299 stories by "Johnny Fox"
The wit and charm of US comedian Wallace Shawn is lost on me. I never saw him as Alicia Silverstone's teacher in Clueless and haven't caught whatever comedy series made him popular, on a cha…
The Barbican staff fuss about with warnings about 'strong magnets' and not bringing in coats or bags, so you're prepared for The Body to be something interactive and physical, and excitedly …
Classic. Expressionist. Socialist. Eugene O'Neill. You could add to that depressing list 'directed by Richard Jones', the man who sucked all the life out of Annie Get Your Gun across the roa…
Southwark Playhouse's recreation of Xanadu is a fabulous, over-the-top, well-staged entertaining evening. Everybody leaves smiling and the enthusiasm is genuinely deserved.
Anita and Me deserves respect for Meera Syal's semi-autobiographical 1996 novel chronicling an awkward schoolgirl's struggle to escape the cloying embrace of her traditional Punjabi family, …
Rotterdam is something quite special. A thoroughly well-crafted piece of comic writing, with naturalistic and credible characters in situations which engage you, smartly staged and directed,…
You'd really need to be Prince Charles to get the most out of this curio: or at least a septuagenarian devotee of the Goons and inveterate nostalgist for the era when BBC radio announcers wo…
Five years ago, Tyler Clementi, a bespectacled 18-year-old freshman at Rutgers University in New Jersey jumped off the George Washington Bridge. His room-mate Dharun Ravi had set up a video …
'Write what you know' has never been more apt. When a former Daily Express entertainment editor writes a play in which the showbiz section of his lightly fictionalized newsroom is called "Cu…
It's doubtful whether I share many readers with the Daily Express which each week seems to trumpet some new 'cure' for Alzheimer's " like this one, and this one " but go see The Father at Wy…
I love an untold story. And it’s beyond intriguing that seven years after the end of the second world war, there was a boarding school in Ongar full of evacuated children still uncolle…
‘Wanna Sing a Show Tune’ starts Michael Feinstein, cementing a career which has stretched across thirty years of meticulous analysis and delivery of the entire catalogue of …
It would be easy to dismiss Roaring Trade as 'Boring Trade', a 2009 quadrille for four unpleasant people in a dealing room which was stale long before the recession cut the rug from under bo…
This was a glamorous night (yes, I know that's by Ivor Novello): Joan Collins, Petula Clark, Richard Fleeshman, Michael Feinstein, Gloria Hunniford, Nanette Newman, Hayley Mills and Una Stub…
When You Me BumBum Train took the site-specific theatre world by storm in 2004 at the Barbican with its unique concept of an audience of one in a wheelchair and a cast of hundreds, and …
A staging of 1973 Robert Redford/Paul Newman caper The Sting with its complicated and long-forgotten plot would need the smart and snappy treatment of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels to bring it to …
All the reviews of F*cking Men at the King’s Head referred to its setting ‘in the gay community’. If it does nothing else, Memphis writer Joe diPietro’s re-…
Sometimes the thing you didn’t want to cross town to see becomes the play you absolutely must recommend. Until they open the new venue in Balham, Theatre 503 is the most tedious fringe…
With the turmoil of three months 'in previews' and gossipy leakage over cast changes and backstage bickering which might warrant a musical in itself, Dusty has become London's Off-West End e…
Tonight Side by Side by Sondheim opens tonight at the Brockley Jack studio theatre, without Su Pollard. According to the email sent to reviewers five days ago, she would not be headlining th…
'Write what you know' remains the best advice to any author and the story of how Michael Kirk picked up the plot of Hatched 'n Dispatched from his 9-year-old observations of sexual shenaniga…
In ordinary circumstances I need to be dragged to Shakespeare, and not even Hozier can Take Me To Church, but Antic Disposition’s happy coincidence of blood, bandage and badinage in a …
I hated Grand Hotel at the Dominion in 1992. It seemed confused, distant, under-scored and under-lit and there wasn’t a character I could engage with. As tickled up by Thom Southerland…
Sometimes it’s nice to see a play near the end of its run. I’m quite a Richard Bean fan and thought Great Britain, particularly after Lucy Punch supplanted Billie Piper, wa…
You Won't Succeed on Broadway if You Don't Have Any Jews is a pithy, smart, hugely enjoyable satirical number from the Monty Python musical Spamalot. This show is none of those things, and …
