Theatre review: The Jonathan Larson Project

Jennifer Ashley Tepper's collection of lesser-known songs by Rent and tick, tick... BOOM! creator Jonathan Larson opens with a video medley of his best-known one, "Seasons of Love," being sung by different groups in different languages, and laments the fact that Larson never lived to see the effect his music had on people and musical theatre as a whole. Although as ever I have to wonder if there would have been anything like that much influence if he hadn't died young - his sudden death aged 35 the day before its first performance is so tied into the legend surrounding Rent and so perfectly fitting to its story that you have to wonder if it might have become a well-liked but obscure show without that unwanted publicity push, rather than a global phenomenon. Does The Jonathan Larson Project go any way to answer how much his success owes to the fact that it's posthumous?

Theatre review: Kathy & Stella Solve a Murder!

I've listened to many podcasts since the pandemic but they've never included the true crime ones that seem to be the most popular genre out there. Still, I know how big they are and can see some of the attraction of digging into cold cases for new clues - after all the mix of morbid curiosity and trying to find sense in the senseless has always been popular in other media, why not this one? I suppose this means a musical about a true crime podcast was only a matter of time, and Jon Brittain (book & lyrics) and Matthew Floyd Jones' (music & lyrics) Kathy & Stella Solve a Murder Exclamation Mark had been a big Edinburgh fringe hit before this London transfer. Kathy (Bronté Barbé) and Stella (Rebekah Hinds) grew up at a time when the hunt for a serial killer called the Hull Decapitator was dominating the city, and this fed into a love for all things gory that turned into a lifelong friendship.

Theatre review: Little Miss Sunshine

Michael Arndt, Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton's 2006 film Little Miss Sunshine was something of a sleeper hit despite being a downbeat comedy whose story takes some wild lurches in tone. Add the fact that it's essentially a road trip movie and it's fair to call it, at the very least, an eccentric choice for musical adaptation. James Lapine (book) and William Finn (music and lyrics) are the writers attempting it in a show that premiered in 2011, and finally comes to the UK in a production by Mehmet Ergen that starts a tour at the Arcola. Hoping to be crowned the titular junior beauty queen is 8-year-old Olive (Sophie Hartley-Booth, Lily Mae Denman or Evie Gibson,) who finds out that the girl who beat her in a local heat has been disqualified (for taking slimming pills) and she's now in the finals - with only a couple of days to make it from New Mexico to the pageant in California.

Theatre review: Out There

While Elliot Davis and James Bourne's first stage musical, Loserville, was unfairly maligned by the press, it's also true that it felt like it had gone too big too quickly with a West End run, and it did a lot better a couple of years later as a fringe show. So it's back to the Union Theatre (albeit in its new location across the road) and to director Michael Burgen that they return for the first outing of their sophomore effort. On the evidence so far, Davis & Bourne's niche is a British take on Americana: After the high school antics of Loserville we have the space race, dysfunctional fathers and sons, and a brash stranger finding redemption in a small town and saving it in the process, in Out There.