Theatre review: Here & Now

The latest group to get the jukebox musical treatment is one that feels inevitable, given the general sense of camp ridiculousness that Pete Waterman's surprisingly enduring manufactured pop quartet plus Lee have always had: Steps are a good match for a genre that's at its best when it doesn't take itself seriously, and Shaun Kitchener's (book) Here & Now gets the tone (mostly) right from the start: Will it, like Viva Forever!, try to emulate Mamma Mia! with a Mediterranean island setting? Nah, we're going down the Pound Shop. Better Best Bargains, a totally unrealistic discount store that has more than two members of staff on duty at any given time, is where Caz (Lara Denning) has worked for 25 years without a promotion or pay raise, but she's still pretty chipper about the place because she's friends with her co-workers, and they all introduce the week's new special offers by dressing up as condiments and singing "Five, Six, Seven, Eight."

Theatre review: Positive

The first generation of HIV/AIDS plays kicked off with As Is, which was seen at the Finborough in 2013 and is currently being revived at Trafalgar Studios. But we now live in a very different environment in which HIV is much more treatable, but on the downside this has led to confidence bordering on flippancy about unsafe sex, with rates of infection, especially among young gay men, on the rise again. So Shaun Kitchener's play could perhaps be part of an overdue new wave of theatre on the subject. It's one in which, as the title suggests, Positive doesn't just have to be the test result but can be the outlook too, but the fact that it's not an automatic death sentence doesn't mean everything goes smoothly either. Benji (Timothy George) was diagnosed HIV-Positive a year ago, and although he's found a supportive friend and flatmate in Nikki (Nathalie Barclay) he's rarely ventured out of his room in that time except to go to work.