Subscribe:
RSS feed
Although lively from the start, Theatre Royal Stratford East’s characteristically modern spin on this festive favourite only really kicks into gear in the second half, unfolding with a lot of audience participation but a lack of magic. All the ingredients are there in writer Paul Sirett and director Dawn Reid’s production – a hiss-able landlord, […]
December 12, 2012
This re-imagining of One Thousand and One Nights is a fun and often lyrical testimony to the cultural richness and diversity of the Middle East, at a time when the western media focuses only on anger and extremism. But as vibrant and as hopeful about the redemptive power of the imagination as this production is, it doesn’t […]
December 8, 2012
This musical based on the hit 1992 film starring Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner has got the stuff that you want, it’s got the thing that you need. It might even bring you to your knees (if you’re so inclined). Everything about it is targeted at breathless poster quotes. It’s the kind of box-office juggernaut […]
December 7, 2012
A welcome break from the pre-packaged twinkle of the festive season, Little Jade Productions’s collection of spooky stories, poems and songs from across the world nevertheless sits awkwardly between recital and performance. There’s no doubting the quality of the pieces, which range from a Grimm Tale to a performance of Nick Cave’s sinister ‘Red Right […]
December 6, 2012
Returning to the Arts Theatre for a second year, Simon Callow’s one-man performance of A Christmas Carol – inspired by Charles Dickens’ popular public readings of the story – already feels like a festive ritual. It’s a well-crafted piece of seasonal cheer that warms the heart even if it doesn’t plumb the darkest depths of […]
November 29, 2012
It’s the oldest story in the book: boy meets boy in 1930s England, the guy he’s jilted at the altar meddles in their relationship, confusion ensues, he ends up stripping in a Parisian nightclub before being reunited with his love for a show-stopping wedding. Gene David Kirk’s production of Bill Solly and Donald Ward’s hugely […]
November 26, 2012
Theatre, particularly historical drama, loves traces – things mentioned in passing, buried in letters or contemporary accounts. From these meagre roots stories branch out and real lives bleed into fiction as the past becomes a stage-bound phantasmagoria of ‘what-ifs’. Neil Bartlett confronts this head-on in his recreation of Oscar Wilde’s encounter with Victorian palm-reader Mrs […]
November 16, 2012
The supposed site of Christ’s crucifixion, ‘Golgotha’ translates from the Bible as ‘place of the skull’. In Nirjay Mahindru’s searingly intense new play, the river Thames is also a place of skulls, haunted by the ghosts of a buried past. Young Loretta is an unwilling immigrant in nineteenth-century London, brought over from India by the […]
November 13, 2012
Cult composer and lyricist Howard Goodall’s new musical based on Shakespeare’s great ‘problem’ play ‘The Winter’s Tale’ comes up against the same difficulty facing a straightforward staging. How do you reconcile the pitch darkness and bucolic light of two acts set 16 years apart, in two different countries? Thematic threads are woven through the story, […]
November 7, 2012
This production marks the European premiere of David Thompson, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Great Depression-set musical about a dance marathon on Atlantic City’s famous Steel Pier, inspired by Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ Ostensibly about the romance between mysterious stunt pilot Billy Kelly (Jay Rincon) and fading dance star Rita […]
December 14, 2012
0