Tag: musicals

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Death Note

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I’ve got another theatre show for you this week – and because has already closed I feel like I can be honest about how I feel about it without feeling like I’m being mean or potentially stopping anyone from going to see it. Which I guess is a bit of a giveaway about what is coming, but let’s maintain the facade and I’ll start with the plot.

Death Note: The Musical is based on the manga (and anime of the same name) and is the story of Light Yagami, a high school student in Tokyo who finds a Death Note – a black notebook where anyone whose name is written into it will die 40 seconds later, from a heart attack unless otherwise specified. Light has strong views about justice and decides (pretty much instantly) that he’s going to use it to rid the world of criminals who he thinks have escaped justice. The number of people dropping dead soon attracts the attention of the police who bring in the mysterious detective L to try and track down who is responsible for the biggest murder spree Japan has ever seen. There are also side plots around the Shinigami who the death note belong to and also a pop star called Mira.

I’ve been hearing about this musical for years now – which is why I went to see it. It’s been circulating in various forms for more than a decade – initially in Japan and South Korea and the first English production of it was a very successful concert performance production in London a couple of years ago and there was a lot of buzz around this when the Barbican announced it. This was also my first Frank Wildhorn musical in a theatre, having been reading about his various shows for 20 years – ie before streaming was a thing so if you wanted to hear the music in question you needed to pay £20+ for a CD of something you had no idea whether you would like or not.*

I am not familiar with the source material but the original manga ran to 12 volumes – and the anime series to nearly 40 episodes – so I suspect that there has been a considerable amount of flattening out of the plot, characters and motivations of the story to get this down to 2 hours and 40 minutes including interval. Or at least I hope there has because I found it all very one dimensional and surface level. Everything happens very quickly and characters take no time to reflect on the whys and whats of their behaviour. Not only does Light decide to start his vigilante killing spree very fast, he soon has (apparently) no qualms about killing anyone who is trying to track him down and stop him. None of this is helped by the fact that the score is also almost entirely power ballads, which start big and end big and soon lost any impact on me because of the total lack of light and shade in the music.

That said, there were things that I did like (or at least appreciate). All the performers were giving it their all and working hard with what they were given to do. My favourite performance came from Telly Leung, who I thought was great as Ryuk, the shinigami who Light’s Death Note originally belonged too – eating up every scene he was in (as well as every apple that he came across) with an enormous and hilarious performance. I thought the ambition and scale of the sets was something to behold too – even if my extreme side seat meant I probably wasn’t getting the full effect of it.

And I realise that this is probably the most down I’ve been on a show I’ve written about here, maybe ever, but I promise I have seen worse – I just haven’t written about them. Also given the massively enthusiastic reception this got in the theatre, the way it’s been selling and most of the other reviews I am an outlier here. And it’s always interesting to be an outlier. Was the fact that I’d been to see Kimberley Akimbo the previous night and loved it a factor? Who can tell but the fact remains that I’ve humming the music from Kimberly and listening to that cast recording and I couldn’t remember a tune from Death Note by the time I’d got home from the theatre.

I will be absolutely fascinated to see if this show has a life beyond this 50 performance summer run at the Barbican. From what I could judge it was definitely not a theatre crowd the night that I was there and any show that can bring in fans of the source material *and* get a 4* review from the Guardian might potentially have another life. But this is going to need a big old theatre to do it in. Much as I hope that next summer’s production of Sunday in the Park with George happens, if it doesn’t (and it feels like at this point it might not happen) I can see this getting another outing in the Barbican to replace it.

Happy Sunday.

*and for perspective, £20 at that point was more than 5 times my hourly wage at my part time job.

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Into the Woods is back!

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Happy Sunday everyone and I’m taking the opportunity to let you know that one of my favourite shows from this year so far, Into the Woods, is starting previews in the West End this week. I loved this so much when I saw it back in March that I went back again in April. Some of the cast from The Bridge have made the transfer including Kate Fleetwood as the Witch, who I thought was amazing, Gabrielle Lewis-Dobson and Gracie McGonagall – who I didn’t see on either of my two trips but there are also a lot of new faces too including John Dalgleish as the Baker and Lara Pitt-Pulver as the Baker’s Wife so there is a distinct chance that I’ll be making the trip to the Noel Coward at some point before January 9th to see it a third time and see how it has changed and evolved.

Have a great Sunday!

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Kimberley Akimbo

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Happy Sunday everyone, I’ve got another new musical for you this week – Kimberley Akimbo at the off-West End Hampstead Theatre which as an added bonus was another new-to-me venue as I continue to tick off theatre spaces around London. This one opened this week and runs until November.

Kimberly Akimbo is the story of Kimberly Levaco, a teenage girl who suffers from a condition that makes her age rapidly. At the start of the show she and her family have just moved to a new town and we follow her as she tries to make friends at her new school and also navigate what I would describe as a complicated home life all the while knowing that the average life span for someone with her condition is 16 – and as she turns 16 during the show her time to find happiness and experience life is running out.

This has music by Jeanine Tesori, who also wrote Caroline or Change, and is based on a play of the same name from the year 2000 which was written by David Lindsay-Abaire who also wrote the book and lyrics for this. The musical was first produced Off-Broadway in 2021 and won Best Musical at the Drama Desk Awards and then moved to Broadway in 2022 where it won five Tony Awards including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, Best Score and Best Actress in a Musical for Victoria Clarke who played Kimberly. This London premiere has Maria Friedman as Kimblerly, Alice Fearn as her aunt Debra and Niamh Perry as Kimberly’s mom.

For a show about a teenager with a terminal illness this is surprisingly funny and upbeat. I thought the other teen characters were great and the dynamics of the group of nerds/misfits who embrace Kimberly – and that none of the drama in the show is about kids being mean to Kimberly. Her family are chaotic and possibly psychotic and aunt Debra is an absolute scene stealer of a role which Alice Fearn absolutely makes the most of.

I loved the music – the lyrics are clever and I came home humming the songs, and I’ve listened to the Broadway recording a bunch since as well. This was a surprise to me because although I enjoyed Caroline, or Change when I saw it in London with the amazing Sharon D Clarke* in 2018, it wasn’t a show where I came out thinking that I was going to have to listen to the cast recording of it immediately because I had enjoyed the music so much. I saw the third preview and despite the fact the director was sat two seats across from me and making notes, I thought it was already in really good shape. There were a few bits where I thought it might be tightened up, a little bit of technical stuff that needed cleaning up and polishing and a couple of issues with the sound balance, but honestly I’ve been to shows in the middle of their runs that have had the same issues – or worse.

But I have no doubt that it will get the tweaks because this has a very high powered production crew behind it and all the hallmarks of a show that is being staged with thoughts about making a transfer in to the West End at a later point. Michael Longhurst also directed that Caroline or Change and is a former artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse. Designer Soutra Gilmour did the Rachel Zegler Evita (among many Jamie Lloyd productions) as well as Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), &Juliet, and the recent Woman in Mind revival with Sheridan Smith. Maria Friedman mostly directs these days (notably the Merrily We Roll Along with Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe that won *all* the awards) but she has eight Olivier nominations as a performer (and another as director) and three wins (and a fourth for director). Basically I really liked this and I would happily go and see this again – whether it’s at Hampstead or in the West End down the line.

I bought a ticket in advance and didn’t wait for discounts because I wasn’t sure how this was going to sell. There are now a few offers around, but it’s hard to tell whether that will last if the word of mouth and the reviews are good because it’s not a big theatre in the grand scheme of things. In my opinion it’s definitely worth venturing up to Swiss Cottage for. In fact I’m not ruling out a repeat trip before the end of the run in November if I can manage it to see how it has developed and changed. But I do already have a very busy theatrical autumn…

Happy Sunday!

*I was really looking forward her Othello at the RSC, and I’m sending her every positive thought as she has treatment for cancer.

**She also the Sally Bowles on the cassette tape of Cabaret I had as a teenager, but someone that I’d never seen live because although she was in the Fiddler on the Roof revival in 2019, it was as a replacement after I had seen it

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Jesus Christ Superstar

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For the third weekend in a row I have a theatre show for you. And this year after missing out on the last couple of summer’s hit Andrew Lloyd Webber revivals basically because I had seen them before in other productions and wasn’t prepared to pay top whack for something I hadn’t loved before just because it had a big star and then regretted it because they became the hot ticket, sell out raves, this year I was in the queue for tickets for Jesus Christ Superstar tickets as soon as they went on sale. Admittedly this is mostly because my Theatre Friend Tom is a massive Eurovision fan and: Sam Ryder, but also I like to think we learn from our mistakes. And so, this Sunday you have my review of the latest Andrew Lloyd Webber revival – which is also the last of his Mega Hits/principle works* that I hadn’t seen live.

And here’s the thing. What I learned from this is that I don’t like Jesus Christ Superstar. I just don’t. Sam Ryder was singing the heck out of the score and Richard Armitage was great as Herod (much better than Boy George who we were originally scheduled to see would have been) but it’s just not a show for me. I had forgotten/blocked out that the only reason I owned (and occasionally watched bits of) the film of the 2000 revival was because it had my teen theatre crush Tony Vincent in it as Simon Zealotes (even though he originally played Judas in the Broadway revival that recording was based on). But I’ve never bothered to see it live until now and I feel like now I’ve seen it once I never need to see it again.

But I am clearly in the minority here. It has sold phenomenally well – if you were trying to get a ticket for this summer run at the Palladium now you’d struggle to get one for under £100, so even though our tickets were the most expensive ones I’ve bought this year we still got a bargain compared to that – and it’s moving to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane after Hercules closes there for a run from October to January and then it’s touring. The audience when we saw it were wildly enthusiastic – with an attempt at a mid show standing ovation for Gethsemane – and seemingly quite a lot of non-theatre regulars. This is not the first time I have found myself out of step with prevailing trends – after all I didn’t really like Hadestown that much (I would rather sit through this JCS again than Hadestown) and everyone else loves that. And that’s fine. (Almost) Anything that gets people into theatres is a good thing – because the industry needs regular theatre goers to survive.

But if you were a visitor to London and asking me what to see this summer, I’d be sending you elsewhere – unless you specifically said “I want to see an Andrew Lloyd Webber mega musical” because even though this expensive it’s not this summer’s very hottest ticket because that’s Hamilton with Leslie Odom Jnr, which is really the thing to see if you want to make people jealous. Not that I’m still bitter about my total lack of success in getting tickets for that.

Have a great Sunday, and I leave you with the aforementioned Tony Vincent doing Superstar on American TV in 2000, which contains two of the three things I (reliably like) in JCS: the classic “Jesus Christ Superstar, do you think you’re what they say you are” phrase and the lyric “Israel in four BC had no mass communication”. (The third is Herod’s song)

*Principle is a tricky one to define, but at this point I have seen: Joseph (more than once), JCS, Evita, Cats, Starlight Express (more than once), Phantom of the Opera (more than once), Aspects of Love, Sunset Boulevard, Whistle Down the Wind. I haven’t seen The Likes of Us, Jeeves, Tell Me On A Sunday, Song and Dance, Cricket, Beautiful Game, Woman in White, Love Never Dies, Wizard of Oz (with his additions at any rate) Stephen Ward, School of Rock, and (Bad) Cinderella. I’ll let you decide whether that’s all the main ones.

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Midnight at the Never Get

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As you know I went to see this the night of England’s semi final at the World Cup, but that was only the third-ish preview and press night wasn’t until this week so I held onto my review – but just a warning – I’ve been very careful in my post here not to give too much away about the show – but not all reviews have been so careful.

This is qutie a hard one to describe without giving spoilers or ruining things, so I’m going to stick to the Menier’s own description of the show: “1965, New York City. Trevor Copeland and Arthur Brightman’s love is against the law. In their secret nightclub act, “Midnight”, they perform love songs in an act of defiance of a world that demands they stay hidden. As tensions rise at the start of a historic movement, Trevor and Arthur are torn between their own surreptitious romance, and the oncoming storm of social revolution.” It’s a chamber musical that runs 90-ish minutes and that’s about as much as I’m prepared to say because they’re so cagey about it all – the programme doesn’t even tell you the names of the character the three cast members are playing and as you go in they put a sticker over your phone camera and tell you it’s a strictly no filming show – hence my photo of the poster at the entrance which I took on the way out at the end.

But I think it’s fair to say that Ben Platt is playing Trevor – and that he is the big name here – returning to London after the brief anniversary run of The Last Five Years with Rachel Zegler (too expensive for my budget!) and obviously a Tony winner for Dear Evan Hansen etc – and the reason this production has been staged. He gets to since his heart out in 1960s-style love songs and torch songs. Alongside him Gregor Milne is excellent – accompanying the songs on piano as well as acting. Platt has got the showier, more obvious part, but Milne holds the thing together – as well as having an acting part of his own to play he’s also the link with the rest of the band, holding the musical performances together. I hadn’t seen him in anything before, but I’ll be looking out for him now.

I enjoyed this a lot – Mark Sonnenblick who write the book, music and lyrics co-wrote a bunch of songs for K-Pop Demon Hunters, including Golden, and although this is a very different style of song it’s very good. He also apparently wrote songs for The Devil Wears Prada musical which is one of the current long (well long-ish) runners that I haven’t seen, so maybe I need to remedy that. If you want a sense of the music, the Menier has put this performance of At the Mercy of Love from the first day of rehearsal on their YouTube:

I would say it’s almost worth it just to hear the songs being sung, but there are some really wonderful moments of acting in there too. And the Menier has once again been transformed – this time into a cabaret bar, with audience members at tables in the middle and on sofas around the sides. If you remember my review of The Baker’s Wife, the cabaret tables are similar to that, but more of them but in a joyous move they have swapped out the terrible hard benches round the sides for cozy sofas. We were at cabaret tables this time but I look forward to testing out the sofas when I go to see Tru in the autumn.

The cabaret seats appear to be sold out for the whole run (yes, I did look at changing the tickets away from World Cup semi final day, that’s how I know) but there are some seats available and it’s such a small venue that you’re never going to be far from the action and Ben Platt moves around a lot so you will see plenty of him wherever you are, although if you want to see Gregor Milne’s face you’ll want to be on the right hand side of the auditorium plan as you see it on the Menier site. It’s a limited run and if this sounds in anyway like your sort of thing and you’re in London I think it’s worth it.

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Thespians

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It is an absolutely scorching bank holiday so far – even hotter than it was earlier this month when we were in Colchester. As I said yesterday Colchester was the capital of Roman Britain – and we were there to see a musical about the other great european classical civilisation: the Greeks, brought to you by Mischief Theatre aka the people behind the …Goes Wrong series.

The Plot: It’s 500 and something BC and Greece is being ravaged by drought. The Tyrant who rules the country decrees that every island must send a group to Athens to compete in a prayer competition to bring the rain. The penalty for not going is death. The penalty for not winning is death. And that’s how the five residents of Ikaria (that’s the whole population of the island) come to invent acting.

Now I should say that we saw this on the first preview, so this isn’t really a proper review because that wouldn’t be fair and I’m expecting a few things will have changed since we saw it. But that said it was in pretty good shape. The joke rate isn’t as high as in a Mischief play but you don’t really expect ever other line to be a joke in a musical – and it’s hard to do jokes in lyrics too – but it’s got lots of puns and dad jokes and a lot of pastiches of other musicals, theatre in jokes and stereotypes. I thought it could use a little tightening and that they hadn’t quite nailed the sound balance, but those are fairly typical issues for early preview shows.

The cast were amazing – every one is turning in a good performance – and some of them are great – but they really work well as a company. It feels a bit harsh to pick anyone out in particular because it is very much a group – but if you really, really twisted my arm I would say that it was Rhys Taylor as The Tyrant and Allie Dart and Matt Cavendish’s double act as Bard and Rhapsodes.

I generally like what Mischief are selling (so to speak) so it’s hard for me to judge whether this will work for people who aren’t Mischief fans. This isn’t relying on things going wrong/choregraphed chaos and farce the way that the Goes Wrong shows do and of course it’s a musical. In some ways it reminded me of a (very superior) pantomime – and I mean that as a compliment. It’s all got a nod and a wink to the fact that there’s an audience watching and that there are rules and conventions of theatre that the characters are “inventing” but we are all aware of. I’m not sure it’s a “first grown up show” the way that I think The Play that Goes Wrong is, but it wouldn’t be a bad shout for an early theatre trip for an upper primary school age child – as well as being a good time for the grown ups too who will understand the in jokes.

Now the eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that this had its last performance in Colchester last night – but it is a tour – it moves to Bath this week coming and then Swindon, Guildford, Cheltenham, Cardiff, back to Guildford and then finishes up in Manchester for two weeks in July. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it have short West End run, but it’s hard to see where it would go – it’s not a big-big show and all the theatres that are the sort of size that I would think they would want are taken at the moment. But never say never.

Have a great Sunday

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!

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.

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.