Natalie Paris — Call To Stage Live, Underbelly Boulevard Soho

★★★★★ (5/5)

There's something special about seeing a West End star step out from behind a character and just be themselves for an evening, and that's exactly what Natalie Paris delivered at Underbelly Boulevard Soho. Best known as the original Jane Seymour in SIX, Paris used this intimate solo concert — part of Amber Davies' Call To Stage Live Residency — to show a different side of her talent: storyteller, vocalist, and genuinely warm host.

The venue itself is part of what makes this residency series work so well. Underbelly Boulevard's small, close-quarters setup means there's genuinely no bad seat in the house, and that closeness suited the format perfectly — this felt less like a gig and more like being let in on something personal.

The night's guest list was a real treat: Aimie Atkinson, Luke Bayer, and Strictly Come Dancing vocalists Hayley Sanderson and Andrea Grant all joined Paris on stage, adding variety to the set and clearly having as much fun as the audience. Between songs, Paris's storytelling and willingness to take audience questions gave the evening an easy, conversational rhythm — you left feeling like you knew her a little better than when you walked in.

It's the kind of show that reminds you why these smaller residency concerts matter: no big production values to hide behind, just a genuinely talented performer, some brilliant friends, and a room full of people happy to be there. A wonderful night — five stars, no hesitation. 

Oh, Mary! (Starring Catherine Tate)

★★★★ (4/5)

Walking into the Trafalgar for Oh, Mary!, you're greeted by a deceptively modest Oval Office set — simple, almost old-fashioned in its staging, with big double doors flanking the President's desk that practically announce "farce is coming." And it delivers on that promise almost immediately. This is a show that trades the polish of a glossy West End import for something scrappier and more anarchic, and it's all the better for it.

Cole Escola's premise is gloriously stupid on paper: Mary Todd Lincoln, reimagined not as a tragic historical footnote but as a whisky-soaked, thwarted cabaret star, stuck in a marriage to a closeted, weary Abraham Lincoln who's desperate to keep her occupied — and away from the stage — by hiring her an acting teacher. It backfires spectacularly, and what follows is 80 unbroken minutes of escalating chaos, mistaken identities, and gleeful bad behaviour.

Catherine Tate is the reason to see this particular run. She throws herself into Mary's tantrums, side-eyes, and nonsensical outbursts with a bratty, unfiltered energy that feels tailor-made for her comic instincts — decades of sketch work and stage experience clearly at play here. She's loud, unhinged, and completely committed to the bit, but she also finds real pathos underneath it: a woman who's bored out of her mind, drinking to cope, and desperate to be seen as more than a First Lady. It's a performance that's both very funny and, in flashes, quietly sad.

Scott Karim brings a lovely, exasperated warmth to Abraham, playing the straight man beautifully against Tate's mayhem without ever disappearing into the background. Dino Fetscher, as the hapless acting teacher caught in the crossfire, and the rest of the ensemble keep the pace relentless — the show moves so fast that you barely have time to process one joke before the next lands.

What struck me most is how the production seems to breathe differently depending on who's playing Mary — it's less a fixed show and more a shifting one, shaped by whichever performer is currently in the role. That's part of the fun of it: you're not just watching a script, you're watching Tate's specific comic DNA get grafted onto this deranged character.

It's not a play with much interest in subtlety, satire, or historical accuracy — it knows exactly how silly it is and never winks at you about it, which is precisely why it works. If you go in ready to laugh loudly at something completely ridiculous, you'll leave grinning. Just a heads-up: Tate has occasionally missed performances due to a knee injury, with understudy Georgie Langdon stepping in, so it's worth checking the day-of cast notice before you head to the theatre

Legally Blonde: The Musical — UK & Ireland Tour Review

★★★★ (4/5)

Directed by Nikolai Foster and produced by Curve Theatre and ROYO, this new touring production of Legally Blonde: The Musical has been one of the most talked-about shows on the road in 2026 — and having gathered impressions from reviewers who caught it in Sheffield, Canterbury, Milton Keynes, Glasgow, Nottingham and Dublin, it's easy to see why.

The verdict, in short

This is a bright, big-hearted and thoroughly entertaining night out. From the moment the opening number kicks in, the production wraps the audience in glitter, pink and pure feel-good energy, and rarely lets up. Several reviewers described cheering, singing-along crowds who were on Elle's side before she'd even proven herself — a sign of just how much residual love there still is for this story, nearly two decades after the musical first opened.

What works beautifully

Leading the charge is Amber Davies as Elle Woods (with Hannah Lowther taking on the role at selected performances), who reviewers consistently praised for bringing warmth, comic timing and real vocal power to the part — making Elle's journey from sorority queen to sharp young lawyer feel both funny and genuinely moving. George Crawford's Emmett is another highlight, with critics singling out the natural chemistry between the two leads. And nearly every review agreed on one thing: Karen Mavundukure practically steals the show as Paulette, bringing the house down night after night.

Nikolai Foster's direction keeps things moving at a brisk, confident pace, and Leah Hill's choreography gives the ensemble numbers real punch and athleticism. The production leans fully into its trademark palette of pink and pastel (courtesy of designer Tom Rogers), and the show stays faithful to the quotable lines and iconic moments fans of the film will be hoping to see.

It's also worth giving credit to the wider company: a few reviewers who caught performances affected by illness and understudy changes noted that the cast and swings pulled together admirably, with the quality of the show barely dipping even with several performers on for the night.

Where it's a little more mixed

Not every review was a total love letter, and it's worth being upfront about that. A couple of critics felt this touring version — with its inevitably pared-back set and simplified staging compared to a full West End production — didn't always hit the same heights as previous incarnations of the show, and one or two found the central casting didn't quite land for them personally on the night they attended. One national critic was notably cooler on the show overall, even while acknowledging the audience around them was having the time of their lives. A couple of reviewers also felt the show's brisk skipping-rope routine and some of the choreography could have pushed a little further technically.

None of this seems to have dented the show's popularity, though — if anything, the split between "the audience was on its feet" and "the critic had reservations" is a fairly familiar pattern for a big, unapologetically fun jukebox-style musical like this one, and shouldn't put you off.

Who it's for

If you're a fan of the film, or you grew up with the original musical, this is a genuinely joyful revisit. It's also a great choice for families and for anyone new to the story — you don't need any prior knowledge to be swept along. Expect a lot of pink in the audience too, as many theatregoers dress up for the occasion.

Bottom line

A warm, funny, expertly performed touring production that leans into everything audiences love about Legally Blonde — occasionally at the expense of a little polish or emotional depth compared to bigger stagings. Go in ready to sing along, and you'll leave with a smile.

★★★★☆ — Recommended

Legally Blonde: The Musical continues touring the UK and Ireland until 2 January 2027. Check local venue listings for cast details, as performers alternate the role of Elle Woods at certain performances.

SIX the Musical — Vaudeville Theatre 

There is a particular kind of fatigue that sets in after you've seen a show enough times to know exactly which lyric gets the biggest laugh, exactly where the light cue lands, exactly which Queen the crowd will lose their minds over before she's even finished her first verse. I've sat in the Vaudeville stalls for Six more times than I can count on both hands, and I walked in this time half-expecting to spend the evening admiring the machinery rather than feeling anything from it. I was wrong, and I am delighted to have been wrong.

For anyone who has somehow avoided the cultural juggernaut that Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss built in their final year at Cambridge: Six takes the six wives of Henry VIII — Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleeves, Katherine Howard, and Catherine Parr — and reimagines them as a pop girl group, each stepping up to the mic in turn to make her case for who suffered most at the hands of history's most notorious serial husband. It runs a lean 75–80 minutes, no interval, and it plays less like a book musical and more like a genuinely brilliant pop concert that happens to have a plot folded quietly inside it.

What struck me most on this viewing wasn't the concept — I know the concept intimately by now — but how completely alive it still felt in the hands of the current company. New casts have come and gone at the Vaudeville since the show made this theatre its permanent home, and the temptation with a show this tightly choreographed is to simply slot performers into pre-carved grooves. That is emphatically not what's happening here. This line-up brings a distinct, lived-in chemistry to the stage; there's a genuine sense of six women who've found something between them, not six soloists taking polite turns. Vocally, the standard is as high as I've ever heard it at this venue — every Queen gets her showstopper, and every one of them earns it, with the kind of pop-belt control that would hold up on any arena stage in the country.

Gabriella Slade's costumes remain, for my money, one of the great design achievements of the modern West End — Tudor silhouette collapsed into glitter-soaked pop-star armour, instantly legible as both history and headline act. Tim Deiling's lighting still knows exactly when to turn the Vaudeville into a nightclub and when to pull back and let a ballad breathe, and the "Ladies in Waiting" — the show's onstage all-female band — continue to be criminally under-praised for how hard they're working underneath all that spectacle. Carrie-Anne Ingrouille's choreography, meanwhile, has aged not one day since I first saw it; it still looks like something these six women invented themselves on the spot, rather than something drilled into them.

The thing that keeps bringing me back, though — and the thing I think a first-time audience underestimates walking in — is the turn in the final third, when the competitive premise (who had the worst marriage?) quietly dissolves into something more generous: an insistence that these women be allowed to exist as more than footnotes in someone else's story. I've seen this moment land a dozen times now, and it has never once failed to catch me slightly off guard. There's something almost sneaky about how Six does its emotional work — it disguises a genuinely moving argument about narrative ownership as 80 minutes of glitter and key changes, and by the time you clock what's happened to you, you're already on your feet.

If I'm holding back a star, it's for reasons that have less to do with this particular company and more to do with the show's own architecture, which by now I know as well as my own address. The book still leans on a handful of jokes that have been doing the same work since 2017 (yes, we know about the beheading; the show knows we know), and the format — thrilling as it is — necessarily sacrifices the kind of narrative shading a full book musical could offer any one of these women. For a first-time audience this barely registers. For a reviewer on their tenth or eleventh visit, it's the only place the show shows its age.

None of that dents what remains a genuinely rare thing in London theatre: a homegrown show that has grown into a global phenomenon without losing the scrappy, fringe-born joy that built it in the first place. I came in braced for diminishing returns. I left, once again, singing on the Strand.

Verdict: Still one of the most purely joyful 80 minutes in the West End, delivered here by a company that has genuinely made the roles their own rather than simply inherited them. Essential, even — especially — on your umpteenth visit.

SIX plays at the Vaudeville Theatre, London.

Derren Brown: Only Human — Mayflower Theatre, Southampton

★★★ (3/5)

There's a version of this review that writes itself, because it's the one every other critic on this tour has already written: sleek staging, magnetic performer, jaw-dropping finale, standing ovation, don't-tell-anyone-what-happens. I wish I could file that review. I can't.

Let's start with what does work, because it isn't nothing. The production values are genuinely first-rate — the set has that stark, industrial brickwork look, the video design is used cleverly rather than as wallpaper, and the lighting does real work creating unease and intimacy in a room this size. On pure texture, it's a handsome show. That's about where the praise runs out.

The trouble starts with the title itself, which as far as I can tell means nothing in particular — there's no throughline that earns it, no moment where "Only Human" clicks into place as a thesis. That's symptomatic of a bigger problem: the show doesn't seem to know what it's about. Past Brown shows have had a spine — free will, legacy, an audience member's grief, a story you could summarise in a sentence. This one doesn't. It opens with a sequence involving gas cylinders that has no clear connection to anything that follows, and there are several other passages that feel bolted on rather than built toward — moments that actively undercut the credibility of the routines around them rather than reinforcing it. Once an audience stops believing one trick, they start picking at all of them, and that's exactly what happened around me.

Structurally, it just isn't there. Brown's best shows have the shape of a three-act play, each beat earning the next until the final revelation lands as inevitable. Only Human rambles. There's a lot of loosely-connected mind-reading that, if anything, felt less convincing than what I'm used to from him, and the show simply stops rather than building to the gut-punch climax his best work always finds. All the windup, none of the pitch. It's tempting to wonder whether the absence of Andy Nyman — Brown's long-time writing collaborator, currently on stage in the West End with The Producers — is part of why the material feels so much weaker than anything I've seen from him before. Whatever the reason, this is the thinnest writing I've encountered under his name.

The performance itself compounds the problem. This is a 2,500-seat theatre, and Brown played it like a much smaller room — at points like no room at all, muttering toward his own feet rather than projecting out. If it landed anywhere, it landed with the front few rows; the rest of us were largely locked out, both literally in terms of volume and figuratively in terms of engagement. Several sightlines simply didn't work for a house this size, and a good chunk of the audience around me was visibly struggling to follow both the geography of the stage and the thread of what was being asked of participants. Mind-reading as a genre lives or dies on charisma and control of the room — the confidence to make an audience believe, in the moment, that something impossible is happening. That energy just wasn't there. Brown seemed to lack the warmth and stage presence this style of show depends on, and without it, routines that should feel uncanny instead feel like watching someone's homework.

Even the poster art and the title feel like an afterthought, evidence of a show that never quite decided what story it was telling about itself before going out on the road. And crucially, it missed the thing Derren Brown shows are usually built around and remembered for: the handful of true WOW moments that send audiences out arguing about how it was done. There wasn't one here.

Perhaps most damning of all: this is a show that has been touring for the best part of a year, and it still felt like an underbaked preview. There's no excuse for that at this stage of a performer's career and this stage of a run. If Only Human doesn't sharpen up considerably before it reaches the West End, I think Brown will struggle. West End economics don't forgive a show that can't generate strong word of mouth and repeat business — you cannot out-advertise a bad first impression, and this one leaves plenty of people with exactly that.

Verdict: Beautifully dressed and badly under-written — a rare off-night for a performer capable of so much more.

Paddington The Musical — Savoy Theatre

 ★★★★★ (5/5)

I want to start by admitting something a little embarrassing: I did not expect to cry at a musical about a bear.

Getting tickets alone felt like an odyssey. I refreshed booking pages at odd hours, set alarms for release dates, and eventually resorted to something between bribery and pure luck to get a seat. By the time I actually sat down in the Savoy, I'd built the evening up so much in my head that I fully expected to be let down. I wasn't. Not for a second.

There's a moment early on — Paddington alone on the station platform, suitcase in paw, utterly lost — that catches you off guard with how much weight it carries. It would be easy for a show about a marmalade-loving bear to stay safely in the realm of children's entertainment, all bright colours and simple jokes. Instead, what struck me most was how unflinching it was willing to be about what that image actually means: displacement, loneliness, the fear of not belonging anywhere. The show never hammers this home with a heavy hand, but it doesn't shy away from it either, and that honesty is what elevates it from "nice family outing" to something genuinely moving.

The puppetry deserves its own paragraph, because I still don't quite understand how it works as well as it does. There's a performer physically embodying Paddington's movement and a voice performer working the vocals and expressions from off to the side, and yet within minutes any awareness of the mechanics simply dissolves. You stop watching a puppet. You start watching a person — or a bear, I suppose — with real interiority: hesitation, hope, disappointment, joy, all legible in a few inches of fabric and glass eyes. It's one of those rare pieces of theatrical craft that doesn't ask for your suspension of disbelief so much as it earns it outright.

As for the cast — genuinely, I don't think I've seen a company this uniformly strong in years. Bonnie Langford is a masterclass in comic timing as Mrs Bird; she doesn't have to reach for a laugh, she just exists in the scene and the laugh arrives on its own, which is the mark of someone who has spent a lifetime perfecting economy of performance. Victoria Hamilton-Barritt is a gloriously unhinged Millicent Clyde — camp, menacing, and vocally spectacular, particularly in her big villain number, which had the audience half-laughing, half-recoiling in delight. And Amy Ellen Richardson's Mrs Brown gives the whole story its emotional ballast; she's the one who makes you believe that kindness, offered without condition, is a radical and difficult thing to practice, not just a platitude.

Musically, it's a genuinely well-crafted score — melodic, warm, unafraid of a big earnest ballad, but also sly enough that the adults in the room are laughing just as hard as the children. I'll confess "Marmalade" has been stuck in my head for the better part of a week, in the way only the very best show tunes manage.

If I'm being properly honest, there are moments in the second act where the plot's ambition slightly outpaces its runtime — a subplot or two could probably be tightened, and there's a sense toward the end that the show is reluctant to let go of its own momentum. But I mention this only because it's the sort of thing you notice on reflection, not in the moment. In the theatre itself, none of it mattered. I was too busy feeling things.

What lingers, days later, isn't a single scene or song — it's the accumulated warmth of the whole evening, and the quiet, stubborn optimism underneath it. This is a show that genuinely believes people can be kind to strangers, that difference is not a threat, that a small, polite bear from Peru might have more to teach us about decency than we'd like to admit. In a moment when so much of the world feels defensive and closed off, there's something almost defiant about a West End musical built entirely around the idea that we should look after one another.

I left the Savoy convinced of two things. First, that I will be back — probably more than once. Second, that this show isn't a passing sensation to be enjoyed and forgotten. It has the rare combination of craft, heart, and universal appeal that keeps a production running for decades, not seasons. I'd genuinely put money on Paddington still charming full houses at the Savoy ten years from now, hard stare and all.

Please look after this bear. London certainly is.