Theatre

Are standards slipping at English National Opera? It’s one thing to rent the place out to Michael Grade in a slack period and smile and pretend to be nice when he casts Katherine Jenkins in a leading...

Best I can say about Dirty Great Love Story is it could make a great date night for Valentine’s Day because your own relationship will seem so much better than dopy Richard and neurotic Katie’s in this...

You want topical? You want immediate? While the Trumpleprotest filed down Whitehall outside, in Trafalgar Studios Stuart Slade’s Black-Mirror-dark London-centric BU21 delivered six interconnected young...

Would we be more 'half in love with easeful Death' if instead of some cadaver in a cowl with a scythe he came at us as a handsome young man?  Can you love someone 'more than life'?  Those are the dilemmas...

Sometimes, however much you like the genre, a musical fails to capture your imagination or engage you in the way it should. So maybe it’s my fault that Kinky Boots comes over as trite, derivative, musically...

It won’t be easy, you’ll think it strange – but Evita in 1978 was the last show co-written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Despite their later separate successes, it remains an often-overlooked...

In the rankings of ‘provincial pantomimes’ Hastings shouldn’t score highly – except its White Rock Theatre, built as a 1066-seater (geddit?) concert hall in 1927 and run by the council, was recently...

Twenty years ago, there was a lot of it about: light comedies afloat in the West End, chronicling the disintegration of a suburban marriage while simultaneously lampooning the middle-class enthusiasm for some...

With the possible exception of my own heterosexual betrothal one heady night in Malta in 1976, I can think of few projects more certifiably doomed to failure than The Dowager’s Oyster. As a succession of...

When I was a kid, the Saturday morning BBC radio programme Children’s Favourites regularly played Tommy Steele’s ‘Flash, Bang, Wallop’. I didn’t like it then, and I’m not much more keen on it today...