Welcome to today’s edition of ShentonSTAGE Daily, in which I look back on last week’s news and reviews (including my own)

FRIDAY JANUARY 27

Rob Madge’s solo autobiographical show My Son’s A Queer (But What Can You Do?) has begun its second West End run, now at the Ambassadors Theatre (newly and beautifully refurbished, which even has a disabled lift to the stalls now and a much larger bar).  

I’d seen it at its earliest outing at the Turbine Theatre in 2021, then again at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe. But revisiting it tonight, it glistens like a freshly-polished jewel in this freshly-polished jewel of a theatre, and I was in tears of joy as well as sadness that not everyone has Madge’s story of real acceptance: what a blessed family they have, especially their gloriously accepting dad and nurturing mother (who became a school dinner lady so that she could keep an eye on them when they were being bullied at school).  Their granddad even built them a beautiful puppet theatre!

I’ve posted about this before, but this was what *MY* father wrote to me just a couple of years ago:

​So I was weeping for myself as much as I was for Madge’s much happier story, knowing what I’d missed out on. And also, of course, as they say in the show: what my father missed too! Both my brother and I are utterly estranged from him now, and it is irreparable.

Thanks to work I’ve done with the support of a 12-step family trauma fellowship, I have been able to see that this is not my fault — and to leave him behind for the sake of my own mental health. I am finally free from his toxic presence and harm. But Madge’s show reveals that there ARE other, better parenting models.

A gorgeous song, composed by Pippa Cleary, ends the show on this affirmative note: We Will Be Loved Anyway. I cried again. Because I am.

SATURDAY JANUARY 28

Today I finally caught Mandela at the Young Vic — my fourth attempt to see it, with each of the previous three times I’d booked myself in to see it being cancelled before I got there.

​And I was very lucky indeed to actually see it at the matinee, as the performance that evening was cancelled again:

“Unfortunately due to reduced company numbers we are very sorry to have to cancel tonight’s performance,” bookers were informed by email.

The entire run has been blighted by this — partly precipitated by a poor management decision not to employ understudies from the very beginning. Yes, of course it costs money to do so — but the Young Vic must be counting the ever-rising costs of cancellations, but even more so, of draining audience goodwill.

When understudies were finally brought on board, they were given barely any time to prepare: one received their script on Saturday and was asked if they could perform one of their tracks on Monday!

Apart from that, Mrs Mandela, how was the show? The almost entire absence of a credible book renders its storytelling a parade of cliches and earnest good intentions. The songs are stirringly sung but also very poorly dramatised. None of this is the fault of a hard-working (and even better singing) cast; Stewart Clark’s Act Two solo, as Mandela’s sympathetic white Afrikaans prison warder, is a particular stand-out.

SUNDAY JANUARY 29

Felicity Kendal is one of the country’s most beloved and ageless senior actors: now 76, she looks 30 years younger (pictured below with Joseph Millson and Matthew Kelly, with whom she is currently starring in NOISES OFF at the Phoenix).

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Yes, Botox has helped a bit — but she’s never denied it. In an interview in today’s Sunday Times magazine, she said:

“I have talked about using Botox in the past and it seemed to cause such a fuss — as if it’s some shocking modern phenomenon. Humans have been preening themselves for thousands of years: tattoos, corsets, the candied with their powdered wigs….”

Her honesty is refreshing. She has also got her life properly sorted, now remarried to director Michael Rudman (whom she divorced and left for Tom Stoppard). “The first time around, our marriage obviously wasn’t working but we then realised that being apart wasn’t working either. Now what we have feels right.”

And the interview also reveals how she’s become Barbara, her character in the 70s sitcom The Good Life that made her a national star, at least when she’s at her country home:

“Our home in Chelsea has only got a patio, but we’re also got a little place in the country and that’s when I really turn into Barbara, with my onions, carrots and tomatoes. That tremendous feeling of plucking a tomato fresh from the vine instead of ripping it out of some horrible plastic container. Of course. We can now look at The Good Life and see that it was way ahead of the cure. Recycling, grow your own veg, make do and mend.”

MONDAY JANUARY 30

The Stage’s annual New Year’s party was always a favourite event for the start of the year — held at the end of January, it was a respite from the post-Christmas blues and London’s usual theatrical slow down at this time of year. In the last few years, they’ve also used the event to present their now annual Stage Awards (done this year from the Drury Lane stage itself, though I am no longer invited; other bloggers are).

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I used, of course, to play an active role in both, as someone who once upon a time took a lead role in compiling the Stage 100 list and as part of the judging panel for the awards.

I’m relieved to no longer play a part, though, so I don’t have to defend choices like excluding major industry players like Bill Kenwright and David Pugh from the 100 most influential list, yet including far more dubious choices, as I previously wrote here)

But I can still happily applaud the award winners, even if I am yet to visit Merseyside’s Shakespeare North Playhouse,  which was named Theatre Building of the Year, and haven’t been to the Bush for the last twelve months, jointly named Theatre of the Year (with Belfast’s Lyric), after a year in which it has, for the first time, presented ten self-produced plays, including Tyrrell Williams’s Red Pitch which had already won The Stage Debut Award for best play.

Bravo, too, to Phelim McDermott and Improbable, named Producer of the Year, after their triumph with their sell-out stage version of My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican — a show we are sure to see again. I can’t wait to see their co-production of Philip Glass’s Aknaten return to the London Coliseum next month —I will go to the press night, but have also already bought tickets to see it with a friend later in the run, too!

TUESDAY JANUARY 31

I was all set to see Steven Moffat’s The Unfriend again, which I saw in its original run at Chichester, in the West End tonight, but I received an email notifying me that two of the three principals were off, so I postponed. (This is nothing against understudies, but for reviewing purposes it’s necessary to see the billed cast).

I tried to arrange to see Dirty Dancing instead, now returned to the Dominion, which has new choreography that I was interested in seeing; but the PR was unable to contact “the team” at the theatre to do so.

But my trip to London was not entirely wasted; I am seeing a brilliant new personal fitness trainer Rob Blair (pictured below) at a gym that he runs in Deptford, south London, who specialises in back pain, and is getting me mobile again.

And when my theatre plans came to nought, I headed home – and was back in West Sussex before 8pm.  It was a win-win, even if I lost a theatre slot.

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 1

The announcement yesterday that the Oldham Coliseum has been forced to cancels all events after March 26 is yet another sign of the darkening, diminishing forces around theatre following the last Arts Council funding round.

The news follows the withdrawal of the theatre’s portfolio funding from April 2023. So “levelling up” seems to mean losing a major theatre entirely, in one of the most deprived areas of the country, too.

As former MP Liz McInnes tweeted,

I’ve only ever been once, in 1986 when I saw the world premiere of Howard Goodall’s Girlfriends there (with a cast that included Maria Friedman and Jenna Russell). As the composer tweeted,

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 2

Today I saw the Cher Show — then the Cheryl show.  

It was a double bill of genuinely popular, populist commercial theatre — and each rewarded their audiences with properly theatrical experiences that add breadth (and breath), if not too much depth, to standard theatrical tropes.

In the case of The Cher Show, which I saw at Wimbledon at the tail end of its national tour which began last summer in Leicester, that’s of course the well-trodden path of the biographical jukebox musical — here inventively split into three competing versions of the iconic pop star and Oscar winning film actress of the title.

We get all the hits, of course — but also more, punchily rendered by a cast led by the astonishing Debbie Kurup as the contemporary Cher, with Danielle Steers and Milliie O’Connell equally fine and fierce as the independent-minded (but of course self-doubting) facets of her personality.

2.22 A Ghost Story meanwhile has fun reinventing a theatrical chiller thriller for the modern age.

It’s quite difficult to scare people in the theatre these days, so the show’s producers have upped the ante by promoting theatrically inexperienced players to add to the potential horrors. But after Lily Allen surprised us all with a credible theatrical debut when this play first premiered at the Noel Coward, another pop singer (and reality TV judge and sometime WAG) Cheryl does even better as the show re-opens at its 4th West End address.

The Geordie-accented icon, whose life story became a kind of public property, plays a new mother in a house that she and her partner have freshly gentrified, but finds that their home is subject to strange hauntings at a very particular bewitching hour; tonight, she asks their dinner guests to stick around to bear witness to it.

Danny Robins’s twisty play — in Matthew Dunster’s literally thrilling production — sustains the tension admirably, and provides some real shocks along the way. Not the least of which is that an act of stunt casting has paid off so well.

SHOWS AHEAD IN LONDON, SELECTED REGIONAL THEATRES AND ON BROADWAY

My regularly updated feature on shows in London, selected regional theatres and on Broadway is here: https://shentonstage.com/theatre-openings-from-w-c-january-30/

I’m heading to New York on Sunday — it’s the 50th anniversary of the Broadway opening of PIPPIN, a show I’m obsessed by, and on Monday some of its surviving cast members are reuniting for a cabaret celebration at 54 Below, and I just had to be there! I’ll report here on Tuesday.

See you here on Tuesday

I will be back on Tuesday. If you can’t wait that long, I may also be found on Twitter (for the moment) here: https://twitter.com/ShentonStage/ (though not as regularly on weekends)