Evening Standard Theatre Podcast: Pygmalion, Little Big Things and Beautiful Thing - it’s a beaut

From an inspirational memoir on stage to a seminal play about young gay love, we’ve got it all
Manuel Harlan

Welcome to the latest edition of the Evening Standard Theatre Podcast.

This week, Nick Butcher and Tom Ling, two of the creators behind the hit new show The Little Big Things running at @sohoplace, join Nick Curtis in the studio. They reveal how they adapted rugby player Henry Fraser’s inspirational memoir – about how a diving accident changed the sportsman’s life forever and what happened next – into an inspirational new musical, which has been given the seal of approval by none other than Andrew Lloyd Webber, who knows a thing or two about this kind of stuff.

We review Pygmalion at the Old Vic, which stars Bertie Carvel (Dr Foster, The 47th) as Henry Higgins and Patsy Ferran (Summer and Smoke, A Streetcar Named Desire) as Eliza Doolittle, and also Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing at Theatre Royal Stratford East, a 30th anniversary revival of this classic coming-out and coming-of-age story.

And finally we discuss Starlight Express steaming back into London next year, ask if you would pay £395 to see Plaza Suite, and celebrate another 30th anniversary – of our chief theatre critic’s first review for the Evening Standard. Listen now…

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