Tag: plays

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: End of the Rainbow

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Happy Sunday everyone and I’ve got another theatre trip for you this week. I was going to save this for next weekend when we’re into Pride month, but this is a limited run and the tickets are getting very limited so I thought I’d maximise your chances of getting to see it by posting it sooner.

End of the Rainbow is a play by Peter Quilter about Judy Garland at the time that she was doing a series of concerts at the Talk of the Town. If you know your Judy lore, this is less than a year from her death and at the time that she was engaged to Mickey Deans who would become her fifth and final husband. This is the struggling with her addictions latter day Judy, and her relationships with both Deans and her pianist and friend Anthony are somewhat strained. This is a play with music – with rehearsals with Anthony in the hotel suite as well as performances with a band at the club. It’s also the source material for the movie Judy, which won Renée Zellweger an Oscar back in 2020.

If you’re a drag race fan you’ll know that Jinkx Monsoon did a very good Judy in Snatch Game on her All Stars season and she’s had success on Broadway in the last couple of years in musicals in Chicago, then Pirates! The Penzance Musical and then in the play Oh, Mary! but this is her first non-comedic acting role. And it’s a big one to take on because this play exists essentially as a showcase for whoever is performing as Judy – they need to be able to sing in a good enough facsimile of Garland and act their hearts out across comedic and tragic moments. And Jinkx is really, really good – better in the comedy and the singing than the tragedy, but pretty good all around. The audience that I saw it with went absolutely wild for it – and I enjoyed it just not as much as them!

But that said this isn’t my first time seeing End of the Rainbow – I saw the 2011 tour with Tracie Bennett, ahead of the transfer to Broadway. And my opinion on the play itself hasn’t changed – it’s a great concept and a great showcase, but it’s a bit long and doesn’t quite stick the ending and really hammers home Anthony’s role as an avatar for Judy’s gay fans in the second half in a way that is totally unsubtle and overdone (for me anyway). However it has a great band and great performances and they make up for a lot. If I’m nitpicking, I would say that the lack of height difference between the characters means that part of Judy’s force of nature character is lost. Garland was under 5 feet tall – and Tracie Bennett is about 5’2″ – and the way that Garland’s voice and charisma dominated the room and the people about her despite her diminutive size was part of the wonder of the performance. But Jinkx is the height she is, and male actors are not a tall breed, and they do make great work of the steps on the set to try and set her at a disadvantage to Mickey at various points to help with that.

This production has been getting four star reviews from the professionals – and I would basically agree with that. It’s worth seeing if you’re a Jinkx fan – and the audience reaction (and sales!) have been strong enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if this goes over to Broadway next season and that this time next year Jinkx is factoring into the Tony award conversations.

End of the Rainbow is on at the Soho Theatre Walthamstow until the 21st of June – and it’s worth the trek up the Victoria Line to zone 3 to see it.

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: The Battle

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A bit of regional theatre for you this week, because for Valentine’s Day we headed to Birmingham to see a new play and it was a lot of fun with a dose of nostalgia attached.

The Battle is a play about the period in 1995 which could possibly be called Peak Britpop, where Oasis and Blur fought it out for the top spot in the singles charts. Britpop was a much larger movement than just these two bands, but the rivalry between them was fierce and really defined the era – Blur, southern and arty and Oasis, Mancunian and unfiltered. Some people will ahve it that you were either one side or the other, but there were plenty who liked both. Matthew Dunster, a former music industry A&R man, has written his first play imagining what was going on behind the scenes of the key moments that people might remember about the feud.

Anyway, this isn’t really a review, because we saw it a few days ahead of press night, and judging from the reviews a few things that we didn’t love may have changed, but is a recommendation because we had such a great time and laughed so hard so much of the time. There are some really good one liners here and some fabulous performances. The names in the cast are Matthew Horne (of Gavin and Stacey fame) as the boss of Blur’s record label, who is excellent whenever you see him but you sort of want more of him, and Louisa Lytton (Eastenders and the Bill) as Noel Gallagher’s girlfriend Meg Matthews, but I thought George Usher as Liam Gallagher (who is making his professional debut in the role) was the standout.

I’m trying not to think about the fact that the 90s are as long ago now as the 60s were back then. Because that is impossible and makes me feel a bit sick. When we saw it, the audience was wearing a lot of Oasis and Blur merch – and a report I saw on the TV earlier this week said that the bars at the theatre had reported near record sales so hopefully it’s doing well with the people who remember it when but I’m hoping it will also find an audience among people who don’t remember the original battle. And that’s because the 1990s seem to be back in fashion at the moment and going through a discovery moment for people who weren’t there at the time, which as someone who does remember particularly the second half of the decade is slightly traumatic.

Anyway, this is on at Birmingham Rep until the 7th March and then moves to Manchester Opera House for a week from 17 March. If you’re near enough by, I think it’s worth a trip.

Have a great Sunday everyone.

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: 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.

book adjacent, theatre

Book Adjacent: Pride and Prejudice (Sort Of)

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We are back at the theatre again this week because I had such a good time at Pride and Prejudice (sort of) on Friday night that I needed to write about it asap.

So, if you’re here and reading this, I’m going to assume you know the story of Pride and Prejudice. And this is a modern retelling of the story through the eyes of the servants, and with a cast of five each playing a servant and then various of the main characters, who sing carefully chosen pop songs at key moments. Here’s a trailer to give you a bit of a sense of what we’re talking about because it’s sort of hard to describe.

The London production of this won the Olivier award for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play in 2022 and I can totally see why. The commentary on the events of the book is on point, the songs are witty (including Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow and You’re So Vain) and the running jokes are a hoot too. I laughed and laughed and laughed. I thought my mum who was sat next to me was going to cry laughing at more than one point.

We did wonder how it might work if you *don’t* know the story of Pride and Prejudice – which as I said may not be a problem for you but maybe your normal theatre going companion isn’t an Austen fan. Well luckily I know someone who went earlier in the week to me and who isn’t familiar with the original text and she also enjoyed it – her description was “pretty good” and she liked the meta-commentary on the events and also the sweary bits, of which there are a few. So I think it’s probably a pretty safe choice for a theatre trip – if you don’t mind a bit of swearing (my mum coped) and some double entendres!

We were the second stop of a new national tour around the UK – you can find all the rest of the dates here along with info on how to book.

Have a great Sunday!

theatre

Not a Book: Best of Enemies

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Getting this in quickly before the barrage of Christmas posts as I went to see this the other week when it was in late preview stages and it’s now open and has been reviewed.

Best of Enemies is a new play by James Graham about the televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jnr at the Republican and Democratic conventions of 1968. The two men represented the new left and the new right respectively and hated what each other stood for. In real life, they remained enemies for the rest of their lives – with lawsuits and counter suits – extending even beyond Buckley’s death when Vidal was still happy to insult him. The play uses transcripts of the dialogue from the TV debate for those sections and imagines what was going on behind the scenes.

In the play Buckley is David Harewood and Vidal is Zachary Quinto. Casting a black actor as the white Buckley does highlight the times when Buckley is talking about race – but that’s not the main focus of the clashes between the men shown in the play. Quinto is excellent as Vidal – arch and snarky and supremely confident in his own abilities and beliefs. The staging – as you can see from the photo has TV like windows – that can show you the control room behind or be used as TV screens to project the actors during the debates, or the sections of rival newscasters talking you through the events of the day.

The play is making the argument that the debates are the start of the commentator-led, TV politics that has turned into the polarisation you see on social media – and while that may sound like a bit of a reach, the debate sections of the play feel very timely – almost spookily so at times. I thought it was really, really good – and if you’re in London before the 18th of February and fancy a show, this would be a good pick.