January 2024 Tour
While 2023’s tour kept its footing firmly in Americana, our Winter 2024 tour leaned heavily into Shakespeare, and the themes of his great tragedies. From the doomed, star-crossed lovers in Cold War and the stark, emotional betrayal of trusts in a BLM-laced staging of Othello, passion and death were never far from our lovers. The tragedy of loss came in other forms as well; first as a parent’s loss of their child in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, and then again as the loss of love, idealism, and purpose in Tom Stoppard’s wrenching Rock ‘N’ Roll. Loss of purpose, loss of youth came with humor and sorrow as two titans of the stage clashed in The Motive and the Cue, as Stephen Sondheim’s rarely staged Pacific Overtures gave us Japan’s loss of identity as trade with western nations corrupted centuries of tradition. And finally, poor old Nathan Detroit lost the longest established, permanent floating craps game in New York as he settled down with his lady love Adelaide in the Bridge Theatre’s show-stopping, immersive revival of Guys and Dolls. Okay, that last one was a bit of a stretch, but that show was one for the ages.
GUEST SPEAKER
Luke Thallon - Actor
Zula is bold and brilliant, a singer who ignites the stage. Wiktor is withdrawn and damaged, a composer longing to write. Irresistibly drown to each other, they dream of escape. But in communist-controlled Poland that can be a dangerous thing.
Based on Pawel Pawlikowski’s Academy Award-nominated film, Cold War is an epic love story spanning the decades and breath of Europe at its most divided.
Warwickshire, 1582. Agnes Hathaway, a natural healer, meets the Latin tutor, William Shakespeare. Drawn together by powerful but hidden impulses, they create a life together and make a family.
When the plague steals 11-year-old Hamnet from his loving parents, they must each confront their loss alone. And yet, out of the greatest suffering, something of extraordinary wonder is born. Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel and adapted by award-winning playwright Lolita Chakrabarti (Life of Pi, Red Velvet, Hymn).
GUEST SPEAKER
Tom Piper - Set Design
GUEST SPEAKER
Nina Raine - Director
1968: Russian tanks have rolled into Czechoslovakia, and Syd Barrett has been dumped by Pink Floyd. Jan, a visiting postgrad at Cambridge, breaks with his old professor Max, a Marxist philosopher, and heads home to Prague with his suitcase full of “socially negative music”. Rock ’n’ Roll covers the ensuing 21 years in the lives of three generations of Max’s family while Jan is caught in the spiral of dissidence in a Communist police state. But it’s a love story too - and then there’s the music…
This play, from the mind of Tom Stoppard, and staged at the staggeringly versatile Hampstead Theatre - just a few blocks from the legendary Abbey Road Studios, is not to be missed.
GUEST SPEAKER
Mark Gatiss - Actor
Why would the most famous movie star in the world choose to do a play which everyone already knows? And what lures us back to the same plays, year after year?
Richard Burton, newly married to Elizabeth Taylor, is to play the title role in an experimental new production of Hamlet under John Gielgud’s exacting direction. But as rehearsals progress, two ages of theatre collide and the collaboration between actor and director soon threatens to unravel.
This fierce and funny new play by by Jack Thorne offers a glimpse into the politics of a rehearsal room and the relationship between art and celebrity.
GUEST SPEAKER
Catherine Jayes - Musical Director
Nippon. The Floating Kingdom.
One of Stephen Sondheim’s most ambitious, rarely seen creations comes to the Chocolate Factory in a co-production with Umeda Arts Theater in Japan, where it has already been a huge success in Tokyo and Osaka.
The story of the arrival of the West in 1853 in isolated Japan is seen from a western perspective but played in an eastern style, and is filled with some of Sondheim’s most ravishing music, including ‘Someone in a Tree’, ‘Pretty Lady’ and ‘A Bowler Hat’.
GUEST SPEAKER
Oli Higginson - Actor
Othello, the General. Othello, the hero. Othello, the husband. Othello, the Black man.
Praised by everyone, Othello has carved a successful career for himself. Until one man’s unrestrained jealousy and deceitful manipulation starts a fire that corrodes not only Othello’s reputation, but his own sanity as well.
Othello, the target. Othello, the enemy. Othello, the murderer. Othello, staged by candlelight against a modern backdrop of police violence and racial intolerance.
The Bridge transforms for one of the greatest musicals of all time. It has more hit songs, more laughs and more romance than any show ever written.
The seating is wrapped around the action while the immersive tickets transport you to the streets of Manhattan and the bars of Havana in the unlikeliest of love stories.
This production of Guys and Dolls was described by Matt Wolf as, “It’s one of the greatest nights at the theatre I’ve ever had - pure joy.”