I spent a fantastic six months as a cultural commissioning editor and regular writer at the Telegraph. I hope to migrate all those articles across at some point, but for now you can find them at my author page here
This is a great time to see the definitive portrayals of some of the best roles in theatre. Not only are there numerous fantastic revivals and returning productions in town, but the lead actors who previously starred in those shows are heading back to the West End too.
Musical theatre hasn’t had much cause for celebration this past year, nor the Proms, which were moved online in 2020. Thankfully, both are now reunited with live audiences, as jubilantly demonstrated at Saturday night’s Broadway bonanza.
Bagdad is a ghost town. Stranded in California’s Mojave desert, it once served mine workers, then travellers on Route 66, but was subsequently abandoned and its buildings razed.
After a less-than-liberating Freedom Day was pulverised by the pingdemic, the theatre industry sorely needed some good news. So, three cheers for the government’s announcement that England will drop restrictions for the fully vaccinated in August and also reopen its borders, without quarantine, to vaccinated travellers from Europe and America.
Who will be the new stars of Who? It was announced today that Jodie Whittaker, the first woman to ever play the Doctor, and showrunner Chris Chibnall will step down after next year’s special episodes of the BBC juggernaut.
Go go go Joseph! Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest work, Cinderella, is still yet to open thanks to the pingdemic, but his very first is up and running again. Laurence Connor’s buoyant revival of Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Biblical musical charmed audiences back in 2019, and remains an absolute winner. If we can’t go to the ball quite yet, at least we’ve got this technicolour dream.
In 2012, playwright Nick Payne dazzled audiences with his fiendishly clever play that merges relationship drama with theories about quantum mechanics, superstrings, and the multiverse. Now it’s back in the West End.
On a night of jubilation for English football fans, there was ample cause for celebration in the West End, too. Theatre came roaring back with a bright and big-hearted musical, ecstatically received by the London Coliseum audience.
Why do we tell stories? Lyndsey Turner’s emotive staging of Dylan Thomas’s 1953 play for voices proffers some profound ideas: to heal familial bonds, to find lucidity in the murkiness of dementia, and to reach much-needed catharsis after a long period of suffering.
