Theatre review: Beetlejuice

An on-and-off hit in New York - it's opened and closed there multiple times since its original Broadway run was scuppered by Covid - Eddie Perfect (music and lyrics,) Scott Brown and Anthony King's (book) Beetlejuice now arrives in the West End for a run that seems to predict a similar mixed level of enthusiasm: It's at the huge Prince Edward Theatre, but has been advertised as a limited year-long run. Following the broad strokes of the Tim Burton film but deviating from the plot when it suits it, the story sees Lydia Deetz (Hannah Nordberg) move into a haunted house with her father Charles (Alasdair Harvey) and his new girlfriend (officially Lydia's life coach,) Delia (Aimie Atkinson.) Still mourning her recently deceased mother and very much stuck in the "denial" stage of grief, when Lydia discovers that the previous owners are still haunting the house, it convinces her there must be a way to see her mother again.

Theatre review: Saving Mozart

The Other Palace's latest attempt to come up with the next big historical pop musical to rival SIX takes us to 18th century Austria for Charli Eglinton's (book, music and lyrics) Saving Mozart. Eglinton's idea is that it was the women in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's (Jack Chambers) life who did the saving (of his memory, at least; given he died penniless aged 35 they didn't do the best job of saving Mozart himself.) With their father Leopold (Douglas Hansell) essentially seeing them as a way to money and influence, young Wolfgang (Carla Lopez Corpas, alternating with Izzie Monk) and his older sister Nannerl (Aimie Atkinson) are toured around the Royal courts of Europe as musical prodigies. But Leopold's treatment of Nannerl is even more cynical than it first appears: Once she's served her purpose in pushing Wolfgang to greatness, she's to be ditched from the act and married off.

Theatre review: Pretty Woman

It's the film that made a generation of little girls write "crack whore" in their "what I want to be when I grow up" essays, so it was only a matter of time before Pretty Woman got turned into a musical. The movie's enduring popularity means that there was always going to be a ready-made audience for it, so the question was going to be whether the creatives would put in much effort, or just figure that the cash will roll in whatever the reviews say. One positive sign is that instead of the unholy union of jukebox musical and film adaptation (neither of which are necessarily a problem on their own, but together...) we've got original songs by, of all people, Bryan Adams and his long-time songwriting partner Jim Vallance. On the other hand neither of them had written for musical theatre before, which has a tendency to go one of two ways.

Theatre review: SIX

The historical musical continues to be a phenomenon in the wake of Hamilton, and the good news is that however much reviewers (including me) like to compare the latest ones to the Broadway juggernaut, none of the British entries have really used Lin-Manuel Miranda as a template, each instead taking its own eccentric path. SIX is the first of the current crop to be sent back across the Atlantic – a Chicago production in the spring will be hoping to carry on to New York – and it’s hard to think of a piece of English history that’d be an easier sell to American audiences than the six wives of Henry VIII. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’ musical played a short run at the Arts Theatre in the autumn, when I was too busy to catch it, but it’s now returned there after a national tour, and is already booking a year in advance. And it’s not hard to see why, as the publicity campaign must be getting help from enough enthusiastic word of mouth to fill the small theatre for a while.

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.