Arifa Akbar

Erivo gives us a tantalising taste of her singing voice towards the end and it raises your hopes but is aborted into a few – exquisitely sung – lines rather than a song. It’s sad that the production plays so little of Erivo’s strengths, which might better have been reconceived as Dracula the Musical.

There are some scenes that penetrate, especially the exhilarating moment that Lewis and Joy declare their love for each other, circling around the other. The rapport between Lewis and his older brother (Jeff Rawle) with whom he lives, is amusing as well. But as a story of love and grief, it should have you in bits. Love found, so late, an emotionally remote man thawed by it, and then lost again, his love an open wound. It does not feel as eviscerating as it should.

It seems like a reluctant musical at times, the songs short and thin but the percussive music and sound design are always arresting, as is the lighting, designed by Neil Austin, which brings emotional clarity and intrigue. A clock is central to Tim Hatley’s set design, counting down to the train’s thrilling arrival and the subsequent showdown, which manages to contain tension and drama, despite the difficulty of staging a cross-town shootout. For all its early stiffness, it builds in momentum and there are moving moments. Ultimately, the political message speaks loudest, harnessing the McCarthyist fear of then and the Trumpian terror of today.

Revived in its 40th anniversary year, the play stands the test of time for its originality and boldness: this is a critique of the emptiness of married life and the desperation that a woman feels inside it that takes us from the domestic drudge to high-wire supernaturalism. When it works, it is unnerving. The imaginary family is creepy for its wooden perfection and performative warmth. You feel the chill building as they turn into nightmarish tormentors.

And how meaningful can any of it be if the writer, by their admission, has undertaken “no research” into Mary Todd Lincoln’s life story? Satire and black comedy as genres are built to accommodate social observation and acid critique, but there is none of that here. You learn next to nothing of how Mary may have been held back or shaped by history in this apparently “revisionist” version. Instead, you get the dramas of the men around her, from Abraham’s hidden homosexuality to his ex-lover (Dino Fetscher) and current squeeze (Oliver Stockley). Mary is simply repulsive and every other character laughs at her behind her back.

The pace is baggy and the tragedy is diffuse, its drama undercut by cerebral questioning. The production’s most enraged moments are downplayed when it could go for the jugular. But the high-wire mix of comedy, horror and intellectualism is brave, the imagination and profundity a breath of fresh air in a theatrical landscape that cleaves to easy entertainment and distraction from darkness. Joseph stares into the Nietzschean abyss, sniggering, and it sniggers back.

The cast bring bags of charm: Jack is ultra-feminine, Red Ridinghood appears like a fearless girl guide, the Wolf (Oliver Savile) a vulpine version of David Niven, it seems, and the Witch (Kate Fleetwood) is both comically evil and wronged. The Baker and his wife’s struggles to conceive come weighted with feeling. After she marries the prince, you feel the yearning of Cinderella (Chumisa Dornford-May) for the old days when she could simply take off to the woods and talk to the birds.

Sure it is full of schmaltz and cliched Englishness – Beefeaters, church bells, men with umbrellas, and dustbin men who look like Dick Van Dyke’s chimney sweep. But it is self-consciously done and knowingly verges on parody – Geographers’ Guild members march on to speak of empire and the Elgin marbles, as one example.

Made in the same mould as the stage version of Stranger Things, this show is not as consistently eye-popping. The production bursts into life in the second half, when the Tributes find themselves in the killing field. There is a brutal frenzy as light, sound and movement combine forcefully. It excels in action drama, and at times seems like an analogy for child soldiers in real-life wars.

This is every bit a “West End Othello” that is ravishing to look at, immaculately choreographed and darkly humorous. It is pacy and does not probe deeply or seek to connect the play’s manipulations with our era of Trumpian truths and lies (and our own trusting of the wrong people?). There is an impressive clarity of language and events as we hear how doubt against Desdemona’s virtue is first cast by her own father, Brabantio (Peter Guinness), who says “she deceived her father and may thee”, before Iago capitalises on it.

It is beautifully directed by Matthew Warchus, who elicits magnificent performances from the ensemble. Sarandon performs with ease, assurance and total ownership of her character; Riseborough, in scraped back ponytail, is astonishing as a woman whose life has hurtled off-course. Rosy McEwen, as an unfaithful wife who feels like an actor in her own life, is a scintillating, dangerous force on stage. The two youngest Marys – the 12-year-old trying to impress her heavy-drinking mother, played by Alisha Weir, and Eleanor Worthington-Cox’s hopeful high-school pupil – are also a pleasure to watch, as is the entire cast.

It is over-adrenalised and messy in its plotting, but you forgive the blips. This is a production stuffed with personality, spectacle and wow factor. Come for the nostalgia, perhaps, but stay for the new kicks: bigger, naughtier and camp as hell.

t seems to aspire to be like The Commitments but feels like a paler reflection. What saves it is the score – the original by Carney and Gary Clark – and the singing. There are high-quality performances and strong voices particularly from Collender and Townsley. Emotion is eked out by the end, although the show drags its feet to get there. Ultimately, it is gig theatre, with a vacuum in-between its uplifting songs.

If you feel denied of the subtleties of story, character and commentary on populist power, you will still have an eye-popping night out. And the balcony scene is a stroke of genius.

There is a briskness to its drama, under the direction of Casey Nicholaw, and a pounding out of the material – Songs! Lights! Action! – that makes it seem like a conveyor-belt musical. The characters are not so much divine as 2D, although the sound and optics are always eye-popping, the swivelling set designs intent on moving heaven and earth. Gregg Barnes and Sky Switser’s costumes are heavenly, too, and camp as hell: gold dresses, white Spanx and Hercules in a mesh vest and miniskirt-style toga by the end.

It feels abidingly faithful but moves stiffly at times, carrying the sense of a dusted down drama despite Chloe Lamford’s shining set, an island of flora and fauna bobbing like an eternally fragrant English garden against a bare black backdrop, before being stripped of its naturalism. The period dress strangely mutes the play’s shocks while, in an awkward touch, lugubrious ghostly figures in undergarments (Victorian sex workers?) crowd around the edges and act as stagehands.

The actors are vibrant nonetheless, though some are wobbly singers. Paulo Szot, as ambassador of the imaginary South American nation Miranda, has an impressive operatic depth to his voice and Chumisa Dornford-May, who plays the revolutionary Fritz ­– a trustafarian who is given an unconvincing romance with a soldier – is a strong singer, too, while Rory Kinnear is fun as the arrogant Leo Brink.

The play is full of plot, especially in Elena’s many machinations. There are moments of great intensity, mostly in the scenes featuring Fleetwood, and real candescence to the writing at its best. The focus on the women is interesting and intriguing, even though it means Henry feels rather spare to the drama. This is a story not of genius men building castles in the air for their princesses but of what destruction they wreak in their homes in so doing. Really, it is the drama of The Master Builder’s Wife.

Fresh from Broadway, this production encapsulates the worst of peacockingly splashy entertainment – the kind whose soul has been suctioned out in the making.

The five-strong cast juggle multiple roles with particularly fast work by Dianne Pilkington as various characters including Lucy’s father. The performances are superb all round, full of fun and mischief, but the low-hanging jokes of the script short-change the actors’ talents. This comedy needs sharper fangs.

The songs, composed by KT Tunstall, are disappointingly flat-footed except for two belters accompanied by comically energised choreography. Reasonable Doubts, sung by Josh and the ensemble, is a magnificent ode to teen jealousy, while I’m Keeping an Eye on You, performed when Josh turns up to a dance to watch over Cher, is as winning. If the score could fizz with more numbers like these then what a blast this show might be. But the lyrics by Glenn Slater too often serve as exposition rather than raising the emotional drama.

As a period piece, it is entirely dusted down and stands gleaming. Oliver Fenwick’s lighting design suffuses the stage in sepia as characters recount memories, or it spotlights them in emotional ways – a sentimental technique yet it works. For all its clunkier moments, this is undefinably winning drama. Perhaps it is down to the truth of the characters, so tender, hopeful, determined and unbeaten despite everything. A retro gem.

The switch from light to dark, when Hero is falsely accused of unfaithfulness on her wedding day by Claudio, is orchestrated with a masterful precision of tone. It brings dangerous anger, and where the scene ordinarily shows up the play’s dated gender politics – a man questioning the virtue of a woman and condemning her to metaphoric death – Hero never loses her power and the couple’s reunion seems genuine and joyful.

A play with abundant beauty to its verse (“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,” sighs the ailing Gaunt, played efficiently by Martin Carroll), its lyricism becomes slightly muted, though never by Bailey, whose words glitter with feeling. Royce Pierreson’s Bullingbrook is a man of action but you do not get beneath his skin. Phoenix Di Sebastiani, as the allegedly traitorous Mowbray, is spirited, while Christopher Osikanlu Colquhoun as the Earl of Northumberland bears gravitas.

The performances lift it, somewhat. There is a natural ease between Walker and Mangan: she is volubly frustrated, he is hangdog. They are best when the laughter drops off and the intensity is raised but this is not often enough. Doherty brings spirit and comedy. But their relationships are peculiarly devoid of passion, too declarative of their desires. However intimate the conversation becomes, the chemistry in this throuple never quite ignites.