Robert Tanitch, Author at Catholic Herald

Robert Tanitch

The last and greatest of the Restoration comedies

April 18, 2018

Haydn Gwynne, playing the great comic role of Lady Wishfort, a crumbling superannuated widow, gets lots of laughs

Theatre: Songs that cross America’s great divide

April 05, 2018

Caroline, Or Change at Hampstead Theatre is an adult musical for adult audiences. The subject matter is race relations between African-Americans and American Jews in 1963, the year of President Kennedy’s assassination and the rise of the Civil Rights movement. The book and lyrics are by Tony Kushner, of Angels in America fame. Jeanine Tesori’s

Theatre: A heartbreaking tale of unrequited love

March 22, 2018

Tennessee Williams’s elegiac and heartbreaking Summer and Smoke, a story of loneliness and unrequited love, which premiered in 1948, is, in the light of his later work, unexpectedly gentle and delicate. Rebecca Frecknall’s clever production at Almeida Theatre is a rare and major revival. A minister’s daughter has loved the boy next door since they

Theatre: An achingly sad clash of class and culture

March 08, 2018

The York Realist, Peter Gill’s beautifully understated, sad drama at Donmar Theatre, is fully confident in its kitchen-sink realism and unafraid to move at a slow pace. Premiered in 2002, it is a perfect companion piece for the working-class plays of DH Lawrence, which Gill famously directed. A young, middle-class assistant director (Jonathan Bailey), working

Theatre: A shatteringly good journey into night

February 22, 2018

Eugene O’Neill is America’s greatest playwright and Long Day’s Journey into Night, at Wyndham’s Theatre, is his greatest play, an act of exorcism, written in tears and blood, and so autobiographical that he didn’t want it published until 25 years after his death. It is, perhaps, the most painful and acrimonious of all 20th-century dramas.

Theatre: A Caesar so lifelike, the audience ducks

February 08, 2018

At Bridge Theatre, near Tower Bridge, you can stand or sit for Nicholas Hytner’s in-the-round, promenade production of Julius Caesar, one of the best political thrillers ever written. It is always topical and will continue to be pertinent as long as there are dictators, bloody coups and rampaging crowds. The play’s popularity in Britain began

Theatre: A ratings triumph that’s mad as hell

January 25, 2018

At the National Theatre, the 1976 Sidney Lumet/Paddy Chayefsky film Network has been adapted for the stage by Lee Hall and its impact has not diminished one jot. The script is a biting satire on the corruptive power of television and big business. The dangers have not gone away. “We are not in the business

Theatre: Blitz spirit fails to lift wartime Cinderella

January 11, 2018

Cinderella has been a popular pantomime since 1830. Today, you can see it performed as a ballet by Prokofiev, an opera by Rossini, a musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, a film by Kenneth Branagh, or even a Disney cartoon. A lot of people will be opting for the ballet and spectacle of Matthew Bourne (he

Hamilton review – the rise and fall of a scrappy orphan who shaped America

December 23, 2017

The acclaimed musical makes its triumphant debut in London

Theatre: A good week for plays that deserved a revival

December 21, 2017

Simon Gray’s spy thriller Cell Mates, which closed early in 1995 when Stephen Fry had a breakdown and suddenly exited the production, is successfully revived by Ed Hall at Hampstead Theatre. Traitor George Blake, sentenced to imprisonment for 42 years, was sprung from Wormwood Scrubs in 1961 by Sean Bourke, an Irish petty criminal. Invited

Theatre: A magical, musical Christmas Carol

December 14, 2017

At Charles Dickens’s funeral at Westminster Abbey in 1888, the Very Reverend Dean Stanley preached that Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was the finest Christmas sermon in the English language. Matthew Warchus’s in-the-round production at The Young Vic, with Rhys Ifans as Scrooge, is a fresh and constant delight, thanks mainly to the carol and

Theatre: A witty and well-cast assault on capitalism

November 29, 2017

Times are hard and four Chicago salesmen in real estate are fighting to keep their jobs. Glengarry Glen Ross is David Mamet’s best play and as damning an indictment of capitalism as Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman. The major pleasure at The Playhouse is listening to the way Mamet manipulates the language. He

1 2 3 … 8 →

Sorry, no search matching search results found. Please try again.