Category Archives: West End

Rufus Wainwright blames UK’s ‘narrow outlook’ after Brexit for Opening Night’s flop

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Exclusive: Audience had ‘vitriolic reaction’ to European tone of musical, forced to close early

Rufus Wainwright has defended his musical Opening Night, which was forced to close early after mixed reviews, saying West End audiences lack “curiosity” after Brexit and the British press had turned on the project because it was “too European”.

Opening Night was Wainwright’s first musical and is an adaptation of John Cassavetes’ 1977 film about an actor struggling to cope, who is played by Sheridan Smith. Directed by Ivo van Hove, it opened in March at the Gielgud theatre but a month later announced it would be closing two months early.

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James Corden to return to London stage in political drama The Constituent

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Joe Penhall’s new play marks the talkshow host’s first theatre role since One Man, Two Guvnors and will see him star opposite Anna Maxwell Martin at the Old Vic

James Corden is to return to the London stage for his first role since the National Theatre’s blockbuster farce One Man, Two Guvnors.

The star, who last year left his US late-night talkshow after eight years, will appear in a new political drama by Joe Penhall. The Constituent, at the Old Vic theatre, is set in an MP’s constituency office. Corden will play “an ex-serviceman with a life in freefall” while Anna Maxwell Martin (Motherland, Line of Duty) is an opposition backbencher whose ideals of public office are tested by his demands. Zachary Hart completes the cast as a parliamentary protection officer. The play will be directed by the Old Vic’s artistic director, Matthew Warchus, and is said to explore “the conflict between public service and personal safety”.

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‘We’re going back to silly’: what’s the next turn for British comedy in era of nostalgia?

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It’s no joke for new shows as classic favourites live on while investment in sitcoms and sketches falters

There is a quip beloved of comedians, when asked if their industry is going down the pan: “Nostalgia? It ain’t what it used to be.”

But for fans of well-worn jokes, and the shows in which they appear, 2024 could be truly a golden era.

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Candace Bushnell set to bring her one-woman show to West End for first time

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The US author of Sex and the City will appear on stage in London in early 2024 before going on a UK-wide tour

Candace Bushnell, the real-life Carrie Bradshaw, is bringing her one-woman show to the West End for the first time.

The bestselling author – whose newspaper column inspired the hit TV drama Sex and the City – will also tour the UK, sharing her philosophy through stories of fashion, literature and sex.

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Steve Coogan to star in Armando Iannucci’s Dr Strangelove play

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Coogan will follow in Peter Sellers’ footsteps to play multiple roles in stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical war film

Steve Coogan is to star in Armando Iannucci’s stage adaptation of the satirical war film Dr Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

The play, set to open in London next autumn, reunites the pair who worked together more than 30 years ago on the BBC radio comedy On the Hour, in which Coogan played Alan Partridge, and on subsequent Partridge projects.

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Vogue editor Anna Wintour planning London’s answer to Met Gala

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Stormzy, Naomi Campbell and Sadiq Khan among those expected at ticketed fashion show raising funds for city’s arts scene

In a perfect storm of fashion catwalk and West End theatrics, Vogue’s editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, is planning a philanthropic arts extravaganza that she hopes will take over the world “in the way the Met Gala did” – while raising money for London’s struggling arts scene.

Featuring Naomi Campbell, Stormzy and Michaela Coel, alongside the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and the actor Sir Ian McKellen, the evening event will take place at London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and include a red carpet outside, a catwalk show within, and live performances overseen by director Stephen Daldry.

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London theatres may lock up audiences’ phones after illicit James Norton photos

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Outrage over naked images of actor published in MailOnline could prompt move to curb cameraphones

Theatre audiences in London’s West End could be made to lock up their phones to prevent illicit images of actors being taken during performances.

The suggestion comes after naked photos of James Norton on stage in A Little Life were published in MailOnline.

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Fleabag producer brings Berlusconi musical to London stage

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‘Fierce, feminist’ show from Francesca Moody is written by former Grange Hill actors Ricky Simmonds and Simon Vaughan and tells an ‘almost true’ story

A musical about Silvio Berlusconi that is described as “Evita on acid”, written by two former Grange Hill stars and features a song called My Weekend With Vladimir is to be staged in London next year.

Entitled Berlusconi, it is billed as an “almost true story” and produced by Francesca Moody who is best known for her success with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. The musical depicts the three-time former Italian PM on the eve of the verdict in his trial for tax fraud as he looks back on his rise and fall and resolves to write an autobiographical opera. His story is then told through the eyes of three women: Ilda Boccassini, the Milan magistrate known as Ilda the Red who investigated him; Berlusconi’s second wife, the actor Veronica Lario, who left him in 2009 after nearly 20 years of marriage; and the character of a journalist who is based on real people. “It places a fierce feminist lens on him,” said Moody of the musical. “These women are telling their story.”

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Vardy v Rooney: ‘Wagatha Christie’ play to hit West End stage

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Producer says trial asked questions about boundaries between privacy and celebrity and what it is to be a Wag

A play about the “Wagatha Christie” trial is to be staged in the West End by the producers behind Agatha Christie’s seminal drama Witness for the Prosecution.

Vardy v Rooney: the Wagatha Christie Trial, adapted from the original high court transcripts by Liv Hennessy and directed by Lisa Spirling, brings the legal battle between Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney to life for one night only this autumn.

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Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cinderella to close in the West End

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Shock news that show will end in June at London’s Gillian Lynne theatre brings heartache for company and those who had been due to join cast

The curtain is to come down on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new West End musical Cinderella, just under a year after opening, with its final performance set for 12 June.

In a statement released on Sunday by Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group, the composer said “mounting a new show in the midst of Covid” had been an “unbelievable challenge” and that a new production of Cinderella would open on Broadway in 2023.

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The stars with Down’s syndrome lighting up our screens: ‘People are talking about us instead of hiding us away’

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From Line of Duty to Mare of Easttown, a new generation of performers are breaking through. Meet the actors, models and presenters leading a revolution in representation

In the middle of last winter’s lockdown, while still adjusting to the news of their newborn son’s Down’s syndrome diagnosis, Matt and Charlotte Court spotted a casting ad from BBC Drama. It called for a baby to star in a Call the Midwife episode depicting the surprising yet joyful arrival of a child with Down’s syndrome in 60s London, when institutionalisation remained horribly common. The resulting shoot would prove a deeply cathartic experience for the young family. “Before that point, I had shut off certain doors for baby Nate in my mind through a lack of knowledge,” Matt remembers. “To then have that opportunity opened my eyes. If he can act one day, which is bloody difficult, then he’s got a fighting chance. He was reborn for us on that TV programme.”

It’s a fitting metaphor for the larger shift in Down’s syndrome visibility over the past few years. While Call the Midwife has featured a number of disability-focused plotlines in its nearly decade-long run – actor Daniel Laurie, who has Down’s syndrome, is a series regular – the history of the condition’s representation on screen is one largely defined by absence.

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Stephen Sondheim: a daring and dazzling musical theatre icon

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The American composer and lyricist, who has died aged 91, shaped the musical artform with his wise, witty and extravagantly clever work

Stephen Sondheim achieved such acclaim – for deepening the content and extending the lyrical ingenuity of musical theatre – that, from the age of 50, each major birthday was celebrated with tribute concerts in London, New York or both.

Watching the composer-lyricist of Sweeney Todd and Follies at such events – taking a bow, with his wry smile – it was impossible not to reflect on our luck in coinciding with the life of someone who would clearly stand in the history of the genre alongside such geniuses as Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Weill, Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein.

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‘We’re taking the man out of the myth’: the musical reclaiming Rumi from Instagram

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A new stage production aims to tell the Sufi poet’s story beyond his aphorisms – and challenge assumptions about Islam and the Middle East in the process

He is everywhere and nowhere. The words of Jalal al-Din Rumi are found on sunset images pasted on Instagram and coffee mugs sold on Etsy; his poems have been featured in recordings from Madonna and Coldplay and he is reputed to be the bestselling poet in the US. Rumi’s observations and aphorisms on life may be endlessly cited – “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop” – but few in the west know him as anything more than a bearded Sufi mystic.

“Rumi has become a mystical, almost deified figure,” says Nadim Naaman. “The reality is that he was the opposite of an untouchable deity.” Naaman, a British Lebanese singer, actor and writer, has collaborated with the Qatari composer Dana Al Fardan to create Rumi: The Musical. “Our approach was to take the man out of the myth,” says Al Fardan, “and to present him as human being.” This is the second time Naaman and Al Fardan have brought a beloved Middle Eastern poet to the London stage. Their 2018 show Broken Wings, which is returning to London in the new year, was based on a novel by the Lebanese poet and writer Kahlil Gibran. It was the success of that production that convinced them there may be an appetite for a musical that delved into the life of Rumi.

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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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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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