Author: The Reviews Hub - London

Both Liza Pulman and Joe Stilgoe come from performing families. Her mother was an actor, and her father was an accomplished screenwriter responsible for the BBC’s I, Claudius adaptation; his mother was an opera singer who hated musical theatre – unfortunately so, as her husband, Joe’s father, Richard Stilgoe, ended up collaborating with Andrew Lloyd Webber multiple times. But from these families came two people obsessed with movie musicals. Any evening of cabaret performances of classic Hollywood tunes would be time well spent, but in the hands of this duo, the songs are elevated further. The combination of Stilgoe’s jazz…

Writer:  Scarlett Smith The harp is not an instrument that screams Saturday night out. Associated almost exclusively with orchestral formality or the ambient tinkling of hotel lobbies, it tends to occupy a rather narrow lane in the public imagination. Scarlett Smith’s mission, with this cheerful and uneven solo show, is to drag it somewhere altogether more unexpected. Smith makes the bulk of her living playing at weddings, and Any Objections? is her bid to demonstrate that there is considerably more to her, and to her instrument, than the white marquee circuit might suggest. Her principal weapon is the loop pedal.…

Writer and Director: Serdar Biliş Country must come above all else, the terrible choice that Agamemnon makes as he subdues his paternal feelings and agrees to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia in return for a fair wind and the start of a war on honour. Serdar Biliş’s new 80-minute retelling at the Arcola Theatre puts Agamemnon in the spotlight, asking what it means to be a father and, through dialogue with his family, ‘real’ tales of childhood from the actors and interviews with the public, makes clear that he made the wrong choice for the wrong reasons. Biliş, adaptor and director,…

Composers: Antonín Dvořák, Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann Conductor: Jonathon Heyward The very best thing in this concert is watching Jonathon Heyward conduct. He’s young (33) and intensely charismatic. Full of smiles, baton-less and often marking rhythm rather than beating time, he has a delightful way of raising both hands above his head and twitching his fingers to signal fortissimo wind entries. And, for the most part, he coaxes good results from the orchestra in a programme devoted entirely to music from the mid to late nineteenth century. Dvořák’s 1891 concert “overture” (really more of a tone poem), In Nature’s…

Composer: Richard Strauss Libretto:  Hedwig Lachmann (after Oscar Wilde) Director: Mark Ravenhill Mark Ravenhill has chosen to put on his production of Richard Strauss’ opera Salome in the East End Mecca of Boxing, York Hall. Its down-at-heels charisma is a vigorous counterpoint to Oscar Wilde’s florid fin de siècle versifying, projected in all its decadent glory on the surtitle screens. The German words to which the performers give voice are less fancy, the librettist Hedwig Lachmann making compromises to accommodate the Strauss score, but the material being presented is very curlicued indeed. The production not so much. Salome appears to…

Writers: Tamm Reynolds and Nicol Parkinson Director: Izzy Rabey People with dwarfism have often found themselves pushed into performance, whether they want it or not. Throughout history, they have been propelled into the role of court jesters. That, and the elision of their existence with a mythological race in fantasy stories, forms one part of performer Tamm Reynolds’s hour as their drag alter ego, Midgitte Bardot. Reynolds’s character is rejected by their subterranean people and emerges into the overground world, where everything is out of scale. For those of us of average human height, seeing the world through Midgitte’s often…

Writer: Bren Gosling Director: Scott Le Crass After a dodgy and clichéd-heavy start, Bren Gosling’s comedy about three people at the cusp of their 60th birthdays is warm and gentle entertainment. But despite Invisible Me being set in the present day, Gosling’s characters feel as if they should be in a play set 30 years ago or so. Does any 60-year-old you know drink Cinzano or dial up the speaking clock just to hear someone’s voice? Jack (a reliably good James Holmes) is still grieving the death of his male partner, while his neighbour Alec (a likeable Kevin N Golding)…

Writer and Composer: Theo Jamieson  Director: Adam Lenson  Not quite out of this world, but coming close is Theo Jamieson’s space-based musical detailing the decision by astronaut Daniel Defoe to leave his spaceship Taurus and head off alone into the unknown in a capsule called the Ostrich. Of course, this voyage into other galaxies, cut off from Earth, is a metaphor for depression, but Jamieson and director Adam Lenson’s conceit makes for a thrilling 105 minutes. A chorus of three boffin-like singers introduces the story of the European Space Commission astronaut who has gone rogue, millions of miles away from…