REVIEW: Summer Street, Waterloo East Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Sumer Street review Waterloo East Theatre

Douglas Mayo reviews Summer Street – The Hilarious Aussie Soap Opera Musical by Andrew Norris now playing at Waterloo East Theatre. Summer Street Waterloo East Theatre 16 May 2019 4 Stars As an Aussie, I remember growing up when Neighbours and Home And Away first hit the air. Neighbours initially lasted a few weeks before it was axed, transferred to a new network and partially recast creating a hit. With both shows still on the air in many countries around the world, it’s not a surprise that the Aussie soap has found itself subject to musicalisation – well sort of. For Andrew Norris has created this Aussie soap opera musical with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Everything is fair game, from the location to the actors and the diabolical scripts. So we find ourselves at the fifth-anniversary reunion of the cast of Summer Street, a now axed soap that ran … Read more

Vault Festival 2018 Preview

Vault Festival 2018 London

Mark Ludmon previews this year’s Vault festival in and around The Vaults in Waterloo, London Our pick of theatre and performance at Vault 2018 Every year, Vault arts festival just gets bigger and bigger. For 2018, more than 300 shows will take place around London’s Waterloo from January 24 to March 18, focused on The Vaults beneath the station but now bringing in new spaces including Waterloo East Theatre. It features comedy, film, live performance and theatre – a lot of theatre in fact, presenting exciting new talent and new writing. We pick out some of the shows that caught our attention. NeverLand Following Vault’s sell-out hit The Great Gatsby last year, The Guild of Misrule and Theatre Deli return with a Peter Pan-inspired new, immersive musical. Dive into a dark and dangerous world of mermaids, rum and glittering pirates. Expect food fights, absinthe bars and soaring live music from a … Read more

REVIEW: Doodle the musical, Waterloo East Theatre ✭✭

Doodle The Musical at Waterloo East Theatrde

Doodle The Musical Waterloo East Theatre 12th January 2018 2 Stars Book Now Well, here’s yet another musical that concerns itself with WWII nostalgia: uniforms; hummable ditties; 2-dimensional characters; and lashings of escapism.  If that’s your bag, you may enjoy this.  The music is certainly often very appealing: Andy Street has good creds in the tunesmith department, and there are several numbers here that will not fail to charm.  Most of them get sung by the starriest presence on stage, Sooz Henshaw (aka Kempner, I do believe): ‘He’s a dinosaur’ is a damn fine tune, in fact, much too good, really, for the lyric attached to it.  Jonathan Kydd, a name I remember most vividly from the 1970s ITV kids’ show, ‘Rainbow’, and who here is the driving force behind this bizarre tale of wartime hijinks.  He doesn’t write a script so much as a rag-tag collection of sketches, which … Read more