Nick Curtis — Theater Critic

Great theatre can be about many things: star quality, spectacle, the lightning-in-bottle capture of a moment... In this Evita, all those things come triumphantly together.

However, Brady’s Hercules is sweet but uncharismatic, his romance with Hades’ bored-seeming servant Meg (Mae Ann Jorolan) low-powered. Alan Menken and David Zippel’s score includes hits from the original film and some new numbers added for the 2019 off Broadway premiere: I enjoyed the Muses’ much-reprised Gospel Truth, Hercules’ Go the Distance, and Meg’s Forget About It in performance, but none lingered in the ear or the mind on the journey home.

Bottom and his fellow artisans, rehearsing a dreadful play for Theseus’s wedding, are treated with more dignity and delicacy than is usual. The whole cast is allowed a measure of ad lib or embellishment, as in Shakespeare’s day. This is a gift to Akwafo, who is funny down to his bones, but also to the drily acerbic Fielding and to Moorst, who has further honed his interaction with audience members since he played Puck in 2019.

Mischief’s artistic director, Lewis co-wrote the script with Wright, and there are many of their fellow founders – who all studied together at LAMDA – and trusted regulars from previous shows in the cast. Dave Hearn’s elastic Lance, Chris Leask’s strangulated Sergei and Greg Tannahill’s fey hotel manager all delight – Tannahill also choreographs the fights. Nancy Zamit and Charlie Russell bring coarser grain to the roles of Lance’s mother Janet and Sergei’s eye-rolling partner Elena. James, a newcomer to the Mischief fold, plays it admirably straight as Rosemary. Director Matt DiCarlo keeps the pace up and David Farley’s simple set nicely recalls the backdrops of 1960s animations.

Smurfit is magnetic in expensive cream athleisurewear, hair artfully sleeked and cheekbones burnished like a battle visor: she’s not afraid to appear hard and unlikeable. Scott-Howells is an edgy and fascinating actor, always pushing the envelope of what is permissible. Stone, ever-dependable, is terrific here. Allison, part of the extraordinary talent school that was Sex Education, has a quietly compelling authority on stage. Deka Walmsley completes a fine cast as her father Jacob. Well, when I say ‘father’...

Before the last of many threats to commit suicide, sawn-off shotgun barrel socketed under his jaw, Moat has a speech about the crisis of masculinity. It feels timely, but like everything here it’s ambiguous, half-plea and half threat. Icke is one of the most gifted theatre artists working today – his magnificent 2024 Oedipus has just won a string of awards – but for all its intensity, Manhunt feels like it’s hedging its bets. Or worse, can’t make its mind up.

Exaggerated parody is a Marmite genre. You either love it or hate it, but it can take only a minor miscalibration in tone or pitch for affection to turn to abhorrence. I found Titanique delightful but many close to me loathed it. I’m deeply irritated by the way Dracula insulates itself against criticism by telling us how slapdash it’s going to be (“you’ll be horrified – one way or another!”). But mostly I was just unamused and bored.

Exaggerated parody is a Marmite genre. You either love it or hate it, but it can take only a minor miscalibration in tone or pitch for affection to turn to abhorrence. I found Titanique delightful but many close to me loathed it. I’m deeply irritated by the way Dracula insulates itself against criticism by telling us how slapdash it’s going to be (“you’ll be horrified – one way or another!”). But mostly I was just unamused and bored.

Omigod guys, Amy Heckerling’s musical adaptation of her 1995 film about a rich Beverley Hills brat finding wisdom and true love is, like, kinda fun. It features a powerfully-sung breakout performance from young New Yorker Emma Flynn as the plaid-clad protagonist Cher Horowitz. I could mutter about yet another risk-averse, cross-genre exploitation of existing intellectual property – not just of the movie but of its inspiration, Jane Austen’s Emma – but frankly it’s more fun to just enjoy it.

Hendy admittedly knows his comedy history, with the onstage trio paying tribute to Max Miller, Sid Field, George Formby and others, and acknowledging the long tradition of stealing jokes. There are some old-favourite zingers: “Des O’Connor – a hard man to ignore. But worth the effort.” But mostly it’s just a chortling, smug, snoozefest, with moments of seriousness heavily flagged by flickering bulbs and the kind of “thoom” sound effect that usually accompanies a nuclear explosion in films.

Hiddleston and Atwell regularly break the fourth wall, flirting and riffing on their celebrity with the audience: one misfire is the introduction of life-size cutouts of their Marvel Cinematic Universe characters to the otherwise blissfully absurd scenes where their characters are tricked into loving each other. The simplicity of the staging and the licensed showboating of the stars gives an idea of what theatre in Shakespeare’s day might have been like, only with more Jagerbombs, airhorn blasts and disco lights.

Richard II, with its rigid structure and strict double-narrative about two different styles of kingship, is never going to be a crowd-pleaser unless it’s by star casting. Hence Bailey. He commands the stage and even allows a little camp to seep into the character (Richard’s marriage to his shopaholic wife may be transactional). He doesn’t sugar the king’s brattish reluctance to cede the crown but in later speeches attains a stricken grandeur.

It's slickly directed by James Macdonald on a set distractingly dominated by a ribbed half-dome that sometimes contracts like a concertina and otherwise acts as a backdrop for garish shadows. Scene changes are accompanied by snatches of the music hall song Daisy, Daisy – a hymn to coupledom involving “a bicycle made for two”, which was changed to “a bisexual” in my school playground. Though the play has flaws, and falls apart completely at the end, it’s never less than a rollicking, stimulating ride. If you’ll pardon the expression.

All of the characters become at some point unconvincing as they contort to move the debate forward, but Mimî M Khayisa and Sifiso Mazibuko are impressive in the tricky roles of Bonolo and Sihle. Robyn Rainsford is very funny as Jess, constantly trying to rebalance her chakras in the face of excruciating social embarrassment. Scott Sparrow is an irredeemably boorish Boer as Christopher. This isn’t perfect but it’s perceptive, provoking fun.

The most prominent insertion though is Drew’s hilarious Dion. Dressed in a sparkling, slash-thighed frock and matching pants, she hunkers down to a succession of the singer’s power ballads like a prop entering a scrum. Her expert pastiche of the singer’s lung-busting stylings and yodelling arpeggios are laced with whoops, squawks and mock-sincere, glutinously-accented asides about how much she “lurves” us.

Lloyd’s production has an incantatory, dream-like quality. The cast wear headset mics and speak the verse with great clarity but little passion, their movements stylised and stiff: on the first of two press nights, Weaver lost her words a couple of times. An interesting thematic suggestion that Prospero’s island is a place of rebirth gets lost amid the sonorous intonation and tedious comic relief. For all its stark visual boldness, this is a curiously old-fashioned take.

There’s a reason Hellman is rarely done. Her plays can look overwrought and dated. The extended Alabama clan featured here make Tennessee Williams’s unhappy families look like the Waltons. But there’s a brutal internal logic to this 1939 work and a timeliness to Turner’s revival. A fine ensemble is anchored by a standout performance from Duff. She mines pathos and empathy from the character of Regina Giddens (nee Hubbard), who could be a monster.

The incidental detail is wonderful: the Zimmer-frame chorus line of Bialystok’s conquests is balanced by a Fiddler-style onslaught of capering shtetl inhabitants earlier on. Some throwaway lines are built up into full-scale Vaudevillian “bits”. Paul Farnsworth’s costumes, including hotpants and giant spangled Bratwurst and Bier-stein headgear for the dancers, Swastika-clad pigeons and a living statue with outsized genitalia, are hilarious.

By far the strongest moment in the play is the electric rap battle between her and Nancy, which sums up the play’s tangled ideas. It’s a contest meticulously scripted by a white male writer to sound improvised, between a white and a Hispanic woman, who are otherwise marginalised by older men, two black and one white, who all think they should own the narrative. The Purists is ungoverned and sprawling and never resolves its thorny questions about identity and authenticity, but it generates much enjoyment as well as much head-scratching along the way.

Tessema’s first produced play, House of Ife, also at the Bush, was a close family drama also set among the Ethiopian diaspora in Britain. Its plot was wayward while its characters and their melting-pot London argot felt blisteringly authentic. Here, Tessema has clearly set out to understand the arcane world of cryptocurrency and you can feel his research sitting in the play like silt, weighing down his sparky dialogue.

The script has been tweaked and the production recast since I saw and loved it at Southwark Playhouse last July: the sketched-in supporting characters feel more winsome and cartoonish, and the cast’s artfully dishevelled clothes and smeared faces make them look like extras from Oliver! but it remains a sweet love story that carries a powerful, almost mystical musing on the nature of existence. Plus you’ve got to love a show that rhymes “cup and saucer” with “divorce her”.

What’s keeping these two people in this room apart from the playwright’s need to generate conflict? There’s some confusion too over their ages. The doll-like Collins looks deliberately young, though actually playing her age: Manuel should surely be older. Again, weird. I think there’s a subtextual strand about the way large-scale, domestic terror atrocities have changed America, but I didn’t buy it.

Strong has superb pacing and physical awareness, his lithe, shaven-headed form switching from loose daddish warmth to vulpine alertness and stricken anguish in a heartbeat. And surely there is no finer actress working today than Manville, who’s excelled at the Royal Court, National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, and conquered Hollywood (The Phantom Thread), British sitcom (Mum) and lockdown binge-watch (Sherwood).

Tulley and Foster’s voices initially lack body but mature and grow movingly throughout the evening. Noah Thomas exhibits easy charm and loose-limbed grace as their friend Art Fulldodger (groan). It’d be impossible to replicate the alchemy of Six and it’s wise of Marlow and Moss not to try. This zesty, in-jokey, crackerjack entertainment proves they’re certainly not one-hit wonders.

Tulley and Foster’s voices initially lack body but mature and grow movingly throughout the evening. Noah Thomas exhibits easy charm and loose-limbed grace as their friend Art Fulldodger (groan). It’d be impossible to replicate the alchemy of Six and it’s wise of Marlow and Moss not to try. This zesty, in-jokey, crackerjack entertainment proves they’re certainly not one-hit wonders.