Theatre

Fearing ‘yet another’ one-woman show about Judy Garland, I almost missed out on Songs for Nobodies, but three things conspired to make it rather special. First, the actress in the role, ‘world famous...

It’s always a buzz when London gets a new theatre space. Now, diagonally opposite across Leicester Square there are two, each coincidentally producing an actor-musician wartime show. One is amazing, the...

Has the Menier Chocolate Factory come to the end of the road? If you want to know how it feels to be trapped in some nightmare prison with no prospect of release, sit in the middle of a row for its current...

A thousand years ago – oh dear, I went for my 25th birthday – there was Side by Side by Sondheim, a revue made from thirty songs extracted from the then impressive canon of Stephen Sondheim including eight...

I’ve known for a while that Edward Albee wanted Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf to be a quartet for four gay men, and pondered how Noel Coward’s Private Lives would work if all four partners were also...

Try for a moment to imagine what might have happened if celebrated poet W H Auden and Berlin-based conceiver of Cabaret’s Sally Bowles Christopher Isherwood had together written ‘The League of...

It may be better not to have seen the movie Fanny and Alexander. Coming to the stage version untainted you’ll have a stronger chance to enjoy an exuberant energy and ribald theatricality that doesn’t...

A good old-fashioned play about good old-fashioned politics. Gore Vidal’s 1960 satire The Best Man is based around the Democratic convention where in reality JFK won his nomination. Each of Vidal’s...

There are a few things you just can’t say about musical theatre without inviting the opprobrium of a fan base – ‘Elaine Paige isn’t a very versatile singer’ might be one, ‘not many Prince...

A trans-generational romance bracketed by two suicides may not seem ideal comedy material but 1971’s mainstream flop Harold and Maude became an unlikely cult movie, making ‘top 100’ lists after a 2012...