Category: not a book

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: False Prophet

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After a podcast last week, I’m back with a Netflix documentary this week to make it two whole weeks in a row that I haven’t talked about theatre. Even though I did go to the theatre (twice) this week. I actually watched this the weekend that it came out last month – but this got caught behind the theatre posts in the queue because they were more time sensitive.

Trust Me: The False Prophet is a four episode mini-series following Christine Marie and her husband Tolga Katas who move to the Short Creek community in the hopes that they can help members of the FLDS community in the aftermath of the arrest and conviction of their leader, Warren Jeffs. Christine is a cult expert who has a fascinatingly varied prior life, Tolga is a videographer. Both are very much city people and get the sort of suspicious reception from the locals you might expect. But Christine is incredibly persistent and helps the women to start a shop to sell their products and make some money. But during the course of this they discover a new “prophet” is emerging from the chaos and vacuum that has been left by the absence of Warren Jeffs.

I’ve written previously about Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, which covers Rulon and Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Mormon Church (and was made by the same director and executive producer) but after Warren Jeffs was imprisoned the community was left isolated and leaderless. Then Samuel Bateman appears in town with a group of wives – some of whom look to be underage and the community starts talking. Christine and Tolga decide that they’re going to try and find out what is going on and bring him to justice – and they’re going to film it as they do it. It’s astonishing. And what makes it even more astonishing is that Bateman approached them to make a documentary about him to help him spread his word – as in he thinks this is a good idea.

The big difference from Keep Sweet is that this has all of Tolga’s footage of the documentary that they were filming and so has all of the people that they are talking about in the documentary in their own words on camera at the time that it was happening. Including Samuel. I said in the post about Keep Sweet that the first parts of that were grimmer than I expected (and I was expecting that to be pretty grim) but I think having seen that gave me a really good background coming into this – and although this is pretty horrifying, ultimately it has a satisfying ending (or as satisfying as things can be in these circumstances) to their quest to help the young women that Bateman was marrying*.

I watched all of these episodes back to back in one sitting. I thought it was really well made and realy clever. I admired Christine and Tolga for what they were trying to do – and the nerves of steel that they showed while they were doing it. I have a few questions about the local police response, but that’s not about the documentary! And if you do watch this, this Guardian article from last week and this Hollywood Reporter profile of Christine Maire are interesting reading too.

Have a good Sunday.

*Spoiler: Samuel Bateman was sentenced to 50 years in prison in late 2024

audio, not a book

Not a Book: Wild Things

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Happy Sunday everyone, and after my mega run of Sunday posts about theatre visits, I’ve got a change for you today – a podcast.

The full title of this is Wild Things: Siegfried and Roy and it’s an eight part series about the German magicians and illusionists Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn. They were famous for using big cats in their shows in Las Vegas. Their careers ended when Roy was attacked – and nearly killed – by one of their white tigers during a show at the Mirage. Now I’m not going to lie, I remember the attack happening – and the many National Enquirer headlines about the duo, so I was shocked to realise that it happened in 2003. Time is a flat circle etc.

Anyway, Wild Things isn’t a new podcast, it came out in 2022 – it’s just I only found it recently, probably because it’s being turned into an Apple TV series starring Jude Law and Andrew Garfield. Although the podcast does go into detail of what happened on the night of the attack, it is a profile of their entire lives and careers – starting in wartime Germany through their meeting on a cruise ship in the 1950s and their development of a double act together, initially on cruise ships but the moving to the nightclub circuit and then to hotels and Las Vegas. It also probes the duo’s much repeated claims about the safety of their act through the years and efforts to protect the brand after the attack.

I listened to most of the series back to back across about three nights and then had to take a bit of a break as it got to the grim details of the tiger attack. But that’s because I’m squeamish more than anything and it’s quite graphic and I didn’t want to have nightmares about angry tigers! It’s got good access to some of the people who were close to (as in proximity) the duo as well as people who were involved in the investigation into the tiger attack. As someone who primarily knew about Siegfried and Roy as a punchline (different sorts of punchlines before and after the attack) or from the aforementioned National Enquirer headlines I found this really interesting – they come out of this as three dimensional people – outrageous in their public personas, who inspired loyalty in the people that worked with them but also flawed and contradictory. If you’ve got a long journey coming up, this would make a great listen.

Happy Sunday!

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Rocky Horror Show

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Because there’s the revival of Rocky Horror opened on Broadway this week, I thought it was a good time to finally post about my trip to the UK Rocky Horror Show tour. Now I saw this back in January when it was in Sheffield, as an extra treat as part of my trip there to see the Figure Skating, but as Rocky is almost always touring the UK, I have been holding onto this since then.

Now if you’ve been living under a rock(y), the Rocky Horror Show is Richard O’Brien’s rock n roll musical tribute to science fiction and horror B-movies that he grew up watching. It turned 50 last year and was the subject of a (very good) documentary about the early days of the show, and the making of the legendary cult movie. The musical has been touring the UK (and other parts of the world) almost constantly ever since and fans will turn up in costume, shout out to the cast and it’s generally a very different experience from going to any other musical.

I first saw Rocky 20 years ago (almost exactly) in the previous touring version, with David Bedella as Frank N Furter, and although I saw it a bunch of times after that first one, I realised as I sat down in the stalls that I’d actually never seen another actor play Frank live. So this was a first on that front. And since the last time I saw Rocky, there’s also been a bit of an update on the sets and a few tweaks to costumes and staging, although it has to be said that Rocky is Rocky, and like The Producers, a lot of it s is sort of baked in, although in this case it’s also because the audience has expectations as well as it being in the script.

And I had a lot of fun. It was great to see the changes to the staging and costumes, but it still felt like the Rocky that I remember. That said, the rocky I remember has David Bedella in it, a man with more charisma in a little finger than many people have in their entire body. The things that man can do with a raised eyebrow. Anyway. I saw Stephen Webb as Frank (Jason Donovan is doing some dates of this tour) and he is good, but he’s no Bedella. That said, if you haven’t experienced the wonder of Bedella as Frank, he may hit a little differently for you. As ever, when you’re really familiar with a property or a performance it’s hard to work out how a first timer would see things.

Where I thought there as a big improvement on previous iterations was the narrator. I saw Nathan Caton, who is a stand up comedian as the Narrator, and he was really, really good at handling the audience participation side of things. I’ve seen a few narrators who get a bit flustered or didn’t quite know how to deal with the more aggressive/persistent audience members, but Caton had it nailed. I think the experience of being a stand up meant he knew what he was doing with hecklers and dealt with them as he would have with people at one of his comedy sets. There were a couple of troublesome people at my performance (and I knew they were going to be trouble as soon as I laid eyes on them) and he had them handled – until they got evicted during Sweet Transvestite (which is really quite early!) by the ushers (who were also really good at what must be a tough gig).

I had a couple of understudies performing on my night in Sheffield – which was actually pretty cool, as I’ve seen Haley Flaherty as Janet before, so that made another point of difference from previous visits. And bother the understudies – Lucy Aston as Janet, and Nathan Zach Johnson as Riff Raff (another role I’ve only ever seen played by one person in the tour) – were really good and you wouldn’t have known they weren’t performing their regular track if you hadn’t seen the notice in the foyer.

Like I said further up, I don’t know how this will hit if you’re not familiar with the source material and also that this has an atypical theatre audience, so it’s a strange one to recommend in a way. I wouldn’t take my mum to see it for example and it’s definitely not a show for people who only do Serious Theatre. But if you’re a fan of the film then it’s great – and I think if you like the back and forth you can get with live comedy then it might be a nice thing to try. it’s a short show – only two hours including an interval – so if it’s not for you it’s over fast. What I would say though is that if you are going for the first time and are a bit nervous or feel intimdated, I would pick a weeknight performance over the Friday and Saturday evening ones, because I think they’re less likely to be as full of people in costumes. I was there on a Tuesday night, on my own, not in costume and I was absolutely fine. Aside from the two (evicted) trouble makers, it was a lovely friendly audience.

And I mentioned at the top that it’s on Broadway at the moment – complete with Luke Evans as Frank. This a new staging – nothing like the UK tour – it’s got a gender flipped Riff Raff and all sorts of stars in the cast. Here’s a bonus video from their Instagram:

Have a great Sunday everyone!

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Avenue Q Revival

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Another Sunday, another show! This time it’s the return to the West End of one of my favourite shows, Avenue Q. Eighteen months ago I wrote about the 18th birthday concert staging featuring the original cast but now its back in the West End until the end of August coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of its West End debut.

Avenue Q is the story of Princeton, a new college graduate, and the people he meets in his rundown neighbourhood after he moves to New York after graduating. The cast is a mix of puppets and humans and the vibe is very much Sesame Street but for adults. Life has changed a lot since this show first hit the stage – smart phones, apps, streaming, *gestures around* the world. And the question for producers staging any revival of any show is how much do you put on the show as it was written and how much do you update to make it work for a modern theatre goer. There were always a few changes in the London version compared to the US one – Gary Coleman was originally a woman on Broadway but was a played by a man in London and lyrics changed to explain Gary’s backstory more clearly, Christmas Eve in London says she worked in a Chinese restauran rather than a Korean deli etc and this revival has mostly followed that pattern – a few light updates to jokes and references but not whole sale cuts or rewrites.

As I said in my prior post about the show, Q has a special place in my heart because when I first saw it I was at the same stage in my life as the characters were and that makes it hard for me to judge how it will come across to people who have never seen the show before and who don’t remember the early 2000s, hard as it is for me to believe that those people can be adults. Now of course that didn’t matter for the concert staging – it was just two performances on one day but for a five month run it sort of does and I’m fascinated to see how this performs in the West End. The night that I went the audience laughed at the first joke and I relaxed. But I was there early in the second week of previews (in fact I spotted original West End cast member now Associate Director Julie Atherton in the audience watching) so potentially a house more loaded with existing fans than it will be later in the run. But that just gives me an excuse to go back and see it again – not that I needed one! I enjoyed it – and enjoyed the twenty minutes I spent on the phone to Him Indoors analysing the changes on the way home too.

Have a great Sunday!

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: A few recent shows

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Happy Sunday everyone, and I’m continuing the run of theatre trips from the last few weekends with two other shows that I’ve seen recently and wanted to mention even though they’ve both finished their runs now.

I’ll start with Marie and Rosetta which had its last performance at Soho Place last night. This is a two-hander about Sister Rosetta Tharp and Marie Knight who were stars in the gospel world. This starts in 1946 when established star Rosetta has persuaded young newcomer Marie to join her on a tour in the segregated southern states of the US. Beverly Knight is Rosetta and Ntombizodwa Ndlovu is Marie and the two of them gave amazing performances that transended the material. For me the play itself was just fine – it was two hours including an interval and I thought it would have worked better as a 90 minute one acter, because the break killed any building tension that was going on. But the two performances – particularly when it came to the music and the singing were extraordinary and were worth going just to see them. It was also my first time in Soho Place – which is the newest West End theatre and I thought it was a great venue and I loved the in the round staging. I will be interested to go back and see something else there. And it should be noted that this was the final West End theatre that I hadn’t ever been in so it was nice to tick that off too – especially as I thought I’d completed the list when I saw Operation Mincemeat until I remembered that Soho Place had opened!

And the second show today is Jeffery Bernard is Unwell which had a run at the Coach and Horses on Sunday and Monday nights in March. Jeffery Bernard was a real life journalist and this play was written and originally staged in the 1980s when Bernard was still alive. Bernard wrote the “Low Life” column in The Spectator, and the title refers to the one line apology the paper would print on the column’s page when he was too drunk (or too hungover) to produce his copy and it was too late to find anything else to fill the gap! The play started as a star vehicle for Peter O’Toole with a supporting cast but was adapted into a one man show in 2019 to be performed at the Coach and Horses pub in Soho – which was Bernard’s regular drinking venue – by Robert Bathurst. This is the at least the third time that it has been brought back – to the same venue with the same star. It won a bunch of acclaim and awards and sold very, very well, so when I saw it pop back up I forked out full price (unusual for me!) for a seated ticket (as opposed to the cheaper standing option) to see it and found myself right opposite Bathurst’s main perforamce spot in the venue which was a delightful treat. It’s only an hour but it’s a hell of a performance feat – one man and a pub full of people and no where to hide if it goes wrong, which considering the climax includes a trick involving a glass of water, a matchbox and an egg is quite something. It was a late start (and so a late night on a work night) but it was totally worth it.

Have a great Sunday everyone!

book adjacent, not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Into the Woods

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It’s Easter Sunday and if you have a long weekend I hope that it is going well so far, and not too encumbered by the sort of weather that a Bank Holiday weekend in the UK always seems to cause. For the third weekend in a row I have a theatre related post for you and to be honest, I don’t think it’s the end of the run of show posts because I’ve seen a lot of shows in the last six weeks – including two this week alone. But this week I’m going with another Sondheim show to join my posts about Here We Are and the Frogs, Merrily We Roll Along and Old Friends.

Into The Woods is Stephen Sondheim’s take on some of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, intertwining them to tell the story of a childless baker and his wife who try to life a curse that has been placed on them by a witch but finding her a series of items in the woods. This brings them into contact with other story book characters. We’re taken through the story by a narrator. I can’t really tell you much more about the plot than that without giving too much away, but the story takes the familiar fairy tale tropes and plays with them. Sondheim’s music is often tricky to perform – there are difficult harmonies and tunes that don’t go where you expect. Into The Woods has got repeating motifs that evolve through the show – you’ll come out humming snatches rather than having an earworm of one tune stuck in your head. The lyrics are brilliant – clever and often witty and even the spoken lines have a rhythm to them.

In the Stephen Sondheim canon, Into the Woods comes after Sunday in the Park with George and is the second of his three collaborations with James Lapine and is at the tail end of his run of what was probably his best work. I had seen the movie of Into the Woods, but this is the first production that I’ve seen in person – the last time it was in London was 2010 when I wasn’t seeing as much theatre for various real world reasons. That production had Hannah Waddingham and Jenna Russell, this one has Jamie Parker and Kate Fleetwood. Now when I (first) went to see it Jamie Parker got injured midway through the first act* and was replaced by his understudy, and there were also understudies on for The Baker’s Wife and Little Red. But I enjoyed it so much that I went back this week to try and catch some of the people that I missed before they leave (more on that later) and to get a different view of the stage.

And as you can see – I was higher up and further back but straight on and that means I could see a lot more detail of the set and the action behind. If you’re going to see this then try and be as front on as you can – I think probably ideally a level down from this seat in Gallery 2 but those seats are pricey – so for the money this was excellent. And I did get to see all of Jamie Parker this time with the original Baker’s Wife Katie Brayben. There were still a few understudies on though – including Little Red again but also Jennifer Hepburn as the Witch. All the performances were excellent, but I can imagine that when it’s the full main cast it is really quite something because I definitely have preferences having seen it twice. I can really see why it earned 11 nominations at the Oliviers – as I said in my Producers review last week I’m expecting the winners to come from this and Paddington. That said I’m expected possibly more Paddington given that Paddington took the Whats On Stage awards – although they are voted for by the public and the Oliviers are voted by the industry so there maybe a difference there. I haven’t seen Paddington because tickets are like gold dust until the summer so I can’t judge, but this is truly brilliant.

In fact it’s been such a success that the run at the Bridge has extended until the end of May, having been originally due to end on April 20th. There is a cast change that comes with that though – the details of which were announced last week and is the reason why I hurried back this week to try and catch Parker and Brayben before they left. The replacements are pretty good too – Rachel Tucker, John Owen Jones and Melanie Le Barrie are all names in their own right, and Hughie O’Donnell is who I saw take over as the Baker mid-performance and he was very good too. Not going to lie, I am tempted to go back again..

Happy Easter if you’re celebrating, happy Sunday if you’re not!

Into the Woods is at the Bridge Theatre until May 30th

*if you know the show, he got injured somewhere in the sequence in the wood shed.

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: The Producers (again)!

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Yes, yes, yes, I realise that this is the third time I have talked about The Producers here. Once when I saw it at the Menier in late 2024 and wrote a review, and then I reminded you of it when the transfer to the West End started last summer. But this week I went back again (third visit!) and I couldn’t resist.

So as previously mentioned, this is the first West End revival of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, the musical version of his classic movie that sees a Broadway producer and his accountant try to put on a surefire flop that they’ve oversold to investors so they can get rich. This revival has four Olivier nominations (the ceremony is in two week’s time) for Andy Nyman (Max Bialystock), Marc Antolin (Leo Bloom), Trevor Ashley (Roger De Bris) and Best Revival. I think it’s going to struggle to win any of them because it’s such a strong year and they’re up against Paddington and Into the Woods (which have been incredibly well reviewed and taking awards in the run up) but it really is an excellent production of a genius show.

Now I mentioned Andy Nyman there, and the reason that I went back to see the show again this week is because Andy is out of the show until mid-May because he’s doing a play in York, and he’s been replaced by Richard Kind. Now if you don’t recognise the name, you will recognise the face because Kind has been in so many things possibly most notably Only Murders in the Building, Curb Your Enthusiasm and the voice of Bing Bong in Inside Out. But he was also one of the replacement Maxes in the original Broadway production, and was also Max when the show played at the Hollywood Bowl and now he’s bringing it to London. And he’s wonderful. It was only his second night when I went (there was a gala performance on night three though) and he was brilliant and more impressively it already looked like he and Marc Antolin had been working together for months, despite the fact that he’s joining a very different production of a show he was last in more than a decade ago. Kind is 69 now, and he’s a tad slower around the stage than Nyman and had a couple of moments where the muscle memory of the old version seemed to kick in, but I’m pretty sure that will iron out – if it hasn’t already.

As you can see I was quite a long way back in the stalls, but that didn’t really matter because it’s not a show that has a lot of stuff happening high up and some how Kind manages to make the more subtle choices he makes reach the back of the room. If you haven’t seen the show already, you could make this your excuse and if you have it’s worth going to see the different version of Max that Kind is giving. I’ve had the tunes from the show stuck in my head all week – in fact some of them are so catchy that they started being earworms at the mere thought of seeing the show again!

The Producers is on at the Garrick Theatre and is booking until mid-September, Richard Kind is in it until May 9 with Andy Nyman returning on May 11. And if you want to see Nyman, there’s a code on the show’s website for some money off if you’re booking more than 8 weeks ahead…

Have a great Sunday everyone.

Exhibitions, not a book

Not a Book: Seurat and the Sea

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Happy Mothering Sunday everyone, and I have been doing some more high culture to report back on today, with one of the first of the big London art exhibitions of the year and one which is very much in my area of interest.

Georges Seurat’s most famous paintings are Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and Bathers at Asnieres. I’ve never seen the first which is in Chicago, but the second lives at the National Gallery and I will go and look at it every time I visit. In Washington back in 2018, I went to the National Gallery of Art where they have a selection of his works and wandered around that. So it’s no surprise that I would be very excited to go and see the first dedicated exhibition of his seascapes which is on at the Courtauld at the moment.

The Courtauld says this “major, focused display is the first devoted to Seurat in the UK in almost 30 years” which I can believe – because I don’t remember another one, and I have had my eye open for one since I first saw Sunday in the Park with George in the summer of 2006. This exhibition has 26 paintings, oil sketches and drawings that Seurat made during a series of summers he spent on the northern French coast between 1885 and 1890 before his early death at the age of 31 in 1891.

I find it really hard to write about art but there is something about the light and movement in Seurat’s works that always gets to me – and these seascapes are really something. They are arranged chronologically so that you can see the his technique and style developing of the the years, as well as seeing some of the studies alongside the major works that they were preparatory for. They have a sense of stillness and calm, despite the fact that they are seascapes. I spent some time standing on the far side of the gallery staring at them from a distance when they look almost like photographs and the effect he was aiming for with the pure colour is at it’s most effective. But up close the detail is incredible too.

The Courtauld also has other Seurats, including studies for la Grande Jatte and others in its regular collection along with other works by the impressionists, so if you’re interested in this period in art, this is well worth the entry fee. This was one of those occasions where I bought myself the exhibition poster and am now spending a stupid amount of money on the frame for it. And I’ve added to my postcard collection too, only to discover that I’ve got a mix of landscape and portrait postcards so I still don’t have enough to fill my big postcard display frame! Anway, if you want to go and see this, do your planning now because there are already some dates that are sold out. It’s already been extended so instead of ending in April it now ends in May and they have added late night opening on Fridays to cope with the demand.

I leave you with some Sunday in the Park with George, from the Sondheim Prom to mark his 80th birthday back in 2010. I’m bracing myself for the bunfight that will be ticket sales for next summer’s revival with Jonathan Bailey and Ariana Grande. Pray for me – and my wallet!

book adjacent, theatre

Book Adjacent: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

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I know it’s meant to be a series post on a Friday, but I’ve seen so much stuff recently that if I save it all for Sundays, some of it will nearly have finished by the time I get to it. So you’ve got a bonus theatre review today – of the musical based on Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

The story, for those (like me!) who don’t know it, is about Harold Fry a retiree in Devon who receives a letter from Queenie, a former colleague from 20 years earlier saying that she is in hospice care and dying of cancer. He writes a (not very good) letter back – but when he gets to the post box, can’t bring himself to post it so walks to the next one, and then the next one until he decides he’s going to go and visit Queenie – all 600 plus miles – on foot. As he goes he thinks about his life, his marriage and his son and starts to work through the issues in his past. His journey also acquires a cult following – people following it on social media and even joining him along the way.

I haven’t read the book that this is based on but that really didn’t matter to en joying the show – it just means that I can’t tell you how far this deviates from the book in terms of the story.There is darkness and sadness in the story as it unfolds (which I haven’t gone into because: Spoilers) but ultimately it is a life affirming slice of a normal man’s life who decides to do something abnormal on the spur of the moment. Mark Addy is great as Harold, but Jenna Russell is really heart breaking as his wife Maureen – she was actually nominated for an Olivier award for this last week, and I think she really deserves it. I’m not sure there was a weak performance – but I thought the puppet dog was particularly effective.

The music is by Passenger, who I couldn’t have named a song by but when I looked it up I did know Let Her Go (video below so you can see if you know it too) and I would describe it as sort of folk inspired and fitted really well with the design of the show too. This started at Chichester last year, and I’m glad it’s got a London run so more people can see it.

This is on at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket until April 18th.

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Hadestown

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Another week, another theatre review, and given that the Hadestown cast is changing at the end of this week, I would have posted this last weekend, if it wasn’t for the fact that I think more people know about Hadestown than they do The Battle.

Hadestown tells a version of the story of the Ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, with the story transposed to an industrial factory version of the underworld, which Eurydice escapes to because of poverty and hunger. The show has a slightly complicated production history, which included a run at the National Theatre in London in 2018 before it went to Broadway and won the Tony for Best Musical Tony in 2019. It then returned to London in 2024 to take up residence at the Lyric Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, where it has proved tremendously popular and commanded ticket prices and availability to match.

This explains why I only just managed to go and see it – I go to a lot of shows and I have rules about how much I will spend. I did try for the period the other summer when the original Broadway cast came over here for a limited run ahead of a pro-shoot, but the fans were there quicker than me to the cheap seats, and so it took a good ticket offer before Christmas to get me there (and if I’d realised it was during the Winter Olympic Skating programme I would have picked a different date!) to see what all the fuss is about. I have a mixed record with Best Musical Tony Winners. I tend to prefer the Big and Fun when it comes to musicals and the Tony’s can sometimes go with the Not Big and Fun option. There are a few years when I look at the nominees and I am genuinely torn between which I like more (La Cage aux Folles vs Sunday in the Park With George in 1984, Avenue Q vs Wicked in 2004 – and I still wish I had had the chance to see Hugh Jackman in Boy from Oz) but in the main I am a commercial musical girl except when it comes to Sondheim.

All of which is to say that I can see why people love this (and I know several people who do) but it is not my thing. It is clever and it is well staged, but it is not a Verity Show. Our show was sold out – yes it was half term week, but there were also a few understudies on and it is clearly the sort of show that has a fan base who want to see as many different people in the roles as possible – because they have a loyalty card you can get stamped to get access to special merch. And I respect that, even as it makes me feel super old, because I would absolutely have been in the market for that for We Will Rock You back in the day. I would probably still have my special WWRY merch in a drawer the way I still have my Gaga t-shirt. So all in all very much a Nice To Tick Off The List for me more than anything else. I can confirm that my current count is 29 out of 76 best musicals (with another 3 if you count amateur productions), 22 out of 49 Best Musical Oliviers and I still have another seven (across the two lists some appear on both) that I could tick off if I pull my finger out and get to the long runners in the West End I still haven’t seen. Maybe 2026 is the year…

Have a Great Sunday!