Cindy Marcolina - Page 50

Michael Yale gives new life to Jordan Tannahill's Late Company at Trafalgar Studios after a critically acclaimed run at Finborough Theatre earlier this year. The cast is once again inspiring and the production is even more poignant than the last.

Songwriter Robert J. Sherman just ended a run of his latest show A Spoonful of Sherman at Live at Zedel. He discusses the genesis of the cabaret and his family's musical heritage.

Andrew Maddock explores a difficult family relationship marred by old issues and mental health in his new play. While Darren (Nebiu Samuel) believes he's going to beat Usain Bolt in the Men's finals, Simon (Rhys Yates) is dealt a heavy hand trying to maintain the ties with his estranged sister Abigail (Michelle Barwood) and struggling to support Darren. The picture of a dysfunctional family, Olympilads leaves the audience with a broken heart and a punch in the gut.

Director Katherine Nesbitt leads the UK premiere of Boom, which premiered at the Ars Nova Theatre in New York in 2008. Following huge success in its first run, it became a favourite among producers, and it's not hard to understand why. Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's play is intelligent and apocalyptically funny.

Tony (Lee Knight) and Greg (Jason Nwoga) have been together for five years. Their relationship is safe, secure, and built on the notion that both of them are allowed to have one-night stands out of their flat. But when Tony hires Robert (Tom Lambert) as a cleaner, the couple's balance starts to shift. Directed by Adam Spreadbury-Maher 35 years after it first premiered in London, Kevin Elyot's Coming Clean is hilarious in his honesty and openness.

Georgiana Vicary, her whole family and her circle of friends are all waiting for shy Adam Lancaster to propose to her and end her shame of being almost 30 and still unmarried. Her conscience and truthfulness, however, do not make her life with the handsome fiance easy. The first London production of suffragette Cicely Hamilton's play in over 100 years is diverse and funny, but takes time to properly kick off.

San Francisco-born Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's hit doomsday comedy Boom, about a biology lab meet-cute with major evolutionary consequences, premiered at the Ars Nova Theatre in New York in 2008. This August, it comes to Theatre503.

Director John Haidar marks the 20th anniversary of Enda Walsh's award-winning Disco Pigs with a cracking new production at Trafalgar Studios. Premiered at the 1997 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the play depicts the peculiar universe created by Pig and Runt in Cork City. Born at the same time on the same day at the same hospital, the deep friendship that unites the two takes a turn on their 17th birthday.

Set in three bedrooms, the same emotional world under three different roofs in time, Torn Apart (Dissolution) is an intimately powerful play. BJ McNeill bares an array of human feelings and cages them on the stage in singular snapshots of differently shared lives.

In 1942, the American War Office issued a pamphlet titled 'Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain' to prepare the nation's soldiers to a life abroad defeating the Nazis. In the riotous comedy by Fol Espoir and The Real McGuffins, Americans and Brits come face to face with odd traditions, typical and debatable food habits, and a shared language that couldn't sound more different.

Premiering at Southwark Playhouse, Superhero is a bittersweet, funny and genuinely moving musical about a dad fighting for custody of his daughter. Colin Bradley (Michael Rouse) recounts his journey through fatherhood recollecting the small victories, hilarious moments and painful mistakes of his life with Emily, his beloved daughter, and Christine, his ex-wife.

James Bridie's Mr Gillie comes to the London stage after more than 60 years. Helmed by Jenny Eastop, this production is a successful portrait of love and passion for art and education.

Owners of a passed-down takeaway joint on an Australian highway, sisters Elma (Emma Playfair) and Nancy's (Lily Newbury-Freeman) unstable relationship is challenged on a daily basis between running the shop and dealing with their past. When they decide to turn their activity into a proper restaurant and hire the mysterious traveller Hakan (Scott Karim), their life take an unexpected turn.

Upon being discharged from the Marine Corps, Isaac (Arthur Darvill) goes back home only to find an anarchically ruled household at hand of his mother (Ashley McGuire). Fed up with domestic patriarchy, Paige seized the opportunity given by her abusive husband Arthur (Andy Williams) having a stroke to turn the tables and start making the rules. She built an ally in her transsexual son Max (Griffyn Gilligan), who helps her to keep tight hold on the reins. Isaac is forced to come to terms with a reality he doesn't recognise as his own.

The Heather Brothers are back with their new heavenly blaspheme musical comedy Holy Crap!. After launching the first pay-per-view religious channel in Great Britain, the American Bobby Del La Ray (John Addison), The "Hallelujah Cowboy", soon realises that there is no market for such an enterprise in the "godless and bankrupt UK". Since his meddling with the mafia is taking its tall on his mother, who is being held hostage in Sicily, he decides to start offering his few viewers another kind of entertainment, something that he is sure will increase his figures: porn. Helped by Rex Bedderman (Arvid Larsen), a legendary British rockstar and devout Christian who promotes his channel, Bobby's influence starts to grow.

Anthony Biggs presents the UK premiere of Maxim Gorky's 1908 The Last Ones in a highly dramatic and touching production that nevertheless feels ultimately insubstantial.

Directed by Anna Ledwich, Kiss Me is passionately and heartbreakingly intimate. Stephanie (Claire Lams), a war widow, struggles to reconcile her role as a "modern woman" with her longing to have a baby. She is met by a man, Dennis (Ben Lloyd-Hughes), whose job is to give exactly what the woman wants most. Their meeting will be the start of an unorthodox relationship in a shifting 1929 London which is still learning to adjust to the new world.

Like other young men, Jack, a 25-year-old with a learning disability, has needs and desires, and his parents don't want him to feel left out of significant life experiences, so they decide to hire a prostitute to arrange their son's first sexual encounter. Julia will slip into the cracks of a marriage on the verge of an invisible crisis, and in the end she will do a lot more than just help Jack.

Edward Fox stars in the one-man tribute to Great Britain's most acclaimed Poet Laureate John Betjeman. Following a successful UK tour, Sand in the Sandwiches is a verbal tour de force for the actor, who, at the age of 80, delivers a distinguished transposition of the artist.

On a (thankfully) sunny Saturday afternoon, the thespians who usually inhabit London theatres turned bakers for the day. Benefitting Acting For Others, an umbrella name that represents 15 charities devoted to helping people in the theatre business, the West End Bake Off was a bounty of show-stopping sugary goodness.