Grease The Immersive Movie Musical - Review

Evolution, London

****

Based on Grease by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey

Directed by Matt Costain

Grease - The Immersive Movie Musical Finale

Battersea Park’s Evolution venue is transformed into Rydell High School for a glorious evening of summer loving in Grease - The Immersive Movie Musical.

Secret Cinema’s 2025 London production is a grand translation of the movie into a multi-media experience. The pre-show experience is a funfair in Evolution’s grounds themed on the movie's finale, before the doors open to reveal a vast space that has been stunningly designed by Tom Rogers capturing key scenes from the film in a meticulously created tribute. This is one of those shows where you can see where the producers’ cash has been spent - the staging is as lavish as it is fun and it truly is worth every penny spent on a ticket!

Matt Costain directs the show that sees the evening segue between the original movie and live musical theatre performance. The event also offers up the opportunity to reflect on what a brilliant piece of big-screen cinema Randal Kleiser’s 1978 movie really was. It wasn’t just the (30yo!) gorgeous Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta (24) singing and dancing spectacularly. The film was a brilliantly crafted, written, photographed and performed satirical commentary on the 1950s through a 1970s lens. And all delivered with perfectly corny pastiche and not a hint of CGI in sight!

In Battersea Park, the wit and humour that has gone into translating the film's scenes into simultaneously performed tableaux is inspired. All the moments are gems, but when cars are involved (think Greased Lighting , Sandy (sung at the Drive-In) and the big race at Thunder River) the effects are as ingenious as they are hilarious. There is room for audience participation too, in some of the bigger staged numbers, that only adds to the show's joy.

Liam Morris is stranded at the Drive-In

Costain’s cast are a blast. Liam Morris and Stephanie Costi are perfectly cast as Danny and Sandy, both capturing the style of their on-screen characters to a tee. A nod too to Leah Dane’s Cha Cha whose dance work in Born To Hand Jive is sensational.

The creatives alongside Costain are equally talented, with Jennifer Weber’s choreography, Susan Kulkarni and Martina Trottmann’s costumes and Howard Hudson’s as always outstanding lighting designs all adding to the evening’s magic.

With food and drink available throughout the evening the whole gig becomes more of a party than a show and with at least half of the audience having made the effort to dress up as Pink Ladies or T-Birds, what's not to love?

Grease - The Immersive Movie Musical is playing until September so head to London's very own Rydell High for.... Oh,  those summer nights!

Runs until 7th September

Photo Credits: DannyWithACamera and Matt Crockett

2.36 - Review

Etcetera Theatre, London

****

Written by Anoushka Cowan and Elijah Lifton

Directed by Guy Rapacioli and Jessie Millson

Anoushka Cowan and Elijah Lifton

In a tightly written 45 minute piece playing as part of the Camden Fringe, 2.36 marks the debut of actor/writers Anoushka Cowan and Elijah Lifton. 

2.36 is the average size of a family household in the UK, with Cowan and Lifton respectively playing Keira and Josh Carrington, two siblings midway through their undergraduate lives. Having been brought up in a family of immense wealth and privilege, this one-act drama follows the pair on a trip to Luxembourg as they seek to discover more about their history and heritage.

The ailing health of their grandfather triggers a series of revelations and as the story plays out, a number of carefully constructed themes and surprises emerge. There’s sibling rivalry (natch), but there are also some well crafted observations on loneliness within a loving family, and the complexities of an unconventional family structure.

Cowan and Lifton have created a compelling play that brings a mature context to some fascinating issues that belie their relatively youthful ages. Only on for three days at the Etcetera Theatre, it merits a much longer run.

Runs until 3rd August

Inter Alia - Review

National Theatre, London

****

Written by Suzie Miller

Directed by Justin Martin

Rosamund Pike

Inter Alia is another theatrical gem from Suzie Miller, who in 2019 premiered Prima Facie. Staying within the jurisprudent ambit of the English legal system, Inter Alia sees Miller focus on Crown Court judge Jessica Parks and the challenges she faces in her domestic life when teenage son Harry is accused of a sex crime. 

Miller offers a meticulously detailed analysis of Park’s privileged life on and off the bench, where with her KC husband Michael, middle-class luxuries are plentiful until the idyll is painfully pierced. The script offers up a troubling glimpse of the manosphere, alongside Parks’s descent into her own personal hell as she finds herself facing profoundly personal conflicts. 

Coincidentally (one imagines), there are hints of the recent TV drama Adolescence in Miller’s narrative and if there is a flaw in the play that otherwise offers up a powerfully sympathetic critique of 21st century feminism, it is that much like Adolescence, the completely white casting of these stories’ lead families fails to reflect some of the more complex diversities of today’s world. And the end of Miller’s story, while being acutely painful, lacks a credibility.

The evening’s stagecraft however is world class. Rosamund Pike is Parks, onstage throughout the play’s 1 hr 40min one-act entirety, in a performance that is a breathtaking tour de force. As her character faces agonising realisations, Pike’s mastery of the dialogue is sensational, picking up the slightest nuances and inflections in Miller’s acutely perceptive script.

Jamie Glover steps up as her husband, also delivering a stunning take on middle-aged husbandry and fatherhood, with Jasper Talbot completing the play’s adult trio as the hapless Harry, again with an assured turn.

The production also showcases the flawless technical competencies of the National Theatre. Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design is exquisite, equally Natasha Chivers’s lighting work. Miriam Buether’s set is a wonder. In essence a staging of simple domesticity that momentarily can transform into a courtroom - however the brilliance of Buether’s achievement in the play’s final act has to be seen to be believed.

Runs until 13th September

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan

Top Hat - Review

Festival Theatre, Chichester

****

Music & lyrics by Irving Berlin

Book by Matthew White & Howard Jacques

Directed & choreographed by Kathleen Marshall

Lucy St Louis and Phillip Attmore

Broadway’s gifted director and choregrapher Kathleen Marshall returns to the UK to helm a gorgeous production of Irving Berlin’s Top Hat.

Berlin’s wondrous songs and the original RKO movie may hail from the 1930s, but the stage show is very much a 21st century confection that takes the film’s ridiculous plot, a narrative so corny that it is the very definition of” musical comedy”, using it as a framework on which to showcase nearly 20 of the American Songbook’s most sparkling gems.

The musical’s story sees two young Americans fall hopelessly in love, albeit their path to happiness is blocked by a delightfully entertaining spin around mistaken identities. Phillip Attmore as Jerry Travers and Lucy St Louis as Dale Tremont lead the show  and while both  deliver perfection in their song and dance, it is left to the show’s gifted supporting characters to truly flesh out the evening’s comedy drama. Alex Gibson-Giorgio plays a preening Italian fashion designer with more than an amorous eye for Miss Tremont, while James Clyde turns in a grand performance as Bates, a manservant who pops up throughout the tale in a range of disguises.

Delivering the evening’s most exquisitely defined masterclasses in stagecraft however are the performing legends Sally Ann Triplett and Clive Carter who play Madge and Horace Hardwick respectively. These two actors are just a crowd-whooping delight whose take on Outside Of That I Love You displays their experience and skill in knowing “just how” to deliver that killer lyric or gag punchline to perfection. To be truthful, the show’s jokes are as old as the hills – but in the hands of Triplett and Carter who cares? Their work puts the humour back into humanity and makes the evening soar! Stephen Ridley directs his 12 piece band masterfully, making fine work of the classic and much-loved melodies.

Top Hat does what it says on the tin. An evening of fabulous Broadway fun that will light up the country on its nationwide tour well into 2026.

Runs until 7th September, then touring

Photo credit: Johan Persson

Sing Street - Review

Lyric Hammersmith, London

***

Music & lyrics by Gary Clark & John Carney

Book by Enda Walsh

Based on the motion picture written and directed by John Carney

Directed by Rebecca Taichman

Grace Collender and Sheridan Townsley

Together with Gary Clark, John Carney has taken his 2016 movie about the power of music, love and dreams to conquer the poverty of 1980’s Dublin, translated it into a musical.

It’s a tall order for any story to be so transformed and (for the show’s first half at least) the photographed beauty that underscored the movie fails to be replicated on Hammersmith’s Lyric stage. Enda Walsh has been drafted in to write the musical’s book, but for all Walsh’s innate understanding of Irish culture, his storyline lurches clumsily through too much expositional cliche.

The evening’s strengths however rest on the extraordinary talents of its young cast of gifted actor-musicians, many of which are making either their London or professional debut in the show.

Sheridan Townsley and Grace Collender (respectively Conor and Raphina) lead the narrative as the young lovers destined to be together. Both have a vocal strength  and charisma that suspends disbelief and drive the story through its cliched backdrop. There is great work too from accomplished singer Adam Hunter as Conor’s older brother Brendan.

It is Carney and Clark’s songs however that power the show, restoring this jaded reviewer’s faith in new writing. Where so much new musical writing can fail to land, in Sing Street, and in the second half in particular, as Walsh’s book fades into insignificance, the songs and more importantly, the passion and power with which they are delivered, make the evening soar.

This show's actors and songs are fab. With a sharper storyline and the 2hr 40 running time trimmed by half an hour, this could yet be a fantastic show.

Runs until 23rd August

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan

The Addams Family - Review

Curve, Leicester

*****

Music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa

Book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice

Based on characters created by Charles Addams

Directed by Matthew White

Ricardo Afonso and Alexandra Burke

The Addams Family hail from back in the day when The New Yorker magazine offered some of the sharpest cynicism in the world and with few contributors sharper than cartoonist Charles Addams, as the gifted artist created a deliciously dysfunctional Gothic clan who resided in a haunted mansion beneath Central Park. The Addams Family’s values were as inverted as they were recognisable and their distinctive Manhattan chic was to spawn television series and a movie and lead to this beloved menagerie of deeply damaged individuals becoming one of 20th century America's cultural icons.

Translating such utterly ghoulish satire into musical comedy requires brilliant writing that demands to be matched by equally outstanding performances. Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice who penned the show’s book have an excellent pedigree behind them. Paired with songsmith Andrew Lippa, the show is based on fabulous foundations and in this iteration of The Addams Family that has just opened at Leicester’s Curve, the cast unite to deliver an evening of arguably the finest musical theatre this year.

The Addams Family musical has been around for a few years now – last reviewed by this site in 2017 -  however this production takes its excellence to the next level. Alexandra Burke and Ricardo Afonso head the family as Morticia and Gomez. Burke bringing the seductive contemptousness that her most fatale of femmes demands, while Afonso adds Latin authenticity to Gomez’s delightful despicability. The couple’s breathtaking flamenco-enhanced Tango De Amor that brings the show towards its conclusion is just joyous and the hallmark of Alistair David’s classy choreography

This production’s strengths however are bolstered not just by such strong leads, but by epic casting throughout. The legendary Clive Rowe plays the genderless Fester, enchantingly in love with the Moon. Rowe is a giant of his generation and his big number, But Love, is as tender as it is hilarious. Lesley Joseph steps up to the plate as the 102yo Grandma of the family. There are few performers who can nail the bittersweet comic delivery required of a wry centenarian, with Joseph delivering in spades. Dickon Gough’s Lurch is a demonstration of understated physical comedy at its finest, while Lauren Jones as Wednesday is all that this infernally rebellious teenager should be.

The musical’s plot revolves around a deliciously improbable romance between Wednesday and Lucas Beineke (Jacob Fowler) but it is the gem of a performance that Kara Lane delivers as Lucas’s mother Alice singing Waiting towards the end of the first half, that almost takes the roof off the Curve. Credit too to Dale Rapley as Alice’s husband Mal – a tough role with few, but nonetheless very dry, sweet spots of humour. Rapley nails them all. And a nod to Nicholas McLean who makes fine work of Wednesday’s younger brother Pugsley.

The Addams Family is more than just musical comedy. It is the finest, most acutely observed satire, that is delivered exquisitely. This tour needs to lead all the way back to the West End. Musicals do not get better than this!

Runs until 10th August, then on tour

Photo credit Pamela Raith

The White Chip - Review

Southwark Playhouse, London

****

Written by Sean Daniels

Directed by Matt Ryan

Ed Coleman and Ashlee Irish

The White Chip (a reference to the Alcoholics Anonymous programme) is a meticulous exploration of one man’s journey through alcohol addiction. Following acclaimed USA productions, Sean Daniels’s play now makes its London debut under the sharp eye of director Matt Ryan and producer Danielle Tarento.

In a Herculean performance of physical and mental prowess, Ed Coleman is Steve, Daniels’s loosely autobiographical protagonist. Lee Newby’s simple yet effective designs create a space in which we follow Steve from his first beer (aged twelve) through his stumbling into the grasp of addiction and the ensuing college and workplace trauma and on into rehab admittances and despair.

Daniels’s script is relentless in its tracking of Steve’s tragic arc, with the extent to which we witness the denials and deceptions, to family, friends and co-workers proving harrowing and profoundly well written theatre.

Alongside Coleman, Mara Allen and Ashlee Irish deliver all the necessary supporting roles to flesh out the narrative, both giving performances that reflect the energy of the show’s leading man. Amidst an array of Tarento’s typically excellent production values, with the evening’s dialogue being so rapid-fire and intense, there are some disappointing moments when the usually excellent Max Pappenheim’s sound design wanders in its accuracy.

But for all this play's brilliance in its writing and its powerhouse performances and notwithstanding the story's uplifting endgame, at 100 minutes with no interval it all makes for an evening of tough drama that at times prove too exhausting to effectively digest. The breakneck sequencing of scenes and tableaux, all key points in the narrative that are lined up to demand our attention can feel overwhelming. 

The White Chip is an important play that demands to be seen. Tough gig though.

Runs until 16th August

Photo credit:Danny Kaan