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The annual announcement of the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre summer season is always a pleasing promise of warmer times to come. And this year’s is extra special: former OAT artistic director Timothy Sheader ran the place for a walloping 18 years, but he’s now gone to run the Donmar Warehouse.
The summer of 2025, then, will mark the debut of new AD Drew McOnie. And it’s a great looking season, kicking off with the transfer of the hit, eight times Tony-nominated Broadway musical Shucked (May 10-Jun 14). It’s comedy about a preposterously insular rural American community whose corn starts to die, leading to naive couple Maizy and Bill heading out into the wider world to look for answers. A new UK cast will star a transfer of Jack O’Brien’s original production for five weeks only (although a transfer seems a distinct possibility).
Following that, one for real musical theatre-slash dance nerds: Dream Ballets: A Triple Bill (Jun 19-22) is a trio of new dance pieces set to the music from the ‘dream ballet’ sequence from the Rodgers & Hammerstein classics Allegro, Oklahoma! and Carousel by Julia Cheng, Shelley Maxwell and Kate Prince respectively.
Next up, and the only ‘proper’ play of the season is a revival for Dominic Cooke’s 2007 adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s classic YA dystopian race drama Noughts & Crosses (Jun 28-Jul 26) – previously commissioned by the RSC, it gets its first revival here courtesy of Open Air Theatre associate director Tinuke Craig. An adaptation of the first novel in the series, it follows two childhood best friends as the negotiate a Europe segregated between lighter-skinned Noughts and darker-skinned Crosses.
The ‘big’ August musical is Lerner & Loewe’s Brigadoon (Aug 2-Sep 20), which McOnie himself will direct and choreograph. A smash when it debut in 1947, the show about two American tourists who stumble across the titular mystical Scottish village that only appears once every hundred years hasn’t been seen in this country for decades. That’s likely to be because it’s kind of offensive to the Scottish, but the revival has been adapted by top Scots playwight Rona Munro, who has hopefully de-cringed its sweeping romance.
And finally, Roald Dahl adaptation kids’ musical The Enormous Crocodile (Aug 15-Sep 7) will be back for a fresh run of daytime performances.
In general it’s a super-fun looking season that sticks to the late Sheader formula of two-musicals-and-a-serious-play-plus-some-kids-stuff. This is fine: people expect big, shiny but interesting musicals at the OAT, and both McOnie and Craig were veterans of the previous regime. The short run Dream Ballets suggests McOnie may operate a slightly more dance-heavy programme, and it’ll be interesting to see if any Shakespeare appears in future years – for much of its lengthy history the OAT was a Bard-only theatre, which changed some time ago, but our national poet has always been kept in the mix, albeit not every year. Still, a populist, confident and interesting start – classic OAT.
The 2025 Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre summer season will go on sale Thursday February 6.
The National Theatre has announced its 2025 summer season.
The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2025.
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