Theatre review: Death Note

It's been a much-loved manga and a much-loathed film, now Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's Death Note becomes a dynamic, tragicomic stage show. Frank Wildhorn (music,) Ivan Menchell (book) and Jack Murphy's (lyrics) musical adaptation debuted in Japan in 2015 and has had a concert production in London before, but Stephen Whitson's production now gives the fully-staged treatment to the story of a very right-wing teenager who gets to live out his fantasies of being judge, jury and executioner: When Ryuk (Telly Leung,) a Shinigami - a chaotic death god - gets bored of handing out death sentences to random humans, he deliberately misplaces his magic book in the mortal world to see who will pick it up. The Death Note ends up in the hands of Light Yagami (Xander Pang,) a schoolboy with an alarmingly right-wing attitude towards social justice.

Theatre review: Allegiance

Jay Kuo (book, music and lyrics,) Marc Acito & Lorenzo Thione's (book) Allegiance had a relatively brief Broadway run a few years ago, but its original star, the beloved queer elder and Star Trek icon George Takei, whose own family partly inspired the story, has remained a staunch supporter of the project. He's evidently been instrumental in its getting a London transfer - so much so it's been rebranded as George Takei's Allegiance for its run at Charing Cross Theatre. It's not surprising that the Japanese-American actor wants the story to be widely told, as it covers a chapter of its racist past America has been remarkably good at hushing up: I'm not sure when I first heard about the internment camps for Japanese-Americans but it must have been a couple of decades after I first learnt about the Second World War. I guess having American movies control much of the way that story's told makes it easy to leave out inconvenient facts.