Don't bother, they're here
Best Play
The Inheritance – Matthew Lopez
Grand Horizons – Bess Wohl
Slave Play – Jeremy O Harris
The Sound Inside – Adam Rapp
Sea Wall / A Life – Simon Stephens / Nick Payne
Best Musical
Tina – The Tina Turner Musical
Moulin Rouge! The Musical
Jagged Little Pill Continue reading “The complete 74th Tony nominations”
The 50th birthday year of work begins with three major commissions:
From 11 Sept – 4 October, 7.30pm – 10.30pm daily except Sundays, free.
Outstanding New Broadway Play
Grand Horizons
The Height of the Storm
The Inheritance
Linda Vista
The Sound Inside
Outstanding New Broadway Musical
Jagged Little Pill
Moulin Rouge!
Tina: The Tina Turner Musical Continue reading “Honorees of 2019-2020 Outer Critics Circle Awards”
Outstanding New Broadway Play
Grand Horizons
The Height of the Storm
The Inheritance
Linda Vista
The Sound Inside
Outstanding New Broadway Musical
Jagged Little Pill
Moulin Rouge!
Tina: The Tina Turner Musical Continue reading “Nominations for 2019-2020 Outer Critics Circle Awards”
“I couldn’t leave this place, not in my mind, not in my heart”
After a scorching run at the Young Vic, Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance makes a well-deserved transfer into the West End. And though the seats (and some of the sightlines) at the Noël Coward Theatre make it a little bit more of an endurance test over its near-seven hours of drama, the experience remains a truly soul-enhancing, life-enrichening thing.
All but one of the original cast have returned (Jack Riddiford stepping in for Luke Thallon who has turned to alternative Cock in Chichester), but none of the production’s magic has been lost. Indeed, for those who have seen it before, it is almost better second time round as the exquisite agony of knowing what is to come deepens so much of the first part. Continue reading “Review: The Inheritance, Noël Coward Theatre”
The ensemble cast of The Inheritance at the Noël Coward Theatre is now confirmed and will include: Hugo Bolton, Robert Boulter, Andrew Burnap, Hubert Burton, John Benjamin Hickey, Paul Hilton, Samuel H Levine, Syrus Lowe, Michael Marcus, Vanessa Redgrave, Jack Riddiford, Kyle Soller and Michael Walters. The main change is that Jack Riddiford joins the company in place of Luke Thallon who is going to be appearing in Chichester’s revival of Mike Bartlett’s Cock instead.
I absolutely adored The Inheritance when I saw it at the Young Vic and am glad that the brave decision to transfer this major new work into the West End has been made. It certainly deserves a bigger audience and I sincerely hope that they come – and why wouldn’t they, when you look at this lovely set of blossom portraits of the new cast by Johan Persson.
“Kill all the lawyers”
If I’m completely honest, Abi Morgan’s The Split did leave me a tad disappointed as it veered away from its legal beginnings to something considerably more soapy over its six episodes. The personal lives of the Defoe clan well and truly took over at the expense of any of the cases they were looking after and even if that family includes Nicola Walker, Annabel Scholey and Deborah Findlay, it’s still a bit of a shame that it ended up so schlocky. Continue reading “TV Review: The Split Series 1 / The Good Fight Series 2”
“A chain of gay men helping each other, loving each other, hurting each other, understanding each other”
It would be easy to focus on the fact that The Inheritance is long and yes, its two parts total up to nearly seven hours in the thankfully comfortable seats of the Young Vic. But they also sum up to a brave and epic piece of new writing from Matthew Lopez, taking a scalpel to contemporary gay life in New York, asking what does it mean to be a gay man today and just how much of that is owed to an inherited (and neglected) cultural legacy.
Structurally, the play owes a curious debt to EM Forster’s Howard’s End, using it as a considerable inspiration for plot but also as a device to launch into its storytelling, which has an occasional tricksiness to it, pulling at the thread of the stories we wish we could tell rather than the ones we have to. That main story centres on Eric and Toby, a gay couple who have the foundations of their relationship rocked when the tenancy of their amazing apartment is terminated. As their lives reshape around new realities, new experiences, new challenges, they come to see how little of the world they really know. Continue reading “Review: The Inheritance, Young Vic”
“Holy shit, Meryl Streep is here?”
I’m just going to write the one review to cover both parts of the The Inheritance but I wanted to flag up that if, for some crazy reason, the full seven hours of Mathew Lopez’s epic didn’t appeal, then you could do worse than sticking with Part One. For though it may not have any Vanessa Redgrave, it does contain a moment of pure transcendent beauty that left me weeping on the bus journey home, and so how could you possibly now resist?! Continue reading “Not-really-a-Review: The Inheritance Part One, Young Vic”
“In my experience, whenever somebody says ‘the truth is’ that usually means it’s not”
Lots to love in The Good Fight, not least its very existence as a female-led, POC-heavy US drama, unafraid to tackle the most modern of issues, as its parent show The Good Wife did in its prime. And over the 10 episodes of its first season, it has proved an engaging and entertaining watch in the midst of finding its feet about the kind of show it actually wants to be. (You can read my thoughts about Episodes 1 and 2 here).
The Good Fight tried to achieve a lot – establishing a large new ensemble, delivering enough storyline for three lead characters, paying adequate but not overbearing fan service to Good Wife devotees, and coming up with up-to-the-minute cases-of-the week. And I think we can say it did most this fairly successfully. Christine Baranski’s Diane Lockhart and her statement necklaces remaining a shining beacon of light in our cold, dark world. Continue reading “TV Review: The Good Fight Series 1”