Our twitter poll asking for people’s favourite genre saw an overwhelming vote for musicals. Cheer was needed. As it was also Stephen Sondheim’s 90th birthday, we went for Into the Woods (Sweeney Todd: too cannibalistic. A Little Night Music: too inept). As an added treat, Matthew Xia, who had directed a very different production at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, recorded a very tender … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the letters in Hamilton
For a show that might reshape the musical for the 21st century, there’s an awful lot of paper in Hamilton. The stage is a flurry of letters, ledgers, leaves and broadsides – it’s almost antiquated. Hamilton has sui generis swagger and the sound of something new, but it’s a story about what is written, what is read. It’s a show built on pen scratching furiously over paper. In 2009, Lin-Manuel … [Read more...]
12 Plays of Xmas: 6 Pal Joey by O’Hara, Rodgers & Hart
Book trouble – it’s the curse of the musical. One of my most slaveringly anticipated shows of the past winter was David Bowie’s Lazarus, but the book by Enda Walsh was an embarrassment of portent, messily motivated and thumpingly framed. Similarly, some of the zippiest musical choreography I saw this year was in the retooled Half A Sixpence, but the rancidly snobbish book by Julian Fellowes made … [Read more...]
New old, same old
The Beggar's Opera and Dead Dog in a Suitcase The world has grown old. There are no new stories, no new songs. We stick to what we know. Comfort-binge legends of sweet romance and poetic justice. Inarguable hard truths of self-serving cruelty. This is the genius of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, and of Dead Dog in a Suitcase, the inspired new version by theatre company Kneehigh. Gay, writing … [Read more...]
Candy-coloured world of stupid
Musicals should have jokes and tap dancing. There, I’ve said it. I’ve long thought it, sitting in the dark while leather-lunged belters lay about with coshes made of bombast and earnestness. Jokes and tap dancing, people. Jokes and tap dancing. Most musicals I see are for review, rather than on my own dollar. Partly that’s because that dollar doesn’t take you very far at West End prices (I will … [Read more...]