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With bare-faced cheek, this bardless take replaces all the original language with olden-days-effect prose – adding singing, dancing and a pointlessly starry cast

Director and former stage actor Timothy Scott Bogart is best known for having made Spinning Gold, a biopic of his father Neil Bogart, the New York music producer and founder of the 70s disco-era label Casablanca Records. Now he has confected a syrupy new musical take on Romeo and Juliet, with music by his brother Evan Kidd Bogart (who won a Grammy for his work on Beyoncé’s single Halo).

Bogart retells the basic story but with Shakespeare’s language all removed and replaced with olden-days-effect prose: a kind of bardless Baz Luhrmann. Ultimately – with what I do have to admit is some amiable cheek – Bogart contrives to do for this play what Nahum Tate did for King Lear. It’s really pretty bland, and with each turn...

MasterVoices raised more than 220,000 to fund the company's Artistic and Education Programs at its 2016 Spring Benefit which featured Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell and Nahum Tate starring Kelli O'Hara, Victoria Clark, Elliot Madore, Anna Christy, and Sarah Mesko, with a World Premiere prologue by Michael John Lachiusa, directed and choreographed by Doug Varone, and conducted by Ted Sperling at Le Parker Meridien and New York City Center on April 28, 2016. BroadwayWorld brings you look inside the big night below...

This likable if more than a trifle laboured Indian movie reworks King Lear in present-day London. A rich Hindu doctor long resident in Britain (the distinguished actor, director and former Rhodes scholar Girish Karnad) confronts late middle age and tries to put his life in order in five packed days between the death of his wife and her funeral. He has three daughters (one married to a British banker, the second a lesbian television journalist, the youngest an actress currently playing Cordelia in a student production and in love with a Muslim). His best friend and counsellor (Om Puri) is a sort of fool, and after a hectic night walking round a storm-racked city contemplating his problems, this Lear inevitably ends up on Hampstead Heath. Like Nahum Tate's 1681 version, Ms Datta's Lear has a happy ending.

William ShakespeareDramaPhilip French

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