Play and musical reviews
Shows and shortcuts, ordered from latest viewing to earliest:
- Hamilton
- Hamilton
- The Truth
- Oh, Mary!
- Grace Pervades
- The Producers
- Arcadia
- Cyrano de Bergerac
- Safe Haven
- The Book of Mormon
- My Neighbour Totoro
- The Phantom of the Opera
Why am I back?
June 2026. I realised I’d finally built the life I’d designed for myself at 13.
It was an ingenious blueprint, one in which it is impossible to fail, to be hurt, and to cry.
The 13-year-old was not naive, he knew the cost of those comforts is never tasting their counterparts again. But his tears told him it would be worth it and he approved the plans.
Though, with a condition – he would first get what he wanted.
He did.
Wanting nothing more meant he no longer had to remain exposed to the world. So he dusted off the blueprints and completed construction of his one-room sanctuary.
Now 32 and the inhabitant, I confirm it is exactly as he predicted. But is hiding, running, and consuming love and resources right? And if it isn’t, what is the right life for a person who wants nothing and lacks a constitution?
This evening, I took a break from my deliberations to wash up my only knife, fork, plate and protein shaker, while listening to some noughties grime music.
But the cotton wool my body is wrapped in makes it difficult to work a touch screen, and as I went to click on Akala, the fibres swiped down into the ‘Forgotten favourites’ section. From there the lamb of fate selected the soundtrack to the Phantom of the Opera.
With the water about to overflow, I rushed to wash up while the water was hottest. But the wool now wet, I couldn’t change song.
After a few tracks, I noticed parallels between my new life and the antagonist’s isolation, as well as an unfortunate physical resemblance nowadays. Like any good student, when I have a problem, I first study those who’ve faced it before.
But the soundtrack wasn’t fully resonating, and Gerard Butler’s Hollywood rendition wouldn’t have either, so I scoured my old discount ticket favourites… and paid full price for a Saturday night seat in the stalls.
What about my disdain for the disrespectful?
Rosamund Pike’s rebuke to an audience proving I wasn’t alone, and recently rereading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, has inspired the advice for the irritable at the end of this page (the guide at the end of part 1 remains in force).
Hamilton
I’ve never seen anything like it.
And I’ve seen Messi carve through peak Tottenham (the year we reached the Champions League final) inside a partisan Wembley without moving faster than a shuffle. My memory of that night is a 90,000 seater stadium in silence. Spurs fans knew that game wasn’t about winning or losing. Instead, we spent 90 minutes sat frozen in grateful awe and helpless fear at Messi’s aura, presence and transcendence.
Lionel Odom Jr. topped that again tonight.
Hamilton
Went to see Hamilton again but, unlike last time, this one does need a review. That’s because the cast included the original Aaron Burr from the Broadway cast, Leslie Odom Jr. He’s also in the version many of us have seen on Disney+ and is the best cast member.
He gave an equally spellbinding performance tonight.
Prices were obscene because of his presence, and when I checked earlier in the week I had the restraint to see sense and not buy a ticket. But in a classic me ‘wake up in the middle of the night and spend recklessly while bleary eyed’, I decided to splurge last minute.
It turned out to be worth every penny.
It was like watching Messi. And it started in surreal fashion. For all the last minute winners and flying limbs I’ve seen in 60 and 90 thousand seater football stadiums, I’ve never seen a reception as deafening and feverish as when Lionel Odom Jr. took to the stage. He can’t have been able to hear his own thoughts and had to restart his performance. Similarly to when I used to watch Ledley King at Tottenham, for three hours tonight I think I changed sexuality.
Best individual performance I’ve seen on stage.
The Truth
I didn’t laugh but everyone else did so it must have been good. Was a bit too neat and impersonal for me, like a pre-wrapped Christmas present from John Lewis.
Oh, Mary!
Could not have been further away from the last play I saw about Mary Todd Lincoln, both in terms of content and quality. The last one was boring and boring, this one was novel and exciting.
Oh, Mary! was like an electric car. It delivered instant torque and got from 0 to 60 quicker than its gas guzzling counterparts, before switching to cruise control at an impressive and bouncy canter.
Also like an electric car, Oh, Mary! had a shorter range than the fossil fuelled, 80 minutes without an interval. But while this is usually a criticism of electrics, I don’t mind it in the theatre. Don’t drag it out if it there’s nothing to drag out. And on this occasion they made the correct decision – the play got to top speed frighteningly quickly as I said, but then stayed there and didn’t push up to the peak I think it wanted to. When it ended it was time to end and meant we didn’t need to check the flashing smart watches of the 1 in 10 people in the theatre we had been forced to check throughout the show.
Continuing the metaphor, Oh, Mary! has a charismatic leader, with Mary played by the extremely talented Mason Alexander Park in the show I watched. Though, unlike the Tesla founder, Mason was less controversial and you could only land one way on their performance.
Grace Pervades
More meta-art. A play about actors.
I guess it makes sense to have some meta-art, given the importance of storytelling to humanity. So I’m changing my view of it to being acceptable, so long as it’s proportional to the time humanity spends watching plays, films, and reading books, compared to other aspects and pursuits in life.
Review: Boring. These plays are missing something. They’re not real enough. Too polished. Lacking grit. There’s no risk. If the actors, director, and writer all know the audience will clap at the end, then there’s a problem.
The Producers
A comedy musical about a comedy musical. There’s exceptions, but I generally dislike meta-art (plays about plays, films about films, books about books, etc) because it’s always more impressive to see a writer write as well about something they haven’t experienced as that which they have. This show is not an exception.
I almost didn’t laugh at all, but an unexpected Irish accent deep into the second half did me and teased out an ungraceful snort.
Although it wasn’t funny, I weirdly liked the effort and labour of the production. Still, trying isn’t enough at this level in the West End and I rate it poorly.
Arcadia
I was the only person under 70 walking into the theatre and I felt the same age as them hobbling out.
I think* it was about avoiding confirmation bias and focusing on what’s relevant.
I know it’s the most boring thing I’ve seen since Waiting for Godot.
*Fell asleep four times in the first half. Smashed a double espresso in the interval. Then stayed up until 1am making collages because I couldn’t sleep.
Cyrano de Bergerac
Like the Gillian Lynne, the Noël Coward Theatre has two ultimate introvert seats in the royal circle. I’ve given up trying to write well enough to explain what I mean by a ‘one-person seat’ (it’s not the same as a ‘seat for one person’), so below is a photo (I had the same seat at Dr. Strangelove).
Review: Excellent.
And centres around an important theme – things out of your control stopping you from getting what you want.
Which sparks the questions:
1. Should you then strive to find ways around it to get what you want?
2a. Or, should you begrudgingly accept it not try?
2b. Should you then endure the pain for the rest of your life, or sacrifice yourself to getting it what it wants?
3. Though, are you sure it’s out of your control? Or is it just something you haven’t found out how to control yet? (The weather was out of humanity’s control until we discovered we can control it by burning dead dinosaurs)
Note, the play never dares ask – should you try to change what you want?
I concur.
Safe Haven
It was at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston and the only way there from Bank was by bus. 32-degree heat meant the bus stank of the perfect balance between sweat and piss. ‘Perfect’ because both were equally horrific, so just as your nose got close to breathing in one smell, it got distracted by the other before it could inhale it fully. That created a cycle which meant you never actually smelled either.
Safe Haven is a play about Kurds. Which left a bitter taste in my mouth because the writer went the entire length without a single lemon curd pun. Though, it was clearly the right decision given the topic and great to see a serious drama that knew its purpose rather than excessively chasing light relief.
As with Kyoto, the subject matter (the plight of the Kurds around the First Gulf War) is, unfortunately, so compelling it gives the script a powerful tailwind.
I’ve thought before that Game of Thrones covered every plotline over its run, but I don’t think it got this one. A bigger light could be shone on the issue if it wasn’t so close to home and someone took the plot and swapped out the guns and tanks for swords and dragons. Then we could blindly enjoy it without questioning ourselves and our votes, until the director tells us what it was really about in their Emmy acceptance speech while we spit out our cornflakes (this is the same arc as one of the characters in the play and, I think, a very important idea).
Choice comments:
– Dialogue heavy, but I was engaged throughout. The length of the scenes was spot on and enabled this.
– Found itself a little bit difficult to end, but that could have been deliberate and the play’s final allegory. And to give context, it wasn’t the kind of abrupt ending it would have had if it was staged at the Gillian Lynne.
– It was a good reminder hearing people worrying about the heat during the interval, minutes after hearing about Kurds freezing to death in the mountains.
Most of all, I was glad for the education – an underappreciated use of theatre.
If you’d have given me, or any audience member, a book on the issue and two hours free time at home, we’d have all just watched the England game* while scrolling on our phones instead. Proof being, a book is cheaper** than a theatre and a bus ticket, and yet we were all in there, inhaling through one nostril and exhaling out of the other as we opened our minds.
*Which I’d, thankfully, forgotten was on when I booked and I got to see this play instead of a laboured 0-0 draw with Ghana.
**Though, Safe Haven is very reasonably priced as theatre goes.
The Book of Mormon
I usually travel light to the theatre.
Tonight was no exception, except I had my dedicated work theatre rucksack with me and it was crammed full with an accountant’s war chest of calculators, abacuses, and chipped protractors. It meant I got searched for the first time since my return to the West End.
It also meant I was asked to drink from my first edition Chilly’s Series 2 500ml water bottle, finished in matte black, to prove it really was just some high quality H2O. I feigned reluctance but was secretly happy to flaunt my office flare in front of the building queue. I made sure to glint the silver crescent Chilly’s logo off the gleaming crescent moon suspended in the evening sky and completely concealed by the western face of the Prince of Wales Theatre.
The show was a musical about Mormons, written by the creators of South Park.
People have loved it for a long time, but I wasn’t wild about it, despite being a big South Park fan (and recently ridiculed for it at work by a generation who couldn’t appreciate a cutting social commentary even if Cartman farted it in their face). The comedy was well constructed, but the content is stale. A key feature of the South Park model is never standing still but, unfortunately, the Prince of Wales’s western face hasn’t moved an inch since the show opened there in 2013.
Conclusion: I agree that the Book of Mormon has earned its glory, but I think its time is up*.
*I have to declare a conflict when making this statement because, as a general rule, I dislike intentional comedy.
My Neighbour Totoro
Popped into a place in the National Gallery before the show that does the best coffee in London.
BIG MISTAKE.
It was day two of West End Live (a cult where sadists who love spoilers take over Trafalgar Square and boom out songs from current productions), which put me in the perverse position of sitting metres away from some of the best content and performers in the world, with earphones in listening to grime to drown them out (contact me for my Golden Age Grime+ Spotify playlist).
I scolded my tongue downing my coffee (it was still exceptional), and walked to the Gillian Lynne Theatre. There are two seats in the stalls at the Gillian Lynne almost as good as the coffee I had, G32 and G51. They’re mirrored one-person seats with a great centrality and distance from the stage, on a slow-lane-side aisle offering a cute diagonal guaranteeing a clear view, and completely on their own and unflanked. The only downside is you have to accept the envious glares from unhappy wives and husbands.
I had G32 today. And as the show started, I made sure to doff my cap to my opposite number+19.
My Neighbour Totoro is the play version of an anime movie.
I’ve never really understood anime (save for a brief period when a girl I liked liked anime, so I very much understood it). They’re Japanese cartoons, which a lot of people think are cool, and I can kind of see it, but only in the right light.
I also realised walking in that this play is mainly a kids thing, though I didn’t feel anywhere near as uncomfortable as going solo to Matilda.
Review: Pretty good.
– Hard to concentrate at the start because I was busy cleaning my coffee infused drool off my perfect seat.
– Mei’s first meeting with Totoro was mesmerising.
– I really liked the antagonist. Clever for a story targeted at kids but worked just as well for an adult.
– Having seen Lehman here too, I can conclude the Gillian Lynne specialises in very good theatre, exceptional seats, and abrupt endings.
Edit: Just watched the film. It’s broadly crap. Frames per second were almost negative. Play is better.
(I should caveat that I was slumped at a 5° angle and my can of Fanta Zero on the table was blocking the bottom right corner of the screen.)
The Phantom of the Opera
Review:
– Lloyd-Webber has created a platform for mastery. Christine and the Phantom proved it again.
– Normally I’m jealous of people who haven’t seen an exceptional show before, they get to experience it for the first time, but with the Phantom of the Opera I pity them.
– Best Raoul I’ve seen. Warm, deserving, and not arrogant. Played by Ashley Gilmour (not to be confused with the TV show Gilmore Girls).
– Asked myself after if I’d have enjoyed an identical performance by AI. I landed closer to no than yes. I’d welcome plot told, and lessons taught, by AI. But a big reason I watch a show like this is the prospect of witnessing perfection from a species that likes blowing each other up.
Sidenote: It will shock those who know me, but I’ve been accused of being a perfectionist in the past. Those who counsel perfectionists say there’s no such thing as perfect, so don’t try to be. It’s a useful tool, and they believe it, but theatre teaches you that perfection does exist, it’s just incredibly rare.
Correction: I take back my previous review comment saying certain moments are dated. They’re not. It’s timeless.
Study notes: A two and a half hour reprieve, a proof of potential excellence, and a warning of descent.
The Broken Fan’s advice to broken fans
Dial in, like the actors have to, and let those who wish to be happy, do what makes them happy. They are the priority. You are not special.