Category: Regional

The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical has stormed into Stoke’s Regent Theatre this week, bringing with it a high-octane, vocally vibrant retelling of Rick Riordan’s bestselling novel. For those unfamiliar with the tale, the story follows Percy Jackson—a seemingly average New York teen who discovers he’s the demigod son of Poseidon. When Zeus’s lightning bolt…

The classic 1935 romantic comedy Top Hat returns to the stage in this dazzling new touring production from Chichester Festival Theatre, currently lighting up the Theatre Royal in Nottingham. With a score of glittering Irving Berlin standards and a story full of mistaken identity, unrequited love and high society glamour, the show is every bit…

13 Going on 30: The Musical is the latest screen-to-stage adaptation hoping to tap into the millennial nostalgia boom—and with its pop-culture legacy, it certainly comes with built-in audience affection. The story, first popularised in the 2004 rom-com starring Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo, follows 13-year-old Jenna Rink, a socially awkward teen desperate to grow up…

2:22 A Ghost Story has built its reputation on being a play that is as much about what you don’t see as what you do, and the Stoke leg of the UK tour at the Regent Theatre confirms why it continues to pull audiences in. The premise is deceptively simple: Jenny and Sam, a young couple who have…

James Graham’s Dear England is a play that shouldn’t work as well as it does. On paper, a drama about Gareth Southgate and the England men’s football team could so easily have been little more than locker-room caricature and sporting cliché. But in practice, what unfolds on stage is a gripping, humane and wonderfully entertaining piece of…

Few musicals have left as deep an impression on British theatre as Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers. First performed in 1983, it tells the tragic story of twins separated at birth: Mickey, raised in hardship in a working-class Liverpool household, and Edward, raised in comfort and wealth by a childless upper-middle-class couple. Fate draws the two…

In its current tour at Nottingham’s Royal Concert Hall, Fiddler on the Roof—the award-winning Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre production—proves itself to be a stirring, emotionally intelligent revival of a musical classic. Fresh from its Olivier Award triumphs for Best Musical Revival, Best Set Design, and Best Sound Design, this iteration of the much-loved story of Tevye and his…

The macabre and mysterious Addams clan have descended on Salford this week, bringing their deadpan humour and darkly romantic charm to The Lowry. In this musical comedy, Wednesday Addams – no longer the morbid child of TV and film – has grown up and fallen for Lucas Beineke, an achingly “normal” young man from a…

Has the summer holiday left your home feeling like ‘A Squash and a Squeeze’? Well, the solution is ‘easy peasy’, get your little ones to The Lowry to enjoy a Squash and a Squeeze.  Julia Donaldson’s much loved children’s classic is adapted with love by Barb Jungr and Samantha Lane. While many of Donaldson’s plays…

Tina: The Tina Turner Musical at Nottingham’s Theatre Royal doesn’t begin with the explosive, high-octane spectacle one might expect from a show about a global music icon. Instead, it opens in stillness, in a church of Tina’s childhood, quietly setting the stage for a story that is as much about survival and spirit as it is…