West End Theatre Reviews

Binkie Beaumont Centenary

August 28, 2008 – 10:11 pm
He's the most famous West End theatre producer you've probably never heard of. For over 30 years he dominated what audiences would enjoy in the West End, at one point producing half of the city's stage shows. This year is the centenary of the birth of Binkie Beaumonth (1908 - 1973). Please find info links below. Richard Huggett's books would not win any great biography prizes but is full of camp anecdotes and a rich ...

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Piaf Review

August 24, 2008 – 5:48 pm
I was really looking forward to seeing this sold-out show – and for the most part I wasn’t disappointed. But I didn’t leave the Donmar feeling as elated as I thought I would. It’s no fault of this production that it has to follow the superb film La Vie En Rose, which kind of renders Pam Gems’ play slightly redundant. And Elena Roger has the physical presence (her slight build perfect for Piaf) and awe-inspiring ...

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The Chalk Garden Review

June 25, 2008 – 2:36 pm
One doesn’t gush orrrrfen but I feel I have to about The Chalk Garden at the Donmar Warehouse, which I saw last night. You might have thought this was creaky old war horse and wondered why Michael Grandage dug it up, but it turns out to be best re-discovery on the London stage since “Absolute Hell”. Probably the best play that will be on this year. Beautifully written, like a cross between Wilde and ...

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Marguerite Review

June 24, 2008 – 7:07 pm
It's a truth, universally acknowledged, that for a musical to succeed, you need to have a leading man or woman (preferably both) for whom you can root. The only exception I can think of is Sweeney Todd – and even that show was never the popular success of, say, My Fair Lady, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story or Rodgers and Hammerstein's blockbusters. One of the numerous problems with Marguerite, the new Boublil/Schonberg ...

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Gone With The Wind Review

May 29, 2008 – 11:11 am
Quite apart from garnering some pretty damning reviews, Trevor Nunn’s production of Gone With the Wind, at the New London Theatre, has also provided a springboard for several showbiz writers to bounce off memories of some of the most disastrous musicals in the West End has ever seen. This ignominious roll call of unmitigated ineptitude includes the likes of Bernadette, Kings and Clowns, Blondel, Twang, Carrie, Leonardo and The Hunting of the Snark. ...

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Never Forget Review

May 29, 2008 – 7:35 am
This show proved a totally unexpected pleasure. Having read some of the reviews I braced myself for a cheese-fest extraordinaire; well, I got that, but not in a bad way. The musical's book hurtles along at break-neck speed; Take That's songs are shoe-horned into every conceivable gap in the action. But a witty script that never takes itself too seriously, and knockout performances from a young and Über talented cast, more than make up for any ...

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Never Forget promo video

May 18, 2008 – 3:55 pm

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God of Carnage Review

May 18, 2008 – 3:46 pm
I'm not quite sure what Yasmina Reza makes of Christopher Hampton's sparkling adaptation of her latest play God of Carnage. She has gone on record as saying her bleak and futile view of humanity and profound insights into life and relationships are often lost in translation. She has also said that she wants her audiences to suffer. Well, if the reaction on the night I attended the play is any indication – Hampton has let her ...

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Never So Good Review

May 18, 2008 – 3:23 pm
One of our most respected and long-standing theatre critics – and also the most politically minded – ended his generally favourable review of Howard Brenton's play about Harold Macmillan, ‘Never So Good’, by expressing his disappointment that the playwright's sympathetic take on Supermac wasn't more ‘radically revisionist’. Given that Brenton, famously antiestablishment, ultra left-wing and hitherto an enemy of all things conservative, has written a warm and affectionate tribute to his subject, how on earth could ...

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The Vortex Review

May 1, 2008 – 8:58 pm
Noel Coward’s far from perfect breakthrough play was The Vortex (1924), and the effect it had on complacent theatre audiences of the day must have been similiar to the impact experienced by theatregoers in 1956 at John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Unlike Osborne though, Coward wasn’t an angry young man; just a prodigiously talented one who, even at so young an age, was a master at surfing the celebrity wave. Being controversial, he knew, was ...

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