Saturday 12 September
London, Prince Edward Theatre • I entered the auditorium some twenty minutes into Beetlejuice the Musical, having discovered rather too late that the performance had begun half an hour earlier than the time printed on my ticket. Unfortunately, it looked like it had been produced on the cheap, in striking contrast to my memory of the original Broadway production. David Fynn carried the titular character with the required campy energy, but that wasn’t enough to prevent the show from posting an early closing notice. The performance left me wondering whether the show would indeed stand the test of time.
London, Barbican Theatre • Death Note comes from a cultural and aesthetic universe to which I have little natural affinity: Japanese manga. And yet, its plot’s originality and the production’s visual ambition won me over. As when I had attended the semi-staged presentation at the Lyric Theatre a few years earlier, I was looking forward to seeing how its knots would be resolved in the elaborate, twisted final scene. Frank Wildhorn’s score, despite sounding slightly generic, somehow managed to emphasise the plot’s dramatic turns.
Sunday 13 September
Paris, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées • Kent Nagano has been working on a “historically informed” version of Richard Wagner’s Ring for quite a few years, but I hadn’t been able to catch the previous instalments. This performance of Götterdämmerung was musically and dramatically sumptuous, despite a certain acidity in the winds and the multiple horn incidents. Nagano confirmed his stature as an opera conductor, driving the drama forward with a firm hand, never losing focus on texture and counterpoint. If a demonstration of the artistic interest of the historical approach was made, however, it eluded me.
Tuesday 15 September
Paris, Théâtre Libre • I only knew David Costello-Lopes from his TV skits and from one of his books. His one-man show Délicieux was in the same vein, telling the stories hidden behind the fixtures of our everyday lives. The precisely-timed performance was pure Costello-Lopes, rich in little-known facts and obvious observations waiting to be made. My only quibbles would be that the purported unifying theme was nothing more than a feeble excuse to move from one random idea to the next… and that Costello-Lopes spent a significant amount of time covering the concept of pleasure at the misfortunes of others without apparently being aware that the Germans had crafted a perfect word for it — Schadenfreude.
Wednesday 16 September
Paris, UGC Maillot • Catalan author Cesc Gay’s play Els veïns de dalt has received quite a few film adaptations, including a 2024 French version by Olivier Ducray and Wilfried Séance. This new 2026 Olivia Wilde film, titled The Invite, relied on a fine cast to give life to this story rich in psychological twists and turns, supported by a finely crafted soundtrack — a particularly gripping section relied on the many voices of a cello. The quick succession of mood changes probably appeared credible on stage but challenged the film’s ability to tell the story convincingly.
Thursday 17 September
Paris, Théâtre de Chaillot • Once again, a revival from Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s younger years, Rosas danst Rosas, opened a window on her formative years and inspirations, and provided a test of the endurance of her creative genius. The four-dancer show unfolded around successive patterns of unrelenting mathematical precision, which didn’t immediately grab me but also created an almost hypnotic experience, enhanced by finely-calibrated lights and music. The most enjoyable part, by far, was hearing De Keersmaeker herself speak about the piece at an after-show talkback session.
Friday 18 September
New York, Studio 54 • I hadn’t seen The Rocky Horror Show since its 2001 revival at Circle in the Square, and I hadn’t planned to see this new Roundabout revival at Studio 54 until the show I was scheduled to attend cancelled a performance and I was left with little choice. I’m glad, in a way, because the 1973 show remains an unidentified theatrical object more than 50 years after its creation and it can hold its worth given the right amount of second degree and zaniness, which the creatives behind this production definitely infused into the performance.