1,405 stories from theatrecat.com
AVE HYTNER IMPERATOR! Â Â THE BRIDGE AS ARENA Before the start, singing along with Eye of the Tiger in the melée and enjoying the red flags, baseball hats and beercans,Â…
AVE HYTNER IMPERATOR! Â Â THE BRIDGE AS ARENA Before the start, singing along with Eye of the Tiger in the melée and enjoying the red flags, baseball hats and beercans,Â…
TWO QUEENS, TWO FATES Who shall be whom? In Robert Icke's arresting adaptation of Schiller's play, the scene opens with a sober-suited group of men watching two women in identical bla…
A WILDE RIDE WITH A BOLTER Beneath the artful fan-shapes of the set, gloriously coloured bustles and ruffles flit between black tailcoats and epigrams ping around the room like…
CLAMBERING TOWARDS LOVE You don't often, in romances, get lines like "Tomato ketchup's always been my Achilles heel". Or indeed proper consideration being given to the erotic p…
PEGGY GUGGENHEIM WALKS AGAIN You cross the stage floor to the toilets and a warning sign on the little set alerts you to the danger of tripping over a "solid stone" bench. So I…
SULTRY HEAT AND SEXUAL DREAD… Our age is beginning, once more, to appreciate E.M.Forster properly: the recent TV Howards's End caught his wit as well as the social indignatio…
My principal review from the Old Vic is here (http://tinyurl.com/y8u2na24) . But now it transfers (with glorious irony to the Noel Coward Theatre..it’s the least Cowardy of all plays e…
VILLAIN VAUDEVILLEÂ Everyone loves the film. Something in the nostalgic British psyche likes to think of a gang of ruthless desperadoes lodging with a dear old lady, pretend…
TOP FOLK ON THE ROADÂ There are boxes , planks, a rope; around and upon them, singly and severally, still or moving, the aristocracy of modern folk music. Strings, accordion, guita…
GIRLS ON THE EDGE Honour to the Royal Court for two things. First for the initial wobble, then  for executing a rapid u-turn over Andrea Dunbar' s rather wonderful play . So after …
AT LAST…AND FINE TO THE LAST After snowbound frustration in December drove me onto the road after part I, I saw the first again and  that evening reached the second play in o…
IT IS JUST AS WONDERFUL AS THEY SAID IT WAS. It could have been just a novelty: the biography of a half-forgotten Founding Father of the USA, an orphaned immigrant who rose to be …
THE OTHER OSCAR, Â A DELIGHT What delight, in the midst of Michael Grandage’s Oscar Wilde season at this theatre, that daytimes this month (11 pm and 2pm) t should see the sta…
SWEET YOUNG LOVE IN PARIS: Â NOT. "We're not going the full Mousetrap here" said the press desk, "but there is a moment at the end…we're asking.." . Fine, no spoilers. Plen…
DISNEY ECHOES AT THE NT: YOU WOODN'T BELIEVE IT The first glimpse of old Geppetto does make you gasp. He is immense, a huge benevolent head bowed attentively as great arms operate the…
OLD DOG NEW TRICKS After a couple of challenging takes on Strindberg, the little theatre's new AD Mr Littler (one presumes with a "whoooff!" of relief) has booked in, and jazze…
ESPIONAGE, ESCAPE, AND THE WORLD'S WORST FLATSHARE This is the one that got away. Simon Gray's 1995 play, set largely in Moscow, is about the Cold War '60s spy George Blake and the Ir…
TO BOLDLY DREAM.. MAINLY OF PLYWOOD AND PROPS THE TWILIGHT ZONE was , long before the phrase was coined, "appointment-to-view television". In the US in the 50s and 60s families gather…
LARKING Â WITHIN TENT As an old radio hack, who started a career over forty years ago in the days when "spot effects" in drama studios were one of the more amusing jobs, I ha…
CICERO, CAESAR, CATILINE: ELOQUENCE, AMBITION , HORROR It begins with a corpse: a horrid human-sacrifice, as we shall learn, as a set of libertines and plotters swear a blood-o…
A SPANGLED ANGLESEY ARISTOCRAT WALKS AGAIN One way to win, if your own era rejects you, is to be so spectacularly odd that two centuries later a musical theatremaker gets obses…
A MINI-CIRCUS AND A MISCASTING A nice irony that this revival of this Mark Bramble / Cy Coleman / Michael Stewart musical about Phineas T.Barnum should open now, just as David Attenbo…
 NEW GENERATION CRITIC MICHAEL ADAIR WONDERS WHO IT'S FOR…. When The Woman in White debuted at the Palace Theatre in 2004, much of the commentary focused on it being a tec…
EROTICROBATICS, BANANAS, HIGH JINKS Relief flooded in with the first act, Cabaret Decadanse from Montreal. Here was a larger-than-life lip-synching puppet diva made of glitteri…
