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.
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.
Another Sunday, another documentary from me. And it’s probably not unexpected that a musicals geek like me would watch a documentary about Liza Minelli, but I’m here to make a case forwhy you’d be interested in it even if you’re not a fan of musicals or divas.
This is a documentary about Liza Minelli, which focuses principally on Liza’s life after the death of her mother Judy Garland, and her work establishing herself as separate to her mother and building her own legacy and legend. As you can see from the trailer, Liza is in it (a lot) as are numerous of her friends – both famous and not.
Liza’s life is pretty incredible. She’s the daughter of one of Hollywood’s most beloved (but troubled) stars and a legendary director of musical films, She was in the public eye from the day that she was born, but she went on to be an iconic performer herself. She’s one of only six people to be a non-competitive EGOT – her Grammy is an honorary one, but she won her Oscar, Emmy and three Tonys in competition (and has a fourth honorary Tony too). And that career is covered extensively in this documentary.
But the reason that I think that this is of interest to people beyond the Liza fans, is because of that life time of fame. Liza has never really had a private life, and she’s had a public persona from the moment her parents first put her in front of a camera. in a way, she’s one of the last vestiges of the studio system: a child brought up in the business who watched how her mother was portrayed in the press and who has deliberately and constantly guarded what facets of herself she shows to her fans and her public when she’s not performing. So don’t go expecting any big revelations or confessions here – but that’s what I found so fascinating – what Minelli is like in normal life is essentially unknowable unless you’re in her inner circle. And you get glimpses of that from the friends and family – but just that, glimpses because her one overriding motivation in her public persona is to prove to everyone that she’s not Judy Garland and that she didn’t inherit all the problems that her mother had.
So it’s incredibly watchable, but there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors. There’s loads of great archive and lots of evidence that she’s a kind person but she’s not going to tell you how she feels, or what she really thinks. I know that Peter Allen was the husband that she liked the most – according to her friends but there’s nothing really good or bad from her about any of them, although various of her friends are not shy to tell you that they really didn’t like David Gest. She’s still sticking to it that she never really saw any drugs at Studio 54, despite all other evidence to the contrary. You come away feeling doused in showbiz pizzaz, and slowly realise that you’re none the wiser about the reality. Just fascinating.
This one is available on different streaming services depending on where you are – in the UK it’s on the iPlayer at the moment.
After writing about Scamanda a couple of months ago, this week we’re in another one of my special interest/fascination areas – mega churches. And the mega church in question here is Hillsong. Firstly for those of you who haven’t come across them before, Hillsong is a charismatic megachurch that started in Australia and spread through the world. They had a very successful music arm which wrote Christian pop and contributed to the church’s success, and then gained fame when one of their pastors, Carl Lenz became spiritual advisor to celebrities like Justin Bieber.
Hillsong first came to my attention when Vanity Fair ran an article about them in 2021 when a scandal blew up around the church’s charismatic pastor. And soon after a documentary popped up – and then in 2023 a second Vanity Fair article about them after a documentary series on Hulu. And as at the moment I’ve got both Disney+ and Discovery+ I’ve watched both of them and I’m here to give you my thoughts!
So the Discovery+ doc was the first one to come out – and covers the founding of the church, the rise and fall of Carl Lenz and other current day scandals and then the historic child sex abuse allegations. It has a final episode which came out six or so months after the first three and covers the fallout to the original three episodes.
The Secrets of Hillsong came out in 2023 and covers a lot of similar ground in terms of the founding of the church, the Carl Lenz scandal and the historic child sex abuse scandal. But what it has that the Discovery+ one doesn’t is interviews with Carl and his wife as well as the latest on the downfall of the church’s founder Brian Houston.
If you’re only going to watch one of these – and given that each is four parts, we’re talking about eight hours of your life if you watch all of both – then The Secrets of Hillsong is probably the one. And that’s mostly because of actually hearing from Lenz but also the fact that it covers some of the later allegations made against Brian Houston. But each of them had stuff that the other didn’t – so if you’re going to watch both, do it chronologically and watch Mega Church exposed first and then do Secrets of.
And if you’ve got any more documentaries (or podcasts) about mega churches or cults and their scandals, drop them in the comments for me, because I’m still fascinated!
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…
One of my favourite documentary series from last year is back! We have a second season of America’s Sweethearts, Netflix’s documentary about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. I wrote a whole post about last year’s series – and I think you really need to watch that one to get the most out of season two, and I say that as someone who is only two episodes into the new season. So do go and read my post from last year and then go and watch it. As I said last year so many people I know watched it who aren’t into sport but also people who are really into sport but not into dance – the first series was just a really good documentary. I’m not sure how series two can live up to that, but I’m excited to see it try! Oh and in case you’re wondering – the original subreddit still hasn’t come to terms with the fact the change to the series compared to the CMT one…
Back with a TV/streaming recommendation today, for those of you who like a murder mystery series at the gentle end of the spectrum.
Our set up is this: in episode one Sylvia Fox, a British spy, is off to Italy for her niece’s wedding. Then someone turns up dead and the groom goes missing so she starts to investigate. There’s a hot Carabinieri officer and by the end of the first episode she’s solved the crime, decided to take a career break and bought a house to do up. There are two more two hour mysteries for her to solve in series one and another three in series two. And I really do hope we get a series three.
For all that Sylvia is an ex spy, these are pretty chill mysteries – there’s not a lot of blood, no jump scares and until the last episode of series two not a lot of peril. And by the time you get to that final episode you’re fairly sure it will all work out ok in the end. There’s lots of beautiful scenery and I want Sylvia’s house, wardrobe and defensive driving skills. I’ve been watching Emilia Fox in things since she was Georgiana in Pride and Prejudice and she’s always very watchable and in this she makes a nice duo with Tara Fitzgerald as her sister.
There are a few occasions in series one why you wonder why the Italian characters are speaking English to each other rather than Italian, but that’s mostly sorted out in season two. The romantic strand is very slow moving – and more long looks and brooding stares than anything else (so far) but Capitano Riva does a very good brooding stares than anything so I forgive it and just hope that we get a bit of progress if we get a series three!
These have just been shown on U and Drama in the UK, and are on their streaming service at the moment, elsewhere in the world they are available through Britbox.
Happy Sunday everyone, I hope you’ve all had a good weekend so far, and I’m back with another suggestion of something to watch – this time at the cinemas because it only came out last week.
The Phoenician Scheme is the latest film from Wes Anderson. Written by Anderson and from a story by him and Roman Coppola, it’s a black comedy about a wealthy businessman who appoints his daughter as his heir after the latest of (many) assassination attempts against him sees his plane crash (again). The two of them set off to try and save his latest business venture where they are targeted by more assassins, tycoons and terrorists.
Anderson is known for his distinctive visual style and ensemble casts featuring regular players as well as the dark comedy, nostalgia-inspired worlds and quirkiness. My first Wes Anderson was The Life Aquatic, which I saw at the cinema in my year in France. Now that is not one of his more critically acclaimed movies, but which I really enjoyed – because of that crazy aesthetic and style. I loved Grand Budapest Hotel when that came out and have been to the last couple at the cinema because I like seeing them on the big screen. I’ve never had a bad time watching them – but some of them I think I will definitely watch again when they come around on the TV and others I probably won’t. This one I think is in the former category – whereas Asteroid City is probably the latter. But his films can be a bit of divisive – I’ve put Mark Kermode’s review here because he explains the situation very well.
So I’m finishing off Brighton/seaside week with one of the other things we did while we were there – which was see Greg Davies’s latest tour: Full Fat Legend. And before I get to that, it should be noted that we saw him in the Brighton Dome – aka the site of Abba’s triumph at Eurovision in 1974. So that was a) very cool and b) also a sign of how much Eurovision has grown because this is a capacity of about 1,500 people – and 30 years on last year’s contest was held in the15,500 capacity Malmo arena that’s the second largest venue in Sweden. Anway, to the comedy…
This is Greg’s first tour in seven years, and while we had definitely seen him before, I can’t tell you if it was that tour, or the one before. But either way, it was a long time ago. And since then Taskmaster has got even bigger (we have done a recent binge) – which I’m assuming is (along with Covid) the reason for the big gap between tours. In Full Fat Legend Greg is telling stories of the things that have happened to him in the last year and I’m not sure how much more than that I can tell you without ruining it, but it’s been *quite* a year.
I laughed so hard I cried my eye make up off and even if I had realised ‘d done that (which I didn’t) I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it without leaving the show, and by the time I did realise I was back at the hotel having walked a mile and a bit though central Brighton and along the seafront with mascara marks all over my cheekbones (how? I don’t know). It got a little bit close to too embarrassing for me to bear, but only very briefly. And it’s a big long set that Greg is doing too – we had a support act who did about 25/30 minutes and then there’s an interval and then it’s 90 minutes of Greg.
We were incredibly lucky to get tickets very last minute – because looking at the tour website writing this, a lot of the venues are a lot bigger and every other date this year is sold out – except for a “last few” for Wembley Arena in June. But the goodness is there are arena dates in March 2026 which have tickets. And so if this sounds like your thing, plan ahead!
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.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 