Category: musical

Mamma Mia! For Heaven’s Sake!

IF YOU’VE WITHSTOOD the hype around the Mamma Mia musical, because you’ve instinctively recognised it for the candy floss, shameless money generating initiative that it is, don’t relent now. Mamma Mia! Here we go again, is a further foray into a schlock-redolent yarn rich with platitudes and clustered […]

Hedwig takes it all the way

YOU KNOW THAT headache you get when you are grinding your teeth really energetically to ensure that the outer chaos doesn’t make your whole head implode? That is the kind of feeling you may emerge with when you exit Hedwig and the angry inch. It’s a mash up […]

How to realise you are beautiful

THERE ARE SO many “wow” moments in the South African stage version of The Color Purple: The Musical, you’ve got to hold onto your seat with both hands. Supported by a set that features diagrammatic representation of space and texture, a cast that sparkles with magnificent voices and […]

Night of a thousand stars

ONE OF THE toughest aspects of mounting a West End and Broadway hit musical that has iconic film status is probably also one of the production’s biggest blessings: everyone knows the lyrics to the Lloyd Webber and Rice production Evita so well, they’re bawling them out all the […]

Knocked out by King Kong

IT WAS THE show that launched the international careers of such performers as Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba and the Manhattan Brothers. King Kong. It’s been labelled iconic and groundbreaking, and frissons of its great potency filtered through the ether long before the Fugard Theatre’s season of this […]

Are we home, yet?

<<Warning: This production contains strobe lights and lights focused directly on the audience>> THE TRICK OF writing good material for a stage production is not about packing a story full of so much detail that it develops narrative indigestion, and then focusing interrogation-strong lights on your audience from […]