music

Dido, Unicorn Theatre

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by Laura Kressly

If theatre has a reputation for being inaccessible and snobbishly high cultured, opera is doubly regarded as such. Fortunately, the Unicorn and ENO teamed up to make this young people’s version of Dido and Aeneas, pared down to 60 minutes with an easy-to-understand story for secondary school students. However, the story is pitched as placing Dido’s teenaged daughter at the centre, but this version is not reconfigured enough to make her more than a passive observer of her mother’s collapse.

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Amour, Charing Cross Theatre

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by Amy Toledano

Post-World War II, the city of Paris is putting itself back together. People go to work, people get married, people get by. Monsieur Dusoleil (Gary Tushaw) epitomises this attitude, working harder than the other clerks in the office, and yet, he feels the sting of loneliness. Amongst the other tortured, Parisian souls is Isabelle (Anna O’Byrne), a woman married off much too young and trapped by a much older man, known simply as the Prosector (Alasdair Harvey).

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Hotter, Soho Theatre

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by Christina Bulford

How well do you know your inner critic? When you look in the mirror, what does she or he whisper in your ear, or shout loudly in your face? “Too fat! Too skinny! Too jiggly! Not hot enough!” Ell Porter and Mary Higgins have not only listened to these voices, they’ve let them out of their heads and, unabashed, onto the stage – from fat to fitness, men to menopause, dildos to doctor’s surgeries, periods to poo and all the body bits in between. As former lovers they claim to know each other extremely well, inside and out, and go to great lengths to get to the bottom of all this body-business. Pun absolutely intended.

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Camille O’Sullivan – Cave, Wilton’s Music Hall

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by Tom Brocklehurst

Camille O’Sullivan performs a set of Nick Cave songs at Wilton’s Music Hall: I go into this gig being a fan of all three elements here. Camille is one of the most striking and versatile cabaret singers of her generation, Nick Cave is a brilliant songwriter, and Wilton’s Music Hall is a gorgeous, atmospheric venue perfectly suited to this sort of show. It absolutely doesn’t disappoint.

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Fiddler on the Roof, Playhouse Theatre

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by Louis Train

When I told my mother I was moving to Russia, she sighed and reminded me that to her, Eastern Europe was a cemetery. Her grandparents had fled during the Russian Civil War, and her parents had grown up watching details of the Holocaust emerge, night by night, like a dark beacon announcing the violent and final end of Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

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SIX, Arts Theatre

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by Hailey Bachrach

SIX knows exactly what it’s doing wrong, which is what makes it so aggravating. After an hour of catty jostling between the six ex-wives of King Henry VIII, who are competing in song to see who had the worst time of it, the show turns around and tries to scold itself for pitting the women against each other. It’s the ultimate in cheap, have-your-cake-and-eat-it moments: get the laughs, then admit they were lazy ones.

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How Eva Von Schnippisch Won WWII, Vault Festival

How Eva Von Schnippisch Won WWII

by an anonymous guest critic

The Vaults is the ideal venue for what is essentially a one-woman, Weimar era Cabaret show.

Stephanie Ware plays Eva Von Schnippisch, a hard-drinking, fun-loving cabaret performer in wartime Berlin. We learn about Eva’s rise to become one of Berlin’s top night club performers, which leads to the British secret service recruiting her to do undercover work gathering intelligence in the fight against Germany.

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Waitress, Adelphi Theatre

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by Laura Kressly

Butter, sugar, flour – these pie crust ingredients form a comforting motif that gets Jenna through each day. There are her solace every morning as she bakes her insecurities, worries and feelings into pies that are served in a small-town American diner. The young waitress is full of hopes and dreams but her story, like the script that contains it, has another ingredient so thoroughly embedded in the narrative that it leaves such a nasty aftertaste that it overpowers everything else.

CW: abuse, abortion, assault

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