Review _ Romeo and Juliet, Garrick Theatre

Marisa Berenson!

Many will have been attracted to this Kenneth Branagh/Rob Ashford directed, rather starrily cast Romeo and Juliet, by the other names: Richard Madden, Lily James, Derek Jacobi and Meera Syal.

Not us. Though to be entirely honest her casting hadn’t been announced when we booked, but our interest went off the Richter when it was. For younger viewers, Berenson played Natalia Landauer in the film of Cabaret and is in the (to us) classic “This was a cold of the bosom, not of the nose” scene. When we get man colds we have described them thusly ever since and “Ze plegm…zat comes in the tubes.” will forever be pronounced the Berenson way as “pleg-ma”.

Review – Anna Christie, Donmar Warehouse

Dear Andrew,

They say you can’t be in two places at the same time, but obviously the Whingers can. You swanned off to the Edinburgh Festival and unlike last year, you haven’t even had the courtesy to send even a postcard.

Your departing instructions were to “mop the surrounds”: take in the Pinter you suggested or perhaps the Caryl Churchill. Thanks a bundle.

Then you handed me the much sought-after tickets for Anna Christie – hot presumably because Jude Law is in it and not because you’ve been holding them in clammy palms. And it is a Eugene O’Neill to boot (not a master of the art of  brevity) while you’ll be seeing shows in Edinburgh that last what –  an hour or less?

But what would you have made of it? In a Being John Malkovich sort of way I’m going to try the unthinkable and get inside your head and imaginge what you’d have made of it.

Review – Shrek the Musical, Theatre Royal Drury Lane

The Curate’s Egg of this summer’s musicals…

Review – Promises, Promises, Broadway Theatre

We may have to make our Show Rating system even more complicated and bewildering that it already is.

For how are we supposed to give a single rating to a show that was a 2 or a 3 at the interval and a 5 15 minutes into the second act?

This is Promises, Promises at The Broadway Theatre, the Burt Bacharach musical with lyrics by Hal David, a book by Neil Simon. But the classy provenance does not end there for it is based on Billy Wilder‘s classic film, The Apartment.

That’s a good start to proceedings. But there’s more: add Sean Hayes (Jack from Will & Grace), Kristin Chenoweth (alcoholic April Rhodes in Glee) and put  Chicago-the-movie Donmar Streetcar director  Rob Ashford in charge of it all and it’s looking very promising.

But wait! Get scenic designer Scott Pask (Hair, Behanding) to construct some gorgeous sixties chic à la Mad Men and his twin brother Bruce Pask to work wonders with the color (sic) palette for the costumes and you’ve got something that simply could not fail except, except…

Review – A Streetcar Named Desire, Donmar Warehouse

The happiness of the Whingers depends on a lot of things when they visit a theatre: good sightlines, brevity, amusement and a competitively priced bar. But unlike Blanche Dubois they do not seek or expect kindness from strangers (or friends for that matter). Indeed, it is a word that rarely features in their limited vocabularies.

Brevity may also have been in somewhat short supply at the Donmar Warehouse on Monday when we dropped in to see Rob Ashford‘s production of Tennessee Williams‘s Pulitzer Prize winning classic A Streetcar Named Desire: it lumbers in at at a massive three hours. But for once the Whingers had struck lucky in the advance booking ticket lottery that the Donmar organises for its “friends” and for the first time in yonks we weren’t sitting to the side of the thrust stage but at the front, where the critics get to sit (in fact Mark Lawson or his Doppelgänger was in front of us). And boy what a difference it made!