Stefan Bednarczyk has spent decades at the piano making other people’s evenings, and now, at 65, he is quite rightly making one of his own. Before I Forget… is a warm, wry, occasionally devastating tour through a life lived in cabaret rooms, rehearsal pianos and the wings of other people’s shows. The premise is disarmingly […]
Ryan Craig’s The Holy Rosenbergs is one of those rare plays that trusts its audience enough to leave them genuinely unsettled. Written in the shadow of the Intifada, this revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory arrives now, against the backdrop of Gaza, with the force of a piece that knew it would be back. The […]
There’s a production lurking inside this Yentl that fully earns the five-star raptures it collected in Melbourne and Sydney – and occasionally, gloriously, you catch a gleam of it. But somewhere between Sydney Opera House and the back end of Baker Street, something of that electric charge has vanished. Kadimah Yiddish Theatre’s bilingual drama – […]
Hadestown has the finest score in the West End right now, and almost everything else you could reasonably ask for except a reason to care. That this folk-opera cult phenomenon can be so bewitching to listen to and so inert to experience is, depending on your tolerance for theatrical enigma, either the point or the […]
Hampstead Downstairs has been quietly cornering the market in thrilling studio theatre, and with Aaron Loeb’s R.O.I. (Return on Investment) it may have found its most audacious investment yet. This is a play tightly wound, relentlessly intelligent, and unlike anything else on a London stage. Loeb, making his UK debut after acclaimed Off-Broadway work including […]
Anna Ziegler’s world premiere two-hander arrives at the Donmar trailing the kind of critical warmth that tends to get spritzed about liberally on opening nights, and it would be churlish to pretend there isn’t something here. It would also be wrong to pretend there’s quite enough. The play is a drama, part domestic portrait, part […]
Rupert Goold’s revival of American Psycho at the Almeida Theatre in Islington is a sleek, menacing, often magnificent production that builds nearly three hours of sustained dread, then collapses in the final stretch. It is very nearly a five-star evening, and the gap between what it achieves and what it squanders is genuinely painful. The […]
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s roller-skating insanity is back, and it is, against all reasonable odds, completely magnificent. That it happens to be playing in a repurposed warehouse a brisk wind’s throw from Wembley Stadium is either the show’s one genuine flaw or its most characterful joke. Luke Sheppard’s immersive production of the 1984 musical drops you […]
For its first hour, Miriam Battye’s new coming-of-age play is one of the funniest things you will see in London this year, raw, fizzing, and unnervingly accurate about what it feels like to be sixteen and convinced that everyone else has already figured it out. Then something shifts, the laughs dry up, and the play […]
There is no show in the West End that tries harder to make you forget you are watching a show, and for long stretches it succeeds magnificently. Arrive early, drink it in, and enjoy the spectacle while it lasts, because once the plot gets going, so does your patience. Moulin Rouge! is Alex Timbers’s stage […]