Category: Musical Theatre

You may not be aware of Jerry’s Girls but there’s a fair chance you’ll be familiar with the back catalogue of composer and lyricist Jerry Herman. He’s written the songs for a range of well-known musicals – most famously Hello, Dolly! and La Cage aux Folles – and Jerry’s Girls is a musical revue based on the biggest hits from his most famous shows. The show has its origins in New York nightclubs in the early 1980s, but was officially commissioned as a full-scale musical revue following the success of…

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For those who’ve not heard of Hadestown before, it’s been around in some form or another for the best part of 20 years. Songwriter Anaïs Mitchell starting working on these ideas in the mid-2000s in Vermont, before taking the songs to the studio to record 2010’s lo-fi folk album Hadestown. Following a series of further workshops and small-scale productions off-Broadway during the 2010s, a fully-fledged musical landed at the National Theatre right here in London for a short stint at the end of 2018. It was then re-imagined for Broadway…

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Some shows really stand the test of time well, and others don’t – Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I sadly falls into the latter category. It’s a well-known and well-liked musical, but its themes wouldn’t be tolerated if it was written as a new work today. Whether it’s the ‘white saviour’ undertone for the whole narrative, or the depiction of foreigners as barbarians, or the dated attitudes towards women and how they should always be subservient to men – this all may have been acceptable when it was first…

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There’s been a fair bit of hype surrounding Treason the Musical since its inception. Originally released as a 5-track EP, there were subsequent staged concert versions of the show on London’s West End, starring big names including Rosalie Craig and Carrie Hope Fletcher. The fully-staged version of the musical opened last month at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre; these performances were followed by a short run at the Sheffield Lyceum and it now finds itself at London’s Alexandra Palace. There are a pair of performances scheduled at the London Palladium later in the…

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