Gary Naylor

“It all makes for an evening that is not without its delights, the spectacular set first and foremost and the score never less than pleasing.”

“To the credit of this extraordinary and so, so timely production, I'm now further away than ever from knowing if it's if or when and then comes the even more terrifying interrogative, how?”

“Like much that is sanitised and simplified for a mass market, Sinatra The Musical flattens a complex life, scatters glitter liberally around it and sends its public away happy, toes tapping.”

“There’s a delicious pleasure to be had in seeing his rebuttal of every value (if that is the right word) that animates the MAGA movement”

“Yes, you can admire the smarts of the plotting, the technically perfect stagecraft and the comic timing, but, Gee, it’s hard to love.”

“If stage musicals, slower, less willing to flood your senses and keener on character development, form your reference point, you’ll be frustrated at the money spent and the opportunities missed.”

“This is an Africa largely shorn of its exotic otherness, of its perceived need for white saviours, of its chaotic feuding warlords.”

“That said, when he returns to the soil ruthlessly grabbed by genocidal invaders, it’s hard not to cheer.”

“That manifest wisdom gives her vicious denunciation of an entire class of intelligentsia at a nightmarish end of summer dinner party all the more force, director Robert Hastie’s slow build to that climax fully vindicated.”

“Crucially, Francis appears to be enjoying it every bit as much as we are, an underrated skill in comic acting.”

“Horror should not be about thinking, it should be about feeling!”

“What earns the final star above is not the adaptation’s subtle relevance nor its urgent pacing but the fact that though there’s an inevitable corniness to the plot, some 73 years after the film’s release, I was moved.”

“So not a very bad play, just not a very good one, the kind that might have started at the Clapham Omnibus or the Camden People’s Theatre, switching out Clacton for Clarkston so the Brits can understand it, before going to Dalston if it were lucky.”

“It's a highwire act that just about works, largely thanks to a confident writer, an acutely perceptive director and a brilliant central performance from Shields.”

“Just as importantly, it’s a rattling good night out in these troubled times.”

“There's spectacle, star-power and emotion to complement some good songs, albeit too many done too loud and too fast.”

“That may induce a sigh from me, but I suspect Joe Tex and family felt they got their money’s worth.”

“This is still a fine and important contribution to a growing debate, and not one confined to museology.”

“That dog, like the play, is serviceable, but it’s not quite all you were hoping for.”

“What remains is an uninteresting man telling us about his uninteresting life. At one point, Moat says that had he not become a murderer, nobody would have noticed him - well, there’s probably a reason for that.”

“That they are crude is fine, that they are devoid of wit isn’t.”

“The rest of us can delight in a masterful recreation of sublime comic acting, even if we do wince at the show's largely unmitigated, and depressingly relentless, raw misogyny.”

“In many ways, this might be exactly the show a too often overly cautious West End needs right now and the energy in the house was good evidence for that conclusion.”

“If that sounds hard work and just a bit intellectually incestuous, it is, but not immediately.”

“The musical, bold in conception, skilled in execution and acclaimed with modern theatre’s greatest accolade, a tearful standing ovation, has delivered.”

“Does it all work as a stage play? I’m not so sure that it does, too episodic, too rooted in its specificities of industrial, northern, working class male culture teetering on the brink, too tied to its source material.”

“For those who do, there’s nothing that compares.”

“Whether it’s worth the emotional investment required on both sides of the fourth wall for its equivocating payoff is moot.”

“Michael Sheen, in the part he was surely born to play, is on stage throughout, carrying the play and the man with equal passion.”

“The narrative really sparks when O’Farrell leaves behind the need to explain and justify and simply goes for the funny bone, attacking his old bête noir, Mrs Thatcher.”

“Federico Garcia Lorca’s play is one of the greatest of the 20th century, but its power is consistently undermined by the staging.”

“On its own terms, The Mongol Khan is a five-star show – and I’m already recommending it to friends.”

“I suspect the show will be received more warmly by fans of the book than fans of musicals....those coming for the more specific attractions of musical theatre may feel a little shortchanged by the blandness of many of the songs and the skipping across plotholes in the book...”

“After two hours of Simon Nye’s pedestrian telling of the tale as a comedy, you have your answer.”

“This terrifying evening brings passions to the surface, the spirit that once bound a group of residents now binding a group of campaigners.”

“Few will feel shortchanged by a show that offers great songs, real spectacle and a sprinkling of starry talent.”

“The craft, and the emotion it provokes, is more than enough in compensation.”

“...this is a production that doesn’t fit its venue, lets its audience down by failing to trust them on the tough stuff and takes the easier staging option too frequently.”

“Ultimately one wonders what director, Josie Rourke, intended to make of the work in its second production at Theatre, having also played at The Old Vic in 2009 and around the world.”

“Ryan Calais Cameron's black blockbuster is one of those overnight successes that was years in the making.”

“The digressions, tricksy effects and focus on weighty hot-button issues make the production feel longer than it is.”

“It is in this third aspect that the production scores in a way that gives it its contemporary relevance.”

“In the final reckoning, Hex delivers on musical theatre’s central proposition – it entertains.”

“With Basil Twist, Jim Henson's Creature Shop and Mervyn Miller (a holy trinity of the puppetry if ever there was one) expectations were sky high - and they were exceeded!”

“In other words, it succeeds on its own terms and we can't ask for much more than that.”

“Far better to strap yourself in, fire up the flux capacitor and stick the pedal to the metal all the way up to 88mph.”

“So, unlike Elvira’s return to the mortal plane, this play’s revival is, on balance, a good thing for everyone involved.”

“But the ambition in taking on one of the most loved fairytales of all, one we’re pretty much born knowing, and reconstructing it for the 21st century, is lost in a book that cannot resolve the contradictions inherent in its avowed iconoclasm.”

“As is too often the case in musicals, the show is let down by Ivan Menchell’s curiously imbalanced book.”