The pair embrace in a symbolic, fictional, out-of-time reconciliation that eerily marries the erotic, the religious and the political, for Henry is then mighty quick to co-opt the dead Becket for his own secular ends.By no means a great play, nor a great staging (the horseback scenes on huge vaulting horses are a terrible embarrassment) But it’s a piece that ripples with unofficial energy.. And the amply proportioned twosome are adorable, dancing cheek to cheek like a couple of dainty hippos. David Martin’s score and Hughes’s lyrics aren’t over-burdened with originality, but this high-jiving cast infuses the proceedings with such infectious energy that the deficiencies are easy to overlook. After several escalating encores, the audience floats out of the theatre on a cloud of bliss To 5 March (0870 060 6632). When Zarita and chums invade Jesse’s bedsit for a boisterously bopping birthday celebration, you can rest assured that Joyce will arrive on cue, righteously returning his clean laundry.The show regularly blows the roof off with its explosions of communal emotion in the ensemble numbers, backed by a superb quartet of musicians on sax, piano, double bass and percussion.

When Clive Rowe, as the lovelorn melon man, and Ruby Turner, as the fiercely independent Miss Mamie, let rip in the sensational “Did You Ever Hear the Blues?”, every hair on the back of your neck stands to attention. Will Jesse succeed in saving the money he needs to divorce his first wife and be able to resist the temptations of the witty Nicola Hughes’s implacably predatory Zarita, the bar’s bottle-blonde vamp? There aren’t many surprises on the bumpy road to rose-tinted happiness. But as he warms to his theme, the festivities crumple and the other men start sloping off in silent scepticism And Hughes keeps up the mischievous digs. Why is it, someone asks, that black people make the front page for rape and murder, but that no black person has ever been reported seeing a flying saucer? The show is wonderfully good-humoured but no sell-out.The bits between the brilliant numbers tell the rather schematic story of a likeable factory hand, Semple (the gangly, irresistibly charming Rhashan Stone), who yearns to wed his churchy, ever-so-proper girlfriend, Joyce (Allyson Brown) It’s a plot about the need for maturity.

Transferred to the West End from the Young Vic, Josette Bushell-Mingo’s production of Simply Heavenly is a joyous blast of a show and boasts a brighter assemblage of musical talent than you’ll find, at the moment, on any other London stage. But is this 1957 Broadway hit too feel-good for its own good, given its setting among the poor black habitu?of a Harlem bar? A sniffy visitor declares to the regulars, “You’re all stereotypes”, whereupon Boyd, who is a surrogate for the author, Langston Hughes, responds, “In the book I’m writing, they’re just folks.” Is this a case, though, of trying to have it both ways in order to appeal to a mixed audience?
While the piece certainly can’t be said to have smoothed the path for Malcolm X and Leroi Jones, it never lets you forget that its characters’ lives are controlled by the off-stage white folk. The resident blues guitar-player is roughed up by the cops for trying to play in the street Whites keep laying the hero, Jesse B Semple, off work. In one of the most pointed scenes, a draft card arrives for the youngest male, and Jesse launches into a visionary speech about how in the next war, the army is bound to be integrated.

Even when the lit squares vanish, you’re aware of dancers crossing lines no longer there. Touring to 30 October ( .uk). It gives Bird Song several false endings, and the last 15 minutes are the weakest.Bird Song is at its best when Davies works most closely with her collaborators. Ward’s patterns of colour and shadow keep changing, and change the dance. In one sequence, lines of light divide the dancers, cutting the stage in four. In one quarter, two dancers lie down, swinging their arms as if making snow angels In another, a group wait, then start to dance. The snow angels start a duet, huddled together in their space.