Central Reviews

Book: Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice Music: Bob Gaudio Lyrics: Bob Crewe Director: Des McAnuff Reviewer: David Robinson The gritty story of the unlikely quartet from the wrong side of the tracks in New Jersey is not your usual shiny and stain-free jukebox musical offering. It’s a real-life tale of how these four problematic pals created some of the most ...

Writer: Sukh Ojla Director: Pravesh Kumar  Reviewer: James Garrington Polly has a good life, all things considered. She has a good husband, a good job, children. It’s not the life she used to dream of, but who gets to do that? Then out of the blue, she is contacted by an old flame, Bali. He is a successful businessman now living in ...

Book: Ken Ludwig Music: George Gershwin Lyrics: Ira Gershwin Director: Paul Hart Reviewer: Selwyn Knight You have to feel sorry for Bobby Child. He’s caught between two overbearing women in New York, his mother, Lottie,  who wants him in the family banking business and Irene, his fiancée of five years standing. Neither woman gets on with the other. No wonder all ...

Writer: Arthur Miller Director: Siobhán Cannon-Brownlie Reviewer: David Robinson Arthur Miller’s ground-breaking and formative work is still seen by many as a seminal piece on the seventeenth-century witch trials in and around Salem Massachusetts. The setting may well be the USA in 1692 but Miller’s influence was the McCarthy trials of the 1950’s. This co-production between The Curve and De ...

Writer: Ken Bentley, from the book by Charles Dickens  Director: Sophie Boyce-Couzens Reviewer: James Garrington Great Expectations is undoubtedly a great classic of English literature, one of the most popular and well-known Dickens novels that has been studied at school and loved by many. It is also quite long – though far from the longest Dickens wrote – and includes a ...

Writer: Tim Firth Music: Take That Lyrics: Take That and David Pugh Directors: Kim Gavin and Jack Ryder Reviewer: Clare White Britain’s most successful boyband has been selling millions of albums, winning multiple awards and enjoying record-breaking sell-out tours for the last three decades, and now Take That has branched out from arena stage to the theatre stage for new ...

Writer: William Shakespeare Director: Erica Whyman Reviewer: James Garrington Most people will be familiar with Romeo and Juliet– the tale of “two star-cross’d lovers” is arguably one of Shakespeare’s best-known plays and the plot has been re-used in many different guises over the years, on stage and on screen. Likewise, there have been a number of productions of the play ...

Book, Music and Lyrics: Stephen Dolginoff Director: Adam Lacey Reviewer: Selwyn Knight Chicago, May 1924. Two ferociously intelligent friends, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, commit what is then dubbed the Crime of the Century when they kidnap and kill the 14-year-old son of a wealthy citizen. When they are captured, they admit that they are driven by the thrill of killing: they ...