UK / WEST END THEATER REVIEWS

It's not everyday you get to sit in such a large auditorium and watch one person entertain you for 90 minutes. When you think about it, it's actually a lot of pressure for just one individual. The Eventim holds over 3500 people and with that comes that same amount of varying personal tastes to have ...

Having run on Broadway in 2010, this week James Lapine's Stephen Sondheim revue, Sondheim On Sondheim, was staged for one night only with the terrific BBC Concert Orchestra and a cast of West End talent....

If you like powerful vocals, camp conversational exchanges and dry humour then this is the show for you....

The final new production in The Winter Selection at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is a daring masterclass in puppetry from Gyre & Gimble. They have used Max Richter's recompositions of Vivaldi's classic 'Four Seasons' concertos as a basis to tell an original story about 'life, death and renewal', focu...

Claustrophobic play about two ill-suited spouses re-united for pragmatic reasons and working through their pain from ten years ago - a gruelling watch....

The father of modern psychology comes back from the grave in a flurry of cross-dressing madness. Natasha Sutton Williams writes an exhilarating musical filled to the brim of phallic jokes and the basis of psychotherapy. Sigmund Freud's cocaine addiction and an imaginary cat named Oedipussy move the ...

It's not every day you get to be shuffled through a tiny green door in the lower-ground floor of a Money Exchange in Piccadilly Circus and, quite literally, enter the Suffragettes' world. 'Are you prepared for a long or short sentence?' they ask, and so you are thrown into a frenzy of missions and ...

Nastazja Somers brings her new show Things That Do Not C(o)unt to Vault Festival. A daring and bold feminist one-woman play, it explores female sexuality and body issues unabashedly. She takes her audience on a partially autobiographical journey through Poland and London, stretching the boundaries o...

This is one of those plays that make you question how a human brain ever came up with it. Deliberately messy in its composition but acutely tight-knitted in its execution, Ned Bennett's quirky production alienates, whilst at the same time intrigues. The entire room is filled with bewilderment, yet t...

April De Angelis's adaptation of Frankenstein, directed by Matthew Xia, stays true to its source's literary narrative....

Charting the rise of Cilla Black's pop career is tough ask for a musical. She may have been an entertainer of superlative quality, but she lacks the back catalogue that is the engine room of similar jukebox style shows....

Following a chance encounter with an escaped convict, orphan Pip is given an unexpected opportunity to visit the reclusive Miss Havisham. In the decay and faded grandeur of her house, Pip falls in love with her adopted daughter Estella and helped by an anonymous benefactor, he moves to London to att...

Ara Malikian showcases his talents with an eclectic mix of music spiced with showmanship and stories, with a twist in the tail....

The first major revival of Charlotte Jones' play Humble Boy is another interesting choice by the Orange Tree's Artistic Director Paul Miller. It is surely a challenge to pull off a play that combines astrophysics, bee-keeping and Shakespearean family angst, but Miller achieves this in a neat and cle...

Emma Rice begins her association with the Old Vic by reviving her version of Brief Encounter. It has recently been performed at the Birmingham Rep (where it first began life 11 years ago) and the Lowry in Salford, but now makes a return to the West End for a run at the Empire Cinema. The screen has ...

Natasha Barnes is a remarkable talent. After breaking onto the London theatre scene in the original London production of the award-winning Spring Awakening in 2009, she has performed in a large number of musicals. However, it wasn't until April 2016 when she was truly brought to a wider audience's a...

Proud Haddock presents The Dog Beneath the Skin, which concludes Jermyn Street Theatre's Scandal season. Every year, in the village of Pressan Ambo a young man is chosen to go on the unfortunate quest to try to find Francis, the heir of a large estate who went missing as a child. When the burden is ...

Agatha Christie and Frank Vosper's Love from a Stranger returns to the stage in this collaboration between Royal and Derngate and Firey Angel. And it's a disconcerting experience, as what starts off seeming like a conventional enough story turns into something altogether creepier....

The Bristol Old Vic has opened it's 'Year of Change' in spectacular fashion in this riveting new translation of Chekhov's final play The Cherry Orchard....

'Hamlet, Prince of Denmark!' the announcement at Wittenberg's graduation ceremony is barely made that beating drums accompany Hamlet Senior's glass hearse across the stage while Gertrude and Claudius look down woefully....

The UK tour of Gershwin musical Crazy for You has reached its London leg, and is still in fine, energetic form. Originally a Depression-era work, it joins retro pleasures like 42nd Street in providing much-needed Brexit escapism: a world in which all our problems can be solved with tap and jazz ...

Bold re-imagining of an early Tennessee Williams play that gives its themes a universality in a uniquely theatrical experience....

Annie Baker's 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Circle Mirror Transformation, transports you to a studio in a community centre in Vermont. Samal Blak's design features mirror-covered walls, in which the audience can view themselves - helpful for making the audience feel a part of the group....

This is a story that the majority of us will know. Some worship it as truth, whilst others think it's make believe. Regardless of your viewpoint, you know how it goes. There's no curveballs; the ending is always the same....

We begin and end with a grisly decapitation. And that's rather the problem with this intermittently engaging Macbeth, which starts in the throes of some unspecified dystopian hellscape, and thus has nowhere to go. ...