Month: September 2023

Next to Normal won a Tony for best score in 2009 and a Pulitzer for Drama in 2010 and caused quite a stir when it opened on Broadway, partly because of its subject: mental illness—not an obvious subject for a musical. We have had to wait a long time for a London production, but director… Continue reading Next To Normal

British Youth Musical Theatre is returning to Birmingham Hippodrome’s Patrick Studio to present a new musical, #50 Days. Performed by a company of 14- to 21-year-olds from across the UK with a number from Birmingham, #50 Days retells the story of the 50-day period that led to the outbreak of the British civil wars. With parallels to Brexit,… Continue reading Birmingham to host new young people’s musical

Classical music meets flamenco. One may ask, how can classical music go with flamenco? Well, see this show and you will know that in the right hands, they can complement each other. The show premièred this year and is based on the music of the eight cities of Andalucia. Daniel Martinez, director of the company,… Continue reading Andalucia

There are a thousand stories that can be told of the French Revolution, but one tale that is largely forgotten is that of Théroigne de Méricourt, an orator and person of some note in the National Assembly meetings during the thrust of the revolution. The Miles Sisters have brought her life to the stage by… Continue reading The Madwoman

This clever relocation of Dickens’s well-known story to India at the turn of the twentieth century when the British were trying to partition Bengal retains the story and characters of the original—some renamed—but stands up well by itself, with the setting integrating well rather than seeming grafted on. As the play opens in an incense-filled… Continue reading Great Expectations

Polly Stenham’s debut play, a study of a dysfunctional family and of mental illness amazingly written when she was only 19, here gets its first major London revival since its 2007 première in a production by Josh Seymour that is relentless and vivid. Eleanor Bull’s design places the entire action around a hospital-like bed, its… Continue reading That Face

The topic of sexual assaults on American college campuses has been a dark but understandably necessary area for theatre for the last half decade or so. It’s an avenue that allows for extremely emotional and difficult explorations of trauma, cover-ups and criminality, yet it is also fruitful ground for nuanced explorations of human interactions, particularly… Continue reading Midnight Building