UK REGIONAL THEATER REVIEWS

Over the last year, many productions have been revived to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the First World War. Oh What A Lovely War , originally produced by Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, is another example of this and is playing the final week of its UK tour at Birmingham...

Gary Naylor sees a musical revival that has its flaws but also has two flawless central performances, with acting and singing of the highest quality....

Gary Naylor sees a play that intertwines eight monologues from eight women getting by as best they can in contemporary London....

Telling the story of the March sisters growing up in Civil War America, Little Women has never really had the recognition it deserves as a musical. It only lasted for four months on Broadway and has had just a few short stints elsewhere. Based on Louisa May Alcott's semi-autobiographical novel, it i...

Gary Naylor sees a musical that has much going for it, but is let down by a predictable script and some uneven singing and acting,...

Shakespeare's KING JOHN comes to a church where the real King actually visited, in Northampton's Royal and Derngate's co-production with Shakespeare's Globe - Verity Wilde was there for BroadwayWorld....

Daphne du Maurier's most famous novel Rebecca - written in 1938 - is spectacularly brought back to life by Kneehigh Theatre Company's current UK tour. "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" is the iconic line starting and ending the performance and from the moment it is first uttered, the a...

10 years since its creation - The Royal Exchange Theatre's Bruntwood prize for Playwriting celebrated with a photo exhibition and the world premiere of one of 2013's winners - Chris Urch's The Rolling Stone. Urch's superb claustrophobic drama tells the love story of Sam and Dembe, in the backdrop of...

Gary Naylor sees football brilliantly brought to life on stage in a cautionary tale about what happens when 18-year-old players are handed a professional contract and what happens when they are not....

Gary Naylor sees a wonderfully funny swearfest of a comedy set in the moral cesspit of a newspaper not too dissimilar to one or two in a newsagent near you....

The Producers, a Mel Brooks musical, has been a favourite of mine since I saw the Las Vegas production years ago starring David Hasselhoff - who was surprisingly good, I might add! The show had been condensed into an hour and a half straight through which worked well in my opinion. The musical was a...

Gary Naylor sees a play full of innovation, one that could only have been written in the last year or two - a rare example of truly contemporary theatre staged in 2015....

Gary Naylor sees a visually stunning and powerful version of one of Shakespeare's problem plays, stripped back to its moral dilemmas...

Bouncers remains a timeless piece and one of John Godber's most popular plays. The current tour presented by the John Godber Company and Theatre Royal Wakefield is playing its penultimate venue this week in Birmingham. The show has been extensively performed across the country so one would presume i...

Gary Naylor enjoys an unorthodox version of one of British Theatre's most performed shows - and finds it as modern and majorly entertaining as ever!...

Gary Naylor sees a debut musical that has great songs and an important message, but needs to get more from its cast in order to reach its potential....

Gary Naylor sees a scary, shocking, sordid evocation of a murder now 90 years in the past, but still capable of making one stop and think about whether we're really all that different from the psychopaths portrayed....

Gary Naylor enjoys a funny, and very scary, play that imagines just what may have happened to see off Margaret Thatcher, one of two politicians to win a secure majority in a UK election in the last 45 years....

Following a successful run at Derby Theatre as a companion piece to The Odyssey, Penelope Retold is now embarking on a national tour. The show intertwines myth and reality in a fast paced modern take on the military wife....

Gary Naylor sees a musical adaptation of one of the icons of British 20th-century tabloid media, Viv Nicholson, who won the pools, lost a husband (or five) and gained the wisdom of late middle age - and survived....

Gary Naylor sees a claustrophobic examination of personalities on the edge of cracking, incapable of occupying the same space, yet lost without each other....

Gary Naylor sees a 25th Anniversary Show of a classic musical that, even after all those performances, still has the feel of a first draft in need of a tidying-up....

A haunting and wonderfully realised production of Fania Fenelon's memoir about her experience as a musician in Nazi concentration camps....

Birmingham Ormiston Academy (or BOA as it is fondly known) may already be on your radar but if it isn't, you won't escape it for much longer. The performing arts academy for 14-19 year olds is an independent state-run establishment and was modelled on the very successful Brit School in London. In ge...

Gary Naylor sees a fierce condemnation of the multi-faceted situation that led to 34 men, many of them teenagers, losing their lives on a mountain pass between Turkey and Iraq....