David Shields

REVIEW: The Clockmaker’s Daughter, Landor Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Off West End, Reviews
The Clockmaker's Daughter

It’s a great story, but the show’s most glittering treasure is its music. There are folk tunes, love songs, impassioned ballads, comedy numbers, patter songs, soaring melodies, complex harmonies and splendid polyphony, all with a sprinkle of Irish jig around the edges. The inherent power and attraction of the score is helped in no small measure by a superbly assured delivery of the most difficult, and gorgeous, music by Jennifer Harding who excels in the central role of Constance. This is an engaging, absorbing, fantastical musical, radiant with possibility and truth. It’s confronting in parts and heartbreaking in others. And it is full of magical moments.

Fanny And Stella at Above The Stag

News, Off West End
Fanny and Stella at Above The Stage in London

Daring to be different may well be considered acceptable in modern times but spare a thought for Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, two cross dressers in Victorian England. Showy and theatrical on and off the stage, which they so loved, Fanny and Stella were arrested at The Strand Theatre in 1870. They appeared in court next morning still in their evening gowns, and the trial for homosexual offences of this judge’s son and a bank clerk was the sensation of the age, especially when Boulton’s respectable and accepting mother, Mary Ann, took the stand. Their ultimate acquittal is all the more fascinating when compared to Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment less than 30 years later. Fanny and Stella: The Shocking True Story makes it’s debut at the Above The Stage Theatre, London’s only full time professional LGBT theatre on 13 May running until June 14,2015. This new play with original music has … Read more

REVIEW: Closer To Heaven, Union Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Off West End, Reviews
Closer To Heaven by Jonathan Harvey and The Pet Shop Boys at the Union Theatre, London

What makes the musical stand-out is it unashamed gaiety, and I use that word in its modern sense. This is, as Nicholas De Jongh said when the piece premiered, “the first truly gay musical to be written and composed by Englishmen” to reach the West End. It is also essentially youthful, and quite uncompromising in dealing head on with the vagaries and traps of young adulthood: sex, drugs (use and sale), pop music, alcohol, predatory conduct, prostitution, love, survival, sexuality and, most compellingly, the family you create separate from the family into which you are born.

REVIEW: She Loves Me, Landor Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Off West End, Reviews
She Loves Me At The Landor Theatre

McWhir understands the limitations of the Landor intimately and is especially skilled at making the most of those limitations. This production of She Loves Me demonstrates his understanding and ability clearly and deftly. There is excellent musical direction from Iain Vince-Gatt who controls the musical side of proceedings from a keyboard. The stand-out performance here comes from Joshua LeClair, whose Arpad is effervescent, energised, and totally convincing throughout.

REVIEW: Rent, Greenwich Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Off West End, Reviews
Rent Greenwich Theatre

In this production, the creative team and cast have clarified Jonathan Larson’s message. By returning to the Broadway roots, recreating the ambiance of the bohemian Alphabet City of the Nineties, and focussing on the narrative drive of the show, Rent becomes relevant. This is an admirable revival of a modern classic.