May on the London Stage: Sondheim's Last Stand, a Tudor Drama and Broadway's Corniest Musical

Stephen Sondheim’s final musical reaches the National, a SIX queen flirts with the supernatural and the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye outdoors at Regent’s Park. These are just a few of the shows on offer on the London stage during the month ahead. For more on this trio of openings and other enticements, read on.

THE LAST MIDNIGHT
Stephen Sondheim’s farewell show, Here We Are, caused a sensation in its New York debut at The Shed some 18 months ago, and here it is afresh at the National Theatre, a onetime home to storied productions of A Little Night Music and Follies, among various Sondheim titles. Denis O’Hare and Tracie Bennett are the holdovers from the U.S. premiere, alongside a preposterously lustrous array of newcomers that includes Tony winners Jane Krakowski, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Paulo Szot, and two-time Olivier recipient Rory Kinnear in the role originated off-Broadway by Bobby Cannavale. Opening night in the Lyttelton auditorium is May 8.

“With the passage of time, there can be a broader engagement with this show,” said Richard Schoch, the American academic whose superb book How Sondheim Can Change Your Life addresses Here We Are in its closing chapter. “We’re able to take the work on its own terms, not just as a farewell moment. With the distance of time, and geography, I think we’re going to see that [Sondheim] has once again been uncannily prophetic in reading the moment” Schoch told Broadway.com, referencing the musical’s critique “of hoarded wealth and unshared power and the collapse of the social order.” And what about the singular star wattage on view? Schoch replied to Broadway.com without hesitation: “This is an amazing, amazing cast.”

I SPY
Mischief Theatre has been generating mirth for 17 years now across such trans-Atlantic successes as The Play That Goes Wrong and Peter Pan Goes Wrong, as well as Groan Ups and Mind Mangler: Member of the Tragic Circle, among others, back home. On May 13, the Noël Coward Theatre sees the opening of their latest show, The Comedy About Spies, set within the early-1960s world of the Cold War and Britain’s intelligence agency MI6. “We wanted a strong kind of genre to tell a fun story and make people laugh,” said one of Mischief’s founders, Henry Lewis, who co-wrote the play with Henry Shields and has a starring role in it as well. How has this assemblage of talent managed to stay together for so long? “We’re always keen to get back together and do new shows. It has been and continues to be a really fun adventure; we’re very lucky, I think.”

ANNE ADJACENT
The English dramatist Ava Pickett won the 2024 Susan Smith Blackburn prize for her play 1536, set in Tudor Essex in the year of the play’s title, which also saw the death of Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. Now comes the period drama’s professional debut at the heavyweight Almeida Theatre, directed by Lyndsey Turner (Chimerica, the recent The Little Foxes), who was on the judging panel for the Blackburn prize. “Every day I’m like, ‘How has this happened?’” an enthused Pickett told Broadway.com of landing so esteemed a berth for what she calls a “subversive history play that is really a drama about friendship and power and sex.” Tanya Reynolds, Liv Hill and Siena Kelly are the three women at its center; opening night is May 13.

COMIC KERNELS
The riotously funny Shucked received nine Tony nominations in 2023 and is now readying an outdoor run at the prestigious Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, whose alfresco revival last summer of Fiddler on the Roof recently won three Oliviers. Broadway legend Jack O’Brien once again directs, and leading the cast of the Cob County denizens this time round are Ben Joyce, Sophie McShera, and, inheriting the part originated by Tony winner Alex Newell, Cinderella alum Georgina Onuorah. What is it like to have a show set in the world of crops and cornrows performed in a playhouse itself open to the skies? “I never could have imagined this,” said its buoyant book writer, Robert Horn, who is also readying Disney’s Hercules for a West End bow in June. “I’m running between rehearsal rooms,” he told Broadway.com of his dizzying schedule. This version of Shucked, opening May 20, will be no mere replication of what was seen on Broadway: “We’re looking at the show from the ground up–or, should I say, from the soil up.”

THE SOUND INSIDE
Renée Lamb played Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in the early days of the musical juggernaut SIX at London’s Arts Theatre. This month, she trades pop ballads and sequins for the eerie-sounding realm of Nancy Netherwood’s new play, Radiant Boy: A Haunting, at Southwark Playhouse Borough–the same venue that offered an early home to Operation Mincemeat and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Stuart Thompson (Spring Awakening) co-stars. “Being at the start of new British theater feels so special,” the delightful 28-year-old said in an interview with Broadway.com, expanding on the challenge of this latest assignment. “I play two parts, Steph and The Voice, both of which help one another. I get to explore what it’s like to have voices in your head.” What Lamb actually means by that character précis will become evident as of opening night May 23.