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      ‘Starlight Express’ Review: The Gravy Train Rolls On

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      Nostalgia will undoubtedly lure many to a London revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. It has more in common with a theme park than with theater, our critic writes.Andrew Lloyd Webber’s baffling musical, “Starlight Express” — in which trains, represented by performers on roller skates, compete in a championship at the behest of a little boy who is dreaming the whole thing — was a big West End hit in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Forty years after its 1984 premiere, it returns with a new production, this time in a purpose-built auditorium about 10 miles west of the theater district.This “Starlight Express,” directed by Luke Sheppard and running through Feb. 16, 2025, channels heady nostalgia for the recent past. The set design and sound effects are redolent of ‘90s video games and British TV game shows like “Gladiators”; the glittery, sci-fi costumes are reminiscent of “Power Rangers.” The show is a dazzlingly produced family entertainment with impressive special effects, but its appeal consists almost entirely in sensory overload rather than plot, music or drama.Our unlikely hero, the steam engine Rusty (Jeevan Braich), is initially intimidated by his competitors, the electric and diesel trains Electra (Tom Pigram) and Greaseball (Al Knott). Rusty’s got hots for a railroad car called Pearl (Kayna Montecillo), but she’s not sure if she likes him in that way. After several setbacks and some soul-searching, he teams up with a hydrogen engine, Hydra (Jaydon Vijn), to win both the race and the girl. Essentially it’s “The Karate Kid,” with trains.A talented cast do their best to breathe life into this somewhat unoriginal tale. Branch plays Rusty with just the right blend of halting self-doubt and plucky determination, and the baddies are rendered with cartoonish bravado. But the real star of the show is Tim Hatley’s spectacular set, with its racing track that snakes out from the stage into the audience seating, so that the performers occasionally zoom right through, complemented by an array of incredibly slick visuals: steam jets, flame effects, laser beams.Rusty with Hydra, played by Jaydon Vijn.Pamela RaithWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What to See on London Stages This Summer

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      British theater recommendations for visitors and residents of all ages — and inclinations.London’s theaters offer something for everyone. Whether in big West End venues or on stages tucked away above a pub, the city’s shows include the classics, new plays and some productions that defy classification. Open air playhouses attract audiences willing to brave the unpredictable summer weather, and venues spread throughout the city make for an accessible theater landscape that extends far beyond the heavily trafficked tourist hot spots.Whether you’re looking for frothy musicals or fiercely charged political writing, chances are your wishes can be answered somewhere around town. Below, in seven categories, are some of the shows vying for the attention of visitors and residents seeking out London theater this summer.Give Me Serious DramaDenise Gough as Emma and Malachi Kirby as Mark in “People, Places & Things.”Marc BrennerAlma MaterFew London playhouses generate as much buzz as the Almeida, and expectations are high for its run of this new play from the Australian playwright Kendall Feaver, whose theatrical debut, “The Almighty Sometimes,” impressed British critics when it played in Manchester, England, in 2018. Feaver’s latest is set on a university campus rocked by sexual assault allegations, and Polly Findlay directs a cast led by Phoebe Campbell and Justine Mitchell. Through July 20 at the Almeida Theater.The Boys from the BlackstuffThe regional accents may prove a challenge — especially if English isn’t your first language — but there’s no denying the passion and power that course through James Graham’s stage adaptation of this era-defining 1982 British TV show. Through a community of Liverpool road builders’ struggles, Kate Wasserberg’s empathic production reminds us that employment is crucial to self-esteem. Through Aug. 3 at the Garrick Theater. More

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      Watching the New ‘Doctor Who’ With 5 Superfans

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      Five British fans gathered to watch the premiere, wondering what a new Doctor and Disney+’s co-production would mean for their favorite show.“Doctor Who,” the BBC’s beloved sci-fi series about an alien time traveler and his human companions, has had 875 episodes over 61 years. The show first ran between 1963 and 1989 on the BBC, was revived in 2005 and has been airing ever since.As a result, the TV shows has one of the most diverse a fan bases when it comes to age. It appeals to older people who sat down to watch the first broadcast on black-and-white televisions, as well as to children watching on their iPads in 2024.On Friday, a new season started airing, featuring Ncuti Gatwa — the 31-year-old Scottish actor who was previously best known for his role as Eric on “Sex Education” — as the latest Doctor. Russell T Davies, who was the showrunner between the reboot in 2005 and 2010, is back at the helm. The show also has a new home on Disney+, the first time the BBC has produced “Doctor Who” in partnership with another company in the show’s history.On a recent evening, Richard Unwin, a 44-year-old writer and actor, gathered four other “Doctor Who” fans at his apartment in East London to watch the first two episodes. They were a little nervous about what the Disney influence, and the need to cater to a new, international audience, might have done to their favorite program.“I am worried that they will Americanize it,” said George Norohna, a 61-year-old retired civil servant, who remembers the show as the first thing he ever saw on a color television. They were joined by the fantasy author Janelle McCurdy, 28, Francis Beveridge, a 27-year-old neuroscience researcher, and Beth Axford, 26, who writes for “Doctor Who Magazine,” a fan publication.Surrounded by shelves packed with “Doctor Who” memorabilia, the fans helped themselves from a platter of vegetarian sandwiches as they watched the episodes: the first about a baby farm in space and the second about a villain who steals the world’s music. From one corner of the room, a full-size replica Dalek watched over the scene.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Andrew Davis, 80, Dies; Renowned Conductor Who Championed Britain’s Music

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      Celebrated for his long tenure with Lyric Opera of Chicago, he led this and other orchestras with force and a notably energetic podium presence.Andrew Davis, an ebullient British conductor who brought energy to his countrymen’s compositions and passion to hundreds of opera performances, died on April 20 in Chicago. He was 80.His manager, Jonathan Brill, said the cause of Mr. Davis’s death, in a hospital, was leukemia.More than many conductors, Mr. Davis was remembered by those who worked with him as deriving a sense of physical enjoyment from the music — “almost a palpable pleasure,” the pianist Emanuel Ax said in an interview. And that translated into a pleasure for his collaborators. “People loved playing for him,” Mr. Ax said.Mr. Davis spent 21 years, from 2000 to 2021, as music director and principal conductor of one of America’s great opera companies, Lyric Opera of Chicago, in a vast repertoire ranging from Mozart through Wagner to Berg. He also led orchestras in Canada — the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, from 1975 to 1988 — and Australia — the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, from 2013 to 2019. He also conducted at the Glyndebourne Festival in England from 1988 to 2000.But it was as an interpreter of 20th-century British music, and particularly the works of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Delius, Holst, Britten and others, that Mr. Davis made his mark and earned his way into the affections of his fellow Britons. With its fervid, billowing patriotism and ruminative pastoral interludes, this music sometimes struggles to cross national boundaries.Mr. Davis conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1995. He was the orchestra’s principal conductor for a decade.Robbie Jack/Corbis, via Getty ImagesMr. Davis, as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1989 to 2000 and at summer London Proms concerts in front of enthusiastic audiences of thousands in the Royal Albert Hall, made the most of the British compositions that were his specialty. This deep homegrown commitment led The New York Times’s Bernard Holland, reviewing a 1987 Avery Fisher Hall appearance by Mr. Davis that included little-known works by Arnold Bax and Michael Tippett, to write that “the music of 20th-century Britain has hugely profited from the fervent ministrations of British musicians and the British musical press.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2024 Olivier Awards: The Snubs and Surprises

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      Our theater critics and a reporter discuss the big winner — “Sunset Boulevard” — and the rest of the honorees at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.On Sunday night, the Olivier Awards — Britain’s equivalent to the Tonys — took place in London. As expected, “Sunset Boulevard” took home the most trophies (and will have a Broadway run later this year), but there were also some surprise winners. Matt Wolf and Houman Barekat, The New York Times’s London theater critics, joined the reporter Alex Marshall to discuss the winners, the snubs and the last year in British theater.Jamie Lloyd’s stripped-back “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, took home seven awards. Do you think it deserved to dominate?ALEX MARSHALL I saw “Sunset Boulevard” from the cheapest of cheap seats in the back row, but it was still my most memorable night in a theater last year. I’m not surprised that Andrew Lloyd Webber responded to the show’s wins by writing on X that it was “a highlight of my career.”For me, the only downside to its sweep is that Nicholas Hytner’s “Guys and Dolls” failed to win any major awards (it picked up one for choreography). If Lloyd’s reimagining of “Sunset” was brutal and stark, Hytner’s revamp was all exuberance and joy.Scherzinger in “Sunset Boulevard.”Marc BrennerMATT WOLF I loved everything about “Sunset Boulevard,” so, yes, I do think it deserved to dominate. That said, it must have been galling for the “Guys and Dolls” company to open that show to universal raves last spring, only to have “Sunset” come along and blindside them. The radical daring of Lloyd’s “Sunset” doesn’t happen every day, and “Guys and Dolls” was the unfortunate victim of that fact.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ Heading to Broadway, Wins Big at Olivier Awards

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      The musical, which stars Nicole Scherzinger, won seven awards at Britain’s version of the Tonys. And Sarah Snook won best actress for “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”A reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, the long forgotten silent movie star who descends into madness, was the big winner at this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The musical, which will open at the St. James Theater on Broadway this fall, was honored Sunday during a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London with seven awards, including best musical revival, best actress in a musical for Scherzinger, best actor in a musical for Tom Francis, as the screenwriter who falls for Desmond’s charms, and best director for Jamie Lloyd.The number of awards was hardly a surprise. After the musical opened last fall, critics praised Lloyd’s stark production, especially highlighting its contemporary twists that included using cameras to zoom in on characters’ faces, then beam their emotions onto a screen at the back of the stage.Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, said that Lloyd’s production belonged firmly “to the here and now.” With this show, the director “takes an established musical by the scruff of the neck and sends it careering into the modern day,” Wolf added.Sarah Hemming, in The Financial Times, was among the critics to praise Scherzinger’s magnetic performance. “She’s not afraid to look scary or ridiculous,” Hemming said, “but there’s also a strung-out vulnerability about her. And when she sings, she pins you to your seat with the harrowing intensity of her delivery.”“Sunset Boulevard” beat several other acclaimed productions to the best musical revival award, including “Guys & Dolls” at the Bridge Theater and “Hadestown” at the Lyric Theater.Sarah Snook in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a solo version for which she won best actress at the Olivier Awards. Snook plays 26 roles in the show.Marc BrennerA host of musicals and plays shared the night’s other major prizes. “Operation Mincemeat,” a word-of-mouth hit about a bizarre World War II counterintelligence plot that is running at the Fortune Theater, won best new musical. While “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a prequel to the Netflix show, now at the Phoenix Theater, was chosen as best new entertainment or comedy play.The best new play award went to James Graham’s “Dear England,” about the English national soccer team, which transferred to the West End from the National Theater.In the hotly contested acting categories, Sarah Snook (“Succession”) was named best actress for “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a solo show running through May 11 at the Theater Royal Haymarket. Snook plays all 26 roles, often interacting with recorded projections of her characters.Before Sunday’s ceremony, some critics had expected the best actor award to go to Andrew Scott for a similarly dazzling solo performance: a one-man “Vanya” at the Duke of York’s Theater. In the end, the prize went to Mark Gatiss for his role as the revered actor and director John Gielgud in “The Motive and the Cue,” a play by Jack Thorne that dramatizes the fraught backstage relationship between Gielgud and Richard Burton as they worked on a Broadway show. Like “Dear England,” that play ran at the National Theater before transferring to the West End. More

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      ‘Player Kings’ Review: Ian McKellen’s Juicy Assignment as Falstaff

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      In Robert Icke’s adaptation of Parts 1 and 2 of “Henry IV,” the veteran stage actor’s performance belies his age.There are two shows for the price of one at “Player Kings,” in which the director Robert Icke has combined both of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” history plays into a self-contained whole.The production offers a compressed version of the royal accession story that, in this version, runs nearly four hours. It is an opportunity to experience Ian McKellen’s unbridled love of performance. At 84, the production’s leading man possesses an energy and vigor that belie his years.“Player Kings” — which runs at the Noël Coward Theater through June 22, before touring England — is the latest in a wave of recent high-profile Shakespeare productions in London. Uniquely among the other great British theater actors of his generation, McKellen still returns year after year to the stage, recently tackling Lear for a second time and playing an octogenarian Hamlet.Perhaps inevitably, there’s a feeling of the star vehicle to this production. In the “sweet creature of bombast” that is this play’s John Falstaff, McKellen has an especially juicy assignment — an outsized character whose appetite for life matches the actor’s own gusto. We’re told that the ample Falstaff hasn’t seen his own knees in years, and when he sits, it looks as if he may never stand up. His mouth, however, seems always in motion, as if chewing food for constant fuel.He’s also a necessary soul mate to the carousing, drug-using Prince Hal (the excellent Toheeb Jimoh, an Emmy nominee for “Ted Lasso”), whose coming-of-age story — becoming, as he puts it, “more myself” — connects these two “Henry IV” plays. But the roustabout Hal’s dawning maturity costs him the companion he once held dear.Clare Perkins as Mistress Quickly and Toheeb Jimoh as Prince Hal.Manuel HarlanWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      On London Stages, Uplifting Tales of Black Masculinity

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      “For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy” and “Red Pitch” offer generous portrayals of male bonding.If you believe the Op-Eds, men are in a bad way these days: perpetually beleaguered and isolated, if not irredeemably toxic. But two lively new plays in London suggest an alternative, sanguine vision of 21st-century masculinity, foregrounding generous portrayals of male bonding and togetherness.In “For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy,” six Black British men participate in a group-therapy session punctuated by bursts of song. The show, written and directed by Ryan Calais Cameron, is a male-centric spin on Ntozake Shange’s 1976 work, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf,” in which women of color recount their experiences of racism and gendered violence through performance poetry, music and dance.“For Black Boys” runs at the Garrick Theater in the West End through June 1. On a stage decked out in bright, blocky primary colors like a pop music video, the men — called Onyx, Pitch, Jet, Sable, Obsidian and Midnight, each a shade of black — bare their souls one by one. Every so often they morph into a ’90-style boy band, delivering neatly choreographed, crowd-pleasing renditions of R&B classics like Backstreet’s “No Diggity” and India.Arie’s “Brown Skin.” (The set design is by Anna Reid, the choreography by Theophilus O. Bailey.)Banter is their love language. Jet (an engagingly plaintive Fela Lufadeju) is joshed for wearing chinos — a “white” affectation — prompting a spiky discussion on the vexed subject of “acting Black.” Gradually, deflection and bravado give way to introspection and insight as the men unpack the perniciousness of machismo in their lives: Jet recalls how his father refused to seek cancer treatment for fear of appearing unmanly; Sable, a self-styled Casanova (Albert Magashi, suitably strutting) concedes that insecurity might be driving his philandering ways; a flashback scene depicts Obsidian (Mohammed Mansaray) reluctantly engaging in senseless violence for street cred, with life-changing consequences.The play ends with an upbeat mantra about keeping your chin up in the face of adversity. Its core message is about collective solidarity: By embracing emotional vulnerability and opening up to one another, young men can build support systems that will help them overcome life’s hardships. And the audience’s enthusiasm at the curtain call suggested to a sense of recognition: These sentiments rang true, and it meant something to see them conveyed from a West End stage.But that easy accessibility comes at a price. The six characters feel like stock types, their respective travails a little too generic to be truly compelling — each existing, rather like pictures in a high-school textbook, to illustrate a trope. This is echoed in dialogue that relies heavily on melodramatic cliché (one character tells us his father was “destructive like a wrecking ball and I was the collateral damage”) and lingo taken from social sciences (“We’re not monoliths!”). Despite its exuberant energy, “For Black Boys” is ultimately somewhat two-dimensional.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More