Sensational stage portrayals seize Oliviers awards’ spotlight

STRONG AND BRAYBEN. Olivier awardees for best actor and actress in their respective categories.

James McAvoy (in Peter Barnes’ “The Ruling Class”) and best actor winner Mark Strong (Arthur Miller’s “A View From The Bridge”) are exceptional in the West End productions they were nominated for at last week’s Olivier Awards, the highest honor in British theater.

But, the transfixing Strong, playing a longshoreman whose incestuous feelings for his teenage niece (Phoebe Fox) unravels a Pandora’s box of shocking secrets, benefits from the spare but inventive staging of director Ivo van Hove’s ability to break open texts “calcified by tradition.”

Best director Van Hove builds thick tension and domestic chaos on a stage stripped of set and scenery, but you won’t be able to look away from the harshness of the play’s avuncular drama!

Of the 20 theater productions we’ve seen in London this season, our favorite single performance belongs to best musical actress Katie Brayben, a relative newcomer who wears her character’s bleeding heart on her sleeve as Carole King in Aldwych Theatre’s “Beautiful”—about a simple but musically gifted woman who finds something beautiful in her fractured life.

It’s a jukebox musical that is as spectacular as it is intimate, made more compelling by well-limned side stories (like King and Gerry Goffin’s “friendly” competition with the songwriting duo of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil) strung cleverly together by its gorgeously rendered pop hits-turned-show tunes: “It’s Too Late,” “You’ve Got a Friend,” “I Feel The Earth Move,” “On Broadway,” “The Locomotion,” “Oh Carol,” “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” —It was hard not to sing along as they were being performed by the musical’s adorable cast!

Into the limelight

Imelda Staunton is sensational in Jonathan Kent’s relentlessly entertaining revival of “Gypsy” at the illustrious Savoy Theatre—about incorrigible stage mother, Momma Rose, who forcibly shoves her daughters, Louise (Lara Pulver) and June (Gemma Sutton), into the limelight.

STAUNTON. Portrays “Gypsy’s” incorrigible stage-mother protagonist.

The 59-year-old actress displays her still-pristine pipes and age-defying range as she performs Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim’s “Some People,” “Let Me Entertain You,” “Together Wherever We Go” and “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” with show-stopping flair and aplomb.

This big, bad Momma can be annoying as heck, but Staunton also manages to make her sympathetic and, yes, ultimately likable!

Best new comedy winner, “The Play That Goes Wrong,” is about joyful disasters. It follows a troupe of inept theater artists as they attempt to mount a 1920s murder mystery, in which everything goes awry—doors don’t open, actors forget to enter on cue, crucial props don’t work, sets fall in the middle of a scene, etc. —Such rip-roaring, loopy fun!

It is quick-witted and laugh-out-loud funny, and plays out like an offshoot of Michael Frayn’s wacky play-within-a-play, “Noises Off.”

Guided only by the age-old theater maxim, “The show must go on,” the show’s beleaguered cast and crew do their insufficient best to keep their wits about them, as everything (and everyone) begins to crumble—but, for how long?