Theatre review: Avenue Q

After Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx (both contributing music and lyrics) and Jeff Whitty's (book) Avenue Q closed (for the third time) its original West End production, my favourite musical didn't stay away too long, with smaller-scale productions and tours meaning I and a group of similarly addicted friends could keep getting our live fix. It's been away for a few years though, meaning what I think is my fourteenth time seeing it live is in fact a 20th-anniversary production of it opening at the Noël Coward (the first show to play there after the theatre had been renamed.) Now at a reduced-capacity Shaftesbury Theatre while its upper level is being repaired, original director Jason Moore returns for a show that was always being tweaked to keep up with the times, and has now had a few extra rewrites to bring it into 2026.

Theatre review: King Lear (Wyndham's)

The received wisdom on Kenneth Branagh is that he's been living out a lifelong Laurence Olivier fixation by playing all the major roles he was most associated with, in performances that increasingly make the late Baron of Brighton seem like a master of gritty naturalism. This has inevitably built up to King Lear, and watching the production - which he also, of course, directs himself in - I have to wonder if this is really the case, or if in fact his role models are the 19th century actor-managers who gave their names to the West End theatres he plays in. Certainly the performances, not only his own but those he gets out of a cast largely made up of recent graduates, are the kind of thing you can imagine a Victorian audience being used to. The evening opens with a projection of the Earth seen from space, perhaps as a clue to where SirKenBran's performance will be visible from.

Theatre review: The Shark is Broken

Big name stars are one way of getting bums on seats, but less well-known actors can also fill a theatre if the subject matter is one enough people care about, like a beloved film. There's no shortage of outright stage adaptations of movies, musical or otherwise, but The Shark is Broken takes a different tack, by taking us behind the scenes of the movie credited with inventing the summer blockbuster - and as the cast end up discussing, a new kind of movie where you don't need famous actors to draw in the crowds. The movie is of course Steven Spielberg's Jaws, and the shark in question is a mechanical one; or actually three mechanical ones, all known as Bruce, and all prone to breaking down at the same time, driving the shoot over schedule and over budget, and leaving its three lead actors stuck in a small boat with little to do for days on end. Ian Shaw co-writes the play with Joseph Nixon, as well as playing his father Robert Shaw, the English classical actor who would be best remembered for his role as gruff shark hunter Quint.

Theatre review: Hamlet (Young Vic)

Returning to the London stage after a few years of fighting The Good Fight and, more dangerously, The Good Wife in America, Cush Jumbo comes to the Young Vic to play Hamlet for Greg Hersov, a director she worked with a lot in the past when he was Artistic Director of the Royal Exchange in Manchester. There's centuries' worth of tradition of women taking on the role, as well as black actors more recently, but I think she might be making history as the first woman of colour to do it in a major London production. There was never much doubt that she was up to the task, and she gives a powerful performance; but while Hamlet remains my favourite Shakespeare play on account of how infinitely flexible it is, it is of course performed very often because it's seen as such a pinnacle of an actor's career. And this was one of those productions that made me wonder - outside of wanting to give an actor their shot at the big role, what was the reason for staging this particular production, at this time?

Theatre review: Venice Preserved

I've seen Venice Preserved once before, but as that particular production was an incoherent car crash that was 50% sales presentation for a property development and 50% people desperately shouting "immersive!" at you while asking for money for four hours, it's probably easiest all round to just treat Thomas Otway's Restoration thriller as completely new to me. Prasanna Puwanarajah directs a mercifully coherent production, although how much sense the plot itself makes remains up for debate. Jaffeir (Michael Grady-Hall) is recruited by his best friend Pierre (Stephen Fewell) to join a bloody rebellion against the corrupt ruling class of Venice; both swear loyalty to the cause, but each also has a personal vendetta against some member of the senate which is the real clincher in wanting to bring them down. In Jaffeir's case, it's his senator father-in-law Priuli (Les Dennis,) who disapproved of the marriage and went out of his way to punish him for it.

Theatre review: The Mountaintop

This year's JMK award winner Roy Alexander Weise gets a more recently-staged play to direct than we usually see in this competition - or maybe seven years is in keeping with other productions, and the 2009 premiere of Katori Hall's Olivier-winning play has just stuck particularly well in my memory. The Mountaintop takes its title from the speech Dr Martin Luther King made in Memphis the day before his assassination, and takes place on that last night in his motel room. Needing to stay up to work on the next day's sermon, King (Gbolahan Obisesan) orders a coffee and gets more than he bargained for with it. Room service maid Camae (Ronke Adékoluejo) catches his eye straight away and seems to be flirting back, so he asks her to stay a while and share a few cigarettes with him.

Theatre review: Usagi Yojimbo

Southwark Playhouse, who like to find something a bit different for their Christmas family show than the usual panto fare, are this year attempting to put manga on stage. Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo has been a hit comic for thirty years, following the adventures of the titular samurai rabbit. Stewart Melton's adaptation takes its story from the earlier books in the series, so we first meet Myamoto Usagi (Jonathan Raggett) playing at swordfighting with his friends. But as he can't stay away from his late father's swords, his mother (Amy Ip) decides it's time for him to begin training for real. He and his best friend set out on a journey over the mountains, but while Kenichi (Siu Hun Li) goes on to the nearest school as planned, when Usagi meets the elderly samurai lion Katsuichi (Dai Tabuchi) he thinks he's found his sensei, and begs to be accepted as his student.