REVIEW: Don Juan In Soho, Wyndhams Theatre ✭✭✭✭
Tennant offers what the West End loves: a tour-de-force performance that looks totally at home in the gilded, plush, ornate interior of this exquisite fin-de-siecle theatre.
Tennant offers what the West End loves: a tour-de-force performance that looks totally at home in the gilded, plush, ornate interior of this exquisite fin-de-siecle theatre.
Patterson’s aim is to create a light comedy, and he has succeeded pretty well.
These songs rank amongst Sondheim’s best, and the witty, light-as-air confection of the book is a constant joy, managing to stay always earthy and ‘grounded’, no matter how fancified the subject matter might become.
The key to all this is John Partridge’s iconic rendition of the complex, fascinating, physically and emotionally demanding role of Albin: an exercise in stagecraft of the highest order.
Right from the first notes of the thrilling overture, this was going to be a night no one present would ever forget.
There’s lots of gentle humour, gentle pathos, gentle social critique, and a gently uplifting ‘message’ to go away with at the end.
It’s very pleasant, often amusing, and if it doesn’t plumb any depths in its conventional story of growing up.
The great, central achievement of this production is in the two-handed coup of Jeremy Legat and Ed MacArthur’s dazzling performance as duetting singer-actor-dancer pianists.