299 stories by "Johnny Fox"
There's more than a touch of Bette Davis in The Anniversary in this Jamie Lloyd-directed version of Alexei Kaye Campbell's acidulated family drama Apologia, now lightly Americanised to suit …
Revival is a strange word. It suggests something rescued from its deathbed and shocked into fresh vigour by an infusion of talent, or money, or inspiration. In the case of I Loved Lucy, th…
Sadly, despite a few crisp one-liners and a catchy title I'm surprised was never used elsewhere, Twilight Song emerges as a frail Rattiganesque slice of sixties' repressed sexuality contrast…
Touch may come from the same stable as the amazing Fleabag but drops the posh and goes Welsh: imagine Stacey left Gavin for a squalid London studio, a diet of Echo Falls, microwave dinners a…
The concentric hooped wooden arches framing the proscenium should give you a clue: made from the barrels scraped during the production process
A 'Privates on Parade' for the war in the Pacific, YANK! is everything you don't expect from the cheesy title " a cleverly-constructed and original musical about illicit gay love which avoid…
I've been trying to remember why I didn't go to either the 1983 original or the 2006 London revival of Blondel. Especially as its central character is King Richard I of England whose heir pr…
My Country: A Work in Progress is an oral tapestry woven by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy from knitted squares of conversation collected by National Theatre researchers from pockets of popul…
Said it before so let's say it again and this time hope they put it on the posters: "Jon Brittain's Rotterdam is the best 'gay play' since My Night With Reg" " a clever sharply-observed come…
This is a difficult one. I really like Annie Get Your Gun but the 1946 original was butchered in 1999 for a US revival with Bernadette Peters and most references to 'Injuns' excised to suit …
I've said this lots of times before but you can't spoof a spoof " when written in 1885 The Mikado was already a parody, satirising British Imperial politics and institutions by transposing t…
So why doesn't the current production of Lettice and Lovage at the Menier Chocolate Factory push my buttons? I fear it suffers from Forty Years On Syndrome " a circumstance whereby even with…
These are the skeletons you want in your closet. In Addams Family Musical, Samantha Womack brings unexpected warmth to Morticia " is that a good thing? " and Cameron Blakeley's Gomez, Carrie…
Madam Rubinstein focuses on her career-long rivalries with Revlon and particularly Elizabeth Arden played with venomous camp by Frances Barber dripping fox furs and acid putdowns. It's stage…
Jordan Tannahill's taut, 70 minute darkly comic real-life social drama Late Company draws two Toronto couples into God of Carnage country as they attempt to broker closure over the suicide o…
I am inordinately fond of Forty Years On. In only my second ever trip to London, my mother took me to see the original production the year I was fifteen and therefore readily able to identi…
It was marvellous to have RNIB guests with their dogs in the audience, and there's a cleverness in the musical that you can enjoy it without sight.
She's joky, and open, and delightful company " and when she sings, although that Juilliard operatic training diction is ever present and the resonance of her chest cavity empowers even the s…
I had high hopes for this first-full-London-staging-in-50-years production of How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.
The ultimate 'backstage musical' 42nd Street lifted America from the depression, and its timely arrival at Drury Lane in such majestic style is still an evening of total escapism, total deli…
Two thoroughly nice chaps you'd safely take home to mother. Two Cambridge choral scholars and occasionally camp satirists at pains to remind you they're heterosexual. One a bit shorter and b…
In The Life, drug-dealing Guys and rent-by-the-hour Dolls walk a side of 42nd Street far shadier than the tapdancing one at Drury Lane. The daily grit and the nightly grind are underpinned w…
It is a delightful curiosity, though, in the sense that it's a show deliberately aiming at a long life on college and festival circuits rather than having eyes on the prize of Broadway or th…
Character development in Chinglish comes second to the brisk pace of the jokes in Andrew Keates' clever and compact staging
Ian Hislop and Nick Newman's stage version of their more realistic television play screened by the BBC in 2013 neatly captures their schoolboy humour but is just a bit too schoolboyish in it…
