The Producers
Marc Antolin plays Leo Bloom in The Producers Credit: Manuel Harlan
Currently on screen in Wicked and now on stage as Max Bialystock in director Patrick Marber’s excellent revival of Mel Brooks’s musical, Andy Nyman is having a moment. His Max may just be the performance of the year of Nyman’s career. It is beautifully observed, brimful of comic timing and deserves to be recognised as the finest Bialystock since Zero Mostel created the role in 1967.
If I were Mel Brooks I’d get my 98-year-old ass over to the Menier Chocolate Factory to check it out.
Giant
John Lithgow and Elliot Levey in Giant Credit: Manuel Harlan
Mark Rosenblatt’s debut play, which is transferring to the West End next year, sees John Lithgow in superb form as Roald Dahl. The work’s most obvious purpose is to reveal the antisemitism of a national treasure whose books have enriched children’s imagination for generations.
Yet perhaps the play’s most remarkable achievement is to reveal the condition of being Jewish in Britain where Jews continue to be judged collectively for whatever reason the country’s antisemites see as fit, not least Israel, of course.
Slave Play
Slave Play by Jeremy O.Harris Credit: Helen Murray
Everything about Jeremy O. Harris’s play is a provocation. It imagines a clinic where three interracial couples are in therapy. The sex life of each has been affected by the African American partner’s inability to enjoy intimate relations with their white loved one. If that sounds far-fetched Harris ultimately shows that the legacy of slavery is as part of every day life as climate change.
Dramatically the conflict here is about wrestling from whites the control they have over black lives, however unwittingly, and even in the bedroom. To describe how this is done in the play would be a spoiler. It is enough to say bravely, wittily and in Robert O’Hara’s electric production, which featured an excellent Kit Harington, with superb acting.
MJ The Musical
Myles Frost in MJ the Musical Credit: Johan Persson
If, like me, your response to Michael Jackson’s death was regret for never having seen him perform live, then this show will fill that gap. Set in the room where king of of pop is rehearsing a tour, the show seamlessly segues through the highlights of Jackson’s life.
Ignore complaints that the widely reported accusations of child abuse have been ignored. That was not the show that I for one wanted to see. This one is.
As Jackson, Myles Frost (who is soon to be replaced by Jamaal Fields-Green) emanated the otherworldly aura of a performer whose music was brilliant, whose dancing was incomparable and who in performance at least came across as epitome of human evolution.
Nachtland
Angus Wright, John Heffernan (centre) and Dorothea Myer-Bennett in Nachtland Credit: Ellie Kurttz
Only Germans and Jewish stage artists are able to address the Holocaust with a knockabout bravura that borders on farce.
In his play about a German family who find a genuine Hitler painting in the attic playwright Marius von Mayenburg used that licence to be downright funny and disturbing in equal measure. And so did his Jewish director Patrick Marber, who is having helluva year. He also directed Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank and The Producers, mentioned above.
All of three shows have a viscerally dangerous satirical edge to them. For that reason, if there were a Theatre Practitioner of the Year award, Marber would get my vote without hesitation.
