One afternoon in 1998, the awkward 12 year-old that was me trudged home from middle school to discover a gift sitting on the table. A children’s librarian had recommended that my mother give my sister and I a copy of a brand new novel that she had read and loved. Although I had never heard […]
Jason Robert Brown is one of the most well-respected composers working in musical theatre today. His credits include Songs for a New World, The Last Five Years and Parade (my personal favourite musical). In 2007, he premiered a show called 13, a musical written for a cast consisting completely of, as the name suggests, 13-year-olds. […]
The big joke of Ink is that a play about a dumb, sordid newspaper is itself dumb and sordid. The audience doesn’t realise that, Rupert Goold doesn’t, James Graham doesn’t. But it is. Dumb. Sordid. Describing a play as ‘sordid’ makes me sound puritan. But it’s not the content that’s sordid, although Ink is about […]
Adorning Shakespeare’s Globe theatre’s ornate and columned stage loom two large blackened missiles directed toward the soggy groundlings who are fighting the rainy elements on the day of this performance. This is my first play experience in the classic Globe and what better play to to take in than Shakespeare’s iconic story of teenage star-crossed […]
The Royal Court’s associate designer, Chloe Lamford, got five writers ‘exploring performance through language, physicality and the power of the imagination’. They wrote a piece each. I caught two of those. I’ll be writing this review in past tense because the plays were on for three nights, and I wanted time to think over them. […]
We all have bad experiences with teachers; some are worse than others. Jam tells the story of a history teacher named Bella (Jasmine Hyde) who, haunted by a rough past with an old student, has moved towns in an attempt to start a new life. Ten years later, Kane (Harry Melling) visits her classroom in […]
As the festivities on London’s South Bank get under way the big purple tent opens its bovine-adorned folds up to a fitting act of spectacle and astonishment. Catch Me (or Attrape Moi) comprises a group of young artists and circus performers from Quebec—a proving ground for the talented entertainers of this sort of thing. Running […]
Othello was written 400 years ago but remains shockingly prescient in this day and age. A society unaccepting of a woman falling in love with a black man, does that ring a bell? In Tobacco Factory Theatres’ production at Wilton’s Music Hall, director Richard Twyman takes the modern relatability even further by presenting a distinctly contemporary production […]