Rural Illinois in 1979. A flagging old man wastes away on a couch watching sports on his tiny TV and sneaking swigs of whiskey when alone. This is Dodge (Ed Harris), the moribund, impotent pillar of the play. His wife Halie (Amy Madigan) calls out from above. She can’t get over her all-American son Ansel’s […]
Putting Voltaire on stage is a difficult task: it is easy to think of the philosopher’s work as too sophisticated for musical adaptation. Bernstein and Wheeler’s version of Candide attempts to make the timeless story more approachable—almost too much so. While it follows the original storyline very well, it sometimes fails to have the same […]
The first half, and probably two-thirds, of The Sewing Group is excruciatingly oblique. It opens on two women, clad in black mantles, sitting on bare wooden stools in a bare wooden room and sewing. These people are, according to the script, A (Jane Hazelgrove) and B (Sarah Niles). They sew and continue to, but before […]
Recounting the short but significant life of Charles Hamilton Sorley, a Scottish poet of World War One, It is Easy to Be Dead is a sombre take on the brutality of war. Told through a collection of letters and poetry, the play follows Sorley from his time at Cambridge to his studies in Germany before […]
There will be few unfamiliar with J.B. Priestley’s most famous piece, An Inspector Calls, and in this latest version director Stephen Daldry extracts the richness of the text to produce a gripping and intense romp and, while it has its ostentatious moments, is a respectfully solid revival of a play that continues to entertain seventy […]
A solid revival of a fringe theatre classic, this latest production of The Last Five Years embraces the personal lyrics and blissful melodies and provides a raw and touching take of a modern love story. A semi-autobiographical piece from Jason Robert Brown, this sung-through musical tracks the relationship between a young aspiring actress, Cathy, and […]
A uniquely bizarre story, Side Show follows the life of conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton as they are saved from their tortured life performing as ‘freaks’ in a Texan sideshow and propelled into stardom as the hottest act on the opium circuit. The musical, which first premiered on Broadway in 1997, has a rather […]
The Belarus Free Theatre has taken on a challenge by putting on Tomorrow I was Always a Lion. Portraying mental health onstage, especially schizophrenia, is no easy task. Because many people do not know how to address the issue, it can be a little overwhelming to go see a play that is entirely centered on […]