![]() ![]() In the space of 12 days that began yesterday (and will continue to May 29), there will be presentations of eight new musicals in all, testing them in bare-bone readings in front of a public, paying audience for the first time. It is located within a railway arch, like the Union in Southwark where artistic director Paul Taylor-Mills’s producing career began - and where he was spotted as a result by Andrew Lloyd Webber when he revived the Lord’s 2000 musical Beautiful Game, and eventually put in charge of programming the Other Palace as a home of new musicals for a time, and where he originated an first incarnation of the MTFest in 2019 and that he’s now revived at the Turbine. I’ve not been nearly enough to the Turbine, which is understandable given that it has not actually been here that long. And that’s the first thing about being back in a theatre (as opposed to in from of our computer monitor watching a show on zoom) it stirs memories and emotions of previous visits to theatres, including of course THIS one that you’re in tonight. The memories of all of these live performances were swirling around inside me as I took my (socially bubbled) seat at the Turbine - protected from my nearest neighbour by a plastic divider screen between us. That’s a show that we have seen here, at the Menier Chocolate Factory in 2019, when Trevor Nunn directs one of my favourite UK leading ladies Jenna Russell (she was number three in my ShenTens, after Imelda Staunton and Sharon D Clark) and Edward Baker-Duly. They would reunite on Broadway less than a year when he played a photographer who visits the town where O’Hara’s character lives with her husband and children, and they have a brief passionate affair while the rest of her family is away, in Jason Robert Brown’s musical adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County. I’d actually seen the whole show in its New York premiere in 2013 at Playwrights Horizon’s that starred the wonderful Steven Pasquale as the husband and the absolutely miraculous Kelli O’Hara as his previously unaware wife (she was number three in my ShenTens of my favourite current Broadway leading ladies, after Audra McDonald and Patti LuPone). And I popped into the Turbine Theatre in Battersea, to see the (partial) British premiere of Far From Heaven, the 2013 Off-Broadway musical version of the 2002 film about a woman in 1957 coming to realise that her husband is gay. Baz Bamigboye checked into the St Martin’s to see The Mousetrap, which is now in its 69th year (though it missed its 68th). Returning to the theatre last night for the first time in over five months, I’m reminded that I’m a theatre fan before I’m a critic.
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