Theatre review: This Bitter Earth

Harrison David Rivers' two-hander This Bitter Earth follows an interracial American gay couple whose relationship is punctuated by significant events in the country's ongoing violent race relations - mostly the high-profile killings of unarmed black people by the police. They meet at a protest when Neil (Alexander Lincoln,) who is white and from a wealthy family, recites a poem by the little-known black, queer poet Essex Hemphill. It just so happens that Hemphill is a specialist subject for Jesse (Omari Douglas,) a black writer from a less privileged background, who's writing a thesis about him at the time and can mouth the poem along by heart. The coincidence makes him seek out the other man and they begin a relationship that lasts several years and sees them move in together before eventually leaving New York for Minnesota, where Jesse has got a teaching job.

Theatre review: The Invention of Love

Crazy to think Tom Stoppard has spent an entire career writing plays about human beings, despite all the evidence suggesting he's never met one. In fact despite having enjoyed some of his work it may be time to add him to my very short list of creatives I've given enough chances to for one lifetime, as The Invention of Love is based around a premise that should be effortlessly moving, but ends up far too interested in deconstructing Catullus to get round to deconstructing emotions: Simon Russell Beale plays A E Housman, the Victorian poet and classicist who, by the time of his death, seems to have decided that the two pursuits don't really go together, as one requires rules, facts and logic to be set aside in favour of emotional truth, while the other involves picking apart every comma in the name of strict accuracy.

Theatre review: Sister Act

I've so far managed to avoid every incarnation of Sister Act The Musical that's run in London, not out of any particular animosity towards it, just because the idea's never really grabbed my interest. I was quite happy to skip the latest production as well, which was originally due to run exactly two years ago, then got postponed again last year. Due to star the source film's leading lady Whoopi Goldberg, it was a hot ticket but I was put off by the idea of the venue. Two years and two reschedules later, Goldberg was no longer available, but to be honest Beverley Knight was a bigger draw for me personally; she leads a cast of big names that include Jennifer Saunders, Keala Settle, Clive Rowe, Lesley Joseph and Lizzie Bea. Alan Menken (music,) Glenn Slater (lyrics,) Bill & Cheri Steinkellner (book) and Douglas Carter Beane's (additional material) musical moves the film's story to 1977, to give the songs disco and Motown influences.

Theatre review:Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

The Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, QC, MD, P.I. and Tim Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was originally conceived as a show for schools but gradually grew, until in the 1990s it was finally fully reinvented as a big-budget West End behemoth – so successfully that the same Steven Pimlott production has kept returning to the stage for nearly thirty years. Laurence Connor’s is the first new take on the show since then, although the story – from an otherwise fairly obscure Genesis passage – remains familiar: Jacob has twelve sons, of whom Joseph is the clear favourite and showered with gifts, because Jacob liked Joseph’s mum more than the other sons’ mums. Joseph has the ability to interpret dreams but not the ability to read a room, so he cheerfully tells his already-alienated brothers that this unequal treatment is just the start, and he’s had a premonition that some day they’ll all fall at his feet.

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: Xanadu

You'd imagine an '80s-themed jukebox musical based on a notorious Olivia Newton-John movie about a roller-disco to be very, very camp. But actually Douglas Carter Beane's 2007 stage version of Xanadu will surprise you. By being so much camper than you'd ever expected. "Wow, this is like children's theatre for 40-year-old gay people!" is how one of the characters describes it: It's Venice Beach, California in 1980, and street artist Sonny (Samuel Edwards) has drawn a chalk picture of (seven of) the nine muses on a wall, but isn't quite happy with it. To help him with inspiration, the real leader of the ancient Greek muses, Clio (Carly Anderson,) descends from Olympus. But instead of helping him with his art, together they hatch a plan to create the ultimate expression of all arts, from music to dance to epic poetry: A roller-disco in an abandoned theatre called the Xanadu.