Andrzej Lukowski

Again, I refuse to treat Williams’ style like the Emperor’s new clothes. He’s onto something! It just doesn’t entirely work here. Despite stumbling over the odd line, Erivo is charismatic, game, and essentially does her best as a cog in Williams’ elaborate machine. But if you agree to tie your big comeback to a very specific directorial vision, there’s not much even a superstar actor can do if that vision is faulty.

Carrie Cracknell’s revival is not an attempt to radically reconfigure Arcadia and I doubt anyone would be so foolish as to try – it’s an incredibly specific play. She and her team - notably designer Alex Eales - have however leaned nicely into the Old Vic’s current in-the-round configuration. A bit of furniture aside, they've forgone any serious attempt to make it look like the country estate on which the play is set, which we visit in the early 19th century and again in the present. Instead we’ve got a revolving circular stage and lights that look like a mobile of the stars – a specific allusion to some lines in the text but also a neat encapsulation of the text’s underlying sense of cosmic wonder.

I think my biggest problem is that with her amusingly preposterous sister in law Muriel (Louise Brealey) and son Rick (Taylor Uttley) freshly escaped from a cult, Susan’s ‘real’ life is so overegged that it’s scarcely any less ludicrous than her imagined one. And while that may possibly be the idea (although I don’t think it actually is the idea) it’s difficult to see what the play is really saying about her. She’s a middle-aged woman who has been left behind by the real world and has instead embraced one conjured by her subconscious. But it never really takes the time to slow down and properly explore loneliness, middle aged sexuality, or even mental health. There is something melancholic and Chekhovian at its core, but it’s deep, deep beneath the surface, obscured by an all consuming conceptual glamour.

Two great leads, a handful of good lines, some top notch physical business and the epically random deployment of Belle and Sebastian’s classic 1996 song ‘Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying’ – these are all good things. Existing at the point in the curve where subversive New York cabaret and naff ‘70s British comedy overlap, there’s clearly an audience over here for Oh, Mary! But that’s not the same thing as living up to the hype.

There’s some pretty jaw-dropping stuff I’d best not even obliquely describe. But on the whole it avoids manipulative jump scares in favour of unnerving moments of rug pulling, where what you assumed was happening in a scene is revealed to be horrifyingly off the mark. And the creepy atmosphere stuff is second to none, from subtle things – the play of light reflected from passing vehicles creates the sense of movement in the house at night – to full on: it opens in pitch darkness, with Nirvana’s ‘Lithium’ raging around us, a truly weird experience, elated and suffocating at once.

Elerian was born to direct this - the play suits his tricksterish style and capricious humour. Rajha Shakity’s flexible set is evocative, an eerie, nocturnal netherworld. There’s an Apocalypse Now-like cracked odyssey quality to the play’s depiction of a generation going mad in a chaotic, lawless conflict, but unlike the US-centricity of most of the great works about the Vietnam War, this takes a wider view of its impact on Americans, Iraqis, and even nature itself.

While Sondheim is the marquee name, the book and lyrics are by James Lapine (who also did the honours for Sunday in the Park with George and Passion). He naturally does a tremendous job – his lyrics are sometimes hilariously bathetic, sometimes formally audacious, sometimes devastatingly poignant, often all three in a single song. But every second is filled with Sondheim’s presence: his lush, motif-saturated score of baroque nursery rhymes feels as vividly alive as the forest itself.

The songs by McFly’s Tom Fletcher are very decent: none are sidesplittingly funny, though there are some nicely droll numbers about London, marmalade and whatnot. The heart of it actually lies in big sweeping ballads like ‘The Explorer and the Bear’ and ‘One of Us’ – they add a sense of yearning that nicely contrasts with the goofier action of the actual story. It’s a little short on bangers but there’s a good sprinkling of decent choruses.

There are problems. Mia Carragher is certainly up to the considerable physical demands of playing Katniss, and maybe that’s why she got the role - there are no stunt doubles here. But she’s somewhat light on the ol’ charisma and she talks in a breathy Marilyn Monroe-style accent that is odd bordering on distracting. She’s not helped by Conor McPherson’s adaptation, which casts her as both protagonist and narrator. It’s true that there’s a lot to explain. But in such an action-heavy format, having the lead character constantly offering background on what’s going on really undermines the sense of her living in a dangerous moment.

Though it would be pushing it to say Tom Morris directs Othello as a comedy, he certainly wrings more laughs than usual out of Shakespeare’s great comedy. To be fair I don’t think I’d appreciated the extent to which previous productions I’ve seen had been using smart line reads to avoid giggles every time a character describes the villainous Iago – the greatest snake in English literature – as ‘honest’. Morris just cheerily milks it, and the result is a lighter-than-usual take on the play. Not out and out hilarious, but with a certain glossiness that speaks of a desire to go easy on a West End audience.

The even more famous Susan Sarandon – making her UK stage debut – has less to get stuck into. Playing Mary Page in her eldest years, there is no fault in her acting and at 79 she’s in great form. The trouble is that in all three of her scenes, her Mary Page is essentially content and has largely surmounted the volcanic traumas of her earlier life. Sure, it’s part of the point that Mary Page is different from scene to scene. And there is some subtly devastating stuff quietly revealed in these sections. But Sarandon is tonally adrift from a play that’s mostly about how difficult this woman’s life was - she almost feels like she’s in her own, lower-stakes drama.

Ultimately what Born with Teeth suffers from the most is asking us to imagine a sex and paranoia crazed Elizabethan society while not actually showing it to us. At one point Marlowe is literally lecturing Shakespeare with a diagram about how patronage works, but it might have been easier to picture if we ever saw the outside world. Fair enough, that’s not the play Duffy wrote. But I can’t help but feel she probably had a more expansive vision that she squashed down for the sake of crafting a cost effective celebrity vehicle. The final act tries to pivot to tragedy, but it’s all based on off stage politicking that it’s hard to invest in.

And FWIW it’s pretty odd as a show about burlesque: I’m not an expert on the form, but only one minor, male character even takes their clothes off and I’m not convinced NYC dive burlesque bars have ever been a thing. If you want to see a musical show about burlesque – Moulin Rouge! is still pretty mild, but it’s a lot more fun. Basically if you’re a big fan of Todrick Hall, this show will be a real treat for you. Everyone else should approach with extreme caution.

“It’s all absolutely fine, and accepting it’s not a screechingly ambitious piece of work then perhaps all it really lacks is a big showstopper moment... Hercules, though, is one unit of generic Disney stage entertainment. It has charm, because it’s adapted from a charming film and talented people have made it, but it’s definitely not going to go down in legend.”

Structurally, it’s a three-and-a-bit-hour interrogation of the creative process that features little more than the band chatting to each other or recording. Set solely in a windowless studio, director Aukin has supreme confidence in the play’s pacing and rhythms. There is a lot – like a lot – of fannying around over drum sounds and guitar tones, but the play leads us to the right psychological space to understand that there’s much more to this than musos muso-ing. A blizzard of coke, exhaustion, the enormous pressure to follow up their previous album, and of course cataclysmic inter-band tensions all go some way to explain why the band and their affable engineers Grover (Eli Gelb) and Charlie (Andrew R Butler) find themselves agonising over every detail.

It’s a strange play: if Ireland has reined in the bad taste stuff, he remains a swearword-heavy comic writer with a specialty in bruising one-liners. But he never commits to a tone: a scene in which Luka hallucinates that James has bunny ears is quite funny but the cartoonish questioning of his sanity needlessly muddies what his whole deal is. In general, Finn den Herzog’s minimalist production is tentative about grabbing the material by the scruff of the neck. The fact the play is specifically set in Glasgow gets drowned out and feels like it’s more a nod to Lowden’s accent more than anything reflected in Milla Clarke’s sterile set.

It’s also important to stress that the cast is preposterously talented: Jane Krakowski is one of the funniest actors alive today, and has a ball here as space cadet Marianne; Martha Pimpton is a hoot as uber-Karen Claudia; US star Denis O’Hare (retained from the show’s 2023 off-Broadway premiere) is wonderful as a succession of servants and waiters; the Brits keep their end up with Rory Kinnear’s fine turn as velour-encrusted main rich guy Leo Brink, while major rising star Chumisa Dornford-May is excellent as Leo and Marianne’s anarchist daughter Fritz. Above all they’re great stage actors who can – by and large – style out the absence of songs in the second half.

Ultimately Raicek has created as many problems as she’s solved in trying to ‘fix’ the original story. Which is no reason not to do it, but her generally thoughtful look at power imbalance and the nature of infidelity lacks fireworks beyond the famous faces. It retains Ibsen’s wild ending, but when it comes it all feels a bit unearned.

Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors is affable enough and probably a decent shout to take your grandparents to: it’s old fashioned, not offensive. But why bother going to the effort of bringing it over from New York? Stoker’s Count famously caused a stir when he came to London; Greenberg and Rosen’s elicits a weak smile at best.

The slightly random deployment of Tunstall does, however, feel emblematic of a frustrating vagueness at the heart of the Rachel Kavanaugh-directed Anglo-American production. It never feels as Californian as the film, and doesn’t quite know whether to play up its ‘90s setting or shrug it off. Tunstall’s tunes broadly go for ‘a bit of everything’ rather than committing to a specific vision. But at best it really works – the grunge pop of Human Barbies and the faux boyband jam Reasonable Doubts pastiche the styles of the decade nicely.

It ultimately feels like a nicely observed but relatively slight slice of life drama. Linton sometimes overcompensates: having a lad wearing Beats headphones occasionally wander across the stage feels like a hysterically heavy-handed way of reminding us of the present generation’s connection to Walker’s. I’m also not totally convinced by the star casting of Kene. It seems to me that Walker is a relatively simple character, but Kene’s combination of freakish good looks and a determination to burden Walker with a load of physical business and a somewhat incongruous pernickity middle manager vibe leaves the character feeling weirdly elusive and ill-defined compared to literally everyone else on stage. Alterations is a ’70s fringe play that will never be a perfect fit with the Lyttelton. But was it worth staging it anyway? Absolutely!

While I’m sure Cotton has done his homework, he’s surely betting that the average British audience is unlikely to have any real opinion on Frederick. His play contents itself with an antagonist who is a sort of vague mish mash of biographical exposition, Blackadder-style toff-isms, and bits where Frederick’s warmongering is unsubtly paralleled with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I’m not saying there’s any need to be totally historically accurate in a work of fiction. But Cotton’s king feels like a half-hearted collection of tyrant tropes rather than a credible character. It’s hard not to see The Score as a distant relative of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, but it’s simply not in the same league in terms of characterisation.

There are those who have become cynical about Lloyd ever since his career went into overdrive with his smash 2023 revival of Sunset Boulevard. And to be fair, those that moaned about the casting of Sigourney Weaver in The Tempest – which preceded Much Ado at Drury Lane, and shares much of the same cast – were basically right, though one celebrity miscasting hardly ruins a career. But accusations that he relies too much on live video (he’s used it in two shows), the same monochrome palette (okay, there has been a lot of black) and relentless tasteful moodiness are all but trolled by this none-more-pink symphony of a production, that totally abandons conventional cool in favour of Tom Hiddleston’s dad dancing.

But despite a committed performance from Bailey, I struggled to get my head around some of the details. Richard returning from Ireland with his crown in a placcy bag is perhaps a droll illustration of his smallness as a man, but it left me struggling to see the exact point. He’s still the king of England – doing a version of the play where he is just an in-over-his-head executive would be interesting, but it never quite feels like that’s what Hytner is pushing.

The biggest flaw, though, is one that’s haunted the show for decades: Olivier himself is just pretty bland. I’m not going to single out the child actor who was on when I saw it, because I think the problem lies firstly with Bart and secondly with the direction. But our hero is a wide eyed, improbably well-spoken young man who travels through life with such monumental innocence that it’s never even clear here that he’s aware Fagin et al are criminals. It’s a demanding role to give a tween, but the amount resting on his small shoulders has always been a weakness of the show. And clearly it’s not something Mackintosh is desperately bothered about fixing. And why would he? Now booking until next March, the West End’s most successful producer has a hit on his hands with Oliver! Again.