Make Shakespeare Lowbrow Again! That's a rallying cry I can get behind. Willy wrote for the groundlings - plenty of sex and violence, interspersed with fart jokes and casual xenophobia. When your audience are drunk and violent, you really need to bring your best rhyming couplets. Shitfaced Shakespeare knows its West End audience have had a few refreshments before the show. Their twist is - so has one of the cast members. Take six classically trained thesps, get one of them pissed, proceed…
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Everybody knows the story of Juliet and her Romeo. Everybody. It's a cultural touchstone unlike any other. It has been remixed, reinterpreted, reimagined, and probably remastered into 4K 3D. So what can a new production of it bring? Well, for a start, ukuleles. The cast - all six of them - give the prologue in song. Reminding us (in updated English) that we all know what's coming. It had never occurred to me that the rhythm and rhyme of Shakespeare's poetry fits perfectly to music. Now,…
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This play is exhausting. It is an absolutely relentless comedy. I don't mean a few scattered laughs, I mean a full-on assault on your comedy nerves. It starts as a high-energy farce and escalates and escalates and escalates until you can't trust your senses any more. If you're unfamiliar with the plot - as I was - it's a remake of a 1970s piece of agit-prop theatre in which the death of a suspect in police custody is investigated. The titular Anarchist died after falling from a 4th floor…
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It's always slightly weird when entertainment transfers from one medium to another. The actors on stage never look like the characters you imagined when you read the book. A prog-rock concept album loses its grandeur when transferred to 27 part Netflix series. And the subversive intent of the comic book is neutered to make a blockbuster movie. So what happens when a hit radio show is transformed into a West End Spectacular? Magic! Radio 4's Bleak Expectations always surpassed other radio c…
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Well, this is a glorious mess! The puppetry is astounding. The grey-clad puppeteers manipulate their charges with grace, precision, and joy. The work is so much more intricate than, say, Avenue Q. The mannerisms of the Tom Cruise doll are perfectly executed, with subtle moments of genius. The puppets range from miniscule to gigantic, with some requiring multiple people to bring them to life. The problem with satire is that it relies on current events. If you watch old Spitting Image episodes …
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I've never heard such whooping and hollering from a Bloomsbury Theatre audience. When Rachel Bloom prances on to the stage it is like seeing a revivalist preacher work the faithful. It would have been so easy for Bloom to rest on her laurels and give a "best of Bloom" revue - the crowd would have lapped it up. But, instead, she puts in the hard work to make something new and incredible. Because Rachel Bloom is a fucking professional. All comedy shows for the foreseeable future are going to be…
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Doing vocal impressions is hard. Doing them while singing is even harder. But Chirstina Bianco does it effortlessly, backwards and in high heels. I remember seeing the Forbidden Broadway show decades ago - Bianco is an alumna - and being slightly confused by all the "inside baseball" terminology. This new one-woman show is much more accessible. We were treated to Shania Twain singing Bucks Fizz, Celine Dion doing West End classics, and Julie Andrews being very rude! It's nice that it's not…
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