Latest news with #WestEnd
Scotsman
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Showstopper! The Improvised Musical returns to Edinburgh Fringe with spontaneous song, dance and improv wizardry
There is a reason Showstopper! The Improvised Musical has established itself as a fixture of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Returning to its longstanding home at the Pleasance Courtyard's Grand for its sixteenth consecutive year, this Olivier Award-winning production invites audiences to witness a musical created in real time — every night, entirely from scratch. Running from 30th July to 24th August (excluding the 11th), and a captioned performance on the 13th of August, the production offers an evening of inventive musical theatre beginning at 5.20pm. The conceit is deceptively simple: audience members provide suggestions for setting, plot, musical styles, and even the title, and the cast of performers respond by crafting an entirely new musical on the spot. No script, no rehearsal — just live, spontaneous theatre delivered with remarkable polish and wit. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Each performance is unique and added to the company's growing archive of over 1,400 original musicals since its inception in 2008. Settings have ranged from Victorian orphanages to alien planets, all given the full West End treatment by a cast adept at parodying musical theatre styles from Sondheim to Disney, jazz to operetta. (c) Ray Burmiston This year's cast features a combination of long-standing company members and acclaimed newcomers, including Ruth Bratt (People Just Do Nothing, BBC), Justin Brett (Million Dollar Quartet, West End), Susan Harrison (Peter Pan Goes Wrong), and Jonathan Ainscough (Royal Opera, Opera North). The ensemble is supported by musical supervisor Duncan Walsh Atkins and movement director Ali James, ensuring that the quality of each improvised performance matches that of a scripted production. Behind the scenes, co-creators Adam Meggido and Dylan Emery lead the artistic team, with production overseen by Showstopper Productions and general management by Suzanna Rosenthal. The show's reputation as a Fringe favourite is reinforced by numerous accolades, including the Olivier Award for Best Entertainment and Family, a Broadway World Edinburgh Award, and consistent placement in the Top 10 best-reviewed shows at the Fringe in both 2023 and 2024. Yet despite its accolades and West End success — including a residency at the Cambridge Theatre and national tours — Showstopper! remains firmly rooted in the spirit of live performance and audience collaboration. Its cast must be ready for any genre, any plot twist, and any musical flourish. This ongoing challenge keeps the format fresh and the audience fully engaged. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad A consistent critical favourite, Showstopper! continues to be recognised for its ingenuity and theatrical craft, offering audiences a performance that is never the same twice — and rarely short of exceptional. Showstopper! The Improvised Musical will be at the Pleasance Courtyard Grand at 5.20pm for the entire fringe for tickets go to
Telegraph
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Christina Aguilera's raunchy Burlesque musical is a cult hit in the making
Well, this is a surprise. After weeks of rumoured chaos, including alleged rows over nepotism, working conditions and creative decisions – including cast members forced to buy their costumes from Primark and various creatives either fired or replaced and forced to sign NDAs – this knowingly daft riff on the 2010 Christina Aguilera and Cher movie emerges as a strange sort of triumph. Written by the film's original director and writer Steve Antin – although with a largely new score by Todrick Hall, who has replaced Nick Winston as director for its West End debut following a try out run in Manchester last year – it is so cheerfully itself, so zestily camp and so sharply performed it somehow snatches victory from the jaws of defeat. It also features an absolute knockout performance from newcomer Jess Folley in the Aguilera role of Ali – the church-going girl from Iowa, who against the odds turns around a struggling Burlesque club in the city. Granted, Antin fumbles his own plot, although mercifully Hall has responded to reports of audiences staggering out of four-hour previews by cutting the running time to two hours, 45 minutes. Half the story has been jettisoned and new bits added with precious little care for plausibility. Tess, the owner of a New York burlesque club (played by Cher in the film), is now Ali's unknown birth mother. This means that Ali is grief-stricken over the death of her adoptive mother, discovers she has another and joyfully sets off to the big smoke from rural Iowa to find her – all within the space of about two minutes. Having seemingly been raised on a diet of corn and church gospel, she is also, bizarrely, an innate burlesque expert, launching into comic send-ups of the other dancers' contemptuous perceptions of her as a rural naif in ways that wittily defy the traditional character arc of an ingénue heroine who learns to discover her true self. Hall embodies the show's meta-lite theatricality by turning the fact he plays both Tess's queeny right-hand man Sean, and Ali's vodka-swilling gospel teacher Miss Loretta into a running gag. He makes a virtue out of the show's scrappy DNA and madcap, extemporaneous air (there's a good line about Coldplay kiss cams). Yes, an awful lot of songs in the first act are filler. Yes, we are expected more than once to invest in a roof-scorching power ballad delivered by a character we have only just met. And sometimes it's hard to know if the show is being wink-wink referential or simply derivative – be it in the echoes of Hamilton and Sweet Charity in the relentless genre-hopping score, or the odd visual nod to A Chorus Line and Cabaret. Yet the buzz is infectious. Folley is formidable as Ali, easily Aguilera's equal as a singer and managing the transition from supposed comic klutz to burlesque vamp with ease. The first act is a victim of its own storyline, parading a succession of standard burlesque routines: the very reason why the club is floundering. But Act Two, with the help of Aguilera's original stand-out song Show Me How You Burlesque, ramps up the raunch. George Maguire brings relish to the English upper-class comedy villain Vince. There's lovely work from Paul Jacob French as Ali's lazily charming love interest Jackson, and Asha Parker-Wallace finds prima donna Nikki's sharp angles and soft core. The dancing is pin-sharp, even if the ensemble spend a lot of time showing us their G-string adorned buttocks. There's an irony to a show that spends a lot of time telling us what burlesque is while sacrificing specificity in its determination to generate general cheesy giddy delirium, but who cares? It's a cult hit in the making.
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Burlesque musical review: Christina Aquilera show is a true spectacle
Burlesque musical review: ★★★★ Was Burlesque going to be the worst musical of the year? Headlines suggest chaos: the director and choreographer exited the production weeks before the West End opening, and the late arrival of costumes forced the actors' union Equity to put out a statement about a 'number of issues,' including to do with unpaid invoices. Who stepped in as director? Todrick Hall, the controversial performer who, amongst other things, was criticised for insensitive behaviour during his stint on Celebrity Big Brother. But the Burlesque musical does not project the chaos of its production – running at two hours fifty minutes, it feels pacey, high-octane, and often funny, and is more slathered than sprinkled with incredibly eye-catching performances. Burlesque: Everyone's here for the production, which delivers Inspired by the 2010 movie starring Christina Aquilera and Cher, the West End iteration includes a touching new plotline that brings its subjects emotionally closer together. It follows Ali Rose, a small town girl who travels to New York where she lands a job in a struggling burlesque bar. Owner Tess has an old-fashioned mindset but club MC Sean helps Ali climb the ranks and potentially save the venue from closure. The plotting feels thin and becomes increasingly confusing by act two, but Burlesque as a set of megawatt performances is so strong that you forgive the holes. Gravelly, funny Todrick Hall is particularly good at gluing together the messy parts of Steve Antin's script with warmth and the odd schmaltzy trick (he does the splits then jokes he's too old for it, struggling back up again), firing off his natural charm offensive as Sean. Everyone's here for the production, which delivers. At points, the Burlesque musical feels like a massive Magic Mike production where shimmering torsos are the main characters, but away from the sensation, there is depth; both Hall and American singer-songwriter Orfeh who plays Tess display gravitas; they command when they stand on stage alone and belt. Jess Folley is also incredible as lead Ali, bringing softer power to the role originated by Aquilera. There are new songs by Christina Aguilera, Sia and Diane Warren. Standouts include Jess' solos Got It All From You and Bound To You, and Orfeh is equally majestic on You Haven't Seen The Last Of Me. Choreography by Hall is slick, but there are a few qualms with the staging: an over-reliance on a floor-to-ceiling video screen at the back of the stage shifts the focus out of the universe, and there is perhaps the most tired use of live projected video (filmed on stage during the production) that I have ever seen in a London theatre. The emotional payoff by the curtain also isn't quite what you want, the result of the wobbly script as the second act becomes increasingly confusing. Don't spend too much time worrying about that: this is the messy, chaotic world of burlesque and what matters is the vocals are in order. Book tickets to the Burlesque musical The Burlesque musical runs until 6 September, to book go to Read more: Read more: Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Daily Mail
17 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
PATRICK MARMION reviews Burlesque at the Savoy Theatre: A laborious theatrical rehash of an already lamentable film
BURLESQUE, Savoy Theatre, London How to make a travesty out of a travesty? Look no further than last night's West End opening of Burlesque The Musical – a theatrical rehash of the lamentable 2010 film Burlesque, starring camp mega-icons Christina Aguilera and Cher. Already a predictable yarn about a small-town girl from Iowa, Ali (Aguilera), who finds herself working in a cash-strapped New York night club (run by Cher), it's now been rendered improbable too after being tweaked by writer Steven Antin so the owner turns out to be... Ali's long-lost mother. Aguilera fooled almost no one as that small-town girl in the original, and The X Factor: The Band winner Jess Folley doesn't fare much better as the church choir refugee in need of a job. As Ali's mother Tess, Orfeh is a surly, surgically modified Barbie doll wearing eight-inch patent heels, S&M bodice and Cupid's-bow lipstick. Both women can live without each other and run a tortuous scale on every syllable of every song, bending notes like Uri Geller. Effort cannot be faulted – except there's way too much of it in a laborious evening pushing three hours. Our main man, Todrick Hall, even jokes that his back hurts from carrying the show. He wrote 20 out of the show's excessive 28 songs, all of them generic gospel-rap-pop mash-ups – including contributions from Aguilera (her again) and Sia. As anthemic belters a few may wallop the eardrums, but they don't so much power the plot as provide repetitive tempos and vocal workouts. Not content with directing and choreographing, Hall also grabs two roles (Tess's sidekick Sean and the Iowa church choir leader Miss Loretta). He's certainly the funniest thing in a show in serious need of comic relief. But Antin's script, adapted from his film, is flat as an Iowa homestead and only fitfully enlivened by topical gags about Baby Reindeer, Coldplay and a TikTok meme. The best moments come from supporting actors – especially Paul Jacob French as Jackson, the cool, bone-dry barman, and Asha Parker-Wallace as the sassy but errant chorus girl Nikki. The would-be steamy choreography certainly features a fair bit of flesh, but it's rote, oven-ready eroticism. A lot of somersaults, a little light can-can and any number of scissor splits – plus a bit of Chippendales and boy-band action for the coach parties. The upshot is rambling raunch, musical cliche and automated whooping. May it rest in peace.
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
This Morning fans seriously concerned by Christina Aguilera's appearance as she promotes new show - gasping ‘is that even her?!
This Morning viewers were left seriously concerned as US singer Christina Aguilera appeared on the show on Tuesday. Christina, 44, joined Alison for a pre-recorded interview during the latest instalment of the show as Dermot O'Leary, 52, and Alison, 50, hosted the daytime hit. It comes as Burlesque arrives on the West End, 15 years after the iconic movie hit screens in 2010, with it marking Christina's film debut. Burlesque The Musical is now playing at the Savoy Theatre for a strictly limited season until 6 September 2025 following its sold-out run in Manchester. Genie In A Bottle hitmaker Christina wore an olive coloured corset-style bodice for her chat with Alison as she showed off her slim figure, while boasting a large bust. However, as the Birmingham native interviewed the Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, fans watching at home were distracted by her appearance. Flooding social media with comments, they expressed some concern about her shrinking size. Posting on X, formerly Twitter, one viewer said: 'My God what has happened to Christina, is that even her?' A second harshly commented: 'State of Christina. Really sad to see... Britney is having a meltdown too.' 'Is Christina Aguilera ok? She doesn't look well,' asked a third worried fan. While a fourth remarked: 'She's wasting away.' Christina previously displayed her thin appearance and caused panic among fans, who discussed rumours she might have undergone plastic surgery on her face to achieve her transformed appearance. Her frame has also sparked rumours about whether may have turned to Ozempic-like drugs to bring about her drastic weight loss. Despite the speculation among fans that she may have altered her appearance in some way, the Grammy-winning singer–songwriter has not addressed the comments. She was previously rumoured to have had a breast augmentation after displaying a scar under her arm — which is a common place for the surgical incision — in 2010. In October of last year, multiple plastic surgeons who had not treated the songstress spoke to about her seemingly transformed appearance, suggesting that she may have undergone a face lift to sculpt her cheekbones and smooth the natural lines between her nose and lips. This Morning airs weekdays on ITV1 from 10am and is available to stream on ITVX.
