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A Man For All Seasons: Seagull True Story - Marylebone Theatre

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It's not often that you see a play that tells you not so much a story but gives you a sense of how it feels to be in a situation, how it feels to be silenced, how it feels to be marginalised, how the dead hand of consensus stifles your creativity. However, in Seagull True Story, created and directed by Alexander Molochnikov and based on his own experiences fleeing Russia and trying to establish himself in New York, we have a chance to look beyond the headlines and understand how the war in Ukraine impacted a a group of ordinary creatives in Russia. And how the gradual smothering of freedom and freedom of expression becomes impossible to resist, except for the brave or the suicidal. Against the backdrop of Chekhov's The Seagull, which explores love and other forms of disappointment, it presents a gripping and enthralling depiction of freedom of expression in the face of adversity. After playing earlier this year in New York, it plays a limited run at the Marylebone Theatre . Fro...

Theatre: Crazy For You (or maybe slightly ambivalent)


Hopefully it will be a while before there is another revival of Crazy For You, which has its final week at Regents Park Open Air Theatre this week.

The cast are terrific and so is the dancing. Sean Palmer and Clare Foster make terrific leads and keep things as fresh as they could be. But this is probably the kind of show that needs constant revisions and rewrites to stay fresh. While it is an update of the Gershwin musical Girl Crazy, twenty years on it too feels dated. The cheesy book linking to even cheesier lesser known Gershwin works quickly becomes tedious.

The "open air" doesn't help the ambience either... Nor does the Roy Rogers inspired set. Perhaps another Gershwin show, Porgy and Bess might lend itself better to the open air environment... Although London summers are not quite the hot temperatures of South Carolina, there no doubt could be some effective rain sequences for the hurricane scenes... Until then, marvel at the cast, great costumes and some rather nifty footwork... It ends 10 September...

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Play ball: Damn Yankees @LandorTheatre

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