Sitting In The Cheap Seats

Sam Wanamaker Playhouse Exciting news from Shakespeare’s Globe as they bid farewell to Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole with a winter season that brings together the plays thought to have been written by Shakespeare for indoor theatre and plays them out on the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse stage. Read on for full details…

Ah, The Producers. Probably our favourite of the glut of movies turned musicals of the past decade or so. The original production was a wonder of un-pc satire that was far and away the best thing Mel Brooks had turned his hand to in years. More than ten years later and the show is well established in the canon of musicals that head out regularly on tour. Has familiarity dulled the humour of the piece?

David Mamet is a playwright whose work is easy to appreciate but difficult to love. The complex wordplay is certainly an acquired taste, but when it’s performed well it can fly. Thankfully director Daniel Evans has three excellent performers at his disposal as he takes a look into the writer’s dissection of the rotting underbelly of the American dream!

As You Like It  is one of Shakespeare’s most divisive plays, critics and audiences seem to either love or hate it with little middle ground. It seems to be a favourite of  Shakespeare’s Globe  too, this being their third production in the last six years.

Critically acclaimed  Lazarus Theatre Company  return in 2015 with their trademark fresh take on two epic classics as they stage their  Summer of Empire ! First they take a fresh look at Shakespeare’s  Henry V  with an all female cast before they give us their spin on Marlowe’s  Tamburlaine The Great .

60 or so years ago  Jean Anouilh ’s works were popular enough for the BBC to broadcast a recording of him reading one of his plays in the original French. These days he’s hardly a household name, but he still maintains enough popularity for his work to be readily revisited.  Chichester Festival Theatre  have regularly produced productions of his plays and this translation, by  Jeremy Sams  who also directs, was originally put together for a production at the Almeida Theatre way back in 1990.

There’s something about the glitz & glamour of Hollywood’s golden age that continues to intrigue theatre goers. Some love the nostalgia, for others it’s a link to a time they never had a chance to experience themselves.  Top Hat  is a perfect example, the epitome of style over substance, it nevertheless manages to consistently draw in the crowds!

The team that brought you last year’s acclaimed Titanic will return to  Southwark Playhouse  this summer with a new production of  George Forrest  and  Robert Wright’s  multiple Tony and Drama Desk award winning  Grand Hotel .

It’s strangely comforting to realise that even the greatest actors have their fair share of fears and worries over their performances. Though most performers work hard to hide them, in his latest book  Year of The Fat Knight   Antony Sher  (a Sir himself) confronts those feelings head on in a brilliantly honest and wonderfully engrossing diary that encompasses the days between the  Gregory Doran  deciding to direct the Henry plays and opening night at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

Ah Oklahoma, another in that list of musicals who have been produced and cast so perfectly in the past (in this case the wonderful National Theatre production that gave Hugh Jackman his big break) that you begin to wonder why anyone would dare attempt it again! But clearly Music & Lyrics – the collaborative effort of a number of the UK’s finest regional receiving theatres – are braver souls than I!

You could be forgiven, if you didn’t know The Merchant of Venice well, for believing it to be a tragedy and more so for thinking Shylock is one of Shakespeare’s most caricature villains. Thankfully Jonathan Munby directs with flair, amping up the comedy without losing even a hint of pathos in what may already be the highlight of Shakespeare’s Globe ’s summer season!