May on the London Stage: A Miyazaki Classic, Tom Holland as Romeo and a Fawlty Farce

While Broadway spends the month of May in pre-Tony Awards overdrive, the London theater continues to do what it does so well—namely, offering a broad array of shows to suit all tastes. Some of the theatrical highpoints will be known to Broadway devotees, while others are sure to strike an immediate chord with movie buffs. Expect star turns and skillful ensembles, as well as that rare West End entry performed in Japanese. For a chronological list of the enticements on offer, read on.

HIGH SPIRITED

Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away won the 2002 Oscar for animated film and is arriving at the London Coliseum in the same Japanese-language production that has already proven a hit in Miyazaki’s home country. Opening night is May 7.

A separate Studio Ghibli screen-to-stage transfer, My Neighbor Totoro, won six Olivier Awards in 2023, but the film of Spirited Away is even more visually extravagant than was Totoro—a fact not lost on Toby Olié, the stage show’s puppet designer-director. “Every other scene [in Spirited Away onstage] would be the finale of any other show,” says Olié, who did “a live draw-along” while watching the film in an initial quest for inspiration. “I set myself the challenge of throwing the door wide open; we’ve got a really broad theatrical palette.” In a nod to continuity, the director and adaptor John Caird’s cast includes an alumna of the film, Mari Natsuki, as one of the women sharing the role of the sorceress, Yubaba. Plan for enchantment to be the order of the day.

CRAZY FOR YOU

Between Riverside and Crazy won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize and was seen on Broadway last season, garnering two Tony nods. This month sees its British premiere at the Hampstead Theatre, the same venue that more than 20 years ago hosted In Arabia We’d All Be Kings, an earlier play from author Stephen Adly Guirgis; May 13 is the opening.

Having recently stepped down as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, Michael Longhurst directs a cast that includes Judith Roddy, Ayesha Antoine, and, in the central role of the widowed ex-cop Walter “Pops” Washington, the tireless Danny Sapani, who just played King Lear this past winter at the Almeida. You might expect most actors to take a long and deserved holiday after tackling Shakespeare’s mightiest challenge, but not Sapani, who finished that marathon task on a Saturday and began rehearsals for “Pops” two days later. “Lear was such a mountain to climb, but it left me with a craving for more work,” Sapani said in an interview. Guirgis’ play, he adds, “was an opportunity that was not going to happen any other time; it was now or never.” It's to London’s benefit that he chose now.

AT FAWLT(Y)

Almost a half-century on from the first recording at the BBC of what became one of the defining British TV comedy series of all time, Fawlty Towers is headed to the West End, adapted by its original Basil Fawlty, John Cleese, alongside his onetime wife, Connie Booth, and directed by Caroline Jay Ranger. Opening May 15 at the Apollo Theatre, the play is not to be confused with the entirely separate Faulty Towers the Dining Experience, running concurrently—and spelled differently.

Adam Jackson-Smith plays the famously gruff hotelier this time out, with Anna-Jane Casey doing honor to Prunella Scales as Basil’s tart-tongued wife, Sybil. Casey’s credits include Stephen Sondheim’s Dot in Sunday in the Park with George and The Lady of the Lake in Spamalot, so she knows a thing or two about minting iconic roles anew.

IN PASSING

It’s difficult to believe that 16 years have passed since the wondrous Passing Strange came to Broadway, starring its co-creator Stew and garnering seven Tony nominations (including a win for Best Book of a Musical). Just as astonishing is that the protean Giles Terera hasn’t done a stage musical in London since winning the 2018 Olivier for playing Aaron Burr in the West End premiere of Hamilton.

So it seems right and just that Terera should be heading the cast of the European premiere of Passing Strange, which opens May 21 at the Young Vic and is directed by Tony nominee Liesl Tommy (Eclipsed) in her London directing debut. “The thing about Giles,” Tommy says admiringly of her leading man, “is that he innately has this very cool rocker persona”—the goal being to fashion the part from the ground up and not, she says, to find “a Stew replica.” As for the show itself, its gig theater feel—unusual in 2008—is comparatively common theatrical currency now. Those behind Passing Strange, adds Tommy, “were at the vanguard of what now seems a thing that theater people do, especially in London.” Time’s passing, it seems, is a definite plus.

WHEREFORE ART THOU

Some titles need no introduction, and so it is with probably the most often produced Shakespeare tragedy Romeo and Juliet, which is coming into view everywhere these days. Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler have been announced for the play on Broadway in the fall, but first out of the starting gate is a London staging, opening May 23 at the Duke of York’s Theatre, with Tom Holland and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers as the star-cross’d lovers. Jamie Lloyd directs, hot off an Olivier for his Broadway-bound revival of Sunset Boulevard. And where that scorching production is headed, can this one, already long sold-out in London, be far behind?