Clive Davis — Theater Critic

As for Dog Day Afternoon at the August Wilson, it’s never clear what the playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis hoped to achieve by bringing the 1970s screen thriller to the stage. Jon Bernthal brings some swagger to the part of Sonny, the bank robber originally played by Al Pacino, yet the British director Rupert Goold seems content to let the play tootle along like some inoffensive sitcom. There’s no tension in this heist; the guns may as well be made of marzipan.

At the Winter Garden, Joe Mantello’s production of Death of a Salesman drops Nathan Lane’s Willy Loman into what looks like a gigantic, dimly lit warehouse. It’s hard to generate a sense of domestic intimacy in such cavernous surroundings. Lane just about wins the battle, although it’s Laurie Metcalf as Willy’s wife, Linda, who commands more attention, not to mention the glossy Chevrolet that rolls onto the stage at the start of proceedings.

As co-producers, Barack and Michelle Obama bring a touch of presidential prestige to the revival of David Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning Proof at the Booth. But it’s a strangely underpowered affair, a soft-spoken Don Cheadle bringing little light and shade to the role of an ailing mathematics pioneer whose depressed daughter (Ayo Edebiri) suddenly claims to have come up with a groundbreaking paper. That thinly rendered McGuffin stretches credibility to breaking point. At the performance I saw, the audience, eager to be won over, laughed and applauded at the most innocuous of lines.

Could Bette Midler have saved Beaches? Probably not. Four decades ago the Divine Miss M brought sassiness to a Hollywood weepie about friendship, ambition and the Grim Reaper. Watching the musical version at the Majestic turned out to be an oddly unaffecting experience. The songs by Mike Stoller (one half of the vintage partnership of Leiber and Stoller) are pleasant enough and, as Cee Cee Bloom, Jessica Vosk nailed one vocal after another. The dialogue, sadly, was alternately wooden and saccharine.

Some productions are so much fun that they can, paradoxically, make you feel a little bit anxious. The feast of in-jokes crammed into the opening quarter of Schmigadoon! leaves you wondering if the laughter can keep flowing at such a preposterous rate.

eff Whitty’s book and Anna Louizos’s brownstone set offer a snapshot of a New York neighbourhood where the residents scuttle around in pursuit of elusive goals. The superb young cast, led by Noah Harrison and Emily Benjamin, manipulate a collection of hand-held puppets, designed by Rick Lyon, that are brought to life with the simplest of gestures and interact with humans including Amelia Kinu Muus’s terminally dissatisfied Asian-American wife. The American Dream hasn’t quite delivered the goods in this part of town. What Do You Do with a BA in English? is a number that tells you everything you need to know about the job market.

It is 17 years since Rosamund Pike last appeared in the West End. Films such as Gone Girl and Saltburn have distracted her from the stage. But seeing her rule over Wyndham’s Theatre with the loose-limbed aplomb she does in this reprise of Inter Alia, the legal-meets-personal drama in which she triumphed at the National Theatre last summer, you cannot help hoping this isn’t a one-off. Will she win an Olivier award on Sunday for the National production? She certainly deserves it. This is acting at its best.

Robert Jones’s shop-floor design, edged with red lights, amply fills the Coliseum’s broad space; the costumes he has created with Tom Rogers are an evocative combination of glamour and workaday. Harvey Fierstein’s book avoids overplaying the uplift. There were groans from some audience members when Price let loose some homophobic slurs but what would be the point of airbrushing prejudice out of the story?

Modern phrases such as “number crunching” are scattered here and there. As with the translation that Nick Dear provided for Nunn a quarter of a century ago, there’s a fair amount of swearing but it’s never gratuitous. Gorky directed his ire at what he saw as the fecklessness of the middle classes, yet given what we now know about the brutal system that was about to sweep them away, it’s hard to pass judgment on them. And the moments when they talk about the sense of rootlessness that haunts them even after they have risen in the world are almost unbearably poignant. This is a play that blends laughter with tears.

Modern phrases such as “number crunching” are scattered here and there. As with the translation that Nick Dear provided for Nunn a quarter of a century ago, there’s a fair amount of swearing but it’s never gratuitous. Gorky directed his ire at what he saw as the fecklessness of the middle classes, yet given what we now know about the brutal system that was about to sweep them away, it’s hard to pass judgment on them. And the moments when they talk about the sense of rootlessness that haunts them even after they have risen in the world are almost unbearably poignant. This is a play that blends laughter with tears.

Kip Williams has spiced up the sensuality of the novel a tad, and there’s an odd moment when Arthur Holmwood, fiancé of the Count’s victim Lucy Westenra, indulges in some very un-Victorian effing and blinding. Anyone unfamiliar with the novel may find the climactic chase slightly confusing, yet the snow falling from above and Erivo’s sudden eruption into an original song add genuine operatic grandeur.

The truth, though, is that while the folk-inflected songs by Mike Rosenberg (known as Passenger) are amiable enough — Chris Poon’s compact band cut a dash and the lyrics inject some surprisingly salty humour at times — Joyce’s script is oddly underpowered. It’s hard to take an interest in whether her unassuming Devon hero makes it to his destination in Berwick-upon-Tweed, where an old acquaintance, Queenie Hennessey, lies dying of cancer in a hospice. Katy Rudd’s production at the Haymarket in the West End trudges on and on, tugging at our heartstrings along the way.

It’s when the piece shifts to the present day, and the self-important academic Bernard Nightingale (Prasanna Puwanarajah) takes centre-stage that the pace begins to flag. The dominant yet unseen figure throughout the evening is that of Lord Byron, whose visit to Sidley prompts all sorts of speculation and theorizing. Continually misreading the fragments of evidence, Nightingale builds a house of cards.

Tim Hatley’s set design, with its sliding wooden-slat walls, evokes a fragile, dusty township. But while a clock hanging above the stage ticks away as we wait for the villainous Frank Miller to arrive on the noon train, the climactic shoot-out looks perfunctory. Still, the lines that Roth has added about morality and confronting rule-breakers take on new force at the start of a year when the world seems to be in meltdown.

Not so long ago, Smith wrongfooted her fans in the misfiring musical-cum-psychodrama, Opening Night, a portrait of another woman on the edge. This drama is even more audacious. It’s so cheering to see the West End can still take risks, and even more encouraging to know that Smith and co will be taking the play out of London, albeit briefly, after the run finishes.

Cole Escola’s deeply weird comedy, which re-imagines Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of honest Abe, as a frustrated cabaret artist, knocking back booze and spitting venom in all directions, has built a cult following since it began life off-Broadway. The performance I attended at the Trafalgar Theatre was greeted with some of the most maniacal cackling I’ve ever heard from a West End audience. Which is very, very odd when you consider that, deep down, Sam Pinkleton’s production is really a Saturday Night Live sketch stretched to improbable lengths.

Libby Todd’s set design and Roberto Surace’s costumes are a match for the larger-than-life madness. DiCarlo, who made such a fine job of keeping all the plot lines spinning in the multi-layered Comedy About Spies, is equally accomplished here. It’s no easy job to keep a production teetering on the edge of disaster. These actors know how to fail with a flourish.

Adam Fisher’s thunderous sound design provides a fine impersonation of a lumbering, unseen giantess seeking revenge for the death of her husband. Kate Fleetwood spits venom as the Witch, while the two princes (Oliver Savile and Rhys Whitfield) are engagingly over-the-top on Agony. Gracie McGonigal’s Little Red Ridinghood [sic] is drenched in convincing gore in her grand guignol moment. Jamie Parker and Katie Brayben win our sympathy as the baker and his wife.

Fletcher’s nimbly crafted songs come with deft lyrics and, occasionally, sleek harmonies that wouldn’t be out of place on an early Queen anthem. One of Us brings the first act to a thunderous conclusion, Don’t Touch That is the jaunty backdrop to a string of domestic mishaps. Just when the score starts to feel lacking in variation Marmalade opens the second act with a cheerful waltz tempo adorned with big-hearted choreography by Ellen Kane.

The cast does an honourable job of portraying the ravenous, genetically engineered creatures that go on the rampage towards the end. Euan Garrett wins our sympathy as Katniss’s comrade Peeta, while Stavros Demetraki camps it up as Caesar Flickerman, the games’ compere played in the film by a bewigged Stanley Tucci. While there were reports of chaotic scenes in the foyer at previews, things moved smoothly at the show I attended. There’s presumably more than enough of a fanbase to keep this venture running and running, but it really needs some genetic engineering of its own.

Harewood is similarly understated in the title role. This military genius is suave and faintly self-satisfied, yet his descent into madness never really tugs at the emotions. Harewood falls heavily to the ground in the scene where Othello slips into a paralytic fit, but there’s not much light and shade to his verse-speaking. (It didn’t help, to be honest, that throughout the evening the audience was prone to chortle at scenes and lines that weren’t remotely comical.)

You wait in vain for this Marlowe to acquire some nuance when he flirts with Edward Bluemel’s ingenuous Will — “Who do you f***: boys or girls?” — as they begin their collaboration on the Henry VI series. (The play’s title comes from Gloucester’s speech in Part 3.) Duffy drew inspiration from research that suggests the two men really did work together on the text, and the script is studded with insider references that will raise a chuckle among some scholars. At its heart, though, it hovers at the level of conscientiously researched fan fiction.

All I can say is that, despite its rough edges — the book, by the film’s director, Steven Antin, gets hopelessly tangled in the second half — Todrick Hall’s production has more vim than that other recently arrived contender in the hen party stakes, The Devil Wears Prada. And in the pairing of Jess Folley and the American singer Orfeh (who is making her West End debut) the evening unfurls some powerhouse vocals.

Zegler… is reduced to a blank-eyed marionette for virtually the whole show. Her voice is fine but it has to compete with the musical director Alan Williams’s wildly amplified orchestra... Call it TikTok musical theatre, if you like.

From where I was sitting in the stalls, to be honest, a fair portion of Zippel’s over-amplified lyrics were so difficult to decipher that they might as well have been written in a classical language. Thankfully, those mighty muses — played this evening by Kimmy Edwards, Kamilla Fernandes, Sharlene Hector, Robyn Rose-Li and Brianna Ogunbawo — can blow the roof off of any temple.