Theatre review: Harold and Maude

Colin Higgins' Harold and Maude was another show I hadn't originally planned on seeing, but when a friend had a matinée ticket she couldn't use, she passed it on to me. Set in early 1970s California, Harold (Bill Milner) is a 20-year-old from a wealthy family, aimless in life and using his unlimited free time to indulge his morbid streak - the play opens with him hanging himself, one of a series of elaborately faked suicides he stages for attention. This fascination with death also sees him attending the funerals of people he doesn't know, at one of which he meets the hippyish 79-year-old Maude (Sheila Hancock,) an Austrian Countess whose colourful life has taken her around the world. Harold just wants to be left alone, but Maude keeps showing up in his life, quickly becoming a major part of it.

Theatre review: Allegro

Much as I have issues with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II - mainly to do with the varied and jaw-dropping ways they find to be offensive, and the fact that "Some Enchanted Evening" on a loop for three hours doesn't constitute a musical - there's no denying the position they occupy in American musical theatre - essentially regarded as its creators - and the love for them worldwide. So the fact that one of their shows has never actually been staged in the UK before has to make you wonder why, while still being fascinated to find out what it's actually like. Their third collaboration after big hits Oklahoma and Carousel, Allegro tanked on Broadway in 1947 but Southwark Playhouse's perennial re-interpreter of classic musicals, Thom Southerland, and his choreographer Lee Proud throw everything at this attempt to make sense of the story of Joseph Taylor Jr (Gary Tushaw,) a talented small-town doctor who's disillusioned when he takes a high-paying job in a big city.

Theatre review: Grey Gardens

One of my last shows of 2015 was The Dazzle, a story based on a real-life pair of wealthy, reclusive hoarders, and I kick off 2016 with another one, this time in musical form. Edith Bouvier Beale was the aunt of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who in the 1970s found notoriety when she and her daughter were found living in a dilapidated mansion filled with junk and cats. Named after the house where the two holed themselves up for decades, Doug Wright (book,) Scott Frankel (music) and Michael Korie's (lyrics) Grey Gardens looks at how a family of Hamptons socialites turned into crazy cat ladies, by taking us back to 1941: Edith (Jenna Russell) is organising an engagement party for her daughter Little Edie (Rachel Anne Rayham,) and putting herself at the centre of it with a plan to perform a number of songs. Little Edie has landed a Kennedy of her own, JFK's older brother Joseph Jr* (Aaron Sidwell,) but when her mother realises she'll end up alone, she sabotages the engagement.

Theatre review: Grand Hotel

After a number of big musical hits there, director Thom Southerland returns to Southwark Playhouse with another musically complex ensemble drama, though I liked this one a lot better than 2013's Titanic: Based on Vicki Baum's book Menschen Im Hotel, Grand Hotel has a book by Luther Davis, music and lyrics by George Forrest and Robert Wright, and additional songs by Maury Yeston. The setting is 1928 Berlin, a time of a huge gap between rich and poor, as the deferential staff of the hotel harbour a lot of angry resentment towards their wealthy guests. But if the guests we meet over the two hours are anything to go by, they actually have a lot more front than they do money. At the centre of the cast of characters is Baron von Gaigern (Scott Garnham,) who coasts by on charm and everyone's assumption that with titles come money and power, but is in fact broke.

Theatre review: The Grand Tour

Unusually for the Finborough, their first show of 2015 is running for two months rather than just one - like one of its characters, they must be optimistic about the chances of The Grand Tour, a 1979 Jerry Herman musical that has never before been staged in Europe, finding a large audience. Set in France in 1940, it follows Polish Jew Jacobowsky (Alastair Brookshaw,) who's been fleeing persecution all his life, and now buys a car to make his latest escape - except he can't drive. Antisemitic Polish Colonel Tadeusz Stjerbinsky (Nic Kyle) has a list of names he needs to deliver to London to help the resistance against the Nazis back in Poland. He can drive, but has no means of transport, so with only the country of their birth in common the two team up for a journey to freedom - stopping along the way to pick up Marianne (Zoë Doano,) the French woman the Colonel loves.

Theatre review: Titanic

I wonder how many people will turn up at Southwark Playhouse for Titanic the Musical expecting an all-singing, all-dancing adaptation of the James Cameron film? I'm afraid you won't be seeing any high-kicks to "Paint Me Like Your French Girls, Jack" or a curtain-call rendition of "Oops I Did It Again" complete with the bit where the Heart of the Ocean gets retrieved from the depths. Instead, Maury Yeston and Peter Stone's version takes all its characters from real people who sailed on the iconic but doomed liner, some of them staying on to her final destination, others getting off at an earlier, more convenient point. This is a true ensemble piece that tries to build a flavour of all four different groups of people who sailed on Titanic, simplified down to a mostly-American First Class, mostly-English Second Class, mostly-Irish Third Class plus a crew from around the British Isles.

Theatre review: Victor/Victoria

Thom Southerland's musical revivals have become a regular feature in Southwark Playhouse's Vault and hopefully one that will follow to wherever the new venue turns out to be. For the final show underneath Platform 1 of London Bridge he's taken us to 1930s Paris for Blake Edwards, Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse's Victor/Victoria. Anna Francolini is Victoria, a talented singer trying to get onto the Paris cabaret scene but lacking the extra something special that'll get people's attention. A chance encounter with Toddy (Richard Dempsey,) a gay cabaret singer who's also just found himself out of a job, leads to an idea for what that X factor might be: Victoria will use her vocal range to cash in on the trend for female impersonators by becoming Victor - a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. But the plan's instant success is put at risk when she falls for American gangster King (Matthew Cutts) and may need to reveal her true identity to get him.

Theatre review: Mack and Mabel

The onstage preoccupation with the early years of Hollywood that's been an occasional theme this year returns with a revival of Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman's 1974 musical Mack and Mabel at Southwark Playhouse. Once again, the unforgiving space of the Vault has been given over to a musical but, perhaps thanks to the fact that he's worked there before with last year's Parade, director Thom Southerland has managed to get over the dodgy acoustics that plague the venue. Designer Jason Denvir has reconfigured the seating into a wide, shallow thrust, with a bank of seating and a curtain blocking the Vault's visually impressive double tunnels, along with their tendency to absorb every word anyone sings in there. The show charts the rise and fall of Keystone Studios through the turbulent relationship of director Mack Sennett (Norman Bowman) and Mabel Normand (Laura Pitt-Pulford,) the starlet he first discovered working at a deli.