UPCOMING: Mary and Kiki – Two new musicals

Mary Stuart

This week Julian Eaves took a look at two new musicals in development Mary Stuart and Kiki, the Queen of Montparnasse. MARY STUART, Karamel Café, Mountview Academy A lot of drama schools commission new work, and this is one of the primary places to go to find new and exciting musical theatre. That is emphatically what we find here in this remarkable new work in development by German writer and dramaturg, Kolja Schallenberg, and his gifted and perfectly well-matched composer-collaborator, Paul Glaser. Schallenberg translates Schiller into English here, and while the effect is literary and worthy, in his desire to be ‘authentic’ and preserve the intention of the original (a rather high-bourgeois, if not actually courtly one – think of Shakespeare, but without the common touch), where this script really scores is in the chunks Schallenberg gives to Glaser to set to music. There, the magic occurs. The combination of … Read more

CRITIC’S CHOICE 2016 : Mark Ludmon

Billie Piper in Yerma

We asked our reviewers to take a look at 2016 and to nominate some stand out productions for 2016. Mark Ludmon replied with the following:- In another wonderful year for British theatre, one of my highlights was Annie Baker’s The Flick at the Dorfman at the National Theatre, unfolding the quiet desperations and joys of young people working at a small independent cinema in Massachusetts. Despite its running time of three-and-a-quarter hours and long silences, it was an absorbing, beautiful play with perfectly pitched performances. A powerful performance by Billie Piper made Yerma at the Young Vic stand out for me. Simon Stone’s modern adaptation played pretty freely with Lorca’s original, creating a stunning, heart-breaking drama about the despair of childlessness, played out within a glass box to add to a feeling we were glimpsing private horrors. My favourite show of the year has come at the end: Schiller’s Mary … Read more