New Sondheim, John Lithgow & Maybe Daisy-Edgar Jones

Tennessee Williams sets Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, his 1955 play about sexual repression, at a cotton plantation on the Mississippi Delta. You can feel the heat in director Rebecca Frecknall’s production at the Almeida Theatre starring a scorching Daisy Edgar-Jones (Twisters, Normal People) as Maggie, the cat in question, who does all in her power to jolt her inattentive husband, Brick — played superbly by Kingsley Ben-Adir — out of his self-inflicted stupor. 

The play opened just a few days ago and there’s already chatter about it transferring into the West End, most appropriately, next summer, and Edgar-Jones must be persuaded to move with it, along with Ben-Adir, Lennie James’ powerful Big Daddy and Clare Burt’s cotton-headed Big Mama.

Edgar-Jones’ Maggie the cat is a study in the art of allure, and calculation; she prowls the Almeida stage like a hungry feline wanting to play with her prey before gobbling it up, only to find its given up the fight. The only phallic symbol Brick can raise is the crutch he uses for his broken foot.

I can see Edgar-Jones growing into her already riveting performance. She can make a movie when the Almeida run ends February 1, then move into the West End. The production will be catnip for filmmakers, casting directors and producers.

Her Normal People co-star, Gladiator II‘s Paul Mescal, is also treading the boards for a strictly limited season in another Williams classic, A Streetcar Named Desire, also directed by Frecknalll the production also originated at the Almeida. After playing the Noel Coward Theatre for three weeks beginning February 3, Streetcar will transfer to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a five-week run starting February 28.

Another theatrical gem for 2025 is the transfer from the Royal Court to the Harold Pinter Theatre of Nicholas Hytner’s production of Mark Rosenblatt’s new play Giant, with John Lithgow reprising his blistering performance as novelist Roald Dahl. The play’s about how Dahl mishandled accusations of antisemitism. Lithgow totally inhabits Dahl, warts and all.

Following its run at the Harold Pinter from April 26 through August 2, I can reveal that it will transfer to Broadway, though a theater and dates have not been set.

Lithgow’s having a time of it at the moment what with his role in the awards-season hit Conclave and his part in the extraordinarily poignant Sundance-bound film Jimpa, directed by Sophie Hyde and starring a sublime Olivia Colman.

It’s also good to see a thespian triumph in a new play.

Let’s hope that’s also the case for Ewan McGregor, who will lead director Michael Grandage’s production of Lila Raicek’s new work My Master Builder, inspired by Ibsen’s The Master Builder, into Wyndham’s Theatre from April 17-July 12.

Must be something to do with our glorious weather (I’m kidding), but there are a lot of big movie names headed to our stages in 2025.

Rami Malek, who seems very much at home in London these days; we shop for provisions at the same grocery store near Regent’s Park. The Bohemian Rhapsody Oscar winner stars with Indira Varmer in a production of Oedipus that opens at the Old Vic beginning January 21. The Theban drama is being jointly directed by Matthew Warchus and boundary-breaking choreographer and composer Hofesh Shechter.

Hollywood clearly favors the Greeks. Brie Larson (Room, Captain Marvel) takes the title role in Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocles’ Elektra directed by Broadway’s Daniel Fish (Oklahoma!). The terrifying vengeance tale that also stars Stockard Channing and Patrick Vaill plays a short outta town run at the Theatre Royal Brighton from January 13-18 before opening officially at the Duke of York’s Theatre (the scene of Tom Holland’s hot-ticket turn as Romeo in Jamie Lloyd’s adaptation of Romeo & Juliet last May) from January 24-April 12.

By the way, Lloyd’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is worth catching at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. It’s a “clean” version, by that I mean it’s in Lloyd’s stark style but done damn straight without use of video screens and hi-tech palaver. And Sigourney Weaver’s Prospero is a treat. It runs until February 1. The Jamie Lloyd Company’s Shakespeare season at Drury Lane will continue February 10-April 5 with Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell as Benedick and Beatrice in the Bard’s savage comedy Much Ado About Nothing.

At the risk of sounding like a humorless, up himself pedantic, dare I note that director Max Webster’s version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, starring Doctor Who’s Ncuti Gatwa, could have done with a hint of starkness. Instead it’s been turned into a pantomime with outlandishly garish costumes. About the only thing that amused me was the curtain that greeted us on arrival into the National Theatre’s Lyttelton Theatre. Suspended against a red velvet curtain was a black handbag. Yes, the very handbag that set Wilde’s play in motion. It made me laugh. Shame that I departed in such a glum mood. 

If you want to see a real pantomime, then head to the London Palladium to see Jane McDonald and Julian Clary in Robin Hood. Much funnier. Deliciously naughty, too. Hurry, the limited season ends January 12.

When Maggie Smith starred as Lady Bracknell in a version of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Aldwych Theatre in 1993, she was so unhappy that when I inquired whether she would take it to Broadway her riposte was: “Broadway?! I wouldn’t take it to Woking!”

I’m afraid that the NT’s production wouldn’t get as far as Surbiton, let alone Woking.

I have higher hopes for Joe Mantello’s (Wicked) direction of Stephen Sondheim’s final musical Here We Are, which opens at the very same Lyttelton Theatre from April 23-June 28. The company includes Tracie Bennett, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Richard Fleeshman, Harry Hadden-Paton, Rory Kinnear, Cameron Johnson, Jane Krakowski, Martha Plimpton, Denis O’Hare, Paulo Szot and Chumisa Dornford-May.

Celia Imrie and Tamsin Greig will play mother and daughter in Backstroke, a new play written and directed by Anna Mackmin. It runs at the Donmar Warehouse from February 14-April 12.

At the same address, The Handmaid’s Tale’s Samira Wiley will star in a revival of Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel directed by Lynette Linton, who staged the definitive version of Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Sweat at the Donmar and in the West End. Intimate Apparel will run at the Donmar from June 20-August 9.

Also headed into summer is Rosamund Pike, who will star in the world premiere of Suzie Miller’s (Prima Facie) Inter Alia, about a High Court judge having to reckon with clashes of a professional and personal nature. It will run at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre in the summer, with official dates to be announced. Justin Martin will direct.

Stephen Daldry will direct Juliet Stevenson in David Lan’s new play The Land of the Living, about displaced children after World War II, in the National’s Dorfman Theatre in September.

Departing National Theatre artistic chief Rufus Norris’ final show as NT leader will be a return of the Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork verbatim musical London Road, about how townsfolk in Ipswich, Suffolk grappled with a serial killer in their midst. It will play on the Olivier Theatre stage June 6-21.

Jamie Lloyd, as revealed in this space last month, will direct the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice musical Evita at the London Palladium. A little tease: I’m hearing a lot of noise about a show-stopping Oscar-winning star being courted to play Eva Peron, but more than that I cannot disclose, for now at any rate. Evita will run at the Palladium for 12 weeks beginning June 14.

Hello, Dolly!, starring an incandescent Imedla Staunton and directed by Dominic Cooke, wowed me at the Palladium this past summer. Cooke and the show’s producer Michael Harrison both tell me that they, and Staunton, had hoped to bring the show back to town in 2025 but thus far their search for an available theater has been fruitless.

It would be nice to have Dolly back where she belongs, but life has taught me that you can’t have everything.