London Theatre Reviews

'Singin' in the Rain' starring Adam Cooper makes a small splash

​​Trust the British weather to make the opening of Singin' in the Rain an immersive experience, with a flurry of umbrellas outside the theatre to match those onstage. And while the revival of Jonathan Church's 2011 Chichester production was certainly cheering on a drizzly night, faithfully re-creating the beloved movie, it never really wowed.Partly, it had the misfortune of following the explosive Anything Goes, which set an enormously high bar for Golden Age musicals. But while that production...

Sutton Foster is giving one of the best musical theatre performances of all time in ​​’Anything Goes’

Are there any actors you wish you could travel back in time and see onstage? For me, it's stars like Carol Channing in Hello,Dolly!, Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun, or Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady. Imagine what it would be like to experience those legends creating those iconic roles. There are also performances I've seen but would love to be able to revisit, like Patti LuPone in Gypsy, Cynthia Erivo in The Color Purple, or Audra McDonald in anything. While theatre's ephemeral nature is part...

A rewritten 'John and Jen' feels like a missed opportunity

The Southwark Playhouse's smaller second stage makes a fitting attic. Natalie Johnson's set is simultaneously cramped and expansive, a naturalistically cluttered backdrop packed with boxes and lovingly detailed detritus of a suburban American life from 1980 to the present, a fit for the intimacy of the venue (which is perhaps unfortunately cramped—there is no distancing in place, and masks are not required).Andrew Lippa and Tom Greenwald's two-person musical about the changing relationship...

‘Wonderville Magic and Illusion’ is a love letter to magic for the ages

If Stan Lee had created the Marvel characters as magicians, then the acts in Wonderville Magic and Illusion would be the Avengers. This newly-created vaudevillian variety show brings together world-leading illusionists for a summer run at the Palace Theatre, famously home to the spellbinding play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Now believing in the impossible and seeing the unthinkable are difficult tasks, but it's made easy thanks to the Wonderville performers. Wonderville rolls an evening...

'Changing Destiny' at the Young Vic is a few bricks short of a pyramid

Changing Destiny makes all sorts of sense as a Covid-era selection with which to reopen the invaluable Young Vic: an hour in length with a cast of two and drawing upon a seminal text from ancient Egypt called Sinuhe that is widely thought to presage many of the great epic narratives that followed (The Odyssey, for one). Like The Mahabharata from Peter Brook, a legendary director well-known to Young Vic audiences, Sinuhe in the Booker prize-winning Nigerian writer Ben Okri's distillation of this...

'Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat' at the Palladium is a jubilant, joy-filled revival

Go go go Joseph! Andrew Lloyd Webber's latest work, Cinderella, is still yet to open thanks to the pingdemic, but his very first is up and running again. Laurence Connor's buoyant revival of Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Biblical musical charmed audiences back in 2019, and remains an absolute winner. If we can't go to the ball quite yet, at least we've got this technicolour dream.Connor and choreographer JoAnn M Hunter, who also collaborated with Lloyd Webber on School of Rock and Cinderella,...

Power politics in David Mamet's 'Oleanna' make for an imbalanced drama

It would be tempting to say that the time has come for Oleanna, David Mamet's supremely discomfiting play about power politics and academe that has been freshly revived by the director Lucy Bailey. But the sorrowful fact of the matter is that it's hard to imagine a world in which this ironically named play (its title references a folk song popularised in the 1960s that posits a possible utopia) doesn't chime with some sort of dystopian present.Whether tallying with the gathering debate back in...

'The Two Character Play' at Hampstead Theatre brings 'new life' to the Tennessee Williams work

Tennessee Williams's strange meta-theatrical play has been given an immensely daring revival at the Hampstead Theatre, where this dense two-hander had its world premiere in 1967. Since then, the play was retitled (as Out Cry) for a brief Broadway run in 1973 and has cropped up both at London's Jermyn Street Theatre in 2010 and Off Broadway in 2013, in a starry revival with Brad Dourif and Amanda Plummer that I actually caught at a sparsely attended Wednesday matinee performed to a bewildered...

Simon Russell Beale shines in 'Bach & Sons' at the Bridge Theatre

When the family business is music, and your father happens to be a genius, are you destined for glittering achievement - or a life underscored by inadequacy? That's a recurring motif in this new play by Nina Raine, who, as the daughter of poet Craig Raine, knows a thing or two about living with a celebrated patriarch. It's a piece about creativity and commerce, about the difficulty of balancing artistic integrity with economic survival. It's also about the eternal emotional haggling in a...

‘Billionaire Boy’ has a heart of gold but it's missing laugh-out-loud moments

Working as a top dog in the toilet roll industry during the pandemic would have been a loo-crative way to earn money. Being in the toilet roll industry definitely worked for Billionaire Boy's Len Spud, a businessman sitting on piles of cash after creating BumFresh, toilet paper that's moist on one side and dry on the other. His son, Joe Spud, may have a lot of money, but all he's looking for is a friend. Moving schools and meeting new people, Joe eventually realises that forming relationships...