Theatre review: Babies

The Other Palace has managed to combine its remit to discover new British musicals with the high school musicals that have been its bread and butter in recent years: Martha Geelan (book) and Jack Godfrey's (music & lyrics) Babies isn't even an adaptation of an existing property, although its premise has been a mainstay of teen TV drama since even I was a teenager: Back then it would most likely have been an egg that each of a class full of kids would have been given to look after as if it was a baby; here Year 11 are delivered a shipment of hi-tech Japanese dolls that cry like real infants and need feeding and care. The class have to look after them for a week while juggling all their usual schoolwork, a cautionary project meant to put them off becoming single teen parents for real, as the entirety of the year above them seem to have done.

Theatre review: The Merry Wives of Windsor (RSC/RST)

Known for being particularly good with some of the lesser-loved Shakespeares, Blanche McIntyre returns to Stratford-upon-Avon for the new RSC regime's first season. And in the first half at least, The Merry Wives of Windsor justifies its place as very few people's favourite: While the popular myth of Elizabeth I demanding to see Falstaff in love seems very unlikely, it does feel probable that this Henry IV spin-off was written because of popular demand, and its mix of characters from a very different world with a whole bunch of new comic foils begins as a tangle of plots, tricks and misunderstandings. There's even a very tedious version of the Twelfth Night subplot about convincing two different types of idiot that the other wants to duel them to the death, which even the characters get openly and mercifully bored with and ditch after the first couple of acts.

Theatre review: English

Marking both one of the last shows from Indhu Rubasingham at the Kiln, and one of the first from the Harvey/Evans regime at the RSC, this co-production of Sanaz Toossi's English is a great reflection on both companies. A play about language and identity, this was the 2023 Pulitzer winner for drama, and marks another year to buck the trend of underwhelming winners of that prize. Some while ago Marjan (Nadia Albina) spent nine years living in Manchester, before returning to her native Iran. She's married and settled now, but is constantly trying to reconnect with how she felt then, which she does by teaching English classes. Over a five-week course she helps four adults prepare for their TOEFL exam in a classroom she optimistically announces will be a Farsi-free zone (the fact that the play uses the conceit of the actors speaking English in Iranian accents, with "Farsi" represented by English in their own accents, tells you how successful they are at sticking to this.)

Theatre review:Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White

Alice Childress' 1966 play about segregation Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White is set in South Carolina in 1918, and the fact that it's the final year of the First World War is a constant underlying theme: Black soldiers like Lula's (Diveen Henry) adopted son Nelson (Patrick Martins) and sailors like Mattie's (Bethan Mary-James) husband are fighting the same as white Americans and risking their lives the same, but in an upcoming celebration Nelson will, like the rest of the black troops, have to add himself to the end of the parade uninvited; and when the war ends, however much they try to convince themselves otherwise, they know their contribution won't be recognised by allowing them into the spaces they're currently forbidden from. But if Lula and Mattie think they've seen it all, their new neighbour will confront them with one more taboo.

Theatre review: Passing Strange

Ben Stones' white wedge of a set, with four musicians stationed around the stage along with the odd prop and piece of furniture, clues the audience in from the start to the fact that we're in for a night of gig theatre. The fact that it opens with a quartet of backing singers arriving on stage to find the star turn hasn't shown up yet, and it takes a few blackouts and resets for the Narrator (Giles Terera) to kick proceedings off, correctly lets us know that there's also a chaotic element in store: Stew Stewart (book, music & lyrics) and Heidi Rodewald's (music) 1970s-'80s-set coming-of-age musical Passing Strange pretty much plays by no other rules than its own. The Narrator introduces himself as Stew so from the start it's implied this piece will be autobiographical, and that he himself is an older version of our young protagonist.

Theatre review: Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare's Globe)

Apparently Shakespeare's Globe is out of the worst of its post-lockdown budget hole, which hopefully means Michelle Terry (who let's not forget chucked The Two Noble Kinsmen into her inaugural season) won't be quite as obliged to programme just the hits, which has essentially seen the venue having to reboot A Midsummer Night's Dream and Much Ado About Nothing in alternate years. But for the time being it's an even-numbered year so I guess it's the latter they have to find a new take on, even as Lucy Bailey's production still feels fresh in my memory. At least Much Ado is a play the Globe rarely seems to fudge, and Sean Holmes' take on it is no exception. Grace Smart's design seems to take inspiration from the text's laboured pun on Seville oranges to set the action in an orange grove, and the cast seem to be liberally handing out fruit to the groundlings in a production that makes particularly good use of the shared space with the audience.

Theatre review:Fun at the Beach Romp-Bomp-a-Lomp!!

It's a week of exclamation marks in theatre and I wonder if the creators of the latest musical parody to hit the stage are unaware of musical theatre history, or just deliberately flying in the face of it: Because famously Oliver Exclamation Mark was an enduring hit, but when Lionel Bart followed it up with Twang Exclamation Mark Exclamation Mark that went so badly that, to my knowledge, nobody's ever even been allowed to revive it even as a curiosity. So with Kathy & Stella Solve a Murder Exclamation Mark opening in the West End, are Brandon Lambert (music and lyrics) and Martin Landry (book) setting themselves up to be the catastrophic flipside at Southwark Playhouse with Fun at the Beach Romp-Bomp-a-Lomp Exclamation Mark Exclamation Mark? Well... a bit.

Theatre review: The Harmony Test

Writer Richard Molloy and director Alice Hamilton were the team behind low-key favourite Every Day I Make Greatness Happen in 2018 so their return to Hampstead Downstairs has to be worth a look: The Harmony Test takes us out of the classroom and into the kitchen, but if kids don't show up on stage they're on everyone's minds: Kash (Bally Gill) and Zoe (Pearl Chanda) are trying for a baby; their friends Naomi (Jemima Rooper) and Charlie's (Milo Twomey) only daughter has gone to university, leaving them wondering what's next. Charlie makes an offhand suggestion that Naomi join a gym to get her endorphin hit, something she does with gusto - almost immediately starting an affair with greased-up personal trainer Rocco (Sandro Rosta.) She leaves her husband and moves into Zoe and Kash's spare room, just as the couple get some major news.

Theatre review: Kathy & Stella Solve a Murder!

I've listened to many podcasts since the pandemic but they've never included the true crime ones that seem to be the most popular genre out there. Still, I know how big they are and can see some of the attraction of digging into cold cases for new clues - after all the mix of morbid curiosity and trying to find sense in the senseless has always been popular in other media, why not this one? I suppose this means a musical about a true crime podcast was only a matter of time, and Jon Brittain (book & lyrics) and Matthew Floyd Jones' (music & lyrics) Kathy & Stella Solve a Murder Exclamation Mark had been a big Edinburgh fringe hit before this London transfer. Kathy (Bronté Barbé) and Stella (Rebekah Hinds) grew up at a time when the hunt for a serial killer called the Hull Decapitator was dominating the city, and this fed into a love for all things gory that turned into a lifelong friendship.

Theatre review: Suite in Three Keys -A Song at Twilight

The third and final play in Noël Coward's Suite in Three Keys is a full-length one, so it plays on its own in Tom Littler's revival of these late dramas. A Song at Twilight is, at least in Littler's production, the part of the trilogy that most acknowledges the fact that the Sixties are starting to swing. Well, ageing Hollywood starlet Carlotta (Tara Fitzgerald) acknowledges it, anyway, sporting the most preposterous and gravity-defying of Chris Smyth's wigs for these shows, enjoying the sound of pop songs playing outside the window, and firmly believing that an overhaul of social opinion on sexuality is overdue. But the man she's visiting (in Louie Whitemore's Swiss hotel suite that the story shares with the earlier double bill) is the sort to slam the windows shut against the noise, and certainly one who'd rather keep certain things behind closed doors.

Theatre review: Suite in Three Keys -Shadows of the Evening andCome into the Garden, Maud

The Orange Tree marks the 50th anniversary of Noël Coward's death by staging very nearly his last works for the stage, the trilogy Suite in Three Keys. The plays are performed as originally intended, in a double bill alternating with the third, longer play, all set in the mid-1960s in the same luxury suite of a Lausanne hotel. And there's a distinctly unpromising start as we open with the damp squib of a drama Shadows of the Evening, apparently such a critical flop it got ditched entirely when the original production transferred to Broadway. George (Stephen Boxer) has lived with his lover Linda (Tara Fitzgerald) for several years after leaving his wife: Anne (Emma Fielding) has stayed on relatively good terms with them for the sake of her children, except for the fact that she's refused to grant him a divorce in all that time. Now Linda, at one time Anne's friend, has asked her to come urgently from London to Switzerland.