Book: Heather Hach Music and Lyrics: Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin Director: Nikolai Foster Amanda Brown’s 2001 comic novel, written during her time at Stanford Law School, and its award-winning movie adaptation, released in the same year, starring Reese Witherspoon, inspired the creation of an equally award-winning musical back in 2007. This time, however, Legally Blonde The Musical is back in fashion, bringing the creative team behind the phenomenally successful Kinky Boots. Following the success of The Silence of the Lambs, Nikolai Foster marks his directorial return in this ultimate feel-good musical adaptation, telling the classic tale of not judging…
Author: The Reviews Hub - Central
The Reviews Hub - Central
The Central team is under the editorship of Selwyn Knight. The Reviews Hub was set up in 2007. Our mission is to provide the most in-depth, nationwide arts coverage online.
Writer and Director: Mike Venables In this entertaining and passionately performed one-man show, Birmingham-based writer and actor Mike Venables presents us with a conundrum – who was the ‘Immortal Beloved’ Beethoven addressed in the three letters found, unsent, in his private papers after his death. It is a question that has entertained music scholars and historians for nearly two hundred years without consensus. A quick search discovers that at least 10 names have been put forward over the two centuries, including the three that Venables chooses to focus on. The play takes us chronologically through Beethoven’s life, from early battles with…
Book: Kate Prince and Priya Parmar Music: Josh Cohen and DJ Walde Lyrics: Kate Prince Director: Kate Prince If one name is synonymous with women’s suffrage, it is Pankhurst. In 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), which evolved from a democratic pressure group into an increasingly militant organisation dominated by Emmeline and her eldest daughter, Christabel. But Sylvia centres on the middle daughter, tracing her emergence from her mother’s shadow to forge her own path. Moving briskly from 1903 to 1928, the show charts the family’s initially united campaign—and the rift that develops as the WSPU grows…
Writer: Inua Ellams Director: Roy Alexander Weise Few new plays arrive carrying the expectation Once Upon a Time in Sokoto does before a line is spoken. Inua Ellams’ account of the birth of Nigeria — caught at the point one empire gives way to another and colonisation is about to begin — won the Alfred Fagon Award, which recognises new writing by Black British playwrights of Caribbean or African descent, while it was still unstaged. That pedigree, and the scale of the story being told, makes its world premiere at Royal & Derngate, the first production in the new Touring…
Book: Kate Prince and Priya Parmar Music: Josh Cohen and DJ Walde Lyrics: Kate Prince Director: Kate Prince Sylvia Pankhurst is not, for most audiences, a name that sits alongside her mother Emmeline or Emily Davison in the popular memory of the suffrage movement. Where the WSPU’s leadership pursued votes for women through escalating confrontation, Sylvia grew increasingly dissatisfied with both the violence and the narrowness of the cause. She left Manchester for London’s East End, broke from her family’s organisation, and turned her energies towards the working women and men the wider movement had left behind. That split —…
Book, Music and Lyrics: Willy Russell Directors: Bob Tomson and Bill Kenwright It is hard to believe that Blood Brothers is over forty years old. It has been a mainstay of both the West End and the touring circuit for so many years that it is hard to imagine our theatres without a regular visit from this now classic British musical. Willy Russell created something very special when he wrote this Liverpudlian tragedy. With echoes of Greek Myth as well as more local superstitions, it is a story of two twin brothers separated at birth and how their lives differ…
Writer: Frederick Knott Director: Josh Mathieson The play that inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic 1954 film of the same name, Dial M for Murder, returns to the stage in this faithful adaptation from Phil & Ben Productions, directed by Josh Mathieson. A classic tale of deception, betrayal and murder, the story follows ex-Tennis star Tony Wendice as he hatches an elaborate plan to have his unfaithful wife Margot killed, setting in motion a tightly wound chain of events where nothing is quite as it seems. With its intricate plotting, sharp twists and deliciously dark sense of suspense, this enduring thriller proves…
Writer: Mark Haddon Adaptor: Simon Stephens Director: Ned Bennett Chris isn’t like other girls. She doesn’t look different, but she is. Somehow her brain works quite differently and this colours her entire perception of the world and of herself. And the way this manifests itself can mean the rest of us have to try harder when her behaviour isn’t what we’d perhaps expect. Although it’s never mentioned in the play (or the source book) as such, Chris is neurodivergent and, it seems, on the autism spectrum. She speaks plainly and struggles with things like metaphor: she can define metaphor, for…