ajhlovestheatre

INTIMATE APPAREL 

by Lynn Nottage

directed by Lynette Linton

Donmar Warehouse, London – until 9 August 2025

running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval

https://www.donmarwarehouse.com/whats-on/34/by-lynn-nottage/intimate-apparel

Double Pulitzer prize winner Lynn Nottage is one of the greatest living American playwrights. Her plays frequently surprise and confront, but the majority of them have a compassion, humanity and generosity of spirit in common. The earlier Donmar productions of Sweat (2018) and Clyde’s (2023) suggested that in director Lynette Linton, Nottage had found the ideal British interpreter of her work. That theory is given even further weight by Linton’s gorgeous new production of Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, a tasty, twisty story of working class Black womanhood in the New York City of the turn of the 20th century.

Like the garment makers in the play (heroine Esther creates sometimes elaborate underwear -the intimate apparel of the title- for other women, becoming a friend and confidante in the process), Linton weaves the discrete but exquisite strands of the production into a rich, tantalising whole. Each element (haunting sound, music and lights by George Dennis, Jai Morjaria and XANA respectively, period-specific designs by Alex Berry, subtly enhanced by Gino Ricardo Green’s video creations, as well as a flawless cast) works in harmony to create a couple of hours of taut, engaging, evocative theatre.

Nottage was inspired to write Intimate Apparel by the discovery of a photo of her great grandmother, a Barbadian seamstress who arrived alone in New York aged 18 to forge a life. Lynton and her designers frame each act and key moments with a striking freeze frame effect so that the living figures are briefly suspended in time like figures in an ancient photograph; when we enter the Donmar’s auditorium the individual objects (a bed, a trunk, the sewing machine upon which Esther whips up her creations) are labelled like exhibits in a museum. It’s a clever device, contextualising these vibrant characters while also humanising history.

Humanising history is of course the point of this rather marvellous play, or rather one of its many points. It’s also a love story of sorts but not between Esther (Samira Wiley)  and George Armstrong (Kadiff Kirwan), the manual worker from the Panama Canal with whom she shares an epistolary romance before a disastrous marriage. It’s about Esther learning to love herself, finally…and about the love in friendship between women. 

Wiley, previously seen on the London stage in Linton’s magnificent Blues For An Alabama Sky revival at the National and barely recognisable here, is deeply moving as a woman at odds with herself but possessed of a steely ambition (to open a ground-breaking beauty parlour for African American women) and a gift for empathy that she doesn’t even fully comprehend. It’s a beautiful performance, your heart actually aches for her, even though she’s too smart to ultimately be a victim.

Honestly though, all the other performances are up to this standard, it’s hard to know where to start with the superlatives. Kirwan has the most unsympathetic role but is thoroughly convincing as a man whose initial good intentions are scuppered by a combination of disappointment, emasculation and sheer bloody mindedness. Faith Omole is a like a firecracker tempered with a volatile but palpable humanity as the Tenderloin prostitute Esther is friendly with, and Nicola Hughes is lovely, funny but grounded, as the kind landlady with a past of her own. Claudia Jolly finds fascinating colours in the rich Upper East Side client whose affection for Esther spills over into unexpected territory. Alex Wldmann delivers a tender, compelling account of the Orthdox Jewish cloth merchant Esther has business dealings with but also a deep, complex connection.

This is one of those rare, blissful productions where everyone seems to be singing from the same metaphorical hymn sheet. I’m not sure Intimate Apparel as a script is right up there with the very best of Nottage’s work: there are a couple of coincidences and plot developments in the second half that slightly strain credulity but it’s also not hard to see why it has enjoyed multiple productions since its 2003 premiere. The dialogue is raw, honest and often painfully funny. It’s a powerfully women-driven story, touching, poetic, shot through with hard truth, and as compulsively watchable as a soap opera. Lynette Linton’s vivid, transporting production is the icing on a wonderful cake. A gem of an evening.

A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN 

by Eugene O’Neill

directed by Rebecca Frecknall

Almeida Theatre, London – until 16 August 2025

running time: 3 hours including interval

https://almeida.co.uk/whats-on/a-moon-for-the-misbegotten/

The majority of Eugene O’Neill’s classic American dramas are known for their punishing length as much as their poetry and Rebecca Frecknall’s glacially paced but stunningly well acted revival of this, his last play, reinforces that twin impression. A sequel of sorts to Long Day’s Journey Into Night, A Moon For The Misbegotten shows some of what happened next to James Tyrone Jr, the boozy, tormented elder son of the family in turmoil depicted in the earlier play. 

He isn’t really the principal character here though; that’s Josie Hogan, the tough talking, hard-bitten worker on the Connecticut farm James owns, who, with her permanently soused father is scheming to ensure that the property will be sold to themselves at a reasonable price. Ruth Wilson and David Threlfall as the hardscrabble Hogans are so utterly convincing, unostentatiously inhabiting these difficult characters, every roar of fury, muted demur of affection or muttered aside feeling authentic, that it’s less like watching acting than witnessing real people navigate their fractured lives. Even their accents are spot on: Threlfall uses a flawless Irish accent while Wilson mixes American and Irish to potent effect.

Wilson is atypical of the actresses to play Josie to date. The character refers to herself as a “rough, ugly cow of a woman” and Wilson assuredly isn’t that. Nor indeed were some of the role’s previous interpreters -Colleen Dewhurst and Cherry Jones on Broadway, Frances de la Tour in London, and Eve Best opposite Kevin Spacey on both sides of the Atlantic- yet they were all physically imposing where Wilson is earthy but petite. She compensates by investing her with an angular awkwardness and abrasive attitude, but the woman’s innate kindness shines through. 

O’Neill ups the stakes by having Josie and Tyrone harbouring real, but mostly unexpressed, love for each other. James can only really verbalise his feelings when intoxicated (and this being O’Neill, that’s most of the time: Michael Shannon’s ‘drunk acting’ is gloriously vivid, in another performance of outstanding detail and fascinating choices) while Josie is so defensive that her emotions come out in intense spasms, swiftly quelled. Wilson is extraordinary, succeeding in demonstrating the complex inner workings of a woman who is terrified to let herself be fully known, so we simultaneously get the bawdy, granite-like facade and the bruised heart within. This Josie and James are desperately afraid of being vulnerable and it’s that tension that motors most of the human interest in this terse, overlong play.

I’m not a massive advocate for cutting down scripts – for instance, the recent Jamie Lloyd Tempest and Much Ado butchered the texts to such an extent that they lost some sense of the originals – but I’d gladly make an exception in the case of A Moon For The Misbegotten. There’s so much repetition here, so much push-and-pull, people telling lies or half truths then backtracking, that it could easily lose twenty minutes out of each act without the play being drastically compromised. 

Despite the quality of the performances and the striking theatricality of the design team’s work (Tom Scutt’s multi-levelled wood set resembles a carpenters workshop rather than a farm but is constantly interesting to look at, and Jack Knowles’s lighting is stark and haunting), meandering occasionally threatens to turn into interminable. Although it’s of the period, the constant references to women as “tarts” and “pigs” is pretty hard to listen to in 2025, and doesn’t do anything to endear James Tyrone to us.

Frecknall’s staging is less gimmicky than her earlier Tennessee Williams revivals here at the Almeida, the only really notable embellishments being NYX’s ethereal, unsettling music and a light circling the playing on a track like a cross between the titular moon and a searchlight, both of which add length to an already epic playing time but are captivating nonetheless. If anything, A Moon For The Misbegotten is a play that, for 2025, might benefit from a bold, unconventional directorial concept. As it stands, it’s an even longer day’s journey into night, albeit a feast of phenomenal acting.

THIS BITTER EARTH

by Harrison David Rivers

directed by Billy Porter 

Soho Theatre, London – until 26 July 2025

running time: 90 minutes no interval 

https://sohotheatre.com/events/this-bitter-earth/

First produced in San Francisco in 2017 and previously seen two years ago on the London fringe, Harrison David Rivers’ two hander, taking its title from the soulful Dinah Washington song classic, is simultaneously a love story, a response to civil unrest in the United States, and a meditation on the nature of multiracial relationships. In Billy Porter’s dynamic new staging, it’s compulsive viewing, sometimes very funny, but also thematically rich with cauldrons of fury and unease simmering just beneath it’s entertaining surface.

Jesse (Omari Douglas) is a Black playwright from a working class background – he’s smart, sensitive, spiky, self-sufficient – while his white boyfriend Neil (Alexander Lincoln, in an entrancing stage debut) is a trust fund baby but also an ardent activist particularly active in the Black Lives Matter movement. Rivers sets This Bitter Earth in the America of 2012-2015 at a time of a series of heavily publicised murders of young African American men such as Travyvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner (the last two by police personnel), and lights the dramatic touch paper by making Neil far more agitated and impassioned, on the surface at least, than Jesse about these grievous injustices.

It’s a compelling brew, written in dialogue that’s snappy, sharp but drenched in deep feeling. It treads some of the same territory as Matthew López’s The Inheritance as two smart gay men watch with disbelief as America votes in Trump (first time round) and the impassioned rows between the pair are similarly engrossing. It’s hard to imagine it better acted than it is here by Douglas and Lincoln, who mine the text for every ounce of anger, pathos, joy and frustration. They’re also combustibly sexy together with a relaxed chemistry that feels entirely natural, but also serves as a twisting knife when the relationship goes tragically asunder in ways that come as a nasty surprise but don’t feel inorganic, unfortunately.

Few actors can marry flamboyance with intellect the way Douglas does, and his Jesse is at once defensive but loving, a soul that finally finds a place to rest at least for a little time. Apart from a misjudged indiscretion following the Baltimore race riots of 2015, Neil, as written, is a bit of a unicorn, a rich, intelligent young man with liberal parents and a social conscience to put most people to shame. Lincoln is such a sincere, magnetic presence, and such a good actor, that you buy into him completely, even though he is markedly less well written than the other character.

The script loops frequently back round to the couple being attacked in the street after a night in a gay bar, and the same portion of dialogue is repeated but each time with different emphasis until finally the outcome of this hideous moment is realised. It’s powerful storytelling and if it doesn’t quite have the emotional punch one might hope for, that may be because the pace of Porter’s otherwise excellent production is so fast that the audience doesn’t always have time to breathe.

Punctuated with blasts of music and slick, striking projections, the show plays out on a predominantly bare stage under a neon sign proclaiming ‘Take Care Of Your Blessings’, words from the poet Essex Hemphill which take on more significance as the evening progresses. Rivers doesn’t stick to a linear timeline, which can be challenging in terms of placing where the characters are at any given moment, but the performances are so engaging and detailed that one’s concentration is amply rewarded. He doesn’t flinch from conveying the particular obstacles inherent in a biracial relationship where the two partners come come from radically different socio-economic backgrounds, but he invests their union with as much love as unease, so the protagonists are very easy to root for.

This Bitter Earth strays briefly into Hallmark Cards territory at the end (cue projections of rolling clouds and a beatific, heavenly light, as the audience are invited to vocalise their feelings) which feels slightly at odds with the meaty drama and acidic comedy that has gone before. It’s a small misstep though in an otherwise terrific piece of theatre, that succeeds in marrying the personal and the political in one neat but satisfyingly thought provoking package. It feels entirely appropriate that this is running during Pride month, but theatre this good deserves to be on all year round.

Disney’s HERCULES

Music by Alan Menken

Lyrics by David Zippel

Book by Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah

Based on the Disney film

Directed by Casey Nicholaw

Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London – booking until 28 March 2026

running time: 2 hours including interval 

https://www.herculesthemusical.co.uk

Some musicals feel organic, transporting, touched by a divine spark of inspiration while others come across as mechanical and formulaic. Despite its subject matter and beloved source material, Hercules, the high budget Disney confection newly ensconced in the West End, falls into the latter category. It’s not a bad show – it’s fast-paced and entertaining, with a large, talented cast working their Grecian sandals off – but few of the world class creatives are delivering their best work here. 

Director Casey Nicholaw’s visually attractive staging is loud, shiny and energetic but, like Alan Menken’s frequently rousing music, seems generic, never throwing up anything really distinguished or memorable, except for the five Muses (Candace Furbert, Sharlene Hector, Brianna Ogunbawo, Malinda Parris, Robyn Rose-Li), scintillating Black divas who ought to have their own show. Nicholaw’s dances are standard Broadway-style showbiz, decorative if over-familiar by now, but co-choreographer Tanisha Scott’s hiphop-infused contributions kicks up the dynamism several notches, especially in the uplifting act one finale when the Muses swagger and stomp on like a quintet of celestial cheerleaders, to the unbridled joy of the audience.

Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s book makes a reasonable fist of translating the cartoon film to the stage, but there’s even less heart here than there is on screen; the budding romance between Luke Brady’s hunky Hercules and Mae Ann Jorolan’s strongly independent Meg goes for very little. Despite the Ancient Greek setting, the original screenplay was always jokey and all-American, and the script here is even more determined to fling more gags at the audience than is strictly bearable or even funny (although some of them admittedly are). In that sense, it’s reminiscent of the recent Shucked, which was also Horn’s work, where joke after joke took precedence over plot or characterisation. It’s hard to imagine what Kwei-Armah’s contribution here was, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be anything to do with dramaturgy or pace of storytelling, both of which are pretty ropey.

David Zippel’s lyrics are genuinely witty although the booming, synthetic sound design renders them mostly indecipherable. Menken’s eclectic tunes are easy on the ear but mainly unmemorable, nearer in character to his decent but uninspired work on Sister Act than his really outstanding scores like Little Shop of Horrors or Disney’s own Beauty and the Beast. As in the film, the astonishing vocal performances of the Muses elevate the musical material.

Brady is perfect casting as Hercules, radiating a sunny cluelessness that it’s hard not to be charmed by. He’s beautiful but goofy, and it works. Jorolan, who previously played Meg in the German production, has a tendency to swallow her lines which becomes frustrating but possesses undeniable leading lady charisma, and Trevor Dion Nicholas has a ball as Phil, the innkeeper reluctantly tasked with training Hercules for his potential return to his Mount Olympus home. Stephen Carlile, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Alan Rickman, is more bitchy than properly evil as scheming God of the Underworld, Hades (he’s way more fun but a lot less threatening than the other Hades currently portrayed on the other side of the West End in Hadestown).

The visual colour scheme for Olympus is azure blue and burnished gold, with earthy tones for the bits amongst the mere mortals, and murky darkness leavened with greens and mauves for the Underworld. It all looks a treat (set by Dane Laffrey with giant Grecian columns in perpetual motion, lighting by Jeff Croiter) and, although overused, George Reeve’s video design has the lovely detail of making every landscape and moon lit sky look as though they’re composed of Greek mosaic. The costumes (Gregg Barnes and Sky Switser) and wigs and hair design (Mia M Neal)  are fabulous: colourful, inventive and frequently outrageous. The giant puppets by James Ortiz are bold and effective, but, apart from the multi-headed hydra, more cute than scary. Indeed, there seldom feels like there’s much at stake throughout the entire evening.

Although it was an accusation frequently levelled at Disney’s Aladdin onstage (which was a much better show), this truly does feel like a pantomime more than a coherent musical. It’s glossy, undemanding and, as long as you don’t overthink it, reasonably good fun, but has the uneasy sense of being a theme park show on a massive budget. It never quite lifts off the ground the way really satisfying tuners do, but it’s an enjoyable, colourful couple of hours that’ll keep this most venerated of West End venues warm until the next really special large scale production comes in.

STEREOPHONIC

by David Adjmi 

Original songs by Will Butler

Directed by Daniel Aukin

Duke of York’s Theatre, London – until 22 November 2025

running time: 3 hours, 15 minutes including interval 

https://stereophonicplay.co.uk

Apparently, lead producer Sonia Friedman was so keen on the script of Stereophonic that she agreed to present the play’s transfer last year from off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons to Broadway proper without even seeing it performed live. It turns out La Friedman’s enthusiasm was well placed, as David Adjmi’s engrossing drama now arrives in London in a replica of Daniel Aukin’s original New York staging, on a wave of critical acclaim as well as more awards than you can shake a stick at, including the coveted Tony Award for Best Play. Watching it for a second time a year on, it reconfirms my initial impression that it’s one of the greatest plays to come out of the USA in decades.

Like the works of Annie Baker and Stephen Karam’s 2016 Tony winner The Humans, this is one of those extraordinary American plays where seemingly nothing much happens…and yet everything happens. This rewarding slow-burner charts, with forensic precision, raucous wit and a clarity of vision that the characters themselves seldom possess, the progress of a rock band creating a career-defining album. It’s like a fly-on-the-wall documentary but performed live, and Adjmi carefully, lovingly builds up a picture of these people -their flaws, their insecurities, their loves, their eccentricities- so that they glow before our very eyes, with a rare richness of colour and detail.

So sublime and real is the direction of Daniel Aukin and the acting (for London, four British actors join a trio from the Broadway cast, though sadly not Sarah Pidgeon whose astounding turn as the tormented lead singer felt like discovering a young Meryl Streep) that it’s hard to know where Adjmi’s script ends and the bravura of the production takes over. It hardly matters. The play deals with the sometimes fraught, often random nature of the creative process, and of how success and validation can wreak havoc on personal relationships. Across three hours duration and a two year timespan (1976-77), the group’s journey from amazement at their new found success to ragingly huge egos, is beautifully managed. 

The performances are excellent. Imported from New York, Eli Gelb and Andrew R Butler are cryingly funny yet oddly touching as the engineers trying to preserve some level of self respect while managing the band’s often outlandish behaviours. Both wonderful originally, Gelb in particular is even more impressive now, finding quirks and nuances in the hangdog but sensitive Grover that ensure he is as compelling as he is hilarious. The other American, Chris Stack as drummer Simon, is, ironically, playing a Brit, and is so charismatic that it’s possible to overlook his sometimes unconvincing accent as he covers the character’s personal emotional pain with a veneer of scabrous sarcasm. 

Zachary Hart’s meticulously well observed bass player Reg transforms brilliantly from alcoholic, drug-crazed mess to holier-than-thou but deluded health freak. Jack Riddiford’s take on diva-esque, almost cruelly disengaged band leader Peter feels more dangerous and difficult than that of his Broadway predecessor, and the emotional abuse of women by men registers more strongly. Opposite him as lead singer Diana, probably destined for stardom if her demons and insecurities don’t get her first, Lucy Karczewski makes a fine West End debut. As yet, she hasn’t quite found a way to make the character’s extreme changes in mood fully coalesce but that will probably develop as the run progresses, and she captures the sense of a young woman torn between kindness and ambition, with a plaintive, rangy singing voice that sounds like that of an authentic rock goddess. 

Nia Towle is terrific, focused and entirely truthful, as Holly, the other female band member, trying to square her ambition and sense of propriety with her feelings for Hart’s unruly Reg. The camaraderie between the two women in a predominantly male environment strikes a real chord. As the evening progresses, the tiniest of details becomes absolutely riveting.

Behaviourally, these people are often nightmares but, and here’s where Stereophonic becomes truly magical, when they find the sweet spot in their music, all is temporarily forgiven. Will Butler has crafted a selection of rock songs – galvanising, affecting, rousing, most of which we only hear fragments of – that aren’t just authentic, they’re completely wonderful. The music is fully live, and the whole evening becomes testament to its power to express, heal and uplift. Almost unheard of for a play, there’s a cast album due to popular demand.

Presenting artists on stage agonising about their art can be tricky: if you don’t show any of the ‘work’ then audiences can feel cheated, but if you do present a taste of it and it isn’t very good (Steven Pimlott’s original NT production of Sunday in the Park with George is a case in point, where the act two Chromolume was eye-rollingly pretentious) it potentially invalidates everything you’ve been trying to point out about creative struggles. From this point of view however, Stereophonic is an utter triumph, these songs sear and soar.

That triumph extends further to David Zinn’s richly textured, intricate set, a hermetically sealed band box atop a scruffy but homey communal area, so evocative you can almost smell it, centred around a gigantic mixing desk. Ryan Rumery’s sound design seems louder and more bombastic than it did originally, which may be down to the difference in theatre. Still it successfully differentiates between the two environments, finding both the human and the monumental. It’s fascinating, even moving, in the final moments where Gelb’s lovable, shell-shocked Grover, alone in the recording studio, plays around with tracks, isolating then adding, making the full sound we’ve been listening to, then dismantling it, until we’re left with just the human voices, breathy, harmonious and timeless.

Honestly, the punishing length is a trifle off-putting, and the second act, although shorter, drags a bit but, for a piece that so steadfastly refuses to ingratiate itself, it’s still astonishing to observe the effect Stereophonic has on an audience: both here and in New York, you could’ve heard a pin drop at key moments, and the ovation at the end was like being at an actual rock concert. The music and irresistible humour are undeniable palliatives, while Adjmi’s naturalistic yet frequently crazy dialogue, and his grasp on his contrary, complex characters, is masterful and delicious. Anybody interested in either contemporary drama or rock music (or both) will need to see this. Remarkable.

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.