Theatre review: Beautiful Little Fool

I'm pretty convinced we're only a few years away from the point where all the new work ever produced will be some kind of adaptation of The Great Gatsby, but until then Hannah Corneau (music and lyrics) and Mona Mansour (book) give us its writer, and the woman whose contribution to it we're led to consider might be larger than we thought. F. Scott (David Hunter) and Zelda Fitzgerald (Amy Parker) were known for their hard-drinking party lifestyle and both died young - the story is narrated by their daughter Scottie (Lauren Ward,) who's just turned 48 and thereby outlived both her parents. At an archive dedicated to their work Scottie goes through records, diary entries and letters that bring her parents back to life and reveal the side of them she had never quite realised was there under the self-obsessed façades and histrionics.

Theatre review: Dear Evan Hansen

Following The Book of Mormon and Hamilton as the hottest ticket on Broadway, it's inevitable that Steven Levenson (book,) Benj Pasek & Justin Paul's (music and lyrics) Dear Evan Hansen would make its way to the West End sooner rather than later, but there was always a question mark over whether this particular show would connect in the same way with a British audience. I can see how it might share the fate of the painfully earnest Rent, which has a dedicated UK fan base and has had a couple of decent runs here but never became what you might call an equivalent phenomenon. I have heard some Marmite responses since Michael Greif's production opened at the Noël Coward, but thanks to the way the world's been changed by the Internet - and the way it affects the musical's story - Evan Hansen's story could end up striking a chord everywhere.