Magic Goes Wrong starring Dave Hearn and Nancy Zamit at the Vaudeville Theatre is funny, but the show breaks no new ground
Magic Goes Wrong
Vaudeville Theatre, London Until May 31, 2hrs 20mins
Mischief Theatre is unstoppable. Two other ‘Goes Wrong’ shows are currently running in the West End. This third is even backed by American showbiz big cheeses. Hollywood director/producer J J Abrams has co-produced it, and the magician duo Penn & Teller – Las Vegas’s longest-running headline act – are co-credited as writers.
If you like the world of magic – and I definitely do – then this new offering partially makes up for Mischief Theatre’s dismally unfunny Groan Ups last year. The idea is that we are at a charity bash in memory of all the magicians who’ve died in the line of duty in the past year – including the one who got myxomatosis from his rabbit.
Acts include the Mind Mangler (Henry Lewis), a deeply amateur mind-reading bully who hates his audience. Sophisticato (Henry Shields) is a lousy trad magician whose flock of doves has a collective death wish.
There’s also a bewildering German female double-act, Bear and Spitzumas (Nancy Zamit and Bryony Corrigan), and an inadvertently self-harming knife artiste, The Blade (Dave Hearn).
The show’s most stagey highlight is the classic lady sawn in half (Roxy Faridany) – a trick that ends in bleeding catastrophe.
The script delves into the performers’ lurid biographies, and there’s cheesy music, a beaming assistant with Debbie McGee-style spangles and some meddling stagehands.
The downside is the repeated use of a tedious audience stooge (Jonathan Sayer) and the way the show is formatted exactly like all the others.
As for the illusions – some go right as well as wrong – I suspect the real work has been done by ace magic consultant Ben Hart. Penn & Teller’s chief input seems to have been to talk their mates David Copperfield and Derren Brown into doing lame ‘live’ video links.
Yes, it’s funny… in bits. But the show breaks no new ground. What with three London playhouses in occupation and the current BBC The Goes Wrong Show series on telly, part of me wishes that this ever-expanding franchise would do a disappearing act for a bit.
The Tyler Sisters
Hampstead Theatre, London Until Saturday, 2hrs
Rating: 
The idea for this play comes from a celebrated, very moving series of photographs by Nicholas Nixon, who for more than 40 years has taken an annual photograph of his wife and her three sisters.
Alexandra Wood’s play likewise covers 40 years (1990 to 2030) and is about three female siblings. Whereas photography is eloquently silent, this relies on lots of Little Women-style bickering.
A screen tells us the date and locations where they meet – eg, the parental home, Valencia, Stonehenge, Ben Nevis – as each year passes by in an average of three minutes.
The star of this trio is Bryony Hannah – Cynthia Miller in Call The Midwife – who plays Gail. There’s rivalry galore, some of it funny, and great troughs of disappointment.
But fundamentally this is a chronology of girls sticking together as they meet men – feckless and difficult – and have children. Their parents are a bonding, off-stage presence.
Caroline Faber plays Maddy, who turns from wallflower into a troubled mum. Angela Griffin is the youngest, Katrina, a loudmouth with a flair for management.
Hannah’s Gail is the private loner whose love life comes as a shock to the others.
Directed by Abigail Graham, this is well acted but, despite its rush through the years, it’s oddly prone to dawdling. It struck me as a clever time-lapse experiment that never quite becomes a fully fleshed drama of sibling survival.