Franco Milazzo - Page 5

Over a decade has passed since Love Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sequel to The Phantom Of The Opera, was an undoubted flop during its first (and last) London run so this week’s revival in concert is a welcome retrospective. Was it a victim of its own hype or is it just a bad show?

Is there no stopping (or topping) Phantom Peak? Just one year after debuting, this epic immersive theatre launches a summer season filled with new stories and is now looking to expand into the US.

In Matthew Bourne’s dystopian take on the classic love story, there are leaps aplenty - and not just in the physical sense.

Back in 2011 playwright Tanika Gupta staged her adaptation of Great Expectations. 12 years later she has re-worked the script, shifted the time frame and collaborated with the Artistic Director of Tamasha Pooja Ghai. Pooja played Mrs Gargery in the original, and who is now directing this new version for the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester.

In an opening sketch which could reasonably have been titled “The Thin Of It”, we meet a team of Downing Street press officers in crisis mode: the Prime Minister has once again gone off-script and ad-libbed something offensive to an unnamed section of society.

The exuberant all-male musical The Choir Of Man motors on at the Arts Theatre with a new cast and a new contemporary context.

Almost as secretive and hidden away as the Batcave, Soho’s Park Row is a restaurant dedicated to the Caped Crusader. At its heart lies Monarch Theatre, an immersive dining experience which combines projections, magic and a sumptuous tasting menu.

“I am the soul that dances chainless. I am the moon’s insatiable dream. I am a witness in life’s shadow…there is no need to tell you that this is my flamenco heart which has a bolero soul.” And with this, Alma's opening speech lays bare the poetic nature of this legendary flamenco dancer’s highly dynamic and deeply hypnotic shows.

With a plot packed with clichés that are older than the hills and gags of pure corn which may be even older, it’s just as well that Crazy For You is an utterly spectacular feast for the eyes and ears.

With June being a prime time to get hitched, now should be as good as any time to dig up and put on stage Felix Mendelssohn’s 1842 incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a score which features the famous Wedding March. Despite the play’s themes, this melding of classical sound and drama from historical performance ensemble Figure is from magical.

Hot off Broadway with a Best Musical Tony and a Pulitzer Prize for its script, Michael R Jackson’s A Strange Loop comes to London for a summer run at The Barbican.

Before DC, Marvel and Spider-Man cottoned onto the potential of cinematic crossovers, Off The Record created arguably the most intriguing of them of all: a staged multiverse drawn from Quentin Tarantino films which is as sweary, gory and fun as one would expect.

Whether We Will Rock You will attract the attention of Trading Standards is unknown but rarely has a show been so poorly named.

Going by this latest show, the Tiger Lillies are still very much kicking against the pricks, still ploughing their own particular furrow, and still staying artistically relevant.

National treasures Giffords Circus return for their annual tour of village greens and stately homes with another show, another theme and, it appears to be, another hit.

Athletes have the Olympics. Chefs have Michelin stars. Actors have Hamlet. Citius, altius, fortius, Danish. In his one-man show Re-member Me (co-devised and directed by Jan Willem Van Den Bosch), Dickie Beau ponders death, mortality and legacy but not in a morbid way; it’s less a shoegazing mope and mumble about whether “to be or not to be”, more a defiant exploration of what it is “to be and not to be”.

Nudity, profanity and hilarity: Head First Acrobats present a new holy trinity in Godz as well as an exciting children's show in Arrr We There Yet?!

Few words grab the attention like murder. And few genres outside immersive theatre can pull you physically into a specific time and place. So why aren’t there more immersive murder productions like this one?

Most people going to the theatre will take public transport or their own car. In September 2021, Nathan Paulin took a 600-metre walk to Chaillot - Paris’ Théâtre National De La Danse on a slackline 70 metres above the Seine.

It’s 1951 and, as the nation prepares itself for the Festival of Britain, a heinous crime has been committed. After a murder most foul, ten suspects, a killer hiding in plain sight and around two hundred passengers-cum-amateur detectives find themselves all aboard the same train. It’s fair to say that Dead On Time knows how to set a scene even before we step aboard.