Theatre review: Grey Gardens

One of my last shows of 2015 was The Dazzle, a story based on a real-life pair of wealthy, reclusive hoarders, and I kick off 2016 with another one, this time in musical form. Edith Bouvier Beale was the aunt of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who in the 1970s found notoriety when she and her daughter were found living in a dilapidated mansion filled with junk and cats. Named after the house where the two holed themselves up for decades, Doug Wright (book,) Scott Frankel (music) and Michael Korie's (lyrics) Grey Gardens looks at how a family of Hamptons socialites turned into crazy cat ladies, by taking us back to 1941: Edith (Jenna Russell) is organising an engagement party for her daughter Little Edie (Rachel Anne Rayham,) and putting herself at the centre of it with a plan to perform a number of songs. Little Edie has landed a Kennedy of her own, JFK's older brother Joseph Jr* (Aaron Sidwell,) but when her mother realises she'll end up alone, she sabotages the engagement.

Theatre review: Quasimodo

Quasimodo means "unfinished," which is ironic because this is how Lionel Bart left his musical adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame on his death, despite having worked on it for decades. As a result, apart from the odd concert performance, the show remained unseen until Robert Chevara's production at the King's Head. The writer of Oliver! may have swapped Dickens' London for Victor Hugo's Paris, but there's still an unmistakeable cockernee sound to the songs, especially the ensemble numbers. Abandoned by his mother as a baby, the physically deformed Quasimodo is taken in by Archdeacon Frollo (James Wolstenholme.) Given the job of bell-ringer at Notre Dame Cathedral, and making his home in the bell tower as well, by the time he's grown up Quasimodo (Steven Webb) is deaf in addition to his twisted bones and scars.