Month: January 2025

For sixteen years, Only Fools and Horses had the nation hooked to its Christmas special, with millions of us tuning in to see what brothers Del Boy and Rodney were up to next. For much of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, the sitcom was a much-loved part of most people’s viewing habits on Christmas day.… Continue reading Only Fools and Horses

I have been to many Eastern Angles Christmas shows over the years, but I have to say that this one is really up with the best of them. Dickens’s famous story has been performed thousands of times over the years and in many different media and guises, so to make it fresh and vibrant is… Continue reading A Christmas Carol

Handel composed Theodora nearly a decade after his last opera. It was his favourite oratorio, the only one based on a Christian subject, with characterful music broken into nearly 60 episodes. But a challenge in presenting any oratorio, written for static performance, is where to set it for the operatic stage. Here’s the context: the Roman governor,… Continue reading Theodora

Mashed-up fairy tales, eye-popping visuals and saturated sound and colour go hand in hand in Patrick J O’Reilly’s exuberant The Adventures of Red Riding Hood at Belfast’s The Mac. It’s busy, loud, paced with enough adrenaline to light up a small town and doesn’t so much bend the fairy tale genre as turn it upside down and… Continue reading The Adventures of Red Riding Hood

Framed posters announcing a Hamlet musical, which closes after one night, a red plush curtain, this is penny-pinching fringe theatre for producer Max Bialystock who boasts of once being king of Broadway. Into his shabby office walks nerdish nebbish accountant Leo Bloom with his baby blue comfort blanket, come to check the creative accountancy in… Continue reading The Producers

We think of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a comedy, but it is full of duress, anger and upset, of disruption and downright cruelty and director Eleanor Rhode doesn’t hide this, they are there from the start with Sirine Saba’s Hippolyta turning her back and walking away from the conqueror whom she now has to marry. Andrew… Continue reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream

For those seeking to avoid panto land but who still want some festive fun, Southwark Playhouse is staging The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary, an adaptation of Flaubert’s iconic novel performed by a cast of four and ‘lovingly derailed’ by writer John Nicholson. Breaking the fourth wall within minutes of the show starting, the cast… Continue reading The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary

Even when it was first conceived, Valentine Davies’s story Miracle on 34th Street was steeped in nostalgia, a yearning for happier, simpler times when belief in Santa Claus and kindness was possible. At that time, no-one could have anticipated society would reach a point where high streets would be barren and physical retail sales in actual shops… Continue reading Miracle on 34th Street

Carlos Acosta’s touring production of Nutcracker in Havana has been on the road since 1 November and will finish in Salford late January, so it has to travel light, relying on video projection (we fly over Havana and Cuban plantations), simple set design and mapping by Nina Dunn and Andrew Exeter’s lighting. And on a… Continue reading Carlos Acosta’s Nutcracker in Havana

When it comes to panto season, who doesn’t like an opportunity to enjoy a look at Jack’s stalk lubricated by a couple of pints? Whereas some adult pantos are straightforwardly themed, Vauxhall’s Garden Theatre is hosting a high energy, generally rude Snow White for 18+. It is a mix of the ribald and the smutty and, by… Continue reading Snow White – London’s Naughtiest Adults Only Panto!