Theatre review: Mrs Warren's Profession

I don't know that I need to consign Bernard Shaw to the same bin I keep Samuel Beckett in, and just avoid his plays entirely, but I do think I should at least be a lot more selective about what revivals of his I book: I can't particularly argue with the general opinion that his themes have stood the test of time, but for the most part the dry style of the plays he expressed them in keep me at best at a distance, at worst bored. The attraction for Dominic Cooke's production of Mrs Warren's Profession was Imelda Staunton taking on the titular businesswoman, Kitty Warren, whose work has kept her moving around Europe most of her life. As a result she has never spent a great deal of time with her daughter Vivie, who got sent to various private schools in England and has just graduated from Cambridge.

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.)

TV review: Talking Heads - A Lady of Letters /An Ordinary Woman / Soldiering On

I can't realistically brand the new Talking Heads as "stage-to-screen" since they originated on TV in the first place; but Alan Bennett's beloved '80s and '90s monologues have occasionally been produced on stage as well, and this new lockdown version corralled by Bennett's regular collaborator Nicholas Hytner features a new collection of current and future dames who are mostly stage regulars, and some big theatre names directing. So I think we can call them stagey enough to keep my blogging muscles exercised on. Monologues filmed on an existing set - the Eastenders complex - are a clever way of making socially-distanced TV without resorting to the ubiquitous Zoom calls, and while I agree that giving some out-of-work playwrights the job of creating new ones might have been a better way of supporting talent, there's nothing stopping the BBC from doing that as well, and if something's acclaimed as a modern classic it should be able to stand up to reinvention.

Theatre review: Follies

Follies is probably the best-known Stephen Sondheim musical I hadn’t yet seen, and the sheer scale of Dominic Cooke’s production at the National suggests why it’s a risky proposition for any smaller theatre to take on. Between 1918 and the early 1940s, Weismann’s Follies were a Broadway staple, but the story takes place in 1971, and the theatre where they played is being demolished to make way for offices. On the building’s last night, Weismann invites the show’s former stars to the site for a farewell party and to reminisce about their time in the limelight. In Vicki Mortimer’s striking design the theatre is already half-demolished, and what remains of it is haunted by the ghosts of the characters’ younger selves, who recreate the routines from their heyday, and watch the people they’ll turn into in curiosity and sometimes horror.

Theatre review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

This year's big-name West End casting is getting into its stride now, and after her all-conquering Gypsy Imelda Staunton is one of the biggest; although, having long been a stage stalwart the amount of seasons Conleth Hill has managed to survive in Game of Thrones must have made him a draw to much of the audience as well. Add Luke Treadaway and you've got a high-powered cast for James Macdonald's revival of a 20th century American classic. Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is the archetypal story of a toxic marriage imploding but, as slowly becomes apparent over one very long night, the situation is even more twisted than it initially appears. George (Hill) is a History lecturer at a small East Coast university, and as his wife Martha (Staunton) is the daughter of the all-powerful college president, it might be expected that he'd have easily advanced in his career.

Theatre review: Gypsy

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: This Chichester transfer hasn't opened to London critics yet.

Something of an origin story for Gypsy Rose Lee, the world's most famous striptease artist, Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim's Gypsy is one of those perennial Broadway classics that doesn't get revived quite as often in the West End. Lara Pulver plays Louise Hovick, who would grow up to become the infamous title character, but the undoubted focus of the show is the pushiest of all pushy stage mothers, Momma Rose (Future Dame Imelda Staunton.) Rose tours around the US with a vaudeville show led by youngest daughter June (Gemma Sutton,) trading on a cutesy child act well into her teens. With the movies making vaudeville a thing of the past, June becomes disillusioned as the audiences dry up and elopes with one of her backing singers, Tulsa (Dan Burton.) The show can't possibly go on - unless you're Momma Rose and unwilling to admit defeat.

Theatre review: Good People

Class comedy is a particularly British genre but there's an American variant as well, often puncturing the aspirational clichés of the American Dream. David Lindsay-Abaire's comedy-drama Good People opens with a woman who's far from living that dream, as Margie (Imelda Staunton) loses her minimum-wage job at a dollar store for being late one time too many. It's been the story of her life ever since she got pregnant in her teens and had a premature, brain-damaged baby. Today her daughter is grown up but still has the mind of a child, and problems arranging a carer have led to Margie losing one job after another. It seems a bleak setup but Margie is a fighter, and surrounded by friends with big mouths and questionable loyalties, her search for work is peppered with acidic one-liners. Especially when an old boyfriend returns to town and a couple of new options present themselves.

Theatre review: Circle Mirror Transformation

Although it's finished in the Royal Court's building itself, the Open Court season lives on via the venue's occasional Theatre Local strand, which has two offerings this year. The Rose Lipman Building is a community centre in Haggerston, which I'm reliably informed is the next area due to get gentrified. (Seems a bit lazy to me - I thought hipsters were supposed to seek out surprising new places to proclaim cool, not just move one Overground station down when they overflow from Dalston.) If the surroundings aren't (yet) that glamorous, a starry cast makes for a big draw instead to Annie Baker's unusual but addicitive Circle Mirror Transformation. The Jerwood Upstairs seating has been brought into a mirrored studio in the East London community centre, which stands in for a similar space in Vermont where hippyish Marty (Imelda Staunton) has convinced the centre to let her run a 6-week acting class for adults. The fact that she's only got four students, one of whom is her husband James (Danny Webb,) isn't going to dull her enthusiasm.

Theatre review: Sweeney Todd

Sometimes you can feel a lot better about yourself by spending some time with the very worst specimens of humanity. But enough about Vanessa, who's a big Stephen Sondheim fan and so got first dibs on my spare ticket for Sweeney Todd, now at the Adelphi in Jonathan Kent's production, originally seen in Chichester. Anthony Ward's multi-level set of metal staircases and curving walkways is an industrial Dante's Inferno in which *Michael Ball* can take centre stage as the vengeful barber, Benjamin Barker, who was transported to Australia because the corrupt Judge Turpin (John Bowe) wanted a shot at his wife. Changing his name to Sweeney Todd, Barker returns to his old Fleet Street premises above a pie shop, and plots bloody revenge on Turpin and his accomplice Beadle Bamford (Peter Polycarpou.) Meanwhile he tries to get back the daughter the judge raised, and is now trying to force into marriage.