June on the London Stage: James Corden Returns, Stephanie J. Block Leads Kiss Me, Kate and Mean Girls Crosses the Pond

In June, New York may be in thrall to the Tonys, but life on the London stage continues apace. The month ahead promises a broad array of musicals, from a pocket-sized hit of the Edinburgh Festival that's been upgraded to a West End stage, to a lush revival of a Cole Porter classic. Theatergoers can also look forward to a meaty new play returning a Tony winner to his London theater roots. (Meanwhile, a fleet of rollerskating locomotives is heading this way and gathering speed…)

Below is a chronological list of five of the most intriguing June offerings in a theater capital proffering no shortage of dramatic bounty.

HITTING THE BIG TIME
Kathy & Stella Solve a Murder! began in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2022 and has since been seen both in Bristol and Manchester. This month it arrives at the West End’s Ambassadors Theatre, opening June 5 and joining Olivier Award winner Operation Mincemeat as a small show—it’s got an onstage cast of seven—surrounded by musical behemoths.

“I love writing for female voices,” the show’s composer and co-lyricist Matthew Floyd Jones said in an interview of his and collaborator Jon Brittain’s murder mystery musical centered around a distaff crime-fighting duo played by Rebekah Hinds (late of Oklahoma!) and Bronté Barbé (recently seen in the London run of Newsies). How does he think his show will look among today’s West End musical lineup? “We might stick out a bit,” says Floyd Jones, “but I do love that we’ve got here.”

WUNDERBAR
The director Bartlett Sher is no stranger to the Broadway musical golden age, and has transferred both South Pacific and The King and I from Lincoln Center across the Atlantic. This summer, Sher is originating such a revival in London, helming a new Kiss Me, Kate opening June 18 at the Barbican and co-starring Irish actor Adrian Dunbar (from TV’s Line of Duty) in the dual roles of this show-within-a-show’s Fred Graham/Petruchio and Tony winner Stephanie J. Block as the feisty Lilli Vanessi/Kate.

“I picked up the phone and called Kelli [O’Hara],” Block told Broadway.com of the decision to uproot her family and hop the Atlantic. “She couldn’t have written a better review about being in London during the summer.” O’Hara performed The King and I here six years ago and told Block, “‘I think you should do it: It’s great for one’s craft and great for the spirit.’” Besides, who wouldn’t want to sing Cole Porter’s lustrous score? “This is a full-bodied belt I’m going to be giving the audience,” says Block—so in love with the sound of that are we.

GIRL/S POWER
It’s been 20 years, astonishingly, since the first Mean Girls film and six years since its Tina Fey-scripted stage musical version hit Broadway, garnering 12 Tony nominations. That adaptation itself became a movie earlier this year, and now the show is reaching London, opening June 19 at the Savoy with Charlie Burn and Georgina Castle heading the cast.

Casey Nicholaw, the show’s director-choreographer, says time has allowed “distance with which to streamline” a production that he estimates will be 15 minutes or so shorter than it was on Broadway. And what of Mean Girls following on from Dreamgirls, which Nicholaw staged at the Savoy in 2016? “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve called this show the wrong thing,” he laughs, pondering what might happen were the earlier musical’s Effie to meet Regina, Mean Girls’ queen of the plastics. “There’d be a sass-off, and I think Effie would mash [Regina] to the ground.”

THE HOMECOMING
May 2011 saw the opening at the National Theatre of Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors, whose Broadway transfer brought leading man James Corden a 2012 Tony Award and fame stateside as a talk show host.

Corden returns to the London stage for the first time since then to head Joe Penhall’s politically themed play The Constituent at the Old Vic, directed by Matthew Warchus and co-starring Anna Maxwell Martin, herself a one-time Sally Bowles in Cabaret. Penhall’s resume includes the Olivier Award-winning three-hander Blue/Orange, so hopes are high for an onward life for this production. Warchus’ onward life in the meantime is taking shape: He has announced he will depart his perch running the Old Vic in September 2026.

THE NEW ‘NORMAL’
Next to Normal took its sweet time to get to London, eventually opening last summer at the Donmar to rave reviews and a slew of Olivier nominations. The director Michael Longhurst’s cast has been reunited for the West End transfer, opening June 25 at Wyndham’s and starring Caissie Levy and Jamie Parker as the parents, Diana and Dan, and Jack Wolfe in a breakout performance as their son, Gabe: The 28-year-old newcomer garnered Evening Standard and Olivier nods alongside copious admiration for his powerhouse vocals.

“I could never ever have seen this coming,” Wolfe said one recent morning of the impact that Next to Normal has had on his career. “This was a pretty formative score for me as a teenager, so the fact that I’ve got to be in the room as part of the team creating this production has been almost too much to take in.” What might happen, in his view, if he ever meets this role’s Broadway originator, Aaron Tveit? “I think my heart would just stop.”