Any piece of theatre that has Annie Lennox proclaiming “I came away with my mind slightly blown”, or better yet, sports on it’s flyer the quote “brilliant! it got me laid!” from a happy audience member, has got to be worth a look, right? And that’s before one even considers the title: We Didn’t Come To Hell For The Croissants must be one of the most amusing and intriguing show names in living memory, not to mention the longest. As it turns out, this South African, multi-authored one woman riff on the Seven Deadly Sins offers rather more than just a whimsical comic title and a series of outrageous pull quotes.
Cape Town based theatre maker Jemma Kahn, armed only with a kamishibai frame (a sort of Japanese equivalent to a toy theatre, where striking illustrations are slotted through to aid with storytelling), a couple of props, some serious comedy chops and a ton of attitude, rattles through an eccentric compendium of monologues, tales and musical numbers, ranging from the precious to the filthy. Not everything lands equally well, but when this magical artist and this show soar (which they mostly do), this is a biliously funny, sometimes unsettling seventy minutes of sheer theatrical chutzpah.
Kahn is mesmerising: a remarkable, shapeshifting combination of sexy, stern, chummy and borderline terrifying. The relish with which she intones a stunningly well written tale of unbridled lust at an unconventional dinner party, or delivers, in a flawless German accent, an increasingly chilling poetic dissection of a stalking obsession, are masterclasses in audience control, provoking titters of unease and amusement, and just occasionally abject shock. A quirky number about a pampered NYC puss with a trust fund also scores a bullseye.
The highlight for me though was the Rosa Lyster-penned section ‘Enemies and How to Love Them’ which starts as a Ted talk from a smugly successful female entrepreneur that becomes progressively more and more venomous, culminating in the bizarre but hilarious assertion that you’re nobody until somebody truly hates you. Most of the writing throughout the show is sensational: wry and tangy, with an elegance that suddenly becomes upended by an unexpected shot of sheer nastiness.
Trawls through the underbelly of human existence are seldom this life-enhancing. Lindiwe Matshikiza’s staging is ostensibly simple but has a subtle tension and sensuality, a certain seedy glamour, and is exquisitely paced. Kahn is the real deal, a unique stage presence with charisma to spare, and the ability to turn the atmosphere in the room from red hot to icy in the blink of one of her mascara besmudged eyes. Connoisseurs of juicy diva star turns should not miss her. Altogether, this is a rare dark delight. I can’t guarantee it’ll get you laid, but you’ll have a Hell of a good time.
Existentialism, absurdism, clowning, vaudeville, country music and a gentle queer romance all collide in this strange but rather lovely show. And Then The Rodeo Burned Down is sometimes reminiscent of other, more conventional, plays – Waiting For Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead spring most readily to mind – but has an off-kilter comic energy, suffused with a certain quiet melancholy, that is entirely it’s own.
Also unique is it’s form: defying conventional categorisation, the piece starts off as a sort of athletic, scattershot vaudeville with the two performers (New York-based creators Chloe Rice and Natasha Roland, sublime) bounding on, capering wildly, and applying clown makeup in between dance sections. A little bewildering at first maybe, but worth sticking with as the show becomes progressively darker and more intriguing. The dialogue when it finally comes is witty, elliptical, and all the funnier for being delivered with a winning sincerity, even vulnerability.
The story, such as it is, involves a rodeo clown Dale (Rice, utterly beguiling) who longs to upgrade to the lofty status of cowboy and whose progress is impeded and/or enhanced by their own shadow (a fully realised character, inhabited with gusto and mischievous charm by co-star Roland), as well as a dismissive headlining performer and a conscience-pricking bull escaped from the pen (both played by the brilliantly shape-shifting Roland). The piece turns into a bit of a whodunnit as the rodeo gets set on fire and they seek to find the identity of the culprit.
The plot matters less though than the playful, sexy, slightly edgy mood throughout. When the house is plunged into darkness in a mock power cut, the performers do a welcome potted summation of everything that we’ve learned thus far. It’s a useful moment for them and us to catch our collective breaths and regroup. No director is credited and one suspects the show might gain a little in clarity and focus from an assured directorial hand. Ultimately, if you like your theatre slick and with linear storytelling, this probably won’t be for you, but it has a haunting contemplative quality as it ponders questions of self awareness and ambition, which contrasts nicely with all the energetic meta-theatrical hi-jinks, that stays with you long after.
Chloe Rice and Natasha Roland have a magical chemistry that ensures that their hour long show is consistently watchable, even as it threatens to become irredeemably obscure at times. That said, at it’s most engaging, it’s genuinely captivating.
Comparisons may be odious but it’s pretty much inevitable that this new Streetcar will be compared to the Almeida’s triumphant 2018 reimagining of Summer And Smoke (same author, director, leading lady and some of the same design team) as well as to earlier iterations of this tricky but magnificent text (this is the fifth London revival in the last twenty five years, following productions variously starring Jessica Lange, Glenn Close, Rachel Weisz and Gillian Anderson as the tragic diva heroine Blanche Dubois). However, this is an unusually youthful reading of a play usually marinated in the disappointments of middle age, which duly casts it in a bold, bracing new light.
Even if the same team hadn’t already tackled (brilliantly) Summer And Smoke at this address, the parallels between the two plays is obvious, there being a direct line between the mental fragility and unconventional moral choices of Alma from the earlier play and Streetcar’s Blanche. Both women reflect Tennessee’s tortured, well-documented struggles with his own damaged, much wronged sister Rose. As in her earlier production, Frecknall employs music and sound to create a sort of fever-dreamscape that is as much a deconstruction of the text as a straightforward rendition of it, that gets right to the dark, broken heart of the piece. Where Summer featured a selection of beaten up pianos, Streetcar’s script is punctuated by necessarily jarring contributions from a sole drum kit and a hauntingly ethereal live vocal (Tom Penn and Gabriela García respectively, who tellingly become the two figures who take stricken Blanche away at the end of the play.)
If Frecknall’s vision is perhaps less revelatory than the knockout Gillian Anderson/Benedict Andrews Young Vic production, which was almost aggressively modern in its visual aesthetic, it has an intriguing timelessness that lingers in the imagination long after the show is over. It’s both raw and expressionistic: witness the way the boy Blanche callously shamed over his sexuality weaves in and out of the action, as though condemned to keep repeating his horrible death forever, endlessly traumatising our heroine in the process. Or how the seller of flowers for the dead contorts and abases herself on the floor, as though mirroring Blanche at her most drunkenly excessive. Even more potent is how the entire company, except for Dubois, group together at key moments, almost like a pack of watchful animals, to create a sense of community from which she is inevitably excluded. The use of water is reminiscent of Ivo van Hove but never feels as self-indulgent as it can with some of his work.
The play is staged in the round, thereby making direct engagement with these flawed, potentially dangerous people inevitable. The immediacy is profoundly effective and affecting and if Madeleine Girling’s design is spare, Lee Curran’s moody lighting works overtime, becoming almost another character in the production. In the second half, when the stakes raise to breaking point for Dubois, her disenchanted brother-in-law Stanley, sister Stella, and Blanche’s doomed liaison with the fundamentally decent Mitch (Dwane Walcott, excellent) the horizontal shards of light on all sides give the playing space the look of a combat arena, one where sheer muscle power looks set to triumph over delicate unreason.
That delicate unreason pours out of every pore of Patsy Ferran’s terrific Blanche by the end, although at first she just seems a little skittish and uncertain, if quietly manipulative. She’s neither the broken doll Rachel Weisz presented from the outset at the Donmar nor imperious like Anderson at the Young Vic. She’s thoroughly convincing, a fragile survivor whose nerves may be shot (the sudden volley of strikes to the drum kit on the upper level in her first appearance being indicative of her ongoingly unquiet mind) but whose victim status doesn’t feel inevitable, at least not initially. Crucially, she reads as much younger than any of her predecessors, so that when she refers to herself as being older than 27, it’s less of a comically grotesque lie, as it tends to play with significantly more senior actresses, and more a genuine concern.
Ferran’s late replacement of the previously announced Lydia Wilson aside, the big casting news here is screen star Paul Mescal as Kowalski. He does not disappoint. With his mullet, muscles and general air of a dirty bomb that could go off at any moment, Mescal is a dangerous, electrifying Stanley. He has a laid back laconicism that makes his sudden, and all too convincing, eruptions into savage, irrational violence all the more alarming, but he also allows us to see glimpses of a sweetness, even a tenderness, that makes Stella’s affection for him entirely plausible. This Stanley may not hint at the inner life Paul Foster fascinatingly gave him at the Young Vic but he is undeniably compelling; he moves stealthily, like an animal, which seems to be a recurring motif in this production, when taunting Blanche at the end and when he beats Stella it’s horrible but it feels as though he knows she’s better than him on every level, so this brute force is all he has.
Anjana Vasan as Stella is equally remarkable, probably the most authoritative yet sympathetic reading of the role since Essie Davis’s acclaimed performance in the 2002 Trevor Nunn production. She’s no simpering victim in sexual thrall to Stanley but rather a strong, intelligent woman who owns her choice to live here in the teaming urban squalor of Elysian Fields. The famed “what happens in the dark between a man and a woman” speech with which Stella justifies her relationship with Stanley to Blanche is less an erotic reverie or romantic whimsy but more like cold, hard facts. Her magnetic strength but sensitivity prove profoundly affecting as does the distressing suggestion at the very end that this Stella may descend in the same way as Blanche. I found it impossible to tear my eyes away from her whenever she was on stage.
The supporting cast, led by Ralph Davis and Janet Etuk as violently warring neighbours, are pretty much flawless. All in all, this is an illuminating, inventive revitalisation of a familiar piece and joins the darkly magical West End Cabaret as further testimony to Ms Frecknall’s claim to be among the most exciting directors of her generation. Good luck with getting a ticket though: best keep everything crossed for a transfer or a screening…either would be richly deserved.
As it sashays triumphantly towards it’s fifth birthday in the West End, with sister companies selling out nightly on Broadway and across the US, the UK and Australia, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s rampant musical-concert hybrid, celebrating/commemorating the wives of Henry VIII, is an inspiring success story. I doubt they ever have to take down the Haus (House) Full sign from outside the Vaudeville Theatre where this glossed-up, spangled version of Lucy Moss and Jamie Armitage’s staging has taken up residence probably until such time as Hell freezes over…and rightly so. The show’s notoriety, both for being a riotously good night out and a tough ticket to get hold of, is a far cry from the student skit this entertainment phenomenon started out as.
After numerous cast changes (if anybody’s counting, London’s now onto it’s third Aragon, fourth Boleyn, second Seymour and Cleves, fifth Howard and fourth Parr, and that’s not including covers), the West End version remains in decent condition, although it feels like it could use a little bit of fine-tuning. While the current team of performers inhabiting Gabriella Slade’s dazzling (and now Tony award winning) rhinestone and metal studded Tudor-meets-Steampunk costumes certainly don’t drop the crowns from their predecessors, there are moments when it feels as though they would benefit from stronger direction. The voices are all terrific, the harmonies and execution of Carrie-Anne Ingrouille’s pop video-ready choreography are crisp; but not every zinger lands, and there are moments where an emotional depth that was previously there seems to be slightly compromised in favour of virtuosic riffing and a determination to meticulously recreate the now-iconic queenly poses from the poster (back arched, fingers splayed on an arm outstretched behind, microphone aloft and head thrown back in an ecstasy of belting). For all Six’s pretensions to being a concert, Marlow and Moss have created a genuinely witty script with a surprising undertow of real feeling. At present, it is undoubtedly fabulous entertainment, but it could, and can, be a little more.
What’s interesting to note as the run continues is how each new Queen gets to put her/their own stamp on the role. Some long running shows tend to succumb to “cookie cutter” casting, whereby each new company replicates what the last umpteen casts did to the extent that a certain blandness and lack of flavour can start to set in. Here though the current Queens bring their own vibrant personalities and attitudes to bear on Marlow and Moss’s witty, sometimes heartbreaking, creations, although in a couple of cases the characterisations could be more specific, an issue I suspect may have more to do with the way they have been directed than with the unquestionably stellar talents on stage.
Still, there is a heck of a lot to enjoy: if molasses had a sound it would be Rhianne-Louise McCaulsky’s thrilling vocals as an authentically diva-esque Catherine of Aragon, and Baylie Carson’s Australian accent adds an irresistible comic piquancy to their bouncy, cheeky, likeable Anne Boleyn. Claudia Kariuki invests Jane with welcome gravitas and a heart-meltingly gorgeous rangy belt, and also gets one of the funniest moments as Seymour reacts to Boleyn’s observation that she can’t dance (patently untrue, but even if it were, Kariuki’s voice would more than compensate).
As a show-stopping Anna of Cleves, Dionne Ward-Anderson is supercool where the role’s originator, Alexia McIntosh, was all irresistible warmth, but she is very very funny as she nips all the regal competitiveness in the bud by repeatedly declaring just how wonderful her life is, plus her lightning fast switches between inscrutably still and ragingly bonkers are a joy to behold. Koko Basigara cuts a more fragile figure than her predecessors as Katherine Howard and finds a fascinating, and necessarily disturbing, contrast between her bravado (“I think we can all agree / I’m the ten amongst these threes”) and the immeasurable damage done to a young woman by a short life of systemic abuse. She’s sexy and sassy but it’s her vulnerability that sticks in the memory as she makes something magnetic and haunting out of ‘All You Wanna Do’, the astonishing solo number which starts out as a fun dance track but darkens to leave her, and us, totally winded. Roxanne Couch is a lovable, vocally assured Catherine Parr, the one who outlived Henry, and probably the most relatable of all the Queens.
It’s also worth noting again that what’s nightly rocking the Vaudeville to its foundations is a subtly different beast from the production that began at the Arts in 2018. Having conquered Chicago, New York, Australasia and the High Seas, Six now has more of an assured swagger and opulence, as well as a considerably larger budget. Part of this will also be due to the weight of expectation: when it first appeared up at the Edinburgh Festival, the show was a wonderful surprise, but now everybody goes in knowing it’s reputation and expecting a party….and, by Henry, do they get one. The show’s warm heart, biting contemporary wit and powerfully female-centric agenda remain the same, but much of the dressing (Emma Bailey’s set, Gabriella Slade’s aforementioned costumes, Tim Deiling’s lighting and Paul Gatehouse’s sound design) is now slicker and brighter. The audience, for the most part, behave as though they are at a stadium rock concert.
Despite the minor reservations regarding detail in the direction of the current iteration, Six remains one of the best times you can have in a West End theatre. A glittering, primary coloured, bombastically full-throated paean to female empowerment and survival, packed with great songs and crowd-pleasing moments. The thought of this ever closing is roughly akin to the idea of the ravens leaving the Tower of London.
“It could be worse” observes Baby, one of the pair of Irish sisters who open and close Margaret Perry’s richly enjoyable new play, as she contemplates their less-than-ideal lives; that statement applies equally to the existences of the other four women whose frustrations, tragedies and eccentricities inform this delightful, unruly tragicomedy. Their gender apart, the other thing that connects this mismatched sextet is their dissatisfaction with their place in the world, specifically contemporary London, although it could be any impersonal major city: each of them feels they could, and should, be doing better, and one of the interesting, humane and frequently laugh-out-loud funny things about Perry’s script is the way that these women tackle their individual plights.
Another thing they have in common is a pyramid selling scheme, the commercial arm of an essential oils company called Paradise (the play’s title is the name of the corporation’s annual weekend-long seminar, an event described with the sort of fervour some people reserve for Christmas, Mardi Gras or a Royal wedding), which is how they all initially meet. Perry is clearly fascinated by the cult-like aspect of some of these schemes and weaves that into a complex but accessible tapestry that also encompasses female empowerment, sisterhood (of both the familial and non-familial kind), loss, the essence of sleep, and how the relationship between siblings can be surprisingly toxic even as they are supportive and loving. It paints an engaging picture of bodies adrift in a big city, each with an agenda but not necessarily much self awareness.
If it sounds a bit random and a lot to take in, well, it is, but it’s also rollicking good fun. Director Jaz Woodcock-Stewart matches the scattershot brilliance of Perry’s text with a staging that hurls everything at the wall: there’s music, physical comedy, some over-elaborate scene changes, a few bizarre dramatic and visual non sequiturs …but the theatrical miracle of it all is how much of it sticks.
Each character is so exquisitely drawn (and, in most cases, indelibly flawed) that it’s impossible not to care, even when some of the behaviour exhibited is less than admirable. The writing is impressive: frank, funny, and at times compellingly weird. Perry has a tremendous gift for imparting information between the lines of dialogue, such as in a glorious scene where needy, strange yet relatable Laurie (Rakhee Thakrar in a performance of genuine comic genius) turns up to a party of an old high school acquaintance who clearly has no idea who she is. It’s blissfully, uncomfortably funny, and all the more amusing because it’s played with a lot of truth but just slightly off kilter from realism.
Act one is pretty much perfect and the second act sets off at a similarly terrific level, with the women at the Paradise Now event, their reactions ranging hilariously from hysteria to disbelief as touchy-feely mutual support swiftly devolves into something a lot less wholesome, albeit way more amusing for us in the audience. Revelations pop, perhaps a little too conveniently, a major deception is uncovered, and it all proves as gripping as it’s funny.
It’s a shame then that the overlong second half loses it’s way a bit, meandering down a couple of dead ends plot wise, and, frustratingly, not giving closure to the story arc of arguably the most interesting character (Thakrar’s inspired Laurie). It’s never less than watchable though, which is due in no small part to the cast, each of whom inhabits her/their characters with utter conviction.
Michele Moran draws a tender, truthful portrait of depressive middle aged Gabriel, who blossoms from dowdy homebody to determined but kind go-getter as her pyramid selling dream seems to take off, while Carmel Winters invests her sister Baby with a riveting combination of whimsy and watchful stoicism. Ayoola Smart is beguiling and multi-layered as youthful would-be TV presenter Carla, whose desire to succeed proves motivated as much by spite and revenge as anything more aspirational. Annabel Baldwin is tremendous – sexy and likeable – as the striving dancer Carla falls in love with (and they are a truly wonderful dancer).
The comedy gold, but with an undertow of real melancholy, is provided by the astonishing Ms Thakrar, who takes an unconventional character and mines her for every last ounce of irresistible peculiarity and pathos, and the equally magnificent Shazna Nicholls, who plays Alex, the Paradise recruiter and lynchpin, with the clenched, ingratiating ferocity of a woman who knows that, if she stops talking and smiling, she’ll probably start screaming and be unable to stop. The moment near the top of act two where she realises that her standing within the company has been bested by one of her own recruits is comedy acting of the highest order.
If ultimately Paradise Now! turns out to be slightly less than the sum of its parts, it’s still a tangy, ambitious, thoroughly engrossing piece. Woodcock-Stewart’s superb production moves at a hell of a pace, and the performances nudge the whole gorgeous enterprise into the realm of the unmissable. I liked it enormously.
As somebody who loves a listicle plus a bandwagon to jump on, how could I NOT compile my list of my top 20 new (to me) shows of 2022?! It’s been a twelve month in which live entertainment has come back with an encouraging roar, although the impending cost of living crisis is inevitably, and understandably, causing anxiety in theatrical circles. Please do get out there, if you can, and support your local venue in 2023….
In 2022 I saw 157 new shows between London, the UK regions and New York so whittling them down to just twenty favourites has been a considerable, but lovely, challenge. Honourable mentions go to Jodie Comer’s astonishing -and Broadway bound- solo performance in Prima Facie, the Donmar’s delicate reinvention of The Band’s Visit (a considerable improvement on the NYC production plus featuring a glorious UK debut for Israeli diva Miri Mesika), and Hampstead Theatre’s truly beautiful drama about the power of music, Folk. I also loved the Old Vic’s rambunctious, timely Eureka Day which comically examined the thought processes of anti-vaxxers, the Royal Court’s haunting feminist time travel thriller The Glow, and Mark Farrelly’s affectionate and affecting solo shows Jarman and Quentin Crisp – Naked Hope, both of which are coming briefly to Wiltons Music Hall in March. Wiltons hosted Starcrossed, the captivating gay riff on Romeo & Juliet and Punchdrunk made a triumphant return with The Burnt City, which is still tantalising audiences at their new Woolwich HQ plus there was a tasty musicalisation of Great British Bake-Off in Cheltenham but heading into the West End next spring. A late addition to the year’s theatrical glories was the Ian McKellen-John Bishop Mother Goose, an affectionate, rambunctiously funny, totally joyful panto that wiped the floor with the Palladium’s annual offering, and tours the country following an extended West End season.
On Broadway I was exhilarated by MJ which features some of the most jawdropping choreography, by Tony winning Brit Christopher Wheeldon, in decades (it’s hitting London in 2024: early booking will be mandatory) and Jordan E Cooper’s furious, wildly entertaining Ain’t No Mo which explored the Black American experience with humour, vitality and sheer in ya face originality. The New York production proved unjustly short lived but I doubt we’ve seen the last of Cooper’s extraordinary creation.
So , here’s my Top 20, in alphabetical order…..enjoy (I did)
1. A STRANGE LOOP – Lyceum Theatre NYC until 15 January 2023
Photograph by Marc J Franklin
The 2022 Best Musical Tony winner, Michael R Jackson’s “big Black and queer ass American Broadway show” (to quote it’s own tangy, racy lyrics) is a boundary-pushing, melancholic yet rollicking interrogation of racial and sexual identity, and what a musical even is. A breathtaking original with a sensational cast, it will go down in the annals of theatre history, no question. Would love to have experienced this again. Calling Stratford East, the Young Vic or Lyric Hammersmith….?
2. BACON – Finborough Theatre London – ended 16 March
Photograph by Ali Wright
A terrific surprise, Corey Montague-Sholay and William Robinson were astounding in Sophie Swithinbank’s swaggering but sensitive two hander that looked at toxic masculinity, peer pressure, social inequality and pent-up sexuality in a devastatingly powerful and inventively abstract production by Matthew Iliffe. This little firecracker surely deserves a further life.
3. BLUES FOR AN ALABAMA SKY – National Theatre London – ended 5 November
Photograph by Marc Brenner
UK premiere for Pearl Cleage’s poetic but muscular 1995 play, set in 1930s Harlem, and reminiscent of a Black Tennessee Williams. A superb evening, marking a magnificently confident NT debut for Bush artistic director Lynette Linton and featuring a brace of flawless performances from a company led by American TV star Samira Wiley and Olivier winner Giles Terera.
4. ELEPHANT – Bush Theatre London – ended 12 November
Photograph by Henri T
The first of several one person shows on this list, and Anoushka Lucas’s gig-family saga-history lesson hybrid is a multi-faceted beauty, taking on colonialism, the dualities of being mixed race, and the implicit racism within the music industry. Lucas herself played the young musician at the centre, as well as various figures in her life, and one fervently hopes she comes back to this when she finishes tearing up the stage as a brilliant Laurey in the Daniel Fish Oklahoma! reimagining.
5. HENRY V – Donmar Warehouse London – ended 9 April
Photograph by Helen Murray
A thrilling reinvention: one of Shakespeare’s driest plays felt dirty, raw, vital and dangerous in Max Webster’s modern dress, multimedia production which seemed to draw parallels between Henry’s unwanted march on France with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Kit Harington was a dynamic, relatable king and a terrific ensemble included Anoushka Lucas (again) as an ice-cool Princess of France who conversed entirely in French. Theatrical dynamite.
6. INTO THE WOODS – St James Theatre NYC until 8 January 2023 then touring
Photograph by Matthew Murphy & Evan Zimmermann
In the year following Sondheim’s death, I also saw, and hugely enjoyed, Into The Woods productions in Belfast and Bath but it was this supremely intelligent, immaculately crafted distillation of the New York City Center all-star concert that really got to the heart of this beautiful, complex piece. Lear deBessonet’s bare bones staging, lushly orchestrated and extravagant of imagination and understanding, proved that when the material and the talent are this good, you don’t need all the folderol. Plus Sara Bareilles’s Bakers Wife was one for the ages. Magic.
7. KIMBERLY AKIMBO – Booth Theatre NYC – now playing
Photograph by Joan Marcus
Possibly my new favourite musical. Adapted by David Lindsay-Abaire from his own quirky comedy about a sixteen year old girl with a rare genetic disorder whereby she ages five times faster than regular people, this fresh, funny heartbreaker boasts an entrancing Jeanine Tesori score and a haunting central performance from Broadway vet Victoria Clark that is one for the history books. Seriously life-enhancing, joyously off-beat, this has had the sort of reviews creatives and producers dream about.
8. MIDDLE – National Theatre London – ended 18 June
Photograph by Johan Persson
David Eldridge, whose unique ability to find the riveting in the apparent ordinariness of everyday life is one of the glories of British theatre, followed his quietly flawless Beginning about a young couple at the start of a relationship (to be revived at Manchester’s Royal Exchange in early 2023) with this equally exquisite two hander about a middle aged marriage in sort-of crisis. Polly Findlay directed a note-perfect production, played out in real time, which drew performances of such truth, tenderness and precision from Claire Rushbrook and Daniel Ryan that the angels could weep.
9. ONE WOMAN SHOW – Ambassadors Theatre London – until 21 January 2023
Photograph by David Monteith-Hodge
Seriously, go and see Liz Kingsman in this intimate setting before she becomes a global superstar. I’m not joking, even though she is in this exhilaratingly funny, gleefully bonkers almost-solo show that takes surreal pot shots at rom coms, the entire concept of a one woman play, and the ubiquitous comic trope of messy, “flawed but loveable” modern women (hello Fleabag). Absolutely tremendous.
10. ONLY AN OCTAVE APART – Wilton’s Music Hall London – ended 22 October
Photograph by Ellie Kurttz
Was it Theatre? Was it a recital? Was it a concert? Was it a cabaret? Who the hell cares…it was utter magic. Downtown cabaret NYC-style (in the endlessly elegant, tartly witty shape of Mx Justin Vivian Bond) met grand opera (engaging, internationally acclaimed counter tenor Anthony Roth Costanzo) in this quirky, eclectic slice of flamboyant joy. An evening of total and utter delight.
11. PASSION – Hope Mill Theatre Manchester – ended 5 June
Photograph by Mark Senior
Another Sondheim, and one of the least popular, although anybody who saw Michael Strassen’s ravishing production, where jagged edges meet raw silk, may wonder why. While this version, ballsier than any other I’ve seen, embraced the delicacy of this semi-operatic tale of poisoned unrequited love, it also had the emotional impact of a sledgehammer. A trio of impeccable, yet consistently surprising, starry central performances (Ruthie Henshall, Dean John-Wilson and Kelly Price) make a further case for a further life for this exceptional staging.
12. PENNYROYAL – Finborough Theatre London – ended 6 August
Photograph by Helen Murray
Another entry for the tiny but mighty Earls Court powerhouse of new writing, and another delicious surprise. Lucy Roslyn (who also starred, winningly, alongside Madison Clare) took a 1922 Edith Wharton novella and turned it into a wonderfully perceptive, occasionally searing, and surprisingly universal mini-saga about infertility, eggs donation and the fractious relationship between a pair of sisters. Beautiful.
13. PROJECT DICTATOR – New Diorama Theatre London – ended 30 April
Photograph by Cesaro de Giglio
This was my first exposure to theatre makers Rhum & Clay and I was bowled over. Starting out as a bit of merry audience participation comedy centred around an apparently trivial power struggle between the fabulous performers (Matt Wells and Julian Spooner), it devolved into a masterful, unsettling critique of power, coercion, collaboration and how artists fit into all that. Seventy five minutes to watch but months, maybe years, to process.
Martin Sherman’s solo piece about a Jewish woman who survived the concentration camps to gain her own pragmatic take on the American Dream, was first seen in the 1990s with the late Olympia Dukakis, but really came into its own with Scott LeCrass’s spellbinding revival, featuring career-best work from Dame Maureen Lipman. An unforgettable evening and a riveting masterclass.
15. SOME LIKE IT HOT – Shubert Theatre NYC – now playing
Photograph by Marc J Franklin
Not just hot, but sizzling. This sparkling musical confection from the team behind Hairspray and Smash, takes a vintage Hollywood screwball comedy and remints it as something fresh, inclusive and full of heart, with an uplifting jazzy score. It’s both traditional yet woke, and announces J Harrison Ghee and Adrianna Hicks as major new Broadway stars. Irresistible.
16. SOUTH PACIFIC – UK and Ireland tour ended 20 November
Photograph by Johan Persson
Originally seen in Chichester, Daniel Evans’s flawless production found new colours and textures in the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, giving it an excitement and emotional urgency I’d never seen before. Revelatory central performances from Gina Beck, Julian Ovenden and Joanna Ampil helped to make this a soul-searing triumph.
17. THE LION – Southwark Playhouse London – ended 25 June, then US tour
Photograph by Pamela Raith
As somebody who had seen, and adored, Benjamin Scheuer perform his autobiographical solo musical about his family and his cancer survival, first time around, I didn’t see the point of reviving it without him. But then I saw Max Alexander-Taylor in Alex Stenhouse and Sean Daniels’s perfectly calibrated new staging, and fell in love all over again. A heartwarming, life-affirming little bit of magic.
18. THE P WORD – Bush Theatre London – ended 29 October
Photograph by Craig Fuller
Another Bush gem. Waleed Akhtar’s terrific two hander was a plea for tolerance, a study of the power of friendship, and ultimately a potent political act that grips like a thriller. Thought provoking, with a simmering rage and a cracking sense of humour, it was a gay Asian sort-of love story that took an unflinching look at the inhumanity with which refugees are often handled in this country. Akhtar himself and co-star Esh Alladi were devastatingly good in Anthony Simpson-Pike’s engrossing production. Revival please.
19. THE SOLID LIFE OF SUGAR WATER – Orange Tree Theatre Richmond – ended 12 November
Photograph by Ellie Kurttz
Short, sharp, shocking and utterly compelling, Indiana Lown-Collins delivered a shattering account of this remarkable Jack Thorne play that considers the effect of the loss of a baby on a young disabled couple. Katie Erich and Adam Fenton delivered soul-baring performances. Strong meat yes, but unforgettable, essential theatre.
20. TITANIQUE – Daryl Roth Theatre NYC – now playing
Photograph by Chad David Kraus
A loving send-up of the Titanic movie and a certain adored French-Canadian diva, this is the Celine Dion disaster jukebox musical we didn’t know we needed but probably now can’t do without. Screamingly funny, jawdroppingly camp and musically enthralling, this off-Broadway smash has already moved into a larger venue and looks set for world domination. Resistance is futile, but really, why would you want to?! Co-creator Marla Mindelle’s Celine is worth the ticket price all by herself.
Beautifully crafted musical comedy, light as air yet with a lingering fragrance of potent joy, and as poignant and full of heart as you need it to be, is back on Broadway….and it doesn’t get much better than this.
Some Like It Hot, the newest incarnation of this most particularly American of all art forms, could have felt like an unfashionable throwback, set as it is in the 1930s and based on an iconic, but potentially problematic, movie, with a jazzy score (Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman’s terrific songs here are more reminiscent of their work on the underrated Catch Me If You Can and TV’s Smash than it is of their irresistible Hairspray) and tap choreography to rival 42nd Street. But no…
In fact, it proves anything but, thanks to inspired casting, some sensitive repointing of the original story and crackerjack good comedy by book writers Amber Ruffin and Matthew López: Some Like It Hot delivers the kind of uplifting good time that should send audiences out into the night with sappy grins plastered all over their faces while they text their friends demanding that they book tickets. Joy meets Woke meets all-embracing here in a way that very few shows manage…
In one of the most remarkable cases of having it’s cake and eating it that I can remember, this sparkling dose of escapism married to modern sensibilities manages to be transporting enough to entrance traditional theatregoers while at the same time ensuring that people who have felt marginalised and shut out are brought along on the beautiful train ride. It looks effortless, in the way that dreamy musical comedy needs to, whether on screen or stage, but features rigorously disciplined and clever work from a crack team of Broadway craftspeople, led by director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw who has never done anything finer, at the top of their games.
The trans community had voiced reservations over the use yet again, after the Tootsie and Mrs Doubtfire musicals, of “man in a dress” as a comic trope, but Ruffin and Lopez sidestep this issue by having Jerry, one of the hapless musicians forced to flee in disguise after witnessing a ganglands massacre in Prohibition Chicago, realise their truest self once they are in their alter ego Daphne’s wig and frocks. It’s done with such a lightness of touch, and played with so much panache and sensitivity by the jaw-droppingly lovely J Harrison Ghee, one of the show’s two breakout stars and who identifies as non-binary, that it adds a freshness and kindness to what could have been an icky cliché. When this Daphne dons the look, the effect isn’t funny at all, it’s enchanting, in the way that classic transformations from chrysalis to butterfly usually are. Extra emotional punch is added by having Osgood, the eccentric millionaire who falls for them and who leads a double life of his own (an utterly delightful Kevin Del Aguila) realise who Daphne is before Jerry does. Truly heartwarming.
Having set that up so well, the show does give us carte blanche to laugh at Jerry’s partner in crime, Joe (Christian Borle, quite restrained by his own standards, but still a masterclass in exquisite musical comedy performance) who makes an exceptionally unusual woman when got up as the hapless Josephine, a fact referred to often and hilariously by NaTasha Yvette Williams’s fabulously sassy band leader. The show softens, rightly, the romantic gaslighting of female lead Sugar by Joe, but it’s still loaded with comic panache.
The other breakout star referred to earlier is Adrianna Hicks as Sugar (the role immortalised on screen by Marilyn Monroe). But whereas the screen Sugar was a product both of her time and Monroe’s particular persona, a ditzy, breathy blonde with a fondness for the bottle and getting repeatedly involved with the wrong kind of men, the new musical incarnation is a much richer, tougher creation. For starters, she’s a Black woman…but this isn’t colour-blind casting: Ruffin and Lopez have deliberately written her this way, giving her a poignant speech about sneaking into cinemas as a kid and never seeing anybody who looked like her on the screen. Hicks gives her attitude, warmth and just enough vulnerability to make us care, but without ever shading her as a victim. She’s a leading lady to fall in love with, and her power-packed vocals swoop and soar.
Everything here works, from Charlie Rosen and Bryan Carter’s brassy, big band orchestrations to Gregg Barnes’s sparkling costuming, and Scott Pask’s glossy art deco box of a set. Nicholaw’s staging is oil-smooth accomplished and reaches a blissfully inventive climax with a tap dance chase sequence late in the second half that is an exhilarating object lesson in stagecraft.
This Some Like It Hot actually feels like a traditional musical comedy from the storied Golden Age of Broadway, but joyfully transmogrified into something inclusive, relevant and deeply satisfying. Any NYC theatre season that includes this life-enhancing confection, the equally unmissable Kimberly Akimbo and the arrival of West End hit & Juliet amongst it’s new musicals might reasonably be considered vintage. “Nobody’s perfect” are the last words in the screenplay of the original movie, but this life-enhancing new musical pretty much is. It’s not just hot, it’s sizzling.
Suffering as the basis for explosive comedy appears to be something of a specialty for acclaimed American dramatist Stephen Karam. Back at Hampstead Theatre where his Pulitzer and Tony winning The Humans was seen before the pandemic, Karam has another gem, which actually predates his better known play having been seen at off-Broadway’s Roundabout Theatre in 2011, with this touching, bracingly funny examination of a young man’s life in freefall as his body collapses on him, his dysfunctional family turn on each other after a bereavement, and his crazy boss threatens to withhold approval for his medical care if he doesn’t cooperate on a book cannibalising his father’s story.
Sons Of The Prophet is a wonderfully quirky paean to human resilience, fleshed out with richly drawn characters and dialogue of immense eccentricity and comic truth.
Joseph (in a superb central performance by Irfan Shamji) has a hell of a lot to deal with. But neither Karam’s writing nor Shamji’s performance allow him much more than a hint of self pity. When he does break down, in an exquisitely drawn final scene as he opens up to a former primary school teacher -a luminous Sue Wallace- who he unexpectedly encounters at a physical therapy class, it’s genuinely affecting. The absence of mawkishness and the constant presence of sheer human weirdness as we endure the allegedly unendurable make this a play to savour.
More often than not, Joseph is necessarily combative whether it’s with his needy but feisty younger brother (Eric Sirakian, just fabulous), triumphantly unreconstructed Uncle Bill who’s both protective of the family’s Lebanese heritage but right on the mark with modern American entitlement (Raad Rawi delivering a masterclass in magnificent crankiness) or his crassly insensitive boss Gloria, determined to inveigle her way into his family by whatever means necessary. Meanwhile, as a long time athlete, his body is breaking down on him. Your heart bleeds for him, but he is no victim.
As for ghastly Gloria, that aforementioned boss, she’s a Manhattan monster and a terrific comic creation. Pill-popping, mendacious, manipulative, the kind of person that plays the victim to get whatever she wants, she’s awful but she revivifies an already salty, tangy script whenever she’s on stage. Dreadful she may be, but she is theatrical dynamite and Juliet Cowan plays her, brilliantly, with a combination of steel and honey that convinces and appals in equal measure. She’s a victim and a predator, and if Shamji, Sirakian and Rawi weren’t so damn fine, she’d walk away with this entire show.
That said, there is brilliant support from Jack Holden as the unerringly privileged journalist Joseph has a fling with and Holly Atkins in a variety of roles, ranging from disaffected medical professional to a terminally unimpressed board member announcing the next stage in the legal case between Joseph’s family and the young man (Raphael Akuwudike, perfection) who accidentally killed their father.
It’s strange perhaps that something this brutal can be so life-enhancing, but that’s what Karam has given us: an enormously loveable play with a core of implacable steel. Strongly recommended.
A Steven Berkoff Christmas show was never gonna be all cards and fairy lights, although both of these do feature in this production, along with a tree, copious amounts of booze and a massive dose of existential despair, but anybody planning to watch Scott Le Crass’s accomplished version of this 1985 solo play, needs to brace themselves for just how grim it gets. I can’t think of anything more depressing on any current London stage…but by the same token I can’t think of many shows as brutally relevant right now either.
When we first encounter Harry (Stephen Smith, whose Threedumb Theatre Company is presenting this production in aid of the anti-suicide charity CALM), he is shuffling around his wan-looking abode, a couple of days before December 25th, in a garishly cheery Christmas jumper, trying to work out whether he should bring out some of last year’s festive cards to bolster the paltry display of the half dozen he received this season. It’s more sad than funny, sweet even, with Smith’s innate likability enhancing Harry’s already potent pathos: the mirthless grin, slightly stooped posture, regular swigs from a can of cheap cider…this is a tender and tough portrait of a man only in very early middle age but already beaten by life.
As the play progresses though, we learn the true extent of Harry’s isolation and also, equally disturbingly, about his anger management issues and fairly unreconstructed attitude to women (one suspects that this aspect of his character was seen as less problematic when Harry’s Christmas premiered in 1985). His desperation for connection and utter hopelessness feel real, but so do his less palatable traits such as self-pity and a chronic lack of self awareness. Berkoff’s writing, pitched at a point somewhere between banal and poetic, that occasionally gets a little wearisome, with a characteristic (for this writer) overlay of the obscene, finds bleak humour in Harry’s sensitive but mind-bendingly tedious phone calls to his aged mother or an ill-advised exchange with a long lost friend which culminates in him being on speaker phone with his mate’s demanding toddler. His internal voice, by turns cajoling then taunting, speak to him, and us, over the sound system.
This is all a lead-up though to the main point of the play, which is how loneliness can blight a life, and how the apparent joys of the Christmas season can throw such feelings into even starker relief. Harry ends up giving in to the dark side, in a chilling overdose scene performed with a remarkable sort of abandoned precision by Smith. It’s not an easy watch, but if it causes anybody who sees it to stop and reach out to someone they know who is spending Christmas alone, then it’s worth it.
In all honesty, Smith reads as too young, vital and attractive to fully convince as Harry, at least initially, but he compellingly charts the character’s tempestuous journey between snarling misanthropy, abject dejection, and, ultimately, complete abandonment of any attempt at hope. You may not necessarily like Harry but it’s hard to feel something for him.
Director Le Crass does a fine, nuanced job of maintaining the tension between how we perceive Harry and perceives himself. The staging is just technically flashy enough to maintain interest across a sometimes harrowing 75 minutes but restrained enough to never run the risk of trivialising or sensationalising the heartrending subject matter. The haunting sound score by Julian Starr, who also collaborated with Le Crass on another solo piece, Rose with Maureen Lipman, which was one of my theatrical highlights of 2022. This is a very different kind of script but in a production that further cements this director’s reputation as a talent to watch.
Harry’s Christmas is about as far removed from traditional festive entertainment as it’s possible to get, and it isn’t for everyone. But, as a consciousness raiser, as well as the chance to see some extraordinarily committed acting at close quarters, this is a worthwhile addition to the capital’s pre-Christmas theatrical offerings.
Newsies, although based on a 1992 Disney live action movie that initially bombed at the box office, belongs to that small coterie of musicals that defies criticism. Paying customers love this show and story: there is something about Alan Menken’s bouncy, catchy tunes and the sight of more than a dozen athletic, waistcoated newsboys leaping tirelessly and unfeasibly high above a stage, that audiences just cannot get enough of. The original 2012 Broadway production, with a heavily revisionist book by Harvey Fierstein and buoyed up by a swaggering, star-making turn from Jeremy Jordan as chief agitator Jack Kelly, was initially intended to be a limited season but wound up extending repeatedly until it achieved an impressive 1000 performances.
This London premiere has already extended bookings until next spring and, if the ecstatic -verging on hysterical- first night reaction was any indication, it’ll be opening up ticket sales for beyond then fairly soon. One would imagine this was always the intention of principal producers Runaway Entertainment (in partnership with Disney Theatrical and a few others) who have clearly spared no expense in presenting this London Newsies. This is one of the largest casts you’ll see on any current stage, backed up a decent-sized band on an environmental set that turns the hangar-like Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre into an atmospherically grimy, iron-girders-and-dirty-glass vision of 1899s New York that recalls the all-encompassing scenic designs John Napier used to create for the Lloyd Webber blockbusters and the RSC in the 1980s. It’s a real eyeful.
Size isn’t everything however and the question is….just how good actually IS Newsies? Well, I suspect your reaction to it may depend on what you want from a night of musical theatre. It was always a pretty simplistic take on actual historical events (a bunch of New York newspaper sellers declaring a strike after publishing magnate Joseph Pulitzer raised the price of their bundles of papers by ten cents in the summer of 1899) with a romantic subplot shoe-horned in….and a ton of dance breaks. Probably wisely, director Matt Cole makes no attempt to find parallels with the newspaper sellers’ strike and this country’s ongoing industrial action problems. Owing to the sheer size of the venue, subtlety and nuance are pretty much non-existent, a problem exacerbated further by having many of the scenes performed so far upstage, mostly on a towering tenement block set piece, that it dwarfs the actors, making it impossible to connect with the characters.
The highly inconsistent sound design doesn’t help either, flattening all, save Simon Hale’s lush orchestrations, in it’s wake, and rendering most of the words unintelligible. During the dialogue scenes it’s often hard to tell who’s speaking yet still possible to note that some of the accents are a bit ropey, and during the choral sections the voices are frequently far too low in the mix. Mark Henderson’s lighting proves frustrating as well: while it’s often gloomily evocative of the mean streets of old New York, there are moments -particularly when the cast are racing all over the auditorium- that it feels over-chaotic and it’s hard to know where you should be looking.
Michael Ahomka-Lindsay captures hero Jack’s mixture of bravado and desperation, even projecting some vulnerability across the wide open spaces, and meets the rangy vocal demands of the role with assurance. Moya Angela, formerly one of the knockout replacements for Amber Riley in the West End Dreamgirls, has too little stage time as Medda, the vaudeville performer-manager who takes Jack and his rebellious crew under her wing, but exudes charisma and vocal firepower that hits right to the back of this massive venue. Bronté Barbé has a fabulous voice but, perhaps understandably, struggles to make coherent the poorly fleshed-out dramatic arc of the young journalist he falls for, being required to go from abrasive to yearning in a couple of indifferently written scenes.
If however, you’re here for the dance and prepared to look on this more as Newsies – The Arena Spectacular rather than a coherent musical where you’re expected to feel more than bedazzled wonder tinged with fatigue, then Cole’s dance-driven extravaganza is a triumph, and he has assembled a formidable, thrilling team of dancers. His choreography -sharp angles and clenched fists giving way to breathtakingly clean lines and acrobatic athleticism- may recall Christopher Gattelli’s Tony-winning contribution to the Broadway version which in turn homaged Kenny Ortega’s iconic work in the original film, but has a dynamism and vitality that sends an electric charge through the theatre. One can’t help but wish that the old adage “less is more” had occasionally been applied to the staging though: filling every spare corner of the space at every available opportunity with a couple of twirling, somersaulting “newsies” threatens to diminish the effect of the genuinely heart-stopping ‘Seize The Day’ massed company number that comes late in the first act.
Still, as these superb dancers/acrobats slice through the air like human dynamos, albeit astonishingly graceful ones, or congregate into a phalanx of youthful exuberance and sheer muscle power, it’s pretty hard not to be won over. There are several moments where all the elements cohere into unforgettable stage pictures, and then this Newsies really soars.
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