Theatre review: Dracula (Noël Coward Theatre)

After an incredibly high-profile couple of years on the Wicked promotional tour that blurred the lines between press junket and mental breakdown, Cynthia Erivo returns to the West End to hold space with the undead. Kip Williams adapts Bram Stoker's Dracula into a one-woman show although in reality, apart from a couple of added fucks near the end, this text is more abridgement than adaptation: Keeping the epistolary form of the novel, Erivo narrates the story of an ancient Romanian vampire who moves to the UK to build up his real estate portfolio and/or army of the damned. On stage she predominantly plays the three rather dull narrators, Jonathan Harker, the lawyer who first visits Dracula's castle and nearly dies there, Jonathan's fiancée Mina, whose best friend Lucy becomes the vampire's victim, and Dr Seward, who's also there.

Theatre review: Henry IV (Donmar Warehouse)

Following 2012's Julius Caesar, which saw the inmates of a women's prison perform the play but find some of its themes too close to home, for the Donmar's 2014 Shakespeare production they've returned to Phyllida Lloyd's concept to see the prisoners try again. Lloyd has now said she enviasages these all-female Shakeaspeares as a trilogy; the third play hasn't been revealed yet but the middle installment is a merging of the Henry IV plays. Although in practice it's a shortened version of Part 1, with Part 2 represented by its two most iconic scenes, plus a third that mops up some plot points. So this is largely the story of Prince Hal (Clare Dunne,) his life of petty crime and carousing with drunken knight Falstaff (Ashley McGuire,) and the first major indication that he's more of a formidable figure than he chooses to present: An uprising against his father, led by the charismatic Hotspur (Jade Anouka,) is crushed partly due to Hal's unexpected transformation into a fighting machine.

Theatre review: Dessa Rose

Based on a novel by a man named Lear Sherley Anne Williams, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty's musical Dessa Rose gets its European premiere by bringing some big voices into the small space of Trafalgar Studio 2. Set in America's Deep South in 1846, it follows the fractious, unlikely friendship between two women, one black, one white. Dessa Rose (Cynthia Erivo) is a pregnant, teenage slave who, when the father of her child is killed, violently rebels. Condemned to be executed once the baby's born she has no intention of sticking around her cell that long. Ruth (Cassidy Janson) is the lonely wife of a plantation owner (John Addison) whose lengthy business trips culminated in him never returning. Raised by a slave who was the only person she ever loved, Ruth is sympathetic to escaped slaves, and doesn't ask many questions if a group of black people turns up on her land.

Theatre review: I Can't Sing!

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: No idea when the producers are going to risk letting the critics in for this one.

All the press about new musical I Can't Sing! has focused on the fact that it's got songs by Glen Ponder from Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge. OK, so strictly speaking none of the press has been about that - they seem to be more interested in the fact that it's a show about The X Factor and has a book by Harry Hill. But it's also true that Steve Brown, who was better known in the mid-nineties as the sidekick whose house band had a different name every week, has brought his musical Savoir Faire to composing the show's songs. All the signs building up to I Can't Sing! were less than promising, from the early previews cancelled due to technical issues to the most worrying fact of all - that this is an official X Factor spin-off, fully authorised and approved by Simon Cowell. To be honest I was planning on skipping this one, but the casting of Nigel Harman as Simon meant my sister wanted to see it as a late Christmas present.

Theatre review: The Color (sic) Purple

Another Broadway musical that shares a title and subject matter with a famous film, except this time the two actually do come from the same source, Alice Walker's novel The Color (sic) Purple. Spanning several decades of the 20th century it first introduces its heroine Celie (Cynthia Erivo) in 1914 at the age of 14, already pregnant for the second time as a result of being raped by her stepfather, both children taken away to mysterious ends. She's soon married off to the tyrannical widower Mister (Christopher Colquhoun,) mainly to raise his kids. Celie is a mousy creature whose only experience of how women should behave to men is cowering obedience, so behaves accordingly to the fearsome Mister, who soon bans her from ever again contacting her beloved sister Nettie (Abiona Omonua.) But over the years she meets other women with a much more independent attitude, and over the years she blossoms.

Theatre review: LIFT

Craig Adams & Ian Watson's new musical LIFT assembles a pretty great cast to tell what isn't quite a story, but a series of scenes and songs that include a lot of good moments. A Busker (George Maguire) is at Covent Garden tube station, reading the letter his ex-girlfriend dumped him with and wondering if he should talk to the girl he sees on the same carriage every morning. The lift takes 54 seconds to get to the surface, and as he travels the Busker imagines the lives of the other people in there with him, and the various ways in which they might interact. A lesbian French Teacher (Julie Atherton) has been bought a lap dance as an ill-judged gift, and ends up treating the Lap Dancer (Cynthia Erivo) more like a counselor. The Lap Dancer herself is at ballet school by day, where she has a complicated relationship with her gay best friend, the Ballet Dancer (Jonny Fines.)