Monthly Archives: August 2011

Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown’s award-wining American musical records a terrible miscarriage of justice, which ends with an innocent man being dragged out of an open prison by a mob, affiliated to the Ku Klux Klan, and lynched. Audiences … Continue reading →

The plays of the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar (1878-1952) are elegant and sophisticated, full of Freudian nuances and sexual ambiguity, and not nearly as trivial as they may at first seem. His best known works, which include Liliom (1909), The … Continue reading →

When Eugene O’Neill’s ballad-like play was premiered in 1921 it failed. When he rewrote it and put Anna Christie centre stage and made her a prostitute he had an enormous success and won the Pulitzer Prize. Greta Garbo would later … Continue reading →

On the press night the show had only just begun when it started to rain. What could be more British than remaining seated and putting up umbrellas? It rained so much that the stage manager ordered the actors off the … Continue reading →

The medieval mystery plays were secularised religious dramas performed in the streets and lasting all day. They were acts of faith, a confirmation of Christian belief. Tony Harrison’s version, written in irreverent Northern rhyming couplets, takes us from Creation to … Continue reading →

Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée and Victoria Chaplin have produced only three shows in 30 years. Chaplin’s father is the world-famous Charles Chaplin and her grandfather is the great American playwright Eugene O’Neill. She and Jean-Baptiste eloped in 1969 when she was 18 … Continue reading →

Ian McFarlane advises the audience not to ask too many questions and just get on with it. The action of his deliberately silly musical takes place in New York and a fairy kingdom that exists in a dimension parallel to … Continue reading →

A young woman from Utah arrives by bus in New York and instantly lands a job in the chorus line of a musical which is opening that night. By the end of the day she is offered the leading role. … Continue reading →