Theatre review: Radiant Boy - A Haunting

Nancy Netherwood's Radiant Boy is subtitled "A Haunting," and is framed as the story of an exorcism. But horror fans will probably be disappointed as this is a gentler, more elusive kind of haunting, more Emily Brontë than William Peter Blatty. It's 1983 and Russell (Stuart Thompson) has returned from London, where he's been studying singing at a conservatoire, to the home where he grew up in a small town in the North-East of England. He and his mother Maud (Wendy Nottingham) are awkward and chilly around each other, and while Russell claims to be ill, he seems wary of whatever cure his mother might have in mind, to the point of making you wonder why he's come back in the first place. It transpires he's had a kind of fit that's affected him before, and this time it almost caused him to hurt someone he cares about.

Theatre review: Cake: The Marie Antoinette Playlist

A few days after the official follow-up to SIX, I'm off to a show with a different creative team (including some big names in its development process so far) but which has clear - perhaps way too clear - ambitions to follow in its footsteps. Cake: The Marie Antoinette Playlist also features a famous historical queen with a detachable head, Zizi Strallen (part of the Z-series of Strallens that also includes Zoltar, Zuzan and Zabulon) taking on the title role, and even casts original West End SIX stars Renée Lamb and Millie O'Connell, but things haven't panned out quite as well so far: The official line is that Cake's ticket sales were so bad the run got cut short before it had even had a press night, so the Sunday matinée I'd booked turned out to be the penultimate performance.

Theatre review: Passing Strange

Ben Stones' white wedge of a set, with four musicians stationed around the stage along with the odd prop and piece of furniture, clues the audience in from the start to the fact that we're in for a night of gig theatre. The fact that it opens with a quartet of backing singers arriving on stage to find the star turn hasn't shown up yet, and it takes a few blackouts and resets for the Narrator (Giles Terera) to kick proceedings off, correctly lets us know that there's also a chaotic element in store: Stew Stewart (book, music & lyrics) and Heidi Rodewald's (music) 1970s-'80s-set coming-of-age musical Passing Strange pretty much plays by no other rules than its own. The Narrator introduces himself as Stew so from the start it's implied this piece will be autobiographical, and that he himself is an older version of our young protagonist.

Theatre review: Be More Chill

Is any other country's art as disproportionately about High School as America's? You have to believe that all the angsty teens we've seen on stage and screen for decades aren't exaggerating, and it's an experience that really does scar everyone for life if so many people are willing to spend the rest of their lives telling stories about it. The dog-eats-dog race to be popular gets a sci-fi twist in Joe Iconis (music and lyrics) and Joe Tracz' (book) Be More Chill, which felt to me like an endearing mashup of Loserville and Little Shop of Horrors. Alarmingly skinny video game geek Jeremy (Scott Folan) seems happy enough with his status as a loser who'll come into his own when he gets to college, but when the bullying gets too much for him and even Christine (Miracle Chance,) the oddball girl he likes, falls for a jock (Miles Paloma,) Jeremy becomes desperate enough to try anything to become more popular.

Theatre review: Ain't Misbehavin'

Murray Horwitz and Richard Maltby Jr’s 1978 show Ain’t Misbehavin’ was something of a precursor to jukebox musicals, celebrating songs written or popularised by Fats Waller between the wars, becoming one of the first people to bring jazz to a wider audience. Southwark Playhouse’s revival sees two people better known as performers making their debuts telling other people what to do: Tyrone Huntley as director and Oti Mabuse as choreographer. Adrian Hansel, Renée Lamb, Carly Mercedes Dyer, Landi Oshinowo and Wayne Robinson take on all the performance duties in a show that runs through thirty of Waller’s hits in under two hours. I’ve seen it described as a “revue-style musical,” although in reality it’s a straightforward revue without much connection to a traditional musical – there’s no thematic link between the songs, takis’ set recreating a glittering nightclub in which Alex Cockle’s band are ensconced to back up the five performers.

Theatre review: Little Shop of Horrors

Last seen in London in 2007, Howard Ashman and Alan Menken's Little Shop of Horrors is the Open Air Theatre's main musical offering of this summer, and if it hadn't already been a must-see for me the fact that Maria Aberg is directing definitely would have tipped the scale. And although everything that's fun about the show remains, there's certain directorial touches - and one casting choice in particular - that really make the production feel like it's been looked at with fresh eyes. The 1982 musical is based on a 1960 Roger Corman B-movie, a fact nodded at by Tom Scutt's design making the stage a drive-in cinema; but as the story's set on Skid Row and everything's run down, this drive-in is long-since closed and derelict, everything is grey and lifeless, and the scenery is wheeled on and off stage in shopping trolleys.