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.)