GRAMOPHONE Review: Natalie Dessay – Pictures of America Paris Mozart Orchestra/Gibault
Anyone who has ever seen Natalie Dessay on the stage will know what an accomplished actress she is. It is that which has put flesh on her singing and enriched her operatic career. And now a new…
Dreamgirls, Savoy Theatre
It’s taken almost four nail-biting decades for Dreamgirls to evolve from the germ of an idea to the most anticipated show never to have quite made it, lock, stock, and smoking barrel across the Atlantic. The germ…
Lazarus, King’s Cross Theatre
When David Bowie first met with producer Robert Fox to discuss Lazarus back in 2013 you have to now wonder if he was seriously contemplating his own mortality. The clue, of course, is in the title, and…
The Last Five Years, St James Theatre
From Monteverdi to Schubert to Bernstein and Lloyd Webber the dramatic song cycle has travelled far and wide over the centuries though not until Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years in opposite directions. His two-handed tour-de-force…
Groundhog Day, Old Vic
Well over a decade ago Stephen Sondheim expressed some interest in turning the movie Groundhog Day into a musical. Presumably he, too, would have turned to the movie’s scriptwriter Danny Rubin for the book – it is,…
Ramin Karimloo, London Palladium
Strictly speaking it should have been billed as “Ramin Karimloo and Broadgrass at the London Palladium” – then we might have anticipated the support act and late arrival of the West End and Broadway star known especially…
The Go-Between, Apollo Theatre
It has taken six years – and Michael Crawford – to bring Richard Taylor and David Wood’s poetic musicalisation of L P Hartley’s The Go-Between to the West End stage; and before the tired old debate begins…
Flowers for Mrs Harris, Crucible Sheffield
You emerge from Flowers for Mrs Harris a little richer, a little lighter, a little more hopeful. Paul Gallico’s enchanting fable is about many things – it’s about new beginnings, rebirth; it’s about aspiration; it’s about the…
Threepenny Opera, National Theatre
John Gay started it, Bertold Brecht politicised it, and right now Dougal Irvine has smartly contemporised it in rhyming couplets. But beggars or buskers aside there’s only one Kurt Weill score – insidiously catchy down to its…
Sunset Boulevard, London Coliseum
At a time in musical theatre when you never quite know what you are hearing when the band strikes up, seeing was believing that on the stage of the Coliseum there were strings aplenty, horns, bassoons, trumpets,…