Theatre review: A Face in the Crowd

Kwame Kwei-Armah's final directing job at the Young Vic is a new musical by Elvis Costello (music and lyrics) and Sarah Ruhl (book,) that adapts the 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd. Judging by the Wikipedia summary of Elia Kazan's film, some liberties have been taken with the plot to make it even more topically relevant, but it certainly seems like this was a story that called out for revisiting in a year full of high-profile elections. Marcia Jeffries (Anoushka Lucas) is a small-town radio host whose show focuses on regular people whose voices don't usually get heard - like the inmates of the county jail, where she finds Lonesome Rhodes (Ramin Karimloo,) being held for drunk and disorderly behaviour. When he sings a song that charms both her and her listeners she invites him to become a regular contributor, and within weeks his hokey folk wisdom has made him the star of the show.

Theatre review: Cold War

Well it was snowing as I made my way to the Almeida, and that fits one of the meanings of Conor McPherson (book) and Elvis Costello's (music) Cold War, whose characters are often to be found shivering in big coats. Another is the more familiar meaning of the term, as the doomed love story is adapted from Paweł Pawlikowski's film set over the first couple of decades of Russian-occupied Poland. Beginning in 1949, Wiktor (Luke Thallon) is a composer who's part of a team led by Kaczmarek (Elliot Levey,) who are going around Poland collecting traditional folk songs. Previously dismissed as insignificant peasant music, their connection to people working the land makes them ideal to be co-opted by the Communists as stirring anthems. Wiktor is there to help make new arrangements that fit the themes of industry and productivity, for a show that'll be toured around Poland and eventually the rest of the Eastern Bloc.