Theatre review: Violet

It’s been an unusually musicals-heavy January, and with Jeanine Tesori’s Caroline, or Change currently transferred to the Playhouse, a few feet away her 1997 show (with book and lyrics by Brian Crawley) gets its UK debut at the Charing Cross Theatre. Another link to the composer’s more recent work is Fun Home’s leading lady Kaisa Hammarlund, looking significantly less like Sue Perkins as she takes the title role in Violet. Set in the Southern US states in 1964, Violet is a woman who was hit in the face with an axe by her father when she was 13 (probably by accident, although she doesn’t seem entirely convinced.) The resulting scar makes people recoil at the sight of her, and as the play opens she’s leaving her small North Carolina town and getting on a Greyhound bus to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to see a televangelist and faith healer she hopes can restore her looks.

Theatre review: Loserville

It's barely more than two years since James Bourne and Elliot Davis' amiable teen musical Loserville took an early bath at the Garrick, and already it's back to make its fringe debut. Even with a big budget behind it the show had the feel of being cobbled together from old yoghurt pots and sticky-back-plastic - perhaps one of the qualities that baffled many of the critics and made them take so violently against it - so this lo-fi aesthetic means it translates well to a smaller scale in Michael Burgen's production at the Union. It's set in 1971 and follows the template of every American High School movie, as Michael Dork (Luke Newton) and his friend Lucas (Jordan Fox) obsess over computers, and hope to find a way to send messages between them - what will eventually be known as email. It's only when geeky girl Holly (Holly-Anne Hull) joins the school though, that they start to make real progress.