Videos: West End Live 2010

The weekend of 19 and 20 June 2010 saw the sixth annual West End Live event in Leicester Square, London. Showcasing the best of West End theatre, casts of most major shows performed for a crowd of over 250,000 people.

Videos courtesy of Elizabeth Toni (www.elizabethtoni.com)

Grease The Musical

Sweet Charity

Jersey Boys

Hair

Chicago The Musical

Love Never Dies

Billy Elliot

We Will Rock You

Wicked

Burn The Floor

Dirty Dancing

Brazil! Brazil!

Videos courtesy of Elizabeth Toni (www.elizabethtoni.com)

Big crowds for West End Live 2010

Over 250,000 people gather in Leicester Square for free West End theatre event.

View VIDEOS of West End Live 2010

West End Live, a free event held in the West End this weekend, showcased the best of London theatre and attracted over a quarter of a million people.

Now in its sixth year and the largest free theatre festival in the world, the event featured the casts of some of London’s biggest shows including Thriller Live, Disney’s The Lion King, Legally Blonde, All The Fun Of The Fair, Tap Dogs, We Will Rock You, Billy Elliot, Wicked, Hair, Chicago, Love Never Dies, Avenue Q, Priscilla Queen Of The Desert, Burn the Floor, Grease, Mamma Mia!, Stomp, Dirty Dancing and Jersey Boys.

An array of West End stars performed at the event including Ramin Karimloo (Love Never Dies), Sheridan Smith (Legally Blonde), Patina Miller (Sister Act), Daniel Boys (Wolfboy) and Ryan Molloy (Jersey Boys).

Councillor Robert Davis of Westminster City Council, who organised the event, said: “Without doubt, this has been our biggest and best West End LIVE. We’ve seen spectacular performances from some of the nation’s favourite shows.”

Nica Burns, President of the Society of London Theatre said: “London has the best theatre in the world and West End LIVE is a fantastic opportunity for people to sample some of the West End’s most popular shows for free.” The success of the past weekend suggests that a quarter of a million satisfied theatre fans agree.

View VIDEOS of West End Live 2010

West End Live this weekend

A free event will be held in London this weekend, showcasing the best of West End theatre.

West End Live will feature the casts of some of London’s biggest shows, performing at a free event this weekend in Leicester Square. On Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 June 2010, hundreds of West End performers will gather to showcase the best of London theatre. Careful juggling by the organisers has enabled the casts of over 25 shows to appear live on a stage in Leicester Square in between performing their matinee and evening performances.

Download and print the West End Live timetable of events.

The line-up for the celebration has now been confirmed, with Brazil! Brazil! launching the weekend at 11am on Saturday.

Shows which have agreed to participate in the family event include Thriller Live, Disney’s The Lion King, Legally Blonde, All The Fun Of The Fair, Tap Dogs, We Will Rock You, Billy Elliot, Wicked, Hair, Chicago, Love Never Dies, Avenue Q, Priscilla Queen Of The Desert, Burn the Floor, Grease, Mamma Mia!, Stomp, Dirty Dancing and Jersey Boys.

West End stars will be out in force to entertain audiences at the event,  including Daniel Boys (Wolfboy), who will be hosting proceedings from 12 noon to 6pm on Sunday 20 June, Sheridan Smith (Legally Blonde), Kerry Ellis (Oliver!), Patina Miller (Sister Act) and Hannah Waddingham (Into The Woods).

Saturday’s full line up* is as follows: 11.00am Brazil! Brazil!; 11.15am Dirty Dancing; 11.25am Burn the Floor; 11.35am Wicked; 11.45am We Will Rock You; 12.05pm Billy Elliot; 12.15pm Love Never Dies; 12.30pm Chicago; 12.45pm HAIR; 13.05pm Jersey Boys; 13.25pm Sweet Charity; 13.35pm Grease; 13.50pm Mamma Mia!; 14.00pm Sister Act; 14.10pm Thriller Live; 14.30pm Julie Atherton; 14.40pm Avenue Q; 15.00pm Into the Woods; 15.20pm Fireman Sam; 15.30pm Sylvia Young Theatre School; 15.50pm Burn the Floor; 16:00pm The Big Dance; 16:20pm London Gay Men’s Chorus; 16:35pm Burn The Floor; 16.45pm The Gleeks; 17.10pm Royal Albert Hall; 17.35pm All the Fun of the Fair; 17.45pm STOMP.

On Sunday* there’s more theatrical thrills and spills with: 12.00pm Tap Dogs; 12.15pm Stomp; 12.30pm Thriller Live; 12.55pm Jersey Boys; 13.10pm Priscilla Queen of the Deasert; 13.25pm Legally Blonde; 13.35pm Disney’s The Lion King; 13.50pm Mamma Mia!; 14.00pm West End Kids; 14.15pm Daniel Boys; 14.30pm National Youth Music Theatre; 14.45pm Into the Woods; 15.10pm Mark Jermin Stage School; 15.30pm Fireman Sam; 15.45pm Jack Day; 16.00pm T Mobile Big Dance; 16.20pm West End Gospel Choir; 16.40pm Burn the Floor; 16.50pm SOLT competition; 17.00pm 1916 the Musical; 17.15pm Burn the Floor; 17.25pm Dover Street.

* Timetable and acts subject to change – check West End Live site for details.

To get the party started early, the cast of Wicked will also be performing on Friday 18 June 2010 at Cardinal Place, Victoria between 12.30 and 1pm for a pre West End LIVE performance.

The weekend event will feature exhibits and activities including the London Film Museum, Science Museum, V&A Museum, Little Angel Puppet theatre and Forbidden Planet.

Over a quarter of a million people attended last year’s event in Leicester Square.  Running in a variety of formats for a number of years, including the Society of London Theatre’s Fair in the Square events in the 1990s, this year’s two-day event is organised by Westminster City Council.

Saturday 19 June, 11am-6pm and Sunday 20 June, 12noon to 6pm in Leicester Square.

Download and print the West End Live timetable of events.

LINKS: West End Live website

Donovan and Swenson bow out of West End

Two West End stars left their roles in major shows this weekend. On Saturday night (29 May) Jason Donovan left Priscilla Queen of the Desert at the Palace Theatre and Broadway star Will Swenson left Hair at the Gielgud Theatre.

JASON DONOVAN

Fans and cast members paid tribute to Jason Donovan on Saturday 29 May as he shimmied in his fabulous shoes and frocks for the final time in Priscilla Queen of the Desert at the Palace Theatre in London, after 14 months and over 450 performances.

On Jason’s Facebook page, fan Laura Harvey said: “So sad that it’s your last Priscilla…. you will be greatly missed”. Cast mate Amy Edwards posted on Twitter that, “am going to miss him loads! He’s a fantastic performer and an amazing person”, and Oliver Thornton, who plays Adam in the show said: “So sad to lose my playmate and friend from the show”.

Ben Richards from ITV’s The Bill takes over Donovan’s role from 1 July. Richards is an accomplished musicals actor having played numerous roles in high-profile West End shows including Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls, Danny Zuko in Grease, Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever and Jerry Lukowski in The Full Monty.

Book tickets to Priscilla Queen of the Desert starring Ben Richards at the Palace Theatre in London

WILL SWENSON

In a theatrical circle of life, Saturday also saw Broadway star Will Swenson leave Hair The Musical in the West End – in order to take on Jason Donovan’s role of Tick in a new Broadway production of Priscilla Queen of the Desert.

Swenson, who was Tony Award-nominated for his performance as Berger in Hair, will open in Priscilla in Toronto in October for 12 weeks before moving the show to Broadway.

The Broadway production will also see Tony Sheldon, who played Bernadette in the Australian and London productions of Priscilla, reprise his role.

Steel Burkhardt, a company member in the original Broadway production and the West End transfer, has taken over Swenson’s role as Berger. Hair marked Burkhardt’s Broadway and West End debuts.

Hair will close at the Gielgud Theatre on 4 September 2010.

In other HAIR news, Gavin Creel, fellow Broadway and now London cast member of the show, will make his solo debut in London this summer. He will play one night only at the Pigalle Club in London’s West End on 20 July. See Facebook for further information.

Book tickets to see Hair starring Gavin Creel at the Gielgud Theatre in London

Free West End event scheduled

The casts of London’s biggest shows are being allowed out of their theatres again this year to perform at the West End’s annual live event in Leicester Square.

West End Live is a weekend of free entertainment on 19 and 20 June that promises to showcase the best of London’s Theatreland.

Running in a variety of formats for a number of years, including the Society of London Theatre’s Fair in the Square events in the 1990s, this year’s two-day event initiated by Westminster City Council will see 23 shows perform on a stage in Leicester Square.

Shows which have agreed to participate in the family event include Thriller Live, The Lion King, Legally Blonde, All The Fun Of The Fair, Tap Dogs, We Will Rock You, Billy Elliot, Wicked, Hair, Chicago, Love Never Dies, Avenue Q, Priscilla Queen Of The Desert, Burn the Floor, Grease, Mamma Mia!, Stomp, Dirty Dancing, The Fantasticks and Jersey Boys.

West End stars will be out in force to entertain audiences at the event,  including Sheridan Smith (Legally Blonde), Kerry Ellis (Oliver!), Patina Miller (Sister Act) and Hannah Waddingham (Into The Woods). More stars are expected to be announced shortly.

Last year’s event attracted around 250,000 people.

Saturday 19 June, 11am-6pm and Sunday 20 June, 12noon to 6pm in Leicester Square.

LINKS: West End Live website

Hair – Gielgud Theatre – Reviews Round-up

There was much reminiscing at the Gielgud Theatre last night for the opening of HAIR. The award-winning Broadway revival, which has moved lock, stock and smoking doobie to London courtesy of Cameron Mackintosh, prompted much nostalgia from the critics, many of whom remembered the original production (Charles Spencer in the Telegraph was particularly sweet:  ”for old hippies like me, the show offers two and a half hours of theatrical bliss”. The critics were largely positive, with much praise heaped on Diane Paulus’s well-judged production and the enthusiasm and energy of the cast.

STAR RATINGS

The Telegraph

The Guardian

Bloomberg

The Independent

The Times

OPENING THOUGHTS

TI: It can’t and doesn’t have the freshness of the moment when Hair first hit a London that had just binned the theatrical censor. But it’s exhilarating, as well as oddly poignant… This is a production whose unstoppable energy and ebullient choreography more than compensate for what could, I suppose, still be considered flaws.

TE: More than 40 years since its premiere, this greatest of all rock musicals can still inspire violent antipathy among the straitlaced. That strikes me as being one of its strengths.

IN: The great thing about this joyous production of the mother of all rock musicals, a total transplant of the recent Broadway revival, is that it makes a bad book look better and the already good music sound great.

GU: Hair is more than just a musical: it is a social and cultural phenomenon, a jubilant assertion of life and freedom and a cry of protest against politicians who, in the late 1960s, sent a generation of young Americans to war.

DM: Big and fuzzy, that’s Hair. An energetic revival of the 1960s anti-war musical has just reached London and the striking thing, apart from the noise and spectacle, is that the Vietnam era’s youth were so much bolder than recent Western youngsters in their reaction to American warfare.

ON THE CAST

TI: With the marvellously febrile Will Swenson to the fore, shaking his long black locks at zombie America, I was time-warped to the turbulent, anarchic feel of 1968.

TE: The verve and energy of the company, who frequently make forays into the audience, ruffling the spectators’ hair and kissing them on the cheek, is irresistible… Will Swenson’s comic but deliberately un-endearing performance in the leading role of Berger… Caissie Levy is tender and touching as the girlfriend he treats so cruelly, Gavin Creel deeply moving as the confused Claude

IN: Will Swenson’s bestial Berger – you couldn’t say he was a ham Berger – exudes a rugged charm even when mooning bare-bottomed at the audience. He has the dark good looks of Oliver Tobias, who played the role here, and doesn’t seem to be “acting” at all. There are some great voices as well as his, notably Sasha Allen’s gorgeous Dionne, who take us back to the Age of Aquarius and Darius Nichols’s Afro-wigged Hud with a big creamy bass.

GU: I can only salute the cascading energy of her cast led by Gavin Creel as Claude, Caissie Levy as the demonstrating Sheila, Will Swenson as the shaggily stoned, self-consciously hammy Berger and Sasha Allen as the brass-lunged Dionne.

DM: [But] the lack of narrative is balanced by the panache of the actors. Only the most reactionary grump could fail to applaud their professionalism. The sheer stamina needed to keep that wall of noise going all evening is remarkable.

BOOK AND MUSIC

TI: Gerome Ragni and James Rado’s book might often have been improvised by stoned beatniks, but Galt MacDermot’s songs, with their tributes to sodomy, onanism and (weirdly) “Manchester, England”, still zing.

IN: …the score by Galt MacDermot, with a handful of chart-topping numbers and a bountiful mix of great jazz ballads, raw blues and choric anthems, remains as irresistible as ever: the “Hare Krishna” chorus elides into the “Where Do I Go?” Act I finale in which the cast’s nudity is now delivered as a graceful and moving statement of helplessness and vulnerability.

DM: That hits you, as does the paucity of plot. The first 40 minutes are almost entirely unexplained – it’s just one high-pulse introductory solo after another – and the second half suffers a long, heinously dull hallucination scene.

ON THE DIRECTOR

TE: Diane Paulus’s production brilliantly succeeds in letting the audience imagine it is present at a Sixties happening where sex and drugs and rock and roll (not to mention full-frontal nudity) combine to create a world of bleary bonhomie, naive idealism and political radicalism.

IN: Diane Paulus’s production pulls the clever stunt of turning the protest into a lament for Claude as the tribe “let the sunshine in” and disperse through the stalls, leaving a corpse in uniform out in the snow. It’s a stunning conclusion, managing to avoid both glutinous sentiment and mawkish piety.

GU: The great thing about Diane Paulus’s revival, which imports an entire Broadway company to London, is that it sees the show in two ways. It recognises that Hair was a product of its time, yet it also presents it as a vibrant, joyous piece of living theatre.

GU: Without attempting to emulate the pyrotechnic, strobe-lit dazzle of Tom O’Horgan’s original production, Paulus also makes this a genuinely tribal show in which the spirit of the ensemble is greater than any individual. Above all, Paulus and her music director, Richard Beadle, give full value to Galt MacDermot’s 40 songs

FINAL THOUGHTS

TI: And, boy, can these performers sing. It doesn’t wholly matter that the show needs a less traditional playhouse than the Gielgud when they celebrate freedom by sprawling into the aisles and the stalls. They do something better. They raise the old theatre’s roof.

TE: …this is essentially an ensemble show in which the whole company shines, while also suggesting the dark shadows of the hippie dream.

IN: It is, sui generis, one of the great musicals of all time, and a phenomenon that, I’m relieved to discover, stands up as a period piece with as much vitality and appeal as, in their own way, do No, No Nanette and The Boy Friend.

GU: But what matters is that it celebrates a period when the joy of life was pitted against the forces of intolerance and the death-dealing might of the military-industrial complex. As Shakespeare once said: “There’s sap in’t yet.”

DM: Forty years on, we are wiser about the sapping, ruinous effects of hallucinogenic drugs. We have also started to realise that the baby-boomer generation was spoilt and, in numerous ways, destructive and fake. When you consider that the draft-dodgers included later warmongers such as Bill Clinton and George W Bush, it doesn’t do much for the brand. And yet here, albeit with great gusto, albeit to shrieking acclaim, such creeps are being romanticised as enlightened and somehow brave. Despite the admirable production values, that stinks.

KEY TO CRITICS:

TE: The Telegraph – Charles Spencer

DM: Daily Mail – Quentin Letts

GU: The Guardian – Michael Billington

BL: Bloomberg – Warwick Thompson

IN: The Independent – Michael Coveney

TI: The Times – Benedict Nightingale

Book tickets to Hair at the Gielgud Theatre in London

Hair starts London previews

Hair, the acclaimed Broadway musical revival, starts previews tonight at the Gielgud Theatre in London.

Cameron Mackintosh has brought over the entire New York cast of James Rado and Gerome Ragni’s 1967 tribal rock musical, starring the sexy and charismatic Gavin Creel as Claude.

The show, set  against the backdrop of the Vietnam war draft during the 1960s, centres on a group of hippies who champion peace, love and freedom and features a famous score including songs Aquarius, Good Morning Starshine, Let The Sunshine In and, of course, Hair.

The current Broadway production by the Public Theater, which won a 2009 Tony Award for Best  Revival of a Musical, celebrated its one-year anniversary yesterday, 31 March, at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre in New York.

Book tickets to Hair at the Gielgud Theatre in London

GAVIN CREEL in Hair

Broadway star Gavin Creel comes to London in Hair

Following its hugely successful run at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, Hair returned to Broadway last year for the first time in more than 30 years. Galt MacDermot, Gerome Ragni and James Rado’s 1967 tribal love-rock musical opened at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre to stunning reviews and legions of new fans.

So much so that theatre impresario Cameron Mackintosh has persuaded New York producers to let him uproot the entire cast lock, stock and barrel and bring them over to the Gielgud Theatre this Spring.

Whilst the show features a strong ensemble cast, GAVIN CREEL, who plays a particularly conflicted member of Hair’s tribe of Vietnam-era, naked-loving bohemians, has stood out as being a particularly powerful presence in the musical.

Creel, 33, who was born in Ohio, was already Tony-nominated for his 2002 Broadway debut in Thoroughly Modern Millie when he claimed another nomination last year for his performance as Claude, this time for best performance by a leading actor in a musical. He was piped to the post by those dancing boys from Billy Elliot, but something tells us that he is sure to get another shot at this – and many other awards – sometime soon.

Book tickets to see Hair at the Gielgud Theatre in London

Broadway Hair to London

The Tony award-winning Broadway production of Hair will transfer to London next year.

Plans are afoot for New York’s Public Theatre production of the show to move to the Gielgud Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue in April. Cameron Macktintosh, owner of the Gielgud, is involved in helping the creative team transfer the show.

Currently playing at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre in New York, the musical has proved a big hit on Broadway, directed by Diane Paulus and created by James Rado and Galt MacDermot.

With a score including songs such as”Let the Sun Shine In”, “Aquarius”, “Hair” and “Good Morning Starshine”, the show depicts the birth of a cultural movement in the ’60s as told through a tribe of hopeful hippies living in New York City while war rages in Vietnam. The young cast of 26 brings the show an energy and exuberance that promises to shake up the West End.

Negotiations are under way to bring the entire US cast to London for the show, with the aim of then introducing UK actors as the run progresses.

BOOK TICKETS TO HAIR AT THE GIELGUD THEATRE IN LONDON

Broadway Tickets

Going to New York? Then book a Broadway show with westendtheatre.com and Viator – one of the world’s leading online travel companies.

A visit to New York is not complete without a visit to Broadway. Home to some of the most exciting and lavish shows on earth, Broadway Theatre leads the world in providing an unforgettable night of  entertainment.

Book here for a number of top Broadway shows including Chicago, The Lion King, The Phantom of the Opera, Memphis on Broadway, South Pacific, Hair, Billy Elliot, Mary Poppins and Mamma Mia!

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