Franco Milazzo

There’s a singular simplicity in Madama Butterfly that draws in audiences year after year, decade by decade like moths to a flame: a man loves and leaves a woman; she gives up everything for him. With a staging that mirrors that bare but powerful concept, Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s 2002 production returns again to Covent Garden with more than a patina of authenticity.

Feeling like the wildest circus party in town, Fuerza Bruta (Spanish for “brute force”) return to the Roundhouse with their new show Aven.

It would be difficult to describe Adam Perchard as some shy, self-effacing wallflower. They follow up Bunburying (The Importance of Being Dr Adam Perchard) with another autobiographical show, this time with composer Richard Thomas, co-creator of Jerry Springer: The Opera.

And here we go again: the London Clown Festival returns for another run of bizarre, brilliant and occasionally bonkers shows until 26 July.

Has opera found its own Ivo van Hove? Jan Philipp Gloger’s radical production of Così fan tutte continues until 10 July.

Fronted by some fresh faces, Jonathan Kent’s cinematic take on the Puccini masterwork Tosca returns for its seventeenth run at Covent Garden. 

Deadweight Theatre’s The Manikins: A Work In Progress is many things. It is interactive. It is intimate. It is thought-provoking. And, despite the misleading title, it has a polished concept that leaves its audience pondering long after the show ends.

With a cry of “honey I’m home!”, international musical theatre icon Lea Salonga returns to the stage that launched her career over three decades ago.

Zhang Quan’s Acrobatic Swan Lake is so much more than its title suggests. The show originated in China in 2004 and, in the intervening decades, has travelled the world and was updated in 2019 under director Yan Hongxia. As choreographer and artistic director, Quan has created a work which seamlessly blends the elegance and poetry of ballet with the ability of circus to defy physics and the limits of the human body.

With its live singers, superb clowning and disappointing vaudeville acts, The Entertainers’ Cirque: The Greatest Show is bringing its dazzling show around the country.

Even if the press night weather for this open air production suggested otherwise, this latest take on The Barber Of Seville is the perfect summer opera with its fluffy blend of humour and romance and some of the art form’s best known arias.

Juggling not only apples but comedy, dance and socio-sexual commentary, the troupe co-founded by Sean Gandini and Kati Ylä-Hokkala in 1992 bring back their signature production to London.

In a sudden lurch away from their epic 2022 creation The Burnt City, immersive specialists Punchdrunk’s next effort is a far more cosy affair. Small barefoot groups walk their way through the Nineties fairytale world of Viola’s Room with the story relayed over headphones by Helena Bonham Carte

Advertised as “Grease meets Squid Game”, Fun At The Beach Romp Bomp A Lomp!! manages to go from the ridiculous to the sublime, even if it does lose its way every now and then.

Miriam Battye’s hilariously brutal and dark dissection of modern relationships - from tentative beginnings over a pint to their varied ends - returns to Soho Theatre for its second run in less than a year. 

The post-pandemic rush of immersive theatre in London has been very hard to ignore with new shows popping up every month. Next month, this resurgent art form is celebrated with voidspace live, a packed day produced by Theatre Deli and Voidspace Zine editor Katy Naylor which showcases over a dozen works .

Walter Washington is stuck. Stuck in his recently deceased wife’s wheelchair. Stuck in “a rent-controlled palace ruled by a grieving despot king” that he can ill afford. Stuck waiting for City Hall to pay him what he considers his due after a thirty year-long cop career ended in a shooting incident. That’s a whole lot of stuck.

Part violent psychodrama, part sunny romcom, The Winter’s Tale was not the most obvious of plays for the Royal Ballet to take on.

With their new work Cycles, it is clear that Boy Blue are at something of a crossroads.

Coming on like some kind of sadistic Mr Bean, the scarier-than-Pennywise Doctor Brown has been terrorising audiences with his silent comedy since 2009 and returns to Soho Theatre with his first new show in over a decade.