Stage-to-screen review: The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Intended as Southwark Playhouse's first big show of 2021, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice went the way of... everything else in recent months, although Richard Hough (book and lyrics) and Ben Morales Frost's (music and orchestrations) musical was among the luckier ones, in that the production got to finish rehearsals and actually perform in The Large. To no live audience, of course, but for a recording that's streaming "as-live" on the stream.theatre platform for the next few weeks. It's based on the Goethe poem that is of course best-known for its adaptation in Disney^TM's Fantasia©, and little suggestions of Paul Dukas' music do find their way into Morales Frost's compositions. But this is essentially a new treatment of the material, starting with a new story that expands on Goethe's simple fable about not trying to run before you can walk.

Theatre review: Miss Littlewood

The influential theatre director and coat thief Joan Littlewood will always be associated with Stratford, so it seems inevitable that a new musical about her life would premiere there; but maybe there was some confusion about which Stratford, because instead of East London Miss Littlewood has turned up in the West Midlands, opening at the RSC. Sam Kenyon's musical sees Joan Littlewood (Clare Burt) narrate her own life, taking control of the story in a way that will prove characteristic of the way she worked. The show's conceit is that a further six actors also play her in various stages of her life, showing her getting older, but also suggesting constant reinvention - the younger Joans all represent different aspects of her personality, the older ones an attempt to tie them all together.

Theatre review: The Scottsboro Boys

One of the last Kander and Ebb musicals gets its UK premiere at the Young Vic, with Broadway legend Susan Stroman reprising her role as director and choreographer (and bringing some of the original cast with her.) The people behind a much-loved musical charting the rise of the Nazis aren't afraid of a difficult subject and so The Scottsboro Boys unearths an unpleasant chapter in America's checkered civil rights history. Nine young black men passing through Scottsboro, Alabama on the train, end up spending much of the 1930s behind bars when, seemingly out of nowhere, they find themselves accused of the rape of two white women. Pressure from the North and funds from the Communist party result in countless retrials but the total lack of evidence, and even one of their accusers confessing that her testimony was made up, don't stop jury after jury finding them guilty.