Genre: Dance
Review: Taiwan Season: Varhung – Heart to Heart
Mesmerizing, this is fine work, fine dance, fine visual storytelling!
Review: Crazy For You
This is a blast of the purest kind. You have to see it. In terms of talent on display worked to a supreme ensemble pitch, this is quite simply the most stunning pure musical I’ve seen this year.
Review: Blackpool
"...just under 60 minutes of surprise, joy, sadness and fabulous dancing punctuated by a manic cheesy grin."
Review: Son of a Preacher Man
Son of a Preacher man has real potential. It’s easily more than a cut above a jukebox musical, and Revel-Horwood’s work particularly coupled with Herbert’s musical arrangements is exemplary. As is the marvellous and marvellously hard-working ensemble.
Review: Rambert
The theatre of Goat, its apotheosis into something else from its comedic opening, is stunning. It’s what the Rambert does; completely reinvent itself and the dance. this and the earlier ballet are outstanding in themselves. The Cunningham company are lucky to learn from them.
Review: Dreamboats and Petticoats
It’s back again. Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran’s nine-year dream Dreamboats and Petticoats returns to Theatre Royal, Brighton with a cast and creatives deserving high praise for creating the lightest touch out of slight narrative. Those who’ve seen it should start marvelling at the musicianship, and those who haven’t will increasingly join in.
Review: Follies
It took a visit into past and pastiche to propel Sondheim’s language into a modernity no-one foresaw. This is the finest realisation of this Janus-faced masterpiece, ringing with towering performances: Staunton, Bennett, Dee, Quast and Forbes simply at the head. This must be the definitive production.
Review: The Wedding Singer
This is an outstandingly-conceived show, generous to cast and audience alike, superbly choreographed and performed in what might seem challenging spaces. The last blast of summer’s breath: enjoy.
Review: #Jesuis
A highly impressive piece of dance and physical theatre which explored our world and its response to the attacks it has suffered.
Review: Border Tales
Brilliant - creatively devised, provocative, well performed, poignant and moving!
Review: On This Side of Time
Evocative and fascinating! Original contemporary choreography with eclectic music.
Review: Kin
Well performed and highly skilled, Kin is a wonderfully entertaining, and theatrical show that draws you in immediately.
Review: Cirkopolis
Highly skilled entertainment. Lyrical, dramatic, beautiful, spirited, exciting and intriguing!
Review: Death City
Stunningly choreographed Korean dance where death lingers round every wrist flick.
Review: The Tempest
You won’t forget the spectacle. But it’s the lonely spectators of their own powers that’ll beat on your mind. Gregory Doran’s RSC production realizes that more fully than ever before. Simon Russell Beale’s riven letting-go of a man’s potency relinquished along with his moral son sounds deeper plummets still.
Review: The Buddy Holly Story
The Buddy Holly Story is a superb show, the fast-track to know Buddy Holly’s world with storyline and songs that influenced and were influenced in turn. Alex Fobbester’s Buddy Holly inhabits his role with verve and heart-stopping sensitivity. There’s room to craft an even more compelling story, but as a show its generosity good-humoured inclusiveness proves irresistible.
Review: Wonderland
The ingredients are there: it’s a magical idea, and just needs a quieter rationale and – to make it a great show - a few more memorable numbers. But if you care for musicals, see it for an outstanding clutch of performers and a dream of something perennial.
Review: Tap Into Health (TIH): Movin’ With Melvin!
Just to meet Texan Movin' Melvin Brown is enough of a privilege to warrant this workshop worthy of being recommended.
Review: AY/NA Ceyda Tanc Dance Company
This world class contemporary dance is filled with both quick and unhurried graceful movement requiring real control, which is displayed in genuine abundance. Yet the themes are so highly contemporary and their skill-set so excellent that they surpass any contemporary dance performance I have seen, whilst holding to their very own distinctive form and style.
Review: Plan B for Utopia
With its low tech props, starkly minimal staging, and exquisite performance, Clevillé has constructed a piece that teeters between being hilarious, heart breaking, and intensely hopeful.
Review: Thoroughly Modern Millie
Plews and Wicks have created a musical powerhouse literally all-singing and dancing, of the highest West End standards. The quintet – and they blend magnetically together – of Clifton, Barrett, Rush, Glover and McDuff have stamped character and stomped bliss on this musical.
Review: Sunny Afternoon
What makes this outstanding is Penhall’s wit and deft charactering of core band and satellites who interact with the complexity of a play, the way the songs move the narrative forward and are given believable geneses. This outstanding musical deserves the awards its original incarnation garnered – and it brings back The Kinks forever sharing the peak of British pop with The Who, The Stones and pre-eminently The Beatles.
Review: Eurobeat
High production values and strong performances make this show fun for fans of Eurovision
Review: Until the Lions
A powerful and breathtaking production, featuring outstanding performances from members of the Akram Kham Company
Review: Smoke and Mirrors
Smoke and Mirrors is a must see. An exquisitely conceived, ultra contemporary blend of circus and dance, it's a wake up call, an intensely radical act.
Review: Follow the Faun
A forty-five minute acid trippy escapade of movement, music, lights and human connection
Review: Borderlands
Meditative and mysterious performance set in the beautiful grounds of Dryburgh abbey
Review: Falling in love with Frida
An intimate and evocative performance that layers text, music and dance.
