Theatre review: Lizzie

Steven Cheslik-deMeyer, Tim Maner and Alan Stevens Hewitt's musical Lizzie premiered in 2009, but hasn't had a full UK production before. The Hope Mill's touring production, which lands at Southwark Playhouse Elephant, makes a pretty strong case for why there was no rush. A rock musical about notorious American axe-murderer Lizzie Borden (she was actually acquitted, but that's not really the part anyone remembers, and this version of her story assumes her guilt,) it's a strange, monotonous misfire that puts women centre-stage to reclaim their story (if it didn't long predate SIX it would seem like an obvious rip-off; of course that one has some actual female creatives...) The musical style is a kind of punky rock, although the vocal style is very much traditional American musical theatre, in the sense that any note not belted at the top of the actors' lungs is considered a note wasted.

Stage-to-screen review: Rent

The latest leg of my virtual tour around the UK's theatres takes me to Manchester and the Hope Mill, where Blake Patrick Anderson and Millie O'Connell must be feeling particularly hard done by 2020 - their run in Be More Chill, which for Anderson in particular had been expected to be a star-making performance, got cut short by the first lockdown, and when they reunited for Luke Sheppard's revival of Rent it only lasted five performances before Lockdown 2: Emetic Boogaloo scuppered that as well. Intended to be a mix of socially distanced audiences with simultaneous live-streaming, with Manchester still barred from live performance even after lockdown lifted they've had to rejig the plan, and stream a recording of the final live performance of Jonathan Larson's iconic, none-more-nineties musical.

Theatre review: SIX

The historical musical continues to be a phenomenon in the wake of Hamilton, and the good news is that however much reviewers (including me) like to compare the latest ones to the Broadway juggernaut, none of the British entries have really used Lin-Manuel Miranda as a template, each instead taking its own eccentric path. SIX is the first of the current crop to be sent back across the Atlantic – a Chicago production in the spring will be hoping to carry on to New York – and it’s hard to think of a piece of English history that’d be an easier sell to American audiences than the six wives of Henry VIII. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’ musical played a short run at the Arts Theatre in the autumn, when I was too busy to catch it, but it’s now returned there after a national tour, and is already booking a year in advance. And it’s not hard to see why, as the publicity campaign must be getting help from enough enthusiastic word of mouth to fill the small theatre for a while.