Theatre review: Song From Far Away

The next transfer to Hampstead Theatre, this time to the main house, is Kirk Jameson's production of Song From Far Away from Manchester. This is one of those shows that took me a certain amount of effort to try and see without the context of having seen the original production. Not just because of the particularly memorable artistic choice that led it to inspire the Schlong From Far Away award in my yearly roundups, but also because Simon Stephens' mournful monologue was written specifically for its original director Ivo van Hove and star Eelco Smits. But this does mean there's a whole new dimension of seeing how the script bears up when taken away from the creatives Stephens envisioned it for, and seen with fresh eyes. So in Jameson's production, Ingrid Hu designs a large, luxurious, but still impersonal Amsterdam hotel room for Will Young's Willem to stay in when he returns from New York to the city of his birth.

Theatre review: Strictly Ballroom

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Strictly Ballroom has its press night on the 24th of April.

I know it officially makes me a Bad Gay, but I haven’t seen Baz Luhrmann’s film Strictly Ballroom. This shouldn’t matter, of course, in seeing Luhrmann and Craig Pearce’s stage adaptation, and there’s certainly nothing so complex about the story that you’d need to already know it going in. Still, I can’t help but feel that not already being a fan of the 1992 film – as most of tonight’s packed preview audience clearly were – meant something about Drew McOnie’s production was definitely lost on me. Scott Hastings (Jonny Labey) is an amateur ballroom dancer competing in the Australian Federation, which insists that all entrants dance only the strictly prescribed steps; this is mainly because Federation president Barry Fife (Gerard Horan) has a lucrative side-line selling instructional videos that teach the set routines. Scott isn’t satisfied with only dancing someone else’s steps though.

Re-review: Cabaret

In a busy year for Kander & Ebb revivals this was always going to be the main event (especially with Chicago finally giving up the ghost.) Rufus Norris revisits his 2007 production of Cabaret, which returns to London with all its grotesquery intact, plus a couple of star names in the leads. With it being just over a month since I saw I Am A Camera, it's easy to spot some of the major changes Joe Masteroff made to John Van Druten's play and Christopher Isherwood's original stories - most notably the conflation of Isherwood's character with that of Clive Mortimer, so now the outsider's view of Berlin is provided by Clifford Bradshaw, an impoverished, bisexual American wannabe writer. There's also a gentler, more emotional storyline to the subplot where landlady Fräulein Schneider makes concessions to the rising Nazis for an easy life, as well as the creation of a new lead character as we see some of the Kit Kat Klub where Sally sings, and its enigmatic Emcee.