Alice Saville — Theater Critic

Director Dominic Cooke’s production is a lean mean entertainment machine – each half is a tight hour (a refreshing contrast to the more lumbering Barbra Streisand-starring 1969 movie version), kept moving by Rae Smith’s projection-filled set design and Bill Deamer’s appropriately high-spirited choreography. And although the show’s farcical climax in a hat shop feels less like a tight physical comedy set piece and more like a tipsy game of musical chairs, its larky approach can tumble away when required. When Staunton sits alone by lamplight to sing “Love, Look in My Window”, the whole story is illuminated by this insight into Dolly’s hidden loneliness.

Harris’s play is full of a sharp satirical intelligence that makes the right words fall from the wrong mouths, and resists pat conclusions. It’s never an easy watch – and its Black Out nights feel like an important gesture to Black audiences who don’t want white discomfort to define their experience of it. But it is a necessary one, showing how old power structures linger, covered over by messy, fleshy protuberances of desire.

Admittedly, the production doesn’t directly tackle the paedophilia accusations – two sexual abuse lawsuits against the musician are currently making their way, albeit very slowly, through the courts – and perhaps a musical could never tackle the legal and moral complexities of discussing them. But Nottage’s portrait of Jackson, which follows the singer in rehearsals for his wildly extravagant 1992 Dangerous tour, never depicts him as the superhero he dresses up as on stage, either.

Anyone who bought tickets to Opening Night in the hope of seeing its star Sheridan Smith treating us to a bit of thespy, Funny Girl-style razzle dazzle is in for a serious shock. Belgian avant-garde theatre director Ivo Van Hove’s musical, set backstage during a show, is determinedly unflashy and oblique, dimly illuminated by singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright’s operatic torch songs. In fact, it feels a bit like the whole cast is trolling musical theatre fans: they linger like bedraggled pigeons in the corners of a vast unornamented stage, capturing the inertia, rather than the glamour, of backstage life. It’s flawed, but intermittently haunting.

Director Sam Mendes’s production brings out all the gentle humour in Butterworth’s play: some of the 1950s scenes feel like lost outtakes from a mid-century sitcom, as Veronica effortfully clings to a hotelier’s respectability in the face of bottom-pinching, pun-peddling rogues like Mr Halliwell (Shaun Dooley). The saucy jokes sail above the heads of most of her children but not older, worldlier Joan (Lara McDonnell), who internalises her mother’s sense that her body is just another tool to be used on the path to stardom.

With an opening scene that parks a hulking great Second World War battleship on stage, Stranger Things: The First Shadow wants to make one thing clear. This isn’t a quiet, quaint, self-consciously theatrical little play. It’s a massive all-out event calculated to thrill fans of the award-winning Netflix series with explosions, thrills, and jumpscares galore – plus a little taste of what’s coming in 2024’s fifth season of the show. But with writer Jack Thorne (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) and director Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot) on board, it’s also got a surprising level of proper theatre cred for anyone who doesn’t come to it intricately versed in Stranger Things lore.

With an opening scene that parks a hulking great Second World War battleship on stage, Stranger Things: The First Shadow wants to make one thing clear. This isn’t a quiet, quaint, self-consciously theatrical little play. It’s a massive all-out event calculated to thrill fans of the award-winning Netflix series with explosions, thrills, and jumpscares galore – plus a little taste of what’s coming in 2024’s fifth season of the show. But with writer Jack Thorne (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) and director Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot) on board, it’s also got a surprising level of proper theatre cred for anyone who doesn’t come to it intricately versed in Stranger Things lore.

It’s Dos Santos’s first West End play, but it doesn’t feel like it. Producer and director Michael Grandage has alighted upon a polished, one-liner-filled script and given it a lavish, pacy production that’s full of moments of delight, from set designer Christopher Oram’s extravagantly pink decor to the real live corgis that scuttle across the stage. The royal family never looked so camp, and that’s before Billy (Luke Evans) delivers his briefing to his newest junior footman: “There are two queens in this castle, and I suggest you pay attention to both equally,” he says, proudly introducing green young Gwydion (Iwan Davies) to the bed-hopping ways of backstairs life.

This King Lear feels like a curio, one that starts to imagine a different kind of way of presenting this time-honoured story of ageing and decline, without quite offering a complete reading. It feels like a first draft, polished to spearhead visual brightness, but not sharpened to a point. For that, we’ll have to wait for Branagh’s near-inevitable, and welcome, film adaptation.

With a glut of roles from Hamlet to Gandalf behind him, 84-year-old Ian McKellen has absolutely nothing left to prove. He’s clearly on stage for the pure joy of it, and that sense of delight shines through in mischievous gay romcom Frank and Percy, where he and Roger Allam have a ball, playing friends-turned-lovers. McKellen pulls on a tiny rainbow-coloured tutu, strikes mock-alluring poses to disco anthems, and has the audience in fits with knowing comments about a “dextrous tongue” that’s schooled in saucier purposes than Shakespearean couplets. Writer Ben Weatherill’s wry comedy is a precision-tooled vehicle for McKellen and Allam’s talents, one that’s motoring into London after a hit premiere at Theatre Royal Windsor in June.

Yanagihara’s perspective seems to be that abuse messes you up for life, making emotional intimacy almost impossible and suicide the only way out. Van Hove’s production reinforces that, creating a production that’s so painful to watch that, like Jude, you wish it would all just stop. But it’s both a hugely irresponsible message, and a false one. Real-life suffering is more complex, interspersed with moments of joy, care and healing – and recovery is too precious to give up on.

With sex so firmly in the foreground, everything about this story shifts. In traditional productions, boy-crazy farm girl Ado Annie is pure comic relief. When she sings ‘I'm just a girl who can't say no!’, it's a straightforward excuse for some jolly old-timey slut-shaming. But here, Georgina Onuorah plays an Annie whose desires can't be so easily laughed at: she tenderly cradles her more prim and proper friend Laurey (Anoushka Lucas) in her arms as she sings about loving that's ‘sweeter than cream’, centimetres away from a kiss. And this Laurey is rapt, not judgemental.

With sex so firmly in the foreground, everything about this story shifts. In traditional productions, boy-crazy farm girl Ado Annie is pure comic relief. When she sings ‘I'm just a girl who can't say no!’, it's a straightforward excuse for some jolly old-timey slut-shaming. But here, Georgina Onuorah plays an Annie whose desires can't be so easily laughed at: she tenderly cradles her more prim and proper friend Laurey (Anoushka Lucas) in her arms as she sings about loving that's ‘sweeter than cream’, centimetres away from a kiss. And this Laurey is rapt, not judgemental.

In the wake of mega hits ‘Hamilton’ and ‘Emilia’, it feels like a hip hop suffragette musical is what theatre fans are crying out for. But despite a dynamite cast, ZooNation director Kate Prince’s ‘Sylvia’ probably won’t get audiences rioting in the streets. Retooled after an Old Vic run in 2018 that was hastily restyled as a work-in-progress, it’s now polished but painfully polite, steering clear of political rabble-rousing in favour of a historically faithful trundle through early twentieth-century politics.