Monthly Archives: May 2014

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I will never know. This 1954 awarding-winning Broadway musical by Richard Adler, Jerry Ross and George Abbott, based on Richard Bissell’s novel, Seven-and-¬a-half-cents, is a … Continue reading →

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s exuberant musical opened off-Broadway in 2007 and went on to win many awards, including best musical. The book by Quira Alegria Hudes is a sentimental and idealistic soap opera about the dreams of Hispanic immigrants and their children. … Continue reading →

It is not unusual for comedians to appear in Samuel Beckett’s plays. Max Wall and Lee Evans were particularly impressive. However, the play doesn’t make sense when Gogo and Didi are cast with actors in their mid-twenties and even less … Continue reading →

The Union Theatre has an excellent policy of reviving musicals which nobody else would risk reviving. There will be lots of people who will want to see Ace of Clubs precisely because it is by Noël Coward and they won’t … Continue reading →

Backstage musicals are two a penny. A front of house musical is something new. There are some amusing barbed in-theatre jokes; sadly, the book is naff and the performance heavy-handed.

Colm Toibin hopes that believers and nonbelievers alike will approach his portrait of Mary, mother of Jesus, with an open mind, and appreciate that he has taken his subject matter seriously. A forlorn hope, since his text cannot fail to … Continue reading →

The rejection in 1928 of Sean O’Casey’s great anti-war play by W.B.Yeats, artistic director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, led to a rift between O’Casey and the Abbey which was never healed and did irreparable harm to playwright and … Continue reading →

Hampstead’s first musical is really a concert performance of great hits by English rock musician Ray Davies and the highly influential, quintessentially English Kinks. Davies’s literate lyrics, cool, melancholy and cynical, have an authentic London voice and are ironic commentaries … Continue reading →