Writer: L Frank Baum Music: Harold Arlen with additional music by Andrew Lloyd Webber Lyrics: E. Y. Harburg with additional lyrics by Tim Rice Adaptors: Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jeremy Sams Director: Nikolai Foster This revival of the latest version of The Wizard of Oz is a gloriously camp riot of Technicolor storytelling. It’s based more firmly on the 1939 film than the 1900 book, so the story will be familiar to many. Dorothy is deposited in the magical world of Oz after feeling undervalued and invisible at home. She makes some unlikely friends with whom she seeks the help…
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: William Shakespeare Director: Sam Dinnage Blue Duck Theatre Company is a group of emerging artists from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire bringing a silly, summery production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It to the Midlands Arts Centre (mac). This high-energy comedy is a good first foray into the world of Shakespeare for the performers but leaves something to be desired in the storytelling and comprehension for audiences, especially those new to the story. As You Like It follows the blossoming love of Rosalind and Orlando, torn apart by unfortunate circumstances of power-hungry relatives and hidden identity, set within the chaos…
Book: Kevin Del Aguila Music and Lyrics: George Noriega and Joel Someillan Director: Kirk Jameson If you ‘like to move it, move it’, then get yourself over to the Wolverhampton Grand Theatre to experience the family-friendly bonanza that is Madagascar The Musical. You will be forgiven if you are sceptical about whether or not successful animated films like these should be turned into an all-singing, all-dancing musical, but Madagascar just about passes the test. There is an audible buzz that comes with a musical like this: the anticipation that the show is going to deliver on energy, colour and extravagant…
Writer: Matt Roberts Director: Tom Stabb What’s Next? must have been the question on everyone’s lips in the first few years of the twentieth century, a time of great advancement and achievement. And those advances are coming quicker and quicker – from steam locomotion in the early nineteenth century to internal combustion engines that were light and powerful enough to be used by the Wright brothers when they demonstrated powered flight in 1903. Of course, once something is known to be possible then advances tumble over one another and flying circuses where daredevil aviators showed off their skills to admiring…
Writer: Sanaz Toossi Director: Diyan Zora We’re in a classroom in Iran where four adult students are working to master English as a foreign language. Their teacher has one rule, a rule she writes on the whiteboard: “English Only”. As she says, “In this room, we are native speakers. We think in English. We laugh in English. Our inhales, our exhales – we fill our lungs in English.” This is the European premiere of Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play English, and it’s a tale of aspirations and disappointments told with pathos and humour. As the piece progresses we start to…
Writer: Bruce Robinson Director: Sean Foley Why are there two gleaming, classic Jags purring outside the Rep inducing a fan-crazed selfie kerfuffle, sporting enough 60s retro cool to have Morse crying over his cryptic crossword and a spontaneous reincarnation of Prince readying to record a triple album titled CROME? Ah ah! The Camden to Perth road trip in the MOT-phobic nightmare battered Jag sequence. It all begins to make nonsense. A dash of drunken panache down in one. ‘Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk? Or maybe – ‘We’re gonna need bigger boat.’ Certainly, ‘Make him an offer he…
Book, Music, and Lyrics: Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey Director: Nikolai Foster Grease is a timeless classic piece of musical theatre, made famous by the iconic 1978 movie starring John Travolta and the late Olivia Newton-John. While it undoubtedly has some classic moments, you could be forgiven for thinking that Grease feels a little bit vanilla in the modern musical theatre landscape. The narrative follows Sandy and Danny’s high school romance as they navigate their final year at Rydell High, and inevitably draws comparisons to the beloved film. Director Nikolai Foster has infused the stage adaptation with a darker, grittier…
Writer: Hanif Kureishi Adaptors: Emma Rice and Hanif Kureishi Director: Emma Rice The late Roger Michell was Hanif Kureishi’s closest and most enduring collaborator. They worked together on at least four different films and TV series (including the award-winning BBC adaptation of The Buddha of Suburbia), and they started out together in theatre at the Royal Court. Michell himself was a resident director with the Royal Shakespeare Company for many years. So the big question is: why did he never attempt a stage adaptation of Kureishi’s era-defining novel? With this production, Emma Rice answers that question. You would have to…