Franco Milazzo - Page 5

Through the lens of three households living in Sheffield’s Park Hill housing estate, Chris Bush examines family and politics in modern Britain.

Looking at their impressive longevity and sheer depravity, Lessons In Nihilism’s combination of musical trio The Tiger Lillies and drag’s philosopher king David Hoyle is an almost inevitable team up, the only surprise being that it hasn’t happened before.

The cruel world of drama schools is examined at close range in Spider, written and directed by Jude Benning and currently playing at Riverside Studios as part of their Bitesize Festival.

Appearing down in the Barbican’s Pit theatre as the final part of this year’s MimeLondon, This & That from Phil Soltanoff and Steven Wendt is an oblique and often frustrating hour of shadow puppetry and animation.

Flying in from the States for her eighth time at Soho Theatre, Seattle-based performer Dina Martin debuts her new show Sub-Standards. It takes some skill to straddle performance art, clowning, drag and stand-up with skill and wit but she never looks uncomfortable. And nor should she with her considerable pedigree and following.

On its West End debut, The Addams Family musical makes the most of its graveyard humour and kooky characters, even if the star casting is questionable.

Appearing as part of their Festival of New Choreography, the Royal Ballet have partnered with the National Ballet of Canada for Dark With Excessive Bright, an extraordinarily intimate experiment which allows audience to experience the art form in a radical way.

Considering their recent losses, physical theatre giants Spymonkey would have been justified to adapt a Greek tragedy rather than a comedy. The death of Stephan Kreiss in 2021 and the departure of Petra Massey to Las Vegas now leaves only Toby Park and Aitor Bassauri remaining.

Performed for the first time outside Spain, El Patio Teatro’s Entrañas asks two simple questions: what does it mean to be a human, and what does it mean to be human? The deceptively simple title roughly translates as “Insides” and obfuscates the intellectual and emotional breadth and depth of this stunningly innovative work. 

Even with its scenes of torture, sexual extortion, execution and suicide, this thirteenth revival of Jonathan Kent’s take on Tosca digs deep into the romantic story at its heart.

The UK can’t claim too many music groups with the impressive longevity or sheer depravity of Fascinating Aïda. Celebrating forty years of dropping jaws with a set of songs that still amuse, shock and titillate, they return for yet another tour up and down the country. 

Filled with a couple of operas’ worth of tragedy, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles is not the likeliest source of inspiration for a dramatic circus show but Ockham's Razor are here to prove us wrong. 

Meshing together live artwork, puppetry and music, Stereoptik’s latest work Antechamber is a theatrical experiment that largely delivers on its intriguing premise.

Flipping the script on the notion that puppet shows are for children, Blind Summit's latest show The Sex Lives Of Puppets is a thought-provoking portrayal of modern lust, love and everything in between.

A show about puppets and sex? There are some obvious gags here, not least are their relationships based on “no strings”? Thankfully, Blind Summit artistic director Mark Down and his co-director and co-writer Ben Keaton eschew the corny and porny in this series of emotive vignettes.

Thanks to some nifty “mixed reality” technology from Tin Drum, Oscar-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto is brought back to some semblance of life in Kagami.

What a year! I pulled out my notebook over a hundred times and came away, more often not, with a happy heart. Below is a condensed list of the very best - and worst - that I saw.

Any new show from Les Enfants Terribles arrives with high expectations. Their hugely imaginative approach to theatre has seen them take wellknown children's tales and turn them into immersive promenade adventures like the deliciously gruesome (and gruesomely delicious) Dinner With The Twits and 2015’s twisted fantasy Alice Underground which is being revived next year.

When I first saw The Nutcracker around a quarter of a century ago, I became sure of one thing: either I was on drugs, the cast were on drugs or we both were. A far cry from the average ballets, this dream-like work still has the power to enthral the young and old.

With an opening that couldn’t be more over the top if it was broadcast from the International Space Station, the never knowingly underdressed Reuben Kaye sweeps the entire room into his particular brand of cabaret. Coming on like a one-man Moulin Rouge floorshow, he spits out caustic one liners like a rapping Henny Youngman.