Theatre review: Titaníque

Docking at the Criterion after a successful run off-Broadway, Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli and director Tye Blue's Titaníque couldn't call itself Titanic: The Musical because there already is one of them. But where that show tried to tell the story from the perspective of pretty much everyone on the iconic but doomed liner, this is what most people would probably expect from a Titanic musical: A stage adaptation of James Cameron's 1997 film juggernaut about how Kate Winslet liked Leonardo DiCaprio, but not quite enough to give him space on a fairly large door. With added Céline Dion, whose back catalogue makes this a jukebox musical, but who also gives it its deranged framing device: At a Titanic-themed museum, Dion (Lauren Drew) bursts in to announce they've got everything wrong and she should know, because she was there. Ignoring the fact that this would make her at least 150 years old, she proceeds to tell the story.

Theatre review: Firebird

After a couple of years away from the venue I return to the original pub theatre for the first time since it moved out of the actual pub: The King's Head is now located in a larger purpose-built theatre a few feet away from its old home - horizontally at least, vertically the new sub-sub-sub basement is a bit more of a trek. The show bringing me back is Firebird, the queer love story of Cold War Russia from Sergey Fetisov's memoir, probably best known here for the recent film version. In fact Richard Hough's stage adaptation is credited as being based as much on Peeter Rebane & Tom Prior's screenplay as it is the book: I've not read the book or seen the film yet, so approached the story of a lieutenant in trouble for touching his privates fresh; but soon got the feeling that Hough is relying on a certain amount of preexisting familiarity with the characters.

Theatre review: Oliver!

After a 2024 full of shows with punctuation in the title, the West End gets the OG musical hit in 2025 with the transferring Chichester Festival Theatre production of Lionel Bart's Oliver Exclamation Mark. Charles Dickens' (Chickens to his friends) story of child trafficking, wifebeating, murder, grooming gangs, antisemitism, alcoholism and a quadruple revolve sees Oliver Twist's (Cian Eagle-Service, alternating with Raphael Korniets, Jack Philpott and Odo Rowntree-Bailly) mother die in a Victorian London workhouse giving birth to him. The child is raised there until the age of eleven, at which point he annoys Mr Bumble (Oscar Conlon-Morrey) by politely asking for a second helping of gruel and has to be got rid of. It being a century too early to sell him to a 1970s DJ, Bumble sells him to an undertaker, but soon the boy is back out on the streets.

Theatre review: The Tempest(Jamie Lloyd Company / Theatre Royal Drury Lane)

Apparently when John Gielgud ended his run as Prospero at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1957, he foretold that Shakespeare would never again be performed at the venue, which would become a home for big musicals only. No doubt any suggestion of snobbery was fully intended, but it's also probably fair to say that a vast stage and 2000+ seat auditorium might be easier to fill with a big spectacle than with a production of a play that comes around every couple of years in London alone. But the theatre is now owned by His Exalted Brittanic Excellency, The Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, QC, MD, P.I, FSB, who has enlisted Jamie Lloyd to end the 67-year Shakespeare drought at the venue with a starry mini-season inspired by the noblest of all intentions: Proving that a man who died a quarter of a century ago was wrong about that thing he said that one time.

Theatre review:Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812

The year's theatre starts for me, as it often seems to, at the Donald and Margot Warehouse, where Tim Sheader's first production as Artistic Director follows on from the tradition of big musicals he established in his time at the Open Air Theatre. I approached this one with a certain amount of trepidation as I've only intermittently got on with the work of off-Broadway royalty Dave Malloy's jarring musical style in the past, but Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 has been the composer's big breakout hit, and it receives its UK premiere here with an impressive cast. Based on a subplot from War and Peace, it sees wide-eyed young aristocrat Natasha (Chumisa Dornford-May) arrive in Moscow (or MscoW, as Leslie Travers' industrial set styles it,) where the family of her fiancé Andrey lives.

2024: Nick's Theatre Review of the Year

Halfway into the decade that started with the Covid pandemic, and I can't be the only one whose perception of time continues to be pretty screwed by that extended pause, can I? I've definitely had a mental block that divides everything into "the before times" and "last week." AD2024 might be the year that I started to get a grip on that again, ish - maybe 2025 I'll actually get my concept of time back, but for now I'm still relying on this blog to help me remember when stuff happened: When I'd been writing it for a year and decided that, for 2013, I'd come up with a new annual theme for my thumbnail images, it was mainly so that I felt like I was giving the thing the occasional spruce-up without actually having to bother properly redesigning anything. Now, whatever crop or filter I've started a review with is a handy little clue to my brain on whether it was as recent as I thought, or if the adorable child cast are now drawing their pensions. I'm old, is what I'm saying, and you probably are too. Both of you.

Theatre review: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Rebecca Frecknall returns to the major Tennessee Williams plays at the Almeida and, with The Glass Menagerie having been done to death in recent years, the next obvious candidate would be Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which hasn't had a major London production since the genitals-forward one of 2017. Still, that one having such a distinctive, er, visual identity means Frecknall still has to put a strong stamp on her version to make it stand out, and unsurprisingly she does. A wealthy, plantation-owning Southern family get together to celebrate the 65th birthday of Big Daddy (Lennie James,) who's recently got the all-clear from cancer. Except he hasn't: In a play about secrets, the one most of the family share is that the doctor's letter actually revealed his condition was inoperable, terminal, and about to enter its final stages. But in what is being considered a kindness, he and Big Mama (Clare Burt) are being kept in the dark.

Theatre review: The Invention of Love

Crazy to think Tom Stoppard has spent an entire career writing plays about human beings, despite all the evidence suggesting he's never met one. In fact despite having enjoyed some of his work it may be time to add him to my very short list of creatives I've given enough chances to for one lifetime, as The Invention of Love is based around a premise that should be effortlessly moving, but ends up far too interested in deconstructing Catullus to get round to deconstructing emotions: Simon Russell Beale plays A E Housman, the Victorian poet and classicist who, by the time of his death, seems to have decided that the two pursuits don't really go together, as one requires rules, facts and logic to be set aside in favour of emotional truth, while the other involves picking apart every comma in the name of strict accuracy.

Theatre review: A Very Naughty Christmas

Look, I don't book everything expecting it to be high art, and sometimes I'll book things with the express hope that it won't be, but you can go in with fairly low expectations and still come out disappointed. For this year's most overtly seasonal theatre visit I kept it local at Southwark Playhouse, who've imported Alex Woodward & Daniel Venz' A Very Naughty Christmas from Australia. Matthew Semple, Stephen Hirst, Emily Kristopher, Dom Woodhead, Tom Collins, Aurélie Roque and Alister Smith also have various writing, composing and creative credits on the show, and the nine of them have put their heads together to notice that a number of popular Christmas songs have some reference to Santa coming. The result is a cabaret show that mainly consists of pointing this fact out to us for a little under two hours.

Theatre review: The Lightning Thief

In among the Greek mythology that's been more present than ever on London stages lately is a more family-friendly version than the usual, um, complex mother-son relationships we get to dissect. Then again on this evidence Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series of YA novels are based on the idea of the Olympian gods knocking up dozens of random humans and then forgetting the kids ever existed. Add some "issues" regarding consent and you'd have 90% of the Greek myths right there. Joe Tracz (book) and Rob Rokicki's (music & lyrics) The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical is based on the first book in the series, in which Percy (Max Harwood) discovers that in his case the absent father is Poseidon, one of the three brothers who founded the Olympians, and therefore one of the three most powerful gods.

Theatre review: Twelfth Night (Orange Tree Theatre)

This year's Twelfth Night productions have leaned extra heavily on the idea of the play as a melancholy one, and while the cliché about it being Shakespeare's farewell to straightforward comedy tends to be code for "we forgot to make it funny," the Open Air Theatre managed a version of that approach that really worked for me. Sad clowns are clearly the order of the day at the Orange Tree as well, where Tom Littler's production sets the action in the 1940s, presumably very soon after the end of the Second World War given the whole stage becomes a War memorial inscribed with names. Anett Black and Neil Irish's designs are in mournful monochrome apart from the yellow stockings, and at the start of the play Olivia (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) is in mourning for her father and brother, both recently deceased, and judging by the portraits in uniform in her cabinet, both killed in action.

Theatre review: The Little Foxes

In what can reasonably be called an alternative to the cheery festive fare at most other theatres, the Young Vic offers up a winter show so unremittingly grim that Anne-Marie Duff agreed to star in it. Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes premiered in 1939, takes place in 1900 and has, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, been set sometime in the 1950s or '60s for Lyndsey Turner's production. At the centre of the story are three siblings, whose family wealth comes from cotton plantations; while slavery has long since been abolished, brothers Ben (Mark Bonnar) and Oscar (Steffan Rhodri) still control all the wealth in their Alabama town, but are trying to get in on a deal for a new cotton mill they hope will restore them to the even greater power their family used to have.

Theatre review: The Importance of Being Earnest

Oscar Wilde's famous comedy about an imaginary friend who seems to have a busier social life than any of the "real" characters is one I do think is very funny, but it's produced so often and the aphorisms are so famous that it's hard to be surprised by it. So I need a good excuse to see any particular production. Max Webster's new revival of The Importance of Being Earnest has a big selling point in that it's always a big deal when the current Doctor takes to the stage, but what sold it for me was that Ncuti Gatwa was just part of a cast heavy on openly LGBTQ+ stars. The rather dubious "fact" that keeps getting rolled out for this play's title is that "Earnest" was a private Victorian code for gay people to identify each other, like an early version of Polari. The fact that I've never seen this referenced in any other context makes me suspect the only real pun in the title is the one that's right there in the last line of the play, but I did think we might be in for a version that focuses on the campness of the characters, and the metaphor in their double lives.

Stage-to-screen review: The Piano Lesson

Maybe we should change the theory that most playwrights secretly just want to write a ghost story, and accept that all of them do. America's great chronicler of the 20th century August Wilson did so in the 1930s instalment of his play cycle, and while by all accounts Malcolm Washington's film version has edged more into horror movie tropes than the original suggests, Wilson's The Piano Lesson does centre on a literal ghost as a way of dragging up a whole lot of metaphorical ones. The literal ghost is that of Sutter, last descendant of a slave-owning family, who's recently died in vaguely suspicious circumstances. Boy Willie (John David Washington) brings news of his death to his sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) in Pittsburgh. Their own ancestors were slaves owned by Sutter's family, and while it's been decades since their emancipation a grim connection to their former owners has continued through the generations.

Theatre review: All's Well That Ends Well(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

The latest winter season at Shakespeare's Globe will include a major playwright who's never appeared in the Swanamaker before, but first two Shakespeares both of which have already made a previous appearance in the candlelit Playhouse; and from my own experience All's Well That Ends Well for one certainly seems to work better indoors than outdoors. Chelsea Walker's production is an edited, speedy one that comes in at a little over two hours, and if it loses anything in clarity of storytelling it gains in clarity of character development. It doesn't make the leads any less icky, but it does eliminate some of the tonal whiplash in the way they're portrayed. Helen (Ruby Bentall) is the daughter of a recently-deceased doctor, who travels to Paris to treat the dying King (Richard Katz) with one of the miracle cures she inherited from him.

Theatre review: Barcelona

Taking two Netflix stars closely associated with Madrid and Paris and throwing them together in a third European city, Bess Wohl's Barcelona is an entertaining story so full of red herrings that even trying to describe a genre for it feels like a spoiler. Its plot does hinge on quite a lot of elements that probably don't bear too much close inspection - I hear that hen dos have got a lot more expensive and elaborate since we took Alex to an Eighties disco night, but was a 12 hour+ flight each way for a hen weekend considered normal a decade later in 2009, when the play is set? Well that's what's brought Irene (Lily Collins) to Barcelona, where she's slipped away from her group to hook up with the man she'd been flirting with in a bar, Manuel (Álvaro Morte.) He's brought her back to a small apartment with a great view of Sagrada Família, a beautiful horizon like a jewel in the sun.

Theatre review: King James

After being very disappointing in 2023, Hampstead Theatre has been getting back into my good books this year, and a strong autumn season continues with King James. Hot on the heels of the Guards at the Taj revival, Rajiv Joseph gives us another two-hander about a platonic male friendship, although while this one also reaches a crisis it's a mercifully bloodless one. We also get to see the relationship right from its inception, as it begins in the Cleveland wine bar where Matt (Sam Mitchell) works. His wages there certainly don't cover the amount of debt he's in, because he's having to sell the remaining games on his season ticket for the local basketball team, the Cavaliers, seats he and his father have sat in all his life. What makes it particularly heartbreaking is that this is the 2003-4 season, in which after decades without any silverware the team has signed teenager LeBron James, a player who went on to become so famous even a British audience is likely to have heard of him, even if we couldn't tell you his full history with the "Cavs."

Theatre review: Wolves on Road

Following Beru Tessema's well-received House of Ife, the playwright returns to the Bush for another story with family at its heart, but this time also taking in much wider social and financial themes, as Wolves on Road dips its toe into cryptocurrency - and suggests that's probably as deep into that particular world it's safe to get into. Manny (Kieran Taylor-Ford) is looking to get rich quick, but so far his instincts to resell designer goods online have just resulted in him being saddled with a pile of fakes even the local market stalls won't take off him. His best friend Abs (Hassan Najib) gets him into a crypto app, and after his initial reservations Manny gets sucked into the seemingly limitless possibilities for growth. But the big money will come if they can get in on a new currency at the start, and a local boy done good has come up with a new app that combines crypto with a money transfer service.

Theatre review: The Duchess [of Malfi]

Poor the Jodie Whittaker, they keep doing her dirty. I still maintain, based on what I've seen of her in interviews, that she could have been an absolute natural as The Doctor, but she spent her entire run on Doctor Who surrounded by so many companions you could blink and miss her. Now she returns to the stage in one of the most iconic roles in theatre, but in a translation that's neither the original nor quite a reinvention, leaving her flailing in an evening that feels little more than just a bit skewwhiff. Zinnie Harris' play, originally announced under the title The Duchess, had by the time it opened been quietly retitled The Duchess Open Square Brackets of Malfi Close Square Brackets, perhaps to help attract school parties: The website says this play is studied in the A Level English Literature curriculum.

Theatre review: The Fear of 13

The Donald and Margot Warehouse celebrates the start of its Timothy Sheader era by hiking the price of my preferred seats by almost 150%, so I was in a slightly worse seat than usual for a mere 50% or so rise for the opening show, Lindsey Ferrentino's The Fear of 13. Though at times an onslaught of implausible events it's firmly in the "truth is stranger than fiction" camp as, with the exception of the character of Jackie who we're told is partly fictionalised to protect her identity, it's based on a documentary film covering true events: Jackie (Nana Mensah) is a graduate student interviewing inmates of a Pennsylvania high security prison on behalf of an advocacy group, and is eventually drawn to the story of quietly charming Death Row inmate Nick Yarris (Adrien Brody,) convicted in 1982 of a particularly grisly murder. Nick has become a prolific reader in prison, and has educated himself to become a compelling storyteller.