list of credits) playing selfish, successful, morally bankrupt lawyer Sammy Campo, staring down the barrel of an eternity of damnation following a fatal heart attack when he’s visited by an avenging angel (Candy Buckley) who bears an uncanny resemblance to the Sunday School teacher he loathed as a kid. Buckley’s inspirationally weird celestial being (think Emma Thompson in the Angels In America movie crossed with the eccentric venom of Eileen Brennan as Captain Lewis in Private Benjamin then in her Emmy-nom’d turn as Jack’s acting teacher in Will & Grace) is finagled into giving him one chance to atone for his “disgusting, sinful, really fun life” or face a series of graphically described endless torments in a literal hell.

Campo interprets this as an opportunity to expiate his former lifestyle by performing a number of good deeds as a sort of point system while remaining essentially unchanged at his gleefully rotten core. He starts with his discarded wife (Maggie Bofill, exquisitely broken) who now works as a diner waitress as she struggles to bring up the son Sammy didn’t even know he had. Young actor Ellis Myers genuinely looks like Alexander’s mini-me and skilfully makes this kid diabolically badly behaved but impossible to hate, just like his Dad. Along the way, Campo also comes across Father Michael (Broadway’s Daniel Breaker, all charm, regret and wide-eyed befuddlement, just wonderful), a Catholic Priest having a massive crisis of faith. The uneasy ‘odd couple’ dynamic between Campo and Michael is a particular joy in an evening chock full of them.

Throw in a side-eyeing secretary with devastating comic timing (Olivia D Dawson), a blithely insensitive and downright strange Monsignor (an irresistible Michael Kostroff), a penniless ageing widow about to lose her forever home (Meg Thalken, as funny as she’s pitiful) and Joe Dempsey as the impervious forecloser on said house, and an individual so vile he almost makes Campo look sympathetic, and you have the recipe for a rich comic stew. The outcome – that genuinely doing good has a profound changing affect on Sammy – is predictable, but the journey to get there proves especially gripping, especially when Ulin throws a few plot curveballs which I’m not going to reveal here. It’s also cryingly, seat-shakingly funny, but that humour is made all the more enjoyable by the authentically ‘big’ questions the play poses to Sammy Campo and, by extension, to us.

This is a brilliant piece of writing, that cloaks its ingenuity and depth in a gallery of characters that initially seem stock types but reveal quirks and layers that surprise and delight, and in zany, irresistible humour. The casting of Jason Alexander is possibly the production’s biggest triumph. Sammy is such a repellent character, at least at the beginning, that the actor playing him could potentially be facing an uphill struggle to engage with an audience, and it is here that Alexander’s bolshy charm and infinite charisma prove invaluable. It’s hard to think of another actor other than perhaps Nathan Lane (and there are moments when Campo is reminiscent of the equally mendacious and venal Max Bialystock, who Alexander also played in The Producers’s West Coast premiere), who can simultaneously do irredeemably awful yet strangely lovable. Alexander has a natural dynamism plus the physical comedy of a great clown, the line delivery of a master, and when he needs to reveal his heart, does so with a delicacy that turns the head. He’s such a good actor, and Ulin’s writing matches him so well, that even when a forever-changed Sammy moans that “I walk around all day every day, giving a shit about people who are not me” it’s hilarious yet touching and entirely convincing. It’s a magnificent performance that turns a fine, spiky comedy into a compulsive dance of (possible) death.

The rest of the cast match Alexander’s brilliance, with Breaker and Bofill especially finding depth under the wit, while Dawson and Kostroff hitting every comic beat, and then some, in their roles. Beowulf Borritt’s giant stained glass window backdrop augmented by meticulously detailed smaller set pieces (Sammy’s office, an upscale bar, the vestibule of legal chambers, an antiquated confessional booth) sent slightly off-kilter by strange angles and perspectives works superbly.

So does everything else in this flat-out wonderful piece of theatre. Chicago Shakespeare Theater is currently represented on Broadway by Six and The Notebook, and it’s hard not to imagine this diabolically entertaining offering following in their footsteps, followed hopefully by a healthy international life. An unmissable treat.

LADY DEALER

by Martha Watson Allpress

directed by Emily Aboud

Bush Theatre Studio, London – until 15 June 2024

https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/event/lady-dealer/

Existential despair and rambunctious comedy make unusual but intriguing bedfellows, and Lady Dealer, an acclaimed hit at last years Edinburgh Festival and now back on stage at one of London’s most consistently high quality venues, typifies this. We know we are in for something with a bit of edge as soon as we enter the Bush’s studio space to the sound of aggressive urban music and first glimpse Jasmine Araujo’s grungy set of upturned giant loudspeakers, loose wires and domestic detritus (a full ashtray, a discarded mug) but this seventy five minute play goes on to spring several surprises. One of the most prominent of these being that most of it is in verse.

This sparky almost-monologue, still featuring same stellar actor, Alexa Davies, who won plaudits first time around, starts off as cheeky comedy, almost stand-up except that when we first encounter motor-mouthed drug dealer Charly she’s lying down, then hunched over, retching. Although writer Martha Watson Allpress doesn’t pull any punches – Charly is confrontational (or “ratchet…raggedy and likeable” as the text has it) in her direct address to the audience but endearing enough to get away with it, and clearly extremely smart, both intellectually and in terms of the street – the gritty humour of the set-up wrongfoots us, as the play ends up examining the loneliness, disillusion and societal pressures on modern young people. Its lack of judgement is refreshing, and its compassion enriches the overall experience.

Having read some of the playtext before watching, I wondered if I had spoilt for myself a revelation in the latter stages of the piece. It turns out I needn’t have worried: the surprise, such as it is, feels like a bit of a non sequitur, although it’s nicely done. Anyway, if you’re in the habit of buying a programme/playtext maybe don’t look at it until after the show. Emily Aboud’s production has a lot going for it.

Chief amongst its pleasures is Alexa Davies as the titular lady dealer. A gifted comedienne with a natural rapport with the audience, Davies also skilfully hints at the unease and isolation beneath Charly’s cocky exterior, before achieving real pathos when it becomes clear just how troubled and anxious her life actually is. She’s hugely impressive and totally convincing.

Personally, I felt slightly less convinced by the script Davies is delivering. Watson Allpress shows genuine talent for writing comedy, describes some of the more unhealthy aspects of Charly’s existence with grim relish, and throws some interesting if not consistently plausible curveballs, the main point of which seems to be a warning not to judge a book by its cover (Charly is Oxbridge educated and completely upfront with her feminist mum about how she makes her living). It just doesn’t ring entirely true though, despite Aboud’s pacy, inventive staging and Davies’s top tier performance, and ultimately it’s not clear quite what the point of the story is, and the line into pretension gets crossed when the play seeks to become serious.

Watching a performer as good as Davies at close quarters is always a treat though, and the production has a bracing theatricality that commands the attention. You may not leave the theatre feeling any more enlightened than you did going in, but Lady Dealer is so short, and Davies so fine, that the show never outstays its welcome. At its best, it’s absolutely hilarious.

TWELFTH NIGHT or What You Will

by William Shakespeare

directed by Owen Horsley

Regents Park Open Air Theatre, London – until 8 June 2024

https://openairtheatre.com/production/twelfth-night-or-what-you-will

I’ve seen funnier and more moving Twelfth Nights than Owen Horsley’s new Regents Park production but I’ve never seen one that so persuasively cuts to the queer heart and flamboyant strangeness of this melancholy comedy, and which creates such a complete alternative universe for this play and these characters to exist in. The island of Illyria is now a gay nightspot called Olivia’s, the time frame is indeterminate but the costumes have nods to 1940s elegance as well as present day chic, and the overall aesthetic of Basia Bińkowska’s set, Ryan Dawson Laight’s costumes and Carole Hancock’s wigs, hair and make-up seems to have been inspired by those glossily gorgeous but vaguely unsettling Jean-Paul Gaultier fragrance ads, the ones with the hunky sailors and the corseted beauties.

Anna Francolini’s nightclub proprietress Olivia who, with her cloud of auburn hair and high definition maquillage, bears an uncanny resemblance to Patti LuPone’s Norma Desmond in the original staging of Sunset Boulevard, carrying her dead brothers ashes around in an urn like it’s a Tony award, is den mother to a dysfunctional queer family. Dawson Laight dresses her like an old school movie star, in jet black lace with sun glasses, veil and trail for mourning, and like a couturier’s vision of a shepherdess for her wedding. She’s poised, brittle, camp and utterly magnetic.

In Olivia’s domain, Toby Belch (a barnstorming but multi-layered Michael Matus, looking like he’s wandered in from last year’s triumphant La Cage aux Folles, which shared the same costume designer, on this very stage) is a mischief-making drag queen with an unexpectedly aggressive edge. His sidekick Andrew Aguecheek (Matthew Spencer, raising gormless indignation to an art form) comes across like a businessman with emotional problems, and Maria (Anita Reynolds, delightful) is a fierce, Welsh accented good time girl. The love between the sexy pairing of Andro Cowperthwaite’s Sebastian and Nicholas Karimi’s Antonio absolutely does dare to speak its name, in fact it’s bellowed joyously from the rooftops. In sailor drag, Cowperthwaite and Evelyn Miller, beautifully voiced as his twin Viola, look like supermodels.

It may all sound a bit gimmicky but in practise it’s mostly successful, and feels entirely in the spirit of Shakespeare’s text. The all-pervading sense of camp sometimes compromises the emotional weight of the play: Francolini’s Olivia has tremendous authority and charisma but her grief and love never seem particularly deeply felt. Neither do the torments of Raphael Bushay’s charming Orsino.

Similarly, Malvolio’s exiting statement “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” feels less like a howl of humiliated fury than a discontented flouncing off, an impression borne out by a rather sweet coda which sees the dysfunctional family reunited despite everything that’s happened. Tamsin Greig delivered the line like a punch to the gut in the last National Theatre production, but here Richard Cant, otherwise a very effective, vinegary Malvolio, seems less horribly aggrieved.

The estimable Julie Legrand, crop-haired and elegant in a shimmering full length coat, is a formidable, androgynous presence, and sings with the louche assurance of a cabaret veteran, but it’s never quite clear who this Feste is and how they fit into this slightly seedy milieu. That said, the mutual affection with Olivia is palpable and when they join singing forces at the end, it’s joyful. Sam Kenyon’s bluesy, jazzy score is so effective there are moments where one almost wishes this team had gone the whole hog and given us the full Twelfth Night musical.

This is a visually ravishing, thoughtfully subversive take on a familiar text, for the most part illuminating rather than reinventing what’s already there. Director Horsley attacks the play with an iconoclastically fresh eye, tempered with a formidable understanding of the riches of Shakespeare’s creation. I didn’t laugh as much as I expected, but I found myself thinking about it on the way home perhaps far more than any other interpretation I’ve seen. A rewarding, vitalising piece of theatre.

THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR

by Nikolai Gogol

adapted and directed by Patrick Myles

Marylebone Theatre, London – until 15 June 2024

https://www.marylebonetheatre.com

Farce is surely one of the trickiest theatrical genres to get right: play it too straight and it becomes leaden, make it too fast and it’s unintelligible, perform it too broadly and it feels like too little is at stake. Gogol’s mayhem of bureaucratic corruption and mistaken identity is a classic of the form and one that, for better or worse, will probably never not be relevant because the wells of human venality and vanity are unlikely to ever run dry. Patrick Myles’s handsomely mounted new production goes for a traditional period setting but relocates the action from 19th century Russia to England, and soaks the whole thing in a bath of cartoonish lunacy.

The result is a high energy show, performed mostly at a pitch of hysteria that proves pretty difficult both to sustain and to watch, that is seldom as funny as it appears to think it is. I don’t think the fault lies with the actors, whose commitment both to the sometimes inspirationally crude but rather charmless script and the relentless comedy shtick they’ve been given, could scarcely be faulted, but with the direction which dials everything up to ten from the get-go and allows a mishmash of acting styles that never coalesce into an onstage world that we can believe in or care about.

Not that Gogol was interested in creating a warm, fuzzy picture of humanity – all the characters in The Government Inspector are financially, socially or sexually on the make – but by denying them any root in basic reality, this version robs them, and us, of much of the hilarity that ensues when real fallible humans get everything spectacularly wrong. This is like grand opera without the singing…and only marginally more laughs.

As the down-on-his-luck posh boy that the hapless denizens of a rural town assume is the government official from the city, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, star of TV’s Ghosts brings admirable energy but disappointingly little finesse, in a performance that seems to confuse shouty with charismatic. Similarly strident is his television colleague Martha Howe-Douglas as the bossy, loquacious local dignitary’s wife who sees him as a means of social advancement. Dan Skinner as her husband shouts himself hoarse berating the audience for chortling at the comic goings-on (“you’re all laughing at yourselves!”) except that there wasn’t really all that much laughter. Chaka Gupta gets thrown around like a ragdoll as their unfortunate daughter, but it feels more uncomfortable than funny.

There are a couple of welcome pockets of restraint amongst all the bawling and posturing however: David Hartley is genuinely funny as a vicar with a predisposition for bloodily injuring himself, and Daniel Millar’s sexually and financially voracious manservant works so well because he’s played comparatively straight. Elsewhere, one certainly couldn’t accuse the actors of laziness – they’re working far too hard for that – but the go-for-broke imprecision frequently blunts the comic edge.

Skinner’s Governor gets a bilious, enraged speech near the end where he screams about the rich kid (Smith-Bynoe’s Percy) going back to his privileged life while leaving regular people to cope with the fallout from the damage he’s caused, and one gets the feeling this is supposed to draw a parallel with our own time and the (hopefully, soon) outgoing Tory government. The trouble is, it feels unearned, so, despite the volume and passion of Skinner’s delivery, goes for very little.

Melanie Jane Brookes has designed a fairly opulent set, encased in a giant golden picture frame, and some attractively garish period costumes. As a project, it clearly has had quite a lot of money lavished on it, it’s just a shame that it doesn’t quite hang together. The savagery of the satire is sacrificed to a showboat full of mugging, and the comic momentum very seldom gets going.

THE COMEUPPANCE

by Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins

directed by Eric Ting

Almeida Theatre, London – until 18 May 2024

https://almeida.co.uk/whats-on/the-comeuppance/

The idea of death being present in all things and at all times, sometimes quite tangibly as the scythe-carrying Grim Reaper, was a constant preoccupation in the medieval ages but less so for subsequent generations. The concept, tuned out and anaesthetised for so long with mass media and the horrors of history, made a brief reappearance for many people during the Covid pandemic as mortality encroached naggingly on the minds and consciousnesses of a global population, particularly in nations, such as the USA and the UK, that pride themselves on being advanced specimens of human civilisation. Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins taps into this in his thought-provoking but richly enjoyable play, first seen off-Broadway last year in a production from which some of the creative team are recreating their work for this London premiere.

Death isn’t listed in the dramatis personae of The Comeuppance but bursts out of the mouths of the five human characters who pop out of the play at regular intervals to deliver monologues on mortality. As personified in Jacobs-Jenkins’ writing, Death isn’t necessarily malevolent, but more wry, reflective, dispassionate, cajoling even.

The premise is that this group of former classmates are meeting for a pre-party prior to their 20th anniversary school reunion. They’re living in the post-Covid era but they each have their own additional crosses to bear: hostess Ursula (Tamara Lawrance) has lost the sight in one eye to diabetes, artist Emilio (Anthony Welsh) has a rootless, lonely existence overseas in Berlin, Caitlin (Yolanda Kettle) is in a loveless marriage and with step kids she hates, her former flame (one of many, apparently) Paco (Ferdinand Kingsley) is traumatised by military duty in foreign war zones, and doctor Kristina (Katie Leung) has a serious drink problem.

So far, so dysfunctional, but Jacob-Jenkins fleshes this disparate bunch with such bleak humour and fascinating backstories that it’s impossible not to be fully engaged. If this self-proclaimed “multi ethnic reject group” is a little too pat in its representation of a polyglot America (the recurring visual motif of an apocalyptic wind ripping through the Stars and Stripes banner also feels a little heavy handed), they’re so well written as individuals and their longstanding relationships and mutual grievances feel so convincing that The Comeuppance remains fully engrossing, even as its savagery threatens to give way to sentimentality in its latter scenes.

Not many plays, as yet, have dealt with the trauma following the world shutdown and mass deaths caused by Covid. The Finborough hosted James McDermott’s Jab earlier this year which dealt with the reaction of a middle aged British couple to the pandemic, but The Comeuppance feels more expansive and universal. It’s not as shocking as the same author’s Appropriate (currently enjoying an acclaimed Broadway production) or as inspirationally crazy as his An Octoroon, but it shares much of the same theatrical imagination, as well as the laudable ability to make deadly serious points while being immensely entertaining. It certainly cements Jacob-Jenkins’s reputation as one of the greatest American dramatists currently at work.

The acting in Eric Ting’s propulsive but sensitive production is impeccable. Not a single false note is struck, even when the characters are at their most outrageous. The American accents are also flawless, which is especially noticeable given that the actors deliver their Death speeches in their own voices. Technically, Arnulfo Maldonado’s designs, Natasha Chivers’s lighting, Emma Laxton’s sound, and the special effects by Skylar Fox and William Houstoun, are all ingenious and noteworthy but never at the expense of the integrity of the script or this brilliant cast.

The Comeuppance is a chilling blast of a play, shot through with genuine belly laughs and shudders of recognition. It interrogates how our past experiences mould us, how striving to find the past in the present is doomed to failure or at least discontent, and it has a quizzical semi-hopeful ending. A fine, funny, troubling evening.

MINORITY REPORT

by David Haig

based on a short story by Philip K Dick

Directed by Max Webster

Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, London – until 18 May 2024

https://lyric.co.uk/shows/minority-report/

Philip K Dick’s 1956 sci-fi novella has already spawned a Hollywood blockbuster starring Tom Cruise, and now actor-writer David Haig and hotshot director Max Bennett take on this futuristic thriller that pits human will and determinism against an authoritarian state in a co-production between Nottingham Playhouse, Birmingham Rep and the Lyric Hammersmith. Minority Report probably feels even more timely now with the ongoing threat of Artificial Intelligence meddling in our perceptions and day-to-day lives. Haig further updates this preposterous yet undeniably troubling tale by making the neuroscientist central character hoisted by their own petard when their own technology predicts the possibility of them committing a murder, into a woman.

Jodie McNee plays, brilliantly, Dr Julia Anderton, all smug self-assurance and with an affected upper crust accent as she addresses a conference of peers while caressing an actual human brain at the outset, before unravelling spectacularly as she goes on the run from the authorities. In a nice, telling touch, McNee’s own Liverpuddlian accent comes to the fore as Anderton’s panic and distress rises, as though everything this woman had suppressed about herself bursts through the urbane sheen of success she’s carefully cultivated, leaving her raw, open and terrified.

It says much for the strength and authority of McNee’s tremendous performance that she isn’t lost amongst the bells and whistles of Bennett’s über-flashy production. In depicting the London of 2050, Bennett and his crack design team (video by Tal Rosner, set by Jon Bausor, lighting by Jessica Hung Han Yun, illusions by Richard Pinner, sound by Nicola T Chang) have hurled everything at the wall….. A taxi hurtles through city streets, platforms rise and fall, searching spotlights sear as they rove, whole rooms appear then disappear in the blink of an eye, avatars pop up in unexpected places….. Visually and aurally, the staging is a sensation. Webster has proved before, most notably with Life of Pi, and the Donmar versions of Macbeth and Henry V, that he is a director most comfortable and adept at utilising multimedia in his productions but never at the expense of the theatricality, and that reaches an apotheosis here.

Bennett’s work is augmented by movement direction by Lucy Hind that is so elaborate and striking that you almost wish they’d gone the whole hog and given us Minority Report – The Musical. Certainly, this is as exciting an attempt to stage the apparently unstageable as you’ll find in any current London theatre, except for the Phoenix and Palace (homes, respectively, to Stranger Things and Harry Potter). Where the show comes unstuck slightly is in the latter half lurch into melodrama as a gun-wielding Anderton seeks to avenge her sisters death: it feels overwrought and messes up the pace of the evening. For all the hi-tech ingenuity of the staging and the commitment of the cast, the story doesn’t always grip as much as it should: in condensing the whole saga into ninety minutes, a certain amount of clarity has been lost, and we’re sometimes left dazzled but not always entirely sure as to what’s going on.

Not all the supporting performances are as strong as they might be, but Nick Fletcher excels as Anderton’s bewildered husband, and Tanvir Virmani is unsettling and amusing as her virtual AI-generated confidante. Even if ultimately Minority Report convinces primarily as a flashy thriller held together by a stunning production and an accomplished central turn, the tensions between human choice and the sinister machinations of technology that is supremely intelligent but ignores the possibilities for rethinking and rehabilitation, are persuasively conveyed. It’s not a great play but it’s an enjoyable, frequently discombobulating one.

PIPPIN – The 50th Anniversary Concert

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz

Book by Roger O. Hirson

Directed by Jonathan O’Boyle

Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London – 29 & 30 April 2024

https://lwtheatres.co.uk/whats-on/pippin-50th-anniversary-concert/

This 1974 Broadway smash, which flopped in London originally but has been revived numerous times since, is an incredibly malleable beast. Bob Fosse’s striking initial vision for it was as a macabre commedia dell’arte, a smirking, snarky dance of death, making it the show that, even more than A Chorus Line which it predates by a year, established ensemble dancers as a group of individuals rather than a homogenised, faceless bunch of chorines. The 2012 Menier production presented it as a computer game, the Tony-winning Diane Paulus Broadway revival a decade ago set it in a circus and the post-Covid London revival that transferred from a pub garden in Vauxhall to Charing Cross saw it as a hippie festival, just steps away from Hair which it sometimes resembles. With its innate theatricality, illusion and emphasis on dance as a mode of storytelling, Pippin is not necessarily a show one would automatically think of for a concert treatment.

Staged concerts have become more elaborate of late however, and director Jonathan O’Boyle has history with this piece: his pre-pandemic production that played Manchester’s Hope Mill then Southwark Playhouse in London, is one of the finest accounts of Stephen Schwartz and Roger O Hirson’s musical that I’ve seen. This new Pippin, featuring an all-star cast, a sizeable choir courtesy of Arts Educational School, and the onstage 20 piece London Musical Theatre Orchestra under the baton of Chris Ma, is basically the show as written but minus the scenery. In order to achieve maximum emotional impact, this loosely structured tale of a troupe of players putting on a show about the youngest son of medieval emperor Charlemagne and his quest for the meaning of life ideally needs more specificity than it gets here, but there’s still a heck of a lot to love.

The blazing talent on stage, Joanna Goodwin’s fabulous Fosse-lite choreography (of which there is plenty) and the transporting tuneful songs (it’s not as well known as the same composer’s Wicked but it’s a considerably stronger score) go a long way to papering over the cracks in the book, which, without an overriding theatrical concept, feels dramatically undernourished and self-consciously peculiar, especially in the second act which gets bogged down in a half-hearted romance and lots of existential pontificating. The ending, where the Leading Player (Broadway’s Alex Newell) strips everything away (sets, lights, costumes, wigs…even the band “get your hands off that goddamn keyboard”) to show Pippin what a “regular” life would be like without magic, isn’t as powerful when there’s not much to strip away…the transformation in Diane Paulus’s Broadway version where the colourful Big Top, with its elaborately costumed cast members, becomes the bare brick back wall of the theatre under harsh strip lighting is probably the most effective and astonishing to date. Nonetheless, it’s a fascinatingly downbeat ending to a show, or rather concert edition, where dazzle dazzle is its predominant stock in trade.

Newell lacks the sinister edge of a really great Leading Player but sings the score sensationally well, riffing and opting up to exhilarating effect, and is often very funny. Jac Yarrow in the title role also sings superbly, and successfully projects the self-absorption and bravado of the character, although the vulnerability that makes Pippin so compelling mostly eludes him. Cedric Neal’s glittering Charlemagne is great fun, and Lucie Jones, despite being saddled with a bizarrely unflattering costume, displays terrific comic chops, as well as a real sense of heartbreak, as Catherine, the widow who falls for Pippin. The four players who make up the versatile, athletic chorus – Jak Allen-Anderson, Sally Frith, Amonik Melaco and Gleanne Purcell-Brown – carry the show, and are just glorious.

The evening is stolen though by two women in supporting, but essential, roles. Firstly, Patricia Hodge, who was the original London Catherine back in the mid 1970s at what used to be Her Majesty’s Theatre, sidles on as Pippin’s majestic but thoroughly naughty grandmother and delivers an object lesson in seducing an audience while never breaking character. She’s simultaneously haughty and earthy-warm, and makes the life-enhancing, ear-wormy singalong ‘No Time At All’ (“join in with the choruses, but the verses are all mine”) the uplifting heartbeat of the show. It’s a wonderful fully-rounded performance which deservedly got the first huge ovation of the night.

Then there’s Zizi Strallen firing on all cylinders as Charlemagne’s scheming wife Fastrada. Sexy as hell, with legs that go on forever, and an exhilarating vocal belt that I did not know she was capable of, she’s authentically stunning. It’s a triple threat performance that transcends mere camp (although she certainly is that)….she’s deliciously nasty, overpoweringly erotic and absolutely hilarious. A real star turn.

The orchestra and choir are magnificent, although the sound design could be a little more crisp and some of the tempi seemed a little off at times, although that may just be teething troubles. There are several moments where the sheer wall of sound hits you like a bombastic sugar rush of gorgeous noise, and it’s in those sections where any reservations are swept joyfully away. The excellent O’Boyle’s knowledge of, and respect for, the piece ensures that, strange as it sometimes is, it’s admirably clear in its focus and storytelling. It’s just a shame that this Pippin is only on for two nights.

OH, MARY!

by Cole Escola

Directed by Sam Pinkleton

Lucille Lortel Theatre, New York City – until 12 May 2024

Lyceum Theatre, New York City – 26 June to 15 September 2024

https://www.ohmaryplay.com

Probably the hottest ticket in New York right now and the kind of downtown audience and critical darling upon which theatrical fortunes, legends and reputations are founded, Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! is utterly, joyfully ridiculous. Watching it, I was reminded of the work of Charles Ludlam’s acclaimed Ridiculous Theatre Company which gleefully, and similarly, took a queer hatchet to conventional straight sensibilities and themes. Escola, as both writer and star, makes an equal impact here: this gorgeous comedy is crazed, super-smart and entirely irresistible as it rewrites American history and leaves audiences helpless with hysteria.

Escola plays Mary Todd Lincoln, yes the First Lady of Abraham, but this is neither drag nor slavish historical recreation (God forbid), although it does feature references to the Civil War. That’s as nothing though compared to the Uncivil War waged between the Lincolns: upright, repressed gay Abraham, forever eyeing up the male domestic staff when he thinks nobody’s looking, and cabaret-obsessed, easily triggered, vicious alcoholic Mary whose determination to return to the stage is outdone only by her loathing for her husband and interest in getting herself around the nearest bottle. This Mary is more than quite contrary, she’s absolutely unhinged and, as represented by Escola, entirely irresistible, even, or maybe especially, when she’s being a total nightmare.

Clad in a funereal black hoop dress and a ringleted wig that is trying so hard to be period specific but seems strangely at war with both itself and Mary’s head, Escola’s Mrs Lincoln raises malice and indignation to an art form, and their comic timing is exquisite. Amazingly, they even find some pathos in the character. When we finally get a taste of the cabaret act Mary was forced to abandon, the mirth stakes are raised even higher, I can’t remember the last time I saw people laughing that hard in a theatre. It’s all the funnier because Cole’s Mary takes herself and her art very seriously indeed.

Conrad Ricamora’s grandstanding, lecherous Lincoln is equally hilarious, which is no mean feat given what he’s up against, and James Scully is attractively manic and also tremendous fun as an acting coach engaged for Mary, and who ends up playing a bigger part in the unfolding history than you might imagine. Bianca Leigh is rather gorgeous as a 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, surprisingly, a whiskery benign barkeep. Tony Macht is the fifth member of this merry team as the assistant that President Lincoln can’t seem to get enough of.

The infamous assassination of the President at the theatre is reenacted here but with a backstory that is anything but predictable. Sam Pinkleton’s pacy production 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. If this sometimes feels like a Saturday Night Live sketch writ large (and with more swearing) it’s undoubtedly a gloriously fun time, and Cole Escola is a magical, one-off talent. I adored it.