In the Heights
King’s Cross Theatre, London N1
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton is currently tearing up Broadway. His 2005 debut is set around the Fourth of July in Manhattan’s mostly Hispanic Washington Heights. Love, graft, ambition: it’s a classic second-generation musical asking what home might mean. It unfolds around Usnavi’s corner bodega and, like his coffee, is hot and sweet. Everyone, or their parents, started somewhere else (one character says she’s “Chile-domini-curican”), and the neighbourhood keeps you safe, but holds you back. Things sag whenever people speak, but Miranda’s liquid music and salty lyrics, soaring and rapping, have emotional intelligence and sociological smarts. Sam Mackay’s endearing Usnavi anchors a killer ensemble in Luke Sheppard’s traverse staging, while Drew McOnie’s barrio choreography brings every inch of the stage to life. Moving between street moves and samba hips, this slice of Nueva York consistently hits the heights.
David Jays
Measure for Measure
Young Vic, London SE1
The director Joe Hill-Gibbins is becoming something of a madcap arch provocateur: it’s not often Shakespeare features a truckload of blow-up sex dolls. But this abridged Measure for Measure is much more than a stunt or a stunted adolescent joke. It starts with a vision of carnal excess, as cast members grope their way out of a pile of plastic bodies before bumping and grinding with them. Should we titter or gasp at all the lolling limbs and gaping mouths? Have we witnessed a bit of fun or a desolating orgy? Either way, the following morning, the Duke of Vienna (Zubin Varla) hands authority to clean up his sleaze-ridden state over to his unbending deputy, Angelo (a permafrost Paul Ready). The dolls are quickly walled up, but Angelo strays from his own strictures, to the distress of Romola Garai’s luminous Isabella. While Hill-Gibbins’s use of video can distract from the action as well as intensifying it, his production’s shock impact comes from the abuses of power within the play. Inflatable todgers and all, this absurdist take on Shakespeare is surprisingly sobering.
Maxie Szalwinska
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Anita and Me
Birmingham Rep
Meera Syal’s tangy, touching semi-autobiographical novel, looking back to a childhood in a fictional Black Country mining village in the 1970s, has already been made into a film. Now Tanika Gupta has created a music-infused stage show about the frowned-upon friendship between 13-year-old Meena (Mandeep Dhillon), the daughter of aspirational Indian immigrants, and the slightly older “wrong ’un”, Anita (Jalleh Alizadeh), “with the face of a pissed-off cherub”. Onto Bob Bailey’s set of a run-down shared yard surrounded by red-brick terraced back-to-backs, Gupta and the director Roxana Silbert cram a lot into two hours, from working women’s badinage to bhangra and postcolonial politics. The result is a colourful show that, though likeable, never fully engages emotionally and fails to show the complexities of Anita and her unfortunate situation. The clear-voiced Dhillon, if good, is physically unconvincing as a young teen. Her mother, Daljit (Ayesha Dharker), father, Shyam (Ameet Chana), grandmother, Nanima (Yasmin Wilde), and neighbour, Mrs Worrall (Janice Connolly), are all superb, though.
Patricia Nicol
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Swan Lake
Sadler’s Wells, London EC1
This is Birmingham Royal Ballet’s 25th anniversary year, but its production of Swan Lake, now touring until January, has a longer history. It was created in 1981, when the company was London-based as Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, by the then director, Peter Wright, and the ballerina Galina Samsova; and — typically of Wright — it is clear in narrative and drama, shunning the extraneous clutter of many Swan Lakes. The keynote of Philip Prowse’s designs is gothic, both in architecture and atmosphere. The company dances with zest and commitment; the swan ensembles are lovely and poignant. In last Tuesday’s opening cast at the Wells, Celine Gittens as Odette/Odile and Tyrone Singleton as Prince Siegfried were a conscientious, elegantly matched partnership, technically accomplished and well attuned in their duets, though they need to find more depth and dazzle.
David Dougill