The Great Gatsby (London Coliseum)
Verdict: A spectacle old sport
Rating:
Marc Bruni's dazzlingproduction of The Great Gatsby opened on Broadway last year and now – with a mostly British cast – bursts into life in the West End.
But while the musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's great American novel about money and class looks like a million dollars, the creators still struggle to overcome the essential problem of the work: none of the leading characters are likeable, not even narrator Nick Carraway (Corbin Bleu), who may not be nasty or vapid but is still (whisper it) a bit of a sap.
Paul Tate dePoo III's scenic and projection design and Cory Pattak's lighting create a dazzling array of scenes, conjuring up the 1922 Long Island mansions of old-money socialites Tom and Daisy Buchanan (Jon Robyns and Frances Mayli McCann) and their party-loving new neighbour Jay Gatsby (Jamie Muscato), who has made his fortune from bootlegging and is determined to win Daisy's heart.
Gatsby in famous film incarnations by Robert Redford and Leonardo DiCaprio is enigmatic. Muscato captures the character's cool detachment, and has a beautiful singing voice in a production that sounds terrific (even if the songs are as ephemeral as the green lamp at the end of Daisy's dock).
McCann and Rachel Tucker, as Tom's mistress Myrtle, also impress in their solo numbers.
The creators (script by Kait Kerrigan, Jazz Age-infused music by Jason Howland and lyrics by Nathan Tysen) have taken a few liberties with the novel, so it may not be an evening for hardcore Fitzgerald purists.
Instead, the show focuses on the Gatsby-Daisy love story, with mere nods to the novel's more nuanced examination of the dark side of the American Dream.
But while it may not fully engage one's emotions, this is a Show with a capital S. It looks fabulous. It has a talented ensemble for the big set pieces – and it offers a lot of bang for its (and your) buck.
None of the leading characters are likeable, not even narrator Nick Carraway (Corbin Bleu), who may not be nasty or vapid but is still (whisper it) a bit of a sap
The show focuses on the Gatsby-Daisy love story, with mere nods to the novel's more nuanced examination of the dark side of the American Dream
The Great Gatsby runs until September 7. Tickets on sale at londoncoliseum.org
The Da Vinci Code (Salisbury Playhouse)
Verdict: 24 carat hokum
Rating:
By Patrick Marmion
Can anyone take Dan Brown seriously? Well, not I… after seeing this re-heated stage adaptation of his religious conspiracy novel, The Da Vinci Code – provocatively timed to open during Easter's Holy Week (imagine The Satanic Verses timed for Eid).
The story is sometimes denounced as blasphemous, which greatly overstates its importance. In reality, it's a work of 24-carat hokum that earned the best-selling author much more than 30 pieces of silver.
Catholics like me could easily take exception to its prurient claim that Jesus had children with Mary Magdalene – and that his 'bloodline' still walks the Earth, safeguarded by a shady organisation called the Priory of Sion.
But it's better understood as a comic caper in which a hot French cop ambushes a Harvard 'Professor of Symbology' in the Louvre, so he can help her investigate the murder of her grandfather, who was mixed up in a pagan sex cult.
Brown's ludicrous plot provides some fun as a nerdish sudoku thriller, supplemented by anagrams, cryptic clues and the notorious Fibonacci sequence – imagine TV's The Crystal Maze meets Countdown, in top tourist destinations across France and the UK.
Poor old Leonardo da Vinci is revealed to be a crackpot cryptographer and proto Steve Bannon conspiracy theorist who encoded civilization-shattering messages in his art.
None of these delusions compress easily into stage action, any more than they did on film. Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel's script is sustained by seemingly AI-generated dialogue including every duff crime-writer's go-to exclamation: 'No, wait, I can explain!'
And yet, in its frenzy to rip through Brown's codswallop, Chelsea Walker's production fizzes amusingly in a setting of a concrete bunker with churchy acoustics, haunted by cowled monks.
None of the book's delusions compress easily into stage action, any more than they did on film
And yet, in its frenzy to rip through Brown's codswallop, Chelsea Walker's production fizzes amusingly in a setting of a concrete bunker with churchy acoustics, haunted by cowled monks
Helping us decipher the labyrinthine conspiracy fostered by the Vatican's answer to the CIA – 'Opus Dei' – Joe Bannister, as our geeky hero Robert Langdon, breathlessly explains Brown's esoterica like a high-end tour guide.
Georgia-Mae Myers does an 'Allo 'Allo! French accent as sassy cop Sophie Neveu, who is impressively au fait with mathematical formulae.
And Philip Bretherton is an over-educated English billionaire/Bond villain, Leigh Teabing, desperate to add the Holy Grail – Jesus's chalice from the Last Supper – to his private collection.
With a self-flagellating Opus Dei flunky (Joe Pitts) in hot pursuit, like Mr Bean with a cat-o'-nine-tails, it's too silly to be sacrilegious, but can just about be enjoyed as pseudo-intellectual larks.
Until May 3; then Mercury Theatre, Colchester May 7-24
How To Fight Loneliness (Park Theatre, Finsbury Park, London)
Verdict: Assisted dying: murder or mercy?
Rating:
By Georgina Brown
'MAYBE he's not coming?' says Jodie in the opening scene of the UK premiere of Neil LaBute's play, in one of many echoes of Beckett's Waiting Godot.
The set is another, with a touch of Dali, too: a scorched apocalyptic landscape, bare but for leafless trees and withered plants, with drinks appearing surreally from a rusting sculpture and painted steps referred to as a 'couch'.
Justina Kehinde's beautiful, blooming Jodie seems gripped by pain, her hair a giveaway post-chemo shadow — and very striking.
Both LaBute and director Lisa Spirling steer well shy of the shocking, ugly deterioration that can come with stage four brain cancer.
Jodie is not just sick, she is 'sick and tired'. She has tried and failed to jump off a building or in front of a van and, for some unexplained reason, she and her devoted husband, Brad (Archie Backhouse), haven't moved to an American state where assisted dying is legal.
Instead, and in spite of the fact that he wants Jodie to live to the inevitably bitter end, Brad has invited a man rumoured to have 'helped' his stepbrother to die to come to their house — and decided to ask him to kill her.
Morgan Watkins's gauche, lunkheaded hulk Tate, capable of snapping someone's neck accidentally, seems an unlikely angel of death.
He has no time for Brad, but every sympathy with Jodie, whom he remembers from schooldays, and accepts the task.
Jodie and Brad's looping, repetitive exchanges about her wanting to end the pain and him wanting her to fight it may be realistic but dramatically paralysing.
The best scene is the last, charged with violence and tenderness, when an antagonised Tate (Brad has been calling and hanging round his workplace) first confronts and finally cradles the grieving Brad. Too late, the play becomes as complicated and conflicted as this life and death issue demands and deserves.
Until May 24.
Midnight Cowboy (Southwark Playhouse, Elephant)
Verdict: Not much to sing about
Rating:
By Georgina Brown
Think of the grimy, gritty 1969 movie Midnight Cowboy and you think of Harry Nilsson's haunting hit Everybody's Talkin' (and Jon Voigt's cowboy boots, and Dustin Hoffman's limp).
Only a composer and lyricist as confident as Francis 'Eg' White (geddit?), who has written hits for Adele, Amy Winehouse, Celine Dion and Kylie, would dare to create a new score for this brutal bromance.
Strikingly, however, the musical opens in silence as Joe Buck washes off his bloodstained body and, with it, the horror of what just happened, and slips into a moody rearrangement of Everybody's Talkin'. An homage, at least.
From there, Bryony Lavery's book goes back to before, when the provincial young Texan (Paul Jacob French, an underwhelming, oddly vacant beefcake), dressed as an ersatz cowboy, takes a bus to New York city, determined to shrug off his haunted, hopeless past and reinvent himself as a gigolo.
Like the movie, it's a series of flashback fragments as Joe is effortlessly swindled and his Great American dream becomes a living nightmare.
Unlike the movie, it fails to get under the skins of the characters.
At least a potential sugar mommy enjoys the ride (a show-stopping Tori Allen-Martin writhes ecstatically while singing Whatever It Is You're Doing) before fleecing him.
A religious pervert shamelessly exploits him.
Like the movie, it's a series of flashback fragments as Joe is effortlessly swindled and his Great American dream becomes a living nightmare
Darkly atmospheric as Nick Winston's production is, it's a pale shadow of John Schlesinger's movie
Sickly, lowlife conman Ricko 'Ratso' Rizzo (a clammy, vulnerable Max Bowden) fails to become his pimp but manages to become his partner in grime.
Lost souls, clinging together, they survive on the rats infesting their squalid tenement, clobbered then baked by Ratso.
Darkly atmospheric as Nick Winston's production is, it's a pale shadow of John Schlesinger's movie. The talkin' ain't great and, but for a couple of moving numbers (Trying To Reach The River and Blue Is The Colour), and a soulful Good Morning Joe (Tori Allen-Martin, fabulous once again), the songs neither push the story forward nor amplify the emotion. Stick to the film.
Until May 17.
