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.
Fiddler on the Roof - last seen in London last year when the Menier Chocolate Factory revival transferred to the West End's Playhouse Theatre - is indisputably one of the greatest of all Broadway musicals. It's a sweeping, soaring tale of the circumstances that led to the diaspora of Eastern European Jews out of Russia, some of whom in the show are said to be emigrating to America. It had a book by Joseph Stein; 22 years after its 1964 Broadway opening, Stein returned to the theme in another...
The set for the original fringe production of The Play That Goes Wrong that opened at the Old Red Lion Theatre in 2012 cost just £300. In true fringe fashion, the cast had built it themselves. And as Mischief Theatre co-founder Jonathan Sayer told an interviewer in 2016, "When we were wrapping our home-made set in tarpaulin and carrying it up The Old Red Lion's windy staircase, the idea that people from Hollywood would be involved in a couple of years' time wouldn't have been believable." The...
Broadway has sent us a lot of great shows this year, including direct transfers for Come from Away, Waitress and Dear Evan Hansen, in replica productions recreated by their original creative teams. We've also seen superb, all-new new British stagings of more offbeat Broadway titles like Falsettos, Amour and Amélie, not to forgot (though I'd rather do so) an almost entirely unnecessary revival of The Man of La Mancha.Now as a late entry, just under the wire for the Christmas season only, a...
While pantos across the capital are providing the slapstick laughs, silly songs and festivities for some, it's not to everyone's tastes. The circus is something that, when done well, can transcend taste; its human nature to marvel at mind-bending, seemingly impossible performances, no matter your age, background or ability.That's what makes Circus 1903, now running at the Southbank Centre, so great. The Royal Festival Hall fills with gasps and tension as they watch through their fingers as a man...
The annual Royal Variety Performance has just seen its 91st show presented, 43 of them at the London Palladium, so it is by far its most established home. And the night after this year's show - filmed in the presence of Prince William - was broadcast on TV, another equally star-studded and outrageously impressive variety show took to the same stage for the fourth consecutive year: the now annual pantomime, which this year is (very loosely) based on the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.But...
While previous National Theatre hits like An Inspector Calls, One Man Two Guvnors, War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time have had repeated returns to the West End and other stages around the country, director Bijan Sheibani has accomplished something different and even more striking in revisiting his 2014 production five years on for a UK tour and now a deserved West End transfer. He has not only completely re-cast it, but also newly underpins it with a live onstage...
Here is Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand's famous French verse drama originally premiered in Paris in 1867, but not as you nose it. The hero, who probably has the most famous proboscis in all of literature after Pinocchio, is denied an outsize snout in a new production that launches a new residency for the Jamie Lloyd Company at the Playhouse Theatre; instead, as played by the buff and matinee-idol handsome film star James McAvoy with no change to his face at all, it could strain credulity...
I saw the original short-lived production of Amélie, a musical version of the 2001 French film, when it premiered on Broadway in 2017 - and ran for just seven weeks. The review I wrote at the time described it as telling "a tenderly-drawn, small story, but it feels out of place amid the bombard and bigger effects that Broadway usually trades in"; it was "sweet and full of charm but it makes no lasting impression."But transplanted across the Atlantic now in a beautiful, tenderly aching and...
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...
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