Author: The Reviews Hub - London

Writer: Sylvia Milo Director: Isaac Byrne  Sylvia Milo brings to life the extraordinary story of Mozart’s older sister, Maria Anna Mozart – Nannerl, as she was familiarly known. A musical prodigy from an early age, she performed and later composed to enormous acclaim. She adored Wolfie – as she called Wolfgang Amadeus – and Leopold, their father, arranged concert tours with the pair across Europe. But, as Milo stresses in this sensitive, fascinating recreation of her life, contemporary attitudes on what was considered suitable for a young woman performer soon curb her opportunities. Certain instruments are deemed improper for a…

Creator: Les Anges au Plafond  French puppetry group Les Anges au Plafond (Angels on the Ceiling) are making its UK debut, and it’s extraordinary. The founders of Les Anges, Camille Trouvé and Brice Berthoud, have co-directed the Centre National Dramatique de Normandie since 2021. Their work is powerfully inventive. Seeing this highly original show in a tiny basement theatre under a bookshop in Hampstead is like diving into a pool and finding yourself in the ocean. Indeed, one of many mesmerising scenes of Le Cri Quotidien (The Daily Scream) atmospherically recreates the Mediterranean with pop-up papier-mâché waves and pelagic playing…

Writer: Mercy Brewer Director: Fiona Popplewell Subject X wakes to find herself in a locked white room, supervised by a closed-circuit camera and with no memory of why she’s there. She is later told that she has been treated with a synthetic drug to simulate the effects of dementia-style memory loss as part of a medical trial – and the drugs she is asked to take daily are intended to treat the condition. The setup for this trial already sounds dodgy – no clinical trial would proceed in anything like these conditions. Macsen Brown’s white-coated supervisor, Y, hardly allays such…

Writer: Atiha Sen Gupta Director: Adam Karim Atiha Sen Gupta’s 2009 What Fatima Did… makes a mostly triumphant return to the stage. Fatima, a wild child in a friend group in London, comes back from the summer wearing a hijab. Chaos ensues as her friends try, with varying degrees of success, to come to terms with her decision. While Sen Gupta has updated the script for this adaptation, collaborating with Tara Theatre’s Young Company, it is still set in the noughties, and the outfits, the music and even the Facebook relationship statuses are all still present, giving the production a fantastically…

Writer: Kit Withington Director: Katie Greenall We’re in The Sun Inn, a working-class pub, in the North West of England, with an ailing landlady on the top floor and a leak in the roof. Bar manager, Valentine (Aaron Anthony), gamely presides over the karaoke proceedings. A girl in cowboy tassels and faded denim does a Shania Twain thing, and other members of the audience have a go. It’s a party atmosphere, like Benidorm, with some rough old singers, but that’s not the point;  karaoke is forgiving: all abilities welcome. We all have a voice. Bright, sparky and pint-sized Franky, engagingly…

Creators:  Sarah-Louise Young and Russell Lucas For those of us who heard Wuthering Heights sung by an unknown 19-year-old for the first time in 1978 (just a couple of years after Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody set new standards in video promotion), it was a memorable moment of her oddly distinctive sound. Yet, both songs, 50 years later, have become music classics. Bush herself only toured once in 1979 (until her 22-show residency at the Eventim Apollo in 2014), but her unique stage presence and musicality made a lasting impression on all who were lucky to see her. Sarah-Louise Young must have…

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.…