Cindy Marcolina - Page 32

Shake It Up Theatre's concept for their Improvised Shakespeare Show is very simple and follows the basic rules of improv - with an Elizabethan twist added to the mix. The audience are in charge of setting the scene, choosing the genre first and then moving to setting and protagonist, the weirder, the better.

It's safe to say that John Mayer's been keeping busy. After starting 2019 with Dead & Company (which features former members from Grateful Dead) and touring North America for the fourth consecutive year, he's finally filled The O2 with a new light. His Summer Tour comes to London after a two-year absence, having played the same venue in 2017 for The Search of Everything World Tour.

In the shadows of the Kennedy compound in Washington DC lives a peculiar family, the Pascals. Twenty years after JFK's assassination, Marty (Fergus Leathem) is coming home from New York to celebrate Thanksgiving with his mother (Gill King), little brother Anthony (Bart Lambert), and twin sister Jackie-O (Colette Eaton). What should have been a delightful festive reunion turns into a perverted evening of mind-games and manipulation when the young man shows up with his fiancée Lesly (Kaya Bucholic)

The Royal Albert Hall is notorious for bringing back to the screen beloved films and setting them to a live score often played by renowned orchestras, creating a magical vibe to surround classics as well as blockbusters. In occasion of this year's Festival of Film, they've dusted off a chef d'oeuvre of monstrous proportions: Nosferatu.

Jacob Zuma, former President of South Africa, checks into a hospital only to find out that an old enemy, Ronnie Kasrils, who used to be in charge of the intelligence services, is staying in the opposite room. Gail Louw writes The Ice Cream Boys, detailing this chance meeting between the two. Directed by Vik Sivalingam and starring Jack Klaff as Kasrils, Andrew Francis as Zuma, and Bu Kunene as nurse Thandi (and a few other figures), it's a thrilling exploration of the crude reality of unpunished crimes.

House of Kittens takes over the Wellington Members Club and turns it into a sort of castle of pleasure. The dress code they installed sums up the evening perfectly: elegant, medical, fetish. Through theatrical movement-led vignettes, they examine sexual desire and attraction using erotic storytelling to tell a tale of liberation.

The extraordinary success of Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman's Ghost Stories back at the Lyric Hammersmith in 2010 led to multiple runs in London, a film starring Martin Freeman, Paul Whitehouse, and Alex Lawter, and a number of tours and productions all over the world. It's easy to see how the piece achieved all that. The 80-minute straight-through show is filled to the brim with scrumptious spookiness. Directors Dyson, Nyman, and Sean Holmes start playing with their public from the outset of their experience, restricting the information on plot and presentation to a minimum on marketing material and website, daring them to book if they dare.

The tiny town of Balbek is falling prey of the far right. Their theatre, managed by the loving but politically weak Eva (Tamzin Griffin), is inhabited by an assortment of actors with different priorities as well as worldviews.

After a stellar run at the Kiln, Florian Zeller's The Son transferred to the West End last month. We caught up with Amaka Okafor to hear about the journey of the show and its harrowing themes.

a?oeIt's crazy intense, that's what I'm likea?? Katie says. Now a washed-out singer who makes a living in pubs, she's struggled with her mind since she was very young, but never managed to give a name to what she was feeling. Afters years of battles with herself and others, she's learnt that she has Bipolar disorder. Ceri Ashe writes Bipolar Me, a jarring reconstruction of the internal and external strifes fought by those affected.

Hailed by The New York Times as a?oebristlinga?? and a?oeprovocativea?? during its Off-Broadway run, Eleanor Burgess's abrasive The Niceties is exactly that. Janie Dee and Moronke Akinola take on the roles of history professor Janine and Zoe, her passionate student. During a meeting to review the latter's thesis, their conversation about trivial grammatical mistakes in the writing escalates to a complicated discussion on race. Matthew Iliffe directs the debate play, revealing systemic internalised racism and the ugly truth of standing on the middle ground.

Holly (Martha Godber) is a talented girl who lives on a Council estate in Hull with her Dad (Jamie Smelt). Her mum left them when she was ten and nothing's ever been the same. When she goes off to London to attend university, she has to come to terms with her protective father and a life that's not exactly what she'd dreamed it would be. John Godber's This is not Right has been rewritten for its current run at Wilton's Music Hall, but feels like it's majorly out of focus and only comes together, unjustifiably, in its last ten minutes.

Emily (Julia-Maria Arnolds) is heading to a?oethe villagea?? to try to fix things with her boyfriend, who's actually decided not to go with her after all. Daniel (Duarte Bandeira) is a young man on his way back home from the city. Their loneliness and hunger for something more finds fertile ground when he pierces through her bubble and starts to talk to her on the train journey. Bandeira writes Platonic, a fairly unusual story about human connection and unrequited love whose balance is inexplicably off.

After revamping Cats and taking on other iconic musicals like Fame, director and choreographer Nick Winston brings Mame back to the stage. The last time the UK saw the show (which has music and lyrics by Jerry Herman and a book by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee) it was 1969 and Ginger Rogers was playing the lead role on Drury Lane. Now, 60 years later, Tracie Bennett is going to be Autie Mame at the Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester.

Three chefs are preparing for service on an Airbus from Beirut to London. While Nora Schmidt's (Georgina Strawson) menu is about to debut with the guests in first class, on the ground at Heathrow spirits are starting to heat as alert is rising.

The year is 2050. Brexit has happened (but it's now an obsolete word and people would rather use a?oeThe Break-upa??) and the economy has crashed, leading the United States to buy the island. Trump did what Trump does, and Great Britain has been turned into the Great British Golf Course - or GBCG. When dystopia is done well, it becomes a mirror onto the contemporary world and the perils that come with it. Regrettably, Florence Bell's The Open drives a compelling concept into a wall.

Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington becomes the Devonshire moor in 09 Lives' production of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Lil Warren directs the promenade show in the creepy setting, with only minimal lighting accompanying Holmes (Giorgio Galassi) and Watson (Gary Cain) as they try to solve perhaps their most notorious of cases. Arthur Conan Doyle himself (Angus Chisolm) is the evening's emcee, pitching in with background information, backstories, and leading the audience onto the next scene through the tombstones aided by facilitators with flashlights.

A year ago to the week Scarlett Maltman and Cathy Read, tired of the lack of active conversations on mental health, sat down and launched the Industry Minds podcast to tackle the subject and tear down the barriers that come with it.

Somerset Maugham's For Services Rendered opens Jermyn Street Theatre's new season, which celebrates the establishment's 25th anniversary since its opening and is aptly called the Memories Season. The First World War has left behind an England scarred by its own hegemony; a place where its own heroes aren't cared for and who are dying among debts and anguish.

Harry Hunter is missing. Hi parents are being supported by the newly graduated Maori social worker Anahera, who's been left there by herself for the first time. When some unusual parenting practices resurface, she decides to take a stand. Emma Kinane's play comes to Finborough Theatre directed by Alice Kornitzer after receiving outstanding reviews and accolades in New Zealand, where it premiered in 2017.