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Read the latest London theatre reviews on the newest openings across the West End and beyond. Discover more about the latest must-see West End shows, Off-West End productions, and why you need to see shows in London. Scroll through our full theatre reviews listings of London musicals, plays, and live events from our London Theatre critics.
London's Menier Chocolate Factory has an enviable track record with its Christmas musicals, many of which have subsequently transferred to the West End, including Little Shop of Horrors, Sweet Charity, Merrily We Roll Along, Funny Girl and last year's entry Fiddler on the Roof (which has just ended its run at the Playhouse), and some that have moved to both the West End and then Broadway, including Sunday in the Park with George, A Little Night Music and Sweet Charity. And while every one of...
Lightning rarely strikes twice, especially when it comes to new musicals. The RSC have sought to re-create the success of their hit version of Roald Dahl's Matilda, which premiered at Stratford-upon-Avon in November 2010, with this mildly recycled and lavishly re-heated adaptation of a title by another favourite children's author David Walliams - his debut novel The Boy in the Dress, originally published in 2008. He has so far since published 11 more, several of which have had earlier stage...
While binge television watching has not only been facilitated by the rise of Netflix but actively encouraged by them - the entirety of the third series of The Crown was released on the same day - theatre has been playing catch-up with its own version: asking theatregoers to commit to spending extended stretches in the theatre watching the same story evolve. But whereas Harry Potter and the Cursed Child creates a brand-new story, told in two parts, that extends a franchise that is already...
It's tempting sometimes today to think many of us have taken the metaphorical step through the wardrobe of C.S.Lewis's imagination and entered the parallel totalitarian universe of Narnia that he created in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, "where it is always winter and never Christmas".As we've become pawns in the great societal shifts that are occurring around us every day, whether it's living in the alternative realities of Trump or Brexit-fuelled grievance and politics, winter seems to...
If there's a sense of deja vu to seeing White Christmas - the ultimate seasonal musical filler - at the Dominion Theatre, that's only because we have actually been here before. After previously touring the UK over earlier Christmas seasons between 2006 and 2011, that augmented stage version of the 1954 film classic first came to the Dominion in 2014 in a production starring Aled Jones and Tom Chambers that was based on a new version led by an American creative team that had also toured the US...
Netflix has just released the third series of The Crown for streaming, chronicling the reign of our current monarch Elizabeth II. But Shakespeare's own version of the box set of royal history - and those who seized the regal reigns from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries - is a series of ten plays. Shakespeare's Globe now conclude their abbreviated journey through some of these plays by opening their 2019/20 season with new productions of Henry VI (an artfully condensed version of the two...
The biggest hit, by far, of the current Broadway season, so far, is Moulin Rouge, a compilation musical that folds extracts from over 70 pop songs, from multiple sources, into telling a story set in the eponymous Parisian nightclub. Now, the new musical & Juliet that has just received its world premiere in the West End after a try-out run in Manchester, tries to replicate some of the same formula, only using a more economical track listing of some 30 songs. It is also likewise set in Paris -...
Everybody's Talking About Jamie has just celebrated its 2nd birthday in the West End, a joyous musical about a British teenager embracing and asserting his gay drag identity at a Sheffield school at which he defiantly and unapologetically decides to go to his end of year prom in a dress. But now everybody will also be talking about Evan Hansen, another teenager at the centre of a musical, but this one's American and far more emotionally insecure.If Jamie, as both a show and a character, has a...
Probably the most famous stage direction in all of world drama is "Exit, pursued by a bear" in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. But in terms of sheer challenges to realise on stage, surely Peter Shaffer's instruction in his 1964 play The Royal Hunt of the Sun, "they cross the Andes" is an even bigger ask. But directors love a challenge: that play's original director John Dexter is said to have told the playwright, "If you take this line out, I'm not directing the play". It was no doubt a similar...
Mary Poppins, the eponymous airborne professional nanny of the PL Travers stories and the 1964 live-action Disney feature, has flown back into the West End, to the original home - the Prince Edward Theatre where this frequently stunning stage version first took flight back in 2004. And just as Mary Poppins is on a magnificent mission to heal a divided family, so the show has returned at exactly the moment it is most needed, to heal a divided nation as we hurtle into yet another divisive...