Gary Naylor - Page 59

Gary Naylor sees a strange concoction of dance, drama, opera, poetry and music set on the seedier side of California - Bukowskiland, as it were.

Gary Naylor sees a long play, full of good intentions, about the aftermath of World War I and its portents for the future.

Gary Naylor sees a technically impressive but strangely distant adaptation of Penelope Lively's Booker Prize winning novel of 1987.

Gary Naylor sees two operas (for the price of one) with plenty in common (and plenty not) in another highly innovative presentation from OperaUpClose.

Gary Naylor sees a technically perfect farce that gets plenty of laughs but leaves him a little cold

Gary Naylor enjoys a slice of life from cold Chicago and is grateful for the sentimentality being reined in just sufficiently to get him through the play.

Gary Naylor enjoys a conversation with John Travolta that could have delivered more, but probably shouldn't have - an evening for fans, not investigative journalists.

Gary Naylor finds that this bulked up, buffed up HMS Pinafore, currently voyaging around the country, is even more fun than when it launched from the Union Theatre last Autumn.

Gary Naylor sees a neglected, problematic musical full of wonderful songs given new life, if not quite full life, at The Union Theatre.

'Orwellian' is a word understood by millions of people who have never read George Orwell's books; 'Big Brother' and 'Room 101' are television shows that feel like they have been around since 1984; and screens fill our homes which we use to 'interact'.

Tim Norton revisits the gift that keeps on giving, Sherlock Holmes, to imagine his last case - he finds it's typically tricky, but sometimes funny too.

Gary Naylor sees one of his favourite plays from last year now delivered bigger, brighter and just as bungled, as the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society starts its UK tour. A&E departments - you have been warned!

It's back to the 80s (and the 50s, 60s, 70s, 90s and 00s) with a legend of the screen telling tales about some of the most famous names in entertainment. She may have played some bad bad women, but she is so lovely in real life - unless you're an ex-husband or a lawyer!

Through the haze of fatigue, parents can only just recall the early days of child-rearing. You expect, and get, the end of a previous life and the start of another, one full of nappies, sleepless nights and a continual planning ahead to make sure that at least one parent will be with the baby at all times.

Just before she hit it big (Dancin' Queen big) with Mamma Mia! (the Rocky Horror Show de nos jours), Catherine Johnson wrote Shang-a-Lang (revived at the King's Head Theatre until 15 February). So is it the 'Ring-Ring' that foreshadows 'Waterloo'? Well, maybe.

Pantomime, even fairy tales, are not known for their well-rounded characters - and the cookie-cutter bad girls, The Ugly Sisters from Cinderella, are no exceptions. But what if they were not men in drag, not just caricatures on envy, not just vicious bullies - what if they were real women?

There are - and you're going to have to believe me on this one - people who don't like musical theatre. They cite the preposterous plots, the sentimental manipulation, the overwhelming spectacle - and the ineluctable fact that people insist on bursting into song.

Though not among Shakespeare's more gory tragedies (competition is pretty fierce after all), Othello is surely his most brutal, a slow motion car crash, in which love and trust go up against cynicism and venality - and lose.

It is (natch) quixotic to stage a version of the mighty chronicle of the unhinged Spanish knight in a North London basement, but what's life (especially theatre) for if not such dreams?

One of the joys of a gig like mine is precisely the opposite of this piece's predicate - I do not look forward to productions at all, simply rolling with the flow and seeing what might come up.