UK / WEST END THEATER REVIEWS

Fanny & Stella is the debut production at The Garden Theatre, situated in The Eagle pub's beer garden in Vauxhall. This is a brand new socially distanced open-air production, running until the end of summer....

With everything that continues to go on around us, it is incredible that we are still managing to be creative and produce new work, such as The Rhythmics, which has just been released as a studio album....

If youa??ve never heard of Howard Ashman, youa??re definitely be familiar with his work. A supremely talented lyricist, he worked on Disney classics including The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Beauty And The Beast. Howard is a new documentary on Disney+ which tells his (until now) remarkable untold st...

The buzz that usually pervades the West End is subdued, even on a Saturday afternoon with the sun shining bright and hot. London still has that feel of a city straight out of a post-apocalyptic film. In a world where all of a sudden theatre as we know it has become a potential threat to the health o...

Ita??s 1987 and the AIDS crisis is peaking in the United Kingdom. Paranoia has pushed people to stigmatise and shun the diseased for fear of contagion even after it was proved that the virus couldna??t be transmitted by touch alone. To challenge public opinion and to prove a point, Diana Princess of...

The Secret Love Life of Ophelia is a new adaption of Steven Berkoff's two-hander play. The cast consists of 39 young actors with a cameo by Oscar-winner and the venue's patron, Dame Helen Mirren. This is Greenwich Theatre's debut online production as part of their ambitious online program titled Gre...

Two new pieces of youth drama are available in the Nick Hern Books catalogue, in their Platform series in collaboration with Tonic Theatre: Georgia Christou's Bright. Young. Things. and Lizzie Nunnery's Heavy Weather. Uncommonly for the publisher, the two plays haven't yet received a full product...

First performed at the Kiln Theatre in 2019, and now available to stream digitally on the Tamasha Theatre Company YouTube channel, Approaching Empty is a play about friendship, community and the immigrant experience in Britain. It's set in a minicab office in the North of England, in the wake of Mar...

Chronic Insanitya??s latest contribution to the online theatre panorama is an entirely interactive and thought-provoking experiment titled Myles Away. From the start, it catapults the audience/players into a futuristic reality where a tech company is about to introduce their newest Virtual Reality p...

In Beethovena's 250th anniversary year, it seems appropriate for a new version of his only opera, Fidelio, to have been created. However, it begs the question of whether Fidelio is actually a fundamentally a 'good' opera? ...

Jason Robert Brown has gifted the world with immeasurable talent through his flair for theatrical compositions with a pop/rock bent and broad vocal ranges. The UK has been gifted with a wealth of JRB productions over the years - most recently an inspired lockdown performance of The Last Five Years, ...

On a rainy evening in North West London, a rather unique experience took place. Drive-in cinema remains a novelty in the UK; a drive-in cinema screening opera is surely a first. However, in response to the current situation, the Luna Drive-in Cinema has adapted its hugely popular cinema nights to bo...

A brand new online production of Nigel Slater's critically acclaimed play Toast has been made available to worldwide audiences by Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield. Half-radio play and half-animated film, Toast can be listened to, or watched as an animated film, by audiences from the comfort of ...

No one could have predicted the catastrophic impact that the coronavirus pandemic has had on the arts industry. From live concerts to releasing never-before-seen archive footage, venues and artists have been doing all they can to keep the theatre industry's profile alive....

Last night was the online premiere of the Royal Opera House's Faust, broadcast for free as part of the #OurHouseToYourHouse series. This is David McVicar's production, recorded in 2019....

The new lockdown mini-musical from David Hunter and Caroline Kay is a well-realised piece about the impact of lockdown on an already strained relationship....

For anyone lucky enough to have seen a performance at the beautiful Arena di Verona will know that out of the thousands of seats, very few are actually comfortable. Three hours sitting on stone steps with no back support will test the most ardent Verdi fan, but luckily Marquee TV have now debuted an...

The stories career along at the speed of a subway train, barely giving a moment for the dilemmas so skilfully set up to be mentally processed before another comes along to knock you off balance. That so many of these challenges do not apply to me nor to my two boys around Zyrick's age, is proof that...

It seems almost a lifetime ago that the National Theatre made the decision to start streaming shows from their archive to shine a light in the darkness of these times. Beginning with One Man, Two Guv'nors, their screening of the peerless production of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus marks the last of these ...

Nigel Slater's Toast is an online play a?" part radio play, part animated film. Written by Henry Filloux-Bennett, the show is based on Nigel Slater's award-winning biography and vividly recreates his childhood through stunning animation....

Undone is an extraordinary examination of what it feels like to live in a world that appears more layered than linear, the past poking into the present so often that the boundaries soon cease to have any real meaning....

What Club11 London has always done so brilliantly is unite communities, and Turn Up London is perhaps their most effective and important example of that....

Last night the Barn Theatre presented their fifth virtual concert, which celebrated the work of musical theatre playwright, lyricist and director Annabel Mutale Reed- known for the critically-acclaimed musical STOP (with Leo Munby), musical collaborations with composer Jack Trzcinski, and directing ...

There were few greater joys in dance in 2019 than English National Ballet's Cinderella-in-the-round, which played to full auditoriums for 10 days last summer in London. After recent events, it already feels like a lifetime ago, so it's a particular treat to relive it now, as the last of their serie...

The latest NT at Home digital offering is Terence Rattigan's 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea, which was performed at the National Theatre in 2016. Directed by Carrie Cracknell and starring the indomitable Helen McCrory, this post-war microcosm bristles with desperate passion....