UK / WEST END THEATER REVIEWS

Hot on the heels of the hugely successful summer season comes 'Wonder Noir', Emma Rice's first winter season at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and with it an opening production of John Milton's masque, Comus. A dark reflection of the Wonder Season opener, A Midsummer Night's Dream, it is a tale that t...

Gary Naylor sees a play that builds atmosphere rather than narrative and now feels of its time - 33 years ago...

It's not just the title that's daunting in Tony Kushner's exhaustive three-and-a-half-hour epic, which tackles everything from socialist history, belief systems and family dysfunction to maternity strap-ons and meta jokes about cell phones at the theatre. It's such a barrage of polyphonic arguments ...

Stephanie Martin is a Canadian born singer-songwriter who has enjoyed a varied career, but most notably in musical theatre. She starred in three productions of Les Miserables as Eponine and provided the Quebec French singing voice of Pocahontas for the 1995 Disney film. Martin's last studio album - ...

Gary Naylor sees a revival of a show that deserves, and gets, the full 'Big Musical' production treatment....

Jealousy stalks this seminal work by the late Peter Schaffer, making a triumphant return to the theatre where it debuted in 1979. Court composer Salieri is cursed with just enough musical appreciation to realise how mediocre his efforts are in comparison with Mozart - whose instinctive genius is yok...

Gary Naylor sees a showbiz monument and finds that it's still as entertaining and as relevant as ever....

Celebrating over 20 years of successful Disney shows on Broadway, the West End and around the World, including smash hits such as Mary Poppins, The Lion King and Aladdin, as well as shorter-running productions, King David, Tarzan and Aida, an all-star cast brought the magic of the movies to the stag...

Gary Naylor sees an ambitious production that runs parallel storylines but doesn't solve the considerable problems so caused....

Lennon: Through A Glass Onion is a part-biographical, part-concert whistle stop journey into the mind of international musical icon, John Lennon. Featuring 31 hits including his solo work, the show has enjoyed great success all over the world but most recently in Lennon's birthplace in Liverpool....

It is an unusual way to earn a living; manipulating your genitals on stage for the entertainment of others. But Puppetry of the Penis, or The Ancient Australian Art of Genital Origami, is just that....

Composed when Shostakovich was just 21 years old, fresh from the conservatoire and still high on the success of his First Symphony, The Nose is a piece of musical rebellion - a fantasy of abrasive, rule-breaking joie de vivre whose absurd, anarchic rompings and musical shape-shiftings conceal a poli...

Gary Naylor sees a lovely show packed with great songs and imaginative staging....

How do you make a musical about cancer? This latest work from Bryony Kimmings isn't just theatre, but metatheatre. Her voiceovers and the emails published in the programme detail the at times highly personal development process, and a gut punch of a last 15 minutes strip away the comfort of fictiona...

You have to get through an awful lot of shell to even glimpse the jewel at the core of The Pearl Fishers. Bizet's opera is much more than just a good duet - the score is glossy with melody, propelled along by some rollicking choruses - but the situation is so awkward, the plot so absurd (yes, even b...

Gary Naylor sees an enthusiastic revival of Moby Dick The Musical that rather loses the wind from its sails in the second half....

Carol Churchill is one of our greatest playwrights; gems such as Top Girls and Far Away have challenged the concepts of theatrical writing in wonderful and exciting ways. Blue Heart at Orange Tree Theatre is a different animal. It is both clever and absurd, and Churchill tests many traditions of the...

Gary Naylor sees a magnificently realised revival of a show that has never been more relevant since the novel was published in 1975....

It was a dark and stormy night. Two couples are caught in a snowstorm on their way back from a party. Three of them arrive at a remote Connecticut farmhouse. One disappears. There's a definite pleasure in this familiar story, immaculately told in David Hare's adaptation of Georges Simenon's novel La...

You have to admire the grand scope of Ella Hickson's long-gestating new play, which grapples with urgent ideas about this vital but declining resource amidst audacious magic realist time travel. Stretching from 19th-century Cornwall to a dystopian future, it's DH Lawrence meets Black Mirror, by way ...

Gary Naylor sees a play from Europe that can't quite decide what it wants to be but raises interesting questions all the same....

2 Faced Dance Company's Run is an evening of dance presented by three female choreographers, featuring three new works from the company's artistic director Tamsin Fitzgerald, Prague-based Lenka Vagnerova and the first BENCH commission recipient Rebecca Evans. All three pieces - danced by 2 Faced Dan...

Gary Naylor sees an opera dating from its earliest period that brims with emotional energy, if a lacking a little in 21st century pace....

'I shook up the world.' So says young gun and new heavyweight champion Cassius Clay (shortly to become Muhammad Ali) in those heady moments after his shock defeat of Sonny Liston in February 1964. But a meeting that same night with three African-American friends of equivalent status - superstar croo...

Gary Naylor sees a spectacular and thought-provoking revival of Cavalli's 17th century opera of gods, myths and mortals....