These Theatre Thoughts

Date: 23rd February 2024 Seat: Unallocated Tickets: Gifted Rating: 4 Stars  It’s almost impossible to believe that it’s coming up for four years since the UK’s first lockdown was looming. But don’t worry if your memories of that strange time are starting to fade, as James McDermott ’s Jab will bring them all straight back again. It’s not a comfortable journey to take.  Married couple Anne ( Kacey Ainsworth ) and Don ( Liam Tobin ) have been together for 29 years, and they’re mostly happy. They bicker and, yes, jab at one another, but it’s all in good fun. In fact, the play starts with the pair drunkenly laughing and dancing to Sweet Dream (Are Made Of This) by the Eurythmics, a throwback to when they first met in a nightclub in Skeggy.  Anne is an NHS worker on the frontline as the COVID-19 pandemic starts to spread, and Don has a vintage shop, although it doesn’t make much (if any) money, and Anne’s the one who has to pay for everything. That’s not a problem at first –...

Date: 19th February 2024 Seat: N2 (Stalls) Tickets: Gifted Rating: 2 Stars  Two directors and two actors walk into a room… it sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it’s actually the setup for John Logan’s Double Feature , currently playing at Hampstead Theatre. And whereas a joke would be funny (ideally, at least), Double Feature is a serious look at the dynamics between said directors (Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Reeves) and actors (Tippi Hedren and Vincent Price). The idea is a clever one – we have two sets of people (Hitch (Ian McNeice) and Hedren (Joanna Vanderham) in one story and Reeves (Rowan Polonski) and Price (Jonathan Hyde) in another) acting out a rehearsal scene for the movies they happen to be working on ( Marnie and The Witchfinder General respectively), and although they’re all on stage at the same time, they’re not there together. The two pairs never acknowledge one another, and the stories play out separately, intertwining without any of the characters know...

Photo credit: Danny Kaan Date: 9th February 2024 Seat: Unallocated (Front Row) Tickets: Gifted Rating: 4 Stars  Before After has the potential to be a complex and befuddling musical, but in the gentle hands of writers Stuart Matthew Price (music and lyrics) and Timothy Knapman (book and additional lyrics), director Georgie Rankcom, and performers Grace Mouat and Jacob Fowler, it instead becomes a piece of art, a beautiful story of love, loss, love found again, and the changes that people go through along the way.  Ben and Ami were a couple once, and very much in love, but after an accident leaves Ben with no memory of his old life, it all falls apart. Yet when Ami finds him again on the same hilltop they used to visit in their other life, it turns out that the old spark remains, even if one of them doesn’t remember the other.  The tension in the story comes from the fact that Ami remembers everything and wants to change what happened before, and Ben remembers nothing and ...

Photo credit: The Other Richard Date: 31st January 2024 Seat: M6 (Stalls) Tickets: Gifted Rating: 3 Stars  Adapting older movies into musicals seems to be a trend these days, some with better results than others, and Bronco Billy , with a book by Dennis Hackin and music and lyrics by Chip Rosenbloom and John Torres (with additional lyrics by Michele Brourman), is one of the better ones – if anything, it’s improved the film and made it a lot more enjoyable for everyone, which is something every audience member is sure to appreciate.  The main word that can be used to describe Bronco Billy is fun. It’s wild and wacky and loud and bright, and there are some wonderful characters and some lovely songs, but really when you leave, it’s the fun you’ve had that stays with you, and that’s no bad thing – if you’re feeling a bit down because January lasted for sixty billion months and you need a quick pick-me-up, Bronco Billy might just do the trick.  The story is about a travellin...