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.

Theatre review: Animal

David (Christopher John-Slater) has cerebral palsy; he's also gay and as sexually frustrated as any man in his mid-20s who's physically unable to have a wank would be. We meet him on the phone to a sex shop's complaints line, after the sex toy he hoped would solve all his problems turned out to be too difficult to use. His best friend Mani (Harry Singh) suggests he bite the bullet and try to have sex with some actual men: After resisting for a long time David joins Grindr. Jon Bradfield's Animal, based on a story by Josh Hepple, is a witty and full-on look at people with disabilities as sexual beings with the same needs as anyone else, but with a different set of obstacles to satisfying them. Different rather than necessarily greater, as the issues and hangups of the able-bodied men he meets are at least as much of an obstacle to his happiness as anything to do with his condition.

Theatre review: Cruise

2021 was a game of two halves in theatre, with an almost even split between the time when shows were all online, and when they started to reopen to live audiences. It was something I reflected in my end of year review, skipping my usual Top Ten shows and instead offering two #1 shows, one live, one in the quickly-evolving digital format. Jack Holden's Cruise straddled both media, appearing first in a filmed version before being chosen as one of the shows to reopen the West End, in a socially distanced Duchess Theatre. Chez Partially Obstructed View the show got my top spot in the online category - I loved it and would have been happy to see it again, but the original live run came right after I'd seen it digitally, which was a bit too soon to revisit it. Now, helped in part by an Olivier nomination for Best New Play, Bronagh Lagan's production gets another short run, this time playing the Apollo at full capacity.

Stage-to-screen review: Cruise

Actors writing monologues for themselves to show off both their writing and acting skills is nothing new, and no doubt many more of them will be on their way soon, written in lockdown. Jack Holden has got in ahead of the pack by using one of the streaming platforms, stream.theatre, for the premiere of his play Cruise, but this particular "stage-to-screen" presentation is actually more like "screen-to-stage," as before the filmed version had been seen online a live production at the Duchess was announced. I'd already booked to watch online before I knew there was the option of seeing it live, but having now watched it I can see why producers might think it was worth a punt as one of the shows to reopen the West End with: Not only is it in the top flight of actor-written monologues, but after the huge TV success of It's A Sin this taps into a similar vein; not just in the subject matter of London's 1980s gay society being ravaged by AIDS, but also in balancing grief for the lives lost with a celebration of the hedonism that was its flipside.

Theatre review: Promises, Promises

The description on the website threatens "a triumph of 1960s sexual work-place politics" but also promises Burt Bacharach songs, making Southwark Playhouse's latest musical revival something of a mixed prospect. Bacharach provides the music, Hal David the lyrics and Neil Simon the book for Promises, Promises, the musical adaptation of Billy Wilder film The Apartment. Chuck Baxter (Gabriel Vick) has a junior role in a huge New York insurance firm, but doesn't realise he also has a secret weapon in the form of his tiny apartment, only a couple of blocks away from the office. Numerous married executives are having affairs with young women working at the company, and they talk Chuck into letting them use his apartment for sex, in return for putting in a good word for him at work. He finally gets his promotion when the personnel director Sheldrake (Paul Robinson, not the one from Neighbours) finds out and joins the club.

Theatre review: Girlfriends

The Howard Goodall season at the Union concludes with Girlfriends, about the Women's Auxiliary Air Force during World War II, with Goodall providing the music and collaborating with Richard Curtis and John Retallack on book and lyrics. The cast features 10 women, playing the girls who enlisted to help behind the scenes on RAF missions, starting with menial but crucial jobs like folding and packing parachutes, getting to know and have relationships with the airmen, not all of whom would be returning from their missions. It's largely an attempt to give an overview of the WAAFs' lives, but it does feature a fairly slight central story of best friends Amy (Corrinne Priest) and Lou (Perry Lambert.) The latter falls for dashing pilot Guy (Tom Sterling) but he only has eyes for her friend. Meanwhile Jas (Catriana Sandison,) whose family has been devastated by bombings, becomes disillusioned and questions the value of simply inflicting similar damage on German families.