Theatre in Covent Garden

Avenue Q was never going to be the number one most zeitgeisty musical of 2026. It’s not that Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx’s subversive ’00s classic has aged badly, even if a couple of its more wilfully transgressive moments – notable the song ‘Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist’ – land a bit ickily in the MAGA era. And sure, some of its reference points have dated: a song about how everyone uses the internet to watch porn (‘The Internet is for Porn’) was clearly considerably sharper in 2003. On the whole, though, the main flaw with Avenue Q in 2026 is that Avenue Q did it first. By which I mean that the jaw-dropping audacity of a rude musical theatre parody of Sesame Street has now largely gone – it is a very famous show that ran for five years in the West End the first time around and almost 20 in New York.  It’s also been superseded in terms of bad-taste musicals, not least by Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s enduring The Book of Mormon, which they co-wrote with Lopez.  Accept all that, and Jason Moore’s revived production is a fun piece of naughty noughties nostalgia that raises a smile from the sight of its fluffy yellow stage curtain onwards. Princeton (Noah Harrison) is a wet-behind-the-ears young puppet who has just graduated from university (‘What Do You Do with a BA in English?’)  and is now looking for a place to live on Avenue Q, a shabby but affordable neighbourhood in outer NYC that boasts former child actor Gary Colman (Dionne Ward-Anderson) as its superintendent...

Sam Ryder is not the Messiah. But he did come second for the UK in Eurovision, which places him close in some people’s eyes. And you can see the logic of casting him as the lead in a splashy summer revival of Jesus Christ Superstar. Though he wasn’t born until almost 20 years after Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical theatre romp debuted, Ryder’s eclectic, guitar heavy pop should theoretically position him well to front this loveably mercurial rock opera.  And with all due caveats re: the fact he’s clearly not Middle Eastern, he also looks a bit like Jesus, or at least popular Western depictions of Jesus, which is at least mildly qualifying, surely.  Can’t act though, can he? Well, maybe that’s unfair. He can act a bit. It’s not horrible for a stage debut. But it’s not really lead-actor-at-the-Palladium stuff either. This production actually started 10 years ago at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, where star Declan Bennett didn’t look a thing like classic Jesus, but had brooding charisma to spare, a troubled man struggling to accept his fate and the difficult questions being asked of him by his relentless frenemy Judas.  Ryder by contrast looks like a mildly perturbed middle manager distracted by some tricky mental arithmetic. A lot of Timothy Sheader’s production involves Jesus listening to Tyrone Huntley’s wiry, street rat Judas and looking conflicted while not saying anything. Bennett aura farmed the hell out of this. Ryder does not have the chops.  The...

Judy Craymer's bold idea of turning the insanely catchy songs of ABBA into a musical has paid off splendidly, in every sense – box office figures for 'Mamma Mia!' are as eye-watering as its outfits. This is largely because Catherine Johnson had the sense to weave the 1970s into her script, and director Phyllida Lloyd to cast accordingly. Heroine Donna Sheridan lived the free love dream (if only because her boyfriend ran out on her), wound up pregnant and survived to see her daughter, Sophie, reject all her principles in favour of a white wedding and the kind of certainty that comes from knowing which of your mother's three consecutive lovers ought to be walking you down the aisle. If you wanted to, you could see this as a conversation about feminism. But you'll look pretty silly debating patriarchal oppression while on your feet clapping to 'Dancing Queen'. Some of the songs are oddly static, but when the choreography does get going – for instance, when Donna's friend Tanya stylishly quashes a libidinous local puppy in 'Does Your Mother Know?' – it's terrific, and makes great use of props: I wonder if the producers can assure us that no electric drills or hairdryers were harmed in the making of this musical? The current cast appear to have been chosen more for their singing voices than their serious acting ability. But who needs dramatic conviction when you have purest pop to do the convincing for you? Given the songs, a story just about solid enough to stay upright on its...

This review is from 2023. SplitLip’s delightful spoof WW2 musical has been heading inexorably for the West End for something like five years now. It’s a fringe theatre comet that’s gathered mass and momentum via seasons at the New Diorama, Southwark Playhouse and Riverside Studios, and has now made impact in Theatreland – wiping out a West End dinosaur to boot, as it displaces ‘The Woman in Black’ after over 30 years at the Fortune Theatre. And it’s really hard to be anything but delighted for the company, which consists of David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Robert. All bar Hagan perform in the show, with Claire Marie Hall and Jak Malone rounding out the cast. This is very much their triumph. And though it’s been redirected for the West End by Robert Hastie, ‘Operation Mincemeat’ is at heart the same show it always was. There are no added backing dancers or bombastic reorchestrations. It’s slicker and bigger in its way, but still feels endearingly shambolic where it counts. It’s a very larky account of the World War 2 Operation Mincemeat, a ploy from British intelligence to feed the German army disinformation via a briefcase of false war plans strapped to a corpse that they hoped to pass off as a downed British pilot (yes, there was a recent film with exactly the same name, about exactly the same thing, and yes they do make a joke about this). The story centres on Charles Cholmondeley (Cumming), the socially inept MI5 operative who dreams up the plan, and...

The parameters for judging a stage adaption of the horror film franchise Paranormal Activity are clearly quite different to, say, a production of King Lear.  It’s not the only consideration, but judgement does essentially boil down to one main question: is it scary? To which the answer here is a frazzled ‘oh my, yes’. Paranormal Activity (the play) is not just a stage transposition of Paranormal Activity (the film), although you can see why it bears the franchise name: there would be a lawsuit if not. While the plot plays out differently in terms of specifics, the fundamentals are identical.  James (Patrick Heusinger) and Lou (Melissa James) are a thirtysomething US couple who have just moved to a rainy London for his job, and to get away from things that were happening at their Chicago home. She believes she’s been haunted by a malevolent supernatural presence since childhood. He wants to be supportive but doesn’t want to pretend he believes in ghosts. She is taking strong antidepressants because she wants to be seen to be playing ball. Nothing weird has happened since they moved – but then, suddenly, weird stuff starts happening.  Clearly you can’t have found footage theatre. But in some ways the fact that Fly Davis’s set is nothing but the couple’s mundane two-storey house captures the genre’s claustrophobia nicely: did something just move in that corner? What’s happening on the top floor while the couple are in the lounge? A couple of grainy screens off to the side...

At the end of this elegant Agatha Christie thriller, the newly uncovered homicidal maniac steps into a sinister spotlight and warns everyone never to reveal his or her identity. The production recently celebrated its 60th birthday and although Wikipedia and Stephen Fry have both blown the murderer's cover, there is a remarkable conspiracy of silence over 'The Moustrap'. The real mystery of the world's longest-running theatre show is not whodunit but, in its currently mediocre state, whydoit at all? 'The Mousetrap's ticket prices are the only element of this show that isn't stuck fast in the 1950s – although the actors' strained RP does make the odd break for the twenty-first century. Otherwise, this is a walking, talking piece of theatre history and – at £39 for a full-price stalls seat – the most expensive museum exhibit in London. Christie's neat puzzler of a plot is easier to defend. It has defied the inevitably mummifying process of more than 25,000 performances and still possesses an uncanny precision worthy of the mistress of murder's chilling geriatric creation, Miss Marple. In the 60 years since it premiered, its premise, in which six Cluedo-like middle-class stereotypes are imprisoned by snow in a country house while they try to fathom which of them is a raving murderer, has become a cliché, just as the authorities' response to adverse weather conditions (skiing coppers? In Berkshire?) have become a nostalgic memory. It's fascinating to glimpse the ghost of Peter...

This review is from 2022. My Neighbour Totoro is now running at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End with a mostly new cast. Studio Ghibli’s 1988 cartoon masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is a stunningly beautiful, devastatingly charming film, in which not a huge amount happens per se.  It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their dad and basically get up to a lot of extremely normal things… while also fleetingly encountering a succession of astounding otherworldly creatures, most notably Totoro, a gigantic furry woodland spirit, and the Cat Bus, a cat that is also a bus (or a bus that is also a cat, whatever). Its most iconic scene involves young heroines Mei and Satsuki waiting at a bus stop, and Totoro shuffling up behind them, chuckling at their umbrella (a new concept to him) and then hopping on his unearthly public transport. So if you’re going to adapt it for the stage you’re going to have to absolutely nail the puppets you use to portray Totoro and co.  The RSC absolutely understood the brief here, although you’ll have to take my word for it, as for this first ever stage adaption – by Tom Morton-Smith, overseen by legendary Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi – the company hasn’t allowed a single publicity photo of a single puppet (bar some chickens) to be released.  Nonetheless, the puppets – designed by Basil Twist, assembled by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop – are fucking spectacular. They have to be fucking spectacular because that’s the...

A Frank Sinatra musical is a great opportunity: a titan of the 20th century, he was a complex figure who was both emblematic of America and in many ways an outsider to it. He also had a pretty stonking songbook.  But this sauceless bio-musical manages to do the impressive job of acknowledging Sinatra’s many, uh, foibles while making him seem incredibly bland as a human being. Joel Harper-Jackson’s Frank comes across like the work experience guy in his own life, drifting through an endless stream of affairs on something like autopilot, as if he simply couldn’t see any other option other than to sleep with a stream of hot Hollywood starlets behind his wife’s back. Here’s the thing: bio-musicals are always a trade-off because they have to be approved by the subject or the subject’s estate. The route that Sinatra the Musical writer Joe DiPietro and Broadway director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall have taken is to acknowledge Frank’s philandering but just take the view that everyone was basically cool with it. Phoebe Panaretos as his first wife Nancy Sinatra does at least express some exasperation about how little he’s around for their children. But we’re never far away from somebody telling Sinatra that he’s a great dad. His mob ties are crisply raised and then shot down. He boozes and fights but there’s never any danger there. It would be excessive to describe it as gaslighting, but it does feel like the MO is to show Ol’ Blue Eyes doing a series of things that would...

'My mummy says I'm a miracle,' lisps a pampered mini-me at a purgatorial kiddies' birthday party at the outset of this delicious, treacly-dark family show. The obnoxious ma and pa of its titular, gifted, pint-sized heroine are not, of course, quite so doting. But 'Matilda' must be making its creators, playwright Dennis Kelly and comedian-songsmith Tim Minchin, a very pair of proud parents. Opening to rave reviews in Stratford-upon Avon before transferring to the West End in 2011 and snatching up Olivier Awards with all the alacrity of a sticky-fingered child in a sweetshop, Matthew Warchus's RSC production remains a treat. With hindsight, Kelly and Minchin's musical, born of the 1988 novel by that master of the splendidly grotesque Roald Dahl, is a little too long and, dramatically, a tad wayward. But like the curly-haired little girl in the famous nursery rhyme, when it is good, it is very, very good. And it's even better when it's horrid. The past few months have seen some cast changes, including, alas, the departure of Bertie Carvel's tremendous Miss Trunchbull, headmistress of the dread Crunchem Hall School, former Olympic hammer-thrower and a gorgon of monumental nastiness, complete with scarily Thatcher-esque tics of purse-lipped gentility and faux concern. David Leonard doesn't quite match the squirm-inducing, hair-raising detail of Carvel in the role, but his more butch, granite-faced version is fantastically horrible nonetheless. And if Paul Kaye as Matilda's...

Show writer Kate Trefry explains all you need to know about ‘The First Shadow’. ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’ is a sprawling maximalist monolith, a gargantuan entertainment that goes beyond being a mere ‘play’. It’s too unwieldy and too indulgent to be a theatrical classic. But nonetheless, this prequel to the Netflix retro horror smash is the very antithesis of a cynical screen-to-stage adaptation.  As overwhelming in scale as as the show’s monstrous Mindflayer, it’s a seethingly ambitious three-hour extravaganza of groundbreaking special effects, gratuitous easter eggs and a wild, irreverent theatricality that feels totally in love with the source material while being appreciably distinct from it.  It’s clearly made by a fan, that being big-name director Stephen Daldry, who used his Netflix connections (he’s the man responsible for ‘The Crown’) to leverage an official collab with the Duffer Brothers, creators of the retro horror smash.  It starts as it means to go on, with pretty much the most technically audacious opening ten minutes of a show I’ve ever seen, as we watch a US naval vessel deploy an experimental cloaking device in 1943, to catastrophic effect. Yes, the sets wobble a bit, and yes, writer Kate Trefry’s dialogue is basically just some sailors bellowing cliches. But we’re talking about watching a giant vessel getting pulled into a horrifying parallel dimension on stage. It is awesome; and when it cut into a thunderous playback of Kyle Dixon and Michael...