Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Filth, farce and absurdism are individually difficult to pull off so combining all three in a ripely uncensored 50th-anniversary version of Joe Orton’s Loot is high risk, but when it works…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:00PMJordan Tannahill’s taut, 75-minute darkly comic real-life social drama Late Company draws two Toronto couples into God of Carnage country as they attempt to broker closure over the suicide…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:00AMMonday, August 28, 2017
Antic Disposition’s RayBan-and-head-mike-modernised Richard III contrasts the glorious 12th century setting of Temple Church, with a terrific crash course in modern ensemble acting and a b…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMMonday, August 21, 2017
Against the odds, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ is an energetic, sharp and witty triumph. I say ‘against the odds’ because, in the over-extended franchise Olympics, Adrian M…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:00AMWednesday, August 9, 2017
I started to wonder whether being cast with an all Indian company – to reflect the population of a typical Lancashire street of terraces nowadays – might better highlight the characters�…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMSaturday, August 5, 2017
There's more than a touch of Bette Davis in The Anniversary in this Jamie Lloyd-directed version of Alexei Kaye Campbell’s acidulated family drama Apologia, now lightly Americanised to sui…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:30AMSunday, July 30, 2017
Revival is a strange word. It suggests something rescued from its deathbed and shocked into fresh vigour by an infusion of talent, or money, or inspiration. In the case of I Loved Lucy, th…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:00PMSadly, despite a few crisp one-liners and a catchy title I’m surprised was never used elsewhere, Twilight Song emerges as a frail Rattiganesque slice of sixties’ repressed sexuality cont…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:00AMWednesday, July 19, 2017
Touch may come from the same stable as the amazing Fleabag but drops the posh and goes Welsh: imagine Stacey left Gavin for a squalid London studio, a diet of Echo Falls, microwave dinners a…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:00AMTuesday, July 18, 2017
The concentric hooped wooden arches framing the proscenium should give you a clue: made from the barrels scraped during the production process
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:00PMSunday, July 16, 2017
A ‘Privates on Parade’ for the war in the Pacific, YANK! is everything you don’t expect from the cheesy title – a cleverly-constructed and original musical about illicit gay love whi…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMTuesday, June 27, 2017
I’ve been trying to remember why I didn’t go to either the 1983 original or the 2006 London revival of Blondel. Especially as its central character is King Richard I of England whose hei…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:00PMSunday, June 25, 2017
My Country: A Work in Progress is an oral tapestry woven by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy from knitted squares of conversation collected by National Theatre researchers from pockets of popul…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMSaturday, June 24, 2017
Said it before so let’s say it again and this time hope they put it on the posters: “Jon Brittain’s Rotterdam is the best ‘gay play’ since My Night With Reg” – a clever sharply…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMWednesday, June 21, 2017
This is a difficult one. I really like Annie Get Your Gun but the 1946 original was butchered in 1999 for a US revival with Bernadette Peters and most references to ‘Injuns’ excised to s…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMFriday, May 26, 2017
I’ve said this lots of times before but you can’t spoof a spoof – when written in 1885 The Mikado was already a parody, satirising British Imperial politics and institutions by transpo…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:00PMMonday, May 22, 2017
So why doesn’t the current production of Lettice and Lovage at the Menier Chocolate Factory push my buttons? I fear it suffers from Forty Years On Syndrome – a circumstance whereby even …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:00AMThursday, May 18, 2017
These are the skeletons you want in your closet. In Addams Family Musical, Samantha Womack brings unexpected warmth to Morticia – is that a good thing? – and Cameron Blakeley’s Gomez, …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:00PMFriday, May 5, 2017
Madam Rubinstein focuses on her career-long rivalries with Revlon and particularly Elizabeth Arden played with venomous camp by Frances Barber dripping fox furs and acid putdowns. It’s sta…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMTuesday, May 2, 2017
Jordan Tannahill’s taut, 70 minute darkly comic real-life social drama Late Company draws two Toronto couples into God of Carnage country as they attempt to broker closure over the suicide…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:00AMFriday, April 28, 2017
I am inordinately fond of Forty Years On. In only my second ever trip to London, my mother took me to see the original production the year I was fifteen and therefore readily able to identi…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:00PMTuesday, April 25, 2017
It was marvellous to have RNIB guests with their dogs in the audience, and there’s a cleverness in the musical that you can enjoy it without sight.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 03:03AMSaturday, April 15, 2017
She’s joky, and open, and delightful company – and when she sings, although that Juilliard operatic training diction is ever present and the resonance of her chest cavity empowers even t…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:00AMThursday, April 13, 2017
I had high hopes for this first-full-London-staging-in-50-years production of How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMSunday, April 9, 2017
The ultimate ‘backstage musical’ 42nd Street lifted America from the depression, and its timely arrival at Drury Lane in such majestic style is still an evening of total escapism, total …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:00AMFriday, April 7, 2017
Two thoroughly nice chaps you’d safely take home to mother. Two Cambridge choral scholars and occasionally camp satirists at pains to remind you they’re heterosexual. One a bit shorter a…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMSunday, April 2, 2017
In The Life, drug-dealing Guys and rent-by-the-hour Dolls walk a side of 42nd Street far shadier than the tapdancing one at Drury Lane. The daily grit and the nightly grind are underpinned w…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:00PMThursday, March 30, 2017
It is a delightful curiosity, though, in the sense that it’s a show deliberately aiming at a long life on college and festival circuits rather than having eyes on the prize of Broadway or …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMWednesday, March 29, 2017
Character development in Chinglish comes second to the brisk pace of the jokes in Andrew Keates’ clever and compact staging
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMIan Hislop and Nick Newman’s stage version of their more realistic television play screened by the BBC in 2013 neatly captures their schoolboy humour but is just a bit too schoolboyish in …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMFriday, March 24, 2017
I have been waiting years for a musical of this quality, of this range of imagination and musical excellence, and of this sheer unadulterated beauty to arrive in London. Happily – so happi…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:00PM 
