Theatre review:The Meat Kings! (Inc.) of Brooklyn Heights

The long-running annual Papatango playwrighting prize has been particularly peripatetic in the last couple of years, and I've pretty much continued to follow the winners around London's theatres, even as I still feel it tends, more often than not, to reward plays filled with abject misery. It can still prove worth keeping up with though, and while Hannah Doran's The Meat Kings Exclamation Mark Open Brackets Inc Full Stop Close Brackets of Brooklyn Heights goes to some very dark places, it does so with the energy and urgency of a thriller. Paula (Retired Lesbian Jackie Clune) runs the New York butcher's shop established by her Italian-American family a century earlier, but is facing financial difficulties they've never faced before thanks to a Whole Foods down the road cutting into her upscale clientèle. But she's still determined to provide the high quality service the family have always delivered.

Theatre review:Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812

The year's theatre starts for me, as it often seems to, at the Donald and Margot Warehouse, where Tim Sheader's first production as Artistic Director follows on from the tradition of big musicals he established in his time at the Open Air Theatre. I approached this one with a certain amount of trepidation as I've only intermittently got on with the work of off-Broadway royalty Dave Malloy's jarring musical style in the past, but Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 has been the composer's big breakout hit, and it receives its UK premiere here with an impressive cast. Based on a subplot from War and Peace, it sees wide-eyed young aristocrat Natasha (Chumisa Dornford-May) arrive in Moscow (or MscoW, as Leslie Travers' industrial set styles it,) where the family of her fiancé Andrey lives.

Theatre review: Legally Blonde

The Open Air Theatre launches its 2022 season with one of its trademarks, a hit Broadway/West End musical reinvented for the space; but both the choice of musical and the kind of reinvention feel like a big step forward for what can traditionally be an old-fashioned, tourist-courting venue. Laurence O'Keefe & Nell Benjamin (music & lyrics) and Heather Hach's (book) Legally Blonde is based on a novel by Amanda Brown, but more famously the Reece Witherspoon-starring film adaptation. Elle Woods (Courtney Bowman) is a wealthy Malibu girl who likes tiny dogs and the colour pink; from the start, Bowman's take on Elle is no dumb blonde, but neither has she done much to dispel the stereotype. She did graduate from UCLA, but she mainly seems to have gone there to join a sorority and nab herself a future husband.

Theatre review: The Pajama Game

The fun side of sexual harassment in the workplace comes to the Shaftesbury Theatre as Chichester's production of The Pajama Game transfers. In what is only the first in this year's major West End musicals about an industrial dispute in a factory, Sid (Michael Xavier) joins the Sleep Tite Pajama Company as factory superintendent, where he quickly gets on the wrong side of the workers and has to deal with one of the trade union representatives, Babe (Joanna Riding.) Despite their first meeting being a clash, and despite her being named after a sheep-pig, Sid falls for Babe, and although she protests otherwise initially, the feeling is mutual because this is a musical rom-com. As soon as they have both declared their love though, a strike over the factory workers' demands for a 7.5 cent pay rise threatens to break them up.