Theatre review: Sunset Blvd

I often grumble about the work of His Excellency The Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, QC, MD, P.I, FSB, but have a soft spot for Sunset Boulevard - one I've never been entirely sure how much to credit to Lloyd Webber (music,) Don Black and Christopher Hampton's (book and lyrics) 1993 musical itself, and how much to my fondness for Billy Wilder's original 1950 film. Well, this should settle some of that at least, as the latest West End revival comes courtesy of director Jamie Lloyd and designer Soutra Gilmour, whose signature style inevitably strips away the usual trappings of faded Hollywood glamour so associated with film and musical alike. But their monochrome style does make for a different kind of link to the age of black and white movies. 

Stage-to-screen review: Rent

The latest leg of my virtual tour around the UK's theatres takes me to Manchester and the Hope Mill, where Blake Patrick Anderson and Millie O'Connell must be feeling particularly hard done by 2020 - their run in Be More Chill, which for Anderson in particular had been expected to be a star-making performance, got cut short by the first lockdown, and when they reunited for Luke Sheppard's revival of Rent it only lasted five performances before Lockdown 2: Emetic Boogaloo scuppered that as well. Intended to be a mix of socially distanced audiences with simultaneous live-streaming, with Manchester still barred from live performance even after lockdown lifted they've had to rejig the plan, and stream a recording of the final live performance of Jonathan Larson's iconic, none-more-nineties musical.