Stage-to-screen review: My Beautiful Laundrette

Leicester's Curve Theatre continues to dip into its archive recordings to provide online content and fundraise during lockdown; latest is last year's My Beautiful Laundrette, adapted by Hanif Kureishi from his own screenplay. It's something of a rollercoaster ride during the early eighties for an extended Pakistani-British family, rising above the general wave of unemployment by building a small business empire (albeit one that isn't quite as legal and respectable as it initially appears) while at the same time being regularly reminded that they're still viewed by many as an underclass. It's seen through the eyes of Omar (Omar Malik) and his complicated relationship with old schoold friend Johnny (Jonny Fines, who seems pretty spot-on casting for a play about laundry, considering he's always struck me as looking literally very clean, but metaphorically a bit dirty.)

Theatre review: Altar Boyz

After a successful off-Broadway run, Kevin Del Aguila, Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker's boyband spoof Altar Boyz finally debuts in the UK, in a production running for just two weeks in Greenwich. Maybe this low-key run is just testing the waters as there's nothing half-baked about Steven Dexter's production, and the show's remarkably silly sense of humour seems to me a good fit for this side of the pond. Altar Boyz takes the form of a concert, the final night of a tour by the titular Catholic boyband. Matthew (Liam Doyle) is the leader, Mark (Jonny Fines) the closeted pretty-boy, Luke (Jamie-Ray Hartshorne) the "streetwise" one, Juan (Faisal Khodabukus) the latin lover-boy with a tragic backstory, and Abraham (Alex Jordan-Mills) is Jewish, but is in the band because he happened to be in the room when God (the recorded voice of Luke Kempner, doing an impression of The X Factor's Peter Dickson,) gave them their calling.

Theatre review: LIFT

Craig Adams & Ian Watson's new musical LIFT assembles a pretty great cast to tell what isn't quite a story, but a series of scenes and songs that include a lot of good moments. A Busker (George Maguire) is at Covent Garden tube station, reading the letter his ex-girlfriend dumped him with and wondering if he should talk to the girl he sees on the same carriage every morning. The lift takes 54 seconds to get to the surface, and as he travels the Busker imagines the lives of the other people in there with him, and the various ways in which they might interact. A lesbian French Teacher (Julie Atherton) has been bought a lap dance as an ill-judged gift, and ends up treating the Lap Dancer (Cynthia Erivo) more like a counselor. The Lap Dancer herself is at ballet school by day, where she has a complicated relationship with her gay best friend, the Ballet Dancer (Jonny Fines.)