Category Archives: Theatre

Diana: The Musical review – a right royal debacle so bad you’ll hyperventilate

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This filmed version of the Broadway show, with its accidental comedy and cringeworthy lines, is a guilty-pleasures singalong in waiting

And … so … it’s … springtime for glamour and victimhood, winter for Windsors and Charles. Netflix have now given us the filmed version of the entirely gobsmacking and jawdropping Broadway show Diana: The Musical, shot at the Longacre theatre on West 48th Street last summer with no audience while the show itself was on pause due to the Covid pandemic. And while you’re waiting for Pablo Larraín’s movie Spencer, starring Kristen Stewart as Diana, this will have to do. Although there is a danger it will cause you to hyperventilate.

Not since the Cats movie have I literally shouted from my seat: “What? What? WHAT?” Only by having Diana ride on stage on the back of a Jellicle cat could this be more bizarre. If it was deliberate satire it would be genius, but it’s not. It’s a saucer-eyed retelling of the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, with bobbing chorus lines of footmen and flunkies who with a costume change morph into step-in-time phalanxes of snarling tabloid hacks, while Diana solemnly warbles downstage about her loneliness and determination in a pool of follow spotlight.

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Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

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As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her

Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson, you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese.

The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wilson and featuring some of Von Teese’s classic routines alongside guest performers from male burlesque artist Jett Adore to hula-hoop virtuoso Marawa. While others rushed out online content during the pandemic, Von Teese took her time to get the details right. “When I was watching a certain famous talkshow host doing his show from his backyard, I thought, ‘Oh, you really do need some showbusiness,’ you know?”

Von Teese is all about the showbusiness, from the giant clam shell she emerges from in her opening routine to the finale bathing in a fizz-filled champagne coupe. It’s a land of satin, ostrich feathers and diamanté nipple pasties, with each of her many-layered outfits drenched in sparkle. “I love trying to come up with the most complicated striptease costume,” she smiles. “That’s my speciality.”

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Tony awards 2021: Australian musical Moulin Rouge! triumphs in a Broadway celebration

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The adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s musical picked up 10 awards in a ceremony that also acted as a comeback for New York theatre

Moulin Rouge! swept the board at the 2021 Tony awards, picking up 10 trophies during a ceremony that also acted as a celebration of the return of Broadway.

The adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 Oscar-winning musical, which reopened on 24 September, became the first Australian-produced show to win a Tony for best musical, beating Jagged Little Pill and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.

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‘We didn’t want to do a Grease’: how Everybody’s Talking About Jamie became a film

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How do you turn hit musicals like Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and Dear Evan Hansen into films? You axe songs, throw out plots and don’t worry about anyone’s favourite bit

Choosing a stage musical to see right now can feel like browsing the cinema listings of the 1980s and 90s. Pretty Woman and Back to the Future are playing across the street from one another in London’s West End, with The Lion King, Matilda and Heathers nearby. Indecent Proposal opens next month.

The speed of traffic travelling in the opposite direction, from stage to screen, tends to be a little faster, though. A film of Dear Evan Hansen, the Broadway hit about an anxious, alienated student who pretends to have been friends with a suicide victim, has arrived only five years after it opened, with Julianne Moore and Amy Adams among the cast. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, which follows a 16-year-old budding drag queen from Sheffield, has taken just four years, picking up Richard E Grant and Sharon Horgan along the way.

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Rebellion and redemption: how the Slits gave a voice to female prisoners

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Playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm on how the groundbreaking female punk band helped her tell the story of women suffocating in the prison system

It was a bit of a “pinch me” moment, to be honest. Earlier this month I sat in the rehearsal room for Typical Girls and watched our incredible cast play the music of the Slits to Tessa Pollitt, an original member of the band.

When I first started writing this show, never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined we would get to this point. This absolute legend, punk royalty, was beaming at the liveness of it all and so were we. This is what we’ve all been aching to do.

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Mugabe, My Dad & Me review – a powerful personal tale of celebration and healing

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York Theatre Royal
Tonderai Munyevu’s semi-autographical show addresses Zimbabwe’s traumatic history with honesty and humour

Clothes hang in broken rows above the bare stage (Nicolai Hart-Hansen’s design). Dresses, suits, uniforms – they are presences that suggest absences, the “ghosts” of the people in the stories that Tonderai Munyevu and Millie Chapanda are bringing to life through words and music.

The text of Mugabe, My Dad & Me, written by Munyevu, is an assemblage of the events that have shaped his complicated identity as a “gay, black Zimbabwean man”. The narrative is set in motion by a white man’s question: “Where are you from?” Never shrinking from confronting the (overwhelmingly white) audience with the lazy tropes of the colonial mindset, Munyevu sets before us intersecting histories, both personal and political, “bouncing, non-linear” between Zimbabwe and the UK, past and present.

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‘It’s the balm we need right now’: how Broadway fought its way back

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The long theatre shutdown in New York has taken its toll on the industry but a renewed and reinvigorated outlook towards diversity could have a major impact

When Ruben Santiago-Hudson walks on stage at the Manhattan Theatre Club on Tuesday night, the electric charge between actor and audience will spark back to life. Then the healing will begin.

“It is the balm that we all need right now, not just on stage, but in our city,” says Santiago-Hudson, writer, performer and director of Lackawanna Blues, one of a record seven works by Black playwrights opening on Broadway this autumn. “It’s a necessity, it’s in us as human beings. Theatre has always been the great gathering place – church and theatre.”

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Sarah Harding, singer with Girls Aloud, dies aged 39 from breast cancer

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Fans and figures from show business pay tribute to pop star who was diagnosed in August 2020 and wrote memoir during her illness

The pop singer and TV personality Sarah Harding, who had 21 UK Top 10 singles as a member of Girls Aloud, has died aged 39 from breast cancer.

Her mother, Marie, announced her death on Instagram, prompting a flood of tributes from fans and figures from show business. Geri Horner, the Spice Girls singer and a judge on the TV talent show that created Girls Aloud, wrote: “Rest in peace, Sarah Harding. You’ll be remembered for the light and joy you brought to the world. X”

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‘My theatre went dark’: Amanda Kloots on loving and losing actor Nick Cordero

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The Broadway favourite, who died of complications from Covid last summer, is remembered by his wife and co-star

When you’re on Broadway and suddenly find out that your show is closing, you feel this wave of sadness. As a cast member, there was nothing you could have done to save it. You didn’t write the script; you didn’t call the shots. You just had to show up, and smile, and dance, and perform, and give it your all every day. Your cast has become like your family, the theatre like your home, and your dressing room like your own personal bedroom in that house, your space filled with photos, cards, and memories. After your last show, you have to take that all down, pack everything into a box, and walk out of the theatre as it goes dark.

Related: Nick Cordero: Broadway star dies aged 41 of coronavirus complications

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Peaceophobia: Muslim men who love their modified motors

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Mistaken for drug dealers? Monitored by police? A new play staged in a Bradford car park weaves stories of everyday racism, faith and petrolheads


“I don’t go out, I don’t really go clubbing, I don’t drink, I don’t do none of that,” says Sohail Hussain, who is explaining how all encompassing his hobby is. “All my money goes on cars – for me it’s an investment.”

Hussain is one of three actors starring in Peaceophobia, a piece from collaborative theatre company Common Wealth and Fuel that interweaves stories about Islam, faith and modified car culture. Set in a car park in Bradford, the three drivers – Casper Ahmed, Mohammad Ali Yunis and Hussain – chat pistons and prayer over the constant hum of engine noise and tension.

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Edinburgh Fringe returns with mix of in-person and online shows

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Festival is part of world’s largest annual arts season which has been forced to curtail events due to Covid

The Edinburgh festival Fringe returns this weekend with a hybrid programme of nearly 800 in-person and online shows after its cancellation last year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Fringe makes up part of the world’s largest annual arts season, alongside the Edinburgh international festival and the book and film festivals, which open later this month, and all have been forced to significantly curtail this August’s events for the second year running. One of the most famous, the military tattoo staged at Edinburgh castle, has again been cancelled.

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Lily Allen: from chart-topping handbag kid to the heart of London’s West End

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The singer is back in front of a live audience this week, playing ‘a woman with a real point of view’ in a spooky new play, 2:22 – A Ghost Story

There, in the background, wearing drop pearl earrings, is 13-year-old Lily Allen dressed up as a little lady-in-waiting. Cinema audiences watching Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth when the film of that name came out in 1998 might have been concentrating on the queen’s courtly dancing in the middle of the frame, but yes, it really was Allen playing a mini royal favourite in director Shekhar Kapur’s lavish production.

Now, more than two decades later, the 36-year-old singer-songwriter is taking centre stage as an actress in the West End, appearing in a spooky new play, 2:22 – A Ghost Story, which opens this week.

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On my radar: Domhnall Gleeson’s cultural highlights

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The actor on an exhibition that’s like a rave, the best crispy chicken and why he’s having to take a break from Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest

Domhnall Gleeson was born in Dublin in 1983. Following his father, Brendan, into acting, he broke through in 2010 with small but memorable roles in Never Let Me Go, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (as Bill Weasley) and True Grit. He played the lead in Frank and a romantic interest in Brooklyn, though he is probably best known as General Hux in the latest Star Wars trilogy. From 4 to 29 August, Gleeson stars in Enda Walsh’s new play, Medicine, at the Traverse theatre as part of the Edinburgh fnternational festival. He lives in Dublin.

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‘I have a scene to do, run!’: backstage at Minack Theatre

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Our photojournalist explores the famed outdoor venue in Cornwall as it welcomes back full houses

“I knew of it from pictures I’d seen online and I thought it looked pretty, but when you arrive and see it yourself, it’s like, ‘Oh wow, this is insane,’” says actor Guido Garcia Lueches about the Minack Theatre. “It’s probably the best theatre I’ve ever performed in.”

Carved largely by hand into a craggy, granite cliff-face, the dizzying outdoor venue on the south coast of Cornwall looks magnificent in the summer sunshine. Tiers of subtropical foliage splash colour throughout the landscape and weathered concrete seats bearing the titles of past shows rise abruptly from the stage. The ocean, 100ft below, looks an enticing shade of turquoise.

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Meet Little Amal, the puppet girl refugee about to walk 8,000km

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Later this month, in one of the most ambitious live artworks ever staged, a giant puppet will trek from the Syria-Turkey border to Manchester, in a moving-theatre show of solidarity with asylum seekers

On the last Tuesday of July, a big little girl will step out into a Turkish city, a few miles from the Syrian border, to begin an 8,000km trek to Manchester. Little Amal is nine years old and is searching for her mother, who went off to find food and never returned. She is the central, and only, character in a spectacularly ambitious theatre project. The Walk will face down international Covid restrictions in a visionary act of solidarity with the plight of refugees, defiance of the borders that put their lives in danger, and belief in the humanity of ordinary people faced with a global humanitarian crisis.

Little Amal’s intercontinental odyssey will be hard to miss in the eight countries whose borders she will cross between July and November, because she is 3.5 metres (nearly 12 feet) tall. She’s a puppet, who will be enabled to make her epic walk by relays of puppeteers, several of whom are themselves refugees. She will bear a single message, on behalf of all the thousands of displaced children who will come out to meet her along the way: “Don’t forget about us.”

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Bard day’s work: what I learned from eavesdropping on RSC rehearsals

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The Royal Shakespeare Company is letting the public watch the usually secret processes towards performance – from clapping games to verse sessions

The creative process normally takes place behind closed doors. But the RSC has boldly upended that idea by streaming its Open Rehearsal Project for Henry VI Part One. What this means, in practice, is that cameras are admitted for three sessions each day. At 10am we watch a half-hour company warm-up. From noon, for 90 minutes, we get to see either a class (movement, combat, verse-speaking) or the rehearsal of a scene. Then at 6pm we eavesdrop on a green-room chat, in which company members mull over progress so far. After dipping in and out for the first fortnight – and there’s still more than a week to go before a streamed performance on 23 June – I’m intrigued by how much I’ve learned.

But are open rehearsals a good idea? There was a pivotal moment when Gregory Doran – who shares direction of the project with Owen Horsley – quoted a letter he’d received from an actor who said “the rehearsal room is sacrosanct – actors must not be exposed like this”. I spoke to a veteran actor who said she too was horrified by the idea of the public witnessing the trial and error that takes place in a rehearsal room.

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Edinburgh festival fringe threatened by Covid rules, says organiser

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CEO calls on Scottish ministers to replace 2-metre rule with 1 metre to secure future of world’s largest arts festival

The survival of the Edinburgh festival fringe is at stake unless social distancing rules for venues are relaxed within a fortnight, its organiser has said.

Shona McCarthy, the chief executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, called on ministers to replace the 2-metre rule with the 1-metre distance used in hospitality in order to help secure the future of the world’s largest arts festival.

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Billie Piper: From vulnerable teen pop star to director of an ‘anti-romcom’

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The characters she plays do not match her own life, the actress insists, but it’s hard not to see parallels with her own journey

Billie Piper has occupied a near continual, if shifting, position in the public imagination for almost a quarter of a century. That’s a notable achievement by any reckoning of a performer’s career, but it’s also rather alarming, given that she’s still only 38.

Having started out as 15-year-old chart sensation, she walked away from the pop music treadmill, enjoyed a boozy marriage with the DJ Chris Evans, returned to frontline fame in Doctor Who, struck out on a path of acclaimed dramatic performances on TV and the stage, and has now made her directorial debut with the feature film Rare Beasts.

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Puppet of refugee girl to ‘walk’ across Europe along 12-week arts festival trail

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Three teams of four puppeteers will accompany Little Amal from Turkey to Manchester to celebrate refugees

A giant puppet of a nine-year-old Syrian refugee girl is to “walk” from Turkey to the UK through villages, towns and cities for one of the most ambitious and complex public artworks ever attempted.

The Walk project was meant to have taken place between April and July but was delayed by the pandemic. Now the 5,000 mile (8,000km) journey of Little Amal, from Gaziantep, near the Turkish-Syrian border, to Manchester, will take place over 12 weeks from 27 July.

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Olympia Dukakis obituary

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American stage and screen actor who won an Oscar for her role in the 1987 film Moonstruck

After more than two decades of distinguished work in the US theatre as an actor, director and teacher, and appearances in a dozen or so films, Olympia Dukakis, who has died aged 89, became hugely famous overnight by winning the best supporting actress Oscar in 1988 for her performance as Cher’s mother in the romantic film Moonstruck (1987).

The course of her career suggests that her ambitions never lay in the direction of Hollywood. Her theatrical credits read like the canon of classic and modern plays: she had roles in plays by Euripides, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, Lorca, Pirandello, Brecht, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, on and off Broadway, as well as in various regional theatres across the country. In films, she took on several character roles, making an impression in scores of pictures for more than half a century.

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