London Reviews

With Summer barely over, plans are already underway at Richmond Theatre for their annual Christmas extravaganza, which, this year, will be Peter Pan with television sitcom favourite Robert Lindsay as Captain Hook and rising musical theatre actor Harry Francis as Peter. Coming straight from a photo shoot on the Golden Hind, the two stars took time out to chat with ...

Adaptors: Michael Gyngell and Mark Haddigan Director and Choreographer: Racky Plews Musical Director: Rob Wicks Reviewer: Dan English With the night’s drawing in and the leaves beginning to fall, it is easy to think that summer is coming to a close. Yet, for those in the touring version of musical Summer Holiday, the heat wave is to stay a little ...

Writer:  Alison Carr Director:  Yasmeen Arden Reviewer:  Richard Maguire Caterpillar opens the new autumn season at Theatre 503, one of London’s stalwarts of new writing. For the first half of this play, set in a B&B in a seaside town, it seems like the season is off to a good start, but a sudden plunge from comedy to horror in ...

Musical Director: Adam Hoskins Reviewer: Scott Matthewman This one-off concert was, as emcee Lucy Dreaver reminded us on more than one occasion, a celebration of one hundred years of women in musical theatre. The reasoning for the rounding to an exact century is not clear – there’s certainly nothing in the 1918 musical calendar of particular note, unless one wishes ...

Composer and lyricist: Howard Goodall Writer: Nick Stimson Director: Bronagh Lagan Reviewer: Stephen Bates Some shows have no luck at all. In the same week that the arts pages of the national press have, along with The Reviews Hub, been heaping extravagant praise on the National Theatre for its groundbreaking pro/am musical version of Shakespeare’s Pericles, along comes a youth ...

Writer: William Shakespeare Director: Nick Bagnall Reviewer: Karl O'Doherty Love's Labour's Lost is more a philosophic meditation on art, love and melancholy than a play. But in the best way. A rattling thoroughfare of discourse, pretty words, wit and self indulgent writing from Shakespeare takes us through a lacklustre plot about princes and princesses. Far from heavy going, however, the ...

Writer: William Shakespeare  Adaptor: Chris Bush  Music: Jim Fortune  Director: Emily Lim  Reviewer: Stephen Bates  Pericles, Prince of Tyre is not William Shakespeare’s best play, nor his best-known play and, according to many scholars, it is not wholly his play at all, but here, in the unlikeliest of circumstances, a case can be made for it being one of his ...

Writer: Luigi Jannuzzi Director: Ben Anderson Reviewer: Maryam Philpott The “To be or not to be” speech from Hamlet is one of the most famous in the English language, examining the value of life against the acceptance and fear of inevitable death, a fundamental debate about the human condition. Luigi Jannuzzi’s play A Bench on the Edge is clearly influenced ...