Sweet Charity (Donmar Warehouse)
Verdict: The 'hostess' with the mostess
Rating:
The minute you walk in the joint (Hey, big spender!), the trumpets and sax blare an impertinent welcome and you’re in the right dive.
Director Josie Rourke’s last hurrah, after running this smart little theatre for seven years, is a real Easter egg: an indulgent treat recklessly overdecorated with mad props, walking-billboards, a flock of stepladders and an over-the-top Sixties nightclub scene with the entire chorus dressed as Andy Warhols. But to hell with the good-taste police: Lent is nearly over, and every number is irresistible.
Neil Simon and Cy Coleman’s musical, fizzing with Dorothy Fields’s smart lyrics, tells one of the world’s most enduring love stories, echoed from grand opera to Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
The minute you walk in the joint (Hey, big spender!), the trumpets and sax blare an impertinent welcome and you’re in the right dive, writes Libby Purves
The show, which is director Josie Rourke's last hurrah, is a 'real Easter egg' writes Libby Purves
The story is about a young woman who falls in love with a respectable man who in the end can't overlook her sexual history
A young woman with a past falls happily in love with a respectable man who can’t, in the end, overlook her sexual history. Even if she was powerless, seduced or, like Charity Hope Valentine, with little choice but the sleazy life of a taxi-dancer fondled for dimes, ‘stuck on the flypaper of life’.
The old story still works today, as the MeToo era reminds us how pretty girls get preyed on and shamed.
The glorious Anne-Marie Duff is Charity, the rashly generous, constantly betrayed nightclub ‘hostess’ whose only friends are the other girls.
She is one of our finest serious actresses, with a marvellous face — ah, those mournful downturned brows — which turns in a flicker from mischief to bottomless weary woe.
She is not known or trained for musicals, so surprise as well as delight met her husky-voiced energy and sweet physical wit.
By the time Arthur Darvill as her geeky, beloved Oscar let her down, every man in the audience, and most of us women, were helplessly, indignantly in love with the woman.
Wayne McGregor’s choreography is richly expressive. On one hand we have the aggressive, sprawlingly sexy moves of the scowling girls in the club, wide-legged and jerky in Bob Fosse style like broken robot Barbies: ‘We don’t dance — we defend ourselves to music.’
The old story still works today, as the MeToo era reminds us how pretty girls get preyed on and shamed, writes Libby Purves
But when Charity is herself, naively dazzled by meeting the movie star Vittorio, daydreaming about a better life or parading triumphantly with, ‘I’m a Brass band!’, it’s quite different.
She shrugs and skips and clowns and wriggles, clutching her shiny minidress like a little girl, graceful and artless and human, in lovely contrast to her seedy life of paid-for snogs and weary bumps and grinds.
She’s adorable. Her final betrayal is painfully shocking, even if you know the show well.
There’s a famous guest spot with The Rhythm Of Life, by Daddy Brubeck, the spliff-wielding pastor leading a jazz-revivalist meeting.
On press night Daddy B, terrorising poor shy Oscar, was Adrian Lester with a spangled T-shirt and helpless grin.
Here’s another stage A-lister not known for an ability to dance. That showed, hilariously, but he was having such an indecent amount of fun that when cabaret star Le Gateau Chocolat takes over on the 29th I expect to see Mr Lester outside, hanging around, hoping for another go.
Who wouldn’t?
Dame Maggie Smith's terrifyingly good as a little old Nazi in A German LifeA German Life (Bridge Theatre)
Verdict: One-woman acting masterclass
Rating: 
As you file into this new play, expectations stratospherically buoyed by the name, the reputation and the solidly bankable pulling power of Dame Maggie Smith, it doesn’t seem much to look at.
We see a quaint living room, an ageing kitchen, a bright streak of morning sun and a round table cluttered in the kind of manic way only pensioners’ tables are.
After a dip into darkness, she’s there. The Nazi. It doesn’t take long for the Dame’s unrivalled ability — and Christopher Hampton’s disturbingly complex text — to ensnare you totally.
This 90-minute monologue, directed by Jonathan Kent, is drawn from an interview with Brunhilde Pomsel when she was 102: one of the last living witnesses to the creation, decline and fall of Nazi Germany.
She’s mostly cardigan now, but in her heyday Brunhilde was a secretary working for Joseph Goebbels.
This 90-minute monologue, directed by Jonathan Kent, is drawn from an interview with Brunhilde Pomsel when she was 102: one of the last living witnesses to the creation, decline and fall of Nazi Germany, writes Luke Jones
We see a quaint living room, an ageing kitchen, a bright streak of morning sun and a round table cluttered in the kind of manic way only pensioners’ tables are, writes Luke Jones describing the stage
Hers is a different telling of history. ‘Politics’ doesn’t interest her. She’s incredibly competent at her job and reels off endless detail, until we get to the Nazi horror.
