Theatre review: Marie Curie

The latest in the West End's influx of East Asian theatre is a South Korean musical, although I'm not sure it heralds a K-Musical revolution to match the popularity of K-Pop or K-Drama - not until the genre develops as distinctive an identity to make it stand out. Jongyoon Choi (music) and Seeun Choun's (book & lyrics) Marie Curie, in an English version by Tom Ramsey (book) and Emma Fraser (arrangements & lyrics) follows Marie Skłodowska (Ailsa Davidson) as she travels from her native Poland to France, where she'll be the only female student of science at the Sorbonne. On the train journey she meets Anne Kowalska (Chrissie Bhima,) who's planning to get factory work, and will become a lifelong friend and link back to her beloved homeland.

Theatre review: Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens

It seems to be revived frequently enough but I hadn’t got round to seeing Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens until the Union’s current production by Bryan Hodgson. Bill Russell (book and lyrics) and Janet Hood’s (music) musical is described as a “song cycle,” although I’d put it much more firmly in “play with songs” territory – the musical numbers only occasionally interrupt what is for the main part a series of monologues by the dead. The show dates from 1989 but has apparently been regularly revised since because its subject matter hasn’t become as irrelevant as many think. That subject is of course HIV/AIDS, and the play takes its inspiration from the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt that was made in response to the fact that, at the time, the official response to victims remained to sweep them under the carpet. The quilt was (and is, as it continues to be added to,) an attempt by loved ones not just to record the names of those lost, but to reflect something of each unique personality as well.