Violet, the 1997 musical by Jeanine Tesori and Brian Crawley, is pretty different as far as stories go: there kind of isn’t one. It’s more of a character study of our titular gal and two supporting men. The score is completely mixed, with some incredible songs and some that should have been cut, or at least cut in half, so the show depends entirely on a superstrong production in order to succeed. When I first saw Violet, it was the 2014 Broadway production with Sutton Foster and Joshua Henry, and it was so shiny and bright and impressive that I barely noticed that a compelling story was missing. With smaller productions, like the current one at the Charing Cross theatre, it’s harder to hide the show’s flaws. Although it’s a pretty nice production with some great talent, it’s clear that Violet is a rather mediocre show – decent and sweet, but mediocre – and there’s nothing anyone can do to hide it without the distraction of Broadway excess.
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At the end of 2018, I read that Letitia Wright was the most bankable star of the year, based on her appearance in two of the biggest blockbusters – Black Panther and Avengers: Yet Another – as well as Ready Player One. I thought wow, that’s a pretty big accomplishment for this what, teenager? what a lucky break for her. But it’s not luck (and she’s not a teenager, just blessed). Letitia Wright is a forking marvel (see what I did there) and deserves to bring in all the box office dollars, for screen or stage. As the star of the new play The Convert, Wright showed that she can do a lot more than turn all of modern science on its head and cure all injuries with alien metal and make cars that are being driven by a remote computer program or whatever, I can’t even wrap my head around what she did in Black Panther. What she did in The Convert, though, was prove that she has the ability to lead an intense stage work and to improve whatever she’s in with her dynamic presence.
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For most shows, I’ll boldly say ‘take my advice’ and leave it at that. Who else do you need to listen to? For Nine Night, however, the debut play from Natasha Gordon, I’m going to say sure, heed my advice, but maybe listen to a few other voices as well. This play, while promising and entertaining, has a few core problems that keep it from being great (which we will discuss). But, one of the biggest problems with my experience is that I am hella white, like so white it’s pronounced ‘ha wite’ (which is funny because both my halves are groups that white supremacists consider or have considered non-white!). I’m not saying that people of any background aren’t able to enjoy a play about any other kind of person; that’s literally the point of theatre. But my hwiteness kept me from actually understanding the heavy Jamaican-British hybrid accents of some of the characters. I know, it’s embarrassing. If I were willing to ever break my cardinal rule of theatergoing (which is “everyone shut the fork up!”) I would have been like those old people in movies going ‘what did he say?…what did she say?’ I mainly missed what lines were so funny that the audience would crack up, which is a shame because the one-liners seem to be everyone else’s favorite part of the play. Without the jokes, the central issues with the plot and the characters became more obvious to me, making Nine Night, while enjoyable, feel less than fully formed.
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Certain demons down at Bad Place headquarters are waiting for the creators of “Aspects of Love” – Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Hart, and Don Black – to join them in their circus of torture, and have been ever since the show was written in 1989 (based on a novella by David Garnett. They will move into the neighborhood where Jared from Subway is heading, along with the guy who created Girls Gone Wild. They’ll all fit together nicely. And into their little torture neighborhood, we will add whoever though it was a good idea to revive this monstrosity of a show at the Southwark Playhouse this season. A rare miss from a theatre whose work we usually adore, “Aspects of Love” is an affront to decent humans. Sure, we are realizing with each passing day that there are fewer and fewer decent humans among us in this brave new world of ours, but that doesn’t excuse this portrayal of domestic abuse, misogyny, incest and more as normal, or worse, as anything remotely resembling love.
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I find it quite amusing that the current production of Christopher Marlowe’s classic Doctor Faustus is playing at Shakespeare’s Globe, because I like to imagine the misters M and S (not to be confused with M&S) as terrible rivals who spat whenever they heard the other one’s name, reviled at the very thought of him. So Marlowe would be like WTF give me my own theatre for my plays; they’re just as important! Spoiler: they aren’t. I’m sorry and I really feel for Rupert Everett in Saving Private Shakespeare but Chris’s works do not have the everlasting genius or impact that Billy’s have. His Doctor Faustus was written in the late 1500s right before he died, and it seems more like a last-ditch effort to show the gods that he agrees that hell is bad oh please don’t send me there, instead of it being interesting dramatically. There’s no emotional journey or impact or sense of consequences – even though it’s about being doomed to hell. It’s pretty surprising that literally the biggest stakes imaginable appear so humdrum. This production has attempted to liven things up by employing the hottest production ploy of the season – switching the gender of the lead role – but it adds nothing.
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Before I saw Part 1 of The Inheritance, I had been putting off seeing the show for a very long time because I couldn’t imagine that it was worth the serious time investment: two separate theatre visits of 3 ½ hours each. I said stupid things like ‘if I’m going to see a superlong two-part show it’s going to be Angels in America’ and ‘but they’re not even singing!’ As we learned a few weeks ago, I was hella wrong, because I found Part 1 to be one of the most gripping, moving, full-blooded shows I’ve ever seen. In the few weeks I had between seeing Part 1 and Part 2, I again wished I could put off seeing the second half, but now for incredibly different reasons: I didn’t want to be finished with this story or have to say goodbye to these characters. Spending so much time with this play, the story became part of my mind the way a book does, the way dedicating so much personal time to a book results in it becoming a part of you. I didn’t want it to end. And I was simultaneously scared of how it would end, because this play isn’t exactly a romp. But even though Part 2 is not as great – after the glorious perfection that was Part 1, no second half could really ever measure up – it’s still riveting and emotional and, ultimately and most importantly, satisfying.
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Does anyone else always forget that Billy Shakes wrote plays about historical figures that weren’t kings of England? Well, I honestly forgot that Shakespeare wrote a play about Mark Antony and Cleopatra and their weird manipulative love that drove Rome to war and them to their deaths. I was too busy reading the fun ones. But despite my ignorance of this play, and despite the fact that this production of Antony & Cleopatra clocks in at 3 ½ hours with only one intermission (whereas The Inheritance Part 1 is (10 minutes) shorter and has two), we had to see the big f-ing thing because it stars RALPH FIENNES! That’s pronounced ‘rafe’, to rhyme with ‘the English paaaaaaaaatient’, which if you are like me you hear Billy Crystal singing every time anyone mentions Ralph Fiennes. Seeing him onstage for hours, let’s just say I sang this Oscar opening number (in my head) a whole heck of a lot. Anyway, with Ralph playing Mark Antony, and with Tony-winner Sophie Okonedo as Cleopatra, this production seemed like a must-see. Turns out, it’s more of a ‘see if you have the time but don’t run or risk injury getting there’ kinda thing.
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I have put off seeing The Inheritance for actual years now. It’s not that I didn’t want to see it, but Matthew Lopez’s two-part, sweeping look at today’s culture of gay men, and how they grapple with their position in life compared to the generation that came before them and paved the way, is…long. It’s really long. And it’s in two parts, so you have to go back to the theatre another night to finish the story. And I got things to do! So I put it off. If I’m going to sit through two plays at nearly four hours each, I said to myself, about gay men and AIDs and stuff, I’m going to see Angels in America. (It might sound pretty narrow-minded to compare to the two works, like ‘oh they’re both about gay men so you’re going to compare them, you bigot’ but please, tell me of another eight-hour play in two parts, I’ll wait.) Also, the hype was ludicrous. I assumed there was no way this is ‘the best play of the year, and of next year too, probably’, to quote a mainstream critic (one of those). But I finally decided to bite the bullet and start this epic journey into hours and hours of theatre, and you know what? It’s probably the best play of the year, and of next year too.
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Theatre followers will know that the current revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company is the most celebrated show in London right now, at least. It might be the most celebrated show in the world, given how reviewers are positively falling over themselves to exalt it more than everyone else, trying to get closer to it so some of its glory can rub off on them OR SOMETHING. I don’t know why they’re doing it, because I am literally the only reviewer not joining the overhype club. As we saw a few months ago, I thought this gender-switched revival of Company was…fine. Not life-changing, and certainly not revolutionary in the musical theatre realm as so many are claiming, as they’re distracted by the main character now being female and overlooking that, even with the switch, it remains an out-dated, old-fashioned, kind of sexist show. So why did I see it again?
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Like with our recently reviewed Twelfth Night, I’ve been waiting a while to see what everyone in New York has been raving about regarding this modernish musical retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. People last season said that if Hadestown had opened on Broadway then, it would have beaten The Band’s Visit for the Tony, and I was like ‘Umm Kulthum is that possible?’ I’m a huge mythology buff, and I still remember the words to the title song from our fifth grade mythology play “It’s All Greek To Me” (forking excellent title, right?). My favorite line was “Zeus was their king and Hera was their queen/sometimes they were wonderful sometimes they were mean.” So true guys. And one of my many roles (I was a child star) in that play was Persephone’s best friend, so her myth has always been special for me (and probably is responsible in part for my longstanding hatred of men who want to control women). Combining mythology with an original score, Hadestown is kind of brilliant on paper, and luckily it’s extremely brilliant in real life. It’s the only musical in London producing such thrilling theatrical magic onstage that feels incredibly new and fresh, all while being not only an interesting take on a classic romance but also an allegory of capitalism vs. socialism. I KNOW.
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Although a play about two old white married people and their mysterious behavior and all their emotions is like Play 101 material, Florian Zeller’s play In the Height of the Storm feels exciting and surprisingly original. This is because the characters are so specific and so fascinating while the truth about their lives (or deaths) is so perplexing. Ostensibly a family drama, this play feels more like a mystery, as things you accepted as fact quickly get turned on their heads, and, more critically, people you accepted as alive or dead seem the opposite.
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Two years ago, everyone in the know in New York was raving about this exciting new production at the Public Theatre. It was a fast-paced, rollicking rendition of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a play we all thought we knew every possible version of yet were seeing in a new light – as a hip musical. (If you use the word hip are you automatically not hip?) I was sorry to have missed that original run, but luckily the production has come to London’s Young Vic to stir things up. With original director Kwame Kwei Armah on board alongside the Public’s Oskar Eustis, this version of Twelfth Night is a short and sweet modern musical with rocking original songs by Shaina Taub. Although the overeager chopping actually cut too much of the story, the overall concept successfully makes a familiar play feel new again.
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London has seen its fair share of plays depicting women of the Victorian era, but rarely have we seen them kick some ass. In Joy Wilkinson’s new play ‘The Sweet Science of Bruising’, four women from extremely different walks of life decide to swap evening gloves for boxing gloves and enter the ring. A refuge from the confines of every other aspect of their lives, the turn to boxing – and the attempt to win the title of Lady Boxing Champion – gives the women some semblance of control and power in their restricted lives. But the kickassy nature of this premise quickly gets weighed down by the play’s overly ambitious endeavor to shoehorn every possible bit of tragedy and drama into the story.
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Isabella Rossellini is wacky. Like super wacky. We knew this already, from her famous ‘Green Porno’ series of short films, in which she teaches us about the sexual behaviors of various animals and insects, with her in costume (and fully in character) as the mating animals and insects. It’s RIDONK. Super informative and creative, yes, but it’ll make you hella uncomfortable. That series cemented Isabella as an artistic free spirit, unafraid to look like a complete goof in furtherance of her surreally funny work. If you didn’t know this already, seeing her live will confirm oh yeah, she’s quite the innovative actress and also a straight nutter. And she’s AWESOME. Most importantly, her dog is adorable.
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Amid all this dreariness, both from the weather getting grayer and Britain’s (slash the world’s) prospects looking bleaker, a goofy superhero musical is exactly what the doctor ordered. (Unless your doctor has actually prescribed you medicine, then take that. (Hooray for universal healthcare.)) Leaning heavily on the spoof side of things, Eugenius! is an easy to enjoy ‘80s-set romp of a familiar comic book story – dorky boy sketches out his feelings and desires in fantastical comic form, proves he has talent, is more than just a dork – but with a clever and, yes, ‘eunique’ (their word) take. From creators Chris Wilkins and Ben Adams, this amusing, cheerful musical needs work before its next incarnation, but what’s there now is happy, silly fun.
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