Tim Wright - Page 2

At first glance, Enid Blyton's Malory Towers seems an odd choice for the second outing of Emma Rice's Wise Children theatre company. A genteel tale of a privileged girl's boarding school in Cornwall with mild peril and even milder themes doesn't seem like classic Rice.

Bristol Comedy Garden has truly blossomed. Its little shoots have grown and grown to the point that the garden is now hosting almost an embarrassment of riches. Each line up feels carefully curated, giving newer or lesser known comics a spot alongside household names. The packed tent makes it clear audiences have taken the event to their hearts.  

'Bring it down, bring it all down' is the anarchic cry from Macheath in Kneehigh's take on The Beggar's Opera. John Gray's original is given the full Kneehigh treatment- the original is not a constraint but a jumping off point. Perhaps the slide in the middle of Michael Vale's set is the physical manifestation of Kneehigh's ever playful nature.

It's 1964 and Cassius Clay has just beaten the odds to become Heavyweight Champion of the World. But, instead of celebrating on the town, he's in a hotel room star NFL running back Jim Brown, soul icon Sam Cooke and Muslim minister and activist Malcolm X.

Children are just revolting aren't they? They're snivelling maggots that need discipline, discipline and more discipline. Agatha Trunchbull's teaching mantra may not fill most with hope but in the context of Matilda the Musical it brings sheer delight. This is a musical that will have maggots of all ages squirming with joy.  

'It's your pub' says Winston, about the Three Kings Barber shop in London. The African barbers at the shop don't drink, so the barber shop has become the hub of the community. It's the place to watch the football, recount stories and tell jokes.

It's a sensible time to be tackling Timberlake Wertenbaker's modern classic Our Country's Good. The role of theatre in society is ripe for the examination, as cuts bite arts institutions and school curriculums alike. The question is, what is there to be gained by putting on a play?

It's fitting that the once industrial space of the Tobacco Factory is now the dystopian setting for the latest outing of the Factory Company - a gender-bending A Midsummer Night's Dream.

There's something undeniably irrepressible about Kinky Boots - it's a fully sequined, unabashed romp through a true (ish) story of a shoe factory threatened with closure until a radical idea to start producing oh so fabulous boots for drag queens appears.

'Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people' writes Angela Carter in her 1992 book Wise Children and that is the starting point for Emma Rice's furiously fast adaptation in this, the first outing for her newly formed theatre company of the same name.

Having the entire Motown back catalogue to work with must be a dream starting point for any jukebox musical. There are decades worth of hit after hit to cram in. And cram them in Motown The Musical certainly does. 66 of them to be precise. It's a whistle-stop tour of all of Motown's greatest artists.

'Alright me babbers!' is the shrill cry from the Ugly Sisters at this year's panto offering from the Bristol Hippodrome. The local references are lapped up by a fervent audience who are ready for laughs and spectacle this Christmas. On both points, Cinderella delivers in bucketloads.

This Christmas, instead of merely treading the boards at Tobacco Factory Theatres, the actors are treading in between the boards in a delightful adaptation of Mary Norton's The Borrowers, a story about a family of tiny people, no bigger than a crayon.

'Some would say change is inevitable' and nowhere more so than Clybourne Park, a street in Chicago in the 1950s where the first black family are about to move in.

Jukebox musicals are tricky things to get right. Especially if the artist concerned hasn't had a particularly eventful career. Thankfully, The Four Seasons at the centre of Jersey Boys have a veritable collection of criminal records, mafia connections and a whole heap of unrefined talent.

If people really do have layers, then Yasmina Reza's God Of Carnage is 80 minutes of stripping them away. Removing the layers of politeness and civility one by one until you're left with the core, for better or worse.

As one of the final so called mega-musicals of the 1980s, Miss Saigon could be forgiven if it felt a little dated by 2018. Thankfully, there's not one bit of tiredness about this re-booted version, originally seen in London in 2014 for its 25th Anniversary.

There's an old rocking chair with a threadbare cushion in the corner of small living room near Brooklyn Bridge, New York. In it sits Eddie Carbone, our tragic hero, reading the paper. He smells of coffee from the sacks he's been unloading at the docks. A hard-working man providing for his wife Beatrice, and his orphaned niece Catherine who is by now a young woman, ready to fly the nest.

Pop music and musicals make good bedfellows for two main reasons. Firstly, pop music has a kind of duality - a song can mean entirely different things in different contexts. Secondly, pop music normally has just the right amount of sentimentality. The Band is a demonstration of how to harness both these qualities and bundle them into two hours of entertainment.

The song-writing partnership of Carole King and Gerry Goffin was such a formidable force in the sixties that even Lennon and McCartney often spoke about wanting to emulate them. It's with this partnership then, that Beautiful: The Carol King Musical spends most of it's time.