Author: The Reviews Hub - London

Adaptor: Robert Stigwood in collaboration with Bill Oakes, with songs by the Bee Gees Featuring a young John Travolta, Saturday Night Fever was the film of late 1977. Facing the tough realities of early adulthood, Tony Manero is a disillusioned Italian-American youth that finds release from the tedious grind of his dead-end job, turbulent family life, and stagnant friendships through New York’s burgeoning subcultural disco scene. As its jukebox stage adaptation, Saturday Night Fever follows the film’s narrative almost step-for-step on a journey down memory lane for disco fanatics at the Peacock Theatre. The show plays up to the nostalgic…

Writer: Caridad Svich Director: Lily McLeish Blue starts with a splash, followed by the gnomic line: ‘They say it is, but it isn’t.’ It continues as a prose poem, imagining the meditations of a female swimmer. It is set in the English Channel, and director Lily McLeish was drawn to it because she likes an ‘unstageable’ play. The swimmer is played by acclaimed Swiss actor Irene Jacob, whose richly mature, slightly accented voice, combined with Caridad Svich’s rhythmic language and Julian Starr’s sound design, makes it easy to imagine limbs steadily powering through water. Sometimes her intonation falls on unexpected…

Writer and Director: Emily Aboud Any show that opens with a shot of vodka from a Mooncup is set to keep you on your toes. Splintered is high-energy, playful politics and carnival revelry. It’s an education and a party all at once. Coming to Soho Upstairs after its award-winning streak, Emily Aboud’s cabaret explores queer Caribbean identities and the complexities of living in a culture that rejects your true self. Aboud interrogates the contradiction in Carnival: the ultimate celebration of freedom and togetherness, yet homophobia still being endemic in Caribbean culture. Particularly because “carnival is gay as shit!” The tales…

Writer: Michael Frayn Director: James Haddrell At a time when there’s so many new, exciting scripts, as well as a realm of classically excellent plays from the past, Michael Frayn’s Alarms and Excursions from 1998 feels like a strange one to revive. The whole performance is very outdated and just doesn’t quite work. It seems a wasted opportunity where a more relevant, engaging script could have been put on a platform to shine instead. The lengthy sketches, directed by James Haddrell, are full of chaotic slapstick and middle-class mishaps, but are devoid unfortunately almost entirely of humour. Rather, they are…

Writer: Nimrod Danishman, translated by Adi Drori Director: Neta Gracewell Gay hookup apps such as Grindr find contacts by distance for convenience. But there are situations where an as-the-crow-flies value conceals a cultural and social distance. Such is the case for the men in Nimrod Danishman’s Borders, who find themselves chatting via the app from either side of the Israel-Lebanon border. As the enforced separation constrains Yaniv Yafe’s Boaz and Joseph Samimi’s George to online chat only, there ensues a delicate negotiation of how far, and how fast, their sexting will go. Director Neta Gracewell keeps the two actors apart…

Writer: Paul Bradshaw Director: Imogen Frances Tell Me Straight exists as a brilliant contradiction, delighting audiences with a queer love story all about… straight men. After finding success as part of King’s Head Theatre’s 2021 Queer Season, the production is now playing at Chiswick Playhouse during LGBTQ+ History Month. Led by Paul Bradshaw, who wrote the piece, original cast members George Greenland and Stephanie Levi-John also return. The cast collaborate brilliantly to deliver the story of Him, played by Bradshaw, who has sworn off booze, fast food and shagging for 30 days in an effort to break his cycle of…

Choreographers: Marco Goecke, Hans van Manen and Johan Inger For the first time since 2016, Nederlands Dans Theater bring their youth company to Sadler’s Wells with three performances including two UK premieres that explore loneliness, connection and stagnation, themes that are unsurprising given two years of pandemic limitations on interaction and social development. But the company brings an athletic and creative vigour that intriguingly, and often quite effectively, work against the melancholic subject matter. Marco Groeke’s opening piece The Big Crying, the first of the evening’s UK premieres, has a unique style, drawing on notions of mechanisation and industrialisation to…

Book: Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice Music and Lyrics: Andrew Lippa Director: Matthew White Based upon the original Charles Addams cartoons and having spawned various film and television versions including the hit 1991 film, The Addams Family: The Musical Comedy has a new temporary home at the New Wimbledon Theatre . The ghoulishly dark-humoured Addams, headed up by Morticia (Strictly Come Dancing’s Joanne Clifton) and her husband Gomez (Cameron Blakely), are met with crisis as their daughter Wednesday (Kingsley Morton) starts to show concerning signs of happiness, infatuation, and even love for outsider Lucas (Ahmed Hamad). The Addams Family is…