299 stories by "Johnny Fox"
Derived in 2002 from the 1967 Julie Andrews movie, Thoroughly Modern Millie is thoroughly old fashioned. It’s sexist: all the women are actresses or typists; racist: landlady Mrs Meers…
At a professionally-packed first night for Songs For A New World even long-time theatre diehards were squeaky with anticipation: never before have so many been longing for a ‘decent…
When backwoods trapper Adam Pontipee strides into the hay and feed store of a small Oregon town and asks “what’s the going rate for beaver?” he’s selling meat but act…
With David Suchet currently bashing Lady Bracknell’s back doors in in the West End it seems almost a logical sequence that trash drag supremo Jonny Woo should assail Katharine Hepburn&…
The Dreamers might have fared better if it hadn’t been billed as a musical. It is hard to find a category for it – part centenary celebration, part video documentary, part commun…
No one wants to piss on Poirot’s chips, but this really isn’t very good. David Suchet is a superb actor. Like Angela Lansbury if you set aside his television detective work he st…
This is the one where critics who spend most of their time in the theatre show off their football knowledge. In my case, it won’t take long. In fact one of the best things ab…
If I have a prediction about The Trial at the Young Vic, it's that every reviewer will mention the conveyor belt and three out of five of them link it to The Generation Game. The auditorium …
Fridays aren’t serious reviewing nights and the friend who suggested this piece to me described it as “some shit for gays” which despite our shared and enthusiastic homosex…
History Lesson: there’s no shortage of backstage musicals. There’s no shortage of musicals set in the Depression or prohibition era either – from Annie to Chicago to Windy …
French and Saunders did a wonderful sketch, with Sarah Walker and Carl Davis, in which the pair spoof opera divas self-consciously ‘doing comedy’ and sing a piece by Kylie Minogu…
Extraordinary man. Extraordinary acts. Extraordinarily brave both of Jez Bond to commission it for the Park Theatre and Alistair McGowan to lend his immaculate skills as …
Clarke Peters doesn’t appear in the official Darren Bell rehearsal photo set for How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying which might explain why he fluffed so many times, lost…
If you’ve never seen traditional opera – as opposed to the mucked-about-with stuff in pubs we also love – or never been to Covent Garden, Richard Eyre’s grandiose, be…
When is a world premiere not a world premiere? When a near-identical play ran three months in Keswick in 2012. This narking misrepresentation aside, Richard Cameron‘s piece direct…
When I saw this at a Brighton matinee last September, my first thoughts were ‘if there’s a fire, we’re all toast: most of this lot are old enough to have known Noel Co…
Dear RSC: I’d like to return this Death of a Salesman. It just doesn’t fit. Apart from its unravelling from not being a Shakespeare play in your theatres over the 23 April ‘…
Apart from almost soiling myself when Sissy Spacek’s hand reached out from the grave in the 1976 Brian de Palma movie, and knowing there’s a book about famous musical flops calle…
In politics, truth is stranger than fiction: given what happened last night in the General Election it would be tough for Theatre Delicatessen and The Lab Collective to conceive something mo…
Even if you can’t forgive Mark Ravenhill for leaden sitcom Vicious whose gay geriatrics are about to bed-block a prime time slot again on ITV, his movie-industry-meets-muslim-cell mono…
Everyman is about one individual’s judgment day and the harrowing evaluation of his life’s work before God. Specifically whether as new custodian of the NT Rufus Norris…
In Bomber’s Moon James Bolam plays the kind of sharp-tongued and witheringly sardonic octogenarian most of us can only dream of becoming: and the first half of William I…
Dead Royal intertwines the stories of Wallis Simpson and Diana Spencer, one man plays two women who never quite made it to the throne despite behaving like a petulant old queen and an e…
‘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 i…
