Theatre review: Here We Are

Stephen Sondheim's final completed musical makes its UK debut at the National with a transfer of Joe Mantello's original off-Broadway production, although "completed" might be a bit of a stretch: The composer had given permission for this version to be staged, but mainly because he was aware he was unlikely to live to write a final version. So we end up with a show whose music and lyrics are very recognisably Sondheim, but which doesn't actually have that many songs mixed into David Ives' book. Inspired by two films by the avant-garde filmmaker Luis Buñuel, Here We Are looks at first to be a fairly straightforward social satire of the criminally rich: Leo (Rory Kinnear) and Marianne Brink (Jane Krakowski) are surprised by a visit from Marianne's sister Fritz (Chumisa Dornford-May.)

Theatre review: As You Like It (@sohoplace)

Back to @sohoplace Theatre, the venue with a name so current it has a pretty solid strategy in place for the Y2K bug, and it gets its first Shakespeare production in Josie Rourke's autumnal As You Like It. Opening with a song from Martha Plimpton's Jaques, it sets the tone for a production that largely reflects that character's melancholy worldview. Rosalind (Leah Harvey) and her cousin Celia (Rose Ayling-Ellis) leave the court they grew up in after a coup by Celia's father, and go to the forest of Arden in search of Rosalind's father, the banished rightful Duke. But before they leave Rosalind's just had time to meet and fall in love at first sight with Orlando (Alfred Enoch,) a dispossessed noble who's also just been banished. By the time they meet up again in the forest Rosalind has disguised herself as a man, and instead of coming clean comes up with a convoluted plan to test his love, because while this may be my favourite Shakespeare comedy honestly he's just throwing plots at the stage to see what sticks.

Theatre review: Sweat

On past experience, a play having won the Pulitzer isn’t much of a guarantee that I’m going to like it, if anything the opposite; identifying a hot-button topic to write about often seems to be enough to win regardless of execution. Lynn Nottage is the first woman to have won the theatre prize twice, and the Donald and Margot Warehouse gets the UK premiere of the latest, Sweat. Nottage certainly identified her hot-button topic early: She started research in 2011, for a play which in part feels like an explanation for why parts of America were so vulnerable to the rise of Trump. The good news is that, in Lynette Linton’s production, the execution lives up to the idea. Nottage was inspired by the statistic that Reading, Pennsylvania, a relatively comfortable industrial city in the 20th century, was now the poorest place in America. The shift came when the textile mill that was the area’s primary employer significantly downsized and outsourced its work, leaving people who’d always felt comfortable in their job security suddenly unemployed.

Theatre review: Other Desert Cities

A few years ago the Old Vic was reconfigured in the round for a production of The Norman Conquests that proved a big hit, followed by some other shows memorable for... other reasons. This configuration has been brought back for Dame Kev's final season in charge of the venue, beginning with the UK premiere of a hit American play, Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities. The setting is Palm Springs on Christmas Eve 2003, with 9/11 and the Iraq War still feeling very new. But a war that still haunts the family of Republican politician Lyman Wyeth (Peter Egan, from the 1980s) is Vietnam: Their oldest son became notorious in the '70s when, at the age of 20, he bombed an army recruitment office in protest at the war, accidentally killing a man, and subsequently committed suicide.