★★★★

“The supporting cast are uniformly excellent, providing light and shade where needed”

If you break a hologram, the original image remains visible in each fragment, but the viewing angle for each piece is narrower, like looking through a smaller window. Every fragment shows the whole picture, but from a different perspective.

Tracy Letts’ intriguing play, “Mary Page Marlowe”, is constructed along similar lines. Carefully selected moments, some mundane and some pivotal, are patch-worked together in no particular order to paint a full, yet intimate, portrait of a woman. An “unexceptional” woman, according to the titular character herself. The experience for the audience, though, is quite the opposite. It is an exceptional and extraordinary play in which time is random. Five actors perform the role of Mary Page Marlowe, charting seventy years of her life over the course of eleven short scenes. A cradle to grave story (the baby Mary is represented by a doll – a less risky proposition than having a real baby onstage as in the premiere nine years ago in Chicago) that spirals around the life of Mary Page – along with her three husbands, two children, alcoholic mother, palliative nurse, therapist, lover… and so on.

We first see her explaining how her divorce will affect and uproot her children, before we flip back to her bright and buoyant schooldays, before fast forwarding to her twilight years. She is then a baby, mewling and puking; and then the lover, sighing like a furnace. There are indeed reflections on Shakespeare’s seven stages of life, albeit as though the bard had thrown his folio into the air and let the pages fall haphazardly around him.

Each scene is succinct and stand alone in its own right; with outstanding, natural performances from the entire cast. The common thread is often missing, however, and we feel that we are not watching the same woman in different stages of her life, but many people’s stories. The distancing of emotional connection that this results in is compensated for, however, by the ingenious structure and Matthew Warchus’ sublime direction. Staged in the round, it emphasises the concept that past, present and future are as one. When the telephone rings at the end of one scene, the weight of its significance is truly felt because we have already seen what comes after.

Each Mary is highly watchable. Alisha Weir’s twelve-year-old Mary is a convincing mix of obstinance and innocence whose rose-tinted view of life is already eroded by her late teens: Eleanor Worthington-Cox captures the ambiguity of hope versus disillusionment in denial. The more Mary ages, the stronger the characterisation. Rosy McEwen, as Mary the adulteress, is a personality to be reckoned with, while Andrea Riseborough lights up the stage every time she appears with her brutally honest energy and physicality, steering Mary on a crash course off the rails. Many people may be drawn to this show by the casting of Susan Sarandon, but the play is, by no means, a vehicle for starry casting. Sarandon has as little stage time as the others, and she uses it as efficiently. Poised and in complete control, Sarandon evokes regret and sadness with a stoicism that matches her presence.

The supporting cast are uniformly excellent, providing light and shade where needed. Kingsley Morton’s schoolfriend, Connie, is a very funny breath of fresh air. Melanie La Barrie’s nurse is wryly comic but wise. A wisdom that is perhaps missing from Mary’s mother, grippingly portrayed by Eden Epstein. The moods are heightened by Hugh Vanstone’s sensitive lighting, but occasionally dampened by some overlong scene changes.

Despite all, however, Letts’ storytelling is a bit of a puzzle and, at times, hard work. The scrambled record of events can be distracting and the true hold on our attention is sometimes out of reach. We are never really let into the life of Mary Page Marlowe. The play hides as much as it reveals, which is part of its charm, but it is also frustratingly inconsequential. Letts wants us to question how much we can really know a person – even ourselves. We are teased into wanting to find out the answer, but left hanging. However, the meaninglessness (for want of a better word) is, in turn, inconsequential. We are won over by the truly mesmerising ensemble cast.

CRY-BABY, THE MUSICAL

Arcola Theatre

★★★★★

“Feel-good is the understatement of the year where this show is concerned”

‘It’s a beautiful day for an anti-polio picnic’. So begins the new all-singing, all-dancing “Cry-Baby, The Musical”. This is no surprise if you are armed with the knowledge that the musical is based on the transgressive filmmaker John Waters’ 1990 film. Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan have written the book, with David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger providing the songs. Directed by the Arcola Theatre’s artistic director, Mehmet Ergen, it bursts onto the London stage with an effervescent eccentricity that Waters would be proud of with all his screwball heart.

A couple of words of advice. Leave your expectations at home, along with any judgements, preconceptions or theatrical snobbery. Don’t read the programme notes – the ones that allude to the show dealing with issues of class-based injustices, political relevance, privilege, demonisation… blah blah blah. It really isn’t that deep. Yes, they’re all in there somewhere, cleverly hidden in hilarious, blink-and-you-miss one-liners, but the trick is to just wallow in the whole explosion of joy that this show bombards you with. The story is as shallow as they come. A kind of ‘Grease’ meets ‘Jailhouse Rock’ – but better than both put together. It is 1954. Communism is the big taboo. Wade “Cry-Baby” Walker is the coolest kid in town. He’s a rebel with a cause. A bad guy – though we kind of twig pretty quickly that he’s not really. Allison is the strait-laced rich girl who crosses to the wrong side of the tracks, drawn to his irresistible flame. Forbidden love and teen rebellion run rife while society moral values are turned upside down.

Adam Davidson plays the eponymous ‘Cry-Baby’. His name derives from the fact that he hasn’t cried since his parents died and he was orphaned at a young age (we learn the circumstances of his mum and dad’s tragic demise later). He is the leader of the ‘Drapes’, a misfit crew of baddies with whom the ‘Squares’ (to which Lulu-Mae Pears’ clean-cut Allison belongs) are in awe of, yet fear, in equal measure. Allison has been brought up by her grandmother, the (seemingly) upright Mrs Cordelia Vernon-Williams (Shirley Jameson). Surrounded by a magnificent kaleidoscope of colourful characters, all performed by an even more magnificent cast, the narrative roller-coasts through picnics, self-awareness days, song contests, arson attacks, prison, escape, freedom, atonement, justice, hard-won-love… right up to its preposterously upbeat finale. All the while our smiles get wider and wider, the laughs get stronger, and our toe-tapping turns into all-out body shaking. Feel-good is the understatement of the year where this show is concerned.

The score must have been one of the easiest to write. There’s irony in that statement, but a snippet of truth too. The entire set list is pure pastiche. The chord structures have been handed to Javerbaum and Schlesinger on a plate. Each song is instantly recognisable, yet bizarrely unique. It’s the lyrics that can take the credit – insanely clever, witty and poignant. The writers are masters of rhyming and scanning, and the performers deliver faultlessly. We are transported back to the fifties with the genre defining songs: the close-knit harmonies of ‘Squeaky Clean’, or the rockabilly rhythms of ‘Jukebox Jamboree’. Ballads such as ‘Misery’ and ‘I’m Infected’ tug at our teenage heartstrings and rekindle the memories of our misspent teenage years. The bar is high, but there still manage to be highlights. Shirley Jameson’s ‘Did Something Wrong Once’ threatens to bring the house down, as does Chad Saint Louis (who plays bad boy Dupree) every time he opens his mouth, and lungs. Davidson and Pears smash every number they sing. The ensemble players are, without exception, exceptional. Eleanor Walsh, in particular, as Lenora Frigid (don’t blame me – I didn’t name the characters), whose solo number ‘Screw Loose’ defines her perfectly. Bonkers? Yes! Virtuosic? Without doubt! And how can you fail to enjoy a musical that includes song titles such as ‘Girl Can I Kiss You with Tongues?’ Forget the phrase ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous’. This show combines the too. Ridiculous? Yes! Sublime? Without a doubt!

You don’t need a big stage to create a spectacle. Chris Whittaker’s choreography shifts the walls outwards, playing with scale and creating deceptively big routines. Meticulously period yet innovative, it encapsulates the show’s energy and sense of fun. Shades of Jerome Robbins in no way eclipse Whittaker’s own individuality. Like every element of the show, familiarity and peculiarity dance side by side.

The finale number – a rousing ‘Nothing Bad’ – sums it up. “Cry-Baby, The Musical” is two hours of star-spangled fun. You’d be a cry-baby to miss it (I know…!). All I can say is ‘be there… or be square’.

MARY PAGE MARLOWE

Old Vic

★★★★

“The supporting cast are uniformly excellent, providing light and shade where needed”

MARY PAGE MARLOWE

Old Vic

Reviewed on 8th October 2025

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Manuel Harlan

Previously reviewed at this venue:

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CRY-BABY, THE MUSICAL

Arcola Theatre

★★★★★

“Feel-good is the understatement of the year where this show is concerned”