Best of West End & More: Top Five London Shows of 2010

London boasts well over 150 significant openings a year, more than triple the number Broadway musters these days in an entire season. Where to begin, then, in looking back with pleasure on the year now drawing to a close? With a heroine named Elle, perhaps, and some rarely seen Rattigan—not to mention a new musical supposedly for kids that adults the world over, trust me, are going to love.


Legally Blonde, Savoy Theatre
In a far smaller venue than it played on Broadway, and boasting a sensational star turn from Sheridan Smith, director-choreographer Jerry Mitchell's stage treatment of the popular Hollywood film acquired a heart somewhere over the Atlantic. Let's hope it remains in place when current alternate Susan McFadden assumes the starring role of Harvard Law’s hardest-working blonde, Elle Woods, beginning January 10, 2011. Co-star Alex Gaumond as Elle’s love interest, Emmett, is pretty nifty, as well—and he, thank heavens, is staying along for the ride.


Measure For Measure, Almeida Theatre
Where would British theater be without Shakespeare? In 2010, we got Judi Dench's frolicsome, effortlessly sexy Titania; Derek Jacobi's rivetingly quixotic Lear; and an unusually lucid (and balding) Hamlet from Rory Kinnear, who was even better as the slippery, power-mad Angelo in director Michael Attenborough's probing production of Measure For Measure. Kinnear and co-stars Ben Miles as the Duke and Anna Maxwell Martin as Isabella served up the Bard’s so-called "problem play" with hurtling force in a comparatively low-profile exercise that left a lasting impression.


After the Dance, National Theatre/Lyttelton
The National Theatre exists not just to showcase acknowledged classics such as Hamlet but to suggest lesser-known titles as essential in their own way. On that front, Terence Rattigan’s 1939 script about bright young things hellbent on their own extinction gave rising stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Nancy Carroll and their director, Thea Sharrock, a further chance to shine. Sharrock—helmer of the Broadway and London Equus, starring Daniel Radcliffe—returns to the Rattigan oeuvre in the spring when she directs Anne-Marie Duff at the Old Vic in Cause Celebre.


Passion, Donmar Warehouse
To tell the truth, I was never entirely persuaded of the merits of Passion, the 1994 Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine Tony-winning study of romantic obsession, illness and the power of beauty. I have admired it in the past without ever surrendering to it emotionally and unconditionally, on its own terms. But that was before Jamie Lloyd directed Elena Roger as Fosca, Scarlett Strallen as Clara and the incomparable David Thaxton as Giorgio in the Sondheim revival of this or any season—a production so revelatory, I saw it twice.


Matilda, Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Pundits expend a lot of energy searching for a great British musical. And, finally, here one is: a Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of Roald Dahl's tale about an unloved, prodigiously bright daughter that on opening night had most of the post-pubescents in the audience in tears. Prolific director Matthew Warchus seems to have given his very soul to this show as well as a co-starring role to his real-life wife, Lauren Ward, as the infinitely understanding Miss Honey. Matilda boasts one of the best cross-dressing turns in British theater history from the amazing Bertie Carvel as that battle-axe of a headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. This show's onward march has just begun.