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…

At the Regent Theatre this week, Mean Girls arrives with a slick, high-energy touring production that captures much of the wit and bite of Tina Fey’s original creation, even if some of its design choices fall noticeably short of its West End and Broadway counterparts. From the outset, this is a cast-led success. Emily Lane’s Cady Heron is a compelling…

Few musicals arrive with the weight of expectation that accompanies Miss Saigon. Since its premiere, the collaboration between Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil has become synonymous with large-scale musical storytelling, emotionally expansive, visually ambitious, and musically demanding. This latest UK tour, overseen by Cameron Mackintosh and directed by Jean-Pierre van der Spuy, embraces that legacy…