Theatre review: [title of show]

A musical so self-referential it occasionally threatens to swallow itself, [title of show] chronicles its own creation. Songwriter Jeff Bowen (Simon Bailey) and book writer Hunter Bell (Scott Garnham) get wind of a musical theatre festival with only three weeks before the deadline. Without a story to hang a whole new musical onto, they decide to write about the process of writing, turning their frustrated conversations and workshops into the script and songs. Bringing in actresses Heidi (Sophia Ragavelas) and Susan (Sarah Galbraith) they end up with a quirky show that's a hit at the festival and gets a much-loved off-Broadway transfer. But this level of success leads Hunter to set his sights on a Broadway run, and the long process of trying to get the show ready for a wider audience puts a strain on the quartet's friendships.

Theatre review: Chess

Musicals don't get much more '80s than Tim Rice, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus' Chess, which uses the rivalry between Russian and American Grand Masters as a metaphor for the Cold War. With music from the songwriters behind ABBA there's a lot of catchy tunes; the story is a bit more of a muddled affair, and Rice has regularly tinkered with the book over the years. His latest version premiered as a concert performance but Christopher Howell and Steven Harris' revival at the Union is the first time this "definitive" version has been fully staged. Ryan Dawson Laight's design configures the space into a thrust with a high platform upstage; you'll probably want to make sure you don't get stuck behind one of the pillars as the platform will probably be badly obscured from there but from our seats, at the corner of the stage, we could see fine.

Theatre review: Steel Pier

Another lesser-known Kander and Ebb musical gets revived, this time at  the Union. It's now the turn of the 1997 Broadway flop Steel Pier, and in one of those weird bits of theatrical synchronicity it's the second show in as many months about 1930s dance marathons. This is a somewhat less nightmarish vision of the Depression-era endurance phenomenon than Dead On Her Feet but it still features a group of desperate young people dancing to the tune of a ruthless promoter who's probably out to rip them off anyway. Former stunt pilot Bill Kelly (Jay Rincon) turns up at Atlantic City's Steel Pier for a dance marathon run by Mick Hamilton (Ian Knauer.) He meets ageing starlet Rita Racine (Sarah Galbraith) whose dance partner hasn't shown up, and convinces her to team up with him instead. But Bill doesn't know that Rita is secretly married to Mick, and is essentially a ringer whose husband will rig things to make sure she wins.