Somewhere inside this Cyrano de Bergerac sits a five-star evening: a script that fizzes, a company acting at full stretch, and a title role played, on the night I saw it, by a man whose name I cannot tell you. The trouble is that the five-star evening comes bundled with a director’s cut nobody asked […]
Nobody Cares is sharp, beautifully sung and never quite sure whether it wants to be a stand-up set, a cabaret or group therapy. That indecision is a real limitation of this otherwise charming show. This is a solo comedy show built around original songs rather than a book musical: stand-up, confessional storytelling and cabaret numbers […]
Some impersonators manage a passable Elton and leave it there. Jess Robinson conjures a whole roomful of women singing his songbook instead, and the result is one of the most purely enjoyable hours you can spend in the theatre. The premise of this comedy-cabaret is disarmingly simple. Robinson takes the Elton John catalogue and hands […]
Alex Edelman is such a disarming company that a show he is visibly still building in front of you beats most people’s finished hours. What Are You Going to Do is not yet the precision instrument that Just for Us was, but it is warm, funny and serious about the right things. This is solo […]
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 […]