Reviews

REVIEW: Fool For Love, Samuel J Friedman Theatre ✭✭✭✭✭

Broadway, Reviews
Fool For Love On Broadway

Central to the power of the the production is the exquisite casting of the two doomed lovers, Eddie and May. Nina Arianda, a fan of this play since her very youngest days, is utterly superb as Eddie. Powerfully sensual, impossibly attractive, but just as impossibly earthy and ordinary, Arianda presents a deeply physiological performance which plays out through intense physical theatre. Remarkably, Sam Rockwell matches Arianda’s intensity and notches it up a level. He exudes a sexual intensity which is overwhelming, laces it with pain and indecision and then overlays that with testosterone cowboy tropes which somehow seem utterly fresh, real and dangerous.

REVIEW: 46 Beacon, Hope Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Off West End, Reviews
46 Beacon at Hope Street Theatre

It is clear from the start that this play – which runs straight through for eighty minutes – is potentially a drama about coming-out and sexual initiation, and indeed it becomes both of those things. But it is a tribute to the skill of the writing and the actors that it becomes a lot more than that too.

REVIEW: Pure Imagination: A Sorta-Biography by Leslie Bricusse ✭✭✭✭✭

Book, Reviews
Leslie Bricusse

The book is laid out like a sorta-score. There is an Overture, large chapters which form ‘the key changes of (Bricusse’s) life’ – from A Minor to G Undiminished and a Coda. The sense of musicality is all pervading, as it should be for the man responsible for tunes such as Goldfinger, The Candy Man, Feeling Good and Talk To The Animals. As Elton John puts it in one of 6 Superstar forewords: “Anyone who has written What Kind Of Fool Am I? and My Old Man’s A Dustman should be revered forever.”

REVIEW: Eventide, Arcola Theatre Studio 2 ✭✭✭

Off West End, Reviews
Eventide by Barney Norris at the Arcola Theatre

This is a genial, quietly satisfying set of reflections on how hard rural life can be and how mostly distant it has always been from any kind of Arcadian idyll or vision of pastoral. Rates of depression and suicide are higher in rural than in urban Britain and in its gently insistent way this play provides valuable, sober insights for those of us living in towns as to how and why this should be so.