Theatre review: Cake: The Marie Antoinette Playlist

A few days after the official follow-up to SIX, I'm off to a show with a different creative team (including some big names in its development process so far) but which has clear - perhaps way too clear - ambitions to follow in its footsteps. Cake: The Marie Antoinette Playlist also features a famous historical queen with a detachable head, Zizi Strallen (part of the Z-series of Strallens that also includes Zoltar, Zuzan and Zabulon) taking on the title role, and even casts original West End SIX stars Renée Lamb and Millie O'Connell, but things haven't panned out quite as well so far: The official line is that Cake's ticket sales were so bad the run got cut short before it had even had a press night, so the Sunday matinée I'd booked turned out to be the penultimate performance.

Stage-to-screen review: Rent

The latest leg of my virtual tour around the UK's theatres takes me to Manchester and the Hope Mill, where Blake Patrick Anderson and Millie O'Connell must be feeling particularly hard done by 2020 - their run in Be More Chill, which for Anderson in particular had been expected to be a star-making performance, got cut short by the first lockdown, and when they reunited for Luke Sheppard's revival of Rent it only lasted five performances before Lockdown 2: Emetic Boogaloo scuppered that as well. Intended to be a mix of socially distanced audiences with simultaneous live-streaming, with Manchester still barred from live performance even after lockdown lifted they've had to rejig the plan, and stream a recording of the final live performance of Jonathan Larson's iconic, none-more-nineties musical.