The Week on Stage: From The Band’s Visit to Blues for an Alabama Sky

From Broadway hit The Band’s Visit to star-studded National Theatre drama Blues for an Alabama Sky, it’s been a big week for new theatre shows. Read on for our verdicts, plus two major dance openings.

The Band’s Visit – Donmar Warehouse ★★★★☆

At the start of The Band’s Visit, we get a simple overview. “Once, not long ago, a group of musicians came to Israel from Egypt.” In terms of plot, this is about right. But then we’re told, “You probably didn’t hear about it. It wasn’t very important.” You didn’t hear about it because it didn’t really happen. But it was, in fact, very important, since it forms the basis for one of the most captivating musicals of recent years.

Based on a 2007 Israeli film, this show by David Yazbek and Itamar Moses won 10 Tony awards back in 2018, after opening on Broadway. It’s a coup for the Donmar Warehouse to have secured its European premiere; the theatre’s artistic director, Michael Longhurst – who directs the production – has bookended this current season with shows that garnered strong Broadway buzz, like a canny football manager swooping in on the transfer market. It didn’t quite pay off with Lucas Hnath’s insubstantial A Doll’s House, Part 2, but it certainly does here. A West End transfer wouldn’t be a wild idea.

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We meet the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra on their way to perform an important concert in Israel, wheeling suitcases. Their leader Tewfiq (Alon Moni Aboutboul) warns them there must be “no embarrassments” and “no mistakes”. Unfortunate, then, that a pronunciation mix-up means they end up in the wrong place, a dead-end town where people sing of being “experts at waiting”. Nothing happens here; its inhabitants are all too ready to have their feathers ruffled.

What follows is a long night of the soul, in which initial suspicions gradually give way to moments of bonding and shared revelations. As in Come from Away, the hospitality of strangers is a major theme – but this is an altogether subtler and more soulful affair. Restaurant owner Dina (Miri Mesika, with a goosebump-inducing voice) finds a kindred spirit in Tewfiq. Both are world-weary and yearning; there’s a sense of immediate understanding. Across 100 minutes, there is a series of charming vignettes – including sexual awakening at a roller disco and a test of endurance at a phone box – in which people gradually help each other unspool. In the best scene, two band members bond with their hosts as they try to remember the words to Ella Fitzgerald’s Summertime. They’ve barely met, but find an easy delight in egging each other on as they work it out together.

Lulls in pace come occasionally, but there’s a unique spirit here that is very hard not to love. The music, some of which is performed by a band on stage, is beautiful, and the cast nail the show’s comic moments as well as those that are meticulously moving. It’s a simple love letter to the way that culture can bind us and build bridges, and it’ll charm the pants off you. Jessie Thompson

Mayerling – Royal Opera House ★★★★☆

Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling is a ballet of doomed obsession. The hero, Rudolf, is a prince, but this historical drama couldn’t be further from fairytale. MacMillan creates a whole world of needy, driven people, trapped in a stifling web of court politics, repression, and destructive emotion.

This Royal Ballet revival marks 30 years since MacMillan’s death, and pays powerful tribute to one of its defining choreographers. Ryoichi Hirano shows Rudolf’s decline as he lurches deeper into tragedy. As his former mistress, Countess Larisch, Laura Morera is both calculating and desperate, clinging to Rudolf as a source of status and because she loves him. She and Natalia Osipova are extraordinary in the scene where she tells Mary’s fortune, grooming her to be Rudolf’s next lover.

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In her scenes with Rudolf, Osipova’s Mary is primed with his fantasies – but Osipova shows us how they become Mary’s, too, as she responds to his fascination with guns and death. In a very strong cast, many performances shine out. Marianela Nuñez gives Mitzi Caspar, another of Rudolf’s mistresses, a glowing glamour. The delicacy of Francesca Hayward’s dancing underlines the fragility of poor Stephanie, Rudolf’s wife.

This revival makes some small changes: I miss seeing the coffin lowered in the grim funeral scene that frames the action. But the onstage world is brilliantly rich, Nicholas Georgiadis’s opulent designs underlining the power and the airlessness of this court, glittering and grand as it sweeps its way to disaster. ZA

Read the full review here.

Blues for an Alabama Sky – National Theatre ★★★☆☆

The year is 1930. The place is Harlem, New York. Nightclub singer Angel (Orange is the New Black’s Samira Wiley) is being carried home after a night surrounded by booze and gangsters. It might sound like a scene of gritty drama, but in fact this opening moment is pure comedy, all slurred words and slapstick. When someone reminds Angel and her friend Guy (Giles Terera) that they’re still living under prohibition, he simply laughs. “Not in Harlem, it isn’t.”

The heroes of Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play know how to find the fun in the darkest of times – you’ll struggle to find a more delightful double act on the London stage right now than Angel and her “notorious homosexual” friend (his words). From inside their slightly rickety apartment (impeccably designed by Frankie Bradshaw), they dream of running away to Paris, designing clothes, and marrying “rich old French men who will die immediately” (her words).

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Guy may be flamboyant, but there’s a nuance to Terera’s interpretation that stops it from feeling like a stereotype (bar the odd out-of-place tongue pop and “okurrr”). Instead, the actor, who won an Olivier for playing Aaron Burr in Hamilton, creates something extraordinary. I struggled to keep my eyes off him, yet under Lynette Linton’s direction, he and Wiley share the spoils of the spotlight. Both characters are brash, but not afraid to show their softer sides, Wiley’s voice a tantalisingly low and luxurious purr.

But while the performances are strong, the play as a whole does not cohere. The first act feels frothy and lively, as light and smooth as Angel’s gowns and Guy’s enviable rainbow-hued silk shirts. Trouble is hinted at – mostly in the form of Angel’s new man Leland (Osy Ikhile) – but it never moves beyond feeling like a one-act comedy.

But then act two arrives, and things shift dramatically. Huge, depressingly relevant topics come to a fiery head: homophobia, poverty, abortion rights. Largely, it’s a pacing problem within Cleage’s script. These topics should be interrogated, but here they feel overstuffed, issue upon issue piling up without the appropriate breathing space. The performances may be sharp, but the production never quite unravels the too-tangled text. Isobel Lewis

Mixtape – Sadler’s Wells ★★★★☆

Since 2002, ZooNation has developed a distinctive take on hip-hop dance theatre, mixing in musicals, pop, and a witty sense of narrative. For Mixtape, Kate Prince adopts a stripped-back gala format, with Dannielle “Rhimes” Lecointe and Bradley Charles co-directing. A scaffolding set by Ben Stones lights up with neon symbols – play and stop signs leading the way through the company’s hits.

It underlines how much of ZooNation’s storytelling is in the bodies. These numbers are full of driving energy, fast footwork and acrobatics – but there’s plenty of characterisation here, too. The wonderful Tommy Franzen returns as the librarian from Some Like It Hip Hop, glasses on nose and body juggling books as well as rhythms. He can fall flat in a second, then recover in slow motion: control so precise that he can play with time and gravity.

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The soundtrack recordings feature live singing, including a dash of beatboxing from DJ Walde, the company’s music director. The material from Message in a Bottle, set to songs by Sting, is the thinnest of the evening, perhaps because Prince is illustrating somebody else’s hits rather than generating her own story.

Mixtape highlights the battle scenes, the character introductions – the moments when dancers can strut their stuff and tell their stories. Prince and her dancers delight in those contrasts. There’s a glow of affection to the way they bounce off each other, a warmth that runs right through this show. ZA

Read the full review here.