WHAT'S ON at CANAL CAFÉ THEATRE
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NEWSREVUE
Christmas edition NEWSREVUE at Canal Café Theatre 13 November - 20 December
It's the most wonderful time of the year here at Canal Café Theatre. Introducing the 2025 NewsRevue Christmas cast! Catch these fa-la-la-la-fabulous performers.
Current NewsRevue Team – Christmas 2025!
Director: Sophie Lynch-Furtado
Musical Director: Zara Harris
Cast: Dión Di Maio, Fraser Adams, Miles Blanch & Liberty Ashford
“Satirically brilliant” – The Guardian – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
“Preposterously talented” – Broadway Baby – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
“Utterly magnificent from start to finish” – LondonTheatre1 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
NewsRevue Season Pass!
For just £99, the pass is designed so that you can come and see each run of the year (7 standard runs, our Edinburgh Previews and our Christmas run), and make major savings compared to buying individual tickets!
For more information and to book, head to our
website
ONE CHRISTMAS CAROL
2 - 7 December
A powerful one-man tour de force, delivering Dickens’ timeless tale with heart, humour, and unforgettable clarity.
Experience the magic of Charles Dickens’ classic tale as you’ve never seen it before. One Christmas Carol is a spellbinding one-man tour de force, where acclaimed actor Gwithian Evans brings over 35 characters to life onstage in a masterful display of storytelling, passion, and precision.
From Ebenezer Scrooge to Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchitt, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, each character emerges vividly without a single costume change or elaborate set. Armed only with three mismatched chairs and the power of performance, Evans guides us on a deeply moving journey through themes of greed, regret, compassion, and ultimately—redemption.
This stripped-back, high-impact production dispenses with holiday excess in favor of something far more meaningful: the enduring heart of the story. With nothing to distract, the spotlight falls firmly on the message that has inspired generations.
SCALES OF THE UNEXPECTED
8 December
Comic musical mayhem – hilarious harmonies, literal choreography and that very special Christmas visitor!
Your favourite hunky* harmonists are back with their hilarious blend of madcap harmonies, literal choreography and NSFW jokes. There might even be an extra special guest who definitely won’t ruin Christmas…
*hunkiness not guaranteed
“Guaranteed to make you forget all your worries” – Heart FM
Performers: Ian Bass, Ian Brandon & Bryan Pilkington
10 & 17 December
An evening of silly songs and barbershop festive fun from an award-winning quartet.
This Christmas, Close Enough Barbershop Quartet brings you a special musical revue.
Close Enough Barbershop Quartet won Best Small Vocal Ensemble (’22, ’23 and ’24) in Buxton for their ‘witty repartee’ and ‘vocal acrobatics’.
Woody Allen (tenor), Thomas Eyre (lead), Tom Rogers (baritone) and Johnny Shipley (bass) have spent the last decade singing their brand of light-hearted and lyrical songs across the green and pleasant parts of the UK, with performances at the Big Feastival, and the Burford, Bath, Brighton and Buxton Festivals. They also toured distilleries in Islay, but they’re a bit hazy about that.
With sparkling festive numbers (from the likes of Perry Como) and some familiar favourites too (from Louis Armstrong and the Marx Brothers), this special Christmas offering promises to be a cracker!
Performers: Tom Rogers, Johnny Shipley, Edward Allen & Thomas Eyre
12 & 13 December
The UK’s most bang average blokes.
The boys are back in town.
After winning a ‘Best Comedy’ award at the Adelaide Fringe in a mammoth Australian tour, the UK’s most bang average blokes – Barry, Brian & Bean – are back tackling everything from patriotism to boners for Beckham. Exploring identity, patriotism and what it means to be ‘English’, all with a side of three small sausages.
Performers: Rachel Barry, Niamh O’Brien & Nina Levy
Written by The Barry, Brian & Bean Company
LOSE YOUR MARBLES
15 December
An evening of pure absurdist comedy with extreme ASMR practitioner Yogie Belle and friends.
Get ready to Lose Your Marbles at the Canal Café Theatre in Little Venice, Maida Vale!
Curated by the worlds #1 extreme ASMR practitioner and sound beautician, Yogie Belle, this vaudevillian extravaganza delivers a hand-picked line-up of alternative acts who’ll leave you wailing with joy like a dolphin that’s escaped from Leningrad zoo.
Unapologetically original absurd alternative comedy— from the front trenches of the fringe.
Lose Your Marbles celebrates the theatre of the weird, the wild, and the wonderfully bizarre in a collision of storytelling, performance, music and clowning in a kaleidoscope of unlimited limitless silliness.
What to Expect:
· Fringe artists who dare to be different.
· A chaotic night of pure comedic anarchy.
· The perfect evening for fans of boundary-pushing brilliance.
Grab your tickets before they’re gone—this show sells out fast! Book now—and get your *FREE sound shower on the house!
16 December
A cornucopia of Christmas classics.
Join us in a celebration of yuletide nostalgia – gorgeously glam, fun and festive.
La Petite Valise, the ever vivacious Ms Janey Gardiner and tickling the ivories musical maestro Mr Will Hall, give their very own and unique cabaret twist to all your favourite Christmas songs.
The intimate cabaret space of Canal Café Theatre provides the perfect setting to immerse yourself in pre Christmas loveliness, delicious, delightful and decadent measures of intoxicating Christmas spirit.
From Santa Baby and Rudolf The Red Nosed Reindeer to Felice Navidad, Fa La La La La, La La La La.
All that remains is for you to relax, indulge and enjoy!
Kawaii Christmas Cabaret
20 December 2pm
The cutest Christmas celebration in London!
Celebrate the festive season with the cutest show in London this year. Join our most magical host, the TikTok LIVE Idol, FAIRIE, along with other amazing performers. Energetic and adorable Jpop idols will take to the stage performing iconic Christmas tunes.
Dance and sing along, play games, win prizes, send Candy Cane grams to your loved ones, find magnificent merchandise, and… party!!! If you’re a fan of anime, kawaii fashion, maid cafés, Jpop idols, live music performances, and (most importantly) CHRISTMAS then this is the event for you! The perfect unique gift experience for a friend, or a brilliant festive trip out to London with the family. Learn more at @kawaiicabaret on Instagram (and please tag us in any photos or videos if you attend!).
THE HOLLY HELLMAN HOUR
7 January
Leopards and squirrels and trains, oh my! An hour of original and extremely unserious new sketch comedy from Holly Hellman and a group of people here of their own free will.
Interested in an hour of nuanced philosophical discussion on the following topics:
– Philosophy
– Culture
– War?
Then for god’s sake look elsewhere. We recommend Bake Off.
If, however, you’re looking for sketches occupying the upper right quadrant of a graph where the x axis is labelled ‘funny’, the y ‘dramatically incoherent’, and jokes as long-winded as that previous one there, then come along down to the Holly Hellman Hour.
From the mind of a 2025 Royal Court shortlisted Young Playwright, and the bodies of actors willing to do this for free, comes an hour of new sketch comedy. With subjects ranging from squirrels to trains to more trains (we got
a bit carried away with the trains) there’s something for everyone, as long as you like at least one of those things. Otherwise, again, Bake Off seems a safe bet.
WHITE ELEPHANTS
23 & 24 January
A small town station bears witness to a series of life changing interactions over 80 years.
1927: A young couple must contend with a decision that threatens the life that they know.
1967: Two strangers meet and strike up an unlikely friendship over a game of cards.
2007: A conversation between two locals demonstrates the risks of miscommunication.
Using Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ as a starting point, White Elephants’ is a new work both comic and melancholic. Musing on life in transit, fleeting interactions, and our capacity for love without duty, it explores how communication shapes our lives and impacts our choices.
Featuring an outstanding cast of performers, White Elephants combines drama and original live music to convey the tensions of small town life from the same station platform.
Looking for Wolverhampton’s Latin Quarter
26 January
A funny, touching and self-deprecating account of growing up in 1970s Wolverhampton.
Winner of the New York Radio Festivals Award 2025 for his collaboration
with Andrew McGibbon on their acclaimed Radio 4 play When Alan met
Ray, starring Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, Ian returns to Canal
Cafe with his sell out Edinburgh Fringe comedy play about growing up in
Wolverhampton in the 1970s.
He looks back at his deluded teenage years. Being a trainee butcher at
the Co-op is only a temporary situation before he reveals his true artistic
talents to the world. No careers officer or personnel manager is going to
stop him producing his rock album, publishing his poetry or mounting
his first exhibition. A world of awkward romantic relationships, Sex Pistols, Crossroads and Angel Delight.
BEAT
27 January
A genre-bending verbatim song cycle that explores what it means to be alive.
What if you didn’t need a beating heart to be alive? This is the question composer-saxophonist Lydia Kenny and librettist-singer Olivia Bell pose in BEAT, a bold new verbatim song cycle for saxophone, bass clarinet, harp,
vibraphone, voice and electronics. Blending electro-acoustic sound with a libretto stitched from first-hand interviews and a vast array of documentary sources, from medieval potions to last rites, BEAT probes the edges of life, death and the strange pulse that binds us together.
The work draws on an eclectic archive: from newspaper cuttings to NHS leaflets on leeches, Instagram callouts, overheard conversations on late-night trains and TED talks on frozen frogs. Kenny and Bell also weave in moving testimony from those who work in end of life care and sacred texts from across multiple faith traditions, exploring how different cultures mark the transition between presence and absence, body and spirit, heartbeat and silence.
Humorous, unsettling, funky and deeply human, BEAT revels in the slippery territory between the medical and the mystical, the scientific and the surreal. Through its collage of voices – living, remembered, archived and overheard – it unpicks our assumptions about what it means to be alive and how we reach for one another when the end comes close. This is documentary music-theatre with a pulse all of its own.
GELIN
31 January
When her overbearing mother arranges a marriage she doesn’t want, Aylin sends her best friend in her place – only for it to backfire when her future husband falls for the imposter.
Gelin is a modern adaptation of Ibrahim Şinasi’s Şair Evlenmesi, reimagined from the female characters’ perspective in present-day London.
Aylin, a young Turkish woman with a habit of telling tall tales, is blindsided when her overbearing mother, Sevim, arranges a marriage she doesn’t want. Instead of saying no, Aylin decides to send her bumbling British friend, Yaz, to meet Emre, the “perfect” groom, in her place, secretly convinced Yaz’s kookiness will scare him off. Only…Yaz and Emre actually click. But he still thinks she’s Aylin. As the lies pile up all the way to the wedding, Aylin is forced to confront why she tells so many stories to keep the peace – with her mother, her best friend and herself.
Inspired by the unheard voices in Şair Evlenmesi, Gelin explores the complexities women face across cultures, from family expectations to the fragile but powerful bonds of female friendships. Funny, charming and honest, Gelin asks whether a woman can be the ‘mükemmel gelin’ – the perfect bride – without lying about herself to make everyone happy.
