Franco Milazzo
'A man with an encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s underground culture.' @thedailybeast
@broadwayworldUK @1883Magazine @PIEeurope @Londonist
Articles by Franco Milazzo
Review: Cabaret at The Kit Kat Club at Balthazar
Photo: Daniel Carminati Theming a dining experience around London’s most immersive musical is no small thing. Can Covent Garden’s Balthazar capture the seedy decadence of Cabaret’s Weimar Berlin atmosphere? For this six-week residency (21st September to 1st November), the restaurant has paired with Rebecca Frecknall's winner of seven Olivier awards.
“Thelma and Louise” at the Young Vic
Franco Milazzo on the South Bank ★★☆☆☆ 18 September 2026 Let’s cut to the chase. How do you even start to think about putting on a musical based on one of the most iconic road movies without having a car on stage? Or a road? Or even a chase? Amy Lennox and Rachel Tucker. Photo credit: Helen Murray. When Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise crashed into cinemas, few who saw it would have thought that it would be turned into a song-and-dance spectacle. And yet, some 35 years down the line, here we are.
Review: Hadestown 2026 – Lyric Theatre, London
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4 out of 5. As the old saying goes, the fact that there’s a highway to hell and only a stairway to heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers. And that certainly proves true for Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown, which, since opening at the Lyric in 2024, has had six different casts. So writes Franco Milazzo for theQR.co.uk… Some musicals arrive fully formed, strut about for a season, then politely leave.
“The Last Ship” at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
Franco Milazzo in the West End ★★★☆☆ 26 September 2026 Towards the end, The Last Ship comes out with a gag for the ages. Union boss Billy has doubts over whether the very risky high-speed plan laid out by the dying shipyard manager Jackie White is achievable. Billy leans over his friend and quietly pleads, “Even Rome wasn’t built in a day.” “Aye,” says Jackie, “but I wasn’t the foreman on that job.” That Jackie gets the best laugh of the night shouldn’t be a surprise.
Dinner comes with a death sentence in Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists
In 2028, in a corner of rural Portugal, there is a meadow with 73 cork oak trees. Under each of them is a dead fascist. As another tree is being planted, a fascist awaits his execution. Written and directed by Tiago Rodrigues, the 2020 play Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists has more than a faint tang of The Wicker Man directed by Wes Anderson. Every year for over seven decades, a family has gathered to catch up over food and drink.
Review: MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET, The Arts At Marble Arch
Elvis Presley is sitting at the piano, his jacket and mouth slightly ajar, his hands over the keys and his eyes looking up at rockabilly legend Carl Perkins holding a guitar. On either side of Perkins are Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis. Teenage dancer Marilyn Evans is sitting on the piano in a dark wool dress; in his article, Bob Johnson euphemistically referred to her as Presley’s “house guest”.
Review: ALCINA, Royal Ballet & Opera
Returning to Covent Garden for the first time since it waltzed off with an Olivier in 2022, Richard Jones’ Alcina is ravishing to look at, a joy to hear and its clever design motifs still stand out from the crowd. The prolific Jones never tires of finding new ways to give his audiences sleepless nights.
Review: JILL'S TUPPERWARE PARTY, Underbelly Boulevard Soho
There's an indecently good chance that you will walk out of Jill's Tupperware Party very different to how you came in. It may be because you now have a brand new attitude to those leftovers that have been mouldering away in the back of the fridge for the past week. Or maybe its the shiny new hairnet over your head, the sticker on your chest proclaiming your name to be "Jill" and the contact details for a new friend.
Review: SALTY BRINE: HOW STRANGE IT IS, Soho Theatre
Anne Frank. Jeff Mangum. And Salty Brine. Maybe especially Salty Brine. If the audience takes one thing away from this tremendous show, it is that one individual can illuminate an entire world. Brine is not a stranger to London. He has now brought several entries from his Living Record Collection to Soho Theatre’s basement cabaret bar and the main theatre but still curiously remains, in the words of Robert Rankin, well known to those who know him well.
Review: Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy – Stratford East
⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3 out of 5. Quentin Tarantino has never adapted Homer. On the evidence of Ava Pickett’s second play, he wouldn’t need to change much. So writes Franco Milazzo for theQR.co.uk… Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy borrows the claustrophobia from Reservoir Dogs, the righteous-vengeance mechanics from Inglourious Basterds, and the powder-keg atmosphere from The Hateful Eight, and then relocates the whole shebang to a Home Counties living room.
Review: MAN TO MAN, Royal Court
A title is the one line of a play a translator absolutely has to get right, and it's the line they most reliably fumble. In Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis clos (French for the legal term “in camera”), the existentialist philosopher stated — not entirely unreasonably — that "hell is other people”; which post-death destination the person that came up with No Exit (a phrase that belongs on a fire door, not a stage) ended up in is unknown.
Review: MERE MORTALS, Sadler's Wells
Seven years is a long time to keep a London audience waiting. San Francisco Ballet is the oldest ballet company in America and was founded in the middle of the Great Depression and the year Prohibition ended, something that perhaps tells us about the national appetite for spectacle even in lean times. They’ve chosen to end the wait with a show about a woman who really should have left well enough alone.
Letitia Wright leads a newsroom drama where ambition proves dangerously combustible
Two days is a short shelf life for a Pulitzer. Janet Cooke handed hers back in 1981 once it emerged that her front-page Washington Post story about an eight-year-old heroin addict called Jimmy was a work of fiction. Inspired by this event, Tracey Scott Wilson’s 2003 rocket of a play fizzes then fizzles out at the Olivier. Her central character closely follows Cooke’s own history, albeit with changed names.
Review: CRYBABIES: THE SCARING, Soho Theatre
Fresh from a run at the Edinburgh Fringe, the Crybabies trio creep into Soho Theatre with their comedy-horror offering The Scaring. In a prologue, we meet two armed priests — crucifix in one hand, a Bible in the other — as they eagerly hunt down a demon. Their mission goes awry, their romantic feelings towards each other go unrequited and one meets their end.
Review: FUCCBOIS: LIVE IN CONCERT, Soho Theatre
Grab a hankie, wipe away the tears and round up all your friends-with-benefits: after 12 years, pop sensations Fuccbois have called it a day and we are all invited to their final gig. Playing to a notional crowd of 90,000 (or as many can safely fit into Soho’s cabaret basement space), the four-piece boyband are here for one last goodbye. Their loyal fans await the anthems they know and love about midnight booty calls, one night stands and the ideal way to ghost someone.
Review: CREATURE, Colab
Yes, yes: ask the average person about Frankenstein and they will speak at length about the book and the films but, if it wasn't for the theatrical adaptations, Mary Shelley's gothic classic would arguably just be collecting dust in your local library. Designed for a single audience member moved around in a wheelchair, Peter Broughton's visceral Creature arrives as the latest in a long line of stage endeavours that dig into the monster's mythos.
Review: How The Other Half Loves @ The Old Vic
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4 out of 5. And so it’s goodbye to the Old Vic’s Matthew Warchus. Eleven years after succeeding Kevin Spacey, he is heading for the exit, even if there are two more productions left in his final season as artistic director (he directs Martin Guerre in October before his long-running A Christmas Carol makes its annual appearance). This venerable Alan Ayckbourn comedy closes in September and so officially does Warchus’ reign, having outstayed six prime ministers.
“Death Note: The Musical” at the Barbican
Franco Milazzo in Central London ★★★★☆ 13 August 2026 Screen-to-stage musicals are, let us be honest, well-intentioned money grabs which leave people wondering whether absolutely everything must now be set to music. They tend to fall into one of three categories: bad and flashy (e.g. Burlesque), bad and loud (e.g. Beetlejuice), and bad to the bone (e.g. Trainspotting).
Review: THE COMEDY ABOUT SPIES, Adelphi Theatre
Set in 1961, the same year that a balding former milkman and coffin-polisher from Edinburgh was interviewed for the role of James Bond, The Comedy About Spies sees two pairs of agents (one American, one Russian) face off in London’s Piccadilly Hotel as they hunt for the mysterious “Project Midnight” documents. This being a slice of classic Mischief Theatre tomfoolery, there’s no prizes for guessing just how smoothly everything will go. No prizes, but perhaps a few surprises.
“Cats” at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre
Franco Milazzo in North London ★★★☆☆ 9 August 2026 Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre is boldly billing this Cats as “London’s most anticipated musical”. That’s sheer chutzpah, given that artistic director Drew McOnie’s predecessor is drawing nightly ovations for another Andrew Lloyd Webber show just three miles down the road.
Review: NOW YOU SEE ME LIVE, London Coliseum
Packed to the brim with illusions and disillusionment, it quickly becomes clear that Now You See Me Live is only a magic show in one sense of the word. Maybe that’s because the much-vaunted connection to the title's film trilogy is thin enough to walk the runway in Paris Fashion Week. Or that trying to do close-up magic from the stage of the West End’s biggest venue seems a frankly pointless task.
Review: THE CAR MAN, Sadler's Wells
The tall, dark and handsome Luca swaggers into Harmony (population 375, and dropping) looking less like a drifter than an escapee from a protein powder advert, and Matthew Bourne's dance-noir wastes no time weaponising that effect. Under a sign reading "Man Wanted," the garage owner Dino offers him work and his wife Lana offers considerably more; before the interval is out, so has the gentle mechanic Angelo. Man wanted, indeed.
Review: TAO OF GLASS at @Sohoplace
Six years after its debut in Manchester, My Neighbour Totoro director Phelim McDermott takes centre stage in this emotionally piercing collaboration with iconic composer Philip Glass to London. History is littered with examples of great works rising from the ashes of collapsed projects. When Alejandro Jodorowsky's hugely ambitious attempt to film Dune collapsed, several of the creatives went off to make Alien.
Review: GREASE THE IMMERSIVE MOVIE MUSICAL, Evolution London
is the word yet again as immersive theatre giant Secret Cinema rolls back into London with a repeat of last year's summer spectacular. Given how the last twelve months have gone for them (and the industry in general), Rocky may have been a more apt choice. The show arrives at Battersea at something of a critical juncture for its makers, both creative and commercial.
Review: THE TIMEWALK EXHIBITION, ImmerseLDN
DEM Museum’s attempt to traverse a dozen millennia in an hour is lacking in neither chutzpah nor dazzling technology. London's ImmerseLD has already taken us through individual catastrophes (Pompeii coming down, the Titanic going under) and dead royalty (Cleopatra, Tutankhamun) but The Timewalk Exhibition spins us across eons of prehistory and the civilizations that filled it, with David Schofield and Olivia Williams on narration. Ambition is not where this one falls short.
“Trainspotting The Musical” at Theatre Royal Haymarket
Franco Milazzo in the West End ★☆☆☆☆ 24 July 2026 Choose the West End. Choose a Thursday. Choose gilt and plush and cherubs on high looking down at a syringe. Choose to buy a ticket because it clearly comes with Irvine Welsh’s backing. Choose to see his name on the poster, the hoarding, the tote, the programme, the press release, the front of house display.
Review: SPACE EXPLORERS: THE ISS EXPERIENCE, Eclipso
The most common question people ask me about immersive theatre — right after “do I need to wear a costume?” and “is there a bar?” — is usually something along the lines of “What does ‘immersive’ mean and isn’t everything immersive?” To cover the second part first: yes, everything is immersive, and everything is also theatre, opera and dance from a particular viewpoint. An art form is more than a stage and its performers; it is also what its audience demands of it.
Review: BBC PROMS: PROG ROCK: A FANFARE FOR THE COMMON MAN, Royal Albert Hall
Finally, prog gets its Prom. The BBC's heart is unarguably in the right place in handing the genre's back catalogue to their Concert Orchestra, in tribute to a "pioneering, British-driven movement" rendered, as the billing has it, "on an orchestral scale". And yet the result falls a fair way short of the ambition. If the mission passes muster, the omissions are the head-scratcher.
Review: BBC PROMS: FIRST NIGHT OF THE PROMS 2026, Royal Albert Hall
And so, we’re off. The 99th BBC Proms bursts from the blocks with a satisfying start. If the Last Night is about the waving of Union Jacks until arms ache, the First Night had some of that feeling too — albeit a different flag. The Proms this time around will commemorate the 250th anniversary of United States declaring bye-bye to Blighty and plotting its own course into history.
Review: LA FILLE DU REGIMENT, Royal Ballet & Opera
All's fair in love and war — at least until the hero storms in on a tank. With Tamsin Greig playing a hilarious cameo, Laurent Pelly's production of Donizetti's comic opera returns to Covent Garden for its fifth outing. Frothy as the storyline is, Gaetano Donizetti's La fille du régiment caused real critical ructions when it first opened in 1840.
“Jesus Christ Superstar” at London Palladium
Franco Milazzo in the West End ★★★★☆ 8 July 2026 And. lo, after forty days (and quite a few years), Sam Ryder Eurovision Superstar returns to the limelight to augur in yet another run of this acclaimed rock musical.
Review: SHEAR MADNESS, The Mill At Sonning
Move over Punchdrunk: the longest running immersive drama in the world has arrived in the UK. Set in a unisex hair salon, Shear Madness’ intriguing mix of murder mystery and interactive sleuthing comes to The Mill At Sonning where artistic director Sally Hughes helms one of the first adaptations to land on British shores.
Review: THE LADYBOYS OF BANGKOK: FULL MOON, Sabai Pavilion
Twenty-eight years ago, The Ladyboys of Bangkok made a brief appearance at what was then the Queen's Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue (now the Sondheim, which has committed itself to Les Misérables with a fervour that makes Swifties look fickle). Now the company has finally brought its full touring operation to London.
Review: I PURITANI, Royal Ballet & Opera
Thirty-four years is a long time to leave an opera in the attic, and I puritani has spent most of that period gathering dust for good reason.
Review: Cyrano – Noël Coward Theatre
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4 out of 5. Adrian Lester holds a 4th-Dan black belt in Taekwondo. This detail, which might seem like idle biographical colour in a programme note, matters rather a lot once you see him fling himself across the Noël Coward stage in London’s West End during the early duelling sequences: cartwheeling, lunging and dispatching opponents with the casual authority of a man who has genuinely trained to hurt people. He is 57. Most actors his age are on their third Lear.
Plenty to admire in The Misanthrope, but little to love
The National Theatre has decided that what the Lyttelton needs this summer is a French play from 1666 written in verse, by a man who is hoping that his third adaptation of the Molière masterwork is the charm. It is directed by Indhu Rubasingham, the National Theatre’s first female artistic director and the first person of colour to hold the role, and stars a woman best known for spending a decade hanging out with impossibly handsome surgeons before chasing a psychopathic assassin around Europe.
Review: VENUS & ADONIS, Barbican Theatre
Putting on something which is so sexy, sensuous and deeply erotic in the middle of a heatwave could be asking for trouble, yet this production of Shakespeare’s Venus & Adonis justifies the gamble, turning the Barbican’s The Pit into a crucible of raw, mythological desire. When the goddess Venus first sees Adonis, it is pure lust at first sight. In her head, she only wants him; in his head, he only wants to hunt. She arrives in a shell-shaped chariot pulled by two white birds; he barely notices.
Review: SINATRA THE MUSICAL, Aldwych Theatre
The stories about Francis Albert Sinatra are endless. Two decades before Beatlemania hit the States, thousands of girls queued around the block so they could see the short, skinny kid from Hoboken sing while they cried, screamed and fainted. He had a thick New Jersey accent and a thin skin, punching one critic in the back of the head and physically threatening other members of the press.
Review: THE MAGICIANS TABLE, The Vaults
Death, it turns out, is an excellent alibi for a party, even one being held in your honour. Legendary magician, beloved family man and complete fiction Dieter Roterburg has sadly died and his wake is being held nightly in the tunnels beneath Waterloo train station. Guests are invited to pay their respects, knock back a cocktail or two, and watch a band of highly skilled magicians perform at an unusually intimate range.
Review: Are You Watching? – Royal Court Theatre
⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3 out of 5. Georgie Dettmer has looked at the internet and found it disgusting. Fair enough: the internet is disgusting. The question a playwright is then obliged to answer is: so what? Are You Watching? at the Royal Court, Dettmer’s professional debut, spends sixty-five minutes in the hellscape and neglects, on the way out, to file a report.
Review: THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO, Royal Ballet & Opera
Mae West famously asked, "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?" Well, at the beginning of the relationship, they will no doubt be very happy to see you. But, at the end of the relationship… And that, my friends, is as good a summary of Mozart’s The Marriage Of Figaro as any. Opera rarely troubles itself with sequels. Most composers arrive, set fire to their characters' lives then move on.
“War Horse” at the Olivier, National Theatre
Franco Milazzo on the South Bank ★★★★☆ 4 June 2026 Listen very carefully, I shall say this only once: if you can look past the French and German accents that makes ’Allo ’Allo look like found footage, an anti-war message with all the subtlety of a 4 a.m. car alarm, and characters so wafer-thin that they give wafers a bad name, then War Horse still holds up as an uplifting night out. Albeit for one major reason: its imaginative use of puppetry. Anita Adam Gabay. Photo credit: Brinkhoff/Moegenburg.
Review: COSÌ FAN TUTTE, Opera Holland Park
Cecilia Stinton sets the action in postwar Naples, with ostensibly American GIs stationed there and their girlfriends flying in from across the Atlantic. It’s an idea with real promise. A city still marked by occupation, saturated in tourist gloss and transactional desire, is a far more pointed setting for Alfonso’s cynicism than Mozart’s original world. But Stinton leans almost exclusively on Neil Irish’s designs to make that case, and then rather leaves the case unspoken.
Review: GIFFORDS CIRCUS: WATERFIELD, Chiswick House & Gardens
There is a moment, somewhere between the knife-thrower's insane grin and Brian the Goose making his entrance with the unruffled authority of a minor aristocrat, when you simply have to give in to the magic. Giffords Circus has this effect on people.
“Beetlejuice” at Prince Edward Theatre
Franco Milazzo in the West End ★★★☆☆ 31 May 2026 Let us cut to the chase: no matter what the critics say, audiences will lap Beetlejuice The Musical up like the first ice cream of summer. And, no matter what its many, many fans say, critics will still die a little inside when they see shows like this latest screen-to-stage slice of amiable but misguided nonsense. David Hunter, David Fynn and Chelsea Halfpenny. Photo credit: Johan Persson.
Review: BLACK COMEDY, Orange Tree Theatre
There is exactly one joke in Peter Shaffer's 1965 farce: when the lights come on, the characters are in the dark. Everything else — the borrowed furniture, the hapless sculptor, the stern colonel, the ex-girlfriend arriving at the worst possible moment — is just escalation. It is either the cleverest piece of theatrical engineering of the twentieth century or an extended thought experiment masquerading as a play. At the Orange Tree, Caroline Steinbeis makes a fairly convincing case for the former.
Review: GENTLEMAN JACK, Sadler's Wells
At this point in the history of humanity, a ballet translated from screen to stage or built around a real person is more likely to raise eyebrows than expectations. That’s not to say they have a uniform quality - Rambert’s Peaky Blinders: The Redemption Of Thomas Shelby blew the roof off Sadler’s Wells while Birmingham Royal Ballet’s tribute to Black Sabbath was an unholy mess.
“Sherlock Holmes” at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre
Franco Milazzo in North London ★★★★☆ 18 May 2026 New approaches to the Holmes mythos have broadened and increased considerably in the 21st century since the fusty portrayals by the likes of Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett. On the small screen, Benedict Cumberbatch was iconic, Jonny Lee Miller broke a record for the most appearances as the detective, and Japan has both puppet and anime versions.
Review: YAMATO THE DRUMMERS OF JAPAN: HITO NO CHIKARA (THE POWER OF HUMAN STRENGTH), Peacock Theatre
Drummers are a particular breed. Keith Moon of The Who famously drove a limousine into a swimming pool during his 21st birthday party. Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham and Motley Crue’s Tommy Lee both engaged in hotel debauchery: Bonham rode motorcycles along corridors while Lee launched fireworks from balconies. Then there was the terrifyingly violent Ginger Baker who, when not raising hell on stage for Cream, threatened those around him with knives and canes.
Review: 1536 – Ambassadors Theatre – London
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 5 out of 5. Henry VIII got through six wives, triggered a religious reformation, and still takes up more than his fair share of history curricula. The least he could do was stay offstage, and in Ava Pickett’s electrifying West End debut, that’s exactly where he stays, radiating menace from a distance while three women in an Essex field work out what his latest marital catastrophe means for the rest of womankind.
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