The top London theatre shows according to our critics
What is it? Transferring from the Open Air Theatre after an acclaimed run last summer, rising star US director Jordan Fein's take on the classic shtetl-set musical transfers to the Barbican ahead of a UK tour.
Where is it? Barbican Centre.
How much is it? £25-£165.
Why go? Fein masterfully balances the musical's two sides – the stand-up-style humour and the dark forshadowing of the Holocaust – by playing it as a sort of absurdist clown show. US star Adam Dannheisser is excellent as a restrained, dignifiede take on milkman protagonist Teyve.
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Time Out
13 hours ago
- Time Out
The top London theatre shows according to our critics
What is it? Transferring from the Open Air Theatre after an acclaimed run last summer, rising star US director Jordan Fein's take on the classic shtetl-set musical transfers to the Barbican ahead of a UK tour. Where is it? Barbican Centre. How much is it? £25-£165. Why go? Fein masterfully balances the musical's two sides – the stand-up-style humour and the dark forshadowing of the Holocaust – by playing it as a sort of absurdist clown show. US star Adam Dannheisser is excellent as a restrained, dignifiede take on milkman protagonist Teyve.
Time Out
2 days ago
- Time Out
101 Dalmatians
This review is from 101 Dalmatians' original 2022 run at the Open Air Theatre. It returns to the Hammersmith Apollo for a summer 2025 run starring Sydnie Christmas as Cruella de Vil. Adapted direct from Dodie Smith's 1956 kids' book – ie, absolute not a Disney production – '101 Dalmatians' is a scrappy affair. It's the first ever original musical from the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, and it boasts charming puppetry, big-name writers and a scream of a turn from Kate Fleetwood as the evil Cruella de Vil. But by the towering standards of the OAT – known for its revelatory musical revivals – it's pretty uneven. If you just view it as a fun kids' show, you'd be more forgiving. In fact, I was pretty forgiving: I skipped press night and took my children the following afternoon. However, I wouldn't say it's really been pushed as a show for youngsters: historically the OAT's musicals are aimed at an adult audience, the evening finish is certainly too late for my children, and the foregrounding of Fleetwood's villainous Cruella de Vil in the publicity recalls Disney's more adult-orientated spin-off film of last year ('Cruella'). Anyway: my kids had fun at Timothy Sheader's production. I mean, it starts with a protracted bottom-sniffing scene, for crying out loud, as grown-up dalmatians Pongo (Danny Collins and Ben Thompson) and Perdi (Emma Lucia and Yana Penrose) meet for the first time, give each other a good honk up the backside, fall in love and nudge their bookish, introverted human owners Dominic (Eric Stroud) and Danielle (Karen Fishwick) into starting a relationship. Skip forward a bit and humans and hounds have moved in together, and the latter have produced 15 babies. Uber puppet designer and director Toby Olié's spotty pooches are proper showstoppers: Pongo and Perdi have large, mobile forebodies operated by a puppeteer and hind legs shared with the human actor who speaks their lines: Emma Lucia is particularly charming as a compassionate, north-eastern Perdi. The innumerable puppies are generally just represented by their heads… and they're jolly sweet, too. In Johnny McKnight's stage adaptation of Zinnie Harris's contemporary update, the canine idyll is punctured by the arrival of Fleetwood's De Vil, a psychopathic influencer who is, by and large, extremely funny as she self-pityingly inveigles her way into our heroes' lives, then persuades herself she absolutely must have – and deserves – a dalmatian-puppy-skin coat. With a succession of increasingly frightening fright wigs, her forever remarkable cheekbones, and some full-on panto-villain vibes, Fleetwood is an absolute joy. She's also the focal point of the most visually imaginative moments of Sheader's production: a spirited, cartoon-style attempt to use puppetry to look like her hair and arms have popped out after she swallows a dodgy potion; and most impressively, a tableau at the end of the first half where the dancers line up in formation behind her to form the giant puppyskin coat of her fantasies (there's deliciously lurid costume design from Katrina Lindsay). Lots of positives, then, but as a whole, it feels pretty all over the shop. Much as Harris has updated the story, neither she nor McKnight have solved its problems: the abrupt second-half switch of focus to a group of child actors playing a quartet of escaped puppies is tonally disorientating and lays an awful lot of pressure on some very young performers. Even taking that on the chin as a necessity of the story, there were too many moments when I struggled to work out exactly what was going on (Cruella's initial capture of Pongo and Perdi, for instance, was baffling – she seemingly only managed to abduct them from their home because a scene change happened around them). There's also simply a dearth of memorable characters beyond Cruella: Perdi is lovely, but her aside it's hard to feel especially invested in the bland good guys (beyond the obvious fact that skinning puppies is bad). And while stage legend Douglas Hodge's wordy, string-and-brass-heavy songs are pleasant and good at keeping the story ticking along, there's a lack of killer tunes that might have compensated for other shortcomings – although the joyous finale 'One Hundred and One' is a keeper. My kids didn't care about any of this: they enjoyed two hours of a lighthearted good vs evil yarn with some cool puppets and a boo-hissable villain. They didn't worry about the merits of '101 Dalmatians' as a musical for the ages. And if you can take the same attitude, you'll have a blast, or at least you'll have a blast in the good bits. But ultimately the Open Air Theatre is one of the best musical theatre venues in London, and by its own extremely lofty standards, '101 Dalmatians' is a bit of a dog's dinner.
Spectator
2 days ago
- Spectator
Satire is nothing without contempt
On 30 April, the solicitors Mishcon de Reya asked me to join a panel commemorating the 25th anniversary of the High Court trial in which David Irving unsuccessfully sued Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier. Deborah was there, alongside her lawyer, Anthony Julius. Irving's anti-Semitism had a particular purpose. Postwar, the chief obstacle to restoring the ideas of Adolf Hitler was what happened to the Jews. If their genocide could be denied, fascism could be rehabilitated. For the occasion, I prepared a list of the 16 principal characteristics of fascism which I take to be: 1) Exploitation of historic grievances 2) Frequent resort to states of emergency 3) Rule by executive order rather than by assembly 4) Disempowering of the judiciary 5) Attacks on the media 6) Threats to annex territory 7) Constant blaming of an enemy within 8) Insistence that the leader is above the law 9) Assaults on higher education and universities 10) Withdrawal from international organisations 11) Extreme nationalism 12) Elevation of the heterosexual family 13) Obsession with birth rates 14) Impassioned denial of historical truth 15) Persecution of particular racial groups and 16) Attacks on cultural institutions. With Donald Trump planning to turn the Kennedy Center in D.C. into his very own Bayreuth, we can surely say he is returning a full score card. Theatre is normally the most uneven of art forms. You must sit through a few bad plays to discover a good one. But, for me, 2025 has been unusual. Everything I have seen is good. I had already caught Mark Rosenblatt's Giant before I saw Howard Brenton's lovely play about Churchill and Stalin. Then came Kyoto, centred on the 1997 climate conference; An Interrogation, by a new writer, Jamie Armitage; the brilliantly directed opera of Festen; and Robert Icke's Manhunt, an evening investigating Raoul Moat. Most original of all, Self Esteem staged her new album A Complicated Woman at the Duke of York's, in an evening which blazed with energy and warmth.
