For an hour, David Alnwick has a room at Wilton’s Music Hall eating out of his hand, and he does it with tricks your uncle could have ordered from a catalogue in 1994. Then he picks up Dickens, steps behind a lectern, and the spell he has spent sixty minutes building quietly derails. The pitch […]
There’s a lot riding on a show like this. Frank Sinatra is one of those names that arrives with so much attached to it – the music, the movies, the complicated personal life – that any theatrical retelling has its work cut out. But Sinatra The Musical rises to the occasion, and it’s a very […]
This is a review of the matinee performance on Saturday, 27 June 2026. Other performances may be better. James Phelan: Showman promises a night in which the impossible becomes possible. At Underbelly Boulevard Soho, it instead demonstrates that an illusion can vanish before it reaches its final reveal. Phelan arrives at Underbelly Boulevard Soho garlanded […]
This is a Tempest that gives you everything you came for. Kenneth Branagh’s long-awaited return to Stratford is a genuine event, but the production around him doesn’t always know what to do with him. The Tempest is Shakespeare’s likely swansong as a solo author, and it wears its fairy-tale bones on the outside: a deposed […]
There’s a swell party going on at the Barbican this summer. High Society is warm, handsome and stuffed with tunes you will still be humming around Moorgate station, even if it never quite convinces you the world was crying out for a third helping of Cole Porter. This is Golden Age musical comedy in its […]
The Karate Kid the Musical lands most of its punches, but it never quite delivers a knockout blow. What you get instead is a warm, well-drilled show that borrows heavily from nostalgia and, for the most part, does a decent job. This is a coming-of-age musical adaptation of Robert Mark Kamen’s 1984 film, and it […]
Ava Pickett’s debut has arrived in the West End trailing so much hype it could power the National Grid. This is smart, funny, properly upsetting theatre, even if the final stretch doesn’t quite stick the landing the rest of the evening promises. It’s a historical drama that refuses to behave like one: a study of […]
We Had a World is a memory play, one man’s autobiographical account of the two women who raised him, staged as an act of theatrical reconstruction rather than straight narrative. Downstairs at the Hampstead Theatre, the audience sits on three sides of a bare, warmly lit playing space, close enough to feel like eavesdroppers on […]
Marianne Elliott’s revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a gorgeous, glittering trap, and it knows it. Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel is a drama of seduction and revenge among the bored aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, and this is, remarkably, its first outing on the National’s stage. The Marquise de Merteuil […]
One of my favourite Broadway shows, Beetlejuice The Musical, has hit the West End looking like it has been dragged backwards through a haunted fairground, force-fed six espressos and told to behave itself in front of Andrew Lloyd Webber. It certainly doesn’t do that, though this is a very good production rather than a fully […]