Review
School of Rock – The Musical
★★★★☆ Belting Edinburgh Playhouse: Tue 25 – Sat 29 Jan 2022 Review by Thom Dibdin 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. Based pretty tightly on the 2003 movie […]
Legally Blonde – The Musical
★★★★☆ Sugar rush
Radiating the sheer enjoyment of being back in a theatre, Edinburgh University Savoy Opera Group’s production of Legally Blonde-The Musical is huge in scale, excellently put together, and full of sugary goodness.
The Enormous Christmas Turnip
★★★★☆ Enormously inventive
Pun-packed and full of playfulness, The Enormous Christmas Turnip from Scottish Theatre Producers, hops into the Studio theatre with its young audience very much in mind.
Jamie and the Unicorn online
★★★★☆ Streaming good fun
The brand new pantomime Jamie and the Unicorn at the Gaiety Theatre in Ayr, hits all the big pantomime tropes – and hits them bang on – with a live performance that makes a smooth transfer to online viewing.
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.
WILF
★★★☆☆ Encouragingly filthy
There is a pleasingly unruly feel to James Ley’s new play WILF, this year’s seasonably unseasonal offering from the Traverse. Full of heart, not to mention dialogue that would have given the Lord Chamberlain palpitations, it overcomes structural difficulties to produce a successful whole.
Christmas Dinner
★★★★☆ Touchingly funny
Christmas Dinner may be something of a stopgap as this year’s Lyceum show, but it proves a success in its own right. Amusing, energetic, and wearing its considerable profundity lightly, it should appeal to the widest possible audience.
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.
The Nutcracker
★★★★☆ Seasonal feast
Scottish Ballet’s much-loved version of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker is back at the Festival Theatre over Christmas. This time round, it seems reinvigorated and remarkably fresh.
20 Minutes of Action
★★★★☆ Unflinching case-study
Pollyanna Esse’s powerful piece of verbatim theatre about horrific real-life events in Stanford University in 2015 gets a welcome second outing at the Assembly Roxy this week, after premiering at Bedlam two years ago.
