Review – A Very Expensive Poison, Old Vic

As Phil joined the queue to get into the Old Vic he engaged in a discussion with two ladies in front of him about whether they were in the queue for the loos or the theatre. We explained it was the correct queue for the stalls.

“Are you regular?” asked one. “That’s a bit personal” replied Phil. “Oh, no” said she, realising the ambiguity “I meant regular theatregoers”. Much hilarity ensued.

A Very Expensive Poison is not about people’s addiction to theatre. But with seats for this production costing up to £150 for the”charitable package”(add your own gag) and a top price of £140 for “standard stalls” without a whiff of a package for the Old Vic’s next production Lungs, it might as well be.

Review – Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Chichester Festival Theatre

Notes for Andrew who is due to see this within a few weeks.

Boring travel details first: We put ourselves in an upbeat mood by eating pies (inappropriately cold) as we travelled to Chichester before being thrown unceremoniously off the train at Barnham. Jolly mood quickly dissipated. Allow plenty of time to get there.

No direct trains back to London. Swathes of grumpy Sondheim aficionados cluttering the platform. Return journey: 3 and a half hours.

Do the dream team of Messrs Ball and Staunton appreciate the lengths we go to?

Director Jonathan Kent has updated Sweeney Todd‘s melodrama to 1930s. Why? It’s a piece of Victorian Grand Guignol (Music and lyrics Stephen Sondheim, book Hugh Wheeler). Updating adds nothing. Fortunately it doesn’t detract too much. Doesn’t Kent realise “You Gotta Get a Gimmick” is from a different Sondheim show?

Review – Imagine This The Musical! New London Theatre

Whatever next? Abu Ghraib the Musical!? Guantánamo the Musical!?

Any new musical is a tremendous risk but to stage one set in 1942 about the occupants of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw staging a show about Masada (where a siege by troops of the Roman Empire in AD 73 led to the mass suicide of Jewish rebels who preferred death to surrender) seems like, well, suicide.

Choose the same venue that housed the mega-flop Gone With the Wind – The Musical! and you might as well be go round backstage shouting “Macbeth” at every Tom, Dick and Manny.

Then there is the misfortune of staging it at a time when “the R word” is tightening belts.

And finally you have to take into account that this is, after all, Whingertown and the Whingers are curiously resistant to new musicals (all the good musicals having already been written in our humble opinion).