London theatre reviews

The lighting may be dim in the Menier Chocolate Factory’s auditorium – reconfigured to resemble an atmospheric 1960s NYC cabaret club – but the star wattage is bright…

This lightweight musical about the very ‘complicated’ FBI director J Edgar Hoover – who dominated America’s 20th century,  serving for 48 years – began life as a 1994 radio play starring Kelsey Grammar. Exactly how it ended up making its stage debut 32 years later at an off-West End theatre in Islington I am fairly unclear. But on some level it’s obviously something to do with the big name creative team…

Director Simon Stone – an Australian – seems obsessed with the English upper-middle classes. He works internationally but in this country, at least, his free adaptations of the classics all concern sweary, witty, slightly awful posh people who live in nice Grand Designs-style houses in which they say funny, cutting things until tragedy inevitably raises its head…

Sam Ryder is not the Messiah. But he did come second for the UK in Eurovision, which places him close in some people’s eyes. And you can see the logic of casting him as the lead in a splashy summer revival of Jesus Christ Superstar…

If you’re in the market for a meticulously accurate, 100 percent culturally sensitive drama about the events that led to the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand… then approach US playwright Rajiv Joseph’s play with caution…

This nailbitingly tense thriller is director Felix Barrett’s second ‘normal’ piece of theatre to open in London in the last year, following West End smash Paranormal Activity.

When Richard Nelson's Springwood was announced last year, it arrived with an impressive pedigree: it was set to mark Stanley Tucci's directorial debut. Since then, Tucci has dropped out (starry scheduling conflicts!), with US playwright Nelson stepping into the director’s chair himself. It's hard not to wonder whether Tucci might have coaxed something more dynamic from the material. 

There is evidence to suggest that giving the hero of Edmond Rostan’s French classic a big prosthetic nose is increasingly considered passé…

Writer Stephen Beresford’s musical adaptation of his own 2014 film is a triumph. Under the assured direction of Matthew Warchus – who directed the film – with a by-turns playful and powerful score by Christopher Nightingale, Josh Cohen and DJ Walde, Pride succeeds in packing a wallop of an emotional punch while never neglecting to find the very human humour in even its most sombre moments…

A Frank Sinatra musical is a great opportunity: a titan of the 20th century, he was a complex figure who was both emblematic of America and in many ways an outsider to it. He also had a pretty stonking songbook. But this sauceless bio-musical manages to do the impressive job of acknowledging Sinatra’s many, uh, foibles while making him seem incredibly bland as a human being…