Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street tells the story of Benjamin Barker, wrongly transported to a penal colony by the corrupt Judge Turpin so that Turpin could pursue Barker’s wife. Barker returns to London years later under the name Sweeney Todd, consumed by grief and thoughts of revenge.…

Operation Mincemeat is, by now, a familiar kind of underdog story in British theatre, though no less remarkable for it. Landing in the West End at the Fortune Theatre in May 2023, where it picked up the Olivier and WhatsOnstage Awards for Best New Musical and racked up dozens of five star reviews on its…

Ten years after it first opened on Broadway, Waitress rolls into Stoke-on-Trent this week as part of its ongoing UK and Ireland tour, bringing Sara Bareilles’ warm, pie-obsessed score to the Regent Theatre stage. Jenna is a waitress and a genuinely gifted pie maker, stuck in a small town and an even smaller marriage. Her…

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has had a winding road to the stage. Roald Dahl’s 1964 novel was already a screen favourite long before it found its current musical form, most famously through the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The stage musical itself, with songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman and…

Set firmly in the present day, this stage adaptation updates the classic psychological thriller for the social media age. Allie (Anna Ruben) is a recently divorced mother navigating single parenthood while attempting to launch her own tech start-up. Stretched financially and emotionally, she advertises for a lodger, and into her life steps the seemingly perfect…

Priscilla Queen of the Desert follows three drag performers, Tick (also known as Mitzi), Bernadette, and Adam (also known as Felicia), as they travel across the Australian outback in a battered bus, Priscilla, to perform a show in Alice Springs. Along the way, the trio encounter hostility, acceptance, humour and moments of genuine emotional connection,…

At its core, Operation Mincemeat tells one of the most extraordinary true stories of the Second World War: a wildly audacious British intelligence plan to deceive the Nazis using a stolen corpse carrying falsified documents. Set in 1943, with the Allies struggling to gain ground, the musical dramatises how a small, eccentric team within MI5 concocted a…

There is something immediately reassuring about an Agatha Christie adaptation arriving on stage. The promise is clear: intrigue, elegance, and a carefully constructed puzzle that will ultimately snap into place. The UK tour of Death on the Nile, now playing at Nottingham’s Theatre Royal, delivers much of that promise, even if the journey there is…

There is an undeniable energy pulsing through Sunny Afternoon, the Olivier Award-winning jukebox musical built around the catalogue of The Kinks. Now touring the UK and stopping this week at the Regent Theatre, this production leans heavily into its greatest strength: the sheer musicality of its actor-muso cast. Sunny Afternoon charts the rise of The…