Reviews by Alan Fitter

If you watch the online trailer for The Choir Of Man, you’d probably think the show was about a load of blokey blokes in beards singing big, anthemic singalong songs in an Irish pub set somewhere in Camden Town or Kilburn and to a certain extent you’d be right, but this is much more than that mainly due to the between-songs monologues from The Narrator, Ben Norris. Ben is an award-winning slam poet and it’s his homespun, philosophy, specially tailored to the current pandemic world we’re living … [Read more...]

There’s no doubt that Covid has forced theatres to think outside the box and in the case of The Arcola in Dalston, they’ve literally thought outside their existing theatre box and opened a brand-new space about 60 metres from their current location on what was a piece of barren land. On it, there is now an outside space covered by a giant dome to keep the rain and snow off as it’s going to be used year-round although last night it was keeping the tropical sun off our heads. Their first … [Read more...]

For most of the duration of the pandemic, singer, songwriter, and actress Ann Hampton Callaway has been doing a monthly concert series from her home in Tucson, Arizona called “The Callaway Hideaway” via Zoom. Under normal circumstances, she would have been performing in clubs across the USA either solo or with her sister Liz, the renowned Broadway star, and the singing voice of many of the Disney princesses, but Liz lives in New York and has been unable to visit. Now after fourteen months with … [Read more...]

There’s no doubt that as the pandemic goes on, that one year after theatres closed, production companies are having to work harder and harder to come up with original and distinctive work. It’s getting to the point where productions using Zoom are becoming a little repetitive - after all, there’s only so much you can do using the format. Other productions have used social media, the filming of live plays and musicals and live streaming using the various platforms. Now production company … [Read more...]

I’ve seen Showstopper The improvised Musical in a theatre a couple of times and always thoroughly enjoyed it. So, I was intrigued to see what they would do in Showstopper (The Socially Distanced) Improvised Musical - an on-line version of the show and I wasn’t disappointed. Firstly, I was delighted to see that they weren’t using Zoom which in my experience can be a bit hit and miss but YouTube which turned out to be the perfect platform. A behind-the-scenes video during the interval showed … [Read more...]