Franco Milazzo - Page 12

Phantom Peak, a Wild West-themed town with robots and no shortage of mysteries, may sound a tad like Westworld – but that’s where the comparison ends.

Amid a summer season positively snowed under with escapist fare, The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe fits right in. Admittedly, dipping into the wintery landscape of Narnia just after a British heatwave is a bit of an ask for the imagination but, if any production could do it, this is it.

Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea, revived here by Ensemble OrQuesta as part of the Arcola Theatre’s Grimeborn season, is a highly controversial and disputed work of baroque opera which flips the script on contemporary morality.

It’s taken three years but the Briefs cabaret crew have finally returned from Down Under with not just a new show but, with Sahara Beck and her band, a new direction too.

It has been a quarter-century since Patrick Marber's Closer debuted, but this play, in which everyone screws everyone in every sense of the word, has lost absolutely none of its epic brutality.

Sh!t-faced Shakespeare doesn’t take itself too seriously and puts bawdy entertainment at the top of the agenda; whether Shakespeare himself would give the thumbs up (or perhaps some other finger) is a question for another day.

Get your flat-cap ready and brush up your Brummie accent: the immersive Peaky Blinders: The Rise has arrived in London.

No, no, it isn’t déjà vu: Anything Goes really is back at the Barbican less than a year after it last opened there.

Australian drag variety show Yummy: Iconic features of quintet of performers dishing out an upbeat blend of dance, circus, burlesque and as much as lipsyncing as they can cram in. Will this tasty mix of talents leave you satiated or craving something more substantial?

Starring and written by JJ Green, A-Typical Rainbow has a particular mission: to give the audience a mind’s eye view of what it was like for him to be an autistic child and young man. For better and for worse, it very much succeeds in its mission.

A gut-punching slab of immersive theatre that takes no prisoners may be just what the doctor ordered in these interesting times. The Big House’s Redemption doesn’t have the most enticing of titles but this layered drama takes place in a unique environment and punches well above its weight.

The late Nell Gifford, co-founder of Gifford’s Circus, wrote that 'a good circus is a sublimely existential thing, living acutely and only for the present moment.' And so it is with ¡Carpa! (Spanish for tent), the company’s joyful and life-affirming show currently sited in Chiswick House’s gardens. From magnificent clowning to acrobatics aloft a horse, knife-throwing to hair-hanging, this show has something for everyone.

August Wilson’s Jitney, a play about Black taxi drivers in Seventies Pittsburgh, last opened in London in October 2001. Cloaked in the resonance of 9/11 and a nation still in shock, it walked away that year with the Olivier award for Best New Play. Two decades on, thoughts run to the Obama presidencies, Black Lives Matter and a world almost unimaginable when this play was written in 1979.

Highly physical, beautifully danced and sexy as all hell, Sir Matthew Bourne’s acclaimed ballet The Car Man made its debut in 2000 and now returns to London with an imaginative new staging at the Royal Albert Hall.

“By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you will be happy. If you get a bad one, you will be a philosopher.” Socrates may not have actually said those words but, even apocryphally, they express a cynicism about marriage that pervades through history to the modern day.

Looking for something endlessly inventive, ridiculously energetic, child-friendly yet racier than an MP's browsing history? Machine de Cirque has it all.

On a summer night in West London, a blazing fire of a Russian opera did battle with the chill night air. The opera won (albeit on points).

any attempt will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones is most definitely not for the faint-hearted. For his latest production at Sadler’s Wells, Flemish choreographer Jan Martens has created in ways which will shock any sane person to their core a highly engaging and provocative piece of political theatre which examines what we mean by community and how society fights against oppression, inequality, and the climate crisis .

In this bloody tale of grief and revenge, the year is 2043 and Reem and her husband Sayeed have an apparently simple life: she cooks lentils and watches Arab Idol, he sells fruit and veg and, on Thursday nights, the pair pop out for a spot of al fresco group sex on contested land under the watchful eye of Israeli snipers.

Due to its intrinsically adult nature, cabaret as an art form is a revolution that cannot be televised. And nor should it be — like some other grownup activities, it is best experienced in the flesh, preferably in company and in dark, intimate surroundings.