Andrzej Lukowski — Theater Critic

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.

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.

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.

Bagging the UK stage debut of movie icon Sigourney Weaver feels like a coup on paper, but maybe not so much in practice. She’s not embarrassingly bad or anything, but the role of exiled magician Prospero simply feels beyond her – this is a giant theatre, a tricky role, and she’s not done any Shakespeare since the ’80s. She’s not a good verse speaker, delivering everything in a sort of concerned mom monotone that fails to hold this big, weird play together. Having her on stage constantly – usually seated in a chair, observing the action – feels like a sop to her celebrity that isn’t really borne out by her ability.

The Producers is a bit dated, a bit slow in getting going, and is bereft of the exciting hype that fizzed and crackled through it last time. But its pillorying of fascist iconography remains hysterically funny and steely sharp – perhaps sharper than it was before.

What Daniel Bailey’s production captures really well is the energy, enthusiasm and underlying societal disaffection of the two puppyish young leads – after directing West End transfer smash Red Pitch, Bailey feels like the absolute go to guy for depicting young Black male camaraderie on stage. Tessema’s dialogue fizzes and pops a treat, but he’s as good at portraying Manny’s flaws as his charm. However, it’s lacking in incisiveness on its subject – ultimately cryptocurrency and its 2021 crash feels more like the backdrop to a story about two pals than what the play is actually about.

The company – doubled in size since the original Southwark run – all sing and play musical instruments and the walls of sea shanty-inflected choral song are a truly beautiful thing, surging and crashing like waves off the Cornish coast. This is as much the show’s USP as the reverse ageing story. Although unquestionably Compton’s project through and through, he wouldn’t have been able to realise it nearly as well without Darren Clake’s music.

Arguably the circus is mostly there as something to look at to accompany the songs, although rather than just random setpieces, Hammerstein’s show attempts to extrapolate a plot from the tunes. Which is a bit peculiar when you consider they’re already part of the plot of The Greatest Showman, but Come Alive is attempting to extrapolate a different plot from them. Admittedly a lot of the appeal of the film’s soundtrack is down to the fact the songs aren’t very specific, lyrically speaking. Nonetheless, it’s often bizarre to hear them rearranged into a wafer-thin, bordering-on-incoherent story that has nothing to do with PT Barnum, but rather something about a young woman named Max who visits the circus with her boyfriend, takes on the mantle of The Greatest Showman from the previous holder, and then possibly feels a bit guilty about the whole thing.

Arguably the circus is mostly there as something to look at to accompany the songs, although rather than just random setpieces, Hammerstein’s show attempts to extrapolate a plot from the tunes. Which is a bit peculiar when you consider they’re already part of the plot of The Greatest Showman, but Come Alive is attempting to extrapolate a different plot from them. Admittedly a lot of the appeal of the film’s soundtrack is down to the fact the songs aren’t very specific, lyrically speaking. Nonetheless, it’s often bizarre to hear them rearranged into a wafer-thin, bordering-on-incoherent story that has nothing to do with PT Barnum, but rather something about a young woman named Max who visits the circus with her boyfriend, takes on the mantle of The Greatest Showman from the previous holder, and then possibly feels a bit guilty about the whole thing.

It’s a show of two halves. The first details Rhodes’s rise, and it’s entertaining but somewhat ponderous. Although Ruhl’s script largely mirrors the film, it leaves out details that foreshadow the path Rhodes will take – going into the interval it feels like the worst he’ll do is disappoint his fans with a bit of light philandering.

And frankly it’s a lot of fun. In truly spectacular costumes from Gabriella Slade, the cast is kind of dressed like Warhammer 40K Space Marines given a Drag Race makeover. Nobody looks even slightly like a train. But it is a tremendous thrill to have these prodigies whistle past you at high velocity. Obviously it’s a silly idea for a show.. But a lot of very skilled things are silly if you think about them too much. Skating around an amphitheatre while singing, acting and wearing what looks like about half a tonne of costume is frankly incredible (shout out to skate coordinator Luke Zammit). And I haven’t even got on to how sensational everybody’s hair looks (respect to wig designer Campbell Young).

Where ‘The Constituent’ unfortunately goes off the rails is in the introduction of a third character. At first Zachary Hart’s paranoid Brummie police officer Mellor seems like a reasonable addition to the story: Monica is getting increasingly worried about Alec’s obsessive behaviour, but doesn’t qualify for proper ministerial protection. But eventually Mellor’s ludicrous behaviour blows up the whole play and unbalances the carefully wrought clash between Monica and Alec. Even when Mellor is out of the equation, Matthew Warchus’s hitherto finely-balanced production feels trivialised and diminished. Penhall perhaps makes a couple of valid points about the British police. But really it feels like he wasn’t sure where to take the story so decided to throw in Mellor as a very crude curveball.