Royal Festival Hall

This review is from Christmas 2023. Bluey’s Big Play returns for Christmas 2025. Where even superior stage adaptations of kids’ cartoons tend not to have much input from the original show creatives, this live adventure for fanatically beloved Australian hound Bluey is as authentic as it comes. ‘Bluey’s Big Play’ is written by the show’s creator Joe Brumm and the voices of its puppets are all-new pre-recordings of the screen cast.  It also feels like the involvement of Brumm has allowed the creative team to do things a little differently - it’s not that Rosemary Myers’s production isn’t crowd-pleasing, it’s just a little less reverential of the source material than these things tend to be.  So you don’t just get a bam-bam-bam compilation of cartoon episodes recreated on stage: there’s a very gentle but nonetheless original plot. It also opens with a couple of cheeky flourishes. The first is the long, wordless intro, in which the puppeteers – the show’s only human performers – ease us in with a segment in which a group of ibises (I believe Bluey and family refer to them as ‘bin chickens’ in the show) wordlessly prance around on Bluey’s street. It’s a pretty, meditative start that chimes with the source show’s weirder moments. That leads into the arrival of Bluey and the Heeler family, as they decide to have a game of musical statues – amusingly, it’s a sort of origin story for the cartoon’s intro sequence, which takes pleasure in wrong-footing the audience by jumbling up the...

It’s been five years since the last series of Operation Ouch!, the gleefully knockabout kids’ medical-slash-biology CBBC show that made stars of its identical twin doctor co-hosts, Chris and Alexander van Tulleken. They’ve got considerably more famous in the interim: Chris made a splash with his book Ultra Processed People (about the effect ultra-processed foods are having on us) while ‘Xand’ has presented numerous documentaries and is a regular on the BBC’s Morning Live. There is a new series of Operation Ouch! due in 2026, but in its absence the twins have kept the Ouch fires burning via live shows. This latest one debuted on an Australian tour in January 2025, which does raise the suspicion that the Van Tullekens basically do this for a laugh in between their increasingly serious ‘adult’ work. In case the name somehow didn’t give it away, Quest for the Jurassic Fart is almost certainly the goofiest stage show ever made by two identical 47-year-old medical professionals (a low bar, admittedly). Be warned: it’s a fair bit more ‘fart’ than ‘Jurassic’. As it begins, the Van Tullekens have been invited to address the annual conference of an extremely prestigious scientific society whose exact name I can’t remember, but all you need to know is that their acronym is FARTERS. The duo conclude that their ideal presentation would be one based upon the Van Tulleken ‘family fart collection’: a series of preserved celebrity parps. But they feel it needs something a little extra:...

There's no denying it: screenwriter Nora Ephron is the queen of movie romcoms. And Sleepless in Seattle is her most sophisticated masterpiece, with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan starring in a story that's soaked in yearning and dreamy romance. Its jazzy, moody score is a big part of the film's appeal, so its first concert screening is not before time. A full band will soundtrack an HD screening of the film, playing Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole numbers as well as its original songs that composer Marc Shaiman. It should make for an atmospheric serenade for this pair of very grown-up lovers.