Theatre review: Cats

T.S. Eliot is probably best known for The Waste Land, but for a true vision of apocalyptic despair you need only look at the stage version of his book of children's poetry Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. It is of course his famous collaboration with His Exalted Britannic Excellency, Master of all he Surveys, The Right Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, KC, MD, P.I, Mother of Dragons, FSB, which Eliot agreed to primarily because he was much too dead at the time to say no. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but Richard Stilgoe was in Countdown's Dictionary Corner quite a lot so he was the next obvious choice to provide additional lyrics for the show's opening, with "Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats" giving a framework.

Stage-to-screen review: Dick Whittington(National Theatre)

British theatres' biggest annual earner, the Christmas pantomime, attempted a limited return in those areas that were allowed to, before everything got promptly shut down again (it's OK though, the Culture Secretary and Prince William had already been very publicly allowed to take their families to one, so it's not like anyone who matters was being excluded.) In what is hopefully a one-off attempt to make up for something people were missing out on elsewhere, the National Theatre were one of the venues putting on a panto, with an updated version of a Jude Christian and Cariad Lloyd script for Dick Whittington first seen at the Lyric Hammersmith two years ago. When this too was put on ice, they put Ned Bennett's new production up on YouTube for a few days over Christmas (available for free internationally, which raises the possibility of people all over the world watching and being baffled by the British concept of wholesome family entertainment consisting predominantly of dick jokes.)

Theatre review: & Juliet

Given the amount of terrible shows I've seen over the years when the signs really should have been there, regular readers of this blog might both have surmised that FOMO has a certain amount of influence on what theatre I book. So an expensive West End show that, despite a cast and creatives I like, I don't feel compelled to spend money on, comes as a bit of a relief. The idea of a jukebox musical of the songs of Max Martin - songwriter for a seemingly endless list of artists that includes the Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry, Broccoli Spears, P!nk and Bon Jovi - built around an alternate ending for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet seemed perfectly skippable when it premiered last year. Except, proving that my instincts can be an absolute disaster in what I avoid as well as what I see, David West Read's & Juliet got rave reviews both from offical critics and, more importantly, theatre Twitter, and started to sound very much like my kind of thing.

Theatre review: Breakfast at Tiffany's

This Christmas the RSC will be using a CGI projection to play Ariel in The Tempest, but if you can't wait that long to see a barely-humanoid homunculus on stage there's always Pixie Lott's performance as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. In a weird coincidence, Nikolai Foster's touring production sets down in London for a few weeks at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, the same venue where a completely different adaptation of Truman Capote's novella (starring Anna Friel, like I just got home, Anna Friel) played only seven years ago. Without looking it up, I remember that as being a decent commercial if not particularly critical success, so I was a bit surprised to see it given another go with an untested "name" in the lead (there seems to be quite the rotating cast of actresses sharing the role for the regional dates, but just Lott for London.) An unnamed narrator whom Holly nicknames "Fred" (Matt Barber) tells the story of how, while much of America was focused on Europe and the Second World War, he moved to New York for the first time to try and make it as a writer.

Theatre review: The Lorax

The colourful worlds and wacky rhymes of Dr. Seuss would make him seem a natural fit for stage adaptation, but his books are so short that expanding his stories to make a full-length show can't be easy without losing a lot of their charm. David Greig, though, has succeeded in giving new life to one of the writer's most heartfelt stories, as he brings a musical version of The Lorax to the Old Vic. In this expanded version of the environmental fable, the Once-ler (Simon Paisley Day) is a dreamer who travels the world hoping and failing to invent something amazing, until he stumbles upon a forest of colourful Truffula trees, that produce an incredibly soft and fluffy wool. Knitting it into a shapeless thing he calls a thneed, it becomes a must-have accessory despite nobody being quite sure what it is. He builds a thneed factory and a town supported by its economy, ignoring the warnings of the Lorax (voiced by Simon Lipkin,) a woodland creature responsible for the trees and worried about what'll happen when the Once-ler starts chopping them down.

Theatre review: Bakkhai

The second full-scale show in the Almeida's Greek season goes for the opposite aesthetic to the first: Where Robert Icke's Oresteia not only brought Aeschylus into the 21st century cosmetically but also in a radical reworking of the text, James Macdonald brings back some of the original staging conventions of ancient Greece, specifically with regards to casting. All the named roles are played by the same three actors, while the chorus - who aren't quite as authentic in that they're played by real women - speak or sing their lines in unison. The former convention leads to a bit of gender-bending, which is appropriate enough when the play is Euripides' Bakkhai. Dionysus (Ben Whishaw,) best-known as the god of wine and revelry, is a fairly new addition to the pantheon of Olympus, in fact when we meet him much of his mortal mother's family are still alive, and it's they who will bear the brunt of the new god's wrath when they don't show him due respect.