Oliver! sets date to close
June 21, 2010 by admin
Filed under News, News - Featured, Shows closing
Cameron Mackintosh’s big-budget production of Oliver! at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane will close on 8 January 2011.
Russ Abbot as Fagin in Oliver!
The show, which originally cast Jodie Prenger in the lead role of Nancy through BBC talent show I’d Do Anything, premiered on 14 January 2009 at the venue. This month the show’s fourth Fagin started work, with Russ Abbot stepping into Griff Rhys Jones’s beard and hat to take on the role. Rowan Atkinson originated the part in the current production.
Lionel Bart’s musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’s classic novel Oliver Twist first premiered in London in 1960. The current production is directed by Rupert Goold (Enron), based on Sam Mendes 1994 production.
Other cast include Kerry Ellis (Wicked) as Nancy, Steven Hartley as Bill Sikes and Stephen Moore as Mr Brownlow.
Large-scale shows hovering as possible replacements for Oliver! at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane include a rumoured Broadway transfer of Disney show Shrek.
Special offer: Save £21 on tickets to see Oliver! at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London
CASTING: Jodie Prenger to join the cast of Spamalot on tour
“I’d Do Anything” winner and Oliver! star Jodie Prenger will join the cast of the UK tour of Spamalot playing the Lady of Lake, in Monty Python’s hit musical comedy. She leaves her role as Nancy on 27 March to be replaced by Kerry Ellis (Wicked). The tour starts at the New Wimbledon Theatre on the 29 May.
Oliver! – Save £11 on tickets
March 10, 2010 by admin
Filed under Uncategorized
Valid Monday to Thursday until the 27th May Excludes School Holidays
Enjoy a special discount on tickets to see Cameron Mackintosh’s triumphant production of Lionel Bart’s classic musical Oliver! at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
This new production is the most spectacular ever staged and stars Griff Rhys Jones as Fagin, Jodie Prenger (winner of the BBC’s I’d Do Anything) and a cast and orchestra of over one hundred. The sensational score is full of Lionel Bart’s irresistible songs including Food Glorious Food, Consider Yourself, You’ve Got to Pick-a-Pocket or Two, I’d Do Anything, Oom Pah Pah, As Long As He Needs Me and many more.
‘Oliver! Sets the West End alight’ Sunday Telegraph.
‘Blast away all those recession cobwebs. Anyone who needs cheering up should get along to Drury Lane sharpish and catch this humdinger of a night’ Daily Mail.
‘Uplifting stuff. Jodie Prenger is terrific, great, earthy and warm. You’ll love it’ Sunday Times.
Valid Monday to Thursday until the 27th May Excludes School Holidays
Oliver! Reviews – Press Round-up
A round-up of Oliver! reviews
- The Telegraph: 4/5
- The Guardian: 3/5
- The Times: 4/5
- The Independent: 3/5
ON THE MATERIAL
Telegraph: “It’s a travesty of Dickens. It’s absolutely fantastic showbiz.”
Guardian: “Not even the expertise of the staging and a handful of fine performances can disguise the essential thinness of this piece of deodorised musical Dickens…. But although this is sanitised Dickens, Bart manages to write some thumping good tunes and provide scope for individual actors.”
BN: “Bart’s songs may be unsophisticated and the rhymes sometimes feeble (“where oh where is love, does it fall from skies above?”), but they’re so tuneful and put over such elan that last night’s audience rightly cheered Consider Yourself, You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two and several others.”
ON THE CAST
Please note: The role of Fagin is now played by Omid Djalili.
The Stage: “Djalili might not appear to be the most obvious choice for Fagin, but any doubts that miscasting may have taken place are soon put aside. Djalili puts his stand-up comedy skills to great use in scenes where he appears to be ad-libbing, making jokes about politicians’ expenses and the banking crisis, and, as you might expect, he demonstrates perfect comic timing”
Telegraph: “Rowan Atkinson is both sinister and hilarious as Fagin… Jodie Prenger, brings a warmth to the stage you could warm your hands by, and wrings every last ounce of emotion from that deeply dodgy celebration of wife beaters, As Long as He Needs Me.”
Guardian: “Rowan Atkinson turns in a sprightly, distinctive performance… Atkinson also plays up the character’s sexual ambiguity…. If this revival is worth catching, it is largely for Atkinson’s saturnine comic presence. The biggest fuss, of course, has been about the casting of Jodie Prenger as Nancy on the strength of TV’s I’d Do Anything competition. The good news is that she acquits herself extremely well.”
Independent: “He’s funniest when fingering his stolen gems, or kicking his legs above his head in a sideways exit. But he’s not a malevolent, gleeful, stage-hogging, dubiously paedophiliac monster that you long for and Lionel Bart wrote, even if Charles Dickens didn’t. The moment Prenger appears, I’m afraid, the heart sinks. She seems to be hiding from the audience. Her voice is okay, but she can’t act and she doesn’t have the depth of lung power to fill a plastic bag, let alone a West End theatre on a nightly basis.”
Times: “all credit to Atkinson for giving Fagin at least as much menace as Jonathan Pryce and Robert Lindsay, who were superlative in Sam Mendes’s revival of the musical 14 years ago….And did Jodie Prenger, who won the role of Nancy in one of those deplorably sadistic television contests, justify her choice? I must admit she did. Initially she struck me as parading, posturing, performing rather than acting, but she went on to prove herself a tough, coarse, credible presence with a big, robust voice — and that’s all that is needed. “
Mail: “Rowan Atkinson, playing that warped scout master Fagin, was the eyebrow-wriggling, funny-walking, laugh-wringing supremo of the show last night… Jodie Prenger, who won the part of the doomed, decent Nancy in a primetime BBC1 talent show, stands up to the test like a sturdy galleon.”
Mirror: “Jodie Prenger took to the West End stage last night and claimed the bright lights of the big city for her own… Rowan Atkinson brought a touch of Blackadder and Mr Bean to gangmaster Fagin.”
ON THE TECHNICAL
Telegraph: “It seems even more polished this time, even more vigorously and inventively choreographed by Matthew Bourne, even more spectacularly designed. Anthony Ward’s beautiful, multi-level sets are both picturesque and brilliantly ingenious, whirling us round the handsome piazzas and dark alleys of London before taking us underground to Fagin’s lair.”
Guardian: “Goold stages it with fluent efficiency, and Anthony Ward’s sets, with their perspectives of St Paul’s and their sliding bridges, are handsome to look at.”
Independent: “Ward’s designs look better than they did in the Palladium.”
Times: “I can’t say that Rupert Goold, who is credited as the director, does much to reinvent Mendes’s production as I recall it, but he certainly gets plenty of energy out of his cast… [Anthony] Ward makes London a character in its own right: a looming St Pauls, swiftly moving and interlocking alleys, and a very Dickensian murk for Bill Sikes to run through.”
THE LAST WORD
Telegraph: “As most of us get poorer in coming months, this production is going to make producer Cameron Mackintosh even richer. It’s so enjoyable however that I find it impossible to grudge him a penny.”
Guardian: “For the most part, however, this is Dickens as jolly family entertainment stripped of the sense of solitude that has roots in the author’s own experience and that makes Oliver Twist such a disturbing novel.”
Independent: “A masterpiece is restored, but not in its fullest glory.”
Times: “His [Bart's] Oliver! remains as good and revivable as anything he wrote.”
Mail: “It is pointless to say that Sir Cameron Mackintosh has a hit because advance ticket sales are already enormous, but last night’s opening showed that its commercial success is deserved artistically.”
Mirror: “Oliver! is the perfect musical for our credit crunch times, packed with unhealthy school dinners, growing poverty and kids drawn to gang culture and crime. It will steal your heart. Please sir, can I have some more?”
BOOK TICKETS TO SEE OLIVER!AT THE THEATRE ROYAL DRURY LANE
London Theatre – 2009 Preview
December 30, 2008 by admin
Filed under News, Shows opening
If theatre mirrors life then you would expect 2009 to be a bad year for the performing arts in London: economic downturns and credit crunches sound like gloomy news for our discretionary entertainment spending. But West End theatre box office figures have kept on going up in recent years, and the huge number of new productions sailing into town during 2009 could mean that Theatreland manages to buck the trend.
THE GREAT REVIVAL
The RSC, National Theatre, Donmar and Old Vic dominated straight drama in the West End in 2008, and they haven’t finished yet. Big hitters coming to town include Judi Dench and Rosamund Pike in the Donmar in the West End’s Madame de Sade at the Wyndhams; Jude Law offering us his, hopefully fighting fit, Hamlet; Gillian Anderson in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Rachel Weisz in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Donmar Warehouse; Helen Mirren making her return to the London stage in Phaedra at the National Theatre; and a number of crowd-pleasing revivals at the Old Vic, no more so than Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel’s hugely successful play starring Andrea Corr, and Sam Mendes directing Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, both featuring Ethan Hawke, Simon Russell Beale and Sinead Cusack.
STAR POWER
Other stars shimmying into town include Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Haymarket, Ken Stott and Hayley Atwell in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge at the Duke of York’s, heavy-hitter Pete Postlethwaite as King Lear at the Young Vic, and Antony Sher giving us his Prospero in the RSC’s The Tempest. The Gavin and Stacey phenomenon continues to roll on, as we see Joe Orton’s delicious romp Entertaining Mr Sloane at the Trafalgar Studios starring Gavin himself, Matthew Horne, alongside Imelda Staunton; whilst Gavin’s onscreen Mum Alison Steadman plays a barking Leeds housewife in Alan Bennett’s Enjoy at the Gielgud Theatre.
NEW PLAYS
The sharp eyed amongst you will notice that all of these plays are revivals rather than new work, keeping audiences firmly in their comfort zones. That said, new plays may be thin on the ground but not absent all together, with the National offering up Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice, following two lovers across four centuries, and Samuel Adamson’s Mrs Affleck set in the 1950s. Jez Butterworth has two new plays in pre-production, with comedy Parlour Song at the Almeida and Jerusalem at the Royal Court. Also at the Royal Court, Mark Ravenhill will bring his new play Over There. Plus Hollywood man of the moment James McAvoy is to star in Richard Greenberg’s acclaimed play Three Days of Rain at the Apollo, and at The Old Vic Richard Dreyfuss headlines the world premiere of American playwright Joe Sutton’s new play Complicit, directed by Kevin Spacey.
“BASED ON A FILM”
In musical theatre, 2009 promises to be a year of great big fabulous and familiar shows, surely enough to see us through the dark times? And it’s no coincidence that many of them are based on hugely successful films.
Oliver! will be well and truly steaming ahead through 2009 at the Drury Lane Theatre Royal with Rowan Atkinson and Jodie Prenger; La Cage Aux Folles will continue camping it up at the Playhouse but with Graham Norton taking over from Douglas Hodge; and at the Adelphi Theatre Lee Mead will bow out of Joseph to be replaced by Gareth Gates.
Jason Donovan will be donning the wigs and lip gloss to take us on an Australian power-mince in Priscilla Queen of the Desert at the Palace Theatre. And Sister Act at the London Palladium will be doing its best to recreate the fun of the film, helped along by Whoopi Goldberg as co-producer. And not quite a musical but as good as, Calendar Girls the stage play will up the naked flesh quotient in the West End, starring Patricia Hodge and Lynda Bellingham at the Noel Coward Theatre.
Also in musicals-land the power of reality TV continues to wield its power, with Gareth Gates going into Joseph at the Adelphi Theatre, the X-factor’s Niki Evans continuing in Blood Brothers at the Phoenix, Jodie Prenger in Oliver at the Drury Lane, and Ray Quinn and Danny Bayne in Grease – joined for a limited time by the legendary Jimmy Osmond.
KIDS RULE
Kids should also see a good year in 2009 with an enormous live theatrical production of Walking with Dinosaurs coming to a stadium near you, and War Horse transfers from its successful run at the National Theatre to the New London Theatre.
