Theatre review: The Frogs

Director Georgie Rankcom seems to have established a very specific niche: Revivals of Stephen Sondheim obscurities that I'd previously seen at Jermyn Street Theatre, given bigger, better productions at Southwark Playhouse that still aren't enough to rehabilitate them. After Anyone Can Whistle it's the turn of The Frogs, Sondheim (music and lyrics) and Burt Shevelove's (book) short 1974 adaptation of the Aristophanes satire, expanded to a full Broadway musical by the composer and Nathan Lane in 2004. In a setting that's simultaneously Ancient Greece and the present day, the god of wine and theatre Dionysos (Dan Buckley) enlists his slave Xanthias (Kevin McHale) to help him travel to the underworld to bring back the deceased playwright Bernard Shaw: He believes Shaw's no-nonsense brand of wisdom is the solution to a modern world he despairs at.

Stage-to-screen review: Eurobeat - The Pride of Europe

I didn't see the original West End production of Eurovision spoof Eurobeat; if I recall correctly, I had tickets to see it a couple of months into its run at the Novello, but it closed before then. Maybe a streamed version, available in the weeks leading up to the real song contest returning, will prove a better home for it: Craig Christie's (book, music and lyrics) Eurobeat - The Pride of Europe is a new version of the musical, with completely different songs to its 2008 premiere, some of them reflecting recent Eurovision trends more obviously than others. In a way this is only half a review: The original show had an audience text vote resulting in a different winner every night; stream.theatre's version has an online vote carrying on throughout its run, and will invite viewers of this first part to watch a special results show once the results have been tabulated and independently verified by the accountants of Liechtenstein.