Theatre
Follies, Royal Albert HallWednesday, 29 April 2015
God love Christine Baranski: Eight years after the Tony and Emmy-winning actress played the supporting role of Carlotta Campion in a semi-staged 2007 production of Stephen Sondheim's Follies in New York, along came the leggy, eternally lithe... Read more... |
'You must accept that muscle is machinery'Wednesday, 29 April 2015
Basketball doesn’t often stray onto the arts pages. Cinema pays the occasional visit. White Men Can’t Jump starred Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as a pair of slamdunking hustlers. Hoop Dreams followed two inner-city college kids in Chicago as... Read more... |
American Buffalo, Wyndham's TheatreTuesday, 28 April 2015
From the great, gasp-inducing rush of colour when the curtain opens on American Buffalo to the embrace that closes it, this revival of David Mamet’s career-making rummage through the junkyard of the American Dream has you in a vice-like grip. It’s... Read more... |
Trial by Jury / The Zoo, King's Head TheatreTuesday, 28 April 2015
Judge Judy meets The Only Way Is Essex: this endlessly resourceful production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s first (mini) masterpiece Trial by Jury is one that cries out to appear on TV. Which in a make-believe sense it does: we’re the audience in the... Read more... |
Ahnen, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Sadler's WellsSaturday, 25 April 2015
You’re already in the land of the unpredictable with Pina Bausch. Creating unease was her métier. But when she pulls a gag intended to convince you that something has gone badly wrong on stage, and then it really does, the discombobulation is... Read more... |
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, National TheatreFriday, 24 April 2015
The trouble with the general election is that while everybody talks about money, nobody talks about ideas. We know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. This might seem to be a triumphant demonstration of the essential pragmatism of the... Read more... |
Clarion, Arcola TheatreThursday, 23 April 2015
“Fury Over Sharia Law For Toddlers!” No, not a prime example of spoof headline generator Daily Mail-o-matic, but the latest piece of fantastical scaremongering from the Clarion, a 125-year-old (semi-)fictional rag that’s upped sales by splashing on... Read more... |
Ah, Wilderness!, Young VicWednesday, 22 April 2015
Coming-of-age comedy, moonlit romance and a gentle folk soul: can this really be Eugene O’Neill? The master of darkness makes a surprising departure with semi-autobiographical 1933 work Ah, Wilderness!, which visits staple tropes – addiction, family... Read more... |
Who Cares, Royal Court TheatreTuesday, 21 April 2015
The NHS is us. Early in this new verbatim play about the National Health Service, one of the characters says that when a sample of Britons was recently asked what the most important institution in the UK is, six per cent said the monarchy, 12 per... Read more... |
Death of a Comedian, Soho TheatreMonday, 20 April 2015
Owen McCafferty’s new play could have had as its starting point John Updike’s line "Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face”, for it deals with stand-up comedian Steve Johnston, who hungers after success so much that he is prepared to jettison... Read more... |
Carmen Disruption, Almeida TheatreSaturday, 18 April 2015
Playwright Simon Stephens has made a long journey. Starting off as a young in-yer-face writer, then pausing to mellow over slices of life, then winning awards with state-of-the-nation family dramas and teen plays, he has ended up by brilliantly... Read more... |
Alice's Adventures Underground, The VaultsSaturday, 18 April 2015
The 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s seminal novel has inspired a raft of commemorative works, from Damon Albarn and Moira Buffini’s musical Wonder.land to Holland Park opera and Glastonbury’s surrealist haven; Disney’s film sequel arrives next... Read more... |
