Playhouse
Derren Brown: Showman
★★★★★ Personal
Derren Brown is at the Playhouse all week with Showman, his first new show for six years and, without doubt, a different show to the one he might have been planning on staging before Covid.
Dreamgirls
★★★★☆ Enduring success
The plot of Dreamgirls, which arrives that the Playhouse for an extended fortnight run until April 16, could be an instruction manual for music moguls.
Hairspray
★★★★☆ Pump up the volume
Unlikely civil rights heroine Tracy Turnblad dances her way to a social justice triumph as Hairspray returns to the Playhouse for a week until Saturday and comes back to Glasgow at the end of the month.
Bat Out of Hell
★★★★☆ The Bat is Back
Three weeks after the death of Meat Loaf, Bat Out Of Hell, the musical based on the album and songs that made him a household name, roars onto the Playhouse stage for a fortnight’s residency.
School of Rock – The Musical
★★★★☆ Belting
Heads up pop pickers! School of Rock – The Musical, which grooves onto the Playhouse stage for a week until Saturday, is a big fat bundle of anarchic rocking-out and feel-good wish-fulfilment.
White Christmas
★★★★☆ Big and bright
The Curve Theatre’s big touring production of White Christmas brightens the Playhouse stage like a clear sky after a night fall of snow, bringing both warmth and crisp definition in its wake.
Heathers The Musical
★★★★☆ Magnificent mean girls
When a beloved film turns stage musical, you can bet that the original’s best-remembered line will become a song. Not Heathers, whose most-quoted piece of dialogue involves, shall we say, the recreational use of a chainsaw.
Beauty and the Beast
★★★★★ Bountiful
The roses are back at the Edinburgh Playhouse and they smell sweeter than ever – be they named Belle or Beast – in Disney’s newly reimagined version of Beauty and the Beast, playing to the end of November.
Blood Brothers
★★★★☆ Compelling tragedy
All may not be right in the world but some things just don’t change. Judging from the opening night audience at the start of its week long stay at the Playhouse, Blood Brothers is still the musical guaranteed to end with a standing ovation.
Chicago
★★★★☆ Tight and technical
Chicago’s tale of murder, greed, corruption, violence, exploitation, adultery and treachery whispers back into the Playhouse with a thrum of double bass, a twitching off-beat on the drums and a haunting moan of muted trumpet.
