Funny, reassuring and irrepressibly warm, the West End version of Only Fools and Horses is proving to be the right musical at the right time.
musicals
Five hundred years ago, Peckham was green and pleasant. By the 1980s and 1990s, when two of its most famous fictional characters Del Boy and Rodney Trotter were plying their dodgy wares, even the pigeons wanted to be elsewhere, or so Rodney tells us.
Any story-line involving a single woman is inherently more dramatic than a narrative of a single man because of biology’s cruel deadlines.
Damon Runyan’s short stories inspired what has become an iconic and much-loved Broadway musical and movie – Guys and Dolls.
When Iolanthe in 1882 became the fourth consecutive major success for Gilbert and Sullivan, Gladstone, a Conservative-turned-Liberal, was prime minister and women had no vote.
The London theatre scene could easily manage without another musical about love. But the UK premiere of this Australian-born celebration of the greatest of emotions by Peter Rutherford and James Millar is nevertheless as welcome, even as necessary, as every generation’s attempts to redefine love for themselves.
As far as 1960s audiences were concerned, Lionel Bart – famed for the musical Oliver – had lost his “twang” when he came up with the box office flop “Twang!!”, with two exclamation marks. But if the audiences of the swinging sixties weren’t ready, the 21st century theatre-goers of London’s Union Theatre – renowned for alternative, low-budget, high-entertainment musicals – are.
In a capitalist society, we’re nearly all hired hands, but the extent of the exploitation is more or less pernicious. Melvyn Bragg’s gritty, Northern, sweeping tale ultimately finds the best option for the ordinary man is to accept a pittance to work above ground rather than to toil in a futile World War I trench or in a narrow coal seam beneath the sea.
by Barbara Lewis • musicals, theatre, year 2020 • Tags: Barbara Lewis, musicals, theatre •
Theatre blogger Jonathan Baz, who rates this show as unmissable, writes in the note at the front of the programme that an audience can only fully grasp its craftsmanship on re-listening or revisiting.