London Theatre Reviews - West End & Off West End

Jayce (Gerard Headley) is a music maker with, or so Chris (Kieran Mason) would have the audience believe, a platform. If Jayce were to ‘come out’ (inverted commas mine) it would, Chris thinks, be beneficial for others who have done the same. For Jayce, however, too much is at stake: rightly or wrongly, he believes his career would be wrecked if he were to be labelled as gay. More pertinently, as he puts it, “not everyone needs to be assigned a letter from the alphabet”, a reference, perhaps, to … [Read more...]

This production of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice has nothing to do with the 2010 Walt Disney motion picture of the same name. It is a show that really needs to be experienced in person: the atmosphere that the staging and music create doesn’t, despite a sterling effort from the production team, come across on screen as well as it would in the theatre. But, at the end of the day, it is better (in the circumstances at the time of writing) to experience it this way than not at all. The lighting, … [Read more...]

Hotline is effectively an auditory blend of the lunar fantasies of Georges Méliès with an informative and sometimes amusing secret history of spaceflight. After an exciting opening, not unlike an Adam Curtis documentary without the pictures, we meet a mysterious star creature, Oxmo, and two US women astronauts who together create a ‘choose your own adventure’ type trip to the moon. Depending on the decision you make other space characters are encountered- some real, some fantastical. Information … [Read more...]

A black man is preparing to head out to paint the town red (this was in 1998, before anyone responds with questions about the legality of leaving one’s house to socialise). As is the case with too many black people’s stories, this is only going to end one way: badly. But this is not, despite the show’s title, a typical case of verbal abuse and a bit of argy-bargy in some nightclub. Some people even think that one hasn’t really lived unless one has been barred from at least one pub in one’s … [Read more...]

Santino Fontana is so versatile that not only does did he voice both parts, Hans and Anna, in a rendering of ‘Love is An Open Door’ from Disney’s Frozen, he’s as comfortable in a play as he is in a musical. This gave rise to some unusual conversations in a musical theatre concert series - it isn’t often that plays by Oscar Wilde and Arthur Miller get referenced in a show otherwise full of showtunes. In his formative years, Fontana played piano in church services but wasn’t a chorister. … [Read more...]