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Review: The King and I, Palladium

So much to like in The King and I at the London Palladium, not least the exquisite costumes and a superb Kelli O’Hara

“Getting to hope you like me…”

Despite my love of a classic musical, it has taken me a wee while to work up the enthusiasm to go and see The King and I at the Palladium. A big Broadway success, Bartlett Sher’s production kept its leads of Kelli O’Hara and Ken Watanabe but with that pedigree comes an element of playing it safe, which is what I think has kept me at bay.

And in watching the show, you can’t ever really escape this feeling of sedateness, splendidly mounted as it is. Catherine Zuber’s costume work is beyond lush, Michael Yeargan’s set has an epic scale and the sweep of Christopher Gattelli’s take on Jerome Robbins’ original choreography is quite often breathtaking – they don’t make em like this any more etc etc. Continue reading “Review: The King and I, Palladium”

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Review: Here Lies Love, National Theatre

“Dancing, oh so beautifully
Dancing, dancing together
Dancing, oh as if in a dream”

It’s not often I leave a play with penis envy – giant golden cock hat envy to be precise – but that’s how I felt leaving the newly-opened Dorfman Theatre (the National’s Cottesloe getting a much needed facelift) after the blisteringly good fun of Here Lies Love. (I also felt sad that I didn’t get a glowstick, it was only later I realised they weren’t being handed out to all and sundry.) But by and large, the abiding feeling was one of huge exhilaration, akin to the endorphin rush of a good night’s clubbing, for if you’ve booked correctly, that’s what you get here.

You can sit down to see the show, the tiered seating of the theatre remains intact, but the real route into Alex Timber’s ingeniously immersive production is by getting a dancefloor ticket, whereby one is thrust right into the midst of this utterly idiosyncratic musical which tells of the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos, former First Lady of the Philippines entirely through the medium of dance music from David Byrne and Fatboy Slim. It is so thoroughly audacious a concept that it is hard to fathom how it even came into being, never mind emerge as the huge success it is here. Continue reading “Review: Here Lies Love, National Theatre”