THEATREWORLD

A 20th Century icon and, arguably, the greatest singing actress of the past hundred years, the life of Maria Callas resembles nothing as much as an ancient Greek tragedy – or, indeed, the plot of a tragic opera.

It is through this latter conceit that Terrence McNally chooses to explore Callas’s situation as her career prematurely approaches its end after two tempestuous decades at the top. So, she chooses to pass on those elements of her artistry that can be taught to three (admittedly implausably dumb, even by American standards) music students at New York’s Julliard School.

McNally employs this engrossing device to facilitate Callas’s journey through, and examination of, key moments in her life as both a performer and a woman. In each case, she is uniquely ballsy, driven and dedicated both to her art and her men. The comparison is, perhaps, rather too facile – though beguiling nonetheless – that here was a woman who, like Tosca, truly lived for her art.

Of the three participants in the titular Master Class, it is Dianne Pilkington’s Sophie de Palma who needs the most intensive coaching from Tyne Daly’s Callas, who chides her for completely lacking the requisite dedication, sophistication and preparation that a career on the opera stage demands. Yet, from such an unpromising start, McNally produces some gut-wrenching dialogue and Stephen Wadsworth’s deft direction nurtures Daly’s innate stagecraft to elicit a consummate and always-engaging central performance.

His choice of arias for the first willing ‘victim’ (often with Daly providing an accompanying prose commentary to the music, where the full visceral impact of the words - helpfully translated in the programme notes - can be felt and the ghost of Callas’s own vocalising imagined) mirror the very feelings and situations of Callas herself.

Amina’s betrayal in Bellini’s Sonnambula echoes Callas’s abandonment by Onassis – ‘dear God, I forgive him: may he be as happy as I am unhappy’. This leads to the first of what can only be described as aria-like monologues where she re-creates in her mind her life with Onassis and the first sacrifice – her career - she is required to make for him. The second is even more wrenching as she agrees to abort their child.

After the interval we get to hear the only male voice of the evening in the tenor aria Recondita Armonia from Tosca sung by Garrett Sorenson with such burly panache that he is allowed to leave with the Diva’s blessing after she has hammered home key insights into creating character - ‘it’s all there in the music’. When this somewhat awed performer leaves the stage after proving that he ‘gets it’ she is both relieved and un-nerved to be so moved by experiencing at first hand on-stage an aria she normally only heard from her dressing room.

Once her other ‘pupil’ (Naomi O’Connell’s full-voiced fuchscia-gowned Sharon Graham) has overcome her initial violent stage fright, she returns to provide a creditable rendition of Lady Macbeth’s Letter Scene which leads into the play’s second ‘aria’, a re-creation of Callas’s early vicissitudes as a fat frump constantly rebuffing her much older husband’s demands for his conjugal rights from his young wife whom he believes owes all her success to his wealth and influence.

She eventually leaves him for Onassis, who subsequently abandons her for the fortune-hunting Jacqueline Kennedy, who – some suggest – may have come to his bed by way of her sister Princess Lee Radziwill.

Like Medea, Callas laments: “I gave everything to you” as, indeed she did: to her public, her art and her Ari. She may have got the worst of all possible worlds out of her liaison with Onassis, but her legacy remains alive today in what she left by way of performances, both live and recorded. .. and this intriguing piece by McNally.

The last time that Master Class was in London was in 1997, and I can recall next to nothing about it: this time I simply cannot get Daly’s portrayal of Callas out of my mind.

Tickets – 0844 412 4663 - £25 - £52.50

Reviewed for Theatreworld Internet Magazine by Clive Burton

SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER

by Oliver Goldsmith

Now playing (in repertory) at the Olivier Theatre

She Stoops to Conquer is not only one of the greatest comedies of its own time but of any other. Oliver Goldsmith wonderfully combines character, comedy and plot to create streams of laughter.

One measure of the play's timeless reach is the fact that before too long, She Stoops will celebrate its 250th anniversary and, even at this esteemed age, is still regularly revived for yet another generation to delight in.

In its latest incarnation, Jamie Lloyd attempts to imprint his own directorial stamp in a fashion that is too easily invoked when The League of Gentlemen's Steve Pemberton as Mr Hardcastle, a country gent with a daughter to marry off, announces of his prospective son-in-law "this is over-acting young gentleman".

It is not just the young gentleman that reinforces every line with frequently thoroughly modern gestures, so too do the whole cast, which can get wearing but never overwhelms the pleasure of the piece.

Designer Mark Thompson makes the most of the Olivier stage. For the majority of the evening, the two main settings use either side of a long wall on the revolve but in the woods, this impressively disappears to bring back happy memories of Frankenstein last year.

As with Jessica Swale's period pieces at Southwark Playhouse, the action is complemented by (in this case wordless) song and movement that brightens the set changes though becomes a touch repetitive by the end of the 2¾ hours.

The fun starts as two young fops come down from London to woo a couple of local lasses. They are literally misguided by David Fynn as Tony Lumpkin, a rich, oafish young fool with a gift for mischief.

Rather than their host's country house, the men believe that they have arrived at an inn, displaying behaviour that shocks Hardcastle and his wife played by Sophie Thompson, not to mention their beautiful daughter, Kate played by Katherine Kelly.

The love affair, in the eighteenth century sense, between Harry Hadden-Paton's Marlow and Kate almost stalls before it starts. This is because despite his schizophrenic raffishness with servants, the young man is painfully shy in the presence of quality, particularly when the packaging is young and female.

Their burgeoning affection between the leading pair is mirrored by their close friends, Cush Jumbo and John Heffernan respectively playing Constance and Hastings.

Katherine Kelly may be best known as Becky McDonald in Coronation Street but proves herself a versatile stage actress. While her lover alternates between "bashful" and "brazen", Kate is fearfully intelligent and wilful but in addition to her appropriately maidenly modesty, she becomes a sly seductress when the need arises.

While some of the physicality can detract from the simplicity and period setting of a classic, this is still an enjoyable evening that might well have great appeal to modern tastes.

Reviewed by Philip Fisher for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

THE MADNESS OF GEORGE III

By Alan Bennett.

Now playing at the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue for a strictly limited season - until 31st March, 2012.

“She has not hurt me, do not hurt her” commanded King George of the deranged woman who attacked him with a dessert knife. “The lowliest in this kingdom could not be subject to such tortures (as reportedly occurred in France) in the name of justice”. He could not know of the tortures to which he would be subjected in the name of medicine and this episode, together with the cosy domestic scene which follows (Mr. and Mrs. King in bed together while she gets on with her knitting) elicit our sympathies for the man from the beginning.

Although King George founded the Royal Academy of Arts, was passionate about music, literature and science, and had an enthusiastic interest in agriculture, he is unfairly remembered for his uncontrollable bouts of lunacy, and the play focuses on the time of his first period of madness, around 1788. With a power struggle going on between politicians, his fat and indolent son The Prince of Wales scheming to depose him, and regret at the loss of the American colonies to contend with, was it any wonder that he was losing his mind, although it has since been thought that the condition was the inherited disease Porphyria. Even today there is no known cure, but his doctors misguidedly tried hard!

Bennett’s play premiered at the National Theatre in 1991 with Nigel Hawthorne in the lead and was subsequently adapted as a globally successful film in 1994 with Hawthorne winning a BAFTA as well as an Oscar nomination.

In Christopher Luscombe’s gripping and intensely moving production David Haig’s King George is a lovable, fatherly figure when sane, happy in his marriage and concerned with the welfare of his many children and of his beloved country, but his treatment when he loses his reason evokes pity and revulsion at the sight of his terror and pain, both most graphically portrayed. Particularly upsetting is his own awareness that he is going out of his mind. Beatie Edney’s Queen Charlotte cradles him in her arms as she asks “Do you think you are mad?” Haig’s pathetically sad “I don’t know’’ is heart-wrenching, and he is as helpless to resist that fate as he is made furiously and impotently helpless to resist the cruel treatments doled out by the doctors. At their insistence he is blistered, bled, purged, has his bodily excretions examined and finally forcibly bound to a restraining chair - until he ‘behaves himself’.

There are strong performances from the twenty four strong case, notably Nicholas Rowe as Pitt the Younger, morally upright and dignified as the unsmiling Tory Prime Minister battling in parliament with the more devious and fun loving Charles James Fox (Gary Oliver). Christopher Keegan is a suitably fat and foppish Prince of Wales with William Belchambers giving a touch of ‘Blackadder’ to his brother, the Duke of York, and Charlotte Asprey’s Lady Pembroke is appropriately dignified yet understanding of the king’s amorous advances. The three main doctors, Peter Pacey, Madhav Sharma and John Webb are arrogantly convinced of their superiority to the recently introduced Dr. Willis, given a superb interpretation by Clive Francis as the Bennett-like straight talking, no-nonsense ‘mind doctor’ - he even sounds like Bennett. The king, however gets a little revenge with a reading of a very pertinent scene from Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Lest I have given the impression that this play is unadulterated horror, Bennett’s script is full of his trademark sardonic humour and, as well as pathos, terror and agony, Haig extracts every ounce of witty comedy from it sometimes at the most tragic moments. Apart from perfect timing, just a gesture, expression or change of intonation bring laughter, and the mental and physical exertion of the role must leave him totally drained.

One of our finest actors, in every field - a performance to remember - and tell the grandchildren!

Reviewed by Sheila Connor for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

TRAVELLING LIGHT

by Nicholas Wright

Now playing at the Lyttelton Theatre

This conjunction of theatrical knights provides an evening of almost unalloyed pleasure. For those with an interest in either Jewish culture or movie history, Travelling Light should be compulsory viewing. Anyone else with a heart will enjoy its strong storytelling about a lost age almost as much.

Nicholas Wright's play, his best since Vincent in Brixton, is set in a Russian Jewish shtetl or village in an era that wealthy Parisian circles knew as fin de siècle.

Times are hard with the risk of a pogrom just around the corner but, as in Fiddler on the Roof, the people find various simple routes to happiness.

Designer Bob Crowley has created a convincing wooden village with at its centre the home of a recently deceased old man and his sister.

The death brings the man's son back to town seven years after he had run away to make his way in the world. The far from Jewish Damien Molony's Motl Mendl has a good heart and shares his late father's love of photography.

When he discovers that his inheritance includes one of the original Lumière Cinématographe cameras that create moving pictures, his boyish excitement must bring a smile to every face in the house, as do his amateurish early movie shorts.

Soon, he is developing techniques that must literally have been unique, putting him decades ahead of Hollywood in manipulating an art that can not only take away your soul but, as his mentor proclaims, give immortality to ordinary folk.

His desire to create perfection soon becomes a collaborative exercise. First, he needs a producer and along comes Sir Antony Sher as Jacob Bindel. He is the fiery but loveable local timber merchant and self-made leader of the community.

This puts him into a position to finance the movie. As a gift from heaven, he sends Motl an assistant. She is the Catholic beauty, Anna.

Lauren O'Neil's character swiftly turns into most men's dream of perfection. She loves the technology, has great ideas for improving technique and when a star is required reveals herself to have the kind of luminescent beauty that looks great on the silent screen.

As Anna and Motl learn their trade and fall for each other, Jacob begins to demand his pounds of flesh. He gets interested, amongst other things, in casting then directing and even script writing with sometimes ironic consequences.

The tale is told with rich, warm humour and joie de vivre by Wright, director Sir Nicholas Hytner, who does not put a foot wrong, and a strong cast.

After the interval, the story moves briefly to Hollywood in 1936, where Paul Jesson as Maurice Montgomery is a great film director and freely admits to his origins as, you guessed it, Motl Mendl.

At this point the play turns deliberately melodramatic or to use its own highly appropriate terminology, schmaltzy. Somehow even this works to a good degree, ensuring that audiences will leave the theatre on a bittersweet high.

While Sir Antony Sher is inevitably the leading actor, both Damien Molony and Lauren O'Neill are close to his equals in a feelgood evening which starts off the National's 2012 programme on the kind of high that we have come to expect after an exceptional run of artistic and critical success that has now lasted for five or more years.

Tickets: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Reviewed by PhilipFisher for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

NOISES OFF

by Michael Frayn

Now playing at the Old Vic until March 10^th

Not so long ago, musicals were the talk of the town. Now, with this unbeatable revival of Michael Frayn's perfect specimen of the genre, farce is threatening an unexpected take-over.

With One Man, Two Guvnors the hottest ticket around and the new farcical version of the Ladykillers getting rave reviews in the national press, the capital has three palpable hits that will have audiences in stitches - just the thing to inject seasonal cheer and take one's mind off a depressed economy.

There is always a danger in bringing back a much-loved favourite but Noises Off, first seen in 1982, is so well conceived that it fully deserves another outing and director, Lindsay Posner makes the most of the opportunity.

The first act sees a touring weekly rep company at the dress rehearsal of a Brian Rix-style, super-clichéd farce entitled Nothing On.

Lack of talent would normally be director Lloyd's biggest problem but not on this occasion. His affairs with the company's two young females are collectively a disaster in waiting, to say nothing of another backstage romance, a marital split, an actress with memory problems, a drunken veteran and an overworked stage manager.

This all creates a stream of effective laughs but soon pales into insignificance in Act 2 after the interval.

Now, the audience witnesses a production one month on but from backstage. While the actions the other side of the scenery are familiar, the love tiffs and other backstage business are truly hilarious, topped off by an actor forced to hop around with his shoelaces tied together.

The last act allows us to witness the tour's final performance and is a gem, as Frayn cruelly deconstructs his own creation.

The evening presents 2½ hours of almost unmitigated laughter as we enjoy lots of theatrical in-jokes and get a feeling that while everything is way over the top, it is all almost certainly based on life and could easily happen.

Posner is blessed with a dream cast, every one of whom plays his or her part in a great team. They build an intricate world that collapses through their all too human foibles.

Philip Glenister is a tired, talentless director more interested in his affairs with ingénues, played by Amy Nuttall and Aisling Loftus, than his play. Celia Imrie is a delight as the producer and housekeeper who cannot learn her part.

Janie Dee plays the calm spirit holding things somewhere near together with assistance from hapless stage manager Tim, Paul Ready, while Jamie Glover is an angry, sexually jealous leading man and Jonathan Coy an insecure, older actor.

Last and by no means least, as he is a true scene-stealer, comes Karl Johnson whose perfect timing as Selsdon, the veteran toper with an acting style a generation away from any of his colleagues.

For anyone concerned to put off a loved one who fancies a career as a theatre director, Noises Off should be a dream answer. On seeing it, they will instantly realise what hell the profession promises.

The rest of us can just enjoy a gloriously funny evening that threatens the supremacy of One Man, Two Guvnors and praise does not come any higher than that.

Tickets: www.oldvictheatre.com

Reviewed by Philip Fisher for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

THE LADYKILLERS

By Graham Linehan

From the motion picture screenplay by William Rose and by special arrangement with Studio Canal.

Now playing at the Gielgud Theatre until 14^th April, 2012

It was a great test of ingenuity taking on this well-loved Ealing black-comedy classic and re-producing it within the confines of a stage set, but designer Michael Taylor is not lacking in the ingenuity department and, ‘confines’ being simply another challenge, the set is a triumphant masterpiece. Minute attention to detail is obvious, and old Mrs Wilberforce’s large rambling, lopsided house is on a revolve with the genteelly cluttered interior switching easily to expertly depicted exterior, finally becoming a railway tunnel. Astonishing and brilliant!

The timing is nineteen fifty six, a gloomy early winter, and the location is Kings Cross next to the rail station - an area for dark deeds.

Following the spirit of the original script we find Maria Warren’s sweet and innocent Mrs. W. taking tea with the local bobby and relating her suspicions of the newsagent she suspects is a Nazi “I had to subdue him with my umbrella”. Constable (Harry Peacock), has heard her stories before and metaphorically pats her on the head assuring her all is well setting the scene for the intricately devised bank robbery which is to follow.

Ben and Max Ringham have provided music and sound effects which follow the story exactly, and Scott Penrose’s ‘special effects’ keep producing some ingenious surprises.

As an ominous black shadow of a man appears through the glass of the front door we know that the game is afoot and dangerous. Enter Professor Marcus intending to use the house and the old lady to cover his intended bank robbery.

No one could follow Alec Guinness’ ingratiatingly demonic leer of a smile, but Peter Capaldi has his own suitably creepy interpretation of the criminally intent (verging on the insane) Professor sporting a ridiculously long black scarf which has its own part to play in the story.

One by one his ‘gang’ of counterfeit musicians arrive, although Clive Rowe’s brain-damaged ex-boxer One-Round never quite gets the hang of it and constantly gives the game away. James Fleet is con-man, and closet transvestite, Major Courtney, Stephen Wight is young incompetent pill-popping thief Harry with a compulsion to clean everything, and Ben Miller is Rumanian Louis Harvey determined to plunge his knife into someone, anyone. The ‘concert’ that these ‘musicians’ give to Mrs. W’s gaggle of chattering old ladies is a cacophonous horror but, following the lead of Beverley Walding’s Mrs Jane Tromleyton they applaud rapturously, and Linehan (creator of Father Ted, the IT Show and Black Books) produces one of his best lines. “Being fooled by art is one of the primary pleasures of the middle class!”

Representation of robbery and chase is another stroke of genius. Who would have thought of miniature cars climbing the walls, but it works and is very funny.

Every one in the well-cast production gives a performance to be proud of, and Marcia Warren is sheer perfection - her sweet innocence covering a strong moral courage.

As a slight criticism (very slight), some of the action I found over-exaggerated, preferring the understated humour of the film - I never was a fan of Monty Python - but I was probably a minority of one as everyone else seemed to be falling about with uncontrollable laughter.

That aside, Sean Foley’s production is an exultation of British humour (I was surprised to find the original was written by an American-born Bill Rose), and overall I loved it. It’s hysterically zany and very funny with a strong, implausible plot - can’t fail to make a killing,

Tickets: http://gielgud.official-theatre.co.uk

Reviewed by Sheila Connor for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

by William Shakespeare

Now playing at the Olivier Theatre (NT)

Royal Court Artistic Director, Dominic Cooke has taken time out to work with Shakespeare in his debut at the National Theatre.

Cooke has come up with a bravely conceptual and most un-Shakespearean production of the Bard's shortest play.

In doing so, he updates the setting for this comedy of confusion to some seedy borough of London today, perhaps Soho, inhabited by lowlives with petty gangsters and whores in profusion.

The setting by Bunny Christie rises to three storeys, starting in grubby streets and remaining outside, inter alia, apartment buildings, knife and jewellery stores, sex joints and a nunnery turned into a clinic for this version.

This set-up presents as many challenges as placing Hamlet in a contemporary lunatic asylum, which Ian Rickson has done just up the road at the Young Vic with help from Michael Sheen.

The Comedy of Errors is a play of pairs. Its main conceit, like that of Twelfth Night, features divided twins but here there are two pairs of identical twins to double up the fun.

The home team from Ephesus is led by sharp-suited Chris Jarman's proud, lecherous Antipholus, a man who rarely plays fair by his pretty wife, Adriana. His Afro-haired, Arsenal-shirted servant Dromio, Daniel Poyser is much beaten but irrepressible.

Their identical twin counterparts visiting from Syracuse have the same names but different characters. In Cooke's eyes, they are Africans. This suits star turn Lenny Henry well, allowing him to reprise one of his staple TV characters on stage to good comic effect, while never overwhelming the rest of the ensemble. He gets strong support from Lucian Msamati as his superstitious Dromio.

The confusions are frequently at their best in the presence of the pick of the pairs, A of E's wife Adriana and her sister Luciana, respectively played as bleach-blonde footballers' WAGS by the fine combination of NT favourites Claudie Blakley and Michelle Terry.

Their travails are wound amongst many others involving bling, sex and cash in home, prison and spa-convent as the poor male dupes get embroiled in each other's lives with sometimes hilarious consequences.

It is telling that the last 15 minutes of the 2¼ hours are the funniest and most moving, since this is the period during which the production most faithfully follows the original script.

Before that, Cooke works very hard to impose a great number of his own ideas on the evening, with varying results. At times, the new inventions seem to get in the way of the play and its poetry without sufficient artistic justification.

This is particularly the case during an inaudible and off-putting opening when microphones and (back)storytelling fail to overcome an excess of overly-noisy stage business with overtones of an action movie.

However, much of the comedy in this unorthodox production is genuinely funny, even if Shakespeare buffs might at times struggle to recognise the play as one penned by their hero.

Tickets: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Reviewed by Philip Fisher for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

ONE MAN, TWO GUVNORS

by Richard Bean, Based on The Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni, with songs by Grant Olding

Now playing at the Adelphi Theatre until 25^th February

Richard Bean might be a little disappointed to learn that at the moment, selling at only just over £200 a pair on eBay, One Man, Two Guvnors tickets are only the second hottest in London.

Mind you, since his competition is coming from the sumptuous Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery, he may not feel too bad. After all, the old Italian's publicity machine has had a 500 year start.

Bean should still be over the moon that this glorious post-commedia dell’Arte romp, which marks his unbelievably belated West End debut, is the talk of the town.

The reason is obvious to anyone lucky enough to get a ticket. One Man, Two Guvnors sustains its comedy almost solidly through 2¾ hours and that is no mean feat. Since its transfer from the National, the play has lost around 20 minutes and been sharpened up a little especially after the interval, where a few longueurs have been ironed out.

Bean utilises the plot of Carlo Goldoni's A Servant to Two Masters but updates it to Brighton c. 1963. The era is fixed long before the curtain goes up by a splendid skiffle band, The Craze who play entr'acte throughout.

In front of simple flat sets, we learn of multiple duplicities in the murky criminal underworld of London and Brighton.

Charlie "The Duck Clench, played absolutely straight by Fred Ridgeway backs two horses when he promises the hand of his ineffably dim daughter, Pauline to Alan an actor (in the most derogatory sense of the word) after hearing that Roscoe, the thug to whom he had practically sold her to settle a debt, is dead.

The dead man reincarnates in the diminutive but surprisingly effective cross-dressing form of Jemima Rooper. She is not only future groom but also simultaneously sister-in-law, Rachel. This dichotomy injects confusion that soon pales into insignificance with the arrival of James Corden's Francis Henshall.

The Gavin and Stacey star has a whale of a time in the title role as the laziest of manservants, playing off one boss (not-Roscoe) against another, Oliver Chris excelling as upper-class twit Stanley. This leads to mayhem and slapstick that sustains seemingly for hours.

Corden, wearing a garish check suit that is the 20^th Century equivalent of the traditional Harlequin costume, gives the impression that the role was written for him. excelling when he is allowed to express his own mischievous, mercurial personality in (often scripted) adlibs. Then a twinkle comes into his eye and the audience is sent into raptures.

While James Corden is a class act, he gets stern competition from Tom Edden playing 87-year-old trainee waiter Alfie. Edden is a genius of a physical comedian who must surely have been a clown in an earlier career.

The plot eventually reaches the most unlikely of commedia happy endings as every couple pairs off happily, including Francis with another of this production's great successes, Suzie Toase as the vivacious Columbine character, Dolly.

Richard Bean has written a script to die for and the cast are universally brilliant but director Nicholas Hytner must take a great deal of credit for the comic timing, which seemingly never misses and also his ability to balance the evening so that it now feels perfectly formed.

As I said after seeing it first time around, One Man, Two Guvnors is possibly the funniest play that I have ever seen. It seems that almost everyone else agrees.

Tickets: www.onemantwoguvnors.com

Reviewed by Philip Fisher for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

Roald Dahl’s

MATILDA THE MUSICAL

Now playing at the Cambridge Theatre, Seven Dials

How do you solve a problem like Matilda when you decide to bring to the musical stage the adventures and inner angst of Roald Dahl’s precociously-studious young heroine, a bookish clairvoyant with nascent kinetic powers, whose parents ignore her very existence and denigrate her overwhelming interest in learning? And a Head Mistress intent on bending every child in her care to her own sadistic will by constantly disciplining her classmates and cowing any teaching staff who dare to intervene?

The answer it would appear, is with some difficulty although the show’s inventive Director, Matthew Warchus, successfully overcomes many of the challenges of transferring the heady mix of plot, characters and outrageous situations from the page to the musical stage.

Judging from what has emerged from the recent out-of-London run of the RSC’s latest offering, the most obvious problems have been solved - often spectacularly - not least on the casting front. The eponymous Matilda (a role shared between four talented and very young actor/singers on different evenings) was played on Theatreworld’s press night by an other-worldly Kerry Ingram who brought considerable assurance and panache to the role, devouring knowledge like most kids of her age devour chocolate bars.

Emotionally abandoned by her heartless, uncomprehending , parents ( Paul Kaye as the spivvy Mr Wormwood and Josie Walker as Matilda’s chavvy chacha-ing mum each strike just the right note of pantomime-villainy)she seeks refuge in the words of authors as diverse as Dickens and Dostoevsky (whom she reads in the original Russian, thus providing a solution to a pivotal plot point later on).

At the heart of an always-impressive stage picture, Rob Howell’s glorious sets begin at the back of the stage as a towering library of books that transmogrifies in its journey up, into and around the auditorium into a series of giant alphabet building blocks that can be joined up to provide words relevant to the production: seeing how many you can identify is an education in itself!

With the help of a sympathetic teacher - Lauren Ward’s Miss Honey is every bit as sweet as her name suggests - Matilda is able to overcome the brutality of the school’s disciplinarian regime as personified by the formidable Miss Trunchbull (whose raucous charges make a fine fist of running this rugged harridan ragged).

Bertie Carvel’s masterful Trunchbull is a six-foot-plus, gently-spoken volcano of self-loathing who coruscatingly lights up the stage – or darkens it, depending on one’s sympathies - with her every appearance. This is no mere travesty role and a consummate Carvel palpably becomes a heartless, towering virago whose power is magnified through the very reasonableness of her demeanour, until eventually her life begins to unravel with far-reaching consequences for all concerned. Suffice it to say that there is an upbeat ending in store after the somewhat Grimm (as in Brothers) revelations that pepper this improbable morality tale.

Dahl’s hugely- popular book has already been made into a stellar film (and the new musical’s story is well handled by Dennis Kelly) but the real deal-breaker with musical theatre is to find an appropriate musical ‘voice’ for the show and here is where the prodigiously-talented Tim Minchin frequently fails to measure up to the task with melodies that obstinately refuse to soar and lyrics that remain obdurately earthbound.

But, by cleverly marketing the show as ‘Roald Dahl’s Matilda the musical’ RSC should ensure a plentiful supply of little bums on seats long after the pantomime season ends.

Tickets: www.matildathemusical.com

Reviewed by Clive Burton for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK

by Sean O'Casey

Now playing at the Lyttelton Theatre until 26^th February 2012

Any collaboration between Dublin's Abbey Theatre and London's National raises expectations to a dizzy peak but Howard Davies' new version of Juno and the Paycock still doesn't disappoint.

This is a great play by any standards, encapsulating the woes of strife-torn Ireland in the early 1920s in memorable fashion. The issues are viewed through the eyes of the members of an atypical working class family and their neighbours occupying an oversized apartment in a crumbling Dublin tenement.

Sinéad Cusack plays matriarch Juno Boyle, the kind of proud, determined housewife that has pretty much disappeared from modern society. She holds the family together through thick and thin, gaining in strength as adversity bites.

The bains of her life are Ciáran Hands as husband Jackie, better known as The Captain or The Paycock and his partner in crime Joxer Daly, played with gusto by Risteárd Cooper.

This mendacious pair of lazily lovable rogues enjoys nothing better than a drink, unless it is the chance to have a laugh or a song.

A generation down, Clare Dunne's Mary Boyle is in her prime, enjoying the attentions of loyal, decent Jerry until the better bred, more polished Charles Bentham comes along.

He brings with him the will of a long lost and never loved cousin of Jack's that instantly turns the penniless drifter into a wealthy man about town.

Thus far, Juno and the Paycock is a delightful social comedy poking gentle fun at the Irish working classes and greatly amusing the audience.

The only sour note comes in the form of son Johnny, Ronan Raftery. This unfortunate has been crippled not once but twice in his efforts to support the Republican struggle losing an arm and left with a permanent limp.

The first hint of a turn in family fortunes is prefaced by the funeral of a neighbour's rebellious son, painfully delayed on opening night by that actor's nightmare, a door with a will of its own.

The arc of the play from this moment on moves away from comedy towards tragedy applied on an almost Grecian scale.

Like Job, the family's good fortune disintegrates, allowing a great crew of actors to show their skills in different styles.

In particular, Sinead Cusack really hits the mark as she delivers a tearful eulogy when fortunes hit rock bottom. While she is good as the long-suffering wife, during the earlier comic scenes it is Hands and particularly Cooper who delight, the latter skipping around like an impatient colt drawing laughs every time that he appears.

What had initially seemed like a light comedy quickly turns into a cleverly written meditation on the troubles, treating poverty religion and the republican struggle with equal regard.

Not only does Sean O'Casey write in beautiful language, giving Joxer a stream of pithy and insightful quotes the pick of which is "it's better to be a coward than a corpse", he also knows how to string an audience along to ensure that his messages are delivered effectively and powerfully.

This lovely collaboration between the English and the Irish should enjoy great success in London following its transfer from Dublin and fully deserves to.

Tickets: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Reviewed by Philip Fisher for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

by Ariel Dorfman

at the Harold Pinter Theatre (formally) the Comedy Theatre until January 21^st 2012

Death and the Maiden is one of the great plays of the late 20th Century. Quite what it cost Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman to write a work about torture in an unnamed country, we will probably never know.

Like his compatriots behind the Iron Curtain, the playwright and novelist thrived artistically in a milieu that threw up moral dilemmas and personal anger on a constant basis, before moving into exile.

There is some irony that this portrayal of totalitarian torture should be the first play to open at the newly-named Harold Pinter Theatre (formerly the Comedy). If any other writer could have penned this play it is the late master of menacing political drama.

Dorfman's most famous and probably best play addresses major issues from the perspective of Paulina Escobar, a woman who fifteen years earlier in 1975 was arrested as a freedom fighter. The new military regime did not favour dissenters and gave torturers free rein to enjoy themselves.

In the case of this plucky little lady, played by multi award winning screen favourite Thandie Newton, the degradation was validated by a Doctor, whom she never laid eyes on. He aided the torturers, informing them how far they could go, and took hideous liberties for his own macabre pleasure.

The catalyst for Paulina's regression to fear and desire for revenge arrives when her husband, Tom Goodman-Hill's Gerardo, a newly-appointed member of a truth and reconciliation commission, is rescued from a flat tyre by a Good Samaritan Doctor Roberto Miranda.

Though blindfolded throughout her ordeal, Paulina believes that she recognises his voice, the feel of his skin and smell as those of her tormentor. This impression is compounded by a cassette taken from his car relaying the tortuous strains of Schubert's evocative, eponymous quartet.

She becomes feral with a gun to instil fear and spends much of the 100 minutes dealing out to her supposed torturer a dose of the medicine that he had inflicted on her.

Gerardo is initially sceptical but somewhat out of character undergoes a sea change, much to the discomfiture of Roberto the Doctor.

The tension increases as Dorfman throws in ever greater numbers of moral questions for torturer, victim and moral guardian in a drama that epitomises the problems that the end of this kind of brutal political regime will inevitably leave unresolved once democracy returns.

In creating this short play, the writer not only makes us consider questions about crime and punishment but also issues of identity and certainty.

Jeremy Herrin and his cast have a lot to live up to, as both Lindsay Posner's original cast with unforgettable performances from Juliet Stevenson and Bill Paterson and Roman Polanski's movie version (now unbelievably only available in this country on a US import DVD) with Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley to compete with.

He tries to turn the political parable into something more with an opening that could have been borrowed from any one of innumerable screen thrillers

Thandie Newton took time to settle on her long-delayed London stage debut and does not have great stage presence but eventually did the part of Paulina reasonable justice and was clearly delighted and relieved at the end of opening night.

Tom Goodman-Hill makes Gerardo rather priggish but convinces once the human rights lawyer is swept up by his wife's obsession.

Perhaps the most distinguished performance comes from Anthony Calf, who overcomes the tight ropes and gag to bear comparison with Ben Kingsley in the difficult supporting role of the embodiment of evil - or innocence.

Death and the Maiden is a brilliant and important play that is as almost relevant today as it was at the time of its creation. As such, it should be compulsory viewing.

Tickets: http://www.haroldpintertheatre.co.uk

Reviewed by Philip Fisher for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

Live Theatre Newcastle and National Theatre co-production of

THE PITMEN PAINTERS

By Lee Hall
Inspired by a book by William Feaver.

Now playing at the Duchess Theatre

It was at the time of the 1930’s depression that William Feaver arrived at a village hall in Ashington, Northumberland prepared to begin a course of lectures on his favourite subject – Art Appreciation. His audience was not composed of his usual students – these were a group of miners who, in
an effort to better themselves, came home from a ten-hour shift of hard physical work in the pit to wash, change into suit, collar and tie, and prepare to learn something new. Their story is truly inspirational, much on the lines of Lee Hall’s Billy Elliott, the miner’s son who, against all odds and opposition finally became a soloist in the Royal Ballet. The difference is that this story is true.

In Hall’s version the tutor’s name is Robert Lyon, played by the versatile Ian Kelly who, that very morning, had given an entertaining, informative, and very funny lecture to the Horsham NADFAS on the subject of The Regency Period and “the things Jane Austen didn’t tell you”. His confident and high speed delivery of the morning had changed (suitably) to more hesitant and diffident confronting these men who had no respect for his knowledge and were prepared to argue every point, but put to work to do their own paintings they produced some remarkable pictures with whatever materials they had to hand, and their story has caught the imagination of the public to such an extent that the play is never out of production and plays to capacity audiences at every theatre.

The five here (condensed from the original thirty) are all members of the Workers Education Association, and bureaucratic, pompous Union Leader George Brown (Joe Caffrey) is there to make sure everything is done by the book. Brian Lonsdale, who later effortlessly takes the part of the casually effete artist Ben Nicholson, is his jobless nephew, simply known as Young Lad. Michael Hodgson Is Harry Wilson, a man who spouts Marxist theories at the drop of a flat cap, and David Whitaker is the willing, but slightly dim, Jimmy Floyd. The most talented of the group turns out to be Oliver Kilbourn, played with intensity, emotion and integrity by Trevor Fox, almost tempted to take a stipend from the wealthy, and rather patronising, patron Helen Sutherland (Joy Brook) but his sense of community spirit, and his feeling of being out of his class, causes him to refuse. Later his voice almost breaks as he realises he could have made the wrong choice and it’s now too late.

The play is often screamingly funny (the groups of girls behind me could testify to that), with the banter between the men and the misunderstanding of accents causing confusion, and the arrival of a life model prepared to take off her clothes causes utter, and hilarious, consternation (Viktoria Kay, strategically draped but baring all).

Their original paintings are displayed on a screen, and these are subjects they know well; the harsh working lives of the pitmen, but also dogs, horses, people, streets – a social history of the time.

Class differences are pointed out in this joyous yet moving play, but not hammered home, and the message which comes through, amid all the laughter, is that art is for everyone no matter what colour, creed or background.

Reviewed by Sheila Connor for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

BACKBEAT

Now playing at The Duke of York’s Theatre

Recently opened at London’s Shaftesbury Theatre, Broadway’s interminable Rock of Ages is already currently in production as a Hollywood vehicle for Tom Cruise: who knows why?

Meanwhile, The Duke of Yorks comes at musical theatre from a different angle by welcoming a thoughtfully-staged version of the classic (1994) Britflic, Backbeat, an intriguing examination of The Beatles in their early Hamburg years (when Pete Best was on drums and an inexperienced Stuart Sutcliffe the bass player).

Thankfully, Backbeat is so much more coherent and compelling than a mindless re-hash of classic songs Post It-noted together to produce a make-do-and-mend storyline. Rather it is a flesh and blood re-creation of real lives, real loves and real talent The real lives belong to John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Pete Best, the drummer who was sacked before he could become part of the greatest group the world had ever known - greater than Jesus Christ as John Lennon once claimed – and the reluctant fifth Beatle, Stuart Sutcliffe.

The love element involves not just groupies giving quick blow jobs to their idols, but painter manqué Sutcliffe who relinquished (at least temporarily) a promising career as an artist before he eventually chose to leave the group in pursuit of his true artistic calling. And, while the other group members played the field, Sutcliffe was seriously taken by the photographer Astrid Kirchherr, who is largely credited with creating the Beatles ‘look’ of Nehru-jacketed suits and pudding-basin haircuts.

Leaving her lukewarm lover Klaus was comparatively easy for Astrid: they simply drifted apart as Sutcliffe’s courting became ever more intense: seducing Sutcliffe away from a devoted and omnipresent John Lennon would prove less easy.

While it is never actually stated that Lennon and Sutcliffe might have been lovers, the script is unequivocal in its assessment of the extent of Lennon’s devotion to him, clearly expressed in a pivotal exchange when Lennon is asked ’What is it between you two? She’s just a girl.’ To which he replies: ‘You’ll never know.’ And, neither will we – at least not for sure.

So much for the loves and lives of this close-knit group of headstrong young rockers - and don’t forget that Harrison was only in his mid-teens when he joined the proto Beetles (sic): history has passed its own verdict on the talents of John, Paul, George and Ringo, Brian Epstein’s brutal, out-of-the-blue replacement for drummer Best.

Backbeat covers the group’s early days with sordid panache; the drugs, drink and dives that were part of a pitiless training that was to stand them in such good stead for coping with the relentless demands of later success. Indeed, if you’d played 100 songs night after night in sordid Hamburg bars, you could hardly fail to be ready when the call to fame came, be it from Bert Kaempfert, Brian Epstein or George Martin.

There was no question but you took it – unless you were Stuart Sutcliffe, whose obdurate pursuit of his ‘true’ calling as a painter and pitiably early death at 21 from a brain haemorrhage has confined him to the margins of pop music history. But, like a similar casualty (Pete Best) at least he had become part of the greatest pop story ever told.

The rest, as they say, may be history but it is rousingly captured in David Leveaux’s fast-paced production and through the expert interpretation of the leading characters’ emotions, not least in the mercurial John Lennon of Andrew Knott, Nick Blood’s finely-realised struggle as a Sutcliffe torn between which of his two powerful muses he should follow, and Ruta Gedmintas’s knowing portrait of the flesh-and-blood love of his brief life.

All the boys in the band play thrillingly and their 1961 version of ‘My Bonnie’ (in which they backed singer Tony Sheridan under the pseudonym of Beat Brothers) created a genuine frisson that (almost) demolished any residual resistance to the acutely-uncomfortable, ear-bleedingly high, levels of amplification inflicted on the audience throughout the entire production.

Reviewed by Clive Burton for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

ROCK OF AGES

Now playing at The Shaftesbury Theatre

When does musical theatre cross over into rock concert territory – and does it really matter if it does as long as it’s fun? To the purists, the answer is probably yes, it does matter: a string of unrelated songs threaded together with the merest whisper of a plot that bear no relation to character or plot development can be disconcerting to anyone expecting something with rather more depth.

To others, an evening of pure 80s nostalgia such as Rock of Ages provides is a sure-fire recipe for a great night out as the show’s smash Broadway run has proved in spades, although the (juke-box) jury is still out as to how many West End theatres should be commandeered to host raucously mindless evenings such as this. But, like We Will Rock You before it, this show will probably run and run, regardless of critical reaction: it is already a Broadway hit, slated for a movie set to star Tom Cruise.

Audiences seeking a rocking evening’s entertainment will raise the (mock) lighters provided with the handsome souvenir programme in unison to accompany such iconic anthems as I Wanna Rock You, The Final Countdown and Every Rose Has Its Thorn and sing or clap along, encouraged by the youthful cast’s tireless exhortations.

While most of the bands who were approached by Rock's producers were happy to grant permission for their songs to be used as part of the show, the notable exception was Motley Crue whose bad hair, debauchery, drug taking, promiscuity and ‘attitude’ were said to have been a major inspiration for book writer Chris D’Arrienzo’s dramatic collage. But, with a multitude of other groups indulging in a similar rock’n’roll lifestyle, the choice of material remained so extensive as to make little difference to the show’s free-wheeling final structure.

Everything about Rock of Ages is undertaken with a light-hearted touch that, on the whole, succeeds largely thanks to the genial cast. That there is little in the way of acting required is a blessing for some: X Factor winner Shayne Ward lacks the stage presence and sense of character to portray such a ballsy part. Although, as with everyone else, his singing is well up to par, there is little or nothing behind the façade – no sense of living on the edge, no cockiness, no obvious reason to believe that he is a true rock god.

In a show that prides itself on being ‘stupid’ (the description of its director, Kristin Hanggi, but perhaps more generously described as ‘very silly’? ) there is room for even broader playing of such roles as the stereotypical German property developer and his effete son who are set to profit from their redevelopment of a rock Club on The Strip. As Dennis, the owner, Justin Lee Collins’ performance is laid back to the point of horizontal - we’ll put that down to his character’s drug use - although he manages to hide any native Bristolian inflections in a passable American accent.

As his partner in an unlikely bromance, Simon Lipkin has created an impressively believable character in his Fonz-like Lonny: a sort of wandering narrator and one-man Chorus weaving in and out of the action making salty comments, putting the other players off their stride by making cutting comments about the show’s star billing and wearing some very rude slogans on his T-shirts. He takes his Avenue Q insouciance to new heights and is a prime example of how much better the show could have been with a firmer hand on the casting and directorial tillers.

Drew (Oliver Tompsett) seizes the opportunity to showcase his talents as a rock performer and is matched by his thwarted love interest in the erstwhile actress, sometime groupie and stripper-by-necessity, Sherrie (the tireless Amy Pemberton) whose down-and-dirty strip colleagues indulge in choreography (by Kelly Devine) that some will see as empowering women while others may find it demeaning. If that was the way things were on The Strip, then so be it, but perhaps some of these bump and grind routines are unnecessarily explicit. And, unlike the ‘fit’ girls, most of the men could do with toning their less-than-buff bodies.

So, despite the many reservations that could be applied in evaluating Rock of Ages as a ‘real’ West End musical and not just a rock arena rip-off, if its main purpose is to give the audience and cast a great time, then it must be counted a success.

But, as to the putative movie with Tom Cruise? I’ll give that a miss.

Tickets: http://www.shaftesburytheatre.com

Reviewed by Clive Burton for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

GHOST, the musical

Now playing at Piccadilly Theatre

In Ghost, the musical, we first meet blissed-out couple Sam and Molly in the Brooklyn apartment found for them by high-flying banker Sam’s buddy, Carl. While it gives Molly just the vibe she needs as a sculptor and provides the loved-up pair with the lifestyle they crave, Carl turns out to be masterminding a huge scam right under his boss Sam’ s nose, defrauding investment accounts to the tune of some $10 million, (most of which could well have gone into this uber-lush production – and then some) a plot that Sam uncovers before a subway mugger robs him of his life.

But the mugging is not as clear-cut as it seems and was intended as a ploy to enable Carl (through the mugger) access to Sam’s apartment and regain control of the account that Sam had sole access to. As the plot thickens and Molly’s life is placed in jeopardy, Sam spends the rest of the evening trying to protect her-even though as a spectre in limbo, he cannot get through to her or anyone else on earth to share his forebodings. He is doomed to remain both unseen and unheard, although of course he must maintain a vivid presence to the audience at all times.

This lack of connection can be almost as frustrating for the audience as it must be to the cast as the (obviously) flesh-and-blood Sam remains such an obstinately-visible part of the action – except, oddly enough, for one later scene when he has discovered how to concentrate his thoughts to such an extent as to be able to inter-act with earthly objects or (invisibly) beat the living daylights out of Carl when he uncovers his friend’s plan to harm his beloved Molly. As he has been disconcertingly present all night, why should he ‘vanish’ now, if not to provide Paul Kieve with a belated opportunity to display his prowess as the show’s consultant illusionist?

By this time, if the audience were not exactly becoming restless, they were finding it difficult to get into the spirit of the evening: dare I say it, but for such a mega production it was all rather soulless, despite a solid script by Ghost’s original Academy Award winning writer, Bruce Joel Rubin, the peerless pedigree of smooth-as-silk virtuoso direction by Matthew Warchus and the West End’s most awesomely-sophisticated sets (all credit to Jon Driscoll for his video and projection design - way beyond anything seen in Enron and surely destined for Bafta plaudits). Indeed, so fabulous were the cinematic effects that Ghost could lay claim to have originated a new hybrid cinematic/theatrical crossover genre, the moviecal.

Despite the show’s fabulous surface gloss, its strong(and vocally-skilled, accent-perfect) cast – Richard Fleeshman as Sam, Caissie Levy as Molly, Andrew Langtree as Carl and an outstanding Sharon D Clarke, in the movie’s pivotal Whoopi Goldberg role as the psychic Oda Mae Brown, who acts as a conduit through whom Sam can communicate with, and eventually be briefly united with, Molly, it proved a long and often thankless two and a half hours with each element fleshed out to provide what is expected of a blockbuster musical. With its constant comings and goings, Ashley Wallen’s attention-seeking choreography is all-too-often redundant (all that hoofing in the subway, inside offices, against a background of New York skyscrapers or beneath a heavy downpour of rain: what was that about?) Ditto the puzzling inclusion of the tap number 'Ball of Wax’ for Sam’s fellow spirits… so much could have been cut to give the piece greater pace.

The main culprit for its ultimate failure to engage was the lack of quality in what could be made out of the pop-oriented lyrics, which were often frustratingly drowned by an aggressively-over-amplified percussive musical accompaniment. The rap lyrics for the Rasta Ghost who taught Sam his life-saving kinetic powers say (or, rather, don’t say) it all: I mean, ‘no hocus pocus, fix it on the locus’ - would anyone on ‘da street’ ever use the word ‘locus’? And, although ‘I had a Life’ could well be resurrected as a boy band pop anthem, it fails to pass muster in the context of this show.

So, the multi-million buck must stop with the creative co-operative of Rubin (credited for lyrics) along with Dave Stewart and Glen Ballard (music and lyrics) whose input impedes the story’s progress rather than advancing it through music and lyrics. And, although it's my guess that this could be one phantom that will not charm its way into the record books, its filmic antecedents will no doubt resurrect sufficient interest to ensure bums on seats for some time to come.

Box Office: 0844 871 7618

Tickets: www.ghostthemusical.com

Reviewed by Clive Burton for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

SHREK The Musical

Book/lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire

Music by Jeanine Tesori

Now playing at The Theatre Royal Drury Lane

No doubt suckered into Shrek The Musical by the pester power of kids who had agreed to be on their best behaviour (seated on a raised cushion, the little girl in front of me solicitously asked if I could still see the stage: I could) even adults will find themselves with more than enough to enjoy in this fast-paced, fairytale adventure. And the fart jokes, spectacular flying dragon and great tunes will keep kids of all ages engaged.

Shrek the Musical has a score by Jeanine Tesori (lauded for the award-winning Caroline or Change) and original book/lyrics by Pulitzer-Prizewinner David Lindsay-Abaire (who also wrote Robots) which plough their own distinct furrow away from the DreamWorks cartoon movie. So, even if you have seen the original, it won’t detract from this lavish new take in which the ogre Shrek must reclaim his swamp from squatting fairytale folk by rescuing the feisty flame-haired Princess Fiona from a dragon-guarded Tower and deliver her to the diminutive Lord Farquaad, who must marry a princess to accede to the throne of the kingdom of Duloc.

Outcasts all, the characters undertake a journey to find acceptance in a hostile world of soaring castles, swamps, woods dappled by sunlight and landscapes flecked by fecund full moons - all populated by fancifully-dressed creatures (set and costume designs by Tim Hatley).

Shrek himself is an overweight ogre with an engaging openness and a love of all things gross (he uses a skunk as a deodorant and is prone to extended bouts of flatulence). Playing him in a vast fat suit and a determined Scottish accent behind a ton of green make-up, Nigel Lindsay regularly crosses the line into bad taste without ever offending and quickly establishes himself as endearing despite his unhygienic habits and a propensity to break wind that has kids and adults helpless with laughter.

Strong of voice and doughty of character, Amanda Holden’s Princess Fiona may be the antithesis of the classic storybook princess, but she exploits her feistiness to winning effect- particularly in her second act opener, Morning Person, when she decimates the forest creatures in their idyllic uber-Disney sylvan setting. She knows how to move, too - even when dancing with a chorus-line of rats.

Richard Blackwood’s Donkey makes a fine comic foil to Shrek’s level-headed stoic and has created his own distinctive approach to a part that has already been well explored in the movie, while EastEnders’Nigel Harman is diminutive dynamite as a petulant Lord Farquaad with an underlying streak of neediness. He tirelessly sings, dances and high-kicks (on his knees) throughout.

Taken at face value, the musical numbers are more than sufficient to engage. But, where Shrek The Musical is unexpectedly rewarding is in the profligacy of the references to other Broadway shows which the directors (the inventive Jason Moore and Rob Ashford) so richly mine throughout the show.

At heart, though, Shrek the Musical remains a good old-fashioned ‘happy ever after’ fairtytale that, in the end, turns out to be rather more entertaining than the sum of its farts.

Theatre Royal Drury Lane,

Catherine Street,

London, WC2B 5JF

Tel: 0844 871 8810

Reviewed by Clive Burton for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

A Theatre Royal Bath production

Bill Kenwright and The Really Useful Group present

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new production of

THE WIZARD OF OZ

Music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E.Y. Harburg

From the book by L Frank Baum

Based upon the Classic Motion Picture and produced with the permission of Warner Bros.

Now playing at the London Palladium.

The programme notes suggest that Baum might have had more serious subjects in mind when he wrote this fantasy tale to entertain children, describing it as a metaphor for the monetary situation in 1890’s USA. That may be true, and it seems a possibility, but those who came to cheer their favourite winner of the ‘Over the Rainbow’ TV talent show cared nothing for that as they munched their way through sweets and treats enjoying the bewitching technical and Technicolor wizardry of a show which has pulled out all the stops to entertain and amaze.

The winner, eighteen year old Danielle Hope, is a charming Dorothy singing the definitive song “Over the Rainbow” from the heart, her voice soaring confidently through the theatre and holding the last note seemingly forever, before running away with her beloved dog Toto to escape the wrath of Miss Gulch. This is Hannah Waddingham, in black, erect and forbidding as she rides majestically by on a sit-up bicycle threatening death to the dog.

Michael Crawford appears as an avuncular Professor Marvel with his Wonders of the World machine, the cheers and applause which greet him before he even utters a word a tribute to his popularity. Dorothy meets him again in Oz as Doorman, Tour Guide and The Wizard himself, and what a fraud he turns out to be.

Suddenly the tornado (the twister) is upon us, and what a storm. Thunder booms and crashes as lightening flashes around the audience, and everything from the Gales Farm, where Dorothy lives with Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, is picked up by the wind and whirled through the air in tumultuous motion before dropping Dorothy and Toto down into the Land of Oz.

I found it hard to take my eyes off the dog, on stage almost constantly, and what an adorable little Westie. He doesn’t put a paw wrong apart from being very wary of the Yellow Brick Road, and obediently goes along with the story, barking in all the right places, although he did seem rather bemused by the strange game these humans were playing.

Lloyd Webber has contributed six new songs to the well-known score with Tim Rice supplying lyrics. The most enjoyable is “ Red Shoes Blues” sung with gleeful malevolence (Hannah Waddingham again) as the most deliciously evil Wicked Witch of the West, threatening to kill Dorothy and prise the magical ruby slippers from her corpse. Looking like a sharp-chinned mobile broomstick, she swoops down to confront the Dress Circle eye to eye, menacingly booming through her megaphone “Surrender Dorothy” before disappearing into the abyss above with “Have a nice day!” A witch with a sense of humour too. I loved her!

Comedy too from the characters Dorothy meets on her way Paul Keating’s floppily agile ‘brainless’ scarecrow, Edward Baker-Duly’s ‘heartless’ tap dancing Tin Man, and David Ganly cuddly and camp as the Cowardly Lion.

Robert Jones’ stunning sets and costumes, lit by Hugh Vanstone, are perpetually changing, the opulently gaudy colours of The Emerald City a stark contrast to the grey and empty landscape around the Gale Farm, and with seventeen musicians working themselves into a frenzy of exhilarating musical madness this is indeed a cost-a-lot show. However with advance sales rumoured to be around £11 million, the gold at the end of this particular rainbow already seems a certainty. Jeremy Sams directs a multi-faceted show with style and Arlene Phillips’ varied choreography is the icing on the cake.

Curtain calls were greeted with an enthusiastic standing ovation - although I’m not sure this wasn’t especially for the dog!

Tickets: www.wizardofozthemusical.com

Reviewed by Sheila Connor for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

LEGALLY BLONDE – The Musical

Now playing at The Savoy Theatre, Strand

The only excuse not to go to Legally Blonde, the musical, is if you are dead. And even then, this show is so uplifting that it makes a good case for resurrection.

Elle Woods is a Californian blonde in the Paris Hilton mould (complete with Chihuahua) who follows her Ivy League childhood sweetheart, Warner Huntington III to Harvard where she is determined to gain an internship with Professor Callahan’s top law firm. By abandoning her partying lifestyle for a rigorous routine of study, she succeeds in achieving her aim and overturns everyone’s previous misconceptions of her as an airhead - finding herself, true love and her purpose in life along the way.

Awash with sets and costumes in every conceivable shade of pink (David Rockwell and Gregg Barnes), this is an undeniably ‘girlie’ show. But the secret of its wider appeal lies with an energetically-eclectic score and engaging lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin. Reminiscent of the very best of Wicked, it also includes a Riverdance parody (courtesy of one of many far-fetched, revised-since-Broadway, sub plots by book writer Heather Hach), lashings of Hairspray’s tuneful rock energy and more than a dash of Avenue Q’s sharp, positive-thinking, homilies.

Although the score pays homage to other shows, it also works spectacularly well on its own well-crafted terms and has much to commend it - including a hilarious second act showstopper.

As Elle, Sheridan Smith sets the standard: pretty in pink, she is equally irresistible when dressed to impress in her ‘corporate’ wardrobe. Vocally and physically, she is MTV-perfect for the part.

The rest of the buff cast ranks with the very best the West End currently has to offer. Ex-Blue singer, Duncan James adopts the sleepy-eyed look of Robert Mitchum to foxy effect as Warner Huntington III, Peter Davison is a convincingly controlling Professor Callahan and Jill Halfpenny shines as unlucky-in-love crimper Paulette Buonufonte, while Chris Ellis-Stanton as her hunky squeeze the UPS messenger Kyle, makes the most of a knock-out cameo role delivering a life-changing package to her.

But this is one of those shows where it really is invidious to mention only a few individual performers: if space permitted, everyone - including the band - would get a mention for making Legally Blonde such fluffy fun. You might not need to check your brain at the door, but it certainly helps to adopt a blonde attitude to enjoy this frothy new musical to the full.

Performances: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday at 7.30pm

Thursday and Saturday at 2.30pm Sunday at 3pm

Box Office: 0844 871 7687

Ticket prices: £20.00 - £62.50

Website: www.legallyblondethemusical.co.uk

Reviewed for Theatreworld Internet Magazine by Clive Burton

DREAMBOATS AND PETTICOATS

Now playing a the Playhouse Theatre

It’s 1961 and everyone’s caught the rock’n’roll bug. A hit song can bring fame and fortune and the chance to score with the opposite sex. Nothing new there, then. And, indeed, there is nothing new in this hit-packed compilation musical featuring around three dozen classic toe-tapping favourites from Del Shannon, Bobby Darin, Roy Orbison, The Platters, Dion and the Belmonts, Neil Sedaka, The Crystals, Chubby Checker and The Shadows to name but a few.

The simple premise of this unsophisticated show revolves around the rivalries of a group of youth club kids keen to win a song-writing competition that will bring them the aforesaid fame and fortune.

Setting it in an Essex youth club is a clever ploy that enables producer Bill Kenwright to keep the costs down – poster-covered walls, a few sticks of furniture, a ping pong table and some dodgems for the club’s seaside outing: you get the picture.

Bobby (played by a 21-year-old X Factor contestant, Scott Bruton) auditions for a local rock band beating ‘some singer with big lips from Dartford’ but losing out to a cocky looker called Norman (the abs-tastic Ben Freeman). Mousey Laura (West End debutante Daisy Wood-Davis) sings up a storm, writes music and faithfully follows Bobby around hoping to catch his eye, inevitably losing out to one of the more forward girls in the group, ‘good time’ Sue (played by Jennifer Biddall, Hollyoaks’ Jessica Harris).

But, unlike Laura, Sue can’t cut it in the song stakes - everyone agrees that Laura gives great middle eight: her collaboration with Bobby eventually wins him over and jointly wins them the national song competition.

As a home-grown musical of the ‘Summer Holiday’ variety it works well enough with a lively young cast and well-played hit songs for every occasion, including the eponymous Dreamboats and Petticoats, co-written by Jason Donovan. It is, unfortunately, the least successful of any of the songs in the show and simply doesn’t stand a chance in comparison against such solid classics as Shakin’ all over, Runaway, Do you wanna dance, Teenager in Love and Great Pretender. Which is a great pity because, as Bobby and Laura’s ‘winning’ song, it has to close the show. Although somewhat of a limp anti-climax, it is quickly redeemed by the obligatory final mega mix of Let’s twist again, C’mon Everybody and At the hop.

The show scores more highly than it perhaps should, largely thanks to the writing skills of experienced TV sitcom hands Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran. The slender story has the ring of truth about it - in no small measure because they draw upon their own shared personal experiences to create a nostalgic evening that will certainly touch a nerve with audiences of a certain age and give their kids a peek into an altogether more innocent age.

Reviewed by Clive Burton for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

Times: Mon-Fri 7.30pm, Sat 8pm, mats Thu 3pm, Sat 4pm

Prices: £25-£50

Phone:08701648787

Website: www.ambassadortickets.com/Savoy-Theatre/Information

WAR HORSE

Based on Michael Morpurgoe’s novel, adapted for the stage by Nick Stafford

Now playing at The New London Theatre, Drury Lane

'A powerfully-touching universal experience'

As the surviving combatants of WWI return to England to rebuild their shattered lives in a home fit for heroes, an ungrateful government callously sells off the horses that had served and suffered alongside them - many eventually ending up in the Middle East or on dinner tables in France and Belgium.

In 'War Horse', we witness life and death on the front-line through the eyes and emotions of Joey, a farm horse from Devon and his young master, Albert, an under-age soldier who enlisted in the hope of being re-united with his beloved charge in war-torn Europe.

Like his human counterparts, Joey did the bidding of his masters without question but, unlike the million other horses that died in combat, Joey was one of a small number of survivors. ‘War Horse’ is his story.

What is remarkable about Joey is that he is a puppet of quite extraordinary verisimilitude, three operators being required to manipulate every aspect of his stylised larger-than-life-size anatomy. He and the other horses do the everyday things that every horse does - snort, twitch, breathe, whinny, react to the environment around them and bond with each other - with such complete naturalness that it soon becomes possible to believe that they are ‘real’ thanks to the unparalleled skill of their manipulators.

These remarkable artists not only animate Joey’s head, heart and hindquarters from foal to the magnificent full-grown creature he eventually becomes, they also imbue him with a soul and manage to become as one with the truly remarkable creations at the heart of this piece, conceived and executed by Handspring Puppet Company as a collaborative venture with the National Theatre.

‘War Horse’ is based on a novel by Michael Morpurgo (adapted by Nick Stafford) who found the key to his story of the WWI horses in the reminiscences of a war veteran whom he met in the Devon village where the action begins on a carefree pre-war summer’s day with swallows swooping over the placid pre-war fields of rural England.

Caught in the emotional crossfire between a strong-minded reconciliatory mother and a feckless, dipsomaniac father, young Albert (an empathetic Kit Harington) channels his repressed passions into nurturing and protecting Joey: the trust between the two blossoms when Joey is subjugated beneath a harness that will briefly turn this proud animal into a shire horse and thus win the bet that will enable him to remain with Albert.

As war arrives, Albert’s father sells the horse to the Army as an Officer’s mount and Joey is summarily shipped to the front where his willing submission to the harness eventually saves his life.

The vast acreage of the New London’s open stage adds considerably to the scenes of carnage that largely constitute the second half, literally drawing the audience into the heart of the action as Rae Smith’s animated monochrome sketches in which elements of the action mirror or augment the on-stage action are projected onto a giant strip of ragged blank paper arcing over the back of the acting area: at one particularly sombre point they are temporarily obliterated by a relentlessly suppurating blood-red tide.

Gun carriages rumble past pulled by ghostly platoons of emaciated horses, officers and men ride recklessly into un-winnable battles where the once-invincible power of the horse is now a vulnerably-dispensable anachronism against the indiscriminate slaying power of the machine gun or the ubiquitous, eviscerating barbed wire which maims man and beast alike.

In War Horse, we experience all this and more: the camaraderie of men (many, like the under-age Albert, hardly more than boys themselves) led by shockingly young Officers, the fear and the bravery and the blind love for King and country that is all but unfathomable these days.

A tribute to the National’s ability to mount such a boldly epic piece, this engrossing transfer is directed in exemplary fashion by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris. That our lives have been so signally enriched by such a powerfully-touching universal experience is a tribute to all concerned.

Reviewed by Clive Burton for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

Performance times
Monday – Saturday evenings 7.30pm
Thursday and Saturday matinees 2.30pm

Ticket prices
Monday - Thursday £15, £25, £35, £45
Friday, Saturday matinee and evening
£15, £25, £37.50, £47.50

www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Under-18yrs discount: £10 off top two prices, Monday - Thursday.

JERSEY BOYS

Book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elise

Music by Bob Gaudio and lyrics by Bob Crewe

Now playing at the Prince Edward Theatre

I approached Jersey Boys with some misgivings - yet another musical tribute and a nostalgia trip for the fans - but the writers are adamant that they have not written a musical, they have written a play about four guys who wrote music. The result is a fascinating tale of "revenge and betrayal and crime and punishment and family and women" and tells the truth about what went on behind the squeaky clean image that Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons presented to the public.

Truth is hard to define, with every character giving their version of how they remembered it, and the writers had the resourceful idea of giving the narration to each one in turn throughout the show, but aside from that they also had the difficult (and dangerous) problem of presenting the whole truth while being careful to avoid upsetting any of the Mafia who were keeping a watchful eye on proceedings. They must not be 'disrespectful' to any of the bosses - warnings were issued - and here Gyp DeCarlo (Stuart Milligan) appears as an emotional avuncular figure sentimental about his mother (probably true) and with the boys' welfare at heart (possibly not!)

The curtain rises and we are blasted with sound, light and colour "Oh, What a Night" (a bit heavy on the base boys), and constant frenetic movement which continues almost throughout the show, with the more or less obligatory set of steel scaffolding, spiral staircase and raised walkway, giving the performers an extra challenge as they are frequently up, down and along while singing and playing. The breath control and energy necessary is awe-inspiring, not to mention the exceptional quality of the acting and singing!

The story begins with the swaggering bravado of Glenn Carter as guitarist Tommy DeVito, a man who had been imprisoned for criminal offences, but sees himself as one who "takes raw clay and makes like Michael Angelo" - the raw clay in this case being a scrawny kid called Frankie Castelluccio. Not a name which trips easily off the tongue, so he becomes Frankie Valli. "With friends like yours" he is told, "maybe you should change your name to Sinatra", and Ryan Molloy does have a slight resemblance to another Jersey Boy who made the big time.

With bassist Nick Massi (Philip Bulcock) they began their musical journey in the fifties, were later joined by young musical genius Bob Gaudio (Stephen Ashfield), and in 1962 had their first big hit "Sherry", closely followed by "Big Girls Don't Cry" and "Walk Like a Man". Their music was for the people - ordinary people with ordinary lives - and Crewe's lyrics appealed to them. "My Eyes Adored You" was sung with deep feeling after Valli's marriage fell apart, and "Can't take my Eyes off You" brought spontaneous applause and cheering. I was surprised to discover how very many songs were so familiar.

After many trial names for their group they finally settle on The Four Seasons - a name not inspired by Vivaldi (Who?) but by the bowling alley where they were playing at the time, and it is here that a legend is born.

In New Jersey nobody locks their doors - there is honour among thieves - and the honour extends to Valli loyally insisting the group must pay Devito's astronomical gambling debts, and to a contract sealed with a handshake lasting over forty years.

The show concludes with a "Where are they now?" scenario. Valli, in his seventies, is still performing, Crewe (here played by an effete Simon Adkins), still writing the lyrics, and Gaudio still writing the music. DeVito, by an ironic twist of fate, is in Las Vegas working for Joe Pesci, the kid he used to knock around back in New Jersey and expertly portrayed with a cheeky charm by Jye Frasca. Massi, however, died in 2000 on Christmas Eve….. "For a Catholic, is that style or what!"

With the original creative team from the hit show in New York, and an extremely talented British cast (Molloy re-creates Valli's soaring falsetto perfectly), this is a show that should go on and on - like the originals. Judging from the enthusiastic reception - standing ovation and an audience who didn't want to leave - it probably will. "Oh What a Night!" says it all.

Reviewed by Sheila Connor for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

"THE 39 STEPS"

by John Buchan, adapted by Patrick Barlow

Now playing at the Criterion Theatre

These days, as Scotland launches its National Theatre (and a very fine one too), it is easy to forget that territories even more serious about their culture got there long ago.

A quarter of a century ahead of the Scots, The National Theatre of Brent was unveiled when the inimitable, irrepressible Desmond Olivier Dingle (or Patrick Barlow) proudly launched his company with The Charge of the Light Brigade and soon after, the Charge of the Jim Broadbent.

The NToB title may not be there for this adaptation of John Buchan's stirring novel of spying and double crossing but the spirit and ethos are present, thanks to its founder, who has adapted John Buchan's tale of an ordinary chap saving his country from disaster.

The recipe has remained the same. Take a famous story and milk it for every gag in sight. This relies on a talented cast, in this case an ensemble of four, each of whom plays their part capably, their timing honed by actress turned director Maria Aitken.

Charles Edwards is hapless hero Richard Hannay, stiff upper lip topped by a pencil moustache and suavity oozing from every pore.

He is pitted against a presumably Nazi professor after picking up a dark lady with a terrible accent at the Palladium. She tells him of The 39 Steps but before she can do more than set him off on a dangerous chase, she reappears groaning with a dagger in her back.

She, like reluctant heroine Pamela and several other glamorous ladies is played by film star Catherine McCormack, clearly relishing her chance to ham it up on stage.

One hundred or so other characters from coppers to train guards, baddies and old ladies are represented by a versatile pair billed as clowns in the programme. Simon Gregor and Rupert Degas provide energy and talent well beyond the call of duty.

Patrick Barlow's adaptation mixes verbal and physical humour and even chucks in a little shadow puppetry. There are many memorable images such as the famous chase along the top of a racing train, with Hannay then jumping onto and then off an entirely convincing Forth Bridge, all reproduced with minimal budget and props.

Like the train, the two hours flash by amid quick costume and persona changes, some trite plotting and corny jokes. The evening is inconsistent but at its best, very funny and should do well in this small West End house in the run-up to Christmas.

Reviewed by Philip Fisher for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

'WICKED' (The untold story of the Witches of Oz)

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz

Book by Winnie Holzman

now playing at the Apollo Victoria Theatre

BEWITCHED BY A FRIEND OF DOROTHY

Whether you view Wicked as a charming fairy story or a parable for our own troubled times depends on your personal 'take' on this prequel to The Wizard of Oz.

Inspired by a book written by Gregory Maguire some 90 years after the original, this brilliantly-cast new Broadway show traces the back story of the protagonists in the original (1939) MGM movie.

In this latest incarnation it is basically a tale of two college girls attending a Hogwarts-style Academy presided over by Miriam Margolyes' bustling, pneumatically-bustled, Madame Morrible (a disarming cross between the steely gentility of Barbara Cartland and the appealing vulgarity of Mrs Slocombe).

The girls, Glinda and Elphaba, start out as rivals and end up bosom buddies, overcoming numerous misunderstandings, romantic entanglements and personal tragedies along the way until their roles as good and bad witches are reversed.

Wicked's monolithic Heath Robinson-style set extends into the auditorium and sandwiches a proscenium dominated by an animated, winged dragon and a map of Oz which is whisked away (to excited anticipatory applause) to reveal the skeletal insides of a giant timepiece.

Yet, despite its many disparate narrative threads (expertly woven together by Winnie Holzman), the key to the show - and its obsession with time - may perhaps be found in a line spoken by Elphaba, the wicked, green witch during her eventual encounter with her nemesis, The Wizard: 'I wanted to put back the clock.'

As Elphaba, Idina Menzel has been imported from Broadway to play the role she originated. Green, geeky and gauche, she is a be-spectacled outcast from the outset, rejected by her father and lacking the social and physical graces needed to succeed in the competitive college environment into which she is thrust with her crippled younger sister, Nessarose (affectingly played by Katie Rowley Jones, a fragrant worm who eventually turns).

Ms Menzel has a gloriously powerful voice which conveys every nuance of the hurt wariness and self-protectiveness the role initially demands, before assuming a manic mantle of absolute power to end the first act with a stunning vocal and visual coup de theatre - one of many in this enchanting show.

Her complex story is told in flashback by Glinda the Good, who arrives on stage on a pendulum surrounded by a cloud of bubbles. Helen Dallimore plays this egocentric airhead with winning charm and, like the rest of the perfect cast, is given every opportunity to shine by Director Joe Mantello (including a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek homage to Evita in the second-act balcony scene).

Glinda quickly finds her Prince Charming in an equally-vacuous and self-absorbed Fiyero, whose philosophy of 'dancing through life, skimming the surface' immediately marks him out as a fellow spirit; the dashing Adam Garcia establishes himself as a major star in this show, grabbing every opportunity in a role he helped develop in the 2002 NY workshop of the show.

Wicked has been tweaked considerably since it garnered mixed Broadway reviews on its opening: Wayne Cilento's sympathetic musical staging helps each actor develop a truly individual character through movement, while the use of standard English - and Scottish - pronunciation (as opposed to faux-American) is universal by everyone except Ms Menzel and Nigel Planer (an excellent Presidential-style Wizard).

As neither Harry Potter nor The Lord of the Rings exerts any personal fascination for me, I feared that Wicked might exhibit a similar tweeness. But, while teenage audiences may latch on to Wicked's obvious tunefulness, the accessibility of its lyrics (both by Stephen Schwartz) and its appealingly-drawn and extravagantly-costumed, characters (scenic design by Eugene Lee and costumes by Susan Hilferty), others will take pleasure in pursuing such deeper elements as the nature of truth and the place of the thinking individual within a thoughtless, hostile environment.

On the night I visited, the audience was roof-raisingly vociferous in its appreciation of this dazzling show and its generous and universally-talented performers. I only wish that, as the next generation of theatregoers, they could have enjoyed the frisson of hearing Schwartz's beautiful and melodic score played by a Broadway-sized pit orchestra with a full string section and a preponderance of non-synthesised instruments.

The performance lasts approximately 2 hours and 50 minutes, including a 20 minute interval.

Reviewed by Clive Burton for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

BILLY ELLIOT -The Musical

Book and Lyrics by Lee Hall

Music by Elton John

Now playing at the Victoria Palace Theatre

Being possibly the only person in the whole of the British Isles - or even the world - who was not totally blown away by the film version of Billy Elliot, and knowing that this show is also directed by STEPHEN DALDRY, I was prepared to dislike this musical. Also so many films have been adapted for the stage recently, could yet another one succeed?

Well - try as I might to find fault - I just loved it - totally captivated from the beginning when 'The Stars Look Down' and destiny beckons, to the soulful 'Dear Billy', sung with his dead mother, when Billy sets off down the aisle on his long journey to the future.

For one thing I had not expected it to be so funny, and I found myself crying with laughter through most of the first act. There is a serious side to it, of course, the story of a young boy from a poor working class family longing to express himself creatively, a story which coincidentally mirrors the lives of both Elton John and Lee Hall, a Geordie lad himself, which could explain the feeling and emotion in both the exceptional lyrics and the music - best that Elton has ever written in my humble opinion.

TIM HEALY is 'Dad', a rough and ready, down to earth (or even down in the earth) miner, and the time is the mid eighties - the time of the miners' strike when there was the threat of pit closures and they would all be out of work - so he has quite enough on his plate without a son wanting to be a poncey ballet dancer, but he too has a soul - and a surprisingly strong and good singing voice - with a sentimental side which brings tears when he and son Billy sing of his dead wife. HAYDN GWYNNE is magnificent as a disillusioned dance teacher at last finding an exceptional talent to encourage, and her troupe of ballet girls were really great little dancers, a fact which they disguised well.

ANN EMERY is a delightfully comical 'grandma' who may be suffering from senile dementia, but remembers her dead husband well in the song which begins 'I hated the sod for thirty three year' - not the sentiments expected. Be warned - there is swearing throughout - not always in anger but part of general conversation. (There is a translation of the Geordie in the programme, if needed)

PETER DARLING's choreography is outstanding is every scene - the line of riot policemen had their own comic routine, even chubby dance pianist STEVE ELIAS strutted his funky stuff, and there is a delightfully humorous dance with Billy and his gay friend Michael (RYAN LONGBOTTOM - showing terrific comic potential) both in drag.

Sets and sound complimented each other perfectly particularly in the scene where Billy shows his frustration in a frenzied and athletic clog dance which wrecks his bedroom, while the sound of rioting is heard from outside.

It took two years to find the ideal Billy and the long search paid off - on the night I attended this was LIAM MOWER, and this 12 year old was absolute perfection and thoroughly deserved the ecstatic standing ovation that he received - twice! An extremely versatile dancer, actor, singer, gymnast and very likeable - I am astounded that anyone so young could not only be so talented, but had the strength and stamina to carry such a demanding role. The ballet scene where he danced with ISAAC JAMES as his 'older self' to the music of Swan Lake was incredibly beautiful.

This is a musical by which all others will now be judged!

Reviewed by Sheila Connor for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

Les Misérables

based on the book by Victor Hugo, produced by Cameron Mackintosh

Music composed by Claude-Michel Schonberg

Original concept and French lyrics by Alain Boublil

Lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer

Production design by John Napier

Reviewed at Palace Theatre - cast changes will apply

An impressive 17 years after its opening in October 1985, Cameron Mackintosh's production of Victor Hugo's epic masterpiece 'Les Misérables' is still running like a Duracell long-life battery at the Palace Theatre a familiar London landmark on Cambridge Circus.

The piece follows the engaging plight of Jean Valjean, imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread for his sister's child. When finally released after 19 soul-destroying years, he is relentlessly pursued by his nemesis, the unforgiving Inspector Javert. While Valjean initially seems irreversibly embittered by his experiences in prison and headed for a life of ongoing crime and punishment, a moment of kindness towards him shortly after his release inspires him to aim towards better things. As he reinvents himself, we follow his progress, from the French provinces to the backstreets, barricades and dank sewers of still-revolting mid-19th century Paris. Hugo's consideration of universal themes including the hypocrisy of society, tolerance, courage, religion and love add gravity along the way.

The production looks undeniably spectacular, with no-frills but highly effective sets by John Napier (his revolving, outsized, industrial-style barricades are especially good), and wonderfully evocative lighting by David Hersey. The cast, which has been given a revamp, is huge, and it would be impossible to note everyone here. Of the leads, however, several stand out: Valjean is played with gentle authority by Michael Sterling; Hadley Fraser is well suited to the young romantic lead of Marius (his West End debut), thanks to his handsome looks and sweet voice; and Sophia Ragavelas, who for me was the best singer in the cast, makes an attractive Eponine feisty yet sympathetic. Jerome Pradon is good as the duty-bound tough guy, Javert. An injection of naughty humour is given by the rough-living Thénardiers, played in this production by a charismatic Stephen Tate and Rosemary Ashe - listen out for their lively version of 'Master of the House'.

With the above excepted, I was on the whole quite disappointed with the quality of singing, with some characters unfortunately being fairly inaudible or even out of tune. This was counterbalanced by the orchestra, however, who played wonderfully throughout - no small achievement for this 3-hour-long show.

This musical has been seen by over 50 million people worldwide so far, and there are plenty of positive aspects in this new production for the show to seem likely to run and run. One would hope that Victor Hugo, in the 200th anniversary of his birth this year, would be proud; musicals fans - the small number who haven't already seen this show, will, I'm sure, not be disappointed.

Reviewed by Clare Peel for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

Glen Henderson and Yes/No Productions present:

STOMP

Reviewed at The Vaudeville Theatre playing at Ambassador's Theatre

In the West End for the first time - and set to take the capital by storm - is STOMP, a unique, energy-fuelled combination of percussion, movement and visual comedy, with - unusually - the dustbin as its central theme. The show launched in Brighton in 1991, following a 10-year collaboration between percussionist Luke Cresswell and actor/singer/ musician/ writer Steve McNicholas. It has since won a host of awards and played in locations as diverse as Athens, Melbourne, New York, Scandinavia and South Africa. This baby has even featured on 'Blue Peter' and in a Coca-Cola commercial (the one with the ice-pick...).

Intrigued? I was. Being a virgin to the phenomenon that is STOMP, I was admittedly slightly fearful of an hour and 40 minutes of bin-lid banging, followed by several painkillers and early to bed. I couldn't have been more surprised. These guys are AMAZING.

Wearing workman's boots, STOMP's immensely talented eight performers mostly trained drummers - stamp (or stomp) and tap their way around the stage in a series of sketches, although there is no apparent plot and no underlying message to be learnt (this is pure visual and aural entertainment). The beats they create with their feet are accompanied by rhythms and sounds produced using impromptu instruments, all connected with garbage (from waste piping and empty plastic bottles to buckets, brushes and dustbin lids). The result is an achingly clever cacophony-cum-symphony of funky rhythms, complex sound patterns and surprisingly toe-tapping tunes, and proof that there is beauty in everything.

It's a spellbinding performance.

The hip, urban backstreet set and the lighting design by Neil Tiplady and Steve McNicholas further enhance the ambience.

The performers work in impressive union - keeping time, interacting with one another and even, in amusing moments, endearingly teasing their less-than-rhythmic audience. Plus - enviably - they look like they are having the absolute time of their lives.

On the evening I attended, there was a standing ovation - something that bodes extremely well for the rest of the run.

Creative, captivating, compulsive and utterly cool. Ten out of ten.

BOX OFFICE: 0870 890 0511

Reviewed by Clare Peel for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

We Will Rock You - (The Musical)

by Queen and Ben Elton

now playing at The Dominion Theatre

Instantaneously catapulted into the mesmeric futuristic world of We Will Rock You, the audience at the Dominion Theatre experience a wonderful roller-coaster ride through Ben Elton's vision of The Brave New World. That's to say, A Brave New Pop World where musical instruments are banned and manufactured pop bands thrive.

Our hero, Galileo, is a freak of nature in this planet of homogenous "Gaga" girls and boys, who furiously strives to bring back rock music to an all too pop-dominated world. With the aid of his sidekick, Scaramouche (yes, the humour is all very obvious but it strangely works), they venture underground and uncover a group of Bohemians who share the aim of bringing the world back to its former glory. Believe me, this is really great stuff. The plot pales into insignificance once the singing and dancing gets going. For someone not overly keen on Queen's songs, my toe really was tapping.

The cast work their way through all the favourites...Under Pressure, It's A Kinda Magic, We Are The Champions...songs which are cleverly interwoven into the plot with ease. They alternate between rigid robotic movements, brilliantly displayed in Radio Gaga, and free flowing head banging during the closing Bohemian Rhapsody. Visually, the costumes excel because of the sheer variety, with the futuristic cyberbabes scantily clad in silver spandex whereas the Bohos opt for a grungy yet glamorous punk ensemble reminiscent of Adam Ant and Boy George.

The Production Designers, Mark Fisher and Willie Williams, famed for innovative tour set designs for Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones, pulled out all the stops. The revolving screens which create a swirling backdrop to the entire play understandably cost £1 million. They bombard you with a technicolour display of eye-catching images and adverts. The quality of this show is undeniable as from start to finish you are captivated by the stunning visual effects and lavish displays of lighting that are so startling they practically sting your eyes.

As with all the West End musicals, there is the obligatory overly sentimental part which in We Will Rock You is dedicated to all famous rock legends who died young and left beautiful bodies(!), the focus being mainly on Freddie Mercury. Its slush but rather good slush.

As far as the acting is concerned, it is first class. Despite a multitude of great performances, Hannah Jane Fox who plays Scaramouche stole the show. For such a waif of a girl she has a gutsy voice, which is breath-taking at moments. Nigel Planer plays Pop, the long-haired loveable hippy character with zeal and is loved by the audience.

When the West End is plagued with some really dire musicals, We Will Rock You is a real breath of fresh air. There is no need to be an ardent fan of Queen to appreciate this amazing spectacle. To a certain extent it will become dated as references to Britney Spears and Hearsay will have less of an impact in months to come. Yet these anachronisms must be overlooked. Go along, surprise yourself and I will guarantee you will come out humming all the tunes.

Reviewed by Charlotte Seales for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

Disney presents

THE LION KING

The Award-Winning Broadway Musical

now playing at LYCEUM THEATRE (Wellington Street, WC2)

“THE LION KING” ROARS IN TRIUMPH !

In almost 50 year’s connection with the Theatre, and four years as Editor of THEATREWORLD INTERNET MAGAZINE, I have to confess that this is the most difficult review I have ever undertaken - there are simply not enough superlatives in the English language to describe “THE LION KING”

From the moment the curtain rises on the assembly of animals at sunrise at Pride Rock for the ‘presentation’ of the heir apparent (Simba) - the audience is totally silenced, mesmerised, by the unbelievably realistic display of wild-life! Huge Elephants, enormous Giraffes, graceful Gazelles - the procession seems to go on and on. It is not until the final drum crash at the end of “Circle of Life”, that the audience whoops with delight and the applause is deafening!

Perhaps I should confess that this review is totally biased - the reviewer being an utter, unashamed Disney fanatic! However, all the hype, and the brilliant marketing of this (former) animated feature pays off in abundance with the most spectacular and stunningly clever musical we have seen in London’s West End for three decades!

Disney’s first venture onto the Broadway, London and other stages around the world began with ‘Beauty and the Beast’. Many critics dismissed the work as just another piece of ‘Disney escapism’. Whilst ‘Beauty’ was relatively simple to translate to the stage, being a familiar ‘folk-tale, and containing ‘human’ characters - THE LION KING with its ‘cast’ consisting entirely of animals should have presented Disney’s ‘imagineers’ with an almighty headache.

Enter Director AND designer JULIE TAYMOR who, with the addition of the most stunning head-dresses, costumes and make-up INSTANTLY AND BELIEVABLY transforms the actors into the characters they portray. These creatures are no ‘Cats’ in leotards and painted faces! Ms. Taymor is an astoundingly brilliant creator, in as much as she has a concept which weaves its’ way throughout the entire production. The choreography (Garth Fagan) is perfect for the piece, the lighting (Donald Holder) ... vividly conjuring up the sights of Africa ... but above all the brilliantly effective design of the characters costumes and masks - all bear her hallmark! Small wonder that she was the first woman to win a coveted “Tony” award for ‘Best Director of a Musical’ for THE LION KING on Broadway.

All of your favourites from the movie are here -

Rafiki (the wise baboon), The wicked hyenas, Scar (the evil uncle), Pumbaa (the wart-hog), Timon (the wise-cracking meercat), Zazu (the major-domo), Nala (Simba’s bride to be!), Mufasa (Simba’s father), and of course, Simba - the Lion King!

But there are many, many more delights - which to reveal, would be to spoil your enjoyment. Ms. Taymor uses every trick in her book - but wisely and sparingly. She draws on techniques not seen in this country for decades .... shadow puppets .... soaring birds which fill the auditorium ... a beautiful ‘flying ballet’ ... animatronics ... the use of lighting and an extremely simple ‘device’ to depict the death of The Pridelands once Scar has murdered Mufasa. All so simple - yet it takes the mind and imagination of a genius to come up with such effects - the Genius of THE LION KING is Julie Taymor.

I have deliberately NOT singled out any member of the (HUGE) cast - since they all played (I suspect as they were directed to?) as an ensemble. Each member of the cast has his or her own chance to ‘shine’ and they do so with a brilliance that is not evident anywhere on the London stage at present.

Acting-wise, for them to even approach the ‘voice-overs’ in the animated feature (which were such luminaries as James Earl Jones, Whoopi Goldberg and Jeremy Irons) might be considered impossible. However, they don’t need to. The sheer size and spectacle of this stage version totally eclipses the two-dimensional movie and brings ‘The Pridelands’ to life before your eyes.

The original score has been expanded for the stage and now features fifteen musical numbers. South African composer Lebo M has created an evocative blend of African rhythms and chorales, with additional material by Julie Taymor and Mark Mancina. Elton John and Tim Rice have added three new numbers to the five they wrote for the animated film. The resulting sound of The Lion King score is a fusion of Western popular music and the distinctive sounds and rhythms of Africa, embracing the Academy award winning “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” and the haunting “Shadowland”

Any ‘critic’ who pours out their usual ‘bile’ after seeing this production has clearly lost the ‘inner child’ which exists within us all - they should seek a good therapist.. What they will not realise is that audiences have now ‘grown-up’ - and yet not (there’s a child deep down inside all of us!) Audiences are now demanding what they want - entertainment. Barricade scenes, riots, falling chandeliers and helicopters are a thing of the past.

Disney’s THE LION KING gives you what you pay for, and as always with Disney - you get VALUE FOR MONEY !!

Last night’s prolonged standing ovation from an enraptured audience said it all !!!!!

THEATREWORLD cannot recommend this production more highly than to rate it as it’s new Number one in the Top Ten Musicals and Plays in London!

You’ll have to wait in line for a long time for a ticket,

THE LION KING will ‘reign’ for years at the Lyceum Theatre -

but be patient and, take my word -

it will be something you tell your Grandchildren about -

you’ll have been part of “The Circle of Life”.

THE LION KING is produced by Walt Disney Theatrical Productions under the direction of Peter Schneider and Thomas Schumacher.

Reviewed by Graham Powner - Theatreworld Internet Magazine

MAMMA MIA

featuring a hefty 27 songs by Europopsters ABBA !!!

now playing at Prince of Wales Theatre

This is a review of the original production cast changes will therefore apply

Let’s face it, the idea of sitting through a musical based on over twenty-seven Abba songs could be, for some of us, a form of Japanese torture, for others, an eagerly anticipated night of frivolous fun, happily overdosing on all the great classics.

The main problem lies in deciding on a plot which can be successfully merged with obscurely titled songs such as “Chiquitita”, “Voulez-vous” and “Mamma Mia.” The writer, Catherine Johnson, opts for the typical cliched story about a girl’s search for identity, self discovery and the difficulty of relationships. The story is straightforward. Sophie, a bride to-be, has invited three men, any of whom could be her long lost father to her wedding on a quiet, Greek island. Two of Sophie’s mother’s friends arrive, Tanya and Rosie. These two characters contribute a great deal of humour to the play. Tanya is a glamorous, nymphomaniac “Abs Fabs” Patsy-esque character who towers over Rosie, the archetypal dumpy yet aimable middle-aged woman, like a giant. They add much colour to “Mamma Mia” and their “Dancing Queen” scene involving Sophie’s mother Donna is great. Hairbrush in hand, the trio sing and dance along to their favourite teenage anthem in a natural, spontaneous manner.

Concerning the choreography in general, the upbeat, energetic performances to “Money, Money,Money” and “Does your mother know” were excellent. More of these and less of the mediocre duets were needed. It seemed as though all the classic Abba songs were crammed into the first half, causing the second part to be slow paced and too static. Nevertheless, a nice alternative to costume was provided by the wetsuit and flipper clad backing dancers in some of the songs, rather fitting to the Greek island setting.

The set design, consisting of two curved walls representing a taverna, allowed fluid change of scene. However, its minimalism was taken a bit to the extreme, the taverna looked more derelict than idyllic, too much was left to the imagination.

Despite these few disappointments “Mamma Mia” redeems itself with its witty dialogue, a combination of double entendre and funny banter. Siobhan McCarthy’s role as the single mother Donna is brilliant, unfortunately casting quite a shadow on Lisa Stokke’s debut in the West End as Sophie.

Although Abba will always be remembered for their electric turquoise blue lycra outfits and white platform boots rather than for an array of songs with deeply moving and thought provoking lyrics, their genre of music is ideal and a real crowdpleaser for this West End musical at the Prince Edward Theatre.

Reviewed by Charlotte Seales for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

SHAKESPEARE'S GLOBE - EXHIBITION AND EDUCATIONAL FACILITIES REMAIN OPEN YEAR ROUND ! - WELL WORTH A VISIT

The Globe Café - with an all-day menu with main dishes from £5 and open from 10am, last orders 11pm. Menu also served on the outside terrace in fine weather. No booking required.

The Globe Restaurant - Main dishes from the Grill starting at £8 and two courses with coffee from £12.50. Open for lunch from 12 noon - 2-30pm, supper 5.30pm to 11pm last orders. Special pre and post theatre menu available during the season. Booking advisable.

The Globe Balcony - Situated on the third floor, with panoramic views of the river, St. Paul’s and the City. Available for private bookings throughout the year.

For reservations and enquiries telephone: 020 7928 9444

Open all the year round except December 24 & 25.

For more details or individual advice/help - email: GPowner@aol.com