Theatre Royal Drury Lane

While Jamie Lloyd’s productions often involve mad celebrity casting of the sort you’d never have expected to see in your lifetime – see his imminent US production of Waiting for Godot starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter – he also has go to actors, and it’s a pleasure to see two of them join forces for this middle-aged Much Ado. MCU veterans Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell have never actually shared the screen in any of the Marvel films, but they’ll share the stage nightly for a couple of months in the second half of Lloyd’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane season of Shakespeare, playing bickering lovers Benedick and Beatrice. Hiddleston previously starred in Lloyd’s revival of Pinter’s Betrayal in the West End and Broadway; Atwell has been in two of Lloyd’s earlier productions, The Faith Machine and The Pride.  The remaining cast will largely be made up of the company of The Tempest, the first show in Lloyd’s two-play Shakespeare stand at Theatre Royal Drury Lane: Mara Huf (Hero), Forbes Masson (Leonato), Phillip Olagoke (Friar Francis), Mason Alexander Park (Margaret), James Phoon (Claudio) and Tim Steed (Don John), plus Mika Onyx Johnson as Borachio and Gerald Kyd as Don Pedro.

Occupying the gap left by the mighty Frozen at the huge Theatre Royal Drury Lane, Hercules is a fascinating choice of Disney film for the megacorp to adapt as its new stage musical – although the 1997 film turned a profit, it was only a modest one and it remains one of the more obscure movies of its blockbuster ’90s. Still, the Disney name plus that of the Greek demigod himself is doubtless brand recognition enough to draw a crowd, and moreover word from the German debut of Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s adaptation – with songs by Alan Menken and David Zippel – is that it’s very good. Luke Brady will play the title role in a musiclal that presumably follows the film’s approximate story in explaining how Hercules came to be only half-divine and following his storied hero-ing career and romantic entanglement with the sarcastic Meg.