Review – Sunny Afternoon, Hampstead Theatre

” It’s not about the words. It’s about the atmosphere” says Ray Davies (John Dagleish) towards the end of the new Kinks’ musical. How apt.

By the finale, that atmosphere was something akin to a party. A party of people jiggling around (but not like their dads at discos – for this audience was largely too elderly to have parents still alive), in the form of a stage-managed standing dancing ovation. Sunny Afternoon is looking to the West End. Not very rock and roll. It ends up wanting to be Mamma Mia.

Review – Chariots of Fire, Gielgud Theatre

A bit slow off the starting blocks with this one.

Anyway, a tip: don’t ask the ushers at Chariots of Fire if Mr Bean is appearing. At the first post-opening ceremony performance Phil checked but they had apparently been asked several times already.

Failing to obtain tickets for any Olympic events, this seemed the nearest alternative to try and get into the spirit of the games and Phil was intrigued: he’d been having a drink outside a hostelry near the Gielgud Theatre a few days earlier when a complete stranger came up and congratulated him on his performance in COF. Who could she mean? Most of the cast weren’t even born when that strangely over-awarded 1981 film came out which left a few of the more senior cast members. So Nicholas Grace or Simon Williams perhaps? Bizarre.

This West End transfer from the Hampstead Theatre was announced before it even opened there; so in some ways swifter than Mark Cavendish Lizzie Armitstead Wiggo.

Review – No Naughty Bits, Hampstead Theatre

In which one of the Whingers boasts of a personal involvement in editing one of the Python’s work. But we’ll come back to that in due course.*

Steve Thompson‘s (Doctor Who, Sherlock) play No Naughty Bits has an intriguing premise: for the first US national broadcast of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1975 the network edited out the ruder elements for the American market. Michael Palin was coaxed into flying to New York with Terry Gilliam to persuade ABC to reinstate the cuts. When negotiations failed they ended up making their case to a Federal Court judge.