Review: Into the Woods
This is an outstanding first-class revival, but more, it’s intimate knowing and innocent at the same time: it sports a residual wisdom beyond its brief.
Genre: Musical Theatre 0
Review: Whaddya Know – We’re In Love!
There’s first-class musical entertainment here, crouched under the disguise of a schoolboy plot. Irresistible.
Review: Blaas (Blow)
Tender, otherworldly, explorative and extraordinary, this is an exquisite show that is more than worth the trip out of town.
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: Flashdance
It’s Joanne Clifton’s night. She lives Alex, dangerously pushing every routine with an extravagance, a hunger, sexiness and raw power that makes it one of the most memorable dance performances in a musical I’ve ever seen.
Review: Flashdance
Review: Medea Electronica
Like the recent Suppliants, in a very different way, Medea Electronica asks just what we mean by Greek tragedy, what our conceptions of drama without music are. An essential experience.
Review: The Suppliant Women
In one of the most radical productions ever mounted of Aeschylus indeed any Greek tragedy we’re literally taken to its roots: as in Greece, a community chorus of fifty, twenty-one of them the suppliant women of the play’s title. In this outstanding production, everything to resurrect this astonishing vision has been invoked.
Review: Saint George and the Dragon
This is an unsettling, unsettled play. Creating its own world, it asks something of substance no-one else is quite doing – not even Rory Mullarkey previously in The Wolf From the Door. His adaptation of the Oresteia for the Globe has after all come between. It’ll be intriguing to see where this big-boned, big-themed dramatist will venture next.
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: Fiddler on the Roof
Evans allows this musical theatre to breathe on his own big-hearted terms whilst allowing the bones to show, as it does with a breath-taking diminuendo that seems to raise and settle the dust of emigration as we watch. For sheer penetration, heart and balance it’s as definitive as we’re likely to see for many years.
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: Prom Kween
Come shimmy your sequined ball gown sister this is an hour of supercharged feel good musical fun -with a heart.
Review: La Cage aux Folles
La Cage aux Folles one might say comes home to Brighton’s Theatre Royal in this revival by Bill Kenwright Productions directed by Martin Connor. There’s no mystery why Brighton gets two weeks of this.
Review: Wall
An enthusiastic musical which promises to view the world from an alt left American perspective given current world posturing
Review: Committee
This edgy new development, faithful to one incident, marks a more than worthwhile variation on such larger works as London Road. It’s more illuminating than the history it sheds music on.
Review: Gilbert and Sullivan’s Improbable New Musical : The Fringe Lozenge
A magic lozenge ensures all’s well at the end in the Fringe for four G&S hopefuls.
Review: All or Nothing
Carol Harrison’s written the band proud and plangent; her split hero strategies work to make this one of the best possible storylines of a British band, given hell-bent Marriott burning his talent at both ends, just like the decade.
Review: The Mikado
This Mikado not only redefines but rescues the operetta from an edgy oblivion, where we could never lose the melodies, yet increasingly hesitate to stage the work. It’s back.
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: Sweet Charity
This is gritty New York in the mid-sixties and is now a fascinating reflection of American sub-culture during that era. It portrays a slice of life at the Fandango Dance Hall where the real purpose of the premises is geared far more towards sex-work than dancing the quick-step.
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: A Pacifist’s Guide to the war on Cancer
An exploration of what caner really feels like and is
Review: Christopher Nibble.
"The Guinea pigs of Dandeville are munching the poor over-stretched dandelion population out of existence and heading for eco-disaster!!
Review: The Forecast
The Forecast is an unforgettable experience on many levels - a horrifying, yet ultimately hopeful story about a future that is already pulling into the driveway
Review: Urinetown
This eco-warning musical can hardly be billed as feel-good but the music is. Mark Hollmann’s music and lyrics are as fresh as they were in 2001, and Greg Kotis’ book and lyrics are sadly prescient. This ambitious professional standard musical is something we almost take for granted with BLT. In festival time, we lose sight of some regular theatre work But this is overall the finest Fringe theatre event I’ve seen so far.
Review: Million Dollar Quartet
This is outstanding for is peerless characterising of the four legends with their unexpected female singer, the acting of Duncan and above al for the way the structure allows such extraordinary musicianship its head.
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: Nell Gwynn
Swale’s unique: she writes a play of feline-scratching wit that’s a feelgood hommage, where intellectual pyrotechnics never feel out of place. We’ve recently enjoyed The Libertine’s brilliantly-lit darkness revived too, and revived Nell Gwynn is the antipode to Jeffreys’ profound masterpiece. Just as clever, as fiendishly witty, Swale’s orange-girl raillery refuses the other’s command to dislike. It ends too, in a startling reality, and tenders a shock.
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: The Wizard of Oz
It beggars belief that on one tiny stage we can be subjected to so many scene stages so expertly handled, so many backdrops and scenery shifts, not to mention a cast of twenty-two who can all sing. This production is good enough for a larger professional stage. If you get a chance, ask for a ticket or return.
Review: Blood Brothers
The show - nearly three hours - never for a moment seemed it, gripping the audience so tightly the whole audience rose spontaneously to its feet – something I’ve not seen in this theatre. The blend of definitive and new cast members in a recent classic has overwhelming impact.
Review: The Shakespeare Revue
A consummate delight in this now rarest of forms; a tight song-and-dance of words. New material sizzles, inserted towards the end, the whole box of Bards from Bernard Levin’s Quoting Shakespeare to McKee’s arrangement of Shakespeare lines for a musical lights-out dances on the edge of hilarity before falling headlong into it.
Review: The Entertainer
Gawn Granger carries the memory of greatness and it’s this elusive elixir Archie, consummately but seedily played by Branagh, which stands in for those lost ideals Osborne’s first great character Jimmy Porter grasped at. It’s the toppling of Archie Rice’s own inner idol, or failure to do so, that sends this absorbing production out whistling into the dark.
Review: Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Character-acting keeps this near-impossible-to-dramatize story a play. Since the film’s different, this charmingly-attempted soufflé of an adaptation might do the best service of all: send people in search of a ninety-page novella, and that’s in large print.
Review: Father Comes Home from the Wars
In three hours there’s hardly a missed beat and the title will tease and baffle in its implication long after the end. Brave visionary theatre, it doesn’t require that much from audiences to enthral.
Review: Love Story
Refreshing treatment of this enormously affecting musical lies in its British bite working so well with Jenny’s feisty character, and youth generally. BLT and the Craig/Nock team have scored another bull’s-eye which by the end is pretty watery.
Review: The Rise and Inevitable Fall of Lucas Petit
An off beat look at life that highlights rather than sparkles but raises a smile nonetheless
Review: Glasgow Girls
Even on fictive terms this would garner praise for its raw power, its beating passion for justice and humanity. Difficult as it might be not to come away warmed this ensemble – and original musical – make it so very easy. This needs to be everywhere and should be shown if not live, then screened.
Review: Twonkey’s Drive In: Jennifer’s Robot Arm
Paul Vickers' first musical is unsettling, shambolic and very, very silly.
Review: A Dog’s Tale
A comic tale of doggie derring do from the Pound that strikes right at heart of the doll.
Review: Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs 2: The Magic Cutlass
Lively action packed family show.
Review: Eurobeat
High production values and strong performances make this show fun for fans of Eurovision
Review: Rent
This is a challenging piece for any company to attempt, but the students at the Brighton Academy of Performing Arts tackle this show with what appears to be great ease. The characters within the story are all brilliantly portrayed by a fantastic cast of principle leads, and a truly exceptional ensemble.
Review: Haim: In the Light of a Violin
Mesmerising, heart-rending concert-cum-narration of a child’s journey through violin lessons to auditioning in Auschwitz, and beyond as told through his eyes.
Review: Pinocchio
Join Bard & Troubadour on a truly magical journary for all ages, as Pinocchio faces scoundrels, set-backs and sea monsters on his quest to become a real boy, in this loving recreation of the classic Italian fairy tale.
Review: The Threepenny Opera
A coming-of-age for Rufus Norris, a wholly credible, cheekily interventionist Threepenny Opera with a few devastating critiques
Review: Limelight
Showstopping numbers stud this heartwarming, touching new play with numbers by Liz Tait.
Review: Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour
Lee Hall’s and Vicky Featherstone‘s sell-out Edinburgh Fringe musical comes to the Theatre Royal. It more than bears out the accolades heaped on it.
Review: The Choir
An evening of song, drama and sheer joy that sits in your head long after the curtain calls
Review: Daniel Cainer: 21st Century Jew
"witty, eloquent and wise, and worthy of its standing ovation"
Review: The Frantic Canticles of Little Brother Fish
An hour of inspiration, silliness, originality and elegant storytelling.
Review: Urinetown
Strong performances and excellent production values make for an enjoyable afternoon’s entertainment
Review: UKIP! The Musical
A whimsical musical comment on one of the most important political movements of the 21st century
Review: My Beautiful Black Dog
An honest, and glittery representation of one womans battle with Depression.
