Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares — Underbelly Boulevard Soho, London 

 ★★★★½ (4.5/5)

Tucked into Underbelly Boulevard Soho's intimate room on Walker's Court, Laura Benanti's London debut felt like being let in on a secret. This is a Tony winner turning her own messiest, most human moments into a show that's equal parts hilarious and quietly devastating — and the venue's close, cabaret-style setup suits that confessional tone perfectly.

The show arrived in London on the back of a sold-out Edinburgh Festival Fringe run, and it earned a New York Times Critics' Pick before that. London critics were quick to fall for it too: one review called Benanti's musical autobiography utterly dazzling, describing her star power as something rarely experienced with this much force, while another noted the show marks a new stage for Benanti both as a performer and as a woman. A third critic wrote that watching it land at Underbelly Boulevard made them wonder why it hadn't already become a West End fixture.

Benanti wrote the show herself, with songs co-written with Todd Almond, and the balance she strikes is the whole draw: sharp, self-deprecating one-liners that feel like she's breaking the fourth wall, paired with storytelling that gives the hour real weight. Her two young daughters — the source of the show's damning title — come up often enough that you feel like you know them by the end. The Melania Trump impression that made her famous on The Late Show still gets a moment, but it's the garnish here, not the meal.

The verdict: Underbelly Boulevard Soho is a fitting home for this one — small enough that Benanti's asides land like she's talking straight to you, warm enough that the show's rawer moments don't feel exposing so much as shared. I'm docking half a star only because a solo show this emotionally honest isn't pure escapism — it catches you off guard. But as a night at the theatre, it's about as complete an experience as you'll find on Walker's Court right now.

 Stamptown 

★★★★½ (4.5/5)

Note: This is a previously unpublished review written in August 2025. 

There's a very specific kind of joy that only exists at 11pm in a sweat room full of strangers when they decide, collectively, to lose their minds — and Stamptown has built an entire show out of manufacturing that feeling on demand. This is a night that runs on pure adrenaline from the first minute, and it rarely, if ever, lets the foot off the gas.

Zach Zucker, as his gloriously unhinged alter-ego Jack Tucker, doesn't so much host the show as detonate it. He's part ringmaster, part fever dream, barrelling around the stage with the manic conviction of a man who's either about to have the best night of his life or get arrested — often both within the same five minutes. The sound and lighting team deserve a review of their own: gunshot effects, meltdown lighting, and perfectly timed stings land with a precision that makes the chaos feel choreographed rather than accidental, which is really the trick of the whole thing. It shouldn't work as a well-oiled machine. It does.

And it feels utterly, unmistakably of the Fringe — the kind of show that could only exist in this specific pocket of the world, at this hour, in this city, for these three and a half weeks in August. There's a real sense that you're watching something that belongs nowhere else: too loose for a proper venue, too gleefully unhinged for a polished comedy club, and exactly right for a Pleasance tent at the tail end of a long festival day. When it's flying — and for long stretches it really is — Stamptown produces some of the most genuinely, helplessly funny moments you'll find on the whole Fringe program. A packed house properly losing it, in that unfiltered way that's almost impossible to fake, happens more than once in the hour, and that's not nothing.

Where it stumbles is in mistaking volume for edge. A handful of the acts lean on shock and crudeness as if the transgression itself is the joke, without quite finding one underneath it — and those stretches drag rather than detonate, feeling more like a dare than a bit. It's a variety night, so the rotating line-up is inevitably a mixed bag by design, and on the night in question a couple of guest turns leaned so hard into crass-for-crass's-sake that they actually cooled the room rather than raising the temperature, undercutting the momentum Zucker had spent the previous twenty minutes building.

But even with those lulls, Stamptown earns its reputation as one of the Fringe's essential late-night rituals. It's messy, it's occasionally too pleased with its own audacity, and it doesn't always know when a joke has stopped working — but when it lands, which is often, there's nothing else on the festival quite like it.

Garry Starr: Classic Penguins — Arts Theatre

 ★★★★½ (4.5/5)

Let's get the obvious question out of the way first: yes, he's naked for almost the entire show. But if you walk into Classic Penguins expecting ninety minutes of shock value dressed up as theatre, you've badly underestimated what Garry Starr is actually doing here — and that miscalculation is precisely why this show works as brilliantly as it does.

The setup is a joke in itself: a man in a tailcoat, an Elizabethan ruff, and a pair of fluorescent orange flippers — and, as it turns out, nothing else — has appointed himself the saviour of Western literature. His mission: perform the entire Penguin Classics catalogue in a single hour. What follows isn't so much a show as a controlled explosion, a 70-minute sprint through Frankenstein, Moby Dick, Breakfast at Tiffany's and a dozen other titles, each dispatched in the time it takes most stand-ups to set up a single joke.

What's easy to miss, amid the flying grapes and the crowd-surfing and the frankly heroic commitment to a Moon River bit that has no business being as funny as it is, is just how disciplined this chaos actually is. Director Cal McCrystal — the man responsible for making James Corden's physical comedy sing in One Man, Two Guvnors, and for the slapstick choreography in both Paddington films — knows exactly how to build an audience's trust before he lets Starr detonate it. There's a reason the crowd-surfing sequence lands: by the time it happens, Starr (in reality Damien Warren-Smith, a Gaulier-trained clown who cut his teeth with the troupe A Plague of Idiots) has spent twenty minutes proving he's not interested in humiliating anyone, least of all himself. The nudity stops being the joke almost immediately and becomes something closer to an offering — total, ridiculous vulnerability as a kind of trust exercise with the room.

That's the thing critics who call this show "shallow" are missing, I think. Classic Penguins was never trying to teach you literature — that's the joke, not the failure. What it's actually interested in is something closer to what great clowning has always been about: using absurdity to strip away the audience's guardedness until they're genuinely, helplessly present in the room with the performer. Judged as literary criticism, sure, it's a belly-slide across the surface. Judged as an hour of pure, unguarded connection between a performer and several hundred strangers, it's close to a masterclass.

Is it perfect? No — and this is where the half star goes. The back third of the show occasionally runs on momentum rather than invention; a few of the later titles get the same beat repeated with a different book cover, and you can feel the show reaching for its next big swing rather than fully earning it. A slightly tighter edit in that stretch would take this from very good to unimpeachable.

But that's a minor complaint against a show with this much heart, craft and sheer audacity. Starr has built something genuinely rare: a piece of theatre that's filthy and clever in equal measure, performed by someone who has clearly thought harder about the mechanics of a laugh than most "serious" playwrights think about a plot point. I left the Arts Theatre grinning, slightly stunned, and quietly moved by how much warmth was hiding inside all that nonsense.

Verdict: A masterclass in vulnerability disguised as a naked man reading Moby Dick — filthy, fearless, and impossible not to fall for.

 Ali Woods: Basher 

★★★★ (4/5)

There's a particular kind of comedy that works by making you laugh so hard you almost miss that it's quietly rearranging something in your chest. Ali Woods: Basher is one of those shows.

Woods opens almost bashfully, admitting that things are going pretty well for him lately — a strange thing to confess to a room of strangers, and stranger still to build a show around. But that's exactly the gamble that pays off. Rather than mining pain for laughs, he's found something rarer: a comedian genuinely at ease enough with his own life to let us in on it, worries and all. Watching your friends pair off and settle down while you're still figuring out who you are is a very specific kind of ache, and Woods turns it into something the whole room recognizes, whatever stage of life they're in.

The heart of the show is his family — particularly his dad. It would have been easy for Woods to play these stories for cheap sentiment or cheap laughs, but he does neither. Instead there's a real tenderness under the jokes, the kind that sneaks up on you. By the time he lands on a small, throwaway image — an old t-shirt slowly demoted, year by year, down to sleepwear — you realize he's actually been telling you a story about growing up, about how love and time work on a person quietly, without asking permission. It's a small moment, deceptively light, but it's the kind of thing that stays with you on the walk back to your hotel.

There's real generosity in how Woods writes, too. His material about growing up sharing a single family computer, or the particular, slightly embarrassing pride of a post doing well online, isn't just "millennial nostalgia" bait — it's an invitation to notice how much of ourselves we've quietly handed over to screens, and how much of our best selves still exist outside them. He's not scolding anyone for it. He's just holding it up to the light, gently, so we can look at it together.

What makes Basher feel bigger than its hour, though, is Woods' willingness to walk toward the topics comedians are told to avoid — the arguments people have at dinner tables and don't know how to end. He doesn't do this to provoke for its own sake. He does it because he seems to genuinely believe that a room full of strangers, brought together by the simple, old-fashioned act of laughing at the same jokes, is exactly the kind of room where harder conversations become possible. Not every one of these detours lands perfectly, but the sincerity behind the attempt is its own kind of achievement — comedy as a bridge rather than a wall.

By the final stretch, something has shifted in the room. Woods has stopped being a stranger on a stage and started to feel like someone you've known a long time — the friend who tells you the truth about getting older, about family, about how strange and lovely it is to still be figuring things out, and somehow makes you leave lighter than when you walked in. That's a rare trick for any comedian to pull off, and Woods does it without ever seeming to try too hard.

Basher isn't just a very funny hour. It's a reminder that comedy, at its best, doesn't just make us laugh at our lives — it makes us a little more grateful to be living them.