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Eyes, hair, mouth: Darkie Armo Girl at Finborough Theatre

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Darkie Armo Girl, Karine Bedrossian’s electrifying one-woman show, commands attention from the moment it begins. First performed in 2022 and revived last year, it now returns for extra performance and it's an event not to miss. The show takes you through the thrills and horrors of a hectic life. She struts, shimmies, and taunts while revealing some horrific truths. She is such an irresistible storyteller that you find yourself hooked. The story is one of fame, glamour, abuse, self-harm, and suicide. If that subject matter doesn't sound like your cup of tea, you haven't seen it delivered with such high energy and provocation. It's currently at the Finborough Theatre . The show's title refers to a slur a popular girl at school once called her. Her ancestry is Armenian, and her parents were from Cyprus, where they fled the civil war and arrived in the UK with nothing. Shortly after she was born in Roehampton. The birth was an emergency C-section that left the baby and ...

Theatre: Sweet Charity



Sweet Charity has been playing on the West End since May, and it is still showing plenty of signs of life. At present the understudies are covering the roles of Charity, Nickie and Helene and are fantastic and serve as a reminder that you don't need to be a name to give a great performance.

The musical itself is an old fashioned musical fluffed up to some extent to make it feel less dated. It's a little bit coarser and dirtier and the drug use is a bit more explicit, but these changes make you feel like you are trapped in a time warp; torn between the sickly saccharine musical and the coarser (and far edgier) Fellini source material. Still this is the show that introduced the world to the numbers "Big Spender", "If my friends could see me now" and "Rhythm of Life" so there is a familiarity to the show for everyone even if you have never seen a musical before.

And while it is by no means a great musical, it does at least provide the actors with an opportunity to show off their singing, dancing and acting chops, and giving the opportunity to make every number a showstopper. The best revelation in this production was the number sung by the two jaded dance hall hostesses Nickie and Helene, "Baby, Dream Your Dream", which even amongst the superfluous sexual innuendo and drug use, conveyed such a sense of bittersweet disappointment. Tamzin Outhwaite is back in it for the rest of this month, but this show is worth catching anytime...

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Play ball: Damn Yankees @LandorTheatre

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