Wilton’s Music Hall today announces its summer season, featuring collaborations with some of the UK’s most exciting production companies.
Bringing pointe shoes to the cobbled streets of London’s East End, Viviana Durante Company in association with Wilton’s present Seven Deadly Sins (8 – 18 May), a re-staging of Kenneth MacMillan’s extraordinary version of the Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht ‘ballet with songs’. Directed by internationally acclaimed ballet legend Viviana Durante, developed in close association with Deborah MacMillan, and starring provocative performer and Weimar specialist Meow Meow and Royal Ballet principal Laura Morera, as well as Melissa Hamilton and Thiago Saores.
From ballet to boxing, Troupe presents The Sweet Science of Bruising (5 – 29 June), set deep in the heart of Victorian London in a theatre where only the strongest survive. Fresh from a critically-acclaimed, sold-out run at Southwark Playhouse, the show takes audiences back to 1869, where four very different women are drawn into the dark underground world of female boxing.
Wilton’s institution OneTrackMinds returns (24 and 25 April, 28 and 31 May, 1 June, 11 July). VERYFINE presents the incredibly popular live storytelling event where a vibrant selection of people from all walks of life tell a thought-provoking story about a song that changed their life, in a brilliant and fascinating combination of Desert Island Discs, The Moth Radio and TED Talks.
Dead Poets Live (8 July), another celebration of the spoken word, also returns to Wilton’s, staging the poetry of the greats with an evening of great performers and surprises.
Wilton’s is bursting with musical talent this summer, with Steve Pretty On the Origin of the Pieces(16 July) taking audiences on a cultural voyage of discovery through musical evolution around the world, The Salts presenting Songs from the Sea (29 May), featuring maritime songs and much-loved classics, and, celebrating four years of sell-out performance at Wilton’s, your piano-playing host Tom Carradine returns for another uproarious evening of song with Carradine’s Cockney Sing-a-long (23 April).
Elsewhere, murder and ambition go hand in hand at Wilton’s in May, as The Faction present Mark Leipacher’s multi-award-nominated and critically-acclaimed production of Patricia Highsmith’s extraordinary psychological thriller The Talented Mr Ripley (21 – 25 May) in a new version. Then it’s improv time as The Society of Strange Summer Madness (30 May) present one night of midsummer madness with their eerie, edgy and entirely improvised show, whilst Dmytro Morykit returns once more to wow audiences with his incredible piano concert-cum-film screening Metropolis Live (27 April), as well as his new pieces Nevertheless: Precipitation and Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (26 April), which is sure to be a visual and aural spectacular.
Going back to its music hall variety roots, Wilton’s welcomes back the intergalactic Bourgeois & Maurice, this time with a whole host of the funniest, filthiest and most subversive performers London has to offer in Bourgeois & Maurice’s Supercreeps (2 – 6 July). Wilton’s also welcomes cabaret star Tricity Vogue, who fronts a swinging line-up of the very finest female jazz musicians for a magnificent extravaganza of cheeky cabaret and some saucy original numbers in Tricity Vogue’s All Girl Swing Band (24 July).
The best of London’s cabaret community come together for Cabaret vs Cancer’s Ashes to Ashes(18 July) to celebrate the genius of David Bowie, whilst Martin, Izzy & Friends (12 July) bring their unique and fun blend of musical genres and comedy, and Wilton’s favourite, the People’s Pensioner and the Queen Mother of our Hearts, Ida Barr brings her show Granarchist back to the East End stage (9 – 10 July).
It’s not just adults having all the fun though. There’s a colourful and varied children’s programme this season at Wilton’s, including Murray Lachlan Young’s brand-new family show The Mystery of the Raddlesham Mumps (16 – 17 April), a delightful fusion of storytelling, poetry, physical theatre and a touch of silliness and the enchanting The Tales of Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck(28 May – 1 June), a magical introduction to classical music through Beatrix Potter’s much-loved characters, who evoke nostalgia in adults and children alike.
