The Latest Breaking News from Marc Brenner

Next to Normal review – fizzing musical about mental illness

The performances are superb in this tale of a family dealing with bipolar disorder but the storyline is thin

The Guardian - UK · Aug 23, 2023

London Theatre Week 2023 is extended: our pick of the top 10 shows to book from A Strange Loop to The Effect

With cheap tickets on offer these are our recommendations of shows to check out

Evening Standard · Aug 21, 2023

Playwright Sam Holcroft: ‘It felt like everyone else got a rulebook that I didn’t’

Her latest play, A Mirror, mixes her keen eye for human behaviour and her experiences in North Korea, but there’s another influence that the writer has never spoken about – her autism diagnosis

The Guardian - UK · Aug 11, 2023

Giant review – medical ethics and 18th-century freakshows create a compelling new opera

Sarah Angliss and Ross Sutherland’s taut tale of an 18th-century ‘giant’ and the doctor who wants his body for research is vividly realised in this Aldeburgh festival opener, with tenor Karim Sulayman towering in the lead role

The Guardian - UK · Jun 11, 2023

‘There will be sex!’ Inside A Strange Loop – the queer, Black Broadway megasmash now hitting Britain

The Pulitzer prize-winning musical shows the world what it’s like ‘to travel in a fat, Black queer body’. Writer Michael R Jackson, a former Lion King usher who based it on his life, relives his astounding success

The Guardian - UK · Jun 6, 2023

‘I want it to feel quite feral’: Rebecca Frecknall on staging Romeo and Juliet

From Cabaret to Streetcar, the West End’s hottest director Rebecca Frecknall has a reputation for finding leads who put bums on seats. ‘I just go on my gut,’ she says

The Guardian - UK · Jun 2, 2023

‘There’s something Shakespearean about Gareth Southgate’: the epic play about England’s hero

He came back from a disastrous penalty to reignite the English men’s football team – and inspire a country in the grip of gloom. Writer James Graham reveals how he turned the ‘quiet guy doing The Impossible Job’ into gripping drama

The Guardian - UK · May 30, 2023

Once on This Island review – stirring Little Mermaid musical in colonial Haiti

A young woman offers her life to save an unworthy aristocrat in a passionately sung fable of Caribbean history

The Guardian - UK · May 18, 2023

The week in theatre: Retrograde; The Secret Life of Bees; Dixon and Daughters – review

Kiln; Almeida; Dorfman, LondonIn his quickfire new McCarthy-era play, For Black Boys… creator Ryan Calais Cameron speaks his mind; a civil rights musical buzzes with potential; and Deborah Bruce’s domestic abuse drama is full of surprises

The Guardian - UK · Apr 30, 2023

Retrograde review – toxicity meets integrity in exceptional Sidney Poitier drama

Ryan Calais Cameron’s terrific three-hander dramatises a meeting in 1955 Hollywood, mapping the dilemmas that actors of colour still face

The Guardian - UK · Apr 27, 2023