Amazonia ** TNT

The Young Vic’s seasonal offerings are usually a treat for adults and children alike, but this year’s Christmas production, despite — or perhaps partly because of — its laudable intentions and long gestation period, fails to live up to expectations. An uncomfortable mixture of folklore and fact, it ends up muddled and preachy and takes far too long for the main thrust of the story to become clear.
Credit to writers Paul Heritage and Colin Teevan for wanting to warn youngsters about the repercussions of destroying the Amazon rain forest and of the plight of the people who live there.
And why not incorporate the ghost of assassinated rubber-tapper turned environmentalist, Chico Mendes? But for it to work, this show needs a lot more fun, laughs and narrative coherence than they’ve managed to provide.
The cast (including Daisy Wilson’s marriageable Rosamaria) works hard to create an exuberant carnival atmosphere and a meagre handful of unexpected laughs is generated by the heroic efforts of Simon Trinder’s Francisco as he desperately attempts to persuade his boss’s bull to dance (and so secure the future prosperity of the village) whilst simultaneously catering to the increasingly bizarre cravings of his pregnant wife.
But this is a disappointing culmination of so much worthy effort, with the upbeat optimism of the final dance at odds with the show’s basic message that progress, at the expense of the trees, can only be of a transient nature.

Young Vic, The Cut, SE1 (020-7922 2922). Until January 24. £22.50

Carousel **** TNT

I can’t remember much about seeing reruns of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 50’s film version repeated on TV — except a lasting childhood image of hunky fairground barker Billy Bigelow almost bursting out of his striped T-shirt. That torso must have made an impression on director Lindsay Posner for, years later, here’s Jeremiah James playing him on stage, with rippling banded biceps and a glorious singing voice I could listen to all night.
You’ll Never Walk Alone may have been appropriated by the football crowd, but this is where it originated, delivered with operatic flourish by Lesley Garrett’s feisty, slightly over-fussy aunt Nettie as she comforts her bereaved niece, Alexandra Silber’s touchingly naïve mill worker Julie Jordan.
For a wartime musical (it premiered in 1945) set in 1870’s New England, there’s some pretty heavy stuff going on — wife beating (apparently it doesn’t hurt if it’s done with love?), women as child-bearing machines or business like harridans, unemployment. But the melodies, including the poignantly cautious duet If I Loved You, are unforgettable, and with Adam Cooper’s vibrant choreography and William Dudley’s projected design, this romanticised story of an ill-fated love still has the power to shamelessly stir the emotions.

Savoy, Strand , WC2 Phone: - 0870 164 8787 Currently booking till 25th July Tickets £61-£31

GETHSEMANE at the National Theatre This is London

This is the third of David Hare's recent plays drawing on public events to be seen at the National, and the only one which he professes to be purely fictional. Yet it doesn't take a great leap of imagination to see the similarities between the characters on stage and those who were in power not so long ago.
In a scenario not a million miles away from Christopher Shinn's recent ‘Now or Later’ at the Royal Court (in which the behaviour of a potential US president's son sparks a damage limitation crisis) Tamsin Greig's Home Secretary Meredith (whose husband's wealth has come from dubious dealings) is additionallysaddled with a sullen, privately educated, 16 year old daughter, Suzette, who has been caught indulging in illegal substances. It's all been hushed up, but even Meredith is unaware of the behind the scenes machinations involving smooth talking pop music mogul turned political fund-raiser Otto (Stanley Townsend).
Nicola Walker has her work cut out trying to make Suzette's idealised and idealistic ex-teacher, Lori, a convincing creation, but there are still confrontations to relish – particularly Meredith's audience with Anthony Calf's manipulative, drum-playing PM.
Ultimately, though (despite his intelligent observations and strongly felt criticism of New Labour) on current evidence, the further Hare moves away from fact, the less involving and hardhitting the result proves to be.
Cottesloe Theatre
Louise Kingsley

The Pride **** TNT

What seems to begin as an elegant 50’s drawing room comedy suddenly travels half a century forward in a slick manoeuvre which catapults the characters into present day London and alternative versions of their initial selves. The names (and the actors) stay the same, but the situation Oliver, Philip and Sylvia find themselves in has changed significantly — gay sex is out in the open, and it’s no longer a question of too little opportunity but of far too much, with every transient encounter an irresistible temptation for promiscuous journalist Oliver.
Alexi Kaye Campbell’s first produced play shifts fluidly between the two eras, highlighting the dilemmas facing homosexual men in very different times. As the Olivers, Bertie Carvel (definitely an actor to watch) is subtly superb throughout as he tries to hold on to the man he loves, whilst JJ Feild’s staccato delivery as married 50’s Philip gives way to real anguish as he realises, but still fights against, his true nature.
Lyndsey Marshal’s Sylvia (distraught as Philip’s betrayed wife, feisty as Oliver’s confidante) switches convincingly between vulnerable book illustrator and assertive actress, and Tim Steed makes just as much impact in a trio of smaller roles, not least that of the doctor whose vomit-inducing aversion therapy aims to replace same-sex attraction with disgust.
Royal Court Theatre Sloane Square, SW1 Phone 020 7565 5000 Until 20th December Tickets £10-£15

August: Osage County **** TNT

Founded over thirty years ago, American company Steppenwolf proves that its still at the top of its game with this multi-award winning production. In the style of his predecessors, Eugene O’Neill & Tennessee Williams, Tracy Letts’ corrosive drama isn’t afraid to take its time to explore the deeper tensions and secrets underlying the surface antagonism of an unplanned family reunion when drunk, former poet Beverly Weston disappears from the Oklahoma home he shares with his sickly, pill-popping wife Violet.
With bitter comedy and a cruel eye for exposing the damage that one’s nearest and dearest can inflict with a not-so-casual word, this ensemble piece packs a hefty emotional punch during its three-and-a-half hours. Eldest daughter Barbara (excellent Amy Morton) battles hot flushes and the intense summer heat while trying to hide the fact that her husband (Jeff Perry) has left her for a young student. Florida-based Karen has brought along her latest beau, in the mistaken belief that she’s finally found herself a really good man, and stay-at-home Ivy — who probably has — really should have looked elsewhere.
Played out on Todd Rosenthal’s three-storey, outsize doll’s house of a set, this is as much a comment on the state of America as on one extremely dysfunctional Midwestern family, and the acting — including Rondi Reed’s knockout performance as Violet’s brash, vulgar sister — is superb.

Lyttelton at the National, South Bank, SE1 Phone: - 020 7452 3000 Until 21 January Tickets £41 - £10

Treasure Island ** TNT

Lily Allen’s dad Keith takes to the West End boards for the first time in his acting career, with his leg encased in a cumbersome prosthesis and a parrot (a squawky mechanical specimen) sporadically perched on his shoulder.
Yup, it’s that time of year again, but Ken Ludwig’s rather prosaic adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic children’s tale is poised precariously somewhere between panto, straight play and musical. The bad guys aren’t particularly scary, the scenery (some rope rigging, a few barrels and floaty video projections) cut-price and, despite a couple of lively numbers and the requisite amount of yo ho hoing, there’s a distinct lack of dramatic power in the retelling of this story of mutiny on the high seas.
Allen obviously relishes the role of the rogue pirate who dupes Michael Legge’s uncharismatic young Jim into believing he’s fatherly friend rather than foe and Tony Bell (having made a brief early appearance as Billy Bones) reappears to add a touch of dignity as Captain Smollett.
But sadly there’s little gold to be found in this particular Treasure Island, and the timing — with real pirates holding the Sirius Star to ransom off the coast of Somalia — only serves to underlines its underwhelming sense of derring-do.
Theatre Royal Haymarket, Haymarket, SW1 (0845-481 1870) Until February 28. £45 -£20

WIG OUT! *** TNT

His recent season at the Young Vic has just won him a well-deserved Evening Standard award for Most Promising Playwright, but as far as Tarell Alvin McCraney is concerned, less is proving to be most definitely more. All he needed to create an initial stir with the excellent The Brothers Size was a tiny cast, a bare stage and his own unique voice. Given more resources, his identity threatens to be swamped by the presentation, even though Dominic Cooke’s cabaret style alternative to the Xmas panto (with the stalls reconfigured as a strut-your-stuff catwalk) makes for entertaining viewing.
Set in the world of the New York drag scene, its loose construction and ultra flimsy plot centre on the Cinderella Ball competition between the rival tranny Houses of Light and of Diabolique – cue outlandish costumes, totter-high heels and risqué routines – and a love story between straight looking Eric (who normally goes for butch guys) and gentle drag queen Wilson a.k.a. Nina (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett).
With a female chorus of harmonising Fates (in skin-tight Lurex and short, short, shorts) controlling the proceedings with a click of their fingers, and Kevin Harvey’s ageing Mother of the house Rey-Rey in a sleek bob wig and head-to-toe pink, this is far from your conventional seasonal offering.
No question McCraney is talented, but this lively exposé of the hierarchies which develop within a marginalised community of African American and other gay men of colour is, disappointingly, more show than content.

Royal Court Theatre Sloane Square, SW1 Phone 020 7565 5000 Until 10th January. Tickets £10-£25

LA CLIQUE - This is London

When the London Hippodrome opened in 1900, it featured a 100,000 gallon water tank, polar bears and elephants. You won't see anything on that sort of scale here in 2008, but La Clique – an international collection of burlesque performers, cabaret artists, contortionists and acrobats – is still pretty amazing and, in my companion's view, one of the most entertaining shows he's ever seen.
The music is pre-recorded, but that detracts not a jot from the impact made by Montreal's Cabaret Decadanse who kick off the proceedings with a miming life size puppet which looks like a vertical slinky and is just as bendy. Two Australian guys in suits mock the seriousness of the English businessman, reading the Financial Times whilst executing gravity-defying balancing acts – before ripping off the pinstripe to reveal their muscled bodies beneath. A toned young man, bare-chested in jeans (definitely centrefold material) takes a bath and performs a delicate aerial ballet, dousing the front row with water, and a beautiful Ukrainian girl turns spinning hula hoops into an incandescent display of giant insect wings.
Then there's the amazing Captain Frodo (who doesn't look anything special in his tennis shorts but has a body that bends in ways which will make you wince as he squeezes his dislocated limbs through a couple of stringless racquets) and Miss Behave in skin-tight red latex who swallows a metal table leg and does awful things (of the ‘don't try this at home’ sort) with scissors opened wide inside her accommodating mouth. And what cheeky striptease artist Ursula Martinez does with a disappearing red hankie defies belief.
The first half is just about faultless, the second slightly overstretched, but this is still an excellent evening out, a welcome escapist concoction guaranteed to make you gasp.
Louise Kingsley

State of Emergency *** TNT

In German playwright Falk Richter’s disturbing 80-minute three hander, a man, a woman and their defiantly incommunicative teenage son are viewed from behind the supposed security of floor to ceiling panes of glass.
Ensconced in the protective environment of a gated community, they should feel safe from the underprivileged violence raging on the other side of the fence beyond. But their sheltered isolation brings its own torments and, as her husband fails to meet his targets at work, the woman is terrified that this pristine, sterile way of life - a prison of their own choosing - is about to be snatched away from them.
Falk’s satire of a supposed utopian existence provides no solutions, but Geraldine Alexander’s immaculate, taut, probing wife and Jonathan Cullen’s weary husband, slipping away into narcoleptic oblivion, are both excellent, powerfully conveying the trapped tension that wealth and elitism can unintentionally create.

Gate, Pembridge Road W11 (020-7229 0706). Until December 13 £16

Imagine This *** TNT

This new musical features not one but two horrific episodes in the history of the Jewish people – but it does so with such banal lyrics that the emotions it intends to rouse are dulled.
Initially, I thought I might have mistakenly wandered into the opening night of Carousel as we are introduced to the Warshowsky family, a troupe of Polish actors enjoying a last carefree evening at the fairground before being herded into the starkly contrasting Warsaw Ghetto. Later, there’s a hint of The Sound of Music as they perform what is intended to be an inspirational musical for their fellow internees on the eve of transportation, in 1942, to the extermination camp of Treblinka. And, with his jokey addresses to the audience, Peter Polycarpou’s impressive and resolutely dignified Daniel invokes memories of Fiddler on the Roof.
There’s one intensely moving sequence (the slow-motion mass suicide of the Jewish community atop Masada in 70 AD, which forms part of the play within a play structure), and cruel killings emphasise the callous brutality of both the Nazi regime and of the Romans centuries earlier.
But although the actors sing their hearts out (beautifully, defiantly), clunky choreography and a parallel pair of uninspiring love stories only serve to emphasise how much this Holocaust musical relies on imitating the style of a host of other familiar (and better) West End successes.

New London, Drury Lane, WC2 (0844-412 4654). Booking until February 28. £60 - £17.50