299 stories by "Johnny Fox"
If you can't take a joke, you really shouldn't have joined. Some critics are up in arms that the 1979 'classic' piece Amadeus has been deconstructed and, they say, dumbed down in the Nationa…
The master stroke of the creative team at Bristol Old Vic is to re-imagine his The Man Who Laughs through the dirty lens of Tim Burton, and to centre The Grinning Man on the brutally malevol…
Shakespeare 101: muck/fuck about with it all you like, the poor sod's well out of copyright, but the acid test for any modern rendering is 'if you hadn't seen this play before, would this pr…
A dozen of Thom Southerland' excellent cast of triple threats also play the entire score as actor-musicians seamlessly blended into the action: I have never seen this done better. In a word,…
This isn't an exhaustive list because there'll be a panto somewhere in practically every postcode come December, but it is a rundown of your options " financial and artistic " for a special …
As this is a one-woman show, the characters are realised only through Muggleton's scathing commentaries in the mouth of once-literary but now blowsy Deborah, a superannuated Shirley Valentin…
There's something instantly inviting about the bench on the seaside pier where average Tom meets average Mary and the crash of the waves under the boardwalk echoes the crash of the noisy int…
Just off the Elephant and Castle roundabout, it's no surprise to come across a grotty pub filled with strange and aggressive drunks. It is a delightful surprise to find it recreated so reali…
'In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine … 'It's very hard to get Huckleberry Hound's tone-deaf version of 'Clementine' out of your head in this musical where a young Kentucky man.
It's eerie that the morning after The Dover Road, I'm driving down the Dover road to a weekend in Kent, and Radio 4 is bemoaning the fact that no-one drives for the pleasure of it any more. …
The evening is all about delayed satisfaction and when the magicians Mike Tyler and Christopher Wayne arrive, fully clothed, their act is glossed with a lot of interactive banter with audien…
Washed up in wartime, Britten, his friend and romantic obsession W H Auden, the tedious waif-like poet and novelist Carson McCullers, and stripper turned thriller writer Gypsy Rose Lee share…
From the moment she processes onto the stage, fairy-lit umbrella held aloft, in what can only be described as a 'gown', to the strains of Yair Evnine's electric cello, you know you are in th…
Not much you see at the Edinburgh Fringe looks totally ready for London. But this does " ideal for Park 90, Trafalgar Studios 2 or Hampstead Downstairs.
The first thing to say here is that yet again the producer/director collaboration of Danielle Tarento and Thom Southerland has come up with a beautiful show, full of charm, of energy and of …
Among the slew of American college circuit and chamber musicals at the Fringe, Stop the Train by Rick Guard and Phil Rice stands apart for looking nearly London-ready. Its score, orchestrati…
It is such a good idea to make a singing Hitler develop a Vegas lounge career as 'Frank Sanazi' with a coterie of 'Iraq Pack' dictators as his support acts " just a pity that the executions …
I don't have much luck in this basement venue. I once saw a one-star one-man show here with an audience of seven, five of whom left part-way through. At a time when the political tussles ov…
May the gods spare us from student visions of dystopian futures. We are beyond a new ice age, in the fifth millennium when the British isles have drifted Norsewards and the people speak cod…
Likeable laddish Midlands magician Ben Hamlin fronts ITV2's Tricked in which the general public and some sub-prime celebrities (Louie Spence, random spraytans from TOWIE) are teased with clo…
For the avoidance of doubt, this is the late night show 'Briefs Factory' present at the Assembly Hall. For the avoidance of further doubt, this is the same show Briefs have brought to the U…
You have to be careful calling any richly tattooed Glaswegian a 'mentalist', but it's how Colin Cloud described himself at his bum-flashing 2012 audition for Britain's Got Talent.
Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of The Secret Garden, was the J K Rowling of her day.
So what did I really think about Harry Potter and the Cursed Child? You need to know two things " first that I went to a press night because the reviewer assigned to it got a hospital appoin…
In a plot which is The West Wing: The Musical before the interval, and The Sopranos after, his Jackie Kennedy-esque widow (scenery chewing fun and tiptop vocals from Lucy Williamson) shifts …
