Author: The Reviews Hub - Central

Writers: Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields Director: Adam Megiddo If you’ve seen Mischief Theatre before then you know what to expect and you will not be disappointed. If this is your first experience of the company then you can expect an absurd, slapstick farce that will build into utter chaos and just as you think the pandemonium has peaked it will build some more. Everything the audience needs to know is quickly set up in a brief exposition as the directors of the show set the scene of both the play and the internecine struggle going on behind…

Artistic Director: Francesca Harper A ludicrous evening’s fanfare for the not-so-common man and woman has a segued programme of rather dark aspects with stage-side horizontal lighting the given muse that rumble-strip accentuates an ebony muscularity to brooding effect. As to the anticipated, Alvin Ailey celebratory denouement, white and para-soul food for the evergreen angels with flirty paces, Revelations(1960), now we know where Cecil Beaton drew his cinematic inspiration for the Royal Ascot tableau in My Fair Lady (1964). Atavistic, bombast-ballistic brilliance, romantic fantasy fantastic – Alvin Ailey 2, a Dance Consortium conspiracy of collaborative, conspiratorial stealth by total body immersive…

Writer: Joe DiPietro Director: Kathleen Marshall Even now, some 25 years after his death, such is the legacy of Frank Sinatra that there can be few who won’t have heard his name and even fewer who haven’t heard, at least in passing, some of his music. In Sinatra the Musical, we get to see Frank’s rise to fame initially as a big band boy singer then solo artist, and his subsequent fall from grace, as well as the ‘greatest comeback of all time’, leaving him on a high. There aren’t rose-tinted glasses here: he’s presented as a man with flaws…

Writer: Simon Beaufoy Director: Michael Gyngell Everyone knows the story of The Full Monty, it’s a play about male strippers isn’t it? Well, yes but also no. For if you look beyond the hype, the screaming and whooping audience, what you have is a poignant, moving and, actually, very sad tale of people who feel they have been thrown onto the scrap heap. It’s about a community that’s been devastated by the closure of the steel mill, in a time and place where the expectation was that you had a job for life. It’s about struggling to get by when…

Conductor: Stephen Bell When you think of movie music, you’ll likely think of the music of John Williams or Hans Zimmer, or maybe one of the pioneers of film music, like Miklós Rózsa. However, in a number of films, the director eschews the use of a specially commissioned suite and looks instead to the existing classical canon for pieces that fit the mood or concept. For example, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick used classical music in his largely non-verbal film, and it is to the futuristic world of 2001 that we venture for the opening piece tonight, for…

Writer: Ben Jonson Director: Josh Caldicott When a play hasn’t been performed professionally for nearly 400 years, you have to suspect there may be a reason for that. A little research tells us that it was a critical failure when it was first performed, so it is a bold choice of material for the Sweet Sorrow Theatre Company to perform at the intimate Bear Pit Theatre. In brief, this is a so-called comedy of humours play, which revolves around the concept that the humours that govern the body may be unbalanced and so one trait comes to dominate its personality…

Original Music: Black Sabbath Choreographers: Pontus Lidberg, Raúl Reinoso, Cassi Abranches Royal Ballet Sinfonia Conductor: Christopher Austin Proto Goth, pre-Punk pioneers of Laney amp stack ear-bleeding volume, kitsch Brummie kitchen-sink anarchist caught-up in the blocked U-bend of lives going nowhere fast on the hard-shoulder of broken-down dreams meet, fifty years later, fellow Brummie ballet iconoclasts. What’s not to like? Old Sab sweats share a pre-performance drink with a conspiratorial smile tonight, maybe more follicly challenged than those late 60s days of hirsute mayhem and Army & Navy default trench overcoats. The War Pigs tattoos, the Ankh crucifixes dangling over a…

Writer: Torben Betts Director: Philip Franks It is always commendable when a production company tours a brand-new original play even from an established writer such as Torben Betts.  Theatre needs new stories to tell if it is going to continue to grow.  The question has to be whether Murder in the Dark was the right choice of script? At first glance, the success of plays such as The Woman in Black and of television series like Inside No. 9, shows there is a continuing appetite for scripts in the psychological thriller and ghost story genres.  And that is very clearly…