West End

Competition has been fierce. Tears, wine and blood have been spilt. Not necessarily in that order. All that remains, with votes cast, arguments played out, and money in brown paper bags tallied and accounted for, is to dust off the golden envelopes and announce the hotly anticipated (umm, by who? – ed) results.

If you are under the suspicion that these awards don’t have any real meaning and are just another internet blog’s attempts to round off the year in a show of unnecessary and undeserved self-importance then, well, you would be right.

However I rest happy knowing these are the views of someone who has seen, and written, a lot about theatre in 2014. And that has a meaning above and beyond those offered by a certain awards ceremony funded by a bearded Russian billionaire whose questionable wealth accumulation tactics enabled them to buy an entire newspaper for seemingly the sole purpose of indulging twin fantasies of being a cultural impresario and being photographed with an arm around attractive celebrities.

So mea culpa over, follow the link to check out the winners.

Find out who won here

Forbidden Broadway – Vaudeville Theatre, booking until 22 November 2014

With a song in my heart and a smile on my face, Civilian Theatre came as close he ever will to skipping with joy out of theatre at the end of Forbidden Broadway. This relentlessly silly, endlessly enjoyable show has transferred from the Menier Chocolate Factory to the Vaudeville to a fill a gap in scheduling after the short notice postponement of Rabbit Hole. It is a mark of the show’s fluid nature that a joke about being a ‘late season replacement’ has already been shoehorned in.

Forbidden Broadway has been around New York since the early 1980s but the nature of the show allows it to seamlessly weave in new musicals as they appear and as a result it broadly resembles the current West End, with The Book of Mormon and Once coming in for two of the most vicious sketches.

Joining the London cast is Christina Bianco, a star in the Broadway run and perhaps as importantly from the ticket agencies point of view, someone whose Youtube video of Let It Go has racked up more than 5 million hits. A not insignificant number when you have a mainly unknown cast and a West End theatre to fill.

The variety on display is quite startling. There is no plot, not even an attempt at one. This is a musical revue through and through, and the talented performers seem to be enjoying themselves as much as the audience. It reminded, more than anything else, of the Reduced Shakespeare Company – a fixture in London for many years.

The cast, Christina Bianco, Anne-Jane Casey, Damien Humbley and Ben Lewis, are impressively versatile and can switch between musical genres at the drop of a hat. They work well together as an ensemble and there isn’t a weak link among them, but it was Bianco demonstrating a stunning range in her pitch-perfect takedown of Kristin Chenoweth that came closest to bring the house down.

Like all parody shows there are hits and misses. However the ratio is certainly in favour of the hits, and even the misses are well sung. It is a show that does require a pretty good knowledge of musical theatre, and it has been written by people who know the form inside out – something seen in their canny choice of beginning with their take on ‘Fugue For Tinhorns’ from Guys and Dolls; a song that any musical aficionado will know has a fair claim of being the best opening number of any musical.

<<Continue to full review>>

I must thank the good people at Official Theatre for the tickets. Even without this shameless plug, please do check out their website to find out what is going on across the West End; it has links to tickets, venue contact details and bits ‘n bobs about all the theatres – the sort of thing I would do if I wasn’t so damn lazy. (www.officialtheatre.com)