Franco Milazzo - Page 8

Hot off Broadway with a Best Musical Tony and a Pulitzer Prize for its script, Michael R Jackson’s A Strange Loop comes to London for a summer run at The Barbican.

Before DC, Marvel and Spider-Man cottoned onto the potential of cinematic crossovers, Off The Record created arguably the most intriguing of them of all: a staged multiverse drawn from Quentin Tarantino films which is as sweary, gory and fun as one would expect.

Whether We Will Rock You will attract the attention of Trading Standards is unknown but rarely has a show been so poorly named.

Going by this latest show, the Tiger Lillies are still very much kicking against the pricks, still ploughing their own particular furrow, and still staying artistically relevant.

National treasures Giffords Circus return for their annual tour of village greens and stately homes with another show, another theme and, it appears to be, another hit.

Athletes have the Olympics. Chefs have Michelin stars. Actors have Hamlet. Citius, altius, fortius, Danish. In his one-man show Re-member Me (co-devised and directed by Jan Willem Van Den Bosch), Dickie Beau ponders death, mortality and legacy but not in a morbid way; it’s less a shoegazing mope and mumble about whether “to be or not to be”, more a defiant exploration of what it is “to be and not to be”.

Nudity, profanity and hilarity: Head First Acrobats present a new holy trinity in Godz as well as an exciting children's show in Arrr We There Yet?!

Few words grab the attention like murder. And few genres outside immersive theatre can pull you physically into a specific time and place. So why aren’t there more immersive murder productions like this one?

Most people going to the theatre will take public transport or their own car. In September 2021, Nathan Paulin took a 600-metre walk to Chaillot - Paris’ Théâtre National De La Danse on a slackline 70 metres above the Seine.

It’s 1951 and, as the nation prepares itself for the Festival of Britain, a heinous crime has been committed. After a murder most foul, ten suspects, a killer hiding in plain sight and around two hundred passengers-cum-amateur detectives find themselves all aboard the same train. It’s fair to say that Dead On Time knows how to set a scene even before we step aboard.

A modern musical fairytale, Once On This Island is Romeo and Juliet set in the French Antilles with the two lovers on opposite sides of a race and class divide. Regent’s Park Theatre opens its 2023 season with a humdinger of a revival, a real foot-stomper that rings in the ears long after the last song finishes.

Sometimes show titles are spot-on perfect, albeit unintentionally. Porca Miseria is, in the Italian vernacular, an expression of frustration, something I would use when losing a cufflink or after sitting through a three hour-plus triptych of dance works that is, in the English vernacular, patently bobbins.

Ulla! Martians, music and mayhem: who could ask for more from an immersive show? Layered Reality has taken HG Wells classic story, scored It with Jeff Wayne’s much-loved album, added some very effective VR and placed it inside a dedicated space in the City of London.

Featuring a work which doesn’t even last an hour, this was never going to be an ordinary evening for the English National Opera but, even from the off, history was being written.

Nederland Dans Theater, one of the premiere dance venues in Europe, makes its first return to Sadler's Wells since 2018 bringing together three very different pieces which go from the dream-like to the very real and heart-rending.

Midnight Circle Theatre finally gets an opening night.

What’s in a name? That which we call William, Hamlet or Anne still smells as sweet when we see their historical origins in this adaptation by Lolita Chakrabarti of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel.

The title of Circa’s Humans 2.0 has a double meaning: as well as being a new iteration of their 2017 show Humans, it explores on what could be the saving future graces for our benighted species: trust, community and incredibly fit bodies.

In this contemporary dance version of the Rudyard Kipling classic, a grim future is played out against the backdrop of a climate crisis and mass human migration.

Can the best get better? In my 2022 year-end roundup, I ranked Phantom Peak as my favourite immersive show of 2022, ahead of bigger shows like Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City and TV show-based drama Peaky Blinders: The Rise. The latest iteration has a new platypus theme and even more mysteries to solve but will it be enough to retain top spot?