Theatre review: Hello Dolly!

Recently-upgraded Dame Imelda Staunton finally gets to take the title role in Jerry Herman (music & lyrics) and Michael Stewart's (book) Hello Dolly Exclamation Mark: Dominic Cooke's production is another holdover from 2020, delayed even further by the leading lady's prior commitment to try and elicit sympathy for the Queen having to give up her favourite yacht. In an unusually widow-heavy Broadway classic, Dolly Levi has dealt with the loss of her husband by throwing herself into matchmaking. But after several years she's decided she's finally ready to find a new match for herself - except the man she's decided on has already engaged her services to find him someone else. Scrooge-like Yonkers shopkeeper Horace Vandergelder (Andy Nyman) is the half-a-millionnaire she'd originally matched with New York milliner Irene Molloy (Jenna Russell.)

Stage-to-screen review: Romantics Anonymous

I've more or less consigned Emma Rice to the same "I'm just never going to see the appeal" box Samuel Beckett has been sitting in, for more or less the exact opposite reasons, for years. But anything resembling live theatre is still a rarity, and Romantics Anonymous is a show that's inspired a lot of love among people whose opinion I consider worth listening to. It debuted at the Swanamaker at the tail end of Rice's notorious run at Shakespeare's Globe, and after playing at the Bristol Old Vic earlier this year it's now returned there to play to an empty theatre with the live performances streamed to computers (the platform they use, TicketCo, turns out to also have an app that works on my TV so that was better than expected.) Based on Les Émotifs Anonymes by Jean-Pierre Améris and Philippe Blasband, Rice (book,) Michael Kooman (music) and Christopher Dimond's (lyrics) musical plays out the familiar French movie trope of quirky misfits finding love.

Theatre review: Rutherford and Son

If it seems like Roger Allam has been building up to playing King Lear for a few years now then Rutherford and Son absolutely feels part of that progression. Although while there’s echoes of Lear in Githa Sowerby’s dictatorial patriarch, even more so he feels like a precursor to Bernarda Alba – trapping his children in dead-end lives for self-destructive reasons of his own – with a story that even suggests Mother Courage in terms of what happens to his legacy. Rutherford owns and runs the Tyneside glassworks founded by his father, which remains the principle employer in his small town. He commands fierce loyalty from his workers, but at home it’s only bullying and intimidation that’s made his children obey him all their lives. For the last few years the glassworks has been operating at a slight loss, and oldest son John (Sam Troughton) has returned after some time in London with a new wife, child, and a formula he believes could cut down production costs significantly and turn around the company’s fortunes.

Theatre review: A Taste of Honey

A seminal kitchen sink play, Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey gets revived by Bijan Sheibani at the Lyttelton. At the tail end of the 1950s Helen (Lesley Sharp) arrives at the small, grubby Salford flat she's rented, accompanied by her teenage daughter Josephine (Kate O'Flynn.) It's far from the first time they've moved; the alcoholic Helen's past is full of failed love affairs and every time one sours she's moved to a new town, dragging her daughter with her. But this time Helen's found a wealthy younger man she won't let slip through her fingers - when the spivvy Peter (Dean Lennox Kelly) proposes, she's soon married and moved in with him, leaving Jo to deal with a marriage proposal of her own: She knows sailor Jimmie (Eric Kofi Abrefa) is only really after one thing but she doesn't care. Soon he's back at sea, and she's alone and pregnant.

Theatre review: The Lightning Child

Euripides' The Bacchae features an antagonist threatened by sexuality, particularly that of women, whose plan to defeat this perceived threat involves him dressing as a woman himself. Throw in that popular Greek tragedy mainstay, the hermaphrodite seer Teiresias (Bette Bourne,) and it's not hard to see why it might have something to say to transgender people to this day, and be ripe for adaptation. Hence The Lightning Child, the final new premiere of the season at Shakespeare's Globe, and the latest collaboration between Ché Walker (book and lyrics) and Arthur Darvill (music and lyrics.) A disco-infused musical adaptation of the gory classic, The Lightning Child opens with Neil Armstrong (Harry Hepple) being cautioned by his wife that his planned mission is hubristic. Armstrong, of course, goes anyway, and in a scene left out of the history books encounters the man in the Moon, aka the Ladyboy Herald (Jonathan Chambers.) An acolyte of Dionysus, the Herald tells the astronaut of another case of hubris that upset the god.

Theatre review: Macbeth (Shakespeare's Globe)

Like many an actor, Eve Best wants to branch out into directing, and following her Beatrice at Shakespeare's Globe she'd had discussions about making that the venue for her directing debut. Apparently she'd imagined being given one of the comedies so when Dominic Dromgoole offered her Macbeth it was a surprise, but one she's embraced - although her interest in staging something lighter in the space is always apparent. It's only three years since the Globe staged Macbeth, in Lucy Bailey's production that embraced the play's dark magic to the point of revealing it as a Faustian story, complete with design straight out of Dante's Inferno. With that in recent memory it's wise of Best to go in a different direction, and she certainly does, making this one of the lightest takes on the play you're likely to see in a long while, embracing the surprisingly frequent opportunities for comedy, and she succeeds just about as well as it's possible to with this interpretation - though it's one with inherent problems.

Theatre review: Privates on Parade

Regular readers of this blog (both of them) will probably know not to expect too much in the way of sensible reviewing from my musings on Privates on Parade at the Noël Coward. Any poor unfortunates who've googled their way here in the hope of figuring out whether the show's worth seeing, I hope you enjoy disappointment, because here you go: The reason, of course, is that Privates on Parade is among other things notorious for how literally its title should be taken with regard to male nudity. And once it was announced that Big Favourite Round These Parts Sam Swainsbury would be in the cast, along with the not unwelcome additions of Joseph Timms and Harry Hepple, I basically spent the couple of months leading up to the show like a toddler who'd overdosed on Sunny Delight. Look, I'm just very, very sexually frustrated, OK? So the fact that, although the nudity remains, it's rather more coy than expected about flashing actual front bottoms, was a bit of a disappointment (people who saw previews tell me things were a bit more clearly on display then; maybe the West End audience clutched their pearls a bit too hard and it was toned down?)

Theatre Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Open Air Theatre)

Alternating with Ragtime at Regent's Park is a play that's almost synonymous with the open air venue, although this take on A Midsummer Night's Dream is far from a frothy, family picnic affair. Taking his cue from the memoirs of Mikey Walsh, who provides the programme notes, Matthew Dunster's production is a Big Fat Gypsy Dream, relocating the action to a caravan site that looks set to be flattened to make way for a Westfield-style shopping centre. In a subculture where arranged marriages still exist, Hermia (Hayley Gallivan) loves Lysander (Tom Padley) but her father wants her to marry Demetrius (Kingsley Ben Adir.) If she doesn't comply, her father has asked the gypsy king Theseus, himself about to get married, to exact a harsh punishment. Hermia flees with Lysander, but her friend Helena (Rebecca Oldfield) is in unrequited love with Demetrius, and they follow the pair into the woods - where they get caught up in the magical games of the fairies who live there.

Theatre review: Ragtime

This year the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park have opted to run just two shows in repertory over the summer, rather than their usual season of four. Ragtime, the 1996 musical adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's novel with book by Terrence McNally, music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, is a story of formative years in modern American culture, following three families from different backgrounds, whose stories will intertwine over the early years of the 20th Century: A well-off white family whose Father (David Birrell) goes off on a Polar expedition only to find some surprising changes at home when he returns; an unmarried black couple with a newborn baby; and a widowed Jewish immigrant (John Marquez) and his daughter. Through them we see an America that's still in the grip of institutional prejudice, but in which the voices calling for civil rights are getting louder.