Theatre review: Hercules

After a diversion where His Exalted Britannic Excellency, Master of all he Surveys, The Right Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, QC, MD, P.I, FSB got Jamie Lloyd to settle a baffling grudge with John Gielgud for him, the Theatre Royal Drury Lane goes back to being the home of Disney musical blockbusters, and following Frozen is something of a less obvious choice: 1997's Hercules doesn't seem to top too many people's favourites list, but it does contain its fair share of memorable bangers from Alan Menken (music) and David Zippel (lyrics.) I remember when the film originally came out there was some grumbling in the Greek press about how the story didn't so much play fast and loose with the original Herakles myth as ignore it completely; but to be fair it did have to appeal to family audiences, and once you've taken the sexual assault out of Greek Mythology you've got what, 5% of the original story left to play with?

Theatre review: A Strange Loop

A Strange Loop comes to the Barbican bearing a Pulitzer, but it's OK - once every few years they give it to something that isn't just the first thing to ham-fistedly tackle whatever the controversial hot topic of the day is. Michael R. Jackson's musical does make a point of the fact that intersectionality is something all the stage producers are looking to capitalise on at the moment, but at least it does it in as knowingly tongue-in-cheek a way as it does most other things. The intersection in question is that between black and queer lives, as seen through Usher (Kyle Ramar Freeman,) an usher at the Broadway production of The Lion King who's trying to write a musical in his spare time. The title has a couple of highbrow origin references but essentially it's about the structure: A musical about a gay black man writing a musical about a gay black man writing a musical about a gay black man.