Things to do in London today

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: Harry Shearer (of The Simpsons and Spinal Tap), Tom Leopold (a writer for Cheers and Seinfeld) and Peter Matz (Barbra Streisand’s musical director, who died in 2002). Given Shearer – who seems to be the driving force behind this production – reputedly makes $300,000 per episode of The Simpsons, it’s not hard to imagine he’s thrown a bit of his own cash at a musical that – while modestly sized – is as big a show as the King's Head Theatre has ever staged. It even has a bona fide US star in the form of Bryan Batt (aka Mad Men’s Salvatore Romano) who plays Hoover. The man was infamous for harvesting kompromat on people he wanted to blackmail, (or people he might want to blackmail one day,) or whose love lives he was just generally interested in. He’s also alleged to have been a closeted gay man and crossdresser: there isn’t really hard public domain evidence for this, especially the crossdressing bit, but certainly he was a ‘confirmed bachelor’ who never married and lived with fellow agent Clyde Tolson, so, er, go figure. The musical goes all in on the idea that Hoover was...

‘We are Malory Towers girls, not ruffians!’ shouts Sally Hope (Bethany Wooding) in Emma Rice’s musical take on Enid Blyton’s classic children’s books. Prior to this production, that line would have summed up Malory Towers as I imagined it. I was a big reader growing up, but not a Blyton girl. A post-war story set at an all-girls boarding school in Cornwall, Malory Towers to me was stuffy and staid. Yet watching Emma Rice’s musical take on Blyton’s books (first staged in 2019, now playing amongst the faded glamour of Alexandra Palace as part of a UK tour), I found myself utterly caught up in and charmed by this world. I credit this to the hyper-talented cast of actor-musos, who take Rice’s oftentimes simple script and imbue it with life. And yes, there are the obligatory hockey sticks and hijinks – ‘whatever that means’, one character notes, with a wink-like shrug to the audience – but they’re mere accoutrements to the good old fashioned storytelling on display. This is not the Malory Towers I imagined, and all the better for it. The first rug pull comes in the show’s opening moments. Lez Brotherton’s white textured set, a canvas with the unequivocal trappings of a school, is transformed using projection and lighting. Neon lights flash and pop music plays, as a gaggle of school girls in modern dress sprint onto the stage. These present day scenes unexpectedly bookend the show, and while they’re rushed through at such speed as to leave little room for world building, they...

This review is from 2025. Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical returns for 2026. It’s been years since there was anything secret about Secret Cinema. The immersive entertainment franchise that began life as cool screenings of mystery films in mystery locations has long been too big a deal – and required too big an audience – to leave things to chance. But massive success has left it in danger of looking artistically adrift, locked in a competition with itself to stage ever more lavish extravaganzas based around ever more obvious films.  Its last London show, 2022’s Guardians of the Galaxy: The Live Immersive Experience, awkwardly grafted together a lavish immersive theatre experience with its own self-contained plot and a screening of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. The fact you could buy a ticket that didn’t include the film screening felt indicative of where Secret Cinema had found itself.  If the latest doesn’t exactly take things back to basics, then it does at least put the classic 1978 film musical at the heart of the evening: you are going to watch Grease. In fact you’re arguably going to watch Grease twice. In Secret Cinema’s Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical, the original film is shown on large screens that are dotted around the cavernous new Battersea Park venue Evolution, which has been lavishly tricked out to serve as Rydale High, aka the school Grease is set in. But then there are live actors who pop up to take over singing and often talking duties in key...

It’s difficult to pinpoint why the moment Paddington walks on stage at the start of his new musical is quite so moving.  Spoiler alert: ‘Paddington’ is a small woman (Arti Shah) in a bear costume (by Tahra Zafar), with a regular-sized man (James Hameed) doing the voice and remote controlling the facial expressions from backstage. Which doesn’t sound groundbreaking but it’s enough to make us believe that Paddington is really in the room with us. Which is surely the point of the endeavor. He’s not the Paddington of the films: he looks different, more teddy-like, and Hameed’s voice is much younger and more boyish than Ben Whishaw’s. He looks more like the Paddington of Michael Bond’s books, but he’s not really him either, on account of all the singing he does and how much more wordy that makes him. He is a new Paddington. But he is, fundamentally, Paddington, right there in the room with us. Does that make it a good performance? I mean sure, he’s a triple threat: adorable, polite and also a bear. The normal rules for a musical theatre lead are suspended here. But Hameed can sing well, and there’s enough expression in both face and body for Paddington to feel genuinely alive to us. Shah doesn’t really dance, but a couple of elaborately choreographed sequences in which our hero pings around causing chaos are impressively physical. Main attraction aside, a fine creative team led by director Luke Sheppard has created a very enjoyable show indeed. It’s by and large a stage...

Despite some formiddable hits to her name (and that of her old band Rufus), Queen of Funk Chaka Khan is perhaps not quite a big enough deal in 2026 to get a full-blown open ended West End run for a new musical about her life and songs. But this more modest affair – with a book by Nia T Hill and direction by Racky Plews – seems about right. And there’s plenty to get its teeth into, with Khan’s story a classic tale of a working class woman triumphing over the odds in a sexist industry and coming out on top. Plus it’s wall to wall bangers, with the likes of ‘I Feel For You’, ‘Tell Me Something Good’, ‘Ain’t Nobody’, ‘Sweet Thing’, ‘Higher Love’ and ‘Through The Fire’ all present and correct. Alexandra Burke will play Khan in this rescheduled run that follows dates at the Peacock Theatre that had to be cancelled.  

London’s playful homegrown circus company Revel Puck returns for a start of summer stint in southeast London before decamping to the Edinburgh Fringe. The company’s current touring show is called A Glimmer Daze Gambit and follows a naive duo desperate to join the circus – despite never having seen one – and find it’s not exactly what they expected. But essentially what you need to know is that it’s 100 minutes of circus thrills, from acrobats both local and international. 

Love’s Labour’s Lost belongs to that club of rarely peformed Shakespeare plays where the name is more famous than the actual story. This summer, though, it gets its biggest Globe – and indeed, London – production in over 20 years, with a lavish revival headed up by director Indiana Lown-Collins. We don’t know a lot about casting, but we do know that the cast is being put through a flamenco bootcamp, the better to take on this Spain-set drama about four lords who forswear women in order to better focus on their studies and general manliness – but things are complicated when four hot women arrive in court on a diplomatic mission.

This review is from 2022. My Neighbour Totoro is now running at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End with a mostly new cast. Studio Ghibli’s 1988 cartoon masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is a stunningly beautiful, devastatingly charming film, in which not a huge amount happens per se.  It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their dad and basically get up to a lot of extremely normal things… while also fleetingly encountering a succession of astounding otherworldly creatures, most notably Totoro, a gigantic furry woodland spirit, and the Cat Bus, a cat that is also a bus (or a bus that is also a cat, whatever). Its most iconic scene involves young heroines Mei and Satsuki waiting at a bus stop, and Totoro shuffling up behind them, chuckling at their umbrella (a new concept to him) and then hopping on his unearthly public transport. So if you’re going to adapt it for the stage you’re going to have to absolutely nail the puppets you use to portray Totoro and co.  The RSC absolutely understood the brief here, although you’ll have to take my word for it, as for this first ever stage adaption – by Tom Morton-Smith, overseen by legendary Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi – the company hasn’t allowed a single publicity photo of a single puppet (bar some chickens) to be released.  Nonetheless, the puppets – designed by Basil Twist, assembled by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop – are fucking spectacular. They have to be fucking spectacular because that’s the...

This review is from Southwark Playhouse in October 2025. Hot Mess returns for a summer 2026 run at The Other Palace While the millennia-old union between planet Earth and humanity might not be the first coupling that springs to mind when you think of unhealthy relationships, there’s no denying it is pretty toxic. The Earth gives! Humanity takes! The Earth had boundaries, and humanity violated ‘em – first digging up the ground to mine for coal and drill for oil, then jetting into space with a wandering eye, pushing the atmosphere to its limits in a bid to see what else was out there.   It’s safe to say we’ve put our hosting planet through the wringer physically, but what if we’ve left it feeling emotionally drained too? Could the climate crisis with its ruinous wild fires and unforgiving floods be a scorned Earth’s way of telling humanity to do one? It’s a theory! Or at least, it’s the premise of this pop musical romcom from Ellie Coote (book) and Jack Godfrey’s (music and lyrics), the duo who scored a hit last year with 42 Balloons. Earth and Humanity (aka Hu) are personified as a couple and under this guise, their entire, increasingly troubling partnership is explored. Over the course of one breathless hour of back-to-back songs, the big breakthroughs of our species are reframed as our rocking what could have been a peaceful, happy relationship.  It’s a kooky concept, but this two-hander holds up surprisingly well in a production which Coote also directs, largely thanks...

After 430 or so years it’s fairly apparent that we as a species are not going to get tired of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. And even though Emily Lim’s new take comes less than three months after the Globe’s last production of the same play ended, it still feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s not the most nuanced or revelatory Dream I’ve ever seen. But Lim’s USP is creating massive scale participatory public theatre works (mostly for the National Theatre). This isn’t quite that, but it uses the Globe’s large, lairy crowd to maximum impact for a production that cheerily deviates repeatedly from Shakespeare’s exact text in a joyous, almost non-stop welter of audience interaction. The embellishments run from start to finish, with a lengthy and enjoyable pre-show that involves roping audience members into ‘auditions’ for the Mechanicals: when I took my seat I assumed the people dancing on stage were in the cast, but no – just punters, though many of them get callbacks throughout the show and one lucky attendee even gets to the play Moon at the end. Lim has, also, hired a ringer in the shape of Michael Grady-Hall, who played an anarchic, improv-tastic Feste in the RSC’s recent Twelfth Night, and more or less reprises the character here except the role is fairy henchman Puck.  His role is actually better modulated here than in Twelfth Night, where it felt like the action kept having to stop so that he could do lengthy magic routines. But it’s easy to...

Once again you can expect to see remarkable feats of astrophotography at the Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition. It’s a chance to see magical views of both our own night sky and of galaxies far, far away. The winning spacey visions come from dozens of professional and amateur snappers in various categories including ‘Planets, Comets and Asteroids’, ‘Stars and Nebulae’, ‘Galaxies’ and ‘Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year’ for under-16s. Soar down to Greenwich to see the winners from 2025's competition on display. 

The Wellcome Collection’s big spring exhibition is a deep dive into perceptions of ageing. Expect the Euston Road institution’s typical blend of art, science and pop culture in the 120+ artworks and objects on display, which range from16th century woodcuts made by German printmaker Sebald Beham to Deborah Roberts’ contemporary collages exploring Black childhood. There’ll also be a spotlight on the Wellcome Trust-funded health research project Age of Wonder – one of the largest studies of adoloscence in the world – and an exploration of how societies can adapt to improve everyone’s experience of ageing.

Henry Moore’s bulbous and undulating sculptures were designed to be seen outside and surrounded by nature. So we’re happy to say that Kew is displaying a huge collection of his works as they were intended at this mega exhibition. The world’s biggest ever exhibition of Moore will open at the botanical gardens, with 30 sculptures on show in the open air and more than 90 works including carvings and drawings displayed in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery. Several of his famous and iconic reclining figures will be on view, as well as more abstract and amorphous pieces like the massive bronze marvel ‘Large Two Forms’. 

There’s something irresistably fascinating about seeing into artist’s studios – messy materials, stacks of canvases, and a peek behind the curtain into the work spaces for some of the world’s best creative minds. To coincide with the Courtauld’s major Barbara Hepworth exhibition, the gallery is running a companion show of photographs taken by Paul Laib offering a look inside Hepworth’s London studio that she shared with Ben Nicholson in the 1930s. 

As one of Britain’s most celebrated sculptors of the 20th century, Barbara Hepworth made stunning modern creations inspired by the nature and lanscapes of Cornwall, where she lived. Her abstract shapes often featured smooth ovals, holes, undulating surfaces and strings. This summer the Courtauld will stage an exhibition interested in one aspect of Hepworth’s practice: her obsession with colour, which often came up in her work in unexpected ways.  Featuring 20 of her most significant sculptures, alongside 30 drawings, Hepworth in Colour will unite for the first time her early innovative sculptures with colour of the 1940s with major examples of her work with colour from the 1950s and 1960s.  

This is a big show of big paintings. Big, energetic, happy paintings which are just as enjoyable to stand in front of as one can imagine they were to make. Hurvin Anderson is the artist responsible, and the 80 paintings on show at Tate Britain amount to 30 years worth of work. Some date back to 1995 when he was an art student at the Royal College of Art; others were made this year (some he even finished off once they’d been hung). ‘Ball Watching’ hangs by the door, next to the entrance. Painted at art school, it captures a moment in Anderson’s youth living in Birmingham, the city in which he was born and raised after his parents emigrated from Jamaica. He and his friends would play football in Handsworth Park, often kicking the football into the lake – here, as the title suggests, they stand watching it. Compared with the sun-bleached, paint-dripped, tree-filled tropicana that fill the later rooms, the palette is darker, the figures less defined, the sky, rendered in broad brushstrokes, feels as though a foaming sponge has been dragged across a car windscreen. The paintings do something similar for the viewer as they do for Anderson: they hold you between places What it establishes, however, is what has kept Hurvin Anderson returning to the studio for three decades: the urge to paint his experience as a Black man of Caribbean heritage, born and raised in the UK. That sense of inbetweenness – belonging to two places, either side of the Atlantic – plays out through...

For Brits of a certain age, James McNeill Whistler will always conjure memories of that scene in the Mr Bean film. But while Rowan Atkinson’s 1997 opus was a memorable introduction to the American Gilded Age painter, Tate Britain’s grand new retrospective will properly acquaint you with his work – minus any snot-related hijinks – through his paintings, prints, and a litany of personal effects.  Using decoration from his Chelsea studio, the opening room establishes Whistler as a bohemian and fashionable man, but the contextual statement also foreshadows his fall from social grace later in his career (thanks to a lawsuit that left him penniless – more on that later). Thus, a unique, non-linear curatorial narrative is introduced. After arriving from New England in Paris in 1855, Whistler prolifically produced moody etchings that express the stoic dinginess of the French capital with dense and dynamic shadows. His first attempts at oil painting also happened here. The medium became an even bigger preoccupation when he moved to an equally morose city: London. Whether it’s choked by smog or cluttered with cargo, the Thames is his muse during his early years in the Big Smoke. The chaotic figuration of ships floating past in Wapping and the spectral abstraction of a frozen river in Chelsea in Ice represent two extremes of how Whistler turns urban ugliness into visual harmony. Conducting tone, colour, and blankness with orchestral balance, he’s acutely aware of the musicality...

In our age of mind-boggling CGI and AI-optimised everything, it’s easy to forget how much pleasure can be had from the simple optical tricks of mirrors and lights. But not for Julio Le Parc. A key figure of the Kinetic and Op Art movements of the 1960s, the late Argentinian artist spent seven pioneering decades making illuminated, kinetic and participatory works, and was still making art at the ripe old age of 97 before his death this past May. This major retrospective celebrates his visionary seven-decade career, spanning from from his arrival in Paris in the late 1950s to his resurgence in the 2010s, with over 60 colourful, immersive (and extremely Instagrammable) works.

The Royal Academy’s first Summer Exhibition opened in 1769. That was the same year that Captain James Cook began his first voyage to the Pacific. In other words, this open-submission exhibition has been around for a very long time. This year, British sculptor Ryan Gander is at the helm, working under the broad curatorial theme of ‘Interconnectness’. Which is just as well, given there are nearly 2,000 works that he’s chosen to fill the galleries of the London institution. The result is that there really is something here for everyone. Paintings, sculptures, paintings of sculptures, and sculptures of paintings, such as Mark Alexander’s Mother and Child rendered in quartz sand. There are woodcuts of birds by Tom Hammick, and etchings camping under a starry sky by Heidrun Rathgeb. Some prints revel in solitude like the beautiful work of Lene Bladbjerg, while others, such as Karen Keogh’s views of a French village, are rendered with a level of detail that rivals a photograph – not that this exhibition is short of those either. Elsewhere, Paul Tecklenberg transforms discarded nitrous oxide canisters into a basketball hoop, while Joseph Grigely has constructed a leaning tower of wine-bottle capsules, almost ten metres high, from the foil found around the necks of bottles. It is the sort of exhibition where almost any material, subject, or idea can find a place.  Those looking for some art world bigwigs will find paintings by Frank Bowling, Gary Humes, Anselm Kiefer, and a...

A stroll through Tracey Emin: A Second Life is an evocative experience. Positioned as a 40-year retrospective through the pioneering artist’s vast and varied repertoire, the show lays bare Emin’s life through her distinct and often unsettling art, from career highs – such as the iconic, Turner Prize-nominated ‘My Bed’, which is every bit as shocking and moving today as it was in 1998 – to stark personal lows in work depicting her experiences with sexual violence, abortion and recent life-threatening illness. As you can imagine, with such subject matter, it is not always a comfortable experience for the artist and the viewer alike. However, Emin’s flair for dark comedy adds moments of levity throughout. The second room of the exhibition features a large-scale projection of a work on video entitled ‘Why I Never Became A Dancer’. It begins with the artist recalling an incident in her youth when she entered a local dance competition only to run off stage mid-performance when a group of men with whom she’d previously had sexual encounters chanted ‘slag’ at her until she could no longer even hear the music. The film ends with a sequence of Emin dancing, totally uninhibited, to the disco classic ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ by Sylvester, and the work is dedicated to each of her aggressors, calling them out by name. It is the perfect encapsulation of both Emin’s defiant approach to life and her ability to turn traumatic experiences into mesmerising art. Longform video is an...