August on the London Stage: End Summer with Oklahoma!, A Chorus Line, The Wizard of Oz and More

Late summer is often reputed as the lull before the autumnal storm of new productions. And yet, the British capital is as busy as ever during the month ahead, breaking into song (many of them familiar) and allowing talent to burst forth in new, sometimes unexpected contexts. For more on five events that are setting the pulse racing on London stages, read on.

ALL HALE
Simon Hale was a 2019 Tony nominee for his orchestrations on Broadway for Tootsie, and won the same award in 2022 for helping make Bob Dylan sing in Girl from the North Country. But as the protean English talent awaits the next move for the stage version of the Oscar-winning film The Artist, for which he composed the score, he is changing gears to conduct none other than Sam Smith in the non-binary performer’s only UK concert appearance this year.

The sellout event is August 2 at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the annual BBC Proms, the heavyweight sequence of concerts—classical and otherwise—that have long distinguished London summers and whose “broad palette,” says Hale, is part of its attraction. Might Smith be a contender to cross over into musical theater in due course? “They’re an incredible artist, so I don’t see why not,” says an admiring Hale. “They’re very keen on theater, so who knows?”

I CAN DO THAT
A Chorus Line is a Broadway landmark, but it also happens to be the first show that Nikolai Foster directed when he was starting out at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, south Yorkshire, some 20 years ago. He’s since taken over as artistic director of the Curve Theatre in Leicester, north of London, where he chose A Chorus Line anew as his post-Covid Christmas production in 2021: “Literally putting yourself on the line seemed such a great poetic metaphor for all theater and what we had been through during [the Covid] years.” That production is now being reprised at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London for a late-summer run opening August 2. “I didn’t want to mess things up,” Foster says of returning to the material two-and-a-half years later. His 2021 version, he says, “really worked.”

1999 Tony nominee Adam Cooper (Swan Lake) once again plays Zach, with Carly Mercedes Dyer (Anything Goes) as the ever-hopeful Cassie. The choreography is not the legendary Bennett original but, instead, has been refashioned by Ellen Kane, the Englishwoman whose credits include Matilda and Dear England. “I’ve done a little homage to Michael at the end of the show,” says Foster, keen nonetheless to maintain a fresh perspective: “If these shows are going to remain in the repertoire, they need to be done in new productions.” All together now: a five, six, seven, eight!

OVER THE RAINBOW
The Wizard of Oz has been adapted more times than there have been rainbows. And here the story of Dorothy, Toto and chums is once again, not in the format of The Wiz or Wicked but in a revival of the 2011 West End version of the iconic L. Frank Baum story that incorporated new material from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Directed by the ever-busy Nikolai Foster (see above), this version pitches up at the Gillian Lynne Theatre for 38 performances starting August 15. The role of Dorothy has been given to Aviva Tulley, a 24-year-old who sounds pleased to be home in London after nine months with the show on tour. The choice of material is a nice change, too. “My family will get to see me in something more child-friendly,” she says, noting by way of comparison that her previous West End entry, The Book of Mormon, “was very different.” One imagines so.

LASSO’ING LAUREY
Concert performances both sides of the Atlantic are getting ever starrier and more elaborate. To the ranks of recent high-profile local sightings of Pippin and The Addams Family, among many others, we can now add a lustrous-sounding Oklahoma! that pitches up August 19 and 20 at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, where the Rodgers and Hammerstein title first opened in London in 1947. The director-choreographer is Bill Deamer, who has a runaway hit at the moment with the Imelda Staunton-led Hello, Dolly!, and the cast includes Ted Lasso’s own Phil Dunster as Curly and Zizi Strallen as Laurey. Aunt Eller is in the redoubtable hands of Joanna Riding, who more than 30 years ago came to attention at the National Theatre in a storied revival of Oklahoma!’s immediate successor, Carousel.

ON THE MOVE
Two years ago, the Anglo Congolese writer Benedict Lombe won the Susan Smith Blackburn Price for her debut play, Lava, which premiered at west London’s small but mighty Bush Theatre in 2021. Her successive Bush premiere, the two-hander Shifters, garnered raves this past February and is now receiving a West End upgrade. The commercial transfer opens August 21 at the Duke of York’s Theatre with its original cast, Tosin Cole and Heather Agyepong, along for the ride.

“It feels good, it feels right,” Lombe, 32, told Broadway.com of the trajectory of a play whose producing team includes Tony podium regular Sonia Friedman (Merrily We Roll Along). The playwright is grateful, too, that her love story will be reaching wider audiences “in the way we created it, so that it is exactly the thing that it is,” she said. “It’s beautiful to realize something with intention and to take it into spaces that [Black theater-makers] don’t normally get to be in. I feel really proud.”