London Spotlight: March 2007
As spring approaches, London is still a big town for musicals. Indeed, the West End is so jammed with hot-ticket tuners that there’s apparently only room for one more this month. It’s the Menier Chocolate Factory transfer of the revival of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s Little Shop of Horrors at the Duke of York’s (March 6-June 2).
Whether it’s a musical or a play, London is always brimming with revivals. Anthony Page’s production of Edward Albee’s less-than-beloved The Lady From Dubuque turns up at the Haymarket (March 3-June 9) with the cherished over-the-top expert, Dame Maggie Smith in the title role.
Another backward glance takes place at the Old Vic, where Tony Award winner Robert Lindsay is starring as Archie Rice in John Osborne’s stunning 1957 send-up of the sinking British empire, The Entertainer (now to May 19).
For more star power, Patrick Stewart returns to the role of Prospero, a role he played in New York in The Tempest, another production of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current London season (Novello, through March 24). Other noteworthy revivals include Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle in a new Frank McGuinness version at the National’s intimate Cottesloe (March 7-April 14) and Athol Fugard’s early Sizwe Banzi is Dead, which occupies the National’s larger Lyttelton (March 19-April 4), starring original cast and co-creators John Kani and Winston Ntshona.
While there are revivals aplenty, the relative shortage of new plays continues to be talked about. Anyone looking for political theater Great Britain-style may gravitate to Steve Thompson’s Whipping It Up, which is set sometime during the future in Whitehall, the seat of national bureaucracy. Technically, the play at the New Ambassadors (through April 28) isn’t brand-new, because it’s a transfer from the Bush. At the Soho, another venue where original and often torrid new works are sought, there’s Drew Pautz’s Someone Else’s Shoes (March 8-April 7) about the commercialization of contemporary art.
King of Hearts at the Hampstead (through March 31) is likely to be the occasion for more dirty-laundry politics. The playwright is Alistair Beaton, who wrote the mordantly amusing Feelgood a while back. Now he imagines what might happen if an heir to the British throne decided to marry a Muslim. Max Stafford-Clark and Ramin Gray co-direct.
Don’t Look Now at the Lyric Hammersmith (March 13-31) is an adaptation by Nell Leyshon of Daphne du Maurier’s short story about an English couple mourning a dead daughter, who have a series of frightening encounters in Venice. At the Almeida, always an important destination for previously unseen work, is Moira Buffini’s Dying For It, a new adaptation of Nicholai Erdman’s controversial 1929 play Suicide.
Weighing in as new to these shores is a bill of three one-acts being unveiled under the catchall title Lovely and Misfit at Trafalgar Studios (March 6-31). They’re a trio of early Tennessee Williams exercises only recently dusted off after lying in long obscurity. The pieces — And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens, Mr. Paradise and Summer at the Lake — are not top-drawer Williams, but his theme of lost illusions is solidly in place.
