Category: theatre

theatre

Not A Book: Fallen Angels

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Happy Sunday everyone, double theatre recommendations this week for you as we head towards Christmas and I get out and about in the run up before the festivities start.

Fallen Angels by Noel Coward is 100 years old this year and this is the first revival in twenty five years. Jane and Julia are best friends and one morning after their husbands leave for a golfing weekend, they hear from a former boyfriend that he’s in London and is planning on paying them a visit. The news throws them into a panic and then into a state of wild excitement and recklessness. The upshot is chaos – very, very funny chaos.

I don’t know how the idea of women having had pre-marital sex and getting drunk will hit to younger audiences who just accept it as a fact of life, but I can see why this caused a huge stir when it was first produced – with the personal intervention of the Lord Chancellor being needed to get it the licence it needed to be performed. This version stars Janie Dee, who I loved in Follies and Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends but haven’t seen in a play since the Angela Lansbury revival of another Coward play Blithe Spirit more than a decade ago (gosh that’s scary). It was pretty early in previews when I saw it, but it was already in really good shape – although I suspect some of the physical comedy moments will have tightened up by now. I didn’t love it the way I did Private Lives, but that’s a very high bar (current count: four viewings of three different productions of it live and repeat viewings of one of those as well as TV version on streaming services) but if you like Coward, I think you’ll enjoy this. I saw it less than a week after I went to the Cecil Beaton exhibition and I think they’d make a pretty good double bill.

Fallen Angels is on at the Menier Chocolate Factory until 21 February 2026, although judging by how full it was the night I went (it looked sold out) you may want to buy your ticket sooner rather than later.

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Titanique

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Don’t panic everyone, it not a Sunday everyone, but we’re into December and I’ve seen so much stuff in recently that I want to talk about and as I try valiantly not to go too Christmas, too fast, and all the bookshops are Christmas central at this point with all the same book and gifts I thought I’d treat you to a bonus (non-Christmas) show today – although it would make a good festive outing if you wanted to, just saying.

So in case you can’t tell from the programme cover, Titanique is a jukebox musical parodying the film Titanic. It features the songs of Celine Dion and is told from Celine’s point of view after she interrupts a tour of a Titanic museum to claim that she is a survivor of the sinking. It’s another short show too – 100 or so minutes, no interval* and it really comes in, does it’s thing and ends on a high without outstaying its welcome.

I actually really struggled with how to describe this because it’s so off the wall but also at times it’s closer to a cabaret or comedy night than it is to a traditional musical. I would need to see it again to be sure, but it felt like there was a fair bit of improv coming from Astrid Harris as Celine. And you can see that dichotomy in the Olivier Awards categories it was in – it won Best Entertainement or Comedy Play (beating among others Ballet Shoes) but also Best Supporting Actor in a Musical for Layton Williams as the Iceberg (and various others). Lauren Drew, who was the original Celine was also nominated in Best Actress in a Musical.

I had a great time and would recommend it for people looking for a fun night out, but I think because of all the pop culture references it’s probably more one for adults, and maybe even millennials and up. I’ve never seen the film Titanic, but I’m old enough to remember it coming out and know what happens in it, so all the jokes about the film landed for me all the same. I can feel that this could end up being a show that groups go to on a night out – and there are definitely deals to be had on the tickets to make that happen. It’s in the Criterion which is at the smaller end of West End capacities (as well as being probably the most underground of them all) and also in one of the prime spots for passing footfall on Piccadilly Circus right next to Eros so it has that in its favour to keep it going for a while – The 39 Steps managed nearly a decade in there, and I think The Comedy about a Bank Robbery would have lasted longer than its four years if it hadn’t been for the pandemic. And I liked it enough that I’m not ruling out going back to see how the improv changes – or how a different cast handle it. But there are just so many shows I want to see that I haven’t already been to that I suspect it won’t happen in the near future!

Have a great Sunday.

*which made it three in a row in the West End for me – with Born With Teeth and Clarkston the other two.

book adjacent, not a book, theatre

Book Adjacent: Born With Teeth

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It’s Sunday and I’m back again with another theatre post because I cheered myself up about being back in the UK and the terrible weather with a trip to see a play on Tuesday.

Born with Teeth is a play about the relationship between William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. In this European premiere, Will is played by Edward Bluemel and Kit by Ncuti Gatwa. The exact relationship between Marlowe and Shakespeare is a matter of huge scholarly debate, but in this telling the two men are collaborators at the least. Over the course of a tight 90 minutes you see the changing fortunes of the two men as we go from 1591 to 1593. Elizabethan England in this telling is a surveillance state rife with spies, where a playwright can struggle to make enough money to live unless they have a wealthy patron – or a side hustle.

For me, the performances are the star here – I find it hard to work out if the play would actually work anywhere near as well with two different actors. Gatwa and Bluemel play brilliantly off each other, and the similarity in their statures is an asset as the fortunes of the two men change and their relationship develops – there’s no physical dominance in terms of height – it’s all in the performances and charisma.

We saw this on Tuesday, and before we went to Wyndams theatre we spent half an hour people watching at the Noel Coward (which basically backs on to it) where it was the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest, which has transferred in from the National, where Gatwa played Algernon. I love Earnest and was annoyed to have missed out on that one (too slow on the ticket buying front for it to be in my budget) so was keen to see Born With Teeth to see Gatwa and also to see why he might have chosen to do this rather than transfer in with Earnest (Olly Alexander is now playing Earnest, with Stephen Fry as Lady Bracknell instead of Sharon D Clarke) and I can see why this appealed to Gatwa – a two-hander, with plenty of scope to stretch your acting chops, rather than re-visit something you’ve already done. Gatwa was my favourite but I was both pleased and surpirsed to see that Bluemel who I only knew from My Lady Jane (RIP) was so good and so nearly as good as him!

This is on until November 1 – we got a good deal on tickets and it was definitely worth it for the performances. And if you like Shakespearean speculation, go and see this now, because I don’t think it’s something that will work as well without performances as good as these!

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: The Producers is back

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Happy Sunday everyone and your reminder that if you missed the Menier Chocolate production of The Producers last Christmas, it’s now transferred to the West End and previews started last night (30th August). I’m off to see it again in about ten days time – so I may yet report back on how or whether it has changed a lot in the move from a very small theatre to a bigger one, but in the meantime, here is my review from last winter as well as their performance at West End Live in June.

book adjacent, theatre

Book Adjacent: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

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I’ve got another lovely theatre visit to tell you about this Sunday – but if you want to see it in London, you’ll need to hurry, because it is only on in London until September 7th, then it’s back out on tour around the UK.

I can’t believe there’s many people out here who don’t know the story, but in case you don’t the four Pevensie children have been evacuated to escape World War II and find themselves living in a big house, owned by a professor. In the house there is a wardrobe that leads to the land of Narnia, which the children help free from the tyranny of The White Witch, with the help of Aslan the Lion and some talking animals. This is a really neat and compact adaptation – it’s a tight two hours ten including interval, which considering the 2005 movie was two and a half hours, and the 1988 tv series which I grew up on was 6 parts and nearly three hours in total. It’s still got all the stuff you remember – Mr Tunmus, the Turkish Delight, the Beavers, Father Christmas etc – so you won’t be disappointed on that front, but short enough that children (hopefully) don’t get too fidgety*.

I wouldn’t exactly describe this as a musical, but it has got some songs – wartime inspired in the “real” world and then folky ones in Narnia. The supporting cast are playing the instruments as well as dancing and playing multiple characters so they’re a really talented group. The children near me seemed to find Maugrim (the chief of the secret police) scary, but that was the only bit that seemed to be an issue- and I think the child in question was about five. There are some great bits of stage illusion and puppetry too so it would make a great alternative to a panto if you’re near Salford at Christmas.

Honestly it really flew by and I would totally recommend it, maybe not as a first show for children but certainly as an early theatre experience. It’s got some really clever puppetry and set design to turn a stage into a magical land. I don’t even think you really need to be familiar with the original book to enjoy 5)3 show.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is at Sadlers wells until early September and then it goes back out on tour around the UK. You can find tour dates here.

*the night I was there someone had been giving out bags of popcorn and the noise was insane for the first 20 minutes or so, but there wasn’t any restlessness before the interval.

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Nye

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Happy Sunday everyone and I apologise profusely for doing a theatre show two Sundays in a row, but this one only has a couple of weeks left in London (and then a run in Wales) so I’m trying to give you the best chance to get to see it if you want to!

In case you don’t know, the Nye of the title is Anuerin ‘Nye’ Bevan – who was the Health Secretary who created the NHS. The play finds him faced with death and reliving the key moments of his life. Michael Sheen is playing Nye and is turning in an amazing performance as the former miner turned union official then politician and eventually minister. Apart from Sheen and Sharon Small as his wife Jennie Lee, the rest of the cast are all playing a variety of roles as you travel through the moments in his life. I knew the rough outlines of his life story but really that’s not necessary to follow the play – once you’ve got the idea that it’s all going on inside his head (and hopefully the pyjamas are the clue to that).

I’ve put the trailer in if you want a taste, but basically this is a really clever and well put together journey through one man’s life that also outlines what healthcare provision in the UK was like before the NHS and how it was brought about and the resistance it faced. As someone who has only ever known healthcare through the NHS, it is easy to not realise what the reality was before the NHS and this really captures that. It’s 2 hours and forty minutes (including interval) but it really flies by. And you get a rendition of Get Happy (one of my favourite Judy Garland performances) to boot.

It’s on at the National until August 16 and then it moves to the Wales Millennium Centre from the 22 to 30 August.

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: The Midnight Bell

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I’m back in the country and back in the theatre this weekend, and this time it’s the new Matthew Bourne show, which was in my town this week. This is great to start with, because my local theatre didn’t use to be on the touring list for him, but now it is which is a good sign. The theatre was very full on Tuesday night and stayed pretty full for the q&a with Matthew Bourne himself afterwards.

So The Midnight Bell is a series of interconnected stories, all playing out at basically the same time in and around a pub in Soho in the 1930s. It’s inspired by the novels of Patrick Hamilton, which I will admit I haven’t read but during the Q&A (and in the programme) Matthew Bourne explained that he has mixed characters from different novels together, added his own and made it all a bit less bleak than the novels are. And it’s definitely darker than some of Bourne’s other works that I’ve seen (currently standing at six of his New Adventures shows plus the latest production of Oliver! which he choreographed) and perhaps less hopeful. But it is brilliantly atmospheric – dark and seedy with beautiful dancing and acting.

I think this is the best cast of dancers that I have seen for a New Adventures show – it’s got lots of their longtime company members all doing brilliant work. There are two people for each role, so there are lots of variations on who you could see, but almost all the names were familiar to me and I was excited to see Dominic North again, as well as Liam Mower. As I said at the top, the theatre was very full on Tuesday night, although I was disappointed to hear some people grousing at the interval about the fact that there was a gay storyline and a couple of couples left. But they missed out because the second half – set a month after the first act – has even more beautiful dancing and clever and interesting resolutions to the various storylines. I liked the device of having characters miming to old songs as well – it added to what you understand of the characters and their motivations and is something different that I haven’t seen Bourne do before – in the Q&A he said he liked it because it is “on the edge of not working, which makes it exciting” and I would agree with that.

This is on tour through until the autumn – check out the New Adventures website for dates and locations, and most of them also have a Q&A night too.

Have a great Sunday.

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Sondheim Shows

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I did two Stephen Sondheim shows in just over a week and I have thoughts. I mean I always have thoughts, but I particularly do this time. You may remember from my post about Old Friends (which coincidentally has just finished up a run on Broadway) that I have seen a lot of Sondheim documentaries and love a lot of his music.

The first of the duo was Here We Are, Sondheim’s final show which he was working on for about the final decade of his life. It’s based on two Luis Bunel films and is as bonkers as you might expect considering that. It’s also, as you can probably tell from the video below possibly Peak Sondheim. There were a bunch of moments where the music reminded me of other Sondheim shows, which I don’t remember ever thinking at one of his shows before. I would not suggest you pick this for your first experience of Sondheim, but if you like him you will probably enjoy this – even though it has a lot less singing than I was expecting. The production at the NT had a brilliant cast – Jane Krakowski, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Rory Kinnear, Martha Plimpton, Paulo Szot and Tracie Bennett have got five Oliviers, three Tonys and an Emmy between them – and they were great. I am so glad I saw it, but I won’t be running back to see it again the way I did with Follies.

The second show was the Southwark Playhouse revival of The Frogs, which is Sondheim’s musical based on the ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes from 405BC. Sondheim’s version premiered in the mid 1970s and was described as “freely adapted” from the original, and then in 2004 Nathan Lane “even more freely adapted” it to the current book and Sondheim wrote a bunch of new songs for it. The plot is that the god Dionysus and his slave Xanthius are going to Hades to bring back George Bernard Shaw to raise the standard of drama being produced. If you’ve watched the recorded version of the original Old Friends concert or the Sondheim 80th birthday concert, the song from this that you will know is Invocation and Instructions to the Audience.

And it was such a good night. The cast was great, especially the ensemble who were rotating through different roles as well as acting as a chorus and the dynamic between Kevin McHale (of Glee fame) as Xanthias and Dan Buckley as Dionysus was great. I laughed a lot and came away humming the music. I definitely liked it more than I liked Here We Are – if another production of Frogs come around in a few years time I would go and see it again, and this is the one that I would be recommending to people of the two.

From my observations the night that I saw it, there was a considerable amount of the audience who were there to see Kevin McNally, rather than because they love seeing Sondheim shows. But that’s fine. Sondheim can be a hard sell, and a plot based on an Ancient Greek comedy might also not appeal to the casual theatre goer, but this was so good and so much fun hopefully they all went away as happy as me and might give another Sondheim production a go in future. I hadn’t actually been to Southwark Playhouse since it moved to it’s current location (which is more than a decade ago so shame on me) and so I was playing seat roulette a little bit but my front row spot on one of the sides was great and you really were quite up close and personal with the cast!

Both of Here We are and The Frogs finished yesterday, so it’s already too late for you to go and see them so sorry about that. And as ever with Sondheim who knows when they will be put on again. Oh and by the way, I’m still hoping for a DVD of the National Theatre Follies…

book adjacent, not a book, theatre

Book Adjacent: Giant

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Back at the theatre this week – and I was going to say for a play rather than a musical, but then I had a bit of a look back and realised that actually I mostly write about plays (and comedians) here rather than musicals, despite the fact that I think of myself as more of a musicals person than a play one.

Giant is a dramatisation of a moment in Roald Dahl’s life in the 1980s. He’s just about to publish The Witches, but is in the middle of a storm of criticism about a review he wrote of a picture book is deemed anti-Semitic. (If you want to read the review, it’s on the Literary Review website here, it’s paywalled, but you can see one of the key points). The play creates a fictional meeting at Dahl’s house (under renovation by his new wife) between the Dahls, his British agent and a representative of his American publisher. The American is an invented character, but Tom Maschler is real – a major figure in publishing (here’s his obituary from the Guardian if you want to know more about him) who escaped Vienna as a child after the Anschluss. The aim of the meeting is to try to get Dahl to apologise, but no-one seems willing to take Dahl on directly for various reasons.

This won three Olivier awards – best play, best actor and best supporting actor – for it’s original run at the Royal Court and has now transferred into the West End for a summer run. John Lithgow’s Dahl is towering in stature but starts as a charming old man before anger transforms him but the other performances are just as strong and the play itself is all the more remarkable for the fact that it is the author’s first. It’s the first time for a long time that I’ve heard a whole audience gasp in a theatre – and in my view deserves all the plaudits it has received both at the Royal Court and now for the transfer.

Giant is at the Harold Pinter Theatre until August 2.

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Not a Book: Typsy

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Back at the theatre this week – this time for a one man show. And if you want to see it you’ll have to be fast because it’s a one week run and it ends tonight. Also, it was mostly sold out, so you could be out of luck anyway. But still, here I am, being timely.

Typsy is Trevor Ashley’s latest cabaret show where he’s playing Liza Minelli – and also Judy Garland, sometimes in the same song. This isn’t limited to songs that you think of as being performed by Liza, it expands out to other musical theatre standards. There are witty lyric changes, chat at the audience between them and plenty of jokes. And I really liked that it’s not just relying on all the old Liza cliches – it’s referencing the newer stuff too – from the documentary, to the appearance on Drag Race to Michael Feinstein. It’s also got a wonderful seven piece band – including what may be the hardest working winds player I have recently seen – swapping between clarinet, two saxophones, flute and piccolo at a rate of knots.

Ashley was recently at the Menier playing Roger de Bris in their wonderful production of The Producers, and is transferring with the cast to the West End for the run this autumn (yes, I’m going again), but that was the first time I had seen him in anything. He’s an Australian and has a string of musical theatre an cabaret credits down there – and that experience really showed in this. I saw it on the first night of the one week run and it felt like he really knew what he was doing and what the plan was. There were a couple of rough edges, but they only made it feel spontaneous and unrehearsed. And the Menier is a really nice space for a show like this – intimate enough that you feel close to the action, but big enough that there’s space for a good sized band and still for a bit of dancing.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see this pop up again somewhere in London – it sold very quickly when it was announced, and Liza-related shows are always popular especially when they’re done well. And this is done well.

Typsy is at the Menier Chocolate Factory until tonight, The Producers is at the Garrick Theatre from September. You can find out more about Trevor Ashley on his website