Theatre review: Fat Ham

After Hamlet on the Titanic and a musical version set to Radiohead* the RSC has its third go at the story this year: I've not got the best history with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, having found a number of past winners underwhelming at best, but in general it still seems to be a respected award, so James Ijames' 2022 winner must have made for one of the few times actors have actively wanted to be called Fat Ham. Fat Ham, I hear it and I know, Fat Ham, Fat Ham, I know you wanna take me home, Fat Ham, and get to know me close, Fat Ham, Fat Ham, when your heart goes Fat Ham is a self-aware, modern-day adaptation of Hamlet that takes the "ham" part of the title (and, I guess, the Danish part of the story) and turns the royal family into one that's made a living out of pork products, raising pigs, butchering them and cooking them in their restaurant.

Stage-to-screen review: Romantics Anonymous

I've more or less consigned Emma Rice to the same "I'm just never going to see the appeal" box Samuel Beckett has been sitting in, for more or less the exact opposite reasons, for years. But anything resembling live theatre is still a rarity, and Romantics Anonymous is a show that's inspired a lot of love among people whose opinion I consider worth listening to. It debuted at the Swanamaker at the tail end of Rice's notorious run at Shakespeare's Globe, and after playing at the Bristol Old Vic earlier this year it's now returned there to play to an empty theatre with the live performances streamed to computers (the platform they use, TicketCo, turns out to also have an app that works on my TV so that was better than expected.) Based on Les Émotifs Anonymes by Jean-Pierre Améris and Philippe Blasband, Rice (book,) Michael Kooman (music) and Christopher Dimond's (lyrics) musical plays out the familiar French movie trope of quirky misfits finding love.

Theatre review: Show Boat

Before Rodgers and Hammerstein were a thing there was Kern and Hammerstein, Oscar Hammerstein II writing book and lyrics for a number of shows with music by Jerome Kern, although of these only Show Boat is particularly remembered and revived - and indeed credited with creating the 20th century American musical. Daniel Evans' production from Sheffield has been quite rightly praised as it moves to London, although however stellar the production and performances are they can only go so far in papering over the many problematic elements. Starting in the 1880s and spanning approximately 40 years, Show Boat follows Magnolia "Nola" Hawks (Gina Beck) from her time as a teenager on the steamboat run by her father Cap'n Andy (Malcolm Sinclair,) which goes up and down the Mississippi every summer, stopping off at small towns and playing from their repertoire of melodrama. Nola's mother Parthy (Lucy Briers) would never hear of her daughter taking to the stage herself, but when their leading lady is chased out of town for being secretly mixed-race, she gets her chance.