ajhlovestheatre

MISS MYRTLE’S GARDEN

by Danny James King

directed by Taio Lawson 

Bush Theatre, London – until 12 July 2025

running time: 2 hours including interval 

https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/event/miss-myrtles-garden/?utm_campaign=15036690_First%20look%20Miss%20Myrtle%27s%20Garden&utm_medium=email&utm_source=BushTheatre&dm_i=1NWY,8YADU,9ER1Z3,11CMGW,1#about

The Bush Theatre’s incoming artistic director Taio Lawson has massive shoes to fill in taking over from Lynette Linton and her deputy Daniel Bailey, a pair of working artists who have led this storied West London powerhouse with kindness, vision and massive flair. Miss Myrtle’s Garden, Lawson’s first show since the announcement was made, is enjoyable but feels tentative, though it’s a production that makes us look forward to seeing more of his directorial work.

Danny James King’s script centres on first generation Jamaican Myrtle (Diveen Henry) in the garden of the Peckham house she and her deceased but still very present husband (Mensah Bediako) purchased for a mere six thousand pounds decades earlier. Myrtle’s grandson, schoolteacher Rudy and his fashionista boyfriend Jason move in partly to care for the ageing grand dame and partly because London rentals are now so expensive (“three months rent is how much they paid to own” as Rudy points out). 

Miss Myrtle’s Garden is a meditation on ageing and the legacy of the past, but also, refreshingly, a warning to young people not to write off their elders who may be rather more clued up and accepting than they initially appear (both Myrtle and her old friend and gardener, Gary Lilburn’s superb Eddie, realise the nature of Jason and Rudy’s relationship without being told). It also seems oddly unfinished, picking up a number of really interesting topics – Myrtle’s fractured relationship with her dead son, Rudy’s Dad, and her encroaching dementia, the stresses in a gay relationship where only one of the partners is fully out, racism within the Black community (Rudy tells his grandmother Jason is from Trinidad as she wouldn’t cope if she knew he had African heritage), the challenges of being a carer – and plays with them but seldom reaches any satisfying conclusions or pay-offs. 

It may simply be that less than two hours running time is insufficient to explore such meaty subjects. A longer duration would certainly help with appreciating Myrtle herself who, despite Henry’s truthful, game performance, is so disagreeable it’s pretty hard to engage with her until quite late in the play. King’s dialogue is sharp and engaging though and the play has agreeable way of taking you by surprise at times: not just in the attitude of the elder characters to the sexuality of the young couple, but in the way that stylist Jason (beautifully realised by Elander Moore) who might initially appear shallow with his preoccupation with designer trainers and pricey cocktails, turns out to be the kindest character of all. There’s real heat in both the playing and the writing of the relationship between Jason and Michael Ahomkah-Lindsay’s  torn but likeable, intriguingly hard-edged Rudy. 

The trope of having dead characters on stage participating in scenes is pretty well worn by now, to be honest, and it’s interesting to note that the moving moment in the entire evening is wordless: Myrtle remembers dancing with her lost husband (played with a lovely combination of stern humour and ironic detachment by Bediako) and as the music swells to its climax, she clings on to him for dear life: it’s deeply affecting.

The magical and the realistic don’t entirely successively coalesce in Lawson’s in-the-round staging, played out on Khadija Raza’s attractive, circular garden set. The action is shot through with deafening sound and music effects, courtesy of Dan Balfour, that seem at odds with what is essentially a pretty gentle, albeit engaging, text. There’s a lot of heart and truth here, and the acting is strong throughout, but one is ultimately left with the impression that this is a piece of theatre where the individual parts are greater than the whole.

JUST FOR ONE DAY 

The Live Aid Musical

written by John O’Farrell

directed by Luke Sheppard

Shaftesbury Theatre, London – until 10 January 2026

running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval 

https://theliveaidmusical.com

A popular success at The Old Vic last year, this Live Aid-inspired musical gets its belated West End transfer following a Toronto season, arriving at the Shaftesbury in a streamlined, mostly recast but still impassioned, roof-raising version. Luke Sheppard’s production, fast-moving and episodic, using spectacle with potent economy, remains catnip to audience members old enough to remember where they were when Sir Bob Geldof engineered his era-defining mega-concert simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic to raise funds for the devastating Ethiopian famine.

It’ll also appeal to anybody who thinks the 1980s was the decade where rock and pop were at their pinnacle (it was). The music and the message are all, and from that point of view Just For One Day is an absolute triumph. The euphoria of the music is occasionally stymied by John O’Farrell’s earnest book which, while slightly shorter than in the original iteration, still can’t decide if it’s satire, polemic, or history lesson. 

The story of Bob Geldof (an almost uncanny Craige Els) being so moved by TV footage of the famine victims that he sets up first the Band Aid single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ before the full-blown Live Aid benefit, is framed by a mother-daughter relationship where Melissa Jacques’s Suzanne who was AT the concert in 1985 is sending her socially conscious daughter Jemma (Fayth Ifil in a striking debut) off to Uni. We also get younger Suzanne in flashback (Hope Kenna, like Els, another holdover from the original Old Vic staging) enjoying her first ‘summer of love’ with a chap she works in a record shop with. The parallels between youthful Suzanne and her feisty daughter are pretty obvious but muddled by a contrived connection between Jemma and a Red Cross aid worker (Rhianne-Louise McCaulsky in gorgeous voice) who was on the ground in Ethiopia in the ‘80s while acting as a sort of voice of conscience to the increasingly tormented Geldof.

The writing is pretty pedestrian, although there is a brutal, deeply moving monologue for Geldof where he cradles a starving child, that cuts, shockingly and urgently, through the extraneous pap. Els delivers it magnificently, and it emotionally anchors the first half, and inevitably prompts uncomfortable parallels with images of children coming out of Gaza right now. A jokey, Music Hall-esque Maggie Thatcher sits strangely alongside the serious stuff.

Act two is generally more successful as we get into the concert proper, the music and performances ascending into the stratosphere. Arranger and orchestrator Matthew Brind has done an astounding job of giving vital theatrical life to classic tunes by icons such as Queen, David Bowie Phil Collins, Madonna, Status Quo, the list goes on and on. Gareth Owen’s all-encompassing sound design, the most impressive I’ve experienced in a theatre since Broadway’s Hells Kitchen which was also Owen’s work, is wholly thrilling, creating thunderous sonic soundscapes that overwhelm but with clarity: you feel this music in your bones. Every harmony and lyric is heard, and the voices are sublime.

O’Farrell’s book raises its game considerably in act two as it charts, with thriller-like urgency, the logistical challenges Geldof and his promoter Harvey Goldsmith (Tim Mahendran, brash and fabulous) were up against to make Live Aid happen simultaneously at Wembley and in Philadelphia. The sense of relief and triumph by the end is hard won and emotionally satisfying. 

Els is superb but much of the rest of the acting feels blander and broader than in the first cast. George Ure is a terrific addition though as a spiky, witty Midge Ure (no relation), Geldof’s collaborator in setting up Band Aid and Live Aid, and does cracking, power-packed versions of Ultravox hits ‘Vienna’ and ‘Dancing With Tears In My Eyes’. Elsewhere the concert performances convey the essences of the original artists rather than slavishly impersonating them, which usefully stops the show sliding into one long tribute act. Probably the most successful is Freddie Love’s sizzling Mercury-adjacent take on ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ but really everyone is excellent, and Patrick Hurley’s onstage band is the real rocking deal.

Howard Hudson’s stadium-style lighting and Andrzej Goulding’s video design, both dazzling, add to the impression of this being a special event. Personally I could have done without some of Ebony Molina’s choreography – songs this good don’t always need such embellishment – but at its best it finds a wild, elemental dynamism. 

Just For One Day ultimately stands as a testament to the fact that when people pull together they can achieve astonishing things, even as it’s depressing to note that the world we live in now is probably even more screwed up and dangerous than the one Geldof, Ure et al were fighting to transform forty years ago. It’s a flawed musical but as a celebration of humanity and truly great rock and pop, it’s a sensation, and a show that, when it seeks to lift off the ground, truly soars. Not only is it a smashing night out, a percentage of ticket sales goes to the Live Aid foundation. 

OSCAR AT THE CROWN 

concept and book by Mark Mauriello

music and lyrics by Andrew Barret Cox

directed by Shira Milikowsky

The Crown, London – until 31 August 2025

running time: 90 minutes no interval 

https://oscaratthecrown.com

A multi-media musical with the emphasis more on screlting vocals than coherent storytelling, performed in an elaborately decked-out basement and relying on pre-recorded backing tracks, needs theatre critics the way it needs a power cut. But here comes Oscar At The Crown, previously seen in Brooklyn and at the Edinburgh Festival, and now arrived on, or rather under, Tottenham Court Road in a blaze of campy grunge, neon and overwhelming volume. 

Mark Mauriello and Andrew Barret Cox’s dystopian dance party centres on a group of underground rebel youths, soul brothers and sisters to the casts of We Will Rock You and Bat Out Of Hell. Clad in punk-meets-fetish costumes reminiscent of things like Rocky Horror and Saucy Jack And The Space Vixens, the kids (the Exiles) are ritualistically re-enacting the downfall of Oscar Wilde but with added references to TV’s The OC and the Real Housewives franchise. So far, so eccentric.

Andrew Barret Cox, also responsible for the costumes and the frequently exciting choreography, has written some genuine dancefloor bangers, that make up for in energy and vocal gymnastics what they lack in originality. Mark Mauriello, as well as delivering a bold, fabulously sung turn as Oscar, has produced a script that isn’t always easy to follow, partly due to an inconsistent sound design, as it veers between potty-mouthed camp and eye-rolling attempts at profundity (“You have to find a way to hurt and heal at the same time”). 

The cast shout and bawl at each other but none of the characters are particularly interesting or sympathetic. This surely isn’t the point anyway for most of Shira Milikowsky’s production, which is presumably aiming at achieving some sort of cult status, where the outlandishness of the aesthetic, the exhilaration of the music and the verve of the performances synthesise a nightclub-style joy that’s pretty persuasive. 

The wheels come off towards the end though where the show aims for depth as the young woman playing Oscar Wilde’s betrayed wife turns the tables on him and beseeches him to change his ways; at least I think that’s what was going on, the words were barely decipherable, but Zofia Weretka has a hell of a voice and an intense sincerity. Oscar’s withering observation that “just because the ending is a mess it doesn’t mean the first 40 minutes weren’t fun” is a little too close for comfort in diagnosing the major issues with this unruly spectacle.

Mauriello is a bit of a star, whether snarling at perceived slights, crooning lasciviously at Zak Marx’s purple-haired Bosie, or hilariously rearing back, delivering money notes, cloak unfurling behind him, in an amusing parody of Wicked’s Elphaba. His flamboyant turn has little to do with Wilde but is fabulous on its own terms. Unusually, the company of Exiles is divided into singers or dancers, which seems odd until you realise just how demanding these songs are or how much energy is expended in the execution of the Gaga Monster Ball-esque choreo. Everybody acquits themselves with commendable passion and skill.

Oscar At The Crown won’t be for everyone: it’s crude, barely coherent, borderline pretentious, yet at its best it’s strangely exhilarating. The sightlines are frequently terrible depending on where you’re standing on designer Andrew Exeter’s extravagantly lit dancefloor set, and being shunted out of the way to facilitate the moving about of platforms gets a bit annoying, but it’s all part of the rough-and-ready feel of this unusual show. It’s part club experience, part rock musical, and has the potential to be very successful if it can find enough people willing to think outside the box when it comes to seeking their musical theatre thrills.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

Book by Joseph Stein 

Lyrics by Sheldon Harnick 

Music by Jerry Bock

Based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem

directed by Jordan Fein

Barbican Theatre, London – until 19 July 2025 then touring 

running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval 

https://fiddlerontheroofuk.com

“An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”

“Very good. That way the whole world will be blind and toothless.” 

….wise words, and amazing how a sixty year old musical, in this case the Broadway classic Fiddler On The Roof, can feel so relevant across the decades.

There are certain vintage tuners that, however well-crafted and admirable, I don’t really need to see another production of, but that’ll never be the case with Bock, Harnick and Stein’s exhilarating, sorrowful and sweet masterpiece. This Fiddler has now acquired an actual roof in the move from Regents Park to the Barbican but also an intensity and focus, plus a heightened sense of the drama and the comedy, that makes another visit mandatory.

It’s impossible in the present climate to watch the violent attack ruining the joyful wedding that closes act one and not equate it with the racist thuggery that periodically rears its ugly head across the so-called civilised world, in the same way that the statement in the script that “horrible things are happening in the world” chillingly foreshadows present times. Fiddler retains its power because it can encompass horrors yet still find the joy in being alive. The show as a whole is a paean to humanity, to faith, and to survival, or as one of the uplifting numbers has it, “L’Chaim” (“To life”).

Sadly, this tale of a rural Jewish peasant settlement in early 20th century Imperial Russia having to uproot and flee due to pogroms and anti-Semitic prejudice, feels even more relevant now than it did then. Joseph Stein’s book, based on a selection of short stories by Sholem Aleichem and centering on devout milkman Tevye, his opinionated wife Golde and their five unmarried daughters, is an engaging mix of Borscht Belt humour, brutal realities and unabashed feeling. Toughness and sentimentality co-habit in this depiction of the hardscrabble, make-do-and-mend lives of these people offset by a wonderful generosity of spirit. 

Bock and Harnick’s score, the music owing more to Klezmer than the traditional brassiness of Broadway, thrills the blood. Beloved numbers such as ‘If I Were A Rich Man’ and the rousing chorale ‘Tradition’ get right under your skin. Expect a quickened pulse and wet eyes. We no longer get the magic of the real sun setting during ‘Sunrise, Sunset’ as we did in the Park but we gain way more than we’ve lost.

Director Jordan Fein creates a staging that, almost miraculously, manages to have its cake and eat it, leaving traditionalists happily tear-stained while simultaneously providing plenty of fresh insights for those seeking a little more edge and depth. It was a sensation last summer in the open air, but now it feels somehow tenser, more urgent. 

Fein has some bracingly original thoughts about this beloved piece, such as having the villagers sitting around bearing witness to even the most intimate family scenes, like a Jewish Greek chorus, or leaning more than usual into the concept that the eponymous fiddle-player (a virtuosic, thrillingly physical Raphael Papo) is an alter ego to Tevye. That said, he doesn’t go as far as the modern framing device Bartlett Sher used in the last Broadway revival (the show opened and closed with Danny Burstein’s Tevye in contemporary dress, clutching a book about historical Anatevka). 

The women possess more agency though, and it’s a stroke of genius having oldest daughter Tzeitel play both her deceased grandmother and vengeful ghost Fruma Sarah in the fantastical dream section (impressively staged and lit by Julia Cheng and Aideen Malone respectively) whereby Tevye convinces his wife that the lucrative match between their first born and the older local butcher, is a terrible idea. There’s no attempt to adopt Yiddish or faux-Russian vocal inflections: everybody speaks in their own accent. This is a production full of glorious things.

Broadway actor Adam Dannheisser was a hugely engaging, affecting Tevye last year but his portrayal feels deeper and richer now. He still projects a magnetic combination of warmth and virility, plus a terrific singing voice. This dairyman is garrulous, sometimes irascible, a family man torn, between his love for his wife and daughters, and his strict obeisance to god, but the comic highs and tragic lows seem more pronounced now. His grief and anguish at rejecting his middle daughter Chava (a desperately moving yet entirely unsentimental Hannah Bristow) is so raw as to be almost unbearable to watch.

Lara Pulver brings gentle authority, an austere elegance and expressive, beautiful singing voice to Golde, while the casting of the three eldest daughters is perfection. Natasha Jules Bernard is steelier but no less likeable than her predecessor as Tzeitel, the harder edge giving an extra layer of plausibility to her union with the meek tailor Motel, whom Dan Wolff invests with a lovely plausibility, and makes her breakdown at the prospect of a lifetime with the entirely unsuitable butcher Lazar Wolfe (Michael S Siegel, excellent) all the more distressing. Georgia Bruce is all matter-of-fact charm and palpable melancholy as Hodel, and a mesmerising Hannah Bristow finds extraordinary inner life in bookish Chava. The much-loved ‘Matchmaker, Matchmaker’ is gorgeously sung but also etched in a real darkness and dread that may surprise some as the tragedy of having lives decided and mapped out for them is realised by these brilliant young women. 

More conventional is Beverley Klein’s gossipy, overdramatic matchmaker, an irresistibly funny creation. Daniel Krikler makes something unique, passionate but haunting out of Perchik, the young revolutionary for whom second daughter Hodel (Bruce, delivering a lamenting ‘Far From The Home I Love’ that sounds like it’s being ripped from her very soul) leaves the village for the frozen wilds of Siberia. The glorious, character-filled ensemble create an entirely credible community on stage, and the choral singing is flat-out wonderful. 

Tom Scutt’s split level set of corn field and wood, suggestive of both shelter and oppression, has transferred superbly indoors. Simultaneously evoking a giant book prised apart (perhaps a nod to the short stories upon which the show is based) with the word ‘Anatevka’ etched on the pages, and the rural harvests that sustains the population, it now partially descends to create a wedding canopy. Cheng’s wild, loose-limbed yet earthy choreography, frantic, celebratory and sometimes dangerous, is better than ever, as is Malone’s vivid, mood-changing lighting. The sound design by Nick Lidster is crystal clear, a significant upgrade from the outdoor acoustics of Regents Park, giving full rein to the lyricism and the acid of Larry Blank’s orchestrations, superbly played by Dan Turek’s onstage band, and ensuring that we get every lyric and delicate harmony. Fein’s direction is nimble and brilliant, many of the stage pictures lingering long in the memory after the performance is over.

You emerge from this revitalised Fiddler with a renewed sense of wonder at how Fein and his marvellous team have honoured what is already there while finding new colours, some subtle, some bold. The show succeeds in changing with the times in a way its hero struggles to do, and as long as some humans feel that they can beat down on people who think or believe differently from them, this story needs to be told. Essential, enthralling theatre, and a production for the ages.

MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION

by George Bernard Shaw

directed by Dominic Cooke

Garrick Theatre, London – until 16 August 2025

running time: 1 hour 45 minutes no interval 

https://nimaxtheatres.com/shows/mrs-warrens-profession/

Imelda Staunton and her daughter Bessie Carter make a formidable pairing in this bracing revival of the George Bernard Shaw classic that pits respectable, genteel, highly educated Vivie Warren against her wealthy, brash and frequently absent mother Kitty. Their already fraught relationship is put under immense strain when Vivie realises her mother’s fortune derives from prostitution, and is then fully shattered when it emerges that the “family business” is an ongoing concern and not a temporary solution to the poverty that Kitty was born into. 

These aren’t spoilers – Mrs Warren’s Profession has been around since 1893 although director Dominic Cooke sets his streamlined, interval-free staging in 1913, just before the First World War. I’m not sure what the difference in decade really alters as the tension between culpability and living with the knowledge that one’s privileged existence is on the back of those less fortunate is a timeless one, as it proves once again here. 

Like the text, the production is pared back. Designer Chloe Lamford has created an austerely beautiful space, a rotating disc initially redolent of a floral garden but one that gradually gets stripped of its accoutrements (the furniture, the grass, the flowers themselves) much as Vivie’s illusions about her upbringing and provenance are worn away one by one in the course of the play. The supernumeries who transform the set are a group of women clad in old fashioned underwear, presumably the victims of Mrs Warren’s ambition and thirst for money. They also observe much of the action from the sidelines, haunting, haunted figures, some accusing, some almost pleading. Stephen Daldry did something similar with his silent chorus in the career-redefining An Inspector Calls. As a directorial flourish, it’s pretty on-the-nose but it’s undeniably effective. 

By the final scene, Lamford’s set has been transformed one last time into a stark circular office, one where Vivie and her business partner are now ensconced near Chancery Lane. There’s just a desk, a door and a vast expanse of grey. It serves as a usefully gladiatorial space for the final, thrilling showdown between mother and daughter but it also feels like a prison cell, no more so than in the very final moments where an emotionally spent Vivie sits in silence being watched balefully by the phantom women who, one suspects, will never fully leave her even though she has jettisoned the mother who turned them into sex workers. 

Lamford has created some wonderful costumes for Staunton, quite beautiful and just teetering on the edge of being a bit much (“can you imagine me in a cathedral city?!” cries Kitty at one point). Jon Clark’s lighting and Angus Macrae’s soulful, if slightly over-used, music complement Lamford’s designs. It’s a muted but handsome production. 

Staunton is a fascinating Kitty Warren. She plays her very much as the self-described vulgarian, with a sharp, watchful energy, broad working class London accent and a veneer of impenetrable toughness. Just how hard is that shell though? When she breaks down at the end, it’s ambiguous: is she play-acting or is she genuinely heartbroken? It’s not clear but it’s all the more compelling for that. This Mrs Warren seems more confident dealing with the men than with her own daughter. She’s part drama queen, part tough cookie, but entirely human. This is a superb performance; if it doesn’t really surprise, that’s probably due to a general expectation that Staunton is always going to be excellent. 

Carter’s Vivie, all cut glass accent and nervous energy tempered with a fierce intelligence, is another fine creation, even though she, and a couple of the supporting actors, have been distractingly directed to deliver a lot of their lines out into the audience rather than to each other. I’m not sure if that’s because of an awareness that the playing area is slightly too far upstage to really engage a lot of the audience, but I suspect Shaw doesn’t actually need the help. Still, Carter judges with real skill the journey from benign self-assurance to appalled anguish though. When the two women go head-to-head the play becomes truly engrossing, probably enhanced by the knowledge of their real life relationship, even though their characters and consequently their performances are very different: Staunton is all fire, earth and stone, while Carter is elegant and witty, but both are united in an undertow of sadness. 

All of the male roles are played pretty broadly but Robert Glenister finds a horrible, gruff power in amoral Sir George Croft, Kitty’s business partner with designs on Vivie. Reuben Joseph is a hugely likeable breath of fresh air, tinged with a certain louche languor, as the much younger man who could theoretically be a much better match for the younger Warren bar one distressing revelation. 

The weighty erudition of Shaw’s language remains a pleasure, as is his astonishingly forward-thinking understanding of the limited lot of women at the time of writing. The theme of exploitation of other humans in order to achieve the lifestyle and status one aspires to, is as relevant today as it was at the end of the nineteenth century. Wordy, worthy but engaging, Mrs Warren’s Profession may not be a particularly dynamic drama, but it remains a potent one.

POP OFF, MICHELANGELO!

book, music and lyrics by Dylan Marcaurele

directed by Joe McNeice

Underbelly Boulevard, London – until 13 July 2025

running time: 75 minutes no interval 

https://www.popoffmichelangelo.com

Sometimes a show comes along that gently/unexpectedly knocks you sideways. Pop Off, Michelangelo! is one such show. It’s short, sharp and exhilarating, packed with camp joy, musical theatre Easter eggs (Six is the most obvious one, with its emphasis on historical accuracy filtered through a pop sensibility, but a show that also references niche masterpieces like Fun Home and Parade suggests creator Dylan Marcaurele really knows his stuff) and, as exquisitely staged by Joe McNeice, gets the balance between sincerity, eccentricity and camp joy exactly right. 

This mini-musical chronicles the rivalry between Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci,  the former a self-made success, the latter equally as brilliant but less appreciated in his own lifetime. Marcaurele’s book and McNeice’s production are deceptively ingenious in that they are rollicking good fun (Michael Marouli’s blinged-up, vaping Pope is an absolute riot, as is Aoife Haakenson’s saintly Marisa Tomei…you really have to see this to understand how she fits into the story) but you also find yourself caring very deeply about Michelangelo and Leonardo (Max Eade and Aidan MacColl respectively, both utterly adorable).

As befits a musical about titans of art and design, the production looks fabulous. The programme doesn’t credit a set designer but the chequerboard floor, Greco-Roman pillars and pop-art cloud combination is stylish and fun, while Emily Bestow’s detailed, joyfully anachronistic costumes and Adam King’s colourful lighting are pretty much perfect. Sundeep Saini’s choreography owes much to the world of music videos and feels entirely appropriate.

If the overall tone is one of breathless camp chaos, the kind of show where Laura Sillett’s gloriously OTT baddie Friar (who definitely isn’t wearing clothes from Temu, by the way….a ridiculous but highly amusing running gag) makes an appearance in the balcony of the theatre solely to villainously laugh at the misfortunes of our heroes, McNeice ensures that it is consistently focused. It’s also wickedly inventive: the marble block out of which Michelangelo sculpts his legendary Pietà is suggested by lighting and movement but is so well set up that, by the time we get a glimpse of the final work, courtesy of PJ McEvoy’s beautifully realised projections, it’s actually genuinely moving. 

Having just one creative responsible for the book, music and lyrics can sometimes lead to self indulgence, but that’s definitely not the case here. There is a consistency of tone between Marcaurele’s often hilarious but surprisingly well informed script and his poppy, eclectic, fiendishly catchy score. What I could hear of the lyrics seem to be pretty brilliant, but Ed Lewis’s sound design, while not exactly overwhelming, often makes it a little difficult to pick out the sung words, which is a shame in a show as witty as this one. Aron Sood’s three piece band sounds great though, and often larger than it actually is.

Pop Off, Michelangelo! is also that rare beast, a show you actually wish was longer than it’s 75 minutes. It feels like there’s a slight headlong rush towards the finale, and it really would be no hardship to spend another half hour or so in the company of this thoroughly engaging cast of characters. Eade and MacColl, the latter resembling a younger Jak Malone, are a winning central pairing, like two disheveled cherubs. This is naughty, slick, hugely entertaining, and genuinely very clever without beating you over the head with its ingenuity. A bonkers delight. 

AFTER THE ACT

by Billy Barrett and Ellice Stevens

music by Frew

directed by Billy Barrett

Royal Court Theatre, London – until 14 June 2025

running time: 2 hours including interval 

https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/after-the-act/

Billy Barrett and Ellice Stevens’s show, revised from its original 2023 outing (no pun intended) at the New Diorama, at the Royal Court briefly following a national tour, feels like a throwback in more ways than one. Not just to the later years of the twentieth century and the grim (for many gay people) two decades that followed the passing of the Conservatives’s controversial Section 28 banning the “promotion” of anything to do with homosexuality, but also to the agitprop political theatre of Joan Littlewood and the issue-driven work of companies like Gay Sweatshop and Monstrous Regiment.

Described as a musical, After The Act is really more of a collage of verbatim accounts of effects and experiences triggered by the infamous bill and recreations of public figures of the time (look out for the disco Maggie Thatcher, and a re-enactment of the lesbian activists storming the BBC newsroom while Sue Lawley struggled valiantly to continue broadcasting). Barrett’s production for Breach Theatre features a cast of four, including co-creator Stevens who has a wonderful gift for deadpan comedy and finding the emotional truth in her various monologues, and has a deliberately makeshift, almost improvisational, tone and look.

Bethany Wells’s set, with it’s gym climbing frame, neon-lit vaulting tables, and school-style benches, adds to the overall feel of a Theatre-in-Education retelling of this lamentable slice of queer history. So does the performing style which has a chummy broadness for much of the show. None of this feels inappropriate actually, given how ignorant some young gay people seem to be about the struggles of their antecedents (I’ll always remember how mind-blown several youthful members of the community were when It’s A Sin first hit our TV screens), and After The Act often compensates in energy and interest what it lacks in finesse.

In all honesty, a production this rough around the edges sometimes looks a little odd in a pros arch theatre, even one as determinedly egalitarian as the Royal Court. The singing is cacophonous and enthusiastic rather than accurate, similarly the execution of Sung-Im Her’s overused choreography. That said, the show is dealing with a messy tranche of recent history, a time where queer people had to fight hard and shout loud to be heard, so the general approach does work. We are left in no doubt as to how much was at stake and also the very real human cost of such unfeeling, wrongheaded homophobic legislation, and the weaponisation of the AIDS crisis, despite the script often being hysterically, camply funny.

Frew’s synth-heavy music, by turns thrashy or haunting and portentous, occasionally pretty rousing, does a wonderful job of evoking the late 1980s/early 1990s. If there are no memorable tunes as such, it still feels like an accurate aural depiction of the era when Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, New Order et al were in their heyday. Barrett and Stevens mash up testimonials, some heartbreaking and others comical, with depictions of mass demonstrations (quite an achievement with a cast of four, but we get the gist) and scenes from House of Commons debates that look jawdroppingly archaic viewed through a 2025 lens.

The most interesting sections, and the ones with probably the most emotional resonance, come after the interval. Zachary Willis and Nkara Stephenson are deeply moving as fragile youngsters blighted by the ramifications of clause 28, Willis also excels as a youthful demo participant at the epic event in Manchester’s Albert Square, suddenly, joyfully aware this is the largest concentration of gays he’s ever encountered in his young life (“there are so many people here that I could potentially have sex with”). 

Stevens is lowkey devastating as a P.E. teacher who spots one of her students in a gay bar at the height of the madness but later deals with the situation in a less than admirable way. These individual speeches have such power that it’s a shame the staging doesn’t always let the words carry their full weight, instead having the rest of the cast perform infuriatingly distracting slo-mo P.E.-type moves while the main actor speaks. While it’s fun to have the versatile Ericka Posadas abseiling down the length of the proscenium in tribute to the women who infiltrated Parliament, some bits of the production would benefit from being a little less busy.

Reservations aside, After The Act is an impressive achievement, taking something dark and cruel, and turning it into a piece of theatre that educates, delights and vitalises. It’s scrappy and stroppy for sure, but for all the paraphernalia and camp, it never trivialises the struggle of the gay rights movement and its allies, and it’s pretty powerful when it needs to. Perhaps most telling is a moment near the end where Stevens’s teacher Catherine points out “I absolutely think this era that we are in now is really the Section 28 of the trans community”….now that is a real gut punch.

THIS IS MY FAMILY 

book and music by Tim Firth

directed by Vicky Featherstone

Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London – until 12 July 2025

running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval 

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/this-is-my-family/

Not many British writers working regularly in musical theatre are committed to putting “average” people on stage and letting the limelight give them a sheen of magic, but it’s something Tim Firth has made a specialty out of. His books for Our House (still unsurpassed when it comes to jukebox tuners) and the stage adaptation of Calendar Girls are examples of this and are full of heart, humour and truth. First seen in Sheffield in 2013, then again in a 2019 revision at Chichester, this cute, low key confection is a sort of apotheosis of this preoccupation with white, straight, fundamentally ordinary folks going about their lives. 

However, where Our House and Calendar Girls (previously The Girls) had the music of Madness and Gary Barlow respectively, Firth has provided his own for This Is My Family and, despite the ravishing arrangements by Caroline Humphris and the top flight work of Natalie Pound’s band, it’s one of the weakest elements in what is otherwise an engaging show. Firth’s lyrics are taut, conversational, funny, touching when they need to be, but his music is bland and recitative-heavy, only occasionally flourishing into anything approaching a melody. 

This means that the show doesn’t really rise above the level of superior sitcom with added singing. The writing is so sharp though, full of love and with a clear-eyed dissection of family dynamics, that this often feels like more than enough. Vicky Featherstone’s production contains a lot to enjoy. The performances are absolutely lovely. All six cast members inhabit their roles with truth and commitment.

Michael Jibson, who got his first big stage break as the unforgettable hero of Firth’s 2002 Olivier winner Our House, is Steve, just turned 41 and in the grip of a midlife crisis, hurling himself into projects like rollerblading or turning his garden rockery into a hot tub, while dreaming of emigrating to the UAE. Jibson plays him as on the permanent verge of fury, so that when moments of sweetness or genuine emotion peep through, it’s genuinely affecting. His marriage to Gemma Whelan’s feisty, likeable Yvonne has lost its lustre, a situation exacerbated by the arrival of May, Steve’s increasingly vulnerable elderly mother who inadvertently nearly set fire to her own home.

Gay Soper invests May with a heart piercing combination of confused desolation and joie de vivre, sometimes within seconds of each other. In writing and performance, this is a pretty devastating portrait of a failing mind, and also a rare example of the score powerfully serving the story, as Soper gets to reprise variants of a folk song May has known, presumably since childhood, each version giving a clue to her mental state. 

Victoria Elliott has fun as Yvonne’s outrageous, freewheeling sister, although the role feels a bit underwritten. Similarly, Luke Lambert does a great job of making sense of Steve and Yvonne’s older child Matt, written and designed as a bewilderingly unlikely goth/druid attention seeker, who feels very much like a middle aged person’s idea of what a rebellious teen looks like. 

The lynchpin of the whole cast is Nancy Allsop as thirteen year old Nicky, observing and commenting on her family. She’s incredibly sweet but never sappy, and totally real; it’s a winning performance, and the conduit between the audience and her sometimes highly irascible relatives. Amy Ball CDG and director Featherstone have done a remarkable job assembling a cast of actors who authentically look, feel and sound like they could be one family.

Chloe Lamford’s wendy house set undergoes a satisfying transformation just before the interval and Featherstone’s staging makes some of the best use of Southwark’s Elephant space that I have seen to date. The singing voices overall are rawer and less polished than one is often used to hearing in musicals but they work in this context of regular people singing, and the transition from speech to song is frequently imperceptible. Not an actor known for doing musicals, Whelan’s phrasing is particularly impressive.

Not much happens in This Is My Family, but it’s broadly relatable and the emotion of it sort of creeps up on you, plus it’s often laugh-out-loud funny. It also feels like one of the most quintessentially British musicals I’ve seen in quite some time. There’s nothing about it that screams essential viewing and I could’ve done without the treacly ending, but its heart is in the right place, and it’s generally a very nice couple of hours in the theatre.

RADIANT BOY – A HAUNTING 

by Nancy Netherwood

directed by Júlia Levai

Southwark Playhouse Borough – The Little, London – until 14 June 2025

running time: 1 hour 50 minutes including interval 

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/radiant-boy/

If you’ve seen a fair amount of theatre over the years, it’s increasingly rare to come across a play that feels like a true original, but here’s one. Certainly writer Nancy Netherwood uses elements of existing genres – ghost story, thriller, queer coming-of-age tale, kitchen sink drama – but she fuses those elements into something unique and, yes, haunting. Radiant Boy – A Haunting, premiering in a ferociously well acted production by Júlia Levai for Cloudburst theatre company, is a spellbinding piece of theatrical storytelling that has the glow of the familiar but refracted in multiple different directions that render it fresh and compelling. It’s also, when it needs to be, thoroughly creepy.

Young Russell (Stuart Thompson, utterly brilliant) returns home to early 1980s North East England from his music college course in London after an unspecified incident. His mother Maud (a grimly convincing Wendy Nottingham) is wary of him, referring back to a time when there was a major, irreversible change in nine year old Russell and, as any concerned mum might do (!), calls in an exorcist. Is Russell actually possessed or is his distracted nature and superhuman ability to control the lighting at moments of high stress a manifestation of the sexuality that Maud is struggling to come to terms with (this is the ‘80s remember)? If it sounds preposterous on paper, the shuddering atmosphere of foreboding that director Levai and her design team conjure up, along with the unhistrionic truth in the acting and Netherwood’s snappy, spare dialogue, means that you buy into it pretty much immediately. 

Thompson, making good on the promise he showed in the Almeida Spring Awakening and the Globe Ghosts, is simply extraordinary. His Russell is a beguiling mixture of defensiveness, cynicism and melancholy, shot through with a sly wit and a louche, languorous physicality. The sort of human who is used to being the smartest, most sensitive person in the room and is resigned to the isolation that brings, it’s a richly textured portrayal. 

Although the writing for her role possesses less colours, and has a backstory monologue in the second half which is the only time where Netherwood’s work gets a tad clunky, Nottingham is also doing very fine, honest work as his bewildered, disapproving mother. Ben Allen skilfully straddles the line between reassuring and ambiguous as the “spiritual therapist” Maud has enlisted to help her son. Renée Lamb, a performer I was mainly familiar with through multiple musical theatre credits, is pretty sensational in a dual role (or is it?!) as Steph, the college friend instrumental in emotionally unlocking Russell, and an all-consuming presence with far-reaching consequences on his life. 

Lamb gets to sing here too (Russell and Steph are music students), and when she does it’s magical. Thompson also has a cracking voice and the juxtaposition of eerie folk and evocative 1980s pop is very powerful. Plus any play that includes a section fangirling over the vocals of Alison Moyet, as we get here, is one I am on board with. The musical elements throughout are captivating and discombobulating, whether acoustic or filtered through the imaginative sound design by Patch Middleton.

Technically, Levai’s accomplished, engrossing production is pretty much flawless. Tomas Palmer’s set encompasses a conventional living room and the sense of being a liminal space, both naturalistic and not quite real, and Lucia Sánchez Roldan’s lighting is suitably unsettling. I’m not sure the play really needs the interval as it briefly decompresses us from the tension and magic, and the script really isn’t that long.

It’s not fair to give away too much about what happens, not that Netherwood ever gives us specific answers which may prove frustrating to some, but at its most potent, it feels as though something truly elemental is being unleashed in that tiny space. Chilling, thrilling stuff and the chance to see one of the most exciting stage actors of this generation at close quarters. Book before it sells out.

THE FROGS 

A comedy written in 405BC by Aristophanes, freely adapted by Burt Shevelove, even more freely adapted by Nathan Lane

music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim 

directed by Georgie Rankcom 

Southwark Playhouse Borough – The Large, London – until 28 June 2025

running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval 

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/the-frogs/

Originally conceived as an entertainment to be performed in the swimming pool at Yale University (where the original chorus of amphibians included Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver), The Frogs mainly features as a footnote to Stephen Sondheim’s extraordinary career. On the basis of this enthusiastic but exhausting revival by Georgie Rankcom, it’s not hard to see why. 

More of a sort of Ancient Greek vaudeville than a conventional musical, the emphasis is on the comic and the cerebral as the God of wine and drama Dionysus heads off to the underworld to bring back an inspirational playwright (in the original Aristophanes it was Euripides, in Burt Shevelove’s belaboured adaptation it’s George Bernard Shaw) in a bid to save an increasingly messed-up mankind from itself. While it’s kinda comforting to see that people haven’t really changed across the centuries, the anything-for-a-joke style of the writing (and this version is further packed with anachronisms) means that it never feels like anything much is at stake. 

Dan Buckley, a tremendously gifted musical comedy performer, works hard as Dionysus but is compromised by some writing and comic schtick, and gets little chance to show off his glorious voice. At least he has bucket loads of charm; as his sidekick slave Xanthias, American star Kevin McHale, formerly of TV’s Glee, seems to have been given only two playing notes – smug and camp – both of which he strikes relentlessly to nullifying effect. 

Elsewhere, the cast perform various amusing cameos – Martha Pothen as a comic Irish-accented GBS, Carl Patrick’s Charon, lugubrious but manic transporter of the dead Charon, Bart Lambert as a grave Shakespeare, Victoria Scone (one of several guest stars) as fruitily funny Pluto, overseer of Hades – but each feels like talented performers bowling his/her/their individual bit at the audience with no coherence or sense of being part of a bigger whole. Joaquin Pedro Valdes fares best as a genuinely hilarious himbo Herakles, Dionysus’s fitness obsessed half brother.

The score is a stately, witty combination of Broadway-style showtune and portentous grandeur – very well played by Yshani Perinpanayagam’s excellent quintet – but there’s nothing here that approaches vintage Sondheim, save for the engaging ‘Gods of the Theatre’ opening number and a joyfully off-kilter second act paean to the glories of wine. Neither the reasonably enjoyable songs nor the energised commitment of the cast are sufficient to compensate for Shevelove’s book being a colossal bore. The second act, dominated by a boxing match-style quote-off between Shaw and Shakespeare that feels like pulling teeth, is interminable.

The titular frogs, of which Dionysus is inexplicably terrified, appear only once for a single number (good luck with getting that piercing “Brekekekèx” out of your head after seeing this) and are costumed here by Libby Todd as colourful panto-esque figures, looking more like hula dancers crossed with aliens rather than amphibians. The visual aesthetic of Todd’s other costumes and curtained set suggests gaudy on a budget – it’s not particularly exciting but it basically works – with Samuel Biondolillo’s lighting doing a lot of visual heavy-lifting.

Matt Nicholson’s choreography skilfully and strikingly combines a variety of showbiz tropes to ensure that the musical numbers look good. Rankcom’s go-for-broke, wide-swinging directorial style works well enough in individual moments but never coheres into anything distinctive or satisfying, and the broad slapstick feels rootless which mitigates against the humour, and the determination to inject modern high camp at every available opportunity becomes tiresome. The cast is strong but the overall effect is one of self-indulgent mugging and little detail. 

At one point, Dionysus, in his bid to save humanity through theatre, states “we have to appeal to their hearts as well as their minds” and the irony here is that is precisely what The Frogs doesn’t do. It’s a show very much up in its own head, and without any human warmth to cling on to, it becomes tedious. It’s a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster of a show, having been reworked and expanded several times, but the lack of real engagement and purpose starts to really register across a playing time of over two hours (the original was a fleet one act). A 2017 revival at Jermyn Street at least invested it with a little charm but this version, stuck between satire and would-be lavish musical, feels mainly brash yet ponderous. One for Sondheim completists only.