April on the London Stage: The Producers, Inter Alia, Avenue Q & More

Spring is here, and with it an abundance of activity in and around the West End, from a hard-hitting film adapted for the stage to a starry takeover and on to the return of a beloved Broadway title. Factor in the anticipation surrounding the coming Olivier Awards, and Britain’s theater capital could hardly be buzzier.

Encore!
Richard Kind has played Max Bialystock in The Producers twice before—on Broadway and then at the Hollywood Bowl—and here he is stepping into the seismically demanding role once again, this time on the West End. He is taking over as the beloved if “betrayed” schemer through May 9 at the Garrick Theatre while 2026 Olivier nominee Andy Nyman steps away from the production. “I had no great desire” to reprise the role, the ebullient Kind told Broadway.com in an interview, “but everything was right with this particular job: it’s London, it’s got Patrick Marber directing, the production is great and I wanted to see if I could still do it.” Kind’s last West End foray was as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls a decade ago, and he spoke at the time of the “loud smiles” of British audiences. And now? “If you get loud smiles in this show, you’re doing a bad job,” Kind said with a laugh. “Mel Brooks”—the musical’s 99-year-old creator—“told me he wanted me loud and the audience louder.” But will it be another decade before Kind hits the London stage anew? “It better be sooner than that,” said the 69-year-old performer. “This thing keeps me young.”

Latin Lessons
2015 Oscar nominee Rosamund Pike returned to the stage last summer for the first time in 15 years to star in the National Theatre premiere of Inter Alia, the latest in a putative trilogy of plays bearing Latin titles from Suzie Miller, the Australian author of Prima Facie. (The next one is to be called Mens Rea.) The tense drama re-opens April 7 in the West End at Wyndham’s Theatre, and New York surely can’t be far behind. “I sometimes think, ‘Wow, I wrote something really challenging, but never thought I was going to put an actress through this,’” an impassioned Miller told Broadway.com. “As a writer, you sit in a dark room never knowing whether your work will ever see a stage. And then when you see it in rehearsal, it’s such a rewarding process; it’s like magic happening amongst you.” As it happens, Prima Facie won an Olivier and a Tony for its solo player, Jodie Comer, while Pike in March won the 2026 Critics' Circle Award for Best Actress and is a leading contender for an Olivier. An admiring Miller extolled both actresses for being “absolute perfectionists of their craft. These are the kinds of working relationships you dream of; I’m suddenly attracting the sorts of actors who are top of the tree.”

Trophy Time
All eyes will be on the prize—and on the styles seen on the red carpet—at the 50th Laurence Olivier Awards, which take place April 12 at the Royal Albert Hall. Ted Lasso star Nick Mohammed will host. Obvious front-runners include the 11-times-nominated Paddington The Musical, the runaway smash of the season, as well as Evita leading lady Rachel Zegler, who redefined that iconic musical for keeps. That still leaves room for the acclaimed revivals of Into the Woods and All My Sons to scoop up a gong or two, and I for one will be rooting for the Old Vic’s magnificent revival of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, while wondering why cast members Seamus Dillane and Angus Cooper failed to make the cut. (Supporting actress hopeful Isis Hainsworth deserves to take her category hands down.) Hopes are high for actor-writer Jack Holden’s splendid New York-bound Kenrex and for the brilliant Julia McDermott from the solo play Weather Girl, which traveled to St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn last fall. As Shakespeare put it in a different context, think of the nominees as “precious winners, all.”

On the Avenue
Astonishingly, it’s been 20 years since the Tony-winning Avenue Q first hit London, and now it’s back, this time at the Shaftesbury Theatre with a cast headed by Noah Harrison, doubling as Princeton and Rod, and Emily Benjamin, as both Kate Monster and Lucy the Slut. Opening night is April 16. “I’ve been singing ‘There’s a Fine, Fine Line’ genuinely since I was 14 years old,” an irrepressible Benjamin told Broadway.com of her excitement at getting to deliver the defining ballad from Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez’s Tony-winning score. How is Benjamin adjusting to the demands of puppeteering after melting down in spectacular fashion as Sally Bowles in the still-running Cabaret? “The musculature of my right arm has never worked quite so hard; I’m regularly massaging my forearm.” As for moving on from Weimar-era Berlin to the “puppet nudity” cheerfully signaled on the Avenue Q website, Benjamin pondered her chosen sequence of shows with a laugh: “I have this image of Kate Monster performing [the song] ‘Cabaret’ in a tiny little suit—or maybe Sally as a puppet would have been able to work some stuff out.”

Collective Catharsis
The world of school shootings provides the sobering subject of Mass, Fran Kranz’s adaptation of his 2021 film, which starred Ann Dowd and Reed Birney. The stage iteration opens April 29 at the Donmar Warehouse as directed by Carrie Cracknell, fresh from her triumph with Arcadia. A distinguished cast is headed by 2019 Olivier winner Monica Dolan (All About Eve), returning to the address where she led the company of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate. “That play was just the most incredible experience for me, and the Donmar definitely feels like the right space for this one: you need to be able to see all the characters at once and experience intimacy”—not hard to achieve in an auditorium that seats 251. How is she handling the grievous terrain of the material? “I’ve been reading around the subject, obviously,” said Dolan. “But I try not to live in it all the time. Rule number one for an actor is to remember your character is not you.”