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Critic's choice: top 5 plays
By Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard 02.01.07
Exceptional: Tonya Pinkins in the award-winning Caroline, or Change
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It's your last chance to catch the award-winning Caroline or Change and Much Ado About Nothing at the Novello, plus, satirical comedy A Family Affair makes a terrific impression...
LAST CHANCE: Caroline, or Change
National's Lyttelton, SE1
Tony Kushner's Broadway hit won the Evening Standard award for Best Musical. Opening on the day JFK was assassinated in 1963, it's set in Louisiana at the start of the civil rights movement and it's central theme is change. The title also aludes to the small change left in the pockets of the dirty laundry. The central character is Caroline (Broadway's magnificent Tonya Pinkins), the underpaid black maid who spends most of her time in the laundry room of the Gellman household to support her three children. An exceptional cast carries off the fantasy sequences with panache. (020 7452 3000). Until 4 Jan.
A Family Affair
Arcola, E8
Here is an ideal antidote to the traditional tonics of Christmas-time theatre. Alexander Ostrovsky's satirical comedy of loose morals and lost manners makes a terrific impression in the stylish but strictly controlled exuberance of Serdar Bilis's spiffing production. In 1849, Russian censors banned Ostrovsky's exposè of a mercantile society in which the family that stays together ends up avariciously preying upon each other. Quite right, too. Nick Dear's translation flows in eloquent cascades of abuse and insult, as Jonathan Coyne plays the too-clever-by-half Merchant Samson with appropriately vulgar guile. (020 7503 1646). Until 13 Jan.
Love Song
New Ambassadors, WC2
John Kolvenbach's trite idea - which his robust humour and bursts of poetic lyricism make more acceptable - is that love from Neve Campbell's monotonously aggressive burglar, Molly, can restore Cillian Murphy's chronically introverted Beane to normal life, behaviour and feelings. Suppose, however, that the girl in question turns out to be no more than the ripened figment of Beane's own imagination? Murphy's bearded, semidetached looking Beane gives a performance of such riveting poignancy that he tended to make me gloss over the ruminative silliness of Love Song's contentions. His transformation is not the stuff of drama in John Crowley's stylish production. (0870 060 6627). Until 3 March.
Rock 'n' Roll
Duke of York's, WC2
No major playwright today so stimulates and challenges minds as Tom Stoppard. His Rock 'n' Roll, winner of the Evening Standard's Best Play award, is eloquently holding on in the West End, nearly two thirds of which is submerged in a sea of popular musicals. To see again Stoppard's epic of communist politics, protest and pop music with Dominic West, Emma Fielding and David Calder in the roles originally taken by Rufus Sewell, Sinead Cusack and Brian Cox, is to be reassured that bracing mental exercise for audiences is still permitted on the commercial London stage. (0870 060 6623). Until 25 Feb.
LAST CHANCE: Much Ado About Nothing
Novello, WC2
Thank heavens for Tamsin Greig! Her tight-skirted, melancholic Beatrice, who has left more than one flush of youth gracefully behind, is just the kind of cool woman to deliver winning shots in a sex war. Her tongue is sharp weapon in the battle of the sexes. It leaves Joseph Millson's pretty-boy Benedick verbally mauled and reeling. Greig's performance has become the striking, saving grace of Marianne Elliott's spectacular, protracted production, set for no discernible military or political reason in Cuba in 1953; her Much Ado opts for belly laughs rather than wit or pathos. (0870 950 0940). Until 6 Jan.
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