ajhlovestheatre

BALLAD LINES

Music and lyrics by Finn Anderson

Book by Finn Anderson and Tania Azevedo

directed by Tania Azevedo

Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London – until 21 March 2026

running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval 

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/ballad-lines/

The dual legacy of music and stories handed down through centuries, traversing centuries, lifestyles, oceans and continents, is at the heart of Finn Anderson and Tania Azevedo’s engrossing, female-centric musical. Ballad Lines feels at once intimate and epic, and equal parts Celtic and American. It’s also possibly the best sung show in town right now.

One certainly can’t accuse songwriter and co-author Anderson and director/co-author Azevedo of lack of ambition. In less than two and a half hours, they examine how traditional songs get passed from person to person, all around the world, and the resulting cross fertilisation of cultures. Equally, the show, previously known as A Mother’s Song in an earlier iteration, considers how women’s bodies are commodified and controlled, across three different time frames but centring on one extended family. 

There’s 17th century Scottish ministers wife Cait (a luminous Kirsty Findlay), unwillingly pregnant and defying social norms, then, a hundred years later, her free-spirited descendent Jean (Yna Tresvalles) unexpectedly pregnant at fifteen and compelled to make the long journey to start a new life in America. In the present day, Sarah (Frances McNamee), the distant offspring of these woman, moving into a new apartment in New York with her girlfriend Alix, is floored when she listens to a series of tapes from her deceased aunt (golden voiced Rebecca Trehearn) recounting family stories and reciting folk songs carried half way across the world by her female forebearers. 

There is a degree of contrivance in the way the three timelines interweave but the sheer potency of the music and the truth of most of the performances ensure that it never devolves into schlocky sentimentality. The score (played gloriously by a four-strong all-female band, and sung by the cast like their lives are depending upon it, which, in the context of the story, is frequently true) is folk made vibrantly theatrical. It’s easy to make comparisons with Once, Come From Away and Benjamin Button, and indeed the music, lyrical yet thrillingly rhythmic, does punch you straight in the heart in a similar way, but Ballad Lines seldom feels derivative. 

The show isn’t perfect: the second half unsatisfactorily resolves a conflict between Sarah and Alix (Sydney Sainté, utterly wonderful) over them having their own child, that blows up too quickly and results in a schism in their relationship that is dealt with too perfunctorily to be fully credible. The sole male in the cast, Ally Kennard, is a capable and likeable triple threat but feels fundamentally miscast. He is a warm, almost cuddly presence but doesn’t feel rough or alpha male enough as to be a physical threat to Findlay’s desperate Cait.

Still, the sense of generations of women’s joys, struggles, traumas and triumphs being channelled through drums, fiddles, guitars and roof-raising vocal harmonies is palpable and powerful. At the centre of it all as the conduit for all the memories, traditions and issues is Sarah, and McNamee is remarkable. She invests this conflicted young woman with a credible, all too human combination of fragility and edge. In all honesty, she’s sometimes better than the script which just occasionally veers into daytime soap territory. As her ancestor, Findlay – heartbreaking – finds a similar balance of softness and steel, while Tresvalles is all passionate determination as fiery but lovable Jean. All of the vocal performances will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

T K Hay’s simple but ingenious set manages to simultaneously suggest Sarah and Alix’s New York apartment, the Appalachian mountains and the ship that carried Sarah’s ancestors across the Atlantic. Tinovimanashe Sibanda’s stomping and keening choreography, although sometimes hemmed in by the limited space, is rousing and hypnotic. The lighting by Simon Wilkinson is suitably atmospheric and helpful in delineating locales and while the sheer wall of sound (design by Andrew Johnson) frequently thrills the blood, there are lengthy sections where the lyrics are indecipherable.

The flaws in Ballad Lines are fairly minor, and as that music and those voices surge through the house, it’s impossible not to get swept up in the raw emotion and melodic brilliance. If the spoken material isn’t quite realising its full potential as yet, this is undeniably a cracking night in the theatre already, and could end up being a real world beater. I’ve already got the studio cast album playing on repeat.

WOMAN IN MIND 

by Alan Ayckbourn

directed by Michael Longhurst

Duke of York’s Theatre, London – until 28th February 2026, then Sunderland Empire 4 to 7 March 2026,  Theatre Royal, Glasgow 10 to 14 March 2026

running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including interval 

https://womaninmindplay.com/

Sheridan Smith’s acting has an emotional availability and sparky comic aplomb that resonate irresistibly with audiences, and her versatility is admirable. She seems oddly miscast though as Susan, a vicar’s wife desperately losing her grip on reality and her sanity in this revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1985 tragicomedy Woman In Mind. Smith delivers an endlessly watchable, occasionally moving performance, but her pert wit, doll-like features, tattoos and mop of blonde hair collectively render her too modern, too glossy and rather too young to fully convince as the mother of grown-up children (one real, one imaginary) and the spouse of Tim McMullan’s brilliantly realised, terminally pompous Gerald.

Julia McKenzie won the Evening Standard Best Actress award for her turn in the original London production, and both she and her replacement Pauline Collins had a useful homely quality that cast a melancholy shadow over the scenes depicting Susan’s fantasised idyllic existence with her impossibly glamorous imaginary family. That same perceived ‘ordinariness’ rendered Susan’s descent into erotic and hysterical abandon all the more shocking. By contrast, Smith has a brassy glamour that makes her seem altogether more at home with Sule Rimi’s flamboyantly dressed alternative husband and Safia Oakley-Green’s doting but not-real daughter, at least until things turn nasty, than she does with their infinitely more pallid real life counterparts. 

Smith does however have an extraordinary gift, used potently here, for allowing deep emotions to well up and sit momentarily on her face before being ruthlessly sucked back down into the depths of her being. When finally those feelings overwhelm her, as they do in the play’s unsettling final scene, and all reason is lost, it’s impossible not to be affected. 

Ayckbourn’s script, which begins and ends with dialogue that is total gibberish reflecting Susan’s heightened mental distress, felt daring and profound when it premiered forty years ago, but attitudes towards women’s agency and possibilities and mental wellness, have thankfully come a long way since. It’s not that Woman In Mind is a misogynistic play, despite the depiction of Susan’s utterly weird grieving sister-in-law Muriel (an admirably committed Louise Brealey), Ayckbourn is too compassionate and even-handed for that. But it does feel dated now in a way that even the last West End revival, in 2008 with an incandescent Janie Dee, didn’t.

Romesh Ranganathan makes an energetic, if slightly one-note, West End debut as a gormless GP smitten with Susan. Chris Jenks and Taylor Uttley are very good in roles (Susan’s imagined brother and estranged real life son) that are more improbable sketches than fully realised human beings, although in fairness the former is only a figment of our heroine’s imagination.

Director Michael Longhurst scored a triumph a couple of years ago with another study of a woman in mental freefall – the Broadway musical Next To Normal at the Donmar then in the West End – but that material had an urgency and emotional clarity largely missing here. Set in a realistic garden against a backdrop of trees that warp and distort as a reflection of Susan’s tortured mind (design by Soutra Gilmour with video by Andrzej Goulding), Longhurst’s staging excels at building an atmosphere of comic chaos with an underlying sense of real threat and disquiet.

Smith’s inherent likability does a lot of heavy lifting here but neither that nor Longhurst’s energised staging can disguise that Woman In Mind, for all its ambition and empathetic heart, is a bit of a slog.

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.