Only an Octave Apart, Wilton’s Music Hall

by Zahid Fayyaz

This show comes straight from New York to one of the world’s oldest surviving music halls in East London. It is a very classy and entertaining tour de force. The concept is a simple one – that a cabaret artist and an opera performer, Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo, join forces to sing songs from their respective fields. The message is despite being from different disciplines they have a lot of similarities, except for being one octave apart.

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Tick, Tick…Boom!, Bridge House Theatre

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by Amy Toledano

Before Jonathan Larson’s iconic musical RENT took the world by storm, there was the autobiographical show, Tick, Tick…Boom!. Originally performed by Larson as an solo show before his tragic death in 1996, the piece was later revamped into a three-hander by David Autumn.

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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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Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, Young Vic

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by Maeve Campbell

Angel Cruz has shot a man in the ass. He says he didn’t kill the religious cult leader, who
had apparently brainwashed his best friend Joey, but this man is now dead. This is where
we start Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train. What follows is a compelling exploration of guilt,
goodness and godliness as Angel, incarcerated in New York’s infamous Rikers Island,
confronts his emphatic public defender, a sadistic prison guard and a charismatic, born-
again Christian serial killer.

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Hadestown, National Theatre

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By Laura Kressly

How can we radically reinvent myths and classic literature? I mean, really radically – not in a box ticking way, or a modernisation the production wears like a piece of costume that doesn’t really change the thematic core of the story. I mean thoroughly, totally, completely. So all traces of horrible ‘isms’ and ‘ists’ are either reframed or criticised. 

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The Unbuilt City, King’s Head Theatre

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by Laura Kressly

Claudia is a reclusive collector whiling away the time in her Brooklyn Heights townhouse overlooking the East River and lower Manhattan. Jonah is a young writer day jobbing for his old university’s academic archives. He’s been sent to see if Claudia has a priceless item, long thought lost, hidden away in her home. As her life approaches it’s midnight hour, she is desperate to cling to the last thing that gives her some power and Jonah is desperate to win this commission which would financially secure his immediate future.

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Long Day’s Journey into Night, Brooklyn Academy of Music

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by guest critic Steven Strauss

On its surface, the title Long Day’s Journey into Night describes the looooong four acts it takes Eugene O’Neill’s play to chronicle the story of one day-into-night in the life of the Tyrone family. Metaphorically, it suggests how the play utilizes this micro-slice of life to depict how this autobiographical family descends from the daylight of sanity to the darkness of madness in a macro sense, and how their projected reality in the sunlight of day masks the true darkness of night lingering underneath. 

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The Seafarer, Irish Repertory Theatre

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by guest critic Steven Strauss

The Seafarer, Conor McPherson’s Olivier Award-nominated play that premiered at the National Theatre in 2006, imagines the plight of humanity as that of lonely sailors lost at sea, teetering on the safe, dry deck of morality above treacherously immoral waters. No matter how far you roam, the Devil that is your sins of the past can always find you. Walking on water isn’t a foreign concept to celestial entities. A reckoning will come, and spiritual debts must be paid.  

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