This Is London Sept 14th

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Photo: Matt Crockett.
KINKY BOOTS REVEALS FIRST LOOK
AT FINAL LONDON COMPANY
A hit with audiences since it opened in
September 2015, Kinky Boots, the winner
of every major Best Musical award, will
play its final performance at London’s
Adelphi Theatre on 12 January 2019. After
celebrating its third birthday in the West
End in September, Kinky Boots will also
embark on an extensive UK tour from
autumn 2018 through 2019.
With a book by Broadway legend and
four-time Tony® Award-winner Harvey
Fierstein (La Cage aux Folles), songs by
Grammy® and Tony® Award-winning
pop icon Cyndi Lauper and direction
and choreography by two-time Tony®
Award-winner Jerry Mitchell (Legally
Blonde, Hairspray), this joyous musical
celebration is about the friendships we
discover, and the belief that you can
change the world when you change your
mind.
Inspired by true events, Kinky Boots
takes you from a gentlemen’s shoe factory
in Northampton to the glamorous catwalks
of Milan. Charlie Price is struggling to
live up to his father’s expectations and
continue the family business of Price &
Son. With the factory’s future hanging in
the balance, help arrives in the unlikely
but spectacular form of Lola, a fabulous
performer in need of some sturdy new
stilettos.
With direction and choreography by
two-time Tony® Award-winner Jerry
Mitchell (Legally Blonde, Hairspray),
Kinky Boots is the winner of every major
Best Musical award including three Olivier
Awards, three WhatsOnStage Awards as
well as six Broadway Tony® Awards.
ARISTOCRATS
Donmar until 22 September
The ‘Big House’ in Lyndsey Turner’s
slow burn revival of the late Brian Friel’s
1979 family drama is tiny – Es Devlin’s
design reduces Ballybeg Hall to a
perfectly fitted out doll’s house which
retains the memories of earlier days when
life was very different for those born and
raised there.
The Catholic O’Donnells’ once splendid
Georgian home is crumbling – just like
the dying paterfamilias Father, a retired
judge now reduced to communicating
with his family via a baby monitor. Four of
his adult offspring have gathered for the
forthcoming marriage of the youngest –
fragile, piano-playing Claire – to a much
older and far from suitable man. This is
no love match.
But the siblings’ reunion proves to be
the occasion of a funeral rather than a
wedding. And, as visiting American
academic Tom (there to research the
‘upper strata of Roman Catholic society in
rural Ireland’) soon realises, fact and
fantasy merge in the memories of this
dysfunctional family, historically isolated
by status from the local villagers and by
religion from wealthy Protestant
landowners.
Elaine Cassidy’s elegant, unhappy
alcoholic Alice now lives in London with
her husband. Older Judith (Eileen Walsh)
who stayed at home is worn down by the
efforts of caring for their father and a
house falling into disrepair, despite the
devoted efforts of David Ganly’s robust
handyman, Willie.
David Dawson invests misfit son
Casimir (who admits that he might well
have been seen as the village idiot had he
come from a less privileged background)
with a febrile intensity. Unable – or
unwilling – to distinguish reality from
fantasy, he’s constantly making attempts to
establish telephone contact with a wife
and children back in Hamburg (who may
or may not exist) and recounting
impossible details of past visitors to the
house.
And as Friel’s play (with its undeniable
Chekhovian influence) progresses, the
splendour of what once was is gradually
revealed as, sliver by sliver, piece by
piece, the layers are peeled away from the
painted backdrop.
Louise Kingsley
Elaine Cassidy (Alice) and Emmet
Kirwan (Eamon) in Aristocrats at the
Donmar Warehouse.
Photo: Johan Persson
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