David Benedict: Last News

David Benedict “What are you staring at? Have you never seen a murderer up close before?” Ever since her startlingly assured 2007 debut “Free Outgoing,” shrewd playwright Anupama Chandrasekhar has calmly been breaking rules to winning dramatic effect. Making her outstanding National Theatre debut with “The Father and the Assassin,” a play about the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, she continues that process by wrong-footing the audience with that opening line.

David Benedict “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” OK, that’s the wrong play since it’s a line from “Macbeth,” but it best sums up Jonathan Bailey’s performance in the new London production of “Richard II”: The actor cranks up several gears the moment his character is forced by usurper Henry Bullingbrook to give up the throne of England for a life of imprisonment in the second half of director Nicholas Hytner’s staging of Shakespeare’s history play. But the fact that Bailey takes time to catch fire is not entirely his fault, since neither Shakespeare nor Hytner make life easy for him.

David Benedict “There is,” as Stephen Sondheim once groaned, “nothing worse than great expectations.” It may seem unfair to evoke a master when reviewing only the second show from a young British musical team, but when their debut was the Tony-winning, Tudors-Got-Talent sensation that is “Six,” expectations are sky high. Sadly, although their follow-up shares the same sassy Gen-Z tone, where “Six” brilliantly found the perfect form for its content, the heartfelt but disappointing “Why Am I So Single?” is fatally slack.

David Benedict When, at a dramatic peak, the lead character is running for her life and she’s teetering on a perilously tiny walkway on the outside of a very tall building, and terrified, certain thoughts shouldn’t be occurring to an audience. Chief among them is, “But she’s only about ten feet from the floor.” Our heroine may be scarily disengaged from everything she thought she knew, but we need to be fully invested. That we rarely are is the overwhelming problem with this strongly designed but tension-free adaptation of “Minority Report.” In this gender-switched stage version not of Steven Spielberg’s movie but Philip K.

David Benedict Enraged by the British government charging the standard 15% sales tax on tickets for Live Aid, Bob Geldof (Craige Els) bullies his way into a meeting with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (sparky Julie Atherton). Ever intransigent, she responds with dialogue lifted from Bernie Taupin and Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing” before they argue with each other unexpectedly as a rap.

David Benedict “We need something a little theatrical.” Boy, does excited Bob Newby (Christopher Buckley) get his wish. He’s trying to solve a staging problem in “The Dark of the Moon,” the school play he and the other kids are secretly putting on in Hawkins, Ind., in 1959. But audiences watching “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” will likely greet the line with a wry smile because immense, intense theatricality is there for all to see.

David Benedict “What a terrible tragedy.” Indeed. That’s the lyric cried out as, in theory, the famously magnificent Cornish home at the heart of the story burns to the ground at the climax of the musical of “Rebecca.” Or, rather, when smoke is pumped into the auditorium, the frontcloth glows red and cast members race around to startlingly little dramatic effect.

David Benedict “What was I thinking when I made this deal?” So sings Holly Martins (Sam Underwood) towards the end of the new musical adaptation of “The Third Man.” Indeed. As it turns out, the mystery at the heart of the show is not the expected “Whatever happened to Harry Lime?” – the man of the title – but what possessed a creative team as distinguished as director Trevor Nunn and bookwriter Christopher Hampton to imagine that what Carol Reed’s still-astonishing classic film needed was to be taken offscreen and planted onstage with added songs. The dismaying production provides no answer. The opening is ominous in completely the wrong way. Yes, we’re still in Vienna in 1947 but it feels like a failure to resort to a voice-over to explain necessary information about how, in the wake of the war, the city has been divided up into sectors under the control of warring nations. The storytelling, it’s clear, is going to be bald.

David Benedict Having the audacity to harness stabs and slashes of Prokofiev’s celebrated ballet score for “Romeo and Juliet” for a production of Shakespeare’s play suggests remarkable confidence on the part of white-hot director Rebecca Frecknall. It’s not misplaced. Her startlingly visceral production, with a cast led by Toheeb Jimoh of “Ted Lasso,” is not only lit up by the power of bodies leaping in space and dramatically alert even when in repose; it’s also alive to the detailed drama of Shakespeare’s language. The intensity she engenders in her actors is sometimes ramped-up too highly and everything boils over, but at its finest, the fiercely articulate passion is electrifying. The fact that the rulebook is being rewritten is made plain from the get-go. The famous opening address about “two houses alike in dignity” is not spoken: The text is lit up on the wall covering the entire front of the stage. Beneath Gareth Fry’s low growl of a soundscape, the company gathers one by one to claw against it before sending it crashing to the ground. But this is not just a shock tactic. Frecknall is illuminating the line about “taking the wall of any man” and using physical energy to punch into a vigorously staged fight between the warring Montagues and Capulets.

David Benedict “Will someone kindly tell me what on Earth has happened?” Well, quite. That’s the that line Michael Ball’s George sings when surveying the absurdity before him, including the body of his passed-out partner Rose (Laura Pitt-Pulford) who has just been shot by his jealous nephew Alec (Jamie Bogyo). Judging by the unexpected laughter that greeted it on opening night, others are framing his question more widely while witnessing this revival — that’s not the right term — of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1989 musical “Aspects of Love.” For that scene and the whole queasy, quasi-romantic story to work, you need emotional truth. But despite the cast’s sincere efforts there is scarcely a speck of that for them to work with. In the sung-through score (no bookwriter is credited; the text is the work of lyricists Don Black and Charles Hart) they are left to sing rambling expository dialogue at one another and emote, giving audiences little to connect with. Lloyd Webber can and does lace lines from the show’s two big tunes, “Love Changes Everything” and “Seeing Is Believing,” through his score all night, but it doesn’t compensate for the lack of believable drama. And that’s before you get to the sexual politics.

Naman Ramachandran The smash hit stage adaptation of Studio Ghibli’s “My Neighbor Totoro” will return to London’s Barbican Theatre for a limited run this fall. The production is from executive producer Joe Hisaishi and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), in collaboration with Improbable and Nippon TV. The global stage premiere of Hayao Miyazaki’s celebrated 1988 animated feature film, adapted by Tom Morton-Smith (“Oppenheimer”), was announced in April 2022 and broke the Barbican’s box office record for most tickets sold in a single day. The production opened at the Barbican in October 2022 and was nominated for nine Olivier Awards, the most nominations for any production this year.

David Benedict Since Nicholas Hytner, former artistic director of the National Theatre, is one of the finest, most detailed Shakespeare directors in the land, you could be forgiven for forgetting that he really knows how to put on a show — and then some. Given that his career spans everything from “One Man, Two Guvnors” to the original “Miss Saigon,” expectations in London were high that, armed with arguably the greatest musical comedy ever written, he might be onto a winner. Revise your expectations: His immersive, explosively joyous “Guys and Dolls” is a solid-gold knockout. Hytner has always been strong on physical staging. Because he started out in opera, he has always known about crowd control and can shift the emotional temperature of a scene simply by how he commands groups of people on stage. After his runaway-hit, immersive productions of “Julius Caesar” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at his own Bridge Theatre, he now takes that skill up umpteen notches moving not just the actors in “Guys and Dolls” but a third of the audience.

David Benedict “We’ve discussed this. We’ve discussed this many times.” That wearied line, which appears in the final scene of David Hare’s new play “Straight Line Crazy,” is spoken by Ariel Porter (Samuel Barnett), the long-suffering right-hand man to New York’s legendary urban planner Robert Moses (Ralph Fiennes).

David Benedict Producer Sonia Friedman returns to the post-pandemic West End not with a safe revival but with a succession of brief runs for three socially-distanced world premieres by young writers, and it is an impressive act of faith in the future. But while Friedman looks to the future of theater, young U.S.