Four decades after opening on Broadway, Dreamgirls has finally come to London. This highly anticipated revival depends entirely on finding not just an exceptionally talented, convincing vocalist but a powerhouse star to play Effie: they certainly found that in Amber Riley.
Beauty is but skin deep, ugly lies the bone. Beauty dies and fades away, but ugly holds its own.
– Albert Einstein
Lindsey Ferrentino‘s play about a severely wounded war veteran attempting to put together a new life confronts an important issue with honesty and compassion. Ugly Lies the Bone premiered in New York in 2015 and marks Ferrentino’s UK debut.
Courtesy of the National Theatre.
StrongBack Productions with Tara Arts put together this production ‘inspired by true events in the lives of Jamaicans who fought in World War One. The narrative takes place in a dusty rum bar in Kingston, The Western Front Jamaica, Egypt, Italy and Oxford.
Throughout history there’s been an us/them divide in regards to Royalty and society. A mystique, a controlled narrative dictated by artworks and carefully edited soundbites and written resources. Subika Anwar-Khan chips down at this carefully constructed facade to delight audiences with Princess Sophia Duleep Singh’s Story.
The Almeida’s new staging of Hamlet is set in contemporary Denmark. The set is flanked with TV screens and looping news broadcasts, the spectre of media saturation possibly suggesting an overlap between Shakespeare’s cloistered, paranoiac courts and modern society, where we too submit to the relentless scrutiny of strangers. Despite the flashy revamp, however, Robert Icke’s production feels relatively conservative, dutifully adapting the source material and making few cuts to the text.
Roundelay, by Visible Theatre, is a collection of sweet and funny vignettes about the complexities and surprises of finding love in old age, featuring a cast of (mostly) older performers. Punctuated with circus and dance, the show is defined by a circular motif that focuses on one couple per story, with one partner moving into the next story and continuing “the circle of life”.
Courtesy of John Haynes.
This recent production of Marietta Kirkbride’s The Long Trick explores a topic that is held close and bitterly to the hearts of many it affects – that of the uneasy relationship between the owners of second ‘holiday’ homes in the sea-side resorts and towns of southern Britain, and the inhabitants that have to live with the collateral and communal fallout of the strange and fragile state of affairs that affects so many of these small towns. While this may, ostensibly, appear a rather niche concern, relevant only to those it directly affects, the constant tension and the study for compromise between the financial concerns of the tourism they bring, and the insouciant approach many holidaymakers take with the regard to the well-being of the communities they disturb serve to address the much more ubiquitous themes of class, money, community, and distributive justice, and provide an interesting battle-ground between the rights of ownership, and the duties of citizens.
The role of the producer is paramount when it comes to piecing a show together. When you consider the amount of shows that open in London, and the selected few that enjoy success, this offers a reminder as to how tough the role can be. Cue Tim Johanson, one of the capital’s youngest producers, who has been responsible for staging a range of fresh and exciting works from David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face in 2013 at the National, to Sabrina Mahfouz’s Fringe First winning Chef. Tim talks to us about his latest theatre projects.
Brave Badger Theatre presents a compelling verbatim play by Harriet Madeley about retribution, rehabilitation and forgiveness, based on interviews with the perpetrators and victims of violent life-changing crime, one involving a murder case.
