Rohtko at Barbican: Savage and gripping satire of the art world October 3, 2025 Rohtko at the Barbican | ★★★★★ Rohtko is one of the most astonishing pieces of work I’ve seen on a London stage. Created by Polish director Łukasz Twarkowski, it’s a genre-defying mash up of theatre, live cinema, installation art, dance and techno. The Barbican stage is filled with an ever-shifting series of sets built inside [...]
Beyond the Barbican: meet the Square Mile’s Bridewell Theatre October 2, 2025 Other than the Barbican, the Bridewell Theatre is the Square Mile’s most significant live performance venue. Here they tell us why they should win at this year’s inaugural Toast the City awards, celebrating the best of the Square Mile later this month. Why does the Bridewell Theatre deserve to win a coveted Slice of Toast at the [...]
What’s On in London in October 2025 October 1, 2025 | City Talk As the leaves turn a golden hue, London in October is a city of stunning autumnal beauty and vibrant events. Explore the fiery foliage in the royal parks, get into the spooky spirit with a ghost tour or a Halloween party at a museum, attend a FREE Battle of Ideas event or discover the world-class [...]
Romans at the Almeida review: ambitious but hard to follow September 19, 2025 Romans at the Almeida review and star rating: ★★ Writer Alice Birch’s new play, Romans: A Novel, at the Almeida Theatre, examines the disparate, disconnected, distended lives of three brothers, over more than a century. Against this backdrop, Birch – famous for her work on blockbuster television series like Succession and Normal People – explores [...]
The Producers, London musical review: the West End’s most shocking show September 16, 2025 The Producers musical review and star rating: ★★★★ Sequinned y-fronts emblazoned with swastikas, floral designs shaped into the Nazi symbol and sing-a-longs including lines like “it’s springtime for Hitler and Germany, Deutschland is happy and gay!” It could only be The Producers, the tongue-in-cheek Nazi musical within a musical written 58 years ago that, despite [...]
Wicked: Record London show sales after film’s success September 11, 2025 The global box office success of the big screen adaptation of musical Wicked helped the London stage show rake in record ticket sales last year. The film, staring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, was released in November 2024 and generated more than $756m (£559.2m) worldwide off the back of a successful promotional tour. It was [...]
Juniper Blood review at Donmar Warehouse: Mike Bartlett’s climate change play lacks heat August 27, 2025 Juniper Blood review and star rating: ★★★ Mike Bartlett‘s play Cock starring Jonathan Bailey and Taron Egerton became one of the most expensive plays in West End history in 2023 when seats went for north of £400. That play, like Unicorn, looked at changing attitudes towards sexuality, but another of Bartlett’s recurrent themes is climate [...]
How the Barbican Theatre has rivalled the West End for four decades August 21, 2025 Our Toast the City Awards are celebrating the City’s top spots and takes place this October. This week: the Barbican Theatre. Think of the Barbican Centre and you might picture the lakeside suntrap or Brutalist passageways that feel purposefully designed to get lost in. You might not immediately think of the Barbican Theatre, but here’s why you [...]
‘Wonderfully weird’: 7 of the best Edinburgh Fringe shows to book now August 14, 2025 City AM’s theatre writers have been catching the very best of the shows at the Edinburgh Fringe festival. We’re only reviewing productions with London transfers in the autumn, so if you can’t make it to Edinburgh this August, everything you read here is coming to the capital at a later date. From Fleabag to Flight [...]
This Grease immersive show isn’t the one that I want August 7, 2025 Grease: immersive musical review: ★★ A Titanic experience where you’re aboard the ship as it sinks, the heavily-mocked Elvis show (that I actually loved), a new Traitors experience and similar ones for Squid Game and Friends. Whatever you want to call them, experiences or immersive theatre (categorising these experiences has instigated a fierce debate raging [...]