Author: The Reviews Hub - Central

Writer: Mark Haddon Adaptor: Simon Stephens Director: Marianne Elliott Cast back to May 2017 and The Review Hub’s sound-bite summary – ‘Sets the synapses sizzling.’ Nigh on five years later does this latest production maintain the vim, the vavoom – has the original dogged velocity of curiosity still got its bite? With more accolades and awards leaving the most complete Oxtail Book of Superlatives struggling to keep up (seven 2013 Olivier Awards to be getting on with) the timeless adage, ‘If it works – don’t fix it’, says it all. The original National Theatre production harks back to 2012. Clearly, they’ve been…

Writer: James Dearden Director: Loveday Ingram Based on the Oscar-nominated classic film of the same name, James Dearden’s Fatal Attraction makes its way to the UK stage. The story follows Dan Gallagher (Oliver Farnworth), a happily married New York attorney, who meets a charming and beautiful young woman, Alex (Susie Amy), on a night out. The two indulge in a night of passion before Dan returns to his family and attempts to carry on with his life. But this is one mistake that cannot be taken back. Whilst Dan attempts to forget his mistake, Alex has other ideas and Dan…

Writer: Zana Fraillon Adaptor: S.Shakthidharan Director: Esther Richardson As The Bone Sparrow opens, we’re treated to a powerful wordless scene of quite unutterable and exquisite beauty. Through movement, projection and puppetry, we see Rohingya refugees fleeing Burma having had their citizenship stripped from them overnight and having lost everything. They reach Australia but are not welcome; rather they are placed in a detention centre in the middle of nowhere, behind wire fences and rolls of barbed wire. It is in this grim place, in a tent, that Subhi is born. And who is Subhi? He’s a limbo child, born in…

Writers: Barney Norris and David Owen Norris Director: Jude Christian There’s one thing you can pretty much guarantee from a Made in Northampton production, and that is interest. Over the years they have given us a variety of plays and musicals and this world premiere of The Wellspring is the latest offering, a two-hander written by and starring playwright Barney Norris and acclaimed pianist and presenter David Owen Norris. It’s billed as being an “exploration of their relationship” and taking us “inside the complex and shifting dynamic between this father and son”. So how does it fare? Considering how much…

Book: Laurence Marks & Maurice Gran Director: Bill Kenwright Bringing On Back The Good Times is the latest instalment of Bill Kenwright’s hugely successful Dreamboats and Petticoats franchise. Inspired by the million-selling albums, the Dreamboats shows have been around now for over a decade and take advantage of the huge popularity of music from the fifties and sixties. Like its predecessors, Bringing On Back The Good Times provides an evening of good, unchallenging fun. It’s a jukebox musical in the traditional style, so the plot is almost incidental and serves as much as a vehicle for introducing the songs as…

Book: Shaun Kerrison and Julian Bigg Director: Shaun Kerrison The Osmonds seem to have been largely consigned to history. At the height of their powers, they had more chart success than The Beatles and, as a result of facing thousands of screaming girls in Osmondmania, they were louder than Led Zeppelin, but now their records hardly trouble the playlists of the multitude of oldie or easy listening radio stations. This musical, with a story by Jay Osmond, tells the story of the band of brothers – and, later, a sister – how they were moulded into global superstars, and how…

Writer: Sandy Rustin Director: Mark Bell We’ve all played Cluedo, the game where we try to mislead our fellow players while simultaneously discovering who killed whom, with what and where – with a different outcome every time. The game was first played in 1949, which also happens to be when the stage show, loosely based on the game, is set – creepy coincidence, eh? Our six characters – Reverend Green, Colonel Mustard, Mrs Peacock, Professor Plum, Miss Scarlett and Miss White – have been summoned to Boddy Manor one stormy night. Ostensibly, their colours are pseudonyms to protect their real…

Music – Nathalie Bazán and Joseph Harper Writer: Euripides Translators: Jay Kardan and Laura-Gray Street Director: Nathalie Bazán It might be conceded that the programme notes tonight deserved hasty revision to reference context to the unfolding barbarity of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Unnecessary. Euripides’ voice howls enough in anger across the millennia with emphatic, contemporary prescience. If Sophocles’ eye-opening Oedipus Rex hasn’t set the Tragedean horror-bar high enough, Euripides follows with the infanticide revenge, Medea. But there is worse, so much worse to come. Following the sack of Troy, his Trojan Women establishes the enslavement of female survivours, Queen Hecuba, daughters Polyxena and…