Sarah Crompton — Theater Critic

But the great virtue of the production is it allows the women to shine. Staunton’s Kitty is a close relation of her Mama Rose, monstrous in her own way, but more understandable and with more pathos. The little moue of her mouth as she speaks with bitter distaste of the poverty of her upbringing is hugely suggestive and invites compassion. Yet for all Staunton’s command, it is Carter who drives the piece, charting with rigorous clarity Vivie’s journey from big-hearted, stuck-up innocent to a knowing woman who might just have a chance of making her own way in a world that will always be against her. She brings to the stage an honesty, a clarity of expression and thought.

But the great virtue of the production is it allows the women to shine. Staunton’s Kitty is a close relation of her Mama Rose, monstrous in her own way, but more understandable and with more pathos. The little moue of her mouth as she speaks with bitter distaste of the poverty of her upbringing is hugely suggestive and invites compassion. Yet for all Staunton’s command, it is Carter who drives the piece, charting with rigorous clarity Vivie’s journey from big-hearted, stuck-up innocent to a knowing woman who might just have a chance of making her own way in a world that will always be against her. She brings to the stage an honesty, a clarity of expression and thought.

A lot has changed since David Ireland’s The Fifth Step had its premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival last August. It’s still a play that teeters between comedy and dark horror, as it examines the relationship between Luka, a young man struggling to conquer his addiction, and James, the older man who becomes his mentor when he joins Alcoholics Anonymous. But it has been substantially rewritten and also recast. Jack Lowden still plays Luka, turning him into a compelling mix of jittery unhappiness and wounded righteousness as he goes on a journey that takes him from despair – “I think I might be an incel” – through dubious revelation, to the knowledge that he isn’t the only one in this relationship with problems.

There’s no avoiding the fact that in many ways the show is a mess. Yet scene by scene it just about works, thanks to Mantello’s inventive direction. What makes it magical are all the performances, each essentially taking a small part in an ensemble and making it rich. Their timing and their characterisations feel nigh on perfect. Krakowski brings a wide-eyed wonder to Marianne, constantly counting her blessings while Plimpton plays cleverly with the scratchy entitlement and fear of losing status that lie under her brittle façade.

The language constantly strives for the poetic but becomes impossibly stilted, leaving the actors making speeches at each other rather than interacting. McGregor in particular, making his return to the London stage after 17 years, seems desperately uncomfortable. Massively charismatic and in the past so fluent, here he is reduced to barking lines like orders, while Debicki has very little to do except gaze winsomely at him.

Each actor rises to the challenge: Stone walks a brilliantly controlled line between sanctimonious and sympathetic, Smurfit lets more and more grief emerge from her frozen control, Allison and above all Howells grapple painfully with a sense of lives ruined before they have even begun. O’Riordan’s taut direction never lets the tension, or the sense of wounded humanity slacken. I suspect Ibsen would have been proud.

But most impressively both he and Atwell find the sombre strains and the deep feeling under the fun. When Hero is attacked by Claudio, it’s Benedick who plays conciliator, calming a furious Leonato as well as Beatrice, with gently outstretched hands. There are long moments of silence and quiet tension as he weighs up what to do and how to proceed. When everything turns out to be much ado about nothing, the joy of the couple’s final coming together attracts “ooh”s and “aah”s of sheer pleasure.

The most compelling quality of the staging – driven on by a Hitchcockian score by Grant Olding – is the way that it treats the unfolding events not as historical inevitability, but as if they are changing moment to moment. From the start when Bailey’s petulant, self-obsessed king first confronts Royce Pierreson’s bullish Bullingbrook (listed according to first quarto spelling) in a scene where a lot of angry noblemen are getting very cross and shouting at each other, while flinging down their passports, it’s never quite clear what is going to happen next.

With the help of James Macdonald’s unobtrusive but taut direction, the cast excel. There are few people better than Mangan at making the words “in theory” feel like an essay in probability; as he wriggles and writhes in the midst of an unfamiliar situation, he brilliantly suggests a genuine confusion that masks something darker and less savoury. Walker is equally powerful, often funny, always honest. Her character is the ultimate truth-sayer, but she’s good at revealing the cost of that – showing the doubts beneath her desire to bring about change.

Brotherston’s set of gantries and iron stairways turns on a revolve, emphasising the bustle and vastness of the city but allowing vivid vignettes to emerge within it; Bourne’s choreography sets the boys in the orphanage scrubbing the stage in fierce unison until the moment of frozen suspense when Oliver dares to ask for more. Later, in routines such as It’s A Fine Life and Consider Yourself, their movement is both fierce (with beaten cups and feet) and childlike (as they imitate horses). Everything adds to the telling of the story in the most compressed and clearest way.

Brotherston’s set of gantries and iron stairways turns on a revolve, emphasising the bustle and vastness of the city but allowing vivid vignettes to emerge within it; Bourne’s choreography sets the boys in the orphanage scrubbing the stage in fierce unison until the moment of frozen suspense when Oliver dares to ask for more. Later, in routines such as It’s A Fine Life and Consider Yourself, their movement is both fierce (with beaten cups and feet) and childlike (as they imitate horses). Everything adds to the telling of the story in the most compressed and clearest way.

Written by Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli and director Tye Blue, it is quite frankly, riotously absurd. But it’s also endearing. And although neither quite as clever or hilarious as it sets out to be, it is so strongly sung and energetically performed under the direction of Blue and the musical direction of Adam Wachter, that it is impossible not to have a good time.

No-one, apart from Selina Cadell who makes an honourable character of Gonzalo, one of the nobles of Milan that Prospero causes to be shipwrecked on the island, seems to have much idea about what they are saying. Weaver absolutely looks the part, commanding the stage with her charisma, brooding watchfully over the action, but she speaks in an unrelenting and perversely unrhythmic monotone.

Nyman eats up the stage, singing powerfully, eyes constantly flashing towards the next main chance, his comic timing – he clasps his heart every time someone mentions money – obvious but also impeccable. As the hapless Bloom, a man never far from a panic attack which sets him sliding across the floor like a human broom, Marc Antolin exudes delicate charm and an attractive fragility. His love affair with the Swedish Ulla (Joanna Woodward, very funny) is played straight; their dance to “That Face” is a tender moment in an uproarious night.

Collins is a revelation, as lively as she is as Emily, yet with a lovely capacity for stillness; as she listens to Manuel talk about love, she becomes becalmed, her shifting from foot to foot stopping as she becomes first enthralled and then appalled by what he is saying. When she talks about “the wedding industrial complex”, she manages to mix dreaminess and despair, the sense of a Denver girl clinging to her illusions with a harder-nosed realisation that they may be fake.

The production is astonishing for all the moments when it rests in the affection between Jocasta and Oedipus, whose physical longing for one another is shown very explicitly, or Oedipus for Watson’s Merope who tells him he is adopted in a voice thick with emotion and longing, making every word count. It is also notable for its stillness; all the activity of the early scenes, the playfights and the rushing, ultimately resolve into stark passages where Strong sits or stands, simply listening.

The difficulty with this approach is that it leaves both play and character nowhere to go when the darker shades of O’Casey’s writing and the keening undertow of the Irish Republican movement’s violence begin to rise to the surface. As the play deepens, and the family is torn apart, it’s only the set that breaks – with the arrival of a non-naturalistic pieta striving for the emotion that the production has failed to generate. The ending is also clumsily altered, to suggest something bleaker than Boyle’s final conclusion about a world of chaos.

Such a meta-theatrical conceit could have backfired. Yet Why Am I So Single? is warm, bold and overflowing with ideas. Not all of them land, but its fizzing generosity makes it one of the most enticing new musicals since, well, Six. It may not have the same broad appeal as that show, but it boasts sensational performances from Jo Foster and Leesa Tulley. It feels like a hit.

Such a meta-theatrical conceit could have backfired. Yet Why Am I So Single? is warm, bold and overflowing with ideas. Not all of them land, but its fizzing generosity makes it one of the most enticing new musicals since, well, Six. It may not have the same broad appeal as that show, but it boasts sensational performances from Jo Foster and Leesa Tulley. It feels like a hit.

The quality of Jordan Fein’s wonderful, emotional production is that it perfectly holds the balance of Fiddler on the Roof, neither tilting towards saccharine nor bitterness, towards schmaltz or politics. It honours the care with which book writer Joseph Stein, lyricist Sheldon Harnick and composer Jerry Bock first created the show in 1964, under the passionate ferocity of their director Jerome Robbins.

Harris’s writing is at once subtle and bludgeoning; it doesn’t offer any moments of respite and it demands extraordinary acting from its entire ensemble. It gets it. Washington powerfully portrays a woman whose life has been distorted by wanting to resolve the unsayable; her stillness when listening and reacting is as remarkable as her final outburst. Harington, wearing his unquestioned privilege as easily as his linen shirt, is equally strong, creating a character whose willingness to undergo both physical and emotional exposure is driven by an adoration he barely understands.

Cox, all bark and ferocity, plays up the character’s fury, his sense of betrayal, his anger at the world and himself. In short, punchy outbursts of speech, he is cruelly dismissive of James, and you almost feel McCormack flinch beneath his verbal blows. Even more shockingly, he is prepared to skimp on the care of the delicate Edmund, whose diagnosis with consumption provides the play’s main narrative thread. Yet in the long final conversation between them, Cox also reveals James’s fear of poverty, and Kynaston’s wonderfully intense and frightened Edmund listens as if understanding his father for the first time.

It’s a sophisticated take on a jukebox musical, staged by Wheeldon with such energy and panache that the trajectory is breathtaking, scenes folding in and out of each other seamlessly. One particularly vivid sequence, for example, sweeps us from a disco party of celebration into the shapes and atmosphere of “Thriller”, complete with the press corps as the zombies and Jackson’s father Joseph as chief villain, into Jackson’s triumphant night at the 1984 Grammys, when he swept the board.

In transferring the film to the stage, Van Hove, who is adaptor as well as director, deliberately disrupts an already jagged story still further – introducing a documentary film crew who beam the cast’s reactions onto huge screens. Sometimes the screen shows what we are seeing on stage, sometimes it is a little behind. And sometimes, confusingly, it moves our attention to an action that is happening at the edge of things. The focus is always shifting, so that there is never an opportunity to get to understand any character before the next development lands. At the same time, Jan Versweyveld’s cluttered set, with mirrors and a table where the crew meet and chat, often doesn’t differentiate between scenes onstage in the play within the play that is being previewed to an audience, and the chaos backstage that is caused by Myrtle’s meltdown.

On paper it always feels as if it shouldn’t work. Yet on stage Hadestown is the most exhilarating ride. That band, with its bluesy trombone and folksy guitar is consistently thrilling, the songs are vibrant and smart, the sung-through text is compelling. In this version, the relationship between Orpheus and Grace Hodgett Young’s down-to earth Eurydice is also much refined, with a glorious and deeply felt performance from Dónal Finn that turns our hero into an agonised dreamer rather than a guitar-strumming popstar.