It’s perhaps one of the most popular Christmas movies around, with merchandise flooding the shelves every year and a family rewatch becoming a tradition for many, and since it’s stage debut in 2010, Elf has proven just as loved on stage as it is on screen. With success across North America and beyond, 2022 saw the festive musical return to the London stage for its second run since 2015, returning once more to the vast Dominion Theatre. It is maybe safe to assume that most peo

Roast dinners with all the trimmings, meeting up with friends and family, exchanging presents, watching tv and constantly reaching for ‘just one more’ chocolate; all things that one would associate with Christmas and on top of all that, many families consider a trip to the theatre to also be a tradition. And whilst pantomimes may be the go-to, many may be looking for something else. Just off Mount Pleasant Road, Royal Tunbridge Wells, stands the Trinity Theatre, a grand churc

It’s a Disney classic and a family favourite, delighting all ages for many years and consistently raising the bar for the type of special effects that can be achieved in a live stage production. ‘Mary Poppins’, the world’s most magical nanny, with her technicolour adventures, fantastic stories, and mystical ways, has been a stage hit since 2004, enjoying London and New York success and popular tours. It swooped back into the West End, back into the Prince Edward Theatre in 20

Please note, the photographs used this in review may not feature the cast members mentioned as at the performance I attended, a number of roles were played by the talented understudies. Whilst it is not uncommon for a musical to seek inspiration from real life events, I don’t think, looking back a few years now, that someone would have thought that a musical based on the events on and surrounding September 11th, 2001, would work, let alone prove to be a global hit. When you t

It’s the biggest public vote theatre awards in the UK, and the build-up has well and truly kicked off for the 2023 WhatsOnStage Awards, with nominations announced in full. Winners will be revealed at a star-studded ceremony on Sunday 12 February at the Prince of Wales Theatre in the heart of London’s West end. The ‘Best performer in a musical’ nominees are Courtney Bowman for ‘Legally Blonde’, Katie Brayben for ‘Tammy Faye’, Divina De Campo for ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’, Jo

Okay, hands up in the air, I’ll admit. I’ve never seen the film ‘Sister Act’. Shocking, I know, as many of you may consider it a classic, but here we are. So, other than knowing a few of the songs and having a very basic idea of the plot, I walked into the UK Tour of ‘Sister Act The Musical’ at Theatre Royal Plymouth relatively blind. ‘Sister Act’ tells the story of singer Deloris Van Cartier (played here by Sandra Marvin), who after witnessing her gangster boyfriend Curtis (

Pantomimes are as much a part of Christmas as the decorations, the festive TV specials, and the roast dinner with all the trimmings. Up and down the country over the next month or so, audiences will be delighted with stories of fairy tales complete with popular music, outlandish costumes, big song, and dance numbers and plenty of audience interaction, and whilst theatres are now fully open again, Peter Duncan’s Panto Online will continue to provide at home entertainment this

The act of turning movies into musicals is commonplace these days, and over the years a number of musicals have gone the other way, jumping from the stage onto screens up and down the country. From Mamma Mia to Dear Evan Hansen, I’m sure that I am not the only one thinking that sometimes stage musical movie adaptations work and sometimes they don’t. The latest stage production to receive the silver screen treatment is Roald Dahl’s Matilda the musical, and let’s say this strai

As of June 2022, there were three hundred and eighty-three seven hundred thousand podcast listeners around the world, with that number expected to rise to four hundred and twenty-four million by the end of the year. Listening to podcasts is now the hobby of many, and the types of podcasts you could listen to are seemingly endless. From family life, true crime, comedy and sports, there’s something for everyone and now there is a new podcast flying out into the world, combining

These days jukebox musicals, seen as guaranteed crowd pleasers, are commonplace up and down the country, entertaining those visiting the glittering west end and sending audiences flocking to their regional theatres in their droves. These popular shows often rely heavily on a singer/group’s most well-known hits, the types of songs that have theatregoers proclaiming, ‘hey I know this one’ and sending them home with a tune stuck in their heads, but sometimes a show can deep dive

When you think of Mischief Theatre images of slapstick hilarity, showbusiness-y attempts gone wrong, and the now globally known Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society spring to mind and as much as we love this and it has been a great success for the company, recent years have seen Mischief branch out to new things. ‘Groan Ups’ saw the company step away from the old school slapstick and towards more wordplay and some more serious topics and with their newest offering ‘Good Luck, St

Catchy songs, custard pies and peddle cars, ‘Bugsy Malone’ is a classic. Seen as a gangster movie for kids, it takes us back to 1920’s New York, when Speakeasy’s were all the rage and gang warfare was rife. The popular 1976 film saw the entire cast consist of children, playing adult roles with their singing voices dubbed by adults, so how exactly does that transfer to the stage. Directed by Sean Holmes and choreographed by Drew McOnie, this Lyric Hammersmith production of ‘Bu

Pictures in this review may not feature the 2022 touring cast I feel the need to start this review with a little bit of truth about me. I will willingly put my hands up and say that I have never got Shakespeare, I have always struggled with it as a whole. I was never really shown it at school, other than that modern retelling of ‘Romeo & Juliet’. But other than that, I had to sit and read it and be expected to understand it and the whole act of having it drilled into me made

Co-produced by Figueteatret I Nordland (Nordland Visual Theatre) and Theatre Royal Plymouth, and presented by Extraordinary Bodies, ‘Delicate’ explores the idea that sometimes in order to find your place in the world, things need to go wrong and fall apart. What exactly does the word ‘Delicate’ mean? The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as ‘needing careful treatment, especially because easily damaged’, but how does that apply to someone’s life. In this production, we are intro

Please note that the photographs featured here may not feature all of the cast members mentioned in this review. Billed as ‘theatre as live as it gets’, the UK Tour of ‘An Improbable Musical’ invites the audience to witness the creation of a brand new musical every night, based purely on tiny suggestions from audience members and made up as it goes along by a gang of world class improvisors. Fans of ‘Showstopper: The Improvised Musical’ and ‘Mischief Movie Night’ may think th

With hits including ‘(You Make Me Feel) Like A Natural Women’, ‘Take Good Care Of My Baby’, ‘The Locomotion’ and ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’, singer/songwriter Carole King is the voice and talent behind many a famous tune, and she soared into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The stage musical adaptation of her story entitled ‘Beautiful: The Carole King Musical’ premiered back in 2013, with Broadway, West End and touring productions proving popular with theatre goers and the sh

If you think of theatre shows that feature stories from the LGBTQ+ Community, it may be ‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ or ‘Kinky Boots’ that spring to mind, shows telling stories of those who struggle to be accepted for being themselves and it is these kind of stories that we often here but here is where Rob Madge’s ‘My Son’s a Queer (But What Can You Do?)’ breaks the mould. This is a show that is all about acceptance, but not the search for it. In this auto-biographical p

Following on from such successes as ‘The Red’ and ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, Original Theatre returns with their next online offering; Shomit Dutta’s ‘Stumped’. This interesting piece tells the story of two great playwrights, Samuel Beckett (played here by Stephen Tompkinson) and Harold Pinter (played by Andrew Lancel). The two were great friends and they shared a love for cricket, something that Pinter described as ‘the greatest thing that God created on Earth’, with t

Fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe, performer and producer Shôn Dale-Jones brings ‘Still Floating’ to the Theatre Royal Plymouth, revisiting his award-winning show ‘Floating’ from 2006 and twisting it with a present day tale of returning home and exploring how things have changed. In 2006, Dale-Jones played his on-stage alter ego Hugh Hughes in ‘Floating’, telling the surreal and comical tale of Anglesey floating away from the mainland, becoming an independent land under the rul

The climate crisis is a major topic of conversation these days, with many ongoing discussions trying to find solutions to the problems and a desperation to source alternative means of power racing to the forefront. It’s a hard-hitting topic but one that the theatre world isn’t shying away from and soon Fuel Theatre, well known for producing ‘fresh work for adventurous people by inspiring artists’, will be presenting a brand-new show that looks directly at the issue. ‘The Gret