UK / WEST END THEATER REVIEWS

Seeing so accomplished and engaging a production as this (VOPERA's first to boot), a genuine question arises - is the socially-distanced, digitally distributed show no longer merely a stopgap, an ersatz simulacrum, but a new art form in itself?...

This latest gala from the Royal Ballet had been planned to be performed in front of a live and appreciative audience, drinking in their first in-person, post lockdown performance. Alas, the stars did not align, but the tenacity of the Opera house team means this “all guns blazing” display is sti...

Not since the Landor production in 2013 has the UK seen a professional production of Title of Show, the self-referential musical by Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell about two struggling writers in New York who decided to write an original musical for the New York Musical Theatre Festival. But joyfully, L...

Morgan Lloyd Malcolm penned the now three-time Olivier Award-winning play, Emilia, which tells her story. It premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2018 under the direction of Nicole Charles. The production then transferred to the West End and played the Vaudeville Theatre in 2019. An archive recordi...

The release of Dom O’Hanlon’s Theatre in Times of Crisis: 20 Scenes for the Stage in Troubled Times is certainly timely, even without COVID. Written in response to the coronavirus pandemic, the collection of twenty play excerpts compiled by the Senior Commissioning Editor of Methuen Drama explor...

15 Heroines is a major new digital project by Jermyn Street Theatre in collaboration with Digital Theatre Plus. Taking Ovid’s Heroides as inspiration they reach back across thousands of years and into the cultures of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Africa, the heroines are rehabilitated an...

The release of the brand new 2020 Mary Poppins cast recording could not have come along at a better time. We have just entered into a second national lockdown, which has meant that some theatres starting to get back on their feet have had the rug pulled out from under them again. Spirits are low, u...

In the next episode of the podcast series What I Love, acclaimed director Ian Rickson meets international theatre producer Sonia Friedman, who chooses a favourite song, film and piece of writing to highlight what we are all in danger of losing. Friedman began in the theatre as a dresser, working ...

At a time when live theatre has again been yanked from our grasp, the joint efforts of The Barn Theatre, The New Wolsey Theatre and The Lawrence Batley theatre to produce an adaptation of Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! is a welcome tonic amidst such ever-darkening days....

This Halloween-themed episode features Aimie Atkinson, Linzi Hateley, Sophie Isaacs, Bradley Jaden, Ria Jones, Josh Piterman, Jordan Shaw and Trevor Dion Nicholas singing tracks from shows including Beetlejuice, The Rocky Horror Show and Carrie....

This week, Storyglass released the first three episodes of their new podcast, What I Love, hosted by former artistic director of the Royal Court, Ian Rickson. In each episode, Rickson speaks with a different artist about three of their cultural treasures – a film, a poem, and a song. The interview...

The infamous Baron Munchausen is updated for our times, given voice by Richard O'Brien who revels in recounting outrageous, outlandish stories....

What I Love is a brand new podcast series from Storyglass. Created and hosted by celebrated British theatre director Ian Rickson, interviews are conducted on the empty stages of some of Britain's most iconic theatres, shut down due to the pandemic. Here, he meets a variety of actors, performers and ...

After a curtailed tour and a sold-out run at Cornwall’s Minack Theatre, Willy Russell’s beautifully poignant Educating Rita now comes to the Rose Theatre for its first performances inside a theatre in a Covid-restricted world. A bittersweet and very funny production; it has been worth the wait....

Uncle Vanya was one of many West End shows that saw their run abruptly cut short when COVID-19 hit. But, with their set still up at the Harold Pinter Theatre, back in August the show was performed once again, this time to cameras instead of an audience, allowing Uncle Vanya to have a nationwide cine...

After a beautifully lyrical version of Romeo and Juliet, Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet returns to our cinema screens on November 1 with a highly emotional version of John Neumeier’s Lady of the Camellias. Created in 1979 for the Stuttgart Ballet, the Bolshoi has been performing this intensely poignan...

Sunday evening saw a very different kind of Zoom call. In aid of The Royal Theatrical Fund, Lockdown Theatre presented another excellent performance; Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, featuring an absolutely stellar cast who performed the play as a live table read over Zoom....

Bubble, the second play in Nottingham Playhouse's Unlocked season, sees Pearl Mackie and Jessica Raine shine as a not-yet-couple deciding whether or not to move in together for lockdown....

There’s no better climate than a global pandemic for the Devil to get married, don’t you think? And they (yes, they - if we need to have one genderqueer character on the theatre scene, it definitely needs to be Lucifer) are inviting you to their hellish royal wedding reception. Dante’s In-Furl...

The third show to run at the open-air The Garden Theatre at The Eagle - now with outdoor heating - is Next Thing You Know​​​​​​​, is a contemporary, American, four-hander musical by Ryan Cunningham and Joshua Salzman....

Austin Winberg's musical First Date was first seen on Broadway in 2013. It's a classic American story of two mismatched singletons in New York - Aaron and Casey - who end up on a blind date, and all the complications that come with that. ...

In the week that Dominic West appeared in a cringe-worthy “We’re still happily married” two-hander on the doorstep of his Wiltshire home with his deceived wife, the opening of Harold Pinter’s tale of betraying loved ones couldn’t be more timely....

Even the introduction of the excellent Naomie Harris can do little to rescue a show that makes you look forward to global warming....

An epic biography about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atom bomb. This is a staged reading by the cast from the original RSC production in 2015....

A very different world (and a very different BBC) emerges from that most impenetrable of dark places - the recent past....