Breakfast at Tiffany's starring Anna Friel – Discount Tickets

Feeling spontaneous this Christmas? Then enjoy a very special festive offer from westendtheatre.com. Save £21 on tickets to see the acclaimed new production of Breakfast at Tiffany’s at the Haymarket Theatre Royal. The offer is valid 23rd to the 26th December matinees and 31st December matinee.

Anna Friel (TV’s Pushing Daisies, Lulu Almeida Theatre, Closer Broadway) stars as Holly Golightly with Joseph Cross (Milk, Flags of Our Fathers, Running With Scissors) as William ‘Fred’ Parsons in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Samuel Adamson’s new stage adaptation of Truman Capote’s classic novella. Sean Mathias directs the second production in his Theatre Royal Haymarket Season.

About the play: New York City, 1943. William ‘Fred’ Parsons, a young writer from Louisiana, meets Miss Holly Golightly, a charming, vivacious and utterly elusive good-time girl. Everyone falls in love with Holly, including William – but he is poor, and Holly needs rich. Will she marry Rusty, playboy millionaire? Or Jose, the future president of Brazil? As war rages in Europe, Holly begins to fall in love with William – and then her past catches up with her…..

Save £21 on tickets to see the acclaimed new production of Breakfast at Tiffany’s at the Haymarket Theatre Royal.

London theatre – summer preview

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London theatre is pulling out all of the stops this summer to ensure that the capital’s theatre scene remains a chief attraction for millions of UK and overseas visitors.

A host of big hitting stars and large scale musicals are lined up to showcase a range of new productions, including performances by Jude Law, Helen Mirren, Ethan Hawke, Gillian Anderson and Ian McKellen.

The death of drama in the West End has been greatly exaggerated given the wide ranging slate of classic and contemporary plays premiering this summer. One of the most high profile will be Jude Law, taking to the stage in Shakespeare’s most famous play, Hamlet, directed by Michael Grandage as part of his Donmar in the West End season. A strong supporting cast includes Penelope Wilton as Gertrude and Kevin McNally as Claudius, from 29 May at the Wyndham’s Theatre.

From Danes to Dames and Helen Mirren returns to London and the National Theatre from 4 June in Racine’s tragic play Phedre. The play concerns a woman (Mirren) consumed by passion for her stepson, which is highly plausible given that the stepson is played by hot young thing and Mamma Mia! The Movie star Dominic Cooper.

Helen Mirren starred in successful British movie Calendar Girls – which is now coming to the stage in a brand new production starring Patricia Hodge and Sian Phillips. Written by Tim Firth, the story of a group of middle-aged Women’s Institute members who pose for a calendar with a difference is playing at the Noel Coward Theatre.

Stage legends Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are reuniting after their onscreen antics in the X-Men movies to give us Waiting for Godot at the Haymarket Theatre from 20 April, in what promises to be a standout production of Samuel Beckett’s classic.

Talents from New York and London will converge at The Old Vic from 23 May for The Bridge Project – a three year partnership between The Old Vic, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Neal Street Productions. Academy Award-winning director Sam Mendes will direct a new version of The Cherry Orchard plus Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, in a cast that features Ethan Hawke, Simon Russell Beale, Sinead Cusack and recent star of Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona, Rebecca Hall.

The Cherry Orchard is a new translation by Tom Stoppard, who will also see his 1993 play Arcadia revived in a new production at the Duke of York’s Theatre starring his son Ed Stoppard and Samantha Bond and Dan Stevens. In its first run at the National Theatre the play won a slew of awards including Critics’ Circle, Evening Standard and Olivier Awards.

Other notable players making their way into town include Prunella Scales (Fawlty Towers) in Carrie’s War at the Apollo Theatre, and Gillian Anderson, who will star in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Donmar Warehouse, joining a stellar cast that includes Christopher Eccleston, Toby Stephens, Tara Fitzgerald and Anton Lesser.

Musical theatre is firmly “based on a film” this year as a blockbuster stage production of Sister Act joins a West End brimming with adaptations of movies, including recent addition Priscilla Queen of the Desert starring Jason Donovan and long-runners Hairspray with Michael Ball, Dirty Dancing, The Lion King, Billy Elliot, Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Sunset Boulevard – and Grease, which will star Dancing on Ice winner Ray Quinn as Danny from 11 May.

Sister Act, which runs from 7 May at the London Palladium, is produced by the film’s original star Whoopi Goldberg and features Sheila Hancock and rising star Patina Miller, with music courtesy of Alan Menken (Disney’s Beauty & The Beast).

Other movie-to-stage shows on the horizon include the Broadway production of Legally Blond opening at the Savoy Theatre at the end of the year and a stage adaptation of Oscar winning film Ghost, directed by Matthew Warchus, set for 2010.

Chief amongst the new musicals opening in London in the later part of 2009 will be Andrew Lloyd Webber’s world premiere of The Phantom of the Opera sequel Love Never Dies at the Adelphi Theatre in early November. The show is set to star current London Phantom Ramin Karimloo and will follow its London opening with productions in Toronto, Shanghai and then Broadway.

A number of shows that have run successfully in other venues are also making their way into the West End including Juliet Stevenson (Truly Madly Deeply) and Henry Goodman in Duet For One at the Vaudeville Theatre; the acclaimed production of Steven Sondheim’s A Little Night Music starring Maureen Lipman at the Garrick Theatre; the National Theatre’s War Horse, a family drama set during World War I about a boy’s adventures to find his beloved horse, at the New London theatre; and following its smash-hit run on Broadway – a new UK production of uber hip musical Spring Awakening at the Novello Theatre.

Other long running musicals that continue to extend their runs and pack them in include Avenue Q – now at the Gielgud Theatre, Blood Brothers, We Will Rock You, Chicago, Wicked, Jersey Boys, Stomp, Oliver!, Mamma Mia!, Les Miserables, Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Joseph, Roger’s and Hammerstein’s Carousel, Thriller Live featuring the songs of Michael Jackson and an award-winning production of La Cage Aux Folles.

Long-running plays in London include scary thriller The Woman in Black, hilarious comedy The 39 Steps based on Alfred Hitchcock’s film and Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap.

Finally, the V&A Museum in London has opened its new Theatre and Performance galleries following the closure of the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden in 2007. The new galleries will celebrate the UK’s heritage in culture and performance with hundreds of exhibits including costumes, set models, stage props, original posters and playbills, theatrical prints, paintings and photographs from some of London’s most famous theatrical productions.

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Marguerite Review

It’s a truth, universally acknowledged, that for a musical to succeed, you need to have a leading man or woman (preferably both) for whom you can root. The only exception I can think of is Sweeney Todd – and even that show was never the popular success of, say, My Fair Lady, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story or Rodgers and Hammerstein’s blockbusters.

One of the numerous problems with Marguerite, the new Boublil/Schonberg musical, with lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer and music by Michel Legrand, is that its titular heroine (Ruthie Henshall) is a loose-living opportunist, who, during France’s occupation by the Nazis, has an affair with a Nazi general called Otto (Alexander Hanson), not because she loves him but because of the nylon stockings and other gifts his status provides.

In the original story by Alexandre Dumas of which this is just one more variation, Marguerite was a courtesan who sacrifices her genuine love for a well-connected young man when her lover’s father persuades her to end the affair or risk ruining his son’s life and reputation.

This time round she’s a middle-aged singer who, despite her involvement with Otto, falls for Armand (Julian Ovenden) a handsome young pianist whose sister Annette (Annalene Beechey) works for the resistance. Needless to say, the ordure hits the fan. Armand becomes a hunted man, his sister is tortured by the Gestapo, he shoots Otto at close range and goes into hiding.

As soon as the war is over, Marguerite, now seen as a collaborator, is physically abused and humiliated by the same Parisian ‘friends’ who benefited from her affair with Otto. She dies from some unspecified condition as the curtain falls. Doom and gloom prevail without a single laugh to leaven the bleakness of it all. And there wasn’t a moist eye in the house.

Blame this on an ill-conceived book by Messrs Boublil, Schonberg and Jonathan Kent, who also directed. The authors totally fail to make you care for any of the two-dimensional characters, the sub-plot is marginally more interesting than the central romance, and a sense of deja vu seeps miasma-like through the show’s two short acts.

Michel Legrand has written some potentially attractive tunes but what we have is a collection of songs (mainly ballads) rather than a fully integrated score. His melodies, as pretty as they are, never rise to the kind of sweeping climax Andrew Lloyd Webber is so good at concocting, and, consequently, fail to invite applause. A big mistake, this.

Herbert Kretzmer’s elegant, thoroughly professional lyrics do their best to advance what little plot there is, but I wish I’d heard more of them in the duets and trios.

Kent’s direction is workmanlike, though his decision to begin the curtain calls without a single note of music until Ruthie Henshall appears for the final call is not only insulting to the rest of the cast, but just bad theatre. With so downbeat an ending, surely you’d immediately want to raise the audience’s sagging spirits with some upbeat music?

As Marguerite, Henshall gives her all. She sings well and is clearly committed to the role. But it’s a cold performance that never engages your sympathy. And while there’s not much to like or admire about her character, one should at least feel some compassion for her. Julian Ovenden sings well and looks good – but the role allows him to do little more than mope, which he does effectively enough. The best performance is Alexander Hanson’s Otto. The part is an elongated cliché, but at least he covers it in flesh and bones.

The undisputed success of this work in- progress is Paul Brown’s smokey, visually striking set, whose stylish, opulence contrasts dramatically with the murky existence of the show’s leading character, her fetid involvement with her Nazi admirer, and her drab, unfulfilled romance with Armand.

It’s one thing removing the ‘comedy’ from musical comedy. Trouble is, Boublil, Schonberg and Kent, in attempting to write a musical with gravitas, haven’t found anything to replace it with.

Haymarket Theatre.

CLIVE HIRSCHHORN. Courtesy of This Is London.

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