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Re:View - 'Pippin'

I can’t help thinking that the Menier Chocolate Factory is a victim of its own success; lately too many shows have been chosen for their ability to transfer to the West End, and too many have disappointed since the genius reworking of ‘Sunday In The Park With George’. Now comes the Stephen Schwartz/ Bob Fosse [...]

The Dark Musical Gene

I listen to an insane amount of music at home. This comes down to personality type; I’m an annoyingly perky fidget, which makes me hell in the mornings and a sucker for musicals. I know all the words because the cadence of language is very important to me. I don’t like conspicuously camp shows or [...]

Re:Re:View - 'Jerusalem'

I missed this play first time around and am thrilled it came back with the original cast intact. Jex Butterworth has matured as a playwright in the last few years, but his edge is as sharp as ever. This is a big evening; a lengthy three-act exploration of the power of English mythology.

Id Mark Rylance’s [...]

Grand Guignol Comes Back With A Vengeance

Over the next two months, eight plays – that’s two lots of four – are being unleashed on unsuspecting Londoners. At the Soho Theatre there will be another four tales of terror by well-known authors at Terrorfest. This is in its third year – the first was great, the second terrible, so we’re hoping this [...]

Re:View - 'Decade'

Ten years after 9/11, the National Theatre and Headlong examine a decade filled with grief, prejudice, rhetoric and hope from the perspective of twenty writers, some new, some up-and-coming, some US, some British. The result of this workshop is a powerful piece of site-specific theatre that reminds us why there is no other theatre in [...]

Missed On A Saturday Night

London is more about what you miss than what you do. The sheer impossibility of knowing what’s going on eventually gets to you. Even Time Out, once a magazine I bought religiously, can no longer keep up. They cover the big openings and a few of the more popular fringe events, but fail to find [...]

How Capitalism Works

Good things go. Bad things stay. The Travel Bookshop was the inspiration for the rom-com Notting Hill, in which Hugh Grant fell in love Julia Roberts.
But despite becoming one of London’s most popular tourist attractions, it emerged on Tuesday that the bookstore is to cease trading after 32 years in business.

A group of writers have [...]

Re:View - The Globe Mysteries

It’s been said that everyone should see The Mysteries once in their life, so when my friend Suzi Feay at the FT had a spare ticket for the new production at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre last night, it seemed a perfect opportunity.

Based on a set of medieval dramas created by guildsmen in York, Wakefield, Chester [...]

Re:View - 'Road Show'

Few plays have ever thrown money at the stage like this one; dollar bills literally leak from the characters until the audience is ankle-deep in the stuff. America is on the rise and there’s money to be made for the opportunists. Spanning a period of 40 years, this is the true story of two fortune-seeking [...]

Re-View: 'Girlfriends'

Ye Old Rose & Crown Theatre Pub is in unlovely Walthamstow, a working class area of London few visitors make it to, but which has an appealing frankness. (One shop boasts a 4 metre-long red plastic sign reading ‘Cheap Booze’). Here above the rambling, shabby Victorian pub is an archetypal fringe venue; small stage, [...]