April on the London Stage: A Tight Olivier Awards Race, Alex Newell in Pippin and a Starry Long Day's Journey

New York isn’t the only game in town. London is continually busy, as befits a theater town that thinks not in terms of seasons but of exciting and rewarding shows throughout the year. Just in April, there's Eugene O'Neill's classic family drama starring a certain TV patriarch, an intimate cabaret performance by one of Broadway's beloved Fiyeros and a barn-burning Tony winner who's going full Fosse in a concert production of Pippin. Follow our chronological list of April highlights to see what matches your travel plans. And remember, there are always more where these came from.

THEATRICAL SUCCESSION

Brian Cox may have achieved late-career renown as Logan Roy in TV’s Succession, but the Scottish actor, now 77, began on the stage and regularly returns there. Last autumn, he played Johann Sebastian Bach in a new play, The Score, at the Theatre Royal, Bath, west of London, and he opens April 2 in the heart of London’s West End in Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill’s great and sorrowful play about his own tormented family.

The play, Cox said in an interview, is “mettle-testing, and you have to test your mettle as an actor.” And that is certainly true of its ruthless three-and-a-half-hour excavation of the dynamics between the onetime matinee idol James Tyrone (Cox), his morphine addicted wife Mary (Patricia Clarkson) and their two sons Jamie (Daryl McCormack) and Edmund (Laurie Kynaston). The play, says its director, Jeremy Herrin, “is one of the greatest ever written,” which sounds reason enough to head to Wyndham’s Theatre and check it out for yourself.

WICKED? WELL, CERTAINLY CRAZY

You’ve seen Kyle Dean Massey on Broadway in Company, Wicked, and Pippin, to name just a few of his credits. But the New York theater regular is jumping the pond for a one-night-only appearance on April 2 at the Crazy Coqs—the intimate cabaret venue that has hosted the likes of Melissa Errico, Liz Callaway, Maria Friedman and plenty of other performers with Broadway bona fides.

Massey will be bringing a show he has performed across America, this time in a place he terms “a spectacular theater town with a vibrant community of artists.” (He might want to check out the Bridge Theatre’s Guys and Dolls during his visit, given that he seems a natural Sky.) London, Massey adds, is “somewhere I’ve always wanted to be a part of,” and this basement venue near Piccadilly Circus is no bad place to begin.

AND THE OLIVIER GOES TO...

Broadway has the Tony Awards June 16, but London gets in its annual gong-giving ritual earlier with the April 14 Olivier Awards. The gala ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall completes a theater trophy trifecta in this town that began last November with the Evening Standard Theatre Awards and was followed mid-March by the Critics’ Circle Awards.

Certain categories are especially tough to call: Nicole Scherzinger (Sunset Boulevard) vs. Marisha Wallace (Guys and Dolls) for Best Actress in a Musical; Dear England or The Motive and the Cue (both National Theatre entries that moved to the West End) for Best Play. There’s also plenty of good will behind Jack Wolfe from the UK premiere of Next to Normal and Motive’s astonishing leading man, Mark Gatiss, who plays John Gielgud in the production that’s rumored for Broadway. Whoever wins, one thing’s for sure: The invaluable Hannah Waddingham is repeating her hosting duties from last year, which means the ceremony will be in safe and assured hands.

OPPOSITES ATTRACT

Britain was still very much in thrall to the pandemic when West End newbie Sam Tutty won the 2020 Olivier Award for his title performance in the London premiere of Dear Evan Hansen. Now soon to be 26, Tutty opens April 23 at the Criterion Theatre in the commercial transfer of a new English musical, Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York). It drew raves during its Off-West End run last year at north London’s Kiln Theatre, also starring Dujonna Gift.

Tutty enthused recently about “a six-week gig becoming a six-month West End contract: It’s really, really surreal.” Does he think this sweet and stirring tale of unexpected romance might itself end up in New York, where it is set? “That’s not for me to decide, but I honestly do think it would do very, very well there.” Perhaps the journey of Jim Barne and Kit Buchan’s production—directed by Tim Jackson, the choreographer of Broadway’s current Merrily We Roll Along—is far from over yet.

MAGIC TO DO

Though unconfirmed, Shucked has been touted for a West End run. Until then, all hail the arrival of its Tony-winning star, Alex Newell, who is heading a notably lustrous concert performance of Pippin at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on April 29 and 30. The Stephen Schwartz musical, which takes over the venue during its nights off from Frozen, features the wonderful Jac Yarrow as the questing young prince of the title. The supporting cast also includes, as Berthe, the venerable Patricia Hodge, who played Catherine in its 1973 West End debut. As Schwartz himself reminds us, "spring will turn to fall / in just no time at all," so make the end of April your "time to take time" for a trip to the theater.