Groundhog Day (Old Vic, London)
Verdict: On repeat, please!
Think you know Groundhog Day from the Bill Murray movie? Been there and got the giant furry rodent T-shirt? Well, think again.
Matthew Warchus and Tim Minchin’s musical is a dizzying, blistering and joyous reinvention of Danny Rubin’s cult story.
Back in the West End seven years after its premiere, it’s a show that not only stands repetition but also turns that repetition into an art form — thanks in no small part to the mesmeric Andy Karl in the Murray role of cynical weatherman Phil Connors.
I wouldn’t have thought it possible to top Murray as the contemptuous TV reporter condemned to relive the same day in Midwest Hicksville.
But to Murray’s laconic genius, Karl adds song, athleticism and fizz.
Matthew Warchus and Tim Minchin’s musical is a dizzying, blistering and joyous reinvention of Danny Rubin’s cult story
Andy Karl as Phil Connors and Tanisha Spring as Rita Hanson in Groundhog Day at the Old Vic, London
Warchus’s production, too, is a spinning top of a show. If it wobbles, it’s over — but wobble it never does.
That’s partly because Warchus has an ultra-low tolerance for stasis, constantly bombarding us with whirligigs of dance.
And Rob Howell’s set is a gigantic cuckoo-clock: swallowing Phil’s chintzy tomb of a bedroom to replace it with a town square, a local diner, a bar, park benches and the pick-up truck Phil uses to belt down the railway in despair.
(A content footnote on the website warns those taking this, and Phil’s comic suicide bids, seriously to contact the Samaritans — but it’s really never that deep.)
The paradoxical genius of the story — and the show — is that we love the ride and yet, like Phil, we long for it to end.
Warchus’s sleight of hand — with astonishing illusions by Paul Kieve that seem to defy the space-time continuum — also ensures that the pace is seldom less than breathless.
Much thanks for this goes to Lizzi Gee’s microscopically choreographed movement, in which one cog out of place would mean all four wheels coming off the recreational vehicle.
Yet it’s a moralistic story, too.
Underpinning the correction of Phil as he turns from contempt to anger, followed by recklessness, despair, acceptance and, finally, redemption is a gooey rom-com, with Phil learning to love his TV producer, Rita (the Andie MacDowell role in the film).
Minchin fares better with cynical whiplash lyrics than he does in giving the love story a memorable, beating heart.
But he blasts the action forward with marching music, rock and a groundhog drum solo — as well as easing it up with moody acoustic guitar, plangent piano and a corny but cute country & western love song for the finale.
Groundhog Day is a show that not only stands repetition but also turns that repetition into an art form — thanks in no small part to the mesmeric Andy Karl (centre) in the Murray role of cynical weatherman Phil Connors
Underpinning the correction of Phil as he turns from contempt to anger, followed by recklessness, despair, acceptance and, finally, redemption is a gooey rom-com, with Phil learning to love his TV producer, Rita (left)
The show, however, would be inconceivable without Karl as self-centred Phil.
Rarely are looks and talent so strikingly combined.
He channels deadpan Murray, Steve Martin’s physical comedy and David Schwimmer’s goofiness, but he also has the dark, brooding features of Bryan Cranston.
Did Minchin need to give his star a number of icky references to his solo sex life?
Probably not, but thanks to the pell-mell pace we never linger on them; and Karl deftly pulls the show together mind, body and soul.
Tanisha Spring fleshes out the MacDowell role of Rita — although her Disneyish ‘Dear Diary’ interludes are a slightly transparent attempt to turn her 2D love interest into the strong, independent woman that has become the cliché du jour.
Still, like the rest of the formidably drilled townsfolk (and Eve Norris’s sweetly yearning Nancy, Phil’s one-night stand), Spring has a warm voice and spirit of her own.
Maybe the second half’s race to the finish is ten minutes too long — simply because it’s so damn exhausting to watch. But that doesn’t mean it’s not one hell of a ride.
The Shape Of Things (Park Theatre, Finsbury Park, London)
Verdict: Shapely fit-up
Welcome back to Neil La Bute’s 20-year-old play, which is now about the same age as its college-grad characters and remains as fresh as a newly decapitated daisy.
Readers who didn’t catch the theatrical fit-up drama first time round, at Islington’s Almeida Theatre (starring Rachel Weisz as a sassy, sociopathic art student), will perhaps know the play instead from the film, in which Weisz also starred.
She meets goofy Adam in a gallery where he works as a security guard — and she is threatening to deface a sculpture, in the name of artistic freedom.
What emerges is a small-scale, American campus version of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion — with genders flipped and a whole load of sex, sneering and swearing.
The jewel in the play remains the Weisz-role of Evelyn, who styles herself as a wild, male fantasy figure.
Amber Anderson as Evelyn and Luke Newton as Adam in The Shape of Things at the Park Theatre in Finsbury Park, London
Gawky English Lit student Adam is eagerly lead to the slaughter as she transforms him from a nervy, Woody Allen type into a mincing Tom Cruise.
He throws off his frumpy corduroy jacket and specs, stops biting his nails and — wait for it —starts using lip balm.
Peaky Blinders’ cruel temptress Amber Anderson nails the part with a wry detachment and forensic purpose. And Luke Newton manages his transition from zero to hero, while remaining loveably and fatally incredulous at his astonishing good luck.
Majid Mehdizadeh-Valoujerdy and Carla Harrison-Hodge fill in the anxious, college-kid background in Nicky Allpress’s nifty production.
And it’s designed by Peter Butler to look like a cross between an art gallery and a Uniqlo outlet — with an array of snazzy Nineties costumes to go with it.
The play can be mistaken for an attempt to present a serious moral dilemma, when really it’s just a theatrical sting and the ethical equivalent of chewing-gum. But it’s good sport all the same.
Around The World In 80 Days (touring)
Verdict: Crown Jules
York Theatre Royal’s touring production of Around The World In 80 Days dares to take liberties with Jules Verne’s transglobal race against the clock — but luckily the effect is (for the most part) invigorating.
Alex Phelps’s stuffy Phileas Fogg is a moustachioed marionette of a club man dressed in red velvet tails, top hat and riding boots, who makes his entrances springing off a trampoline.
Wilson Benedito, as his French sidekick Passepartout, is an unusually loveable buffoon, nattily dressed in chequered pants, Breton shirt and bowler hat.
The big wheeze though is that — amid the usual denunciations of the patriarchy, etc — there’s a subplot about real-life American journalist of the era Nellie Bly (Katriona Brown), who actually completed the round the world trek in a mere 72 days.
But thanks to Genevieve Sabherwal as the Indian love interest, and Eddie Mann as the detective stalker and knife thrower who never misses (think about it), it’s political correction with a mercifully light touch.
The focus is firmly on the fun of improvisation with bikes, parasols and a very busy laundry basket.
The best moments in Juliet Forster’s inventive production are a drunken double act on a see-saw, a storm tossing the cast about deck on the China seas, and a hare-brained attempt to drive a steam train across a collapsing bridge, en route to New York.
The second half is nippier than the first, and they could do with a circus band to provide a little more ‘ta-da!’, but it’s still another jewel in Verne’s well-worn crown.
Alex Phelps’s (centre) stuffy Phileas Fogg is a moustachioed marionette of a club man dressed in red velvet tails, top hat and riding boots, who makes his entrances springing off a trampoline.
Wilson Benedito as French sidekick Passepartou and Genevieve Sabherwal as Aouda in Around The World In 80 Days
Patriots (Noel Coward Theatre, London)
Verdict: Russian roulette
Georgina Brown
After that famous first meeting with Putin, the newly elected President George W Bush said he looked into the Russian’s eyes and saw his soul.
His astute Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was more specific. He saw ‘KGB’.
Which is nailed quite brilliantly by Will Keen as the Russian President in Peter (The Crown) Morgan’s political drama, Patriots.
His Putin has zero personality. Still but twitchy, he melts into the background.
Even as he stands in front of a mirror trying out a few poses which might make him look bigger, he is more of an absence than a presence, a soulless, chilling, blank.
In sharp contrast with Tom Hollander’s boisterous, bouncy Boris Berezovsky, the child maths prodigy who did a PhD in decision-making, then sold out to Mammon.
Tom Hollander’s (pictured) boisterous, bouncy Boris Berezovsky, the child maths prodigy who did a PhD in decision-making, then sold out to Mammon
Josef Davies and Stefanie Martini in Patriots at the Noel Coward Theatre in London
All front, charisma and swagger, he also has enough cash to create the Russia he wants to live in, ruled and run by oligarchs, prosperous and confident.
Rupert Goold’s characteristically fleet production unravels on a blood-red cruciform platform conjuring a sinister subterranean night club and a presidential Kremlin office, as determinedly Russian as Adam Corke’s catchy soundtrack.
An overlong first half charts the rise and rise of a KGB nobody. In the more gripping second half, almost Shakespearean in its structure, the puppet-master becomes the puppet, and Berezovsky’s creation becomes the monster we all know and hate.
A blazing Berezovsky overreaches himself, Richard III-style, and on Russia’s main television channel, which he owns, he labels the government’s handling of the torpedoed submarine, Kursk, as ‘another Chernobyl’.
Ousted from Kremlin circles, exiled in his Berkshire home, missing mathematics and the Russia he loves, Hollander’s sagging, almost pitiable Berezovsky seems, quite literally, to lose his stuffing. He is a patriot without a country.
Morgan’s prescient play suggests that for Putin, patriotism means making Russia bigger and feared. And, as the war against Ukraine proves, it has no bounds.
I Found My Horn (Riverside Studios, London)
Verdict: Hits the right notes
Veronica Lee
Midlife crises are weird, aren’t they? Some men grow facial fuzz, some buy an expensive red sports car.
Others, such as journalist Jasper Rees, take up an instrument they haven’t played since they were in the school orchestra…in his case the French horn, one of the most difficult orchestral instruments to master, apparently.
But then, crises aren’t supposed to be easy.
Mr Rees adapted his amusing 2008 memoir of the same title for the stage with actor Jonathan Guy Lewis and now they have, with director Harry Burton, revived the one-man play for a short run in London.
Mr Lewis plays several roles, including would-be hornblower Jasper — going through a divorce and dealing with a moody teenage son — as well as several other characters including gruff Yorkshireman and French horn fanatic Dave, who becomes Jasper’s mentor.
‘Takes bollocks of Sheffield steel to play that thing in public,’ is Dave’s response when Jasper tells him his plan to perform Mozart’s third horn concerto, K.447, at the British Horn Society’s annual festival 12 months away. Will Jasper find his horn in time?
It’s a sign of deft plotting that even though I know the story, there’s a sense of jeopardy over the 90 minutes as Mr Rees (it feels odd to write that, as I’ve called him a mate for several years) and Mr Lewis have fashioned a touching tale about learning to live with oneself and resetting relationships.
There’s a bit of horn playing, too, as we hear Jasper’s progress (or lack of it); Mr Lewis can clearly play but manages to convince as a novice.
He also delineates the array of characters nicely, including the Americans Jasper meets at horn camp — it’s a thing! — in New Hampshire.
Although the play feels underdeveloped in parts — Jasper’s fractured relationship with his son, for instance — it’s a convivial evening with plenty of laughs.
***
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