Kevin Spacey as Richard III at the Old Vic

The final season of the Old Vic’s The Bridge Project sees Kevin Spacey in the title role of Richard III, directed by Sam Mendes.

See a round-up of reviews for Richard III, below.

Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre is the only permanent professional outdoor theatre in Britain. Their new 2011 season promises something for everyone with classic plays, Shakespeare and a great big Broadway musical set to break new box-office records at this magical venue.

What’s on at the Open Air Theatre in 2011

Lord of The Flies

19 May – 18 June
William Golding’s classic novel is brought to the stage by the same team as last season’s The Crucible. After a group of schoolboys survive a massive plane crash, what starts as a classic desert island adventure quickly becomes a struggle for survival as superstition and immorality sees the community slide into a darkly sinister world. This production promises to rediscover this gripping drama in the unconfined and atmospheric setting of the open air. Recommended for ages 11+.
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The Beggar’s Opera

23 June – 23 July
Director Lucy Bailey injects her trademark visual dynamism into John Gay’s original text and The City Waites, led by Roddy and Lucy Skeaping, use authentic instruments to recreate the popular ballads and folk tunes of the time. In The Beggar’s Opera a tangled web of lies and deceit blissfully unravels between innocent but feisty heroine Polly Peachum, her wronged rival Lucy Lockit and Macheath, their irrepressible highwayman lover. Set deep in London’s underworld, this comedy of highwaymen, hangmen and harlots is an uncompromising exposure of moral and financial corruption.
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Pericles

Re-imagined for everyone ages six and over
02 July – 23 July
Continuing the successful series of Shakespeare plays for younger audiences, and making its first appearance at the Open Air Theatre since 1939, Pericles is re-imagined for everyone aged six and over. The young prince, Pericles, takes to the high seas on a quest to discover the world. An odyssey adventure of shipwrecks, tournaments and of love lost, and found, this is a journey into adulthood and a celebration of family to enjoy together.
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Crazy For You

28 July – 10 September
George and Ira Gershwin’s hit musical comedy is packed full of classic songs including “I Got Rhythm”, “Someone To Watch Over Me”, “Embraceable You” and “Nice Work If You Can Get It”. The original 1992 production won both the Tony and Olivier Award for Best New Musical, and the creative team from the Open Air’s multi-award winning production of Hello, Dolly! reunite to bring you a joyous musical treat. The production is led by director Timothy Sheader, choreographer Stephen Mear and designer Peter McKintosh, plus Into the Woods musical supervisor, Gareth Valentine.
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Review of Twelfth Night at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London

How much silliness there is in the Christmas and New Year season. Why, Shakespeare himself gives us in the timely ‘Tweflth Night’ (that is, Epiphany or 6th January to us) the fat, farting Sir Toby Belch and the foppish fool, Sir Andrew Aguecheek. In between their antics we are entertained by the muddled romances of twins Viola and Sebastian, who each believe the other dead in a shipwreck. Viola disguises herself as a man in order to serve a certain Duke Orsino; she apparently looks so much like her brother in this guise that no one can tell them apart. Hmm.

But it’s no use applying modern genetic logic to the Bard’s comedies. Even when we are sure of the outcome, it’s always fun to watch Viola – here played by the pleasingly androgynous Nancy Carroll – fall in love with the Duke, only to be sent by him as a messenger to woo the countess Olivia. The exquisite pain of it all!

But all poignancy is counterbalanced by the mirth of mistaken identity. Olivia promptly falls in love with Viola (how odd) and will be doomed to disappointment unless – could it possibly be? – her twin brother turns up and accedes, all bemused, to her desire to marry him.

This RSC production is headlined, at least in the minds of a local audience, by TV star Richard Wilson, cast as the countess’s steward. This is a man full of pomp and ceremony, so that he inevitably falls prey to a wicked practical joke played by Belch and Aguecheek. Persuaded by a fraudulent letter that Olivia secretly loves and admires only him, he adorns himself with cross gartered yellow stockings (as per her supposed tastes in fashion) and fantasises aloud about his future role as consort instead of servant. The two pranksters, meanwhile, hide in the Cubist-styled foliage of a tree to listen and laugh, their heads popping out like so many tourists posing behind comic beachside boards.

This is quite funny, although it has to be said that Wilson, notwithstanding his cut glass accent, lacks the required diction for Shakespearean verse-speaking, so that you have to strain to understand him.

The rest of the cast are, as you might expect, excellent. The erotic frisson between Nancy Carroll and Jo Stone- Fewings as the Duke sustains us throughout with its titillating prospect of hopeless love which will somehow bear fruit, while Alexandra Gilbreath as Olivia is both pretty and pretty determined to have her man. How modern: we love her.

There is live music, merriment and even sword fighting to point up the Bard’s rapier wit. Enjoy.

SUE WEBSTER. Courtesy of This Is London.

Book tickets to see Twelfth Night att he Duke of York’s Theatre in London

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.

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