REVIEW: Love In Idleness. Apollo Theatre ✭✭✭

Love In idleness at the Apollo Theatre

Love In Idleness Apollo Theatre 18th May 2017 3 Stars Book Tickets Recently, there has been a spate of interest in Terence Rattigan’s masterpiece, ‘The Deep Blue Sea’, with high-profile revivals, a new film, and even a brilliant new play, Mike Poulton’s, ‘Kenny’, based on both the real events that suggested it and also on the meticulously crafted drama that arose from their ashes.  So it was probably only a matter of time before someone got around to wheeling out his collection of sketches for the later, much more fully realised and successful play, the work that is known by a peculiar reference to Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ that now finds itself upgrading from the Menier Chocolate Factory in this show relocation to Shaftesbury Avenue. Promoted – in Bob King’s carefully arranged graphic design – as a three-hander between a young man, Michael Brown, a woman in the prime … Read more

UPCOMING: Musical Theatre For Shopkeepers

Tomorrow Maybe a new musical

H G Wells could see into the future, and he gave us his alter ego – the ebullient draper’s boy, Kipps, who is even now, thanks to the combined efforts of Anthony Drewe, George Stiles and Julian Fellowes, dazzling his way back onto the Chichester Festival Theatre stage in the most recently refreshed version of the 1960s musical based on his adventures, David Henecker and Beverley Cross’s ‘Half A Sixpence’. But perhaps even Wells’ clairvoyance might have fallen short of grasping just what a powerful role the British fascination with trade would play in its musical theatre creations of the early 21st century. Two shows seen earlier in London (and now entertaining the crowds in Edinburgh), and another housed in a temporary space in the capital, open our eyes and ears to the powerful influence that commercial life still exerts upon national life. First, in ‘Tomorrow, Maybe‘, we pop into … Read more

REVIEW: Let It Be, Garrick Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Let It Be is a two hour marathon of Beatles hit performed nightly at the Garrick Theatre, London

Let It Be is a musical celebration of the Beatles and the many, many glorious hits that they recorded during the decade from 1906 to 1970. The show does not offer up any pretence at being a juke box musical with biographical elements, it simply gives audiences a mostly chronological hit smorgasboard, the likes of which will never be equaled by any other pop group.