A KICK IN THE STALLS

Merchant Ivory Soap

2012-02-08T14:19:00.007Z

Went to the London premiere last night of 'Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' starring La Dench, Smith, Wilton, Imrie

What a waste of the assembled vintage talent - it's trite, predictable and every line was anticipated by the audience - some of it audibly.

Dismally directed by John Madden it merges every conceivable Merchant-Ivory homage with 'Carry On Abroad' and brings nothing to the screen except a further opportunity for some pretty well-worn old hams to exercise their trademark schtick.

None does it more annoyingly than Bill Nighy retailing that goofy lanky twunt he's honed in countless torpid Britflics and too many adverts to shake a stick at.

Talking of adverts, there's an outrageous piece of product placement for the over sugared BritBiscuit 'Hobnob'. God knows how much United Biscuits/McVities' paid to have it described by Dame Judi and visually advertised by Dame Maggie but it's not nearly enough.

Every racist and patronising cliche is trotted out: revulsion at spicy food, Delhi belly, horror at traffic, Indian inability to organise, visible poverty, caste system, accents and cricket. Apart from the visuals of a fascinating country which may boost Jaipur/Udaipur tourism, this is an appalling piece of lazy and soapy made-for-TV standard filming.

Mad as a Hatter

2012-01-21T19:51:00.005Z

The Carroll Myth
Venue: Sweet Grassmarket
Where: Edinburgh
Date Reviewed: 20 August 2011
WOS Rating: 5 stars

There can scarcely be anyone whose childhood was untouched by Alice in Wonderland, the beloved and enduring Victorian creation of mathematician Charles Dodgson under his pen-name Lewis Carroll and modelled in part on the inquisitive mind of the daughter of his college Dean, Henry Liddell.

Academics and psychologists have mined the text and contemporary diaries for rival theories about Carroll’s fixation with Alice, and analysed his own mind conflicted between his career as a logician and vivid imaginings of the storybook characters with which he entertained her.

Superbly realised in Nathan Shreeve’s original and dynamic script, the gentle Dodgson is besieged by the characters from the story. How they overlap with the personalities in his real life and unravel his mind is entirely plausible in Joshua Ogle’s meticulously graduated performance: Alice’s overbearing mother becomes the Red Queen, a pair of quarrelsome gardeners in the Liddell household inform Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

The sinister atmospherics of the production are brilliantly nuanced through original music and the sinuous linkages of the Cheshire Cat, played by an enthralling trio of physical actors. Fine characterisations too in the performances of Charlie Rendell as Liddell and the realistically mad Hatter, and a gorgeously creepy and coquettish Sarah-Miles-in-the-making Alice from Eleri Jones, the very embodiment of ‘Contrariwise’.

- Johnny Fox

The Granny Awards

2012-01-21T19:45:00.002Z

ED FRINGE 2011: Alzheimer’s The Musical : A Night to Remember
Gilded Ballroom Teviot
Written by : Maureen Sherlock

Reviewer: Johnny Fox

The Public Reviews Rating: 3.5 stars

What did I go and see yesterday? Is this Glasgow? Are you my sister? Have I had my pills?

Perhaps Alzheimer’s is setting in already because I know from the damp patch in my pants I laughed a lot yesterday afternoon, but can’t fully recall what at.

Three Australian actresses portray elderly ladies in the ‘Jurassic Park’ retirement home in Melbourne. The slight joke gives a clue to what’s to come: lots of obvious gags about incontinence, failing eyesight, forgotten sex, deafness and hip replacements … and it’s true some of the jokes are as whiskered as the residents and the dialogue needs the over-repeated “dear” plucking from it like white hairs on the old girls’ chins, but an almost sell-out crowd rocked with laughter.

Sharpened up with a bit more topicality, this could become a regular Fringe favourite.

There are some hilarious moments, the best of which is the sex education balloon routine. A sketch about grandma giving her granddaughter a Mickey Mouse watch is both funny and touching, but the best gag of the afternoon comes in the ballroom dancing class and you’ll certainly remember that.

Off Broadway. Way Off.

2012-01-21T19:36:00.010Z

Broadway Swings
Venue: Pleasance Courtyard
Where: Edinburgh
Date Reviewed: 19 August 2011
WOS Rating: 2 stars

Interviewed for Edinburgh-Festivals.com, former Fest director Paul Gudgin trails his big band show by identifying his favourite number as "a fantastic version of 'Don't Rain On My Parade' from Sweet Charity".

That he didn’t appear to know it comes from Funny Girl seemed exemplary of the many cock-ups in this thrown-together one-night stand.

The A4-photocopied “Razz Big Band” labels stuck onto the music stands suggests a random assemblage of session musos most of whom peer closely at the dots throughout rather than relaxing into confident jazz improvisations. And there were some cataclysmic mistakes, particularly among the brass section whose multiple casualties littered the car-crash near the end of a West Side Story medley.

The chorus of what looked like local amateurs was under-rehearsed and tragically choreographed, although several of them sang extremely well in the Hairspray finale.

The unannounced soloists varied from a confident and polished delivery of “Mack the Knife” to two musically excellent divas, one tall and blonde and one Bassey statuesque who sang brilliantly but might just take a closer look at the lyrics, which caused some mistiming issues in Roxie’s big number from Chicago and, unforgiveably, "Over the Rainbow".

- Johnny Fox

Sweat, Sweat, Sweating on Heaven's Door

2012-01-21T19:29:00.004Z

ED FRINGE 2011: Liberace: Live in Heaven
Assembly George Square

Written and directed by: Julian Woolford
Musical Director: Allan Rogers
Lighting Design: Martin Nicholas

The Public Reviews Rating: 4.0 Stars

Reviewer: Johnny Fox

This is a clever construct: at the pearly gates, the “world’s highest paid entertainer” meets his inquisitors in St Peter (voiced by Stephen Fry) and God (Victoria Wood – “I made the world in six days and on the seventh I baked a fruit cake”) before an audience of angels decides his ultimate destination.

Smartly realised in Julian Woolford’s well-researched script, the casting of seventies’ talent show pianist Bobby Crush is a stroke of genius. ‘Stroke’ may be uncomfortably close to the truth: Crush looks terrific as Liberace, having morphed from sweet-faced Opportunity Knocks winner to convincingly sweating grotesque, but you might worry for his own cholesterol count.

His acting, though, has only two settings: accurately gargling his vowels to ape Lee’s camp delivery, and ‘serious’ which he deploys for the reflective passages about childhood and sexual confessions,. The wig and makeup transform him perfectly into the character, but when he copies Liberace’s trademark smile, his eyes disappear and some engagement with the audience is lost.

His competence at the keyboard is unrivalled, and the way in which he adopts Liberace’s style of playing is entirely authentic. However, the anachronistic references to Amy Winehouse and Michael Jackson don’t really work and the excessive reverb on the sound desk and the imbalance between piano and backing track need to be urgently addressed.

'Shooting' Stars

2012-01-21T19:19:00.006Z

Pretty Little Panic
Venue: Pleasance Dome
Where: Edinburgh
Date Reviewed: 20 August 2011
WOS Rating: 5 Stars

The only reason I acceded to my headmaster’s arm-twisting to attempt the Cambridge entrance exam was that I might have stood a chance of getting into the Footlights. Over its many years, the Footlights have developed a well-earned rep as a crucible of original and brilliant comedic talent from Monty Python via Fry and Laurie to The Inbetweeners - and now most latterly incarnated in the class of 2011’s Edinburgh offering Pretty Little Panic.

The barrel-vaulted auditorium and black set offer no clues to the content. Four guys in white shirts and black jeans with big shoes to fill. No pressure, then.

The genius of Pretty Little Panic is the way in which the last line of a sketch sparks the first of the next, and the pace never drops. This would be individous if all you remembered was the technique, but Chain Gang, Liberal Parents, and the Truth Spoon sketches ensure you’ll carry away much more from this tight and almost impeccably performed show.

It’s always fun to guess which of a Footlights cast could have a stage career beyond Uni: Adam Lawrence’s rubber-legged physicality might make him a good cover for Lee Evans, but it’s Ben Ashenden who stands out with potential for a combined stand-up, acting and car insurance career in the mould of Chris Addison.

There’s a long tradition of Edinburgh Fringe reviewers spunking stars up the wall in order to be bylined on the posters – but what the hell, this is so far beyond four that as long as you spell my name right, it’s a definite five.

- Johnny Fox

Swann Upmanship

2012-01-21T19:14:00.003Z

ED FRINGE 2011: Flanders and Swann – Pleasance Courtyard
Reviewer: Johnny Fox

The Public Reviews Rating: 4.5 stars

Michael Flanders and Donald Swann were songwriters and cabaret artistes who debuted in the 1950s and attracted the same kind of polite following as Joyce Grenfell for whom they also wrote some material.

As a sort of Kit and the Widow of the post-war parlour song, their pairing is almost perfect: Tim FitzHigham is a patrician cross between Richard Stilgoe and Boris Johnson and expertly mimics Flanders’ booming baritone, and Duncan Walsh-Atkins neatly pins Swann’s diffidence masking exceptional brilliance on the keyboard.

I wrote in my notes that this was a “60+” audience, meaning that numerically they nearly filled the seats, but it’s pretty much a demographic too.

Joyce Grenfell once wrote that her wartime audiences loved nothing more than to sing ‘old songs together, very slowly’ and when FitzHigham embarks on the bestiary of animal numbers including “The Elephant” “The Hippopotamus” and “I’m A Gnu” the audience joins in and the whiff of the twilight home is palpable.

His vocal energy is uncontainable, he punctuates many songs by leaping into the air at the start of the chorus but the uniqueness of Flanders and Swann was that they were both chair-bound: Swann behind his keyboard and Flanders with polio. I don’t think the show would be diminished if he tried the act in a wheelchair.

The highpoint of their continually delightful absurdity is when FitzHigham strips the tubular steel music stand of its cover, inserts hosepipe and funnel and plays the Rondo from Mozart’s Horn Concerto No 4 in E-flat Major during which he turns an acute shade of puce not often seen outside a Zandra Rhodes wallpaper book. Inspired.

No 'bang', flaccid 'kok'

2012-01-21T19:04:00.004Z

Lady Boys of Bangkok: Fur Coats and French Knickers Tour
Meadows Theatre Big Top

Producer: Carol Gandey
Director: Phillip Gandey

Reviewer: Johnny Fox

The Public Reviews Rating: 1.5 stars

The noble tradition of the transsexual ‘katoey’ features in Thai culture, art and literature and stretches back centuries.

The parading of transexuals in a circus tent is an exploitative Western phenomenon in the ‘freak show’ tradition and stretches credulity that it persists in the 21st century.

It seems almost inappropriate to include Lady Boys of Bangkok among in the Edinburgh Festival reviews because its audience seemed so different from other EdFest and Fringe: party tables of women on an office outing, a kind of sub-hen night midweek jolly fuelled by blush Zinfandel and a chance to sing along to familiar chav anthems like Shania Twain’s “Feel Like A Woman” or “Y.M.C.A.” here bizarrely mimed by a four-man tribute to the six-man Village People.

The costumes are colourful although not very revealing, and with the help of hormones the dancers have hairless bodies and convincing breasts but the music’s all cover versions of pop hits and the lip-synching is downright appalling.

The performers look glazed and mechanical as you might expect on a 72 gig tour which drags them from Dundee to Truro between August and November and their choreography is as basic and dated as a BBC Seaside Special from 1985.

There is comedy but reduced to the crudest level of mime that could be perceived by partially sighted non-English-speaking customers a hundred feet back in the audience. And featuring a dwarf as a butt of the jokes.

It’s also Edinburgh’s most aggressively security-screened venue, with all bags searched for contraband including soft drinks. This seems less for safety than to ensure you purchase only their own high-priced offerings within the tent.

Commercial. Tacky. Trite. Not very Edinburgh at all.

Reich on Target

2012-01-21T18:55:00.002Z

Hitler! The Musical
Venue: Gryphon Venues at the Point Hotel
Where: Edinburgh
Date Reviewed: 18 August 2011
WOS Rating: 5 stars

This is the show which might as easily have been titled Fringetime for Hitler: if only Max Biyalistock had thought to do it with an all-female cast.

Apart from one guy who actually plays Hitler’s mum, it’s an all-girl band who deliver this ‘gay romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden’ and suggest his conquest of Europe was a secondary career choice after failing to get into art school.

The songs raid every musical theatre genre including the obligatory-in-Edinburgh-student-show rap, but it’s all done to such a high standard that the fact that the parodies are driven home with the firmness of the inflatable hammer that constantly whacks the Jewish girl in the show’s best running gag, is as happily disregarded by the audience as any pretence at political correctness.

The singing’s great and the movement as sharply coordinated as you’d expect from Trinity Laban students, and the Third Reich rises and falls in a wildly anachronistic and irreverent hour.

It’s a four star show, but I’m adding a special sew-on yellow one for Rachel the token Jew who carries the joke right through to the last line.

- Johnny Fox

No Music? Tell Me It's Not True ...

2012-01-21T18:46:00.003Z

Blood Brothers
Venue: C venues - C too
Where: Edinburgh
Date Reviewed: 16 August 2011
WOS Rating: 4 Stars

Because the musical’s been a fixture in the West End for over 25 years, initially starring Barbara Dickson but subsequently sheltering any number of pop retirees including Spice Girl Mel C, most of the Nolan Sisters and X-Factor’s Niki Evans, it’s interesting to remember that Blood Brothers started life as a school play written by Willy Russell for Fazakerley Comprehensive in 1981.

Stripped of its music, you might wonder what’s left and how the pathos of a pair of separated twins who later meet as friends across a Liverpudlian class divide will play out unsupported by the anthemic score.

Surprisingly well, in the Lincoln student production.

The central character of cleaner Mrs Johnstone and her boss Mrs Lyons, although well-acted, become secondary to the development of their sons whose performances are totally convincing, particularly the gradual transition of ‘posh’ Edward from awkward schoolboy to uncomprehending businessman. It’s a characterisation rich in detail and both he and the ‘street’ brother Mickey strive successfully to keep Russell’s crude polemical view of class difference within the bounds of realism.

The streets of Liverpool are well-realised through simple props like dustbins, ladders and an old door, and the background is provided by a trio of wryly watchful urchins whose attentive expressions and subtle childlike reactions are a model for all ensemble actors.

Cast lists were unavailable but high praise also for the actress playing Linda, the best-friend/girlfriend who inherits the lonely burden of disenfranchised motherhood on a tough estate.

- Johnny Fox

Watered Down Oxford Blues

2012-01-21T18:42:00.001Z

ED FRINGE 2011: Out of the Blue – Pleasance Courtyard
Musical Director: Alexei Kalveks

Reviewer: Johnny Fox

The Public Reviews Rating: 4.0 stars

Has appearance on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ gone to their heads? Have the self-styled ‘Kings of this genre’ lost their crown?

Oxford University’s Out of the Blue have been an Edinburgh fixture since 2005 and their a capella stylings of everything from 80s synthpop to Lady Gaga a solid “must-see” demanding ever larger venues.

There’s no doubt they have a following: drawing one of Edinburgh’s most varied audiences from pensioners to teens and a surprisingly large contingent of overseas visitors. Annoyingly there’s an equally large contingent of teenage girls filming the show on their mobiles and this, and the constant hiss of the air-conditioning in the Pleasance venue make it harder to be totally engaged with this year’s show.

There are other changes: the turnover this year has been particularly high and 11 of the guys are new to the 15-man troupe: they still perform in smart suits, shirts and socks but the energetic choreography seems more random and less strictly patterned than in previous years. Most significantly, they’ve abandoned microphones in favour of an all-acoustic set which makes for balancing difficulties especially in the quieter pieces, and in a direct comparison with 2010 the diction of the Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby’ was noticeably muddier.

Nonetheless, the audience roared its approval for a rich mix of sounds from Jason Derülo’s punchy ‘In My Head’ to a beautifully contrasted pairing of ‘Uptown Girl’ and ‘Always a Woman to Me’ highlighting OOTB’s exceptional affinity with the Long Island sound of Billy Joel.

A crowd-pleasing show, for sure, but a crowd that came not just ready to be pleased but lying on its back with its legs in the air and waiting to be tickled.

Shite Charity

2012-01-21T18:32:00.005Z

Sweet Charity by 'Northern Theatre Company' (actually a random amateur bunch from Hull)
Venue: C venues - C
Where: Edinburgh
Date Reviewed: 15 August 2011
WOS Rating: 1 star (but only because 0 stars isn't permissible)

The idea that the Neil Simon-scripted 60's musical and Shirley MacLaine vehicle in which taxi dancer Charity Hope Valentine’s cheerful optimism survives all misfortunes should be transposed to a gay bar and bath-house on the Lower East Side is intriguing.

Realistically, that’s the only good thing about this show.

The opening “Big Spender” is set in a convincingly dirty urinal and features drag queens changing into leather for a fetish night, but it’s quickly apparent that these performers don’t have a singing or acting bone in their bodies and what’s left is an embarrassing hour during which the audience is largely agape at the awfulness of the entire project.

Cast and credits were unavailable, but the standard is universally dire, none more so than Charity’s dashing film-star Latin lover, played here as a lardy clod whose hair overhangs his expressionless face, or his two best friends who collectively crucify “Dream Your Dream” at least twice during the evening.

The cast are not helped by the staging (the urinals remain in view throughout), the accompaniment wherein Cy Coleman‘s glorious tunes are played inaccurately and without regard to variation of tempo or dynamics on a wheezingly emphysemic synthesizer, or by choreography so predictably conceived and inexpertly performed you have to watch it through your fingers.

There is nudity and simulated sex but tastelessly inappropriate and flabbily acted such that they lend new meaning to the American phrase ‘bad ass’.

Titipu Big Band

2012-01-21T18:28:00.004Z

The Hot Mikado
reviewed for www.whatsonstage.com
4 stars

Few things are more indestructible than Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. It’s been set in so many different times and places that Jonathan Miller’s flapperish twenties’ mash-up for ENO is seen as as much of a ‘classic’ as the original.

The 1986 score of The Hot Mikado in which G&S got souped up by Rob Bowman pitched it into the big band era, and a broad range of jazz and blues stylings although this production focuses on swing and a neatly Americanised setting.

It’s a vigorous, pacy and cleverly compacted production: colourful, witty, full of boisterous choreography smartly integrated into the overall direction by Maddy Mutch. The five-piece band is simply outstanding, and driven by a first-rate MD in Chris Guard. Only trouble is that they’re so good that the excellent voices in the cast can’t always be heard over the music, and the show would be more nearly perfect if the principals were miked.

This is particularly unfortunate because the best voices really are worth hearing: Sarah Hollinshead’s wonderful angry contralto so perfectly frames Katisha, and the sharp and soaring tones of Adele Pope contrast beautifully with her chavvy characterization of Pitti-Sing who thereby overshadows Hannah Howie’s rather toughened Yum-Yum.

Among the men, Douglas Gibbs is a superb anchorman as 'Lord High Everything Else' Pooh-Ba, Alex Wingfield may be the first ever Nanki-Poo to successfully rock a Primark wifebeater vest and fatigues, and Charlie Warner’s Lord High Executioner Ko-Ko is a masterly combination of Gilbertian comedy and Gok Wan.

Still fresh after 40 years

2011-08-22T15:14:00.003+01:00

Review of FRESHER THE MUSICAL
at Edinburgh Fringe

Music and Lyrics: Mark Aspinall
Director: Guy Unsworth
Musical Director: Tom Curran

The Public Reviews Rating: 3.5 stars

It’s refreshing to see how Fresher’s Week hasn’t changed over the years. The insecurities over how to fit in, find your feet, seem cool and get laid could as easily have been set in the History Man era as today. Five students arrive in their allocated shared flat and through a series of drinking games and party nights discover, and expose, each other’s frailties.

The cast of young professionals and drama students are excellent, but the characters thinly drawn: the lads are variously post-Inbetweeners nerdish, nebbish or c*ntstruck and the girls too baldly contrasted pretentious Sloane and timid virgin. Whilst each actor inhabits the stereotype convincingly and with tremendous vocal ability, only Grace Eccleson‘s performance as Hayley finds emotional warmth and credibility.

As a project, Fresher The Musical has become a vigorously extended franchise with multiple productions and actively promoted performing rights. Like almost all novice musicals, its influences derive exclusively from ‘Rent’ and whilst the sub-Jonathan Larson pop-rock score is enjoyable within the theatre, the musical direction is good and the lyrics are sharp, there isn’t a take-away song or one you could recall even an hour later.

The cast sing enthusiastically “There’s More To Me Than This”, except there isn’t.

The obvious plot is monothematic and if the show’s designed to stretch beyond an Edinburgh hour might improve if the songs were harnessed to a more multi-dimensional script along the lines of Dean Craig’s tight first-year sitcom Off The Hook or the more surreal Campus devised by the Smack The Pony team.

They used to say about The Mousetrap that it didn’t matter if it wasn’t brilliant because there were enough new theatregoers born each day to keep it going for ever. With the Government’s aim for 50% of 18-year olds to get a student loan, maybe the same applies to Fresher.

Review written for The Public Reviews

Moderately Unbearable

2011-08-22T15:09:00.003+01:00

Review of THE UNBEARABLE SH*TENESS OF BEING
at Edinburgh Fringe
Whatsonstage rating: 2 stars

Whilst deserving some sort of award for the most imaginative Fringe title, the show doesn’t live up to expectations. Whilst it isn’t “quite” unbearable and it isn’t “quite” shite, it came close enough for some punters to leave part-way through which is pretty condemnatory for a 35-minute piece.

Performed almost entirely by one lightly perspiring man in a boiler suit with interactive video, poetry reading, and dialogue rich in non-sequiturs – at one point he says, "if I were to explain this for 47 squllion years, you wouldn’t understand it" – and most of the audience nodded assent.

Despite the opacity of the concept, there are songs, poems and a determined rap about President Mitterrand, but your engagement is not helped by Roberts’ awkward microphone technique or the fact he reads eyes-down from the script, although I did like the ironic reworking of the Grimm's fairy tale as The Elves and the Psychotherapist.

Because of the disjunct of mashed ideas, you may come out of it with a smile raised or a memory jogged, but that feels like a too random result.

This review written for Whatsonstage.com

Into Edinburgh's Woods

2011-08-22T15:03:00.004+01:00

Review of INTO THE WOODS at Edinburgh Fringe
TPR score: 4.0 stars

If ever a musical were designed to set traps for amateurs, it’s ‘Into The Woods’. The deceptively accessible ‘pantomime’ themes of Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood disguise Sondheim’s disjunctive and difficult score full of pitfalls for the musically unwary.

Opera di Nepotist stands out for its bravery: formed in 2009 to produce Sweeney Todd, the company actively embraces people without theatre experience or ability to read music which makes its well-judged and wholly engaging production of Into the Woods all the more triumphant.

As ROH Covent Garden proved in a 2007 Linbury studio version, ‘Woods’ shrinks well to a chamber format if the production values, colourful costumes and well-crafted props are of an exceptionally high standard as they are here. Copyright restrictions mean it couldn’t be trimmed to an Edinburgh-friendly hour, but even at 2 hours 20 with no interval it kept all the audience (except one small-bladdered seven-year-old) gripped throughout.

Some of the ‘one midight gone’ routines could be taken at a faster pace, but the five-piece band drove through the score at a lick, with some exceptionally well-rendered trumpet and string work.

Cast and credits were not available, but the stand-out voices belonged to Cinderella and her Prince, and good characterisations also from the Wolf/Prince/Steward, the Witch and the Baker’s Wife – but the most engaging single performance was Jack (of Beanstalk fame) who seemed best to capture both the spirit and the mockery of the pantomime format as well as the moral dilemmas explored through his character. Topically, when he raids the giant’s home for money, a harp and a fowl that lays golden eggs: is that the action of a boyish hero to support his family and friends, or looting?

This review written for The Public Reviews

'Card' Tricks

2011-08-22T14:57:00.003+01:00

Review of THE CARD at Edinburgh Fringe
Whatsonstage.com rating: 3 stars

Forty-year old ‘forgotten’ musicals are tough to revive but the Keith Waterhouse/Willis Hall script and Tony Hatch score come up fresh and alive in Norfolk Youth Theatre’s enterprising and imaginative production of The Card.

With the luxury of a 25-strong unafraid and well-focused cast and a fine saxophone-led band, it tells the story of Denry Machin, an ambitious youngster in the mould of Waterhouse’s own Billy Liar who rises to fame and fortune in his small Potteries town through wily charm and steely determination.

Fraser Davidson makes Denry’s journey a confident arc of discovery from schoolboy to prosperous businessman, and carries the songs with a well-supported light tenor and naturalistic performance. Edward Bartram is every bit as promising as his best mate Parsloe, Jess Davidson pulls off the complex role of machinating Ruth Earp with class, and Charley Nicol shows great comic potential as Denry’s washerwoman mother whose sardonic commentary punctuates most of the scenes.

Although amateur, all the voices are free from the karaoke desperation of teenage singers and have been well-coached in musical theatre delivery by director Adrian Connell. In the ensemble numbers the sound is strong and well-blended, and the diction excellent. The many scene changes are slickly accomplished and the show moves at a great pace.

There are two versions of this musical, and whereas this one benefits from some sharpened lyrics from Betty Blue Eyes’ Anthony Drewe, the music’s a touch repetitive and the best songs from the original have been excised. That said, this production is a credit to the company and further consolidates their Edinburgh reputation.

This review written for Whatsonstage.com

Pluckers

2011-08-08T09:05:00.004+01:00

Review of The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain
4.5 stars
written for The Public Reviews

On the night an angry mob set fire to police cars and an Aldi supermarket in Tottenham it seemed wholly appropriate that the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain should not just lead in to its set with the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’ but actively encourage the entire Richmond audience to sing along with such enthusiasm.

Of course if the Rocky Mountain campfire modulations of the Ukes’ version had been the inspiration behind a Tottenham disturbance, the hoodies might have been washing the police cars and taking their empty petrol bottles back to Aldi since it’s such a calming and elegant version of the song which as well as demonstrating their extraordinarily adaptable technique also shows up the real musicality of Pistols John Lydon and Glen Matlock who composed it.

The other thing to say about the Ukes is that theirs is an act to which you really can bring the whole family, and many did – a completely full house featured many nuclear groups of mum, dad and a couple of teenagers all of whom seemed to get something enjoyable from the show.

They’re an eight-piece band but since they’ve been together 26 years they must by now have paid holidays and a pension scheme because only seven made an appearance at Richmond. Their self-deprecating humour and deadpan delivery have become a trademark and adored by their many fans, but to the uninitiated this can feel rather like all your secondary school teachers coming together with a certain amount of reticence to perform for an end of term concert.

Because most of their orchestrations deliberately contrast with the music itself, each piece becomes a ‘name that tune’ session as the audience sighs or applauds with appreciation when it finally recognizes the song. Despite vociferous enthusiasm for all the material, there were moments of repetitiveness during which we amused ourselves by identifying the ‘lookalikes’ in the orchestra – including John Major, David Tennant, Joan Bakewell and Jo Brand, plus a massive bonus in the leader George Hinchliffe who is a dead ringer for former German Chancellor Willy Brandt, although for sure the Chancellor never impersonated Kate Bush as remarkably as George.

The individual vocals are variable, the men generally better than the women, but standout hits were a folky version of Wheatus’ Teenage Dirtbag, the theme tune to ‘Shaft’ and an outstanding 32-bar Limehouse Blues taken at the breakneck speed of duelling gypsy violins.

The group fights shy of paying homage to popular ukulele players like George Formby or Tiny Tim, but in their storming finale transformed Formby’s most popular song into a mournfully Russian, balalaika-orchestral, authentically Cossack dance which must henceforward be known as ‘Lenin on a Lamp-post’.

Comedy-SLASH-Musical. Literally.

2011-08-06T12:32:00.004+01:00

review of Slay It With Music
written for The Public Reviews
3 stars

Would Bette Davis be seen dead on the Isle of Dogs? Could the East India Dock Road ever be confused with Sunset Boulevard? Only in the curious conjunction of Michael Colby’s comedy thriller musical with the slightly creepy, faintly gothic converted chapel which is ‘The Space’ theatre in London’s Docklands.

The two combine in an oddly atmospheric evening of schlock and parody in which a once-great film star is reduced to making a slasher picture to make ends meet, via a remarkably high body count inside her own mansion. In a mash-up of Sunset Boulevard, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and Psycho, Colby’s piece is a broad-brush portrait of two feuding actresses and the men who come, and die, between them.

As such it’s less well-scripted than, say, ‘Bette and Joan’ although there are some good laugh-out-loud one-liners,and the songs are momentarily catchy if a bit declamatory. Even the score of Sunset wouldn’t be best-served by one piano in a church hall acoustic, but a future revival might benefit from more varied orchestrations and a small band.

There’s an extractable number (I mean one which could be sung outside the context of the show) in the second act when Andrea Miller in a strong and attacking performance as the reclusive star Enid Beaucoup sings about ‘My Second Chance’ and introduces real pathos and warmth of feeling into what’s otherwise written as something of a cartoon figure.

The supporting cast inhabit their oddball characters with enthusiasm, Ellen Verenieks is effective as Enid’s TV-star sister in a well measured transition from strident to vulnerable across the evening, Helen Kelly’s powerful voice and Brooklyn accent makes the audience identify with tour guide Rosemarie and genuinely sorry when she becomes another body in a trunk.

For a low-budget production, the effects are surprisingly good, with a busy lighting plot and at least one genuine scream from an audience member at the dispatch of a victim.

The production’s staged in a diamond-shaped round, but played quite definitely toward the entrance doors which makes for the loss of some of the lyrics, particularly when the cast are dancing or killing someone, which is a lot of the time.

Bewitched, Bothered but also a bit blah

2011-07-29T13:21:00.013+01:00

Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered ... a celebration of the works of Rodgers and Hart

written for The Public Reviews - 3 stars

By the time he was my age, Lorenz Hart had been dead ten years and deprived Richard Rodgers of what many musical theatre aficionadoes think was his finest collaborating lyricist. In their twenty year partnership, they created 26 musicals based on a solid belief in the integration of libretto, lyrics and music .

This makes it harder to excise songs from their contexts but Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered is a good example of the songbook show, prettily staged and the material smartly selected. Editor of Cabaret Scenes magazine Harold Sanditon suggested in the bar that when songs were presented like this you look for more in the way of interpretation, and may not find it here.

Angular, striking, glamorous Valerie Cutko – possibly the possessor of the last trademark beehive in musical London now that Amy’s gone and Mari Wilson has had a bob – opens with My Friend The Night in an expressive rendition of the first of many rarely-performed songs cut from films or from lesser-known musicals.

They’re intertwined with famous standards, and some glass-sharp comic numbers like Laura Armstrong’s To Keep My Love Alive or her excellently-pointed Way Out West … on West End Avenue which show the brilliance of Hart’s internal rhymes and lyric placement. Armstrong also displays one of the most beautiful cadences in the Rodgers canon with He Was Too Good To Me, and blends perfectly with Katie Kerr in Like A Ship Without A Sail.

The harmonies are delicious, and the piano accompaniment by MD David Harvey is excellent but some of the vocal entrances and cutoffs are mistimed.

The real treat is Stephen Ashfield, cruising elegantly through a succession of ballads including a charming Isn’t It Romantic, and partnering Cutko in a moving segue of There’s A Small Hotel and My Romance which seemed to have a tenderly unspoken sub-plot of a failed affair as Cutko’s voice tailed away to silence and Ashfield left the stage.

In an act of vanity casting, director Tim McArthur gives himself Johnny One Note, My Funny Valentine and a tap number, but as Jennifer Reischel pointed out in ‘The Stage’: as a singer, he makes a better director.

It was encouraging to see Jermyn Street so full but post-Ghost it also seems fair to question how much longer inexpensively-staged and heavily-nostalgic musical theatre will attract an audience often referred to as “the greys and the gays”.

The material may be immortal, but this style of production isn’t.

Four TImes Knightly

2011-07-27T19:25:00.003+01:00

Review of Four Nights in Knaresborough written for www.remotegoat.co.uk 4 stars

"Thomas à Becket was a fuckwit. Discuss." Wouldn't it be great to open a GSCE History paper and see that? It makes an equally good starting point for Paul Webb's historical comic psychodrama - if that's a genre - at Southwark Playhouse.

Four Nights in Knaresborough follows the conspirators in Becket's murder as they flee adverse 'public opinion' - which travels at only the speed of a rider on horseback and takes nearly a year to catch up with them - to their hideout in a draughty Yorkshire castle. Without support from the King, Henry's men are left to contemplate their motives, their paranoia and their sexuality in an intensely-acted and ultimately enjoyable production.

It's played with anachronistic, idiomatic dialogue which is initially unnerving but works well to convey the machismo motivations to a modern audience. I also liked the incidental music: rock, metal and thrash - and was that really a bit of The Stranglers?

Rather like the dugout occupants in Journey's End, the four Knights have disparate conflicting characters: the know-it-all, the peacemaker, the laddish upstart and the maverick, brothers in arms on the surface but sexually urgent and combative underneath.

The audience seemed to side immediately with Tom Greaves' priapic Brito, the young Estuarian upstart whose chippy spirit unnerves the broodingly undpredictable Fitz played fiercely by Alex Hughes in an initially psychotic performance which gives the piece genuine pathos when he talks about his lost son. The more heartfelt writing in this section late in the piece feels like an antidote to the broader comedy which focuses on some (very good) cock and turd jokes.

As the Blair-like apologist for the political actions, David Sturzaker illuminated de Traci's struggle between duty and devotion, and public and private feelings, in an intense and intelligently centred performance.

The feelings of loneliness and despair are well-realised through Martin Thomas' shadowy design, and whilst the direction by Seb Billings gives clarity to the characterizations, the piece feels a fraction overlong.

Ghost, with a chance ...

2011-07-25T16:14:00.007+01:00

First thing to say about Ghost is it’s a great night out.

From its filmic start, it looks and feels crafted for a new breed of theatregoer – cleverly pitched to attract the X-Factor crowd.  The set by Jon Driscoll is three full walls of LED and the New York screetscapes zip by with energy and class.  The onstage illusions by Paul Kieve are deft and fast: he really does walk through that door, and the well-remembered set-pieces from the movie like the fight in the alley, the run through the subway train and the heavenly transfigurations are brilliantly realised although when the strobes focus on the audience the show’s dazzling in more ways than one.

Baftas all round for set, lighting and special effects, no question.  But the music and lyrics and the central performances?  Dave (Eurythmics) Stewart has rejected Betty Blue Eyes-pastiche in favour of an original pop-rock score, but the lyrics are occasionally swallowed by the reverberant sound design and the only tune you come out humming is the one you hummed on the way in, Unchained Melody.

In his wife-beater vest, balconied pectorals and rigger boots, Richard Fleeshman* looks more hustler than Wall Street banker and whilst the choreography requires him to do little more than stand around feigning anger or disbelief most of the time, his is a musically accomplished performance for a 22-year old.

We found Caissie Levy in the Demi Moore role a bit blond and bland although other critics we met in the bar admired her performance strongly.  Perhaps on the day of Rebekah Brooks’ resignation, we’d had enough corkscrew curl-tossing to last us a while.  As the psychic Oda Mae, Sharon D Clarke fully matches Whoopi’s comic turn whilst putting her own naturalistic gloss on the character and, with her voice at its career best, sings up a veritable storm. Twice.

Some of the best moments belong to Adebayo Bolaji as the subway ghost in perhaps the sharpest-recreated scene from the movie when he fights with Sam on the moving train but he also has a great solo number in the second act.

If you're looking for a modern, polished movie-related musical with more spine than Mamma Mia and maybe a touch less camp than Priscilla, this is spot on.

*Notes on the leading man:

We loved Craig the teenage Goth in Corrie.

We even pardoned his early sexualisation with kohl eyeliner and leather accessories supporting Brian Sewell’s allegation that the Street is penned by pooftahs.

We cheered him through Soapstar Superstar and went appropriately “aaah” when he turned up at the semis with his clothes in a TopShop bag.

We sneaked a look and a listen at him a couple of weeks ago when he supported his mate Julie Atherton in her one-nighter at the Apollo, and marveled at both his strong vocals and Chippendale-buffed body.

We’d heard on the Manchester grapevine (actually from a freshly shamphoo-and-setted but still insightful septuagenarian called Christine we met last week on a tram to Eccles) that the provincial tryout had been a great success, the boy done good and the special effects were outstanding.

She was right.

Above the Stag, Below Par

2011-07-09T23:15:00.004+01:00

In my remotegoat.co.uk review I wrote that you have to admire Above The Stag’s sustained support for new writing, for showcasing young talent, and for championing work on gay themes. Although that admiration’s wearing thin.

Their revival of When Harry Met Barry after comparatively recent success at the Gatehouse and the stretching of it from 75 minutes to two lengthy acts and an interval hasn’t really added much to the initial charm of the piece.

Briefly, which is a concept alien to the writer, ex-Uni mates Harry and Barry each develop a relationship: H with a boy, B with a girl, before realising they were made for each other. It’s the germ of a good idea.

Paul Emelion Daly is credited with book, music and lyrics and they’re tripartite triteness: the heterosexuals have a romantic relationship, the homosexuals have a physical one, the woman is librarian-frumpy with glasses, the gayest boy is a cipher in plastic trousers and a lisp (although that’s possibly actor’s own rather than scripted).

The music is banal and forgettable, all the songs eventually merging into one continuous round of arpeggio-laden underscore played skilfully (by Lee Freeman) but far too loudly on one electronic keyboard, and the set is one of those home-made hand-painted cartoon jobs which have become an increasingly annoying trademark at the Stag and no longer bear comparison with other low budget fringe theatres where both ingenuity and execution are of a much higher order.

The cast try hard, particularly Madeleine Macmahon as a fallen-angel-cum-taxi driver who narrates and links the piece and Holly Julier who is entirely credible as Alice and well deserves her one good comedy moment in the second act.

Fortunately, Barry is played by Craig Rhys Barlow, a recent finalist in the Stephen Sondheim Society Performer of the Year awards and a young man with an exceptional and entirely natural musical theatre voice for which there should be a bright future: when he sings all the doubts you have about the production and the venue fall away and you really don’t want him to stop.

The Maine Event

2011-07-09T21:10:00.008+01:00

4-star review of 'Carousel' at the Landor Theatre, written for www.remotegoat.co.uk

Encouraged by the success of Pal Joey written with his late partner Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers persuaded his new collaborator Oscar Hammerstein also to use an anti-hero and even darker themes of corruption and redemption for Carousel.

Often lost in sugar-coated productions, the depth and intensity of relationships, and the struggle between doing right by your family and doing wrong to help them are brilliantly condensed in Jeremy Lloyd Thomas’s impressive and intelligent production at the Landor.

Rodgers and Hammerstein toyed with the idea of writing an opera, and in Carousel they came close with soaring soprano solos and complex sung recitatives. Lloyd Thomas has wisely cast young actors with surprising power and range and the list of ‘excellent voices’ is long and the harmonies strongly delivered right from the opening vocalised Carousel Waltz.

Australian Ebony Buckle brings a studied coolness and sagacity to mill-girl Julie Jordan and covers ‘If I Loved You’ elegantly despite being obliged to climb the apple-crate mountain of Rachel Stone’s nifty set. Her partner Billy Bigelow is played by Sean-Paul Jenkinson and he’s almost a match for her vocally, although his technique is more perceptible and a slight rhotacism interferes with the well-energised ‘My Boy Bill’.

They may be the leads, but the evening belongs to Chelsea Corfield and Iddon Jones as Carrie and Enoch Snow through whom Lloyd Thomas discovers more comedy than usually seen in Carousel, and saves the production from an over-reverent earnestness which sometimes infects this show. Corfield is a plus-size girl who so overshadows Jones that you might think Tracey Turnblad just hopped a bus from Baltimore to Maine, but they work beautifully together and Jones’ singing is magnificent.

This is a cast largely drawn from recent graduates of Mountview Academy of Theatre, and steered by tutors like Lainie Baird who with Jodie-Lee Wilde recreates demanding Agnes de Mille choreography for the small stage.

There are no weak links in the ensemble chain, Lee Dillon-Stuart captures the essence of Jigger Craven despite his youth, and rather like a den mother, veteran Sue Kennet infuses Nettie Fowler with skittish warmth and a sensibly abbreviated ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ which has real emotion in her cradling of the audibly weeping Julie and mercifully dispels the spectre of Lesley Garrett.

Stag Night v 3.0

2011-06-17T12:56:00.006+01:00

Review of Blink Again! Turn On The Lights! at Above The Stag

For the third year in a row director Tim McArthur and the resourceful team at the Stag have pulled together over two dozen songs from 'less successful' musicals and you'd think by now they'd be scraping barrels. Not so, such is the back catalogue of continually flopping musical theatre that even the very recently-deceased 'Umbrellas of Cherbourg' and currently-in-longest-ever-previews 'Spiderman' get a battering in hilarious parodies.

The parodies leaven what could have been a repetitive evening of show tunes delivered with just sufficient staging to resist the static.

Many of the songs are technically difficult, possibly a reason their source musicals struggled, but the young voices cope well with the demands and there's a freshness in rediscovering 'China Doll' from 'Marguerite' sung by Jamie Lee and also Paul Brangan's extremely well-judged 'Grief Never Grows Old' from an ill-fated Mike Read musical about Oscar Wilde which opened and closed the same night, and was recycled only as a charity single for the 2004 tsunami.

The standout voice belongs to Peter Navickas whose faultless high lyric tenor illuminates 'A Boy from Nowhere' from 'Matador' and 'If It's Only Love' from 'Metropolis' as well as blending beautifully with Brangan in 'Lilly's Eyes' from 'The Secret Garden'.

Linking narratives rest heavily on commenting on the short runs of many of the shows but there's a slightly ironic surreallism in hearing such pitying tones from profit-share actors in a room over a grotty pub sighing that a multi-million dollar Disney project "survived only four months on Broadway" or a critically-acclaimed show "ran for barely 100 performances in the West End" ... when they're playing to an audience of five.

But the running 'Spiderman' joke is worth the ticket price alone ...

This review written for www.remotegoat.co.uk

Lend Me Some Earplugs

2011-06-17T10:28:00.006+01:00

Review of Lend Me A Tenor at the Gielgud Theatre

Ever since Al, Fred and George had the lucky posthumous collaboration which turned Pygmalion into My Fair Lady, producers have salivated over the lucrative idea that grafting a few songs onto a popular stage comedy could make an audience see the play twice, this time with music.

It worked for Shaw and Lerner and Loewe possibly because both the source material and the music and lyrics are equally clever and at the time, original. But suppose you woke up one morning and considered that a pretty average mid-80’s mistaken-identity door-slamming farce could be well-revived with the addition of fifteen songs by completely unknown composers (if you Google ‘Peter Sham’ it only brings up the dressmakers’ ribbon).

You might be lucky and snag a highly competent musical theatre star just out of a major flop. Cherbourg escapee Joanna Riding plays the disenchanted wife of a touring Italian tenor who misses his gala by taking sleeping pills and is impersonated by a waiter – are you laughing yet? - but with a wig by Ukrainian Premier Yulia Tymoshenko and accent by Joe Dolce, even she doesn’t stand much of a chance in her two brief scenes.

You might throw sets, costumes and gilt at it like Linda Barker loosed on Chatsworth but the resultant surfeit of mauve and hefty mobile set looks recycled from a provincial pantomime – those juddering chandeliers must have done a Cinderella or ten – and betrays the production’s origins in the Theatre Royal Plymouth where, for many London critics, it should have stayed.

You could, if you were heavily nostalgic for ITV’s Stars in their Eyes engage its mugging presenter Matthew Kelly as the embattled impresario at the centre of the farce and subject the audience to his camp and manic breathlessness in lieu of characterization or musicality. Does he prepare backstage by telling the mirror ‘Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be dreadful’ ?

You’d be the producers of Lend Me A Tenor, which isn’t really salvaged by the fine voice of Michael Matus (another flop escapee from Martin Guerre) as Tito Merelli, or the second-act setpiece by Sophie Louise Dann as a scenery-chewing diva compacting all the great arias into one seduction audition and which may well be lost on the coach parties unless they’re assiduous followers of Soapstar to Operastar.

Dominic Cavendish in the Telegraph dismissed it as ‘barely memorable ... all the sophistication of four-minute pasta’. I’d go further: in a month when London productions swept the board at the Tonys, with exemplars of excellence in straight plays and musicals it’s a disgrace to smear Shaftesbury Avenue with this great big pile of steaming stale Dolmio.

This review written for Londonist

Not Defying Gravity

2011-06-16T00:07:00.006+01:00

Review of The Flying Karamazov Brothers, Vaudeville Theatre

Yeah, yeah, we get it: you’re not brothers, you don’t fly and no-one’s from Russia. And you juggle, how hilarious is that?

The ‘FKB’ are a four-man troupe led - since 1975 - by ponytailed Paul Magid who has possibly the second least attractive London stage persona after ‘Sir’ Bruce Forsyth. Certainly he found it hard to lash the sparse Thursday night audience into anything approaching enthusiasm.

He’s also the one who seemed to drop most of the balls and clubs, and we’re not counting those ho-ho-ho ‘accidentally on purpose’ moments which were too numerous to be convincing: when you drop illuminated balls on a darkened stage and they roll into the wings, no-one thinks that’s a joke.

No one thought much else in the act was a joke either – there’s a running (make that limping) gag about gathering nine ‘objects of terror’ like a hatchet, an egg and a shaken bottle of champagne which will be juggled in the finale, but by the time we got to seven someone near us suggested the eighth object of terror should be the script.

Those sight gags about blindness, the casual racism about dog-eating Koreans, the unfunny puns and the whole lame-ass pretence of being corn-pone Americans failing to understand the Brits just don’t work. And nobody finds anything about the House of Lords amusing, certainly not just mentioning it and hoping for a laugh.

There’s music, but it’s random and often poor – Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance doesn’t by itself make plastic Indian Clubs exciting, and the ‘jazz juggling’ required such long and tedious explanation of how twirling objects is like the rhythm of a jazz quartet that most of the audience lost the will to riff.

The actual juggling routines are well-choreographed and among the younger performers, Stephen Bent is very competent and has nice hair, but it’s too like an audition for Britain’s Got Talent and you long for someone to buzzer them off and make way for a dog act.

This review written for Londonist.

Forced Rhubarb, Lumpy 'Custard'

2011-06-03T11:59:00.004+01:00

Kit and the Widow are a sophisticated and enduring cabaret act of much skill and polish, at least when not reading the words from a music stand. Dillie Keane, founder and stalwart of Fascinating Aida has become the sort of national comedy institution round whom people should be taken in boats to marvel at her brilliance, and Noel Coward is arguably the country’s finest theatrical composer-lyricist of the 20^th century, certainly our only one to bear comparison with Cole Porter or the Gershwins.

So why does the fusion of these elements work only sporadically in the revue format Cowardy Custard currently ending its tour in Richmond? It seems to be a question of ‘trying too hard’. Coward’s lyrics were so carefully crafted and polished that even adjusting a syllable can unbalance the delicate perfection of his phrasing, and when the principals perform it with such overemphasis – Hesketh-Harvey ices all his words like wedding cake - it feels forced.

Comparing this production with the forty-year old original is possibly unfair – at the Mermaid in 1972 the material was shared among a cast of twelve stretching from the sublime jazz singer Elaine Delmar to comedienne Una Stubbs whereas here five performers strain to produce variety in the staging, or enough light and shade in the singing. Recalling the comic timing and gentle contralto of Patricia Routledge delivering ‘Marvellous Party’ was made more painful by watching Keane contort it into a pantomime drunk sketch, hammering each verse ever more bluntly into the eyeballs and eardrums of the front rows of the stalls whilst losing control of her limbs, clinging to the piano, and rolling her eyeballs like an electro-convulsive.

The audience lapped it up, though, and so did two mainstream critics – Charlie Spencer of the Telegraph made a pilgrimage to Lincoln and thought it “a classy delight” and Keane’s rubber-legged drunk act ‘hilarious’, although he felt as uncomfortable as we did at ‘London Pride’ being set to a background of Ken Livingstone commenting on the 2005 London bombings. At Guildford, Mark Shenton of The Stage found the material “smart and revealing” and Keane “priceless” but overall he saw the show, like the custard of its title, as oversweetened and lumpy.

We’d mark it “not yet suitable for London” although the two young performers drafted in to sing the songs gauged too difficult for the cabaret comedians and for a couple of dance numbers, are excellent: Savannah Stevenson has a glorious voice and when not being too puppyish, Stuart Neal has a winning delivery in both the comic and straight numbers, ‘Matelot’ being his finest hour.

“Gallant old troupers, you’ve bored us all for years” cuts Coward in a satirical song about old theatrical stagers ‘Why Must The Show Go On’ … and delivers his own verdict. To keep such glorious material fresh for the new audience, it needs newer voices.

Find another ten performers like Stevenson and Neal, and re-stage it.

This review written for Londonist.

Cross Section

2011-05-24T19:17:00.015+01:00

Would it be churlish, even for me, to suggest that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s £32m sale of a Nazi-tainted Picasso to fund (just ten, tuition-fee only) bursaries for musical theatre students is merely another in a long line of tax-deductible publicity stunts for the noble Lord?

In a good weekend for musical theatre, I’ve witnessed two remarkable events. The first was an actual pay-day for performers in a profit-share production. Last Saturday, thanks to the generosity and good management of their producer, The Audience Club doyenne Angela Hyde-Courtney, the cast of Thom Southerland’s bouncy Jerry Herman compilation show at the Landor each received a white envelope of proper folding stuff at the after-show party.

This in itself is remarkable: few fringe productions generate more than beer money for their participants, and it often makes me feel uncomfortable that to keep ticket prices affordable so many actors and singers have to double a day job in Debenhams. When you don’t get paid, it could be argued you’re actually an amateur, except that the standard and the pool of talent washing around London for such work is so outstanding. In a cast most of whom were West-End-ready there were several shiners but none brighter than Daniella Gibb whose rendition of ‘Look What Happened To Mabel’ was impeccably focused and sung.

The second remarkable event is the SSSPOTTYs – or the Stephen Sondheim Society Student Performer of the Year awards in which not only performances but also new composition is recognized with a secondary prize given by Betty Blue Eyes composers Stiles and Drewe.

Sunday afternoon’s finals at the Queen’s Theatre simply blew me away. Whilst the boys somewhat outshone the girls, the standard is again beyond excellent, and interestingly many of the finalists came from classical colleges like the Royal Academy of Music and RADA rather than the usual hothouses of Mountview, Central or ArtsEd Schools which is fast becoming the ‘Fame’ academy of the UK.

Winner Taron Egerton, making so much more of ‘Giants in the Sky’ than the piece usually gets in productions, and stand-out finalist Craig Rhys Barlow whose meticulous diction and body language combined in an electrifying ‘Franklin Shepherd Inc’, both proved that Wales still produces naturally talented singers.

The winning composition – a delightful humorous and tender piece in which a superhero tells a geeky kid that muscle doesn’t outrank brains, ‘It’s Not All Kaboom, Kapow’ by Eric Angus and Paul James from their adaptation of the Ayckbourn piece The Boy Who Fell into a Book was delivered by another highly promising baritone, Howard Jenkins.

I was so elated after the SSSPOTTYs I almost didn’t go on to the evening concert at Cadogan Hall where a range of more established performers were supporting London Gay Men's Chorus and the male rape crisis charity SurvivorsUK. Part of my reluctance was fuelled by the fact that the headliner was Lesley Garrett, but given it was for a deserving cause, I thought I’d give her the benefit of the doubt.

Shouldn’t have bothered, she was terrible.

I'm not sure which made me more annoyed - her ridiculous, shrill, too-high-in-her-range singing or the clumsy, campy way she claimed allegiance to the charity. Among the other stars, Hannah Waddingham in particular showed her up with her effortless phrasing and natural projection. Everyone else seemed to make a genuine and heartfelt connection to the Survivors cause, but Garrett came over as desperate-to-be-popular, and a fake.

Her song choices were bizarre – I Dreamed a Dream, Somewhere and The Impossible Dream - since Fantine dies aged 27, Maria is a teenager, and Don Quixote a virile young knight-errant, everything she sang was irrelevant and contributed to her delusional belief in her own ability, youth or popularity, none of which were evident from the Stalls.

Garrett compares piercings with the LGMC's David Clarke. Hers is in her voice. (photo: Mark Killien)

It’s such a pity. She and I are contemporaries and both grew up in Yorkshire, but whereas I couldn't wait to get away, Garrett clings to the Doncaster coal-face as though ashamed to relinquish a background she has long transcended. She’s obviously a very kindly woman if she’ll give of her time for a worthy event, and it must be quite a come-down after her festival career to sing in a half-empty Cadogan Hall – but it’s vastly irritating to see someone who COULD be so much better, and more real, if she abandoned any pretence of being either a great operatic singer (Verdi is not enhanced by a Yorkshire accent), or a soprano.

As a mezzo, she might have had the international career denied her by languishing in the ENO too long, and if she had some acting lessons she mightn’t have disgraced herself quite so badly in Carousel, when despite having only two numbers she almost never worked a full week.

Still, for every fading or deluded diva there’s a thousand up and coming musical theatre performers to cheer on and applaud. It makes even me optimistic.

in which I take it all back, and @JKCorden stalks me on Twitter

2011-05-19T17:20:00.016+01:00

ONE MAN, TWO 'GUVNORS' at the National Theatre

When two reclusive, friendless shut-ins of my acquaintance begged me to take an unwanted ticket to the first preview of One Man, Two Guvnors I closed my ears to the pitiful scratch of their nails on the barrel’s already well-scraped base and, as had their other contacts, ran carefully through a list of pros and cons.

Pros : 1. directed by Nick Hytner, not often a failure. 2. contains Suzy Toase and Green Wing’s Oliver Chris whom I’ve always found decorative. 3. Original by Carlo Goldoni, author of my first school play (although not, you ageist facebuggers, a contemporary) 4. cast complaining online about difficulties of coping with entrances, props and script - could be a so-bad-it’s-good car-crash.

Cons : 1. arse-clamp Travelex second-row seats in the Lyttleton which are already the reason I don’t like Sunday in the Park with George where I think the sciatica first set in. 2. they are both enthusiastic topers and I haven’t had a glass of wine in six weeks so may well keel over on first contact with the high-octane bin end Venezuelan Merlot they tend to imbibe.

and

3, and possibly the superinjunction of Cons, contains James Corden whose recent career some thought exhibited an arc like a drunk’s vomitory parabola from projectile History Boys promise through glorious Gavin and Stacey zenith plummeting via footy- award- and chat-show laddish ubiquity to splashdown in a dire two-handed TV sketch show from which only a vestigial bounceback of carrot and sweetcorn may yet remain.

So I went.

How wrong we collectively were.

First off, the show is fronted by a superb skiffle band – The (homonymic) Craze – to pinpoint the setting in the pre-Beatles shiny suited sixties, cover scene changes and give several members of the cast a virtuoso opportunity on xylophone, horns or close harmony vocals.

Second, it’s scripted as a filthy pantomime by Richard Bean who both penned England People Very Nice and gagged up the flaccid prose of London Assurance in another sharp collaboration with Hytner. This is coarser cut, and played even more broadly with direct dialogue with the audience, ad-libs and what amounts to a splosh scene in the fractionally overextended second act.

Third, there are some very fine comic turns, notably by Oliver Chris as a Cameronesque Flashman who may single-handedly have repopularised the chinless wonder, by Toase who could perhaps be persuaded to bring her northern broadside down a notch or two in the interest of blending, by Daniel Rigby as Chris’s actorly love rival in a thoroughly engaging performance of an Angry Young Man conflicted with beatnik cowardice, and by Tom Edden as an 87-year old waiter whose physical comedy rivals Norman Wisdom’s and whose tureen-bearing skills challenge Julie Walters in the two-soup sketch stakes.

Fourth, there is James Kimberley (I am not making this up) Corden. Actors, especially chubby ones, are hard to pigeonhole and for every vocal sitcom fan there’s a theatre lover who wishes he’d stuck to the craft and honed his stage skills instead of spunking them up the wall in oeuvres like Lesbian Vampire Killers. However, in his portrayal of Francis the dually employed servant he fulfils not only the Harlequin role from the Commedia dell’Arte plundered by Goldoni for his characters, but also the otherwise vacant position on the London stage of Showman. Because that’s what he is, holding the audience in his palm and carrying them and the production before him. If he inhabits the character with trace elements of Smithy, that’s simply appropriate recycling and Hytner’s direction tames any excess.

James – don’t call him Kimberley – also has the good grace to engage with admirers and detractors alike on Twitter, and messaged me this morning about his sketch show regrets with Well, as Francis says in the play, “Only the man who never does nothing never makes no mistakes"

No-one has made a mistake here in casting, direction or script, and neither should you. This is as close to a sure-fire hit as I have seen in a year. Go.

Fings, for the memory ...

2011-05-14T12:02:00.006+01:00

FINGS AIN'T WOT THEY USED T'BE

Book Frank Norman
Music/Lyrics Lionel Bart
Director Phil Willmott
Musical Director Elliot Davis
Choreographer Nick Winston
Lighting Jason Meininger

TPR score 4 stars

I confess it, I have previous with this show: in the mid-eighties I was in a fringe production which was selling so badly that one wet Wednesday we’d just decided to give the seven people in the audience their money back when the producer got a phone call to say that Lionel Bart was on his way.

We hastily sent half the cast out to the local pubs to offer free tickets and drag in some punters, and most of them were still there when Bart and his entourage rocked up. He was in the middle of his twenty-year drinking binge at the time, and somewhat fidgety so after a few minutes of waiting he sat down at the piano in the pit … and started to play the overture. To Oliver!.

Our performance was pretty shabby, and when at the end Bart vomited over the poster it seemed a fitting critique of the show. No need for sick-bags at the Union, though, where in Phil Willmott’s bright production the consistently talented cast and Elliot Davis‘s box-fresh arrangements bring the songs to life with a knuckle-duster punch.

Given the Union’s black box flexibility, it might have been fun to mix the audience with the action, or even transfer across the road to the Union Jack pub to make it more site specific, we are after all supposed to be in a raffish London drinking den where ex-Razor King Fred and tart-with-a-heart Lil are on their uppers like a Berwick Street market bruised-fruit half-price Nathan Detroit and Miss Adelaide.

If there’s a problem, it’s the scant plot. Joan Littlewood’s theatre workshop in Stratford E15 received the script as a straight play by an ex-con, and she set about it with the ferocity of a razor gang - commissioning songs from Bart and literally slashing the pages before scattering them to her cast of improvising actors, including then-unknown George Sewell, Miriam Karlin and Barbara Windsor.

Apart from the title song there’s nothing memorable, which is probably why they reprise it so often, and it’s striking to think that only a year later, Bart – who never learned to read music – composed the lush and varied score for Oliver!. There’s little light and shade in this material and it largely sounds like a knees-up in Peggy Mitchell’s back room, but Hannah-Jane Fox as Lil finds subtlety in ‘Where Do Little Birds Go’ and Richard Foster-King leads the rollicking tapping first act closer ‘Contempery’, which is where Nick Winston's choreography really takes off, to send the audience out to the bar glowing with pleasure.

Whilst the central performances of Neil McCaul as Fred and Hadrian Delacey as Sgt Collins are convincing and committed, Delacey has a particularly strong voice, this is something of a lost period for realistic drama and there’s acting-by-hearsay as many of the women sound like Windsor and the men like Del Boy. The two who stand out are differentiated as colourful pavement caricatures: Suzie Chard as a topheavy Barbara precipitately balanced in her rigid corset, and audience favourite Foster-King as Horace the rhapsodically bohemian decorator.

If you’re in the mood for a right-old Cockerney sing-song, get dahn the Union, knock twice and ask for Fred ...

This review written for The Public Reviews

Catch Me ... Don't dare miss it

2011-04-01T17:25:00.003+01:00

I’m typing this at the desk of my friend, a NYU literature professor, in the study of her 3000sq ft apartment watching tiny flakes of snow dress the back gardens of some low rise but high end white brick mansions here on the Upper East Side. I feel extraordinarily privileged.

I also feel extraordinarily privileged to have been in at the beginning of something great on Broadway. Hot off the plane on Wednesday afternoon I scored a brilliant centre stalls house seat for the soon-to-open ‘Catch Me If You Can’, the musical by the creators of 'Hairspray' made on the back of the successful Leonardo di Caprio movie about the life of serial and successful con-man Frank Abagnale who eventually parlayed his capture and arrest into an almost equally lucrative career as fraud advisor to the FBI.

Funnily enough, on the plane I’d read a Vanity Fair snippet of an article by Abagnale himself about how proud he was to have been impersonated by both di Caprio and the star of CMIYC on Broadway, Aaron Tveit.

I’ve swooned over Tveit before, a couple of years ago when ‘Next to Normal’ blew me away as the most original modern piece to hit town since Rent, and although his presence lit up the stage and his effortless rock voice carried the best tunes, as the imaginary son of Alice Ripley’s character, he wasn’t the lead.

Then he may have been a counter hand but now, he’s bought the store and owns the stage too. Never before have I seen such a big show carried on the shoulders of such a young man. The structure of CMIYC begins with Frank’s arrest at Miami International Airport by his reluctantly-admiring nemesis Lt. Carl Hanratty in a multi-dimensional performance by Norbert Leo Butz that paired with Tveit’s extraordinary winning presence cannot help but put you in mind of Leo and Max from The Producers. It continues as though Frank is the impresario of a big-production TV show, and demands his constant presence on stage.

Not for a second in two and a half hours does his confidence or concentration lapse, and he carries 2500 people in the audience with him every step of the way. Even those who are jet-lagged from a tube journey on which someone died and the points failed, an urgent 90 quid taxi dash to Heathrow, seven weird hours in the hands of British Airways sitting across the aisle from a client I sued this time last year, and the unusually disjointed world vision of a Bangladeshi taxi driver.

For this show, and this young man, I’d have swum here.

Leary

2011-04-01T16:18:00.002+01:00

Michael Grandage’s production of Lear has had so many accolades from its run at the Donmar it’s unnecessary to chronicle them here. What is important is to say that if you want to see it you need to scoot to the Richmond Theatre before it disappears off to Cornwall and Brooklyn.

It’s not Shakespeare’s most accessible play, and being neither a fantasy nor a history falls in an almost unique category of being as realistic as possible about an ancient King of Britain without historical fact. Since it features a Duke of Cornwall inheriting much of the monarchy you could say it begs for updating but the conversational modernity and mediaeval-by-way-of-All-Saints costuming seems to suit the text. ‘Illuminated’ is a good adjective for the production because every actor strives for the meaning in the lines, and the setting is a fine bright white-scraped timber box beautifully lit by Neil Austin and underscored with atmospheric sound by Adam Cork.

There’s so much good in it: taut performances, a spanking pace (2h30 plus interval) some sexy effects both mechanical like the storm and acted when the putting out of Gloucester’s eyes is vivid, sadistic and totally thrilling theatre. The subsequent scene where he’s led to the brink of the cliffs is made even more touching by the intensity of his torture.

Does the central performance crown the effort? Yes and no. Because (apart from I, Claudius) Derek Jacobi has largely resisted television and film exposure and clung firmly to the boards this is possibly your last opportunity to see one of England’s finest theatrical knights strut his stuff in the tradition of Gielgud or Olivier. And it is quite strutting. His Lear captures the foolishness is his decision-making, his vanity and constant need for approbation and foregrounds the peevishness making it hard to see him as a great man, rather one in a high position marred by many human frailties. Again, you’ll be able to make modern comparisons from an historic, in many senses of the word, performance.

This review written for Londonist

Forced Milk Wood

2011-03-27T12:15:00.000+01:00

In the week they buried Elizabeth Taylor it seems appropriate to revisit Under Milk Wood, in which she appeared briefly as Rosie Probert at the height of her partnership with Richard Burton in the 1971 Technicolor version.

Even though playing a bit-part, Taylor was famously difficult, refusing to travel to Fishguard where the movie was being shot. Her scenes were filmed in London over the two days she had available before leaving England to avoid being collared for income tax, and the stills with a cameraman lying on the floor to get the only angle which flattered her low-slung figure and showed off the three Parisian nightdresses she’d demanded which cost half the costume budget.

Both Parisian nightdresses and Technicolor are absent from the Pentameters production. Colourlessness becomes a positive virtue in a play where the sounds are paramount, a day-in-the-life of a small Welsh fishing village seen through the eyes of a blind sea captain.

It starts well enough with a convincing blackout and a few minutes in which to let the imagery of the sleeping hamlet beside the ‘sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea’ unfold in your head. Even without Richard Burton’s impassioned baritone, it works. Unfortunately as the lights come up, the scene is an anticlimax: an all-purpose set comprising a badly painted door panel, the back of a piano and a cheap flat-pack Welsh dresser certainly not borrowed from any self-respecting neighbouring kitchen here in Hampstead.

There are two ways Under Milk Wood is successfully performed: with a vast and colourful cast recreating as authentically as possible in costumes and props a fishing village in the fifties, or on an almost bare stage returning to the piece’s heritage as ‘a play for voices’. This production falls uncomfortably between the two stools with the five actors straining – a lot of the vocals are shouted – to portray in snapshot 64 different characters and using the all-purpose Welsh dresser as everything from captain’s bunk to wild wooded hillside, but equally using all-purpose accents which, even to my one-sixteenth-Welsh ears, sounded occasionally English in their inflections and certainly more random than the quite specific lilt of Cardigan Bay where Dylan Thomas placed the village.

The play has been set to music, by director and onstage participant Tom Neill, but it’s the sort of self-consciously-worthy wheezing and whining compositions you might hear scraped out by a school orchestra and serves only as irritating punctuation while the actors clump on and off stage to their instruments. The music is massively better when the cast sing, finely in two- or four-part harmony for example in the first-act closer of the Reverend Eli Jenkins’ morning service in which Tom Neill and Thomas Heard counterpoint particularly well together.

Even when shared among only five pairs of hands, the material can shine, and the bickering of Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard with her two deceased husbands, or Butcher Beynon’s taunting of his wife with the liver of her pet cat are quite nicely pointed.

It’s a heart-felt production: Pentameters founder Leonie Scott-Matthews introduced the evening with a personal memoir of Dylan Thomas’s daughter Aeronwy, who read and dedicated her own poems on this same stage, and Neill’s affection for the work is palpable. Sometimes the best that a fringe production can do is to indicate that a classy revival is overdue. Hopefully the National or the Donmar will hear this clarion call from Hampstead and give Under Milk Wood the production it deserves.

This review written for The Public Reviews

French Leave ... preferably in the interval

2011-03-24T12:46:00.004Z

Sacre Bleu, Zut Alors, Quelle Horreur, and as for the choreography: Fosse septique … pick your own Francophone diatribes, this is vachement awful.

It’s a shame, because the hand on the Kneehigh Theatre tiller is Emma Rice who helmed their extraordinarily inventive Brief Encounter but to continue the boating metaphors it’s no coincidence that Cherbourg was the port from which the Titanic steered out into the Atlantic, you can’t wait for this leviathan to hit its own iceberg.

Reworked from the Jacques Demy movie which made Catherine Deneuve a star, it's a tenderly simple story of very young lovers parted by circumstance – he’s sent to fight in Algeria whilst she covers her pregnancy marrying a rich bore. He returns, she’s gone, he marries the maid. The central character of the girl’s mother is played here by the much undervalued Joanna Riding as a haughty harridan in a ginger Fanny Cradock wig and the lovers limply by recent Guildford graduate Carly Bawden and Andrew Durand for some unfathomable reason imported from the US to play Guy, despite the fact the West End is crawling with unemployed lightweight younger leading men: shout across the street from the Gielgud to The Yard bar and you’d find a dozen his equal.

‘Internationally renowned’ (although not so much in this country) cabaret artiste Meow Meow – actually a harmless Australian soubrette called Melissa Madden Gray who assumes her fantasy alter ego rather like Humphries does Edna - is contractually obliged to front the soiree in a split skirt, fishnets and black beehive. She also has to hustle the reluctant audience participation so morphs Irma La Douce with Gladys from Hi-de-Hi in a performance which is more cliché than Clichy. Mind you, in the echoing grove of yesterday’s second press night with three-quarters of the seats unsold, not even Ken Dodd could have warmed us up. Her ‘straight’ entr’acte solo ‘Sans Toi‘ is delivered sans taste and with so much eye rolling, r’s trilling and lardoned pathos that the producers of ‘Allo ‘Allo would have cut it from embarrassment.

Veteran composer Michel Legrand reworked his orchestrations for the production – but using the sort of random, stunted, cul-de-sac riffs which make you realise some jazz is basically musical masturbation: enjoyable for the participants but ultimately not really a spectator sport. And it’s through-sung which means banalities to music, and no interruption for some sharp dialogue or even a joke. There’s only one recognizable theme tune (appropriately the made-for-lift-muzak If It Takes Forever I Will Wait For You) which repeats on such an interminable loop the audience feels it’s being battered to death with an especially stale baguette.

There’s a highly mechanized set from Lez Brotherston with tricksy use of model buildings, artful neon and an unexpected skate ramp, colourful costumes, and a seductive lighting scheme by Malcolm Rippeth, but it’s all so much empty effort when the performance doesn’t engage with the audience.

London weather’s so unpredictable but I expect folding Umbrellas before Easter.

Debs' Delight

2011-03-16T12:44:00.007Z

A social-climbing middle-class Home Counties couple launch their pretty but awkward daughter on the London marriage market and eventually steer her towards the ‘right’ public schoolboy with a title to inherit …

… but enough about the Middletons.

In The Reluctant Debutante, it’s 1957 and the pushy mother is Jane Asher in a series of Butterick shirtwaisters pleading brightly into the Bakelite telephone to beg a series of MAYfair and SLOane numbers to come to dinner. Thanks to her vagueness she dials a wrong number and invites a ‘dark’ bounder rather than the Tim-Nice-But-Dim she’d targeted, but two and a quarter hours later the bounder inherits a dukedom and so turns out to be the right sort after all.

I wanted to write a scathing dissertation about the inappropriateness of snobbish and mildly racist comedy in a post-20th century theatrical brave new world but firstly the excellent Jem Bloomfield has already done it for Suite101.com and secondly I found this revival rather beguiling.

Although born to the purple and a sibling of a future Prime Minister, William Douglas Home didn’t fit the Tory mould and was something of a maverick, joining several different political parties but finding none of them met his aversions to authority and convention. The Reluctant Debutante is a satire, and his opinions about the ridiculous ‘social season’ as an expensive cattle market for middle-class parents ‘one step away from white slavery’ are voiced through Clive Francis’s drily perfected portrayal of the jaded father of the bride-to-be.

Drawing room comedies are valuable because they sowed the seeds of the most durable entertainment vehicle of the age: the television situation comedy, where domestic misunderstandings and trivial accidents are heightened to melodramatic effect in a chain of events from early The Marriage Lines or Terry and June to 30 Rock and Peep Show.

The audience certainly responded to the sitcom format of the script with enthusiasm, and this is a tribute to the fact that the entire cast plays it straight. In the recent Blithe Spirit at Richmond, a drawing room comedy of similar vintage, director Thea Sharrock encouraged the cast to overact it rather than rely on the script to entertain. Reluctant Debutante works better because Belinda Lang has the sense to let the lines and situations speak for themselves.

Asher, Francis and Lang herself are old hands at this sort of thing and their performances are consistently good although Lang’s own ‘turn’ as Mabel Duchess of Claremont borders on caricature and if someone else had been directing might have been tamed.

The ‘gels’: daughter Jane (Louise Calf) and her friend Clarissa (Lucy May Barker) are serviceable performances, but the two young suitors played by Alex Felton and Marlborough-educated Ed Cooper Clarke are excellent. Cooper Clarke is particularly good at the romantic suavity required of his ‘bounder’ character, and may remind you of a young Rupert Everett or Hugh Grant.

Don’t let mental images of Hugh Grant put you off, this is an enjoyable evening.

This review written for The Public Reviews

Kitchen Sink for the Cornbelt

2011-03-13T09:47:00.000Z

Although set in the remote boondocks of Northern Illinois, on a near-derelict farm, we are not in any new territory with Sam Shephard’s ‘Buried Child’.

The possibility that an outwardly-naturalistic family shelters a dark secret which through the arrival of a stranger is revealed to devastating effect over three drawn-out acts is a theatrical motif so well explored as to have lost its power to shock even by 1979 when ‘Buried Child’ won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama – an accolade which, incidentally, Shepard said gave him less satisfaction than winning a roping contest in the local rodeo.

Shepard’s plays chart the decline of the American dream but more angrily than Miller or Albee, and more autobiographically too: Shepard’s father, a former WWII Air Force pilot, grew up on a broken-down farmstead and supported his mother and brothers from a very young age when the farm business collapsed but later succumbed to alcoholism, living a life that was endlessly disappointing and not able to find another path.

But Shepard is not easy to pigeonhole: his works combine attempts at satire, farce, and cynical verbal attack with images of the Old West, a mourning sense of nostalgia for a lost rural idyll, and a disconnection from familial and spiritual roots.

Possibly Shepard wanted to be a Beckett or a Pinter but merely acquired Pinter’s relentless verbosity and Becket’s obscurantism which makes the play hard to listen to since the dialogue is repetitive and disconnected. This isn’t helped by the variable accents of some of the cast and their propensity to turn upstage on important lines – Tala Gouveia is simply unintelligible a lot of the time.

The ramshackle farmhouse – the location is shown as ‘a squalid farm home’ in the programme - is excellently realised in Martin Thomas’s design, and Howard Hudson’s carefully graduated lighting scheme.

There are some good performances: the play starts well enough with a verbal sparring match between John Atterbury, totally convincing as the old-timer Dodge, arguing with his irritable wife shouting from offstage. His ‘slow’ son Tilde played by Math Sams and grandson Vince by Joe Jameson are also well-studied and persuasive performances of quite unengaging redneck characters.

In Timothy Trimingham-Lee’s lurching production, the actors are required to switch urgently from kitchen-sink drama to Ortonesque farce and back to horror when the parentage of the dead infant is revealed in the too-long-coming third act denouement.

It almost works, but last night’s audience was too readily entertained by the absurd to focus on the dramatic conclusion.

In fact towards the end it was a bit like 'What the Butler Saw' with Vince chasing Bradley round the stage with his prosthetic leg. But too hard to call, the audience was an odd mix of bemused blogcritics and over-volubly enthusiastic friends of the cast: it might have been better if we'd just had a fist-fight ourselves over it.

an edited version of this review appears on The Public Reviews

Covent Garden markets

2011-03-10T10:36:00.002Z

Tuesday morning 11am and one is royally chuffed to be invited with a clutch of bloggerati by the Covent Garden media/marketing team to put ones feet up in the Director’s box at Covent Garden for dress rehearsal of the David McVicar Aida which opens on Friday.

Apart from the close-up view of the singers’ facial expressions and a position right over the pit where we can eyeball Fabio Luisi spurring the orchestra to a spanking pace, we're all captivated by brilliance of both staging and movement.

If you’ve seen Aida before, forget those legions of spear carriers and chorines in white nighties and gold halters, crapping camels or Zandra Rhodes’ pleated silk elephants making the Nile run turquoise with fashion accessories. In Jean-Marc Puissant’s design it’s more Dune than Pyramids, and his motifs are smeared blood, scimitar and samurai. We’re in a darkly exciting metallica world framing the stories of battle, sacrifice – literally, human sacrifice – and conflicted loyalties.

In a brief chat after the performance, associate director Leah Hausman points out that Verdi was writing a serious piece about war: the word ‘guerra’ appears a hundred times more often than ‘amore’ in the libretto, so this is a story of war in which love happens, rather than the other way round.

It looks like Coriolanus but feels suddenly relevant: Amneris condemns the priests as controllers of a rotten society, Radames as head of the army is called upon to save the nation for posterity amid popular chanting and a march of bloodied and butchered foot-soldiers. It could be played out in Tahrir Square.

The grandiose set-pieces are so much more than parades: there’s a fantastic troupe of athletic bare-breasted women whose urgent runs and synchronized thrusting seem lifted from a Soviet spartakiade, there’s ritual disembowelling and corpses dangle from the rafters. Their male counterparts stage Kendo-inspired sword and lance fights in a dance of death under David Greeves’ genius martial arts coaching.

It’s no-one’s fault but Verdi’s that Aida shoots its load in the first two acts and what remains after the interval is the afterglow of the doomed romance between Radames and Aida, and Amneris’s slow-burning disappointment. But this is where the production really delivers as the emotional triangle is explored in scenes of tender and realistic intimacy, due to the powerful collaboration of the three principals: Roberto Alagna, Olga Borodina and Micaela Carosi whose acting is every bit the equal of their sung performances.

It’s edgy casting: Alagna was booed at La Scala in the same role in 2006, Olga Borodina famously walked out of an earlier Covent Garden Aida in a disagreement with ROH music director Antonio Pappano, so it’s a miracle not just that they are both here but that they conspire with Carosi to create such chemistry.

We went backstage for the scene change and some gossip: Swan Lake has had a box office mega-surge due to the ‘Black Swan’ effect with phone calls asking when Natalie Portman would be ‘on’. The box office has a sense of humour because they’re tempted to answer ‘every other night alternating with Billy Elliott’. But the best news is that ROH is trying to reprise its sensational Anna Nicole in 2013, and working on available dates with Eva-Maria Westbroek.

a version of this article appears on Londonist

No Betty, No Hotpot

2011-03-02T17:03:00.005Z

Corrie!
at Churchill Theatre, Bromley

Writer: Jonathan Harvey
Director : Fiona Buffini
Designer: Liz Ascroft
Lighting Designer : Ian Scott
Reviewer: JohnnyFox

TPR score: 3 stars

We’re like that, in Lancashire. We build you up and then we knock you down … just so’s you don’t forget where you come from and get a bit above yerself down in that there Lundun. The script of Corrie! Is by much-garlanded author Jonathan Harvey, not only a long-time stalwart of the show’s writing team, but also originator of Gimme Gimme Gimme, Beautiful Thing and the Pet Shop Boys musical Closer To Heaven and well on his way to becoming something of a national treasure.

In the Bromley local paper, the headline is ‘Former Thamesmead Teacher writes ultimate Corrie experience’. It couldn’t have been a better putdown if it had been front page of t' Weatherfield Gazette.

The structure condenses two thousand Coronation Street plotlines from the last 50 years of the soap opera into a couple of hours (and a bit) and the technique follows the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s breakneck trolley dash through 31 of the bard’s works: niceties of nuance or characterization are ditched in favour of trademark wigs and glasses, and hit or miss vocal impressions. With only six actors, even though none is late for an entrance or a cue, it’s all a bit breathless.

Most of the stories are dismissed in an instant, but two Corrie anti-heroines get closer examination: Gail Potter Tilsley Platt Hillman McIntyre, in a weak showing by Leanne Best, and better when Jo Mousley has enough stage time to develop Deirdre Hunt Langton Barlow Rachid Barlow’s popping neck-veins and fag-raddled throatiness whilst chronicling Dierdre’s grande affaire with Mike Baldwin, wrongful imprisonment, spawning of devil child Tracey, acquisition of toy boy Samir, and constant grinding disappointment in Ken.

Ken as played by Simon Chadwick is the most convincingly heroic performance, as vocally and physically he manages to pin down both the Barlow character and Bill Roache’s slightly diffident acting of it, Chadwick is equally strong as Jack Duckworth and Richard Hillman.

Mousley’s also authentic as Hilda, particularly in the ‘Muriel’ scene and when she challenges Annie Walker for shortchanging her wage packet, but disappointing as Ena Sharples. Lucy Thackeray’s Elsie is visually spot on with the cinched waist, the five-inch-heel tittup and the only decent wig in the show, but her Annie Walker and Raquel are less crisply defined. Besides, anyone can ‘do’ Raquel’s French lesson – I’m sure I’ve been caught in the kitchen at parties offering ‘voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir’ in a Salford accent.

Chadwick and Best are the only survivors from the original run at the Lowry last August. The show could do with adding a couple of more mature actresses to the cast to make Ena, Annie, Vera and Audrey less cartoonish: most of the older women are played by youngish men, a device that works well enough for Peter Temple’s alarmingly Alan Bennett-like Blanche meeting St Peter at the Pearly Gates but grates when Bet Lynch is portrayed as an ugly bloke in drag, and reminds you how much more accurately impressionists like Dustin Gee and Les Dennis delivered Vera and Mavis, or Victoria Wood, Lill Roughley and Julie Walters copied the trio in the snug.

The multi-layered set by Liz Ascroft is very fine, and quite elaborate for one which will undergo a six-month tour, as are the lighting and special effects particularly the slow-motion it’s-curtains-for-Alan-Bradley on Blackpool seafront and the recent ‘Corriepocalypse’ explosion of the tram coming off the viaduct.

In Moira Buffini’s deliberately staccato direction, it’s all played as a series of disconnected vignettes and the evening feels long. But there’s a moment towards then end when the ghost of Elsie finds common ground with present-day Becky where the seed of a more durable idea seems to germinate. Pity there wasn’t more of that.

Obviously some favourites are going to be missed: there’s no Alma testing the underwater road handling of Don Brennan’s taxi, no scenes in the raincoat (later knicker) factory, no Sean or Norris, no Betty, no hotpot, no return to the Gamma Garments of Miss Nugent and Mr Swindley, no Phyllis Pearce, Alf Roberts, ‘Sunny Jim’ or Eddie Yates.

Most unforgiveably, there’s no Mavis. What do you say to that?

Well, I don’t really KNOW, Rita …

Not Quite Spellbound

2011-02-23T22:43:00.009Z

We expect a lot from our Donmar. Under Michael Grandage’s stewardship we’ve had star turns from the Jude Law Hamlet to the Derek Jacobi Lear (currently playing Llandudno which shows true dedication), fresh as paint translations of The Wild Duck, Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Phaedra, envelope-pushing exports such as Red, Piaf and Creditors and a clutch of successful Sondheims.

It seems faintly bizarre that as his swansong, Grandage should select 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. For all its Gleeky zeitgeist, it’s a thin and trite one-act musical based around the slightly creepy public competitions which attract the unsporty and dentally-braced from America’s high schools.

Its cloying annoying moralising, feeble spoofing of the American competition ethic or naked ambition is too wearisome for analysis. Relax and try to enjoy the fun which is increased by the co-opting of three or four audience members to the stage as additional spellers.

The book, by Rachel Sheinkin, follows a more simplified path than the movies Spellbound or Akeelah and the Bee and the Donmar is brightly transformed into a school gymnasium adorned with blue and yellow pennants, but the characters are as one-dimensional as South Park cartoons and form a box-ticking minority list of overachieving Asian, chubby boy scout, gay geek, straight geek, neglected daughter and right-on feminist.

They’re marshalled by the under-used Katherine Kingsley in a leggy blonde homage to Sarah Palin's pageant queen vacuity, partnered by an excellent Steve Pemberton (a long way from Benidorm) as the Vice Principal with a nice line in withering put-downs and sardonic definitions for the spelling challenges.

Apart from a momentarily catchy title song, the music – by William Finn – is peppy but forgettable, which is a shame because the young actors have good voices and attack the songs with gusto.

On that subject it’s worth noting that there’s possibly no-one in West End theatre who works harder than Grandage’s long-time collaborator as Casting Director Anne McNulty to unearth aspiring talent. From drama schools and provincial profit-shares she has found at least three highly promising young actors: David Fynn as the pudgy know-all boy-scout, Hayley Gallivan as the wistful romantic Olive and Chris Carswell as a home-schooled hayseed all exhibit strong singing, nifty footwork and a total commitment to the project. Hopefully they’ll each get better projects soon.

Incidentally, some of the words used to test the audience members don’t actually appear in Merriam-Webster’s American dictionary, and we suspect cheating.

Haseholes.

This review written for Londonist

Dis-Spirit-ed

2011-02-23T12:01:00.005Z

There’s a whiff of mothballs at Richmond, and it’s not all coming from the audience in this starry but stolid revival of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit …

A glossy 2009 Broadway production showcased Angela Lansbury in cracking and crackpot form as clairvoyant Madam Arcati and Rupert Everett in a role he was born to play, the suave and languid author Charles Condomine.

At Richmond on the last leg of its 'immediately prior to West End' tour, a new British production heads for the Apollo in Shaftesbury Avenue next week and features Alison Steadman as the medium, Robert Bathurst and Hermione Norris reprising their Cold Feet pairing as the novelist and his wife, and Ruthie Henshall as the ghostly ex accidentally manifested during a séance.

From the same Triumph/Theatre Royal Bath production stable as the Kim Cattrall Private Lives and helmed by Thea Sharrock who directed the brilliant Daniel Radcliffe Equus, it has all the ingredients of a surefire hit, and yet it doesn’t quite come off.

Even the indulgent Richmond audience wasn’t lapping it up, although they seemed to appreciate the physical comedy better than the dialogue which is only partially explained by the ruckus at the desk in the foyer when several complained their hearing-impaired headsets weren’t working.

It’s smartly costumed with authentic late 1930s gowns, but both script and setting feel stale: a childless and fustian middle class marriage afloat on a wash of cocktails and coffee fetched by servants is all about to be swept away by the war, and whilst there’s no spectre of the coming realities in Coward’s script, this production doesn’t sustain a constant barrage of bright and brittle banter either.

Coward wrote (and Margaret Rutherford made flesh) Madame Arcati as a tweedy countrywoman with an almost professorial interest in the occult – Steadman makes her much more strident which might be effective if it weren’t all on one note, and misses both the charming battiness and the sensitive vulnerability of the character. Perhaps she’s spent too long in easy sitcoms like Gavin and Stacey and Fat Friends but this isn’t her best work and doesn’t compare with the excellence of her last West End outing in Alan Bennett’s Enjoy.

Where Lansbury was balletic and hummed to herself as she danced about the stage, Steadman grunts and feints hand jives that look as though she’s pioneering hip-hop fifty years ahead of its time.

Norris is the most successful in the thankless role of Ruth, the domestically-rooted second wife, but she plays it with less petulance and more elegant authority than the part usually receives and so is more fairly matched with the impishness of Ruthie Henshall’s shoeless and footloose Elvira.

The set, by the usually laudable Hildegard Bechtler has predictable art deco touches but looks cheap with a tackily painted piano and centerpiece terrible green sofa with rigid polyurethane foam cushions which weren’t around till the 50’s.

This review written for Londonist

Twisted Sisters

2011-02-21T12:48:00.003Z

Review of Snake in the Grass, by Alan Ayckbourn
at The Print Room, London W2.

In 1985, Susan Wooldridge (centre) made her name as Daphne Manners in ‘The Jewel In the Crown’ by having a nasty shock in an overgrown garden. You turn your back for 25 years and she’s at it again this time in a tense and twisting three-hander by Alan Ayckbourn which - in his 61st script - combines his well-documented empathy for the anguish of suburban womanhood with an unfulfilled ambition to write a ‘serious’ play.

Wooldridge is solidly middle-middle class Annabel Chester who returns - after thirty years and a failed marriage in Tasmania - with Barbour and headscarf but no trace of Australian accent to inherit the family home, and to spar uneasily with her sister Miriam who has tended their ailing father until reaching the end of her tether. This could be Ayckbourn re-working Sarah and Annie from 'The Norman Conquests' (the characters on which Barbara and Margo were based for 'The Good Life' as a matter of fact) if it weren't for the suggestion that Miriam may just - slightly - have overdosed papa with his medication and – ever so gently – pushed him down the stairs.

It could go either way - spirited comic banter, or kitchen sink meltdown if the situation weren't complicated by the arrival of father's long-serving but recently-sacked nurse, played by Mossie Smith as a muscular prole with the stomping energy of a cage fighter looking to land her first punch on the square jaw of Wooldridge's clumsily bombastic Tory bitch - and with a nice sideline in blackmail.

They're well-matched if somewhat stock characters, so it's Miriam who captures the audience's attention in Sarah Woodward's intelligently finessed performance. She has the slight advantage that the author gives her the best lines and the most interesting motivations, but this is a naturalistic acting of the highest calibre.

It's this naturalism which helps resist the decline of the piece into schlock as it becomes a sinister ghost story through Ayckbourn’s cleverly controlled gradual escape of the darker detail of the disturbed relationships each of the women has had with the men in her life, and with each other.

The atmospherics are enabled superbly by William Dudley’s magisterially dilapidated tennis court set - how did they persuade such an ace designer to work in a relatively unknown fringe venue - and which could be a metaphor for the dessication of middle class society complete in every detail down to the rusted mower and dried out grass, and equally by Richard Howell’s creepily effective lighting and Neil Alexander’s subtle sound patterns.

There are flaws: the plotting will be easily anticipated by anyone who’s seen ‘Deathtrap’ or ‘Sleuth’ – the clues are so obviously planted they could come with potting shed labels, but director Lucy Bailey controls the pacing carefully to heighten the tension, and there’s every chance the hairs on the back of your neck will rise more than once before the denouement.

versions of this review appeared on ThePublicReviews and Londonist

Long night in Chiswick

2011-02-14T12:17:00.004Z

It’s been a bit of a week for song cycles – Company at Southwark Playhouse has great tunes but doesn’t really lift the ‘book’ off the page, and The Last Five Years doesn’t even have one.

American composer Jason Robert Brown penned fourteen songs for a pair of actors: she sings the cycle going backwards from the breakdown of their marriage, he works forward from their first romantic tryst. They never interact or touch except in the one number that marks their wedding.

That much is smart and original, and although ‘Dorothy’ entrant Lauren Samuels has a great voice for the material, she’s underdirected and at 22 patently too young to be wrestling the emotions of an about-to-be-divorced wife. Christopher Pym is also a competent performer if somewhat studenty in his mannerisms and has a conspicuous weak 'r' in his diction.

That the evening isn’t totally gripping isn’t really their fault: Brown used to be heralded as the ‘Next Stephen Sondheim’ but despite a couple of encouraging awards about ten years ago, at 40 he hasn’t yet had the breakthrough show to take him mainstream and is looking increasingly like the Tim Henman of musical theatre.

All the songs are orchestrated with the same mounting crescendo – rising in the final bars to a stagey climax which makes each of them feel like a finale, although none delivers a satisfying chord resolution or in this un-nuanced production a lyric that truly engages the audience. In a through-sung show, this is a serious flaw and you long for the obviously talented composer to collaborate on a better, scripted story.

On the plus side, Samuels shows great promise for her future work, the mirrored and symmetrical set by Ben M Rogers is stunning, and the band under Lee Freeman are terrific. If their energy and virtuosity alone could float the show, it would be a winner.

This review written for Londonist

Loose Women, Tight Harmonies

2011-02-14T12:12:00.001Z

Liza Minnelli may have taught us that Life is a Cabaret old chum but for many mature women it comes with a whiff of vodka and regret. When brandished at men like a blunt weapon this can cause politicians to question whether feminism is still relevant, but when set to music it can be transformational.

Barb Jungr and Mari Wilson have been around a while: workaholic Jungr on a series of writing projects, her Brel, Elvis and Dylan albums as well as headlining at Café Carlyle in New York. Wilson is simply a supercool Eighties icon, trademark beehive ditched in favour of a soft blonde bob, and the voice more honeyed and thoughtful. Now they’re joined by Gwyneth Herbert whose fresh complexion and innocent expression belie an authentic jazz voice honed on late nights in Soho basements.

Kicking off with a slightly desperate ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ - its lyric ‘who makes it fun to spend your money, who calls you honey’ somewhat wasted on the front row tables-for-two populated by black-clad gentlemen picking at ‘leggero’ pizzas and chugging white Zinfandel, the trio found their mark better with The Stones' ‘Under My Thumb’ in harmonies so tight you could barely sense half a tone between them.

There’s plenty more in the same vein mashing up – and sending up – everything from ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl’ and the B-52's rousing ‘Give Me Back My Man’ to a wickedly funny ‘Never Been To Me’.

The staging and banter between the numbers needs sorting out, and there’s something slightly disturbing about Mari Wilson’s camp delivery and double entendres – possibly under the influence of Jungr’s former comedy collaborator, it seems as if a small part of Julian Clary has rubbed off on her.

Whilst each has her solo, this is clearly Jungr’s show and a powerful, painful and distilled ‘Woman in Love’ which could not only wipe the floor, walls and windows with Streisand also firmly asserts her position as the most impeccable interpreter of the ‘chanson’ of her own - or any subsequent - generation.

Pub Opera: Troy of the Rovers

2011-02-12T11:19:00.010Z

TROY BOY

Adaptor/Director : Kit Hesketh-Harvey
Musical Director: Stephen Hose
Set Design: James Perkins
Lighting: Derek Carlyle

TPR score : 4 Stars

Opera may not be the new rock and roll but a phalanx of brave companies with funky modern productions in a series of fringe theatres and pubs may soon ensure that no North London landlord will be able to hold his head up at the Licensed Victuallers Association without boasting of some Puccini served up with the pork scratchings. At the very least, ‘Troy Boy’ represents a bold advance for the juggernaut of boutique opera currently barrelling across London.

Scoring cabaret-to-Radio 4 professional wit Kit Hesketh-Harvey as librettist and director gives this version of Offenbach’s La Belle Helene class and polish, and the quality’s evident in a stylish set by James Perkins dexterously assembled from a series of Cycladic white blocks, and the welcome indulgence of a six-piece orchestra.

What’s not so clear are the theatrical devices which transpose the scenes from Sparta to Surbiton to Faliraki, motivations aren't always obvious from the recitative. Having Helen go to bed with her dreary suburban husband and dream herself on Olympus isn’t original, it featured in the Paris Chatelet production in 2001 with Felicity Lott, also modern dress and very comical.

This is part of the problem: it’s difficult to parody something which is already itself parodic - Offenbach was a contemporary of Gilbert and Sullivan and there are times in La Belle Helene when you could expect Agamemnon to chime in with a ‘here’s a how-de-do’. For me Troy Boy didn’t quite live up to its clever title since it's neither a smartly updated grand opera, nor deconstructed into a musical in the style of Tony Britten’s pioneering work with Music Theatre London.

Trimming some of the arias and introducing more dialogue may re-shape the piece to make it even more understandable and it could lose thirty minutes without damage. Whilst appreciating Hesketh-Harvey’s cleverness, because it’s applied to a comparatively rarely-performed opera with no famous tunes used as television advertisements, it doesn’t have the accessibility it might achieve if the same techniques were overlaid on Butterfly or Carmen.

The singing is almost flawless, and again London is fortunate to have a pool of assured and well developed young voices from which to cast. Rosalind Coad certainly climbs the mountain as Helen, and I liked her poutingly spoilt characterization as well as the power and clarity in her voice. Her lover Paris is a testing role for a lyric tenor, which Christopher Diffey inhabits superbly with bright, vaulting, almost over-sung high notes and the ensemble is excellent and frequently underpinned by the warm and beautifully supported Bass of Marcin Gesla as Agamemnon.

It is amazing that work of this quality can be presented for a ticket price of £12. I hope the cast are getting paid, but it’s the best bargain in town.

This review written for thepublicreviews.com

Phone rings, door chimes, pretend you're out ...

2011-02-09T14:00:00.009Z

Poor Steve Sondheim. During his 80th birthday year in 2010 his works were exhaustively produced and his dramatic entrails more pored over than in any autopsy. There’ll be less of a retrospective when he’s dead. In London, the revivals ranged from a lumpen ‘Follies’ atop a Walthamstow boozer to a puppyishly adoring all-star Albert Hall Prom which was the theatrical equivalent of humping the Great Man’s leg.

As the dustcart follows the Lord Mayor’s show, here comes Southwark Playhouse’s production. Company contains some of Sondheim’s best lyrics, is most autobiographically representative of his own views on relationships, but it’s not the best ‘book’ musical in the canon. Indeed, the script by George Furth is so inconsequential that the show works largely as a song cycle wherein married friends revolve round bachelor Bobby in a carousel of exhortation to find a wife. Updating it with iPhones and MacBooks robs it of a certain 70’s ‘Mad Men’ style and contemporaneous conventions about relationships, but does bring some fresh perspectives.

In his first fully-fledged directorship, Joe Fredericks allows too much unevenness: Siobhan McCarthy’s uncannily accurate impersonation of Bette Davis doing Margo Channing is funny but can undermine the power and pathos in her bravura rendition of ‘Ladies Who Lunch’, Mark Curry’s archly dated portrayal of husband Larry clings more to Mr Clifford in Acorn Antiques than to Broadway, and for a musical so deeply rooted in Manhattan the accents wander widely and the singing projects some very English vowels.

Cassidy Janson as Amy scores highly for her comic timing and vocal precision in ‘Not Getting Married Today’ in which she’s partnered by the strong and charming voice of Greg Castiglioni as Paul. Two of Bobby’s single girlfriends also stand out: Katie Brayben as April the air hostess manages to find the comedy in the script, her dumb blonde resistance to Bobby’s chat-up lines were one of the few laugh-out-loud moments, and Michelle Bishop as spunky punk Marta takes command of ‘Another Hundred People’ with genuine panache.

Bobby is meant to be an enigma, often portrayed as a coolly suave playboy who degenerates into a self-pitying mess, but Rupert Young‘s performance showed less of an arc since his Bobby is a greasy sweaty cokehead from the outset, perpetually dishevelled and disoriented. It’s a more modern reading of the part and emotionally distanced from the audience, but improves in the second act when ‘Being Alive’ was thoughtfully phrased and strongly delivered.

The singing is mostly very fine indeed, but the production lacks pace - you could see the audience’s attention wander - entrances need more immediacy and less clunking over the underlit Bridge-of-Sighs-made-from-scaffolding set - and for the dialogue to crackle authentically, cues need to be picked up much more smartly.

This review written for www.londonist.com

Soho Boho

2011-01-20T22:32:00.009Z

Review of La Boheme at Soho Theatre

Written by Giacomo Puccini
Directed and re-translated by Robin Norton-Hale
Musical Director - Andrew Charity
Lighting - Christopher Nairne
Designer - Lucy Read

TPR rating - 4.5 Stars

A short sprint across Leicester Square, Jonathan Miller’s new and lavish production of La Boheme is at the Coliseum, with a cast of 40 and a magnificent two-tier revolving set.

When Dr Miller himself went to see OperaUpClose’s production above a ramshackle Irish pub in Kilburn, he pronounced it a ‘revolution’. Now it’s migrated from the Cock Tavern to the modern Soho Theatre to become even more ‘boutique’ by shedding its chorus and having the whole thing played by a cast of eight. In so doing, OperaUpClose have turned it into a nightly phenomenon and it’s become the longest-running opera in the country.

The first act of La Boheme contains all the best tunes and shows Rodolfo and his student mates living in poverty and about to set fire to the landlord’s furniture to keep warm on Christmas Eve. They can, however, afford vodka, wine, beer and Apple laptops and despite the bitter cold are often running out into the street in t-shirts: some of this needs tidying up in Robin Norton-Hale’s clever but uneven production. Mimi, their Ukranian illegal immigrant neighbour stumbles into their group and Rodolfo falls for her.

Mimi’s illicit status needs emphasizing too, otherwise it’s unclear why she doesn’t just go to an NHS hospital when TB overwhelms her – but the construct is brilliant, and proves the resilience of La Boheme to survive equally a massively-budgeted ENO production and this shoestring, chamber, cosy exposition in Soho.

There are three castings for each principal and most of the young singers are in their second or third year after graduation – at this performance Rodolfo was played by a substantial Welsh lad named Gareth Morris, with a dramatic tenor voice of great beauty which sailed through the tricky top C’s of ‘Your Tiny Hand is Frozen’ but whose volume seemed suited more to the arena at Verona than a 100-seat indoor venue.

His uncontrollable power made it more difficult for the others to blend in the ensemble scenes, his diction is sometimes clouded and at odds with the conversational libretto and you felt that just his vocal megawattage might have kept Mimi alive … but I don’t want to underestimate him. In a similarly deconstructed Cosi Fan Tutte I saw about thirty years ago, then-student Bryn Terfel appeared as a mis-spelled understudy in the programme I’ve still kept, and Morris has no lesser potential.

The first act is a touch underlit and overlong but when the audience descends to the bar at the interval, the second act erupts through the street doors like a whirlwind as the action moves to Café Momus and Claire Presland’s tarty chavvy Musetta takes control and wins the audience’s affection.

Back upstairs in the garrett, the mood shifts and towards the end there’s very realistic emotion in Rodolfo’s cradling of the ailing Mimi and genuine disbelief that she might be dying. This intimacy is where the production is at its best, and made several audience members tighten their grip on their partner’s hand.

There’s tenderness too in the piano playing, it’s a major task to play the entire score of La Boheme on one piano, and Mihalis Angelakis did it beautifully.

This review written for The Public Reviews

PaulinLondon and I made a couple of AudioBoos during the evening and I'm quite chuffed that Soho Theatre are using the second one in their own online publicity ...

Listen!

Listen!

Panned

2010-12-18T11:14:00.011Z

If you’re the kind of sentimental old purist who remembers Mary Martin in the title role, and the words “second star to the right and straight on till morning” still bring a lump to your throat – this is not the Pan for you. This is a modern, popular-culture-on-steroids, musically throbbing show and light years’ flying distance from J M Barrie’s fireside story.

What it lacks in subtlety or adherence to the plot it makes up for with the energy of the ensemble performances led by a Priscilla-derived trio of Motown divas – Nadine Higgin, Donna Hines and Tasheka Coe who carry the singing load (presumably because the principals can’t) with stunning voices and punctuating the action with a series of punchy numbers and sparkly frocks until you’re not sure whether this is panto or promo for Destiny’s Child. They’re called the Pan-ettes, but assessing the carbohydrate load of one or two of them, Paninis might have been funnier.

David Hasselhoff isn’t Ian McKellen. But he isn’t rubbish either, tall enough to invite a sort of totemic admiration merely for being there he turns in a more than adequate performance as a nervously under-confident Hook who ultimately charms rather than frightens the little kiddies, and the knowing references to ‘Knight Rider’ and ‘Baywatch’ are very well-handled. He is not out of his depth.

In contrast, there is no pit of adjectival condemnation deep enough in which to drown Mr Louie Spence, who appears as Roger the Cabin Boy.

I had no previous exposure to the toxic radiation of this character, which I now consider to be the sort of lucky escape you’d have had to be weekending away from Chernobyl in April 1986 - but thanks to Wikipedia I understand he’s a ‘dance expert’ and that overused oxymoron ‘television personality’ whose reputation is fuelled by appearances in tabloid magazines and his own show on Sky 1.

It’s amazing what you can miss if you go out in the evenings.

His wriggling, arse-spreading, tit-flashing, hyperbolically vulgar camp performance is so revolting that it should come with a health warning ‘Not Suitable For Children’. Or Adults. The constant and undisguised references to his sexual appetite and capacity are so far removed from either the clever innuendo tradition of Pantomime where the lewd jokes go over the children’s heads – with Spence’s shockingly nasty aim they’d probably get it in the eye - or from the boundaries of taste and inappropriate stereotyping that you wonder what Wimbledon was thinking of in casting him. Perhaps he’s part of their outreach programme to employ someone with such a disabling speech impediment?

Mr Louie Spence courting tabloid publicity, copyright BigPictures/holymoly.com

On evenings when Mr Hasselhoff is unavailable, the role of Hook will be played by Jerry Springer. Let’s hope he gives Mr Spence the kind of feedback he gives to damaged personalities on his show.

In the rest of the cast, it’s worth praising Shane Knight who looks as if he may be Spence’s understudy but dances better, doubling Nana, a fey Pirate, an Indian and the excellent crocodile. Jaymz Denning leads the Pirate band with considerable charm, and dance captain Katherine Iles is engaging as Tiger Lily. Amy Bird is a rather too bland Wendy and Robert Rees, excellent in State Fair and Hobson’s Choice is not really given full rein in this production, and emerges as a somewhat grounded Peter. Nor are he and Bird allowed to sing until the final number which is a shame because they both have fine musical theatre voices.

There are ten sparkly sets, and the scene changes are slick enough to hold the young audience’s attention but sets, costumes and the Eric Potts script are thoroughly recycled, having done duty last year at Brighton Theatre Royal and previously at Woking and Bromley.

Wimbledon is lucky to have its enterprising theatre which delivers on so many levels, it’s unfortunate this glossy production is damaged by injudicious casting.

This review written for ThePublicReviews

Twentieth Century. Limited.

2010-12-15T15:13:00.003Z

Desperately trying to resuscitate his career and escape Chicago creditors, theatrical impresario Oscar Jaffee hops the Twentieth Century streamliner train for New York. In the next door sleeper resides his former muse turned Hollywood superstar Lily Garland.

In the 1978 Broadway and 1980 London productions there was orchestral sweep and solid grandeur in the fittings of the train, the jazz age costumes, and the panorama of scenery and effects as ‘in flight across the night America the beautiful rolls by’. This fitted with the witty script and inventiveness of the Betty Comden and Adolph Green lyrics, in what would be their last major success crowning a career stretching back to Singin’ in the Rain and On The Town. Written the year before the popular musical was shape-shifted for ever by Sweeney Todd and Evita, On The Twentieth Century belongs in that ‘last great traditional book musical’ category and still needs the production values of its genre.

Ryan McBryde’s production at the Union follows another superb Comden and Green show, Bells Are Ringing, and invites unfortunate contrast. Whereas Bells looked ready for an immediate West End transfer (and may yet make the leap when theatres come free in the spring) Twentieth Century serves more as a memo to producers with deeper pockets to say what a great script and brilliant Cy (Sweet Charity) Coleman score it has.

Unfortunately not in the hands of this band where a misguided MD has set it for five saxophones and a piano, thereby burying one of the best and most symphonically seamless overtures in musical theatre.

Not that the performances are poor - quite the reverse - Rebecca Vere shines as Lily and sings both the operetta and the show tunes with class, although Kathryn Evans in the 1997 chamber production at the Bridewell was more overtly comic. Valda Aviks infuses the mad philanthropist Mrs Primrose with charm and cunning and her appearances are all a delight. The ironic casting of diminutive Howard Samuels as the towering knight of Broadway Oscar Jaffee may test you more. He’s funny and sings accurately but something powerful was missing, at least from the preview performance.

Since the original boasted a cast of about 45, it’s hard to believe this is performed by just 11 because they really do fill the stage with all the principals sharing the roles of the ensemble and managing some glorious harmonies in their unmiked singing. With the inevitable doubling and trebling some of the smaller characterizations are necessarily a bit cartoony, but as Jaffe’s longsuffering henchmen, Matt Harrop and particularly the Captain Pugwash-like Chris David Storer are first rate.

The scant set and indifferent lighting show up the shabbiness of the venue, and the confines of a train don’t really allow for elaborate dance choreography, although Drew McOnie’s movement and staging was well-executed by the enthusiastic cast. The home made special effects, including a shoe-brush-on-tea-tray steam train, and torch lit transfiguration, are superb.

At Tuesday’s opening, I was thrilled to discover that The Stage critic Mark Shenton is as big a fan of this musical as I am, although PaulinLondon felt Shenton was somewhat better at suppressing his desire to sing along.

It ran 2 hours 45. The show needs tightening and if licensing allows, judicious cuts.

This review written for Londonist.com

A Star is re-Born

2010-11-24T10:11:00.014Z

Tracie Bennett (yes, Rita's adopted daughter from Corrie) fairly strips the skin and the bones off of that there Judy Garland. The 5* accolade is for an impeccable impersonation, maybe the production and script deserve 4 ... there's clearly a giant, or possibly a Giant, movie to be made from this excoriated life and in giving us only the last five weeks the stage show does Garland a disservice because there's no background or explanation of how she got into this terrible state.

END OF THE RAINBOW

Playwright: Peter Quilter
Director: Terry Johnson
Designer: William Dudley
Musical Director: Gareth Valentine
Sound: Gareth Owen

Reviewer: JohnnyFox

TPR score: 5 stars

Can you imagine what it would be like if Judy Garland were still alive? In her late eighties would she be shuffling from one tacky daytime chat show to the next still living off ancient glories like The Wizard of Oz and Easter Parade, trotting out the same old stories of booze and drugs to any daytime host who’ll listen and favouring audiences with her uncontrolled vibrato?

Or perhaps she’d have got sober, like Elaine Stritch, and be twinkling her way through A Little Night Music on Broadway or could it have been Judy instead of her parodic daughter officiating at the schlock gay wedding in Sex and the City 2?

'End of the Rainbow', Peter Quilter‘s smartly-scripted play shows a snapshot of this giant ego undermined by wracking self-doubt as she heads for a final meltdown in 1968 struggling to repay debts with a five-week season at the Talk of the Town in London buoyed by the romance of her newly acquired fifth husband (and allegedly third gay one) Mickey Deans.

In a gloriously inaccurate Richard Mawbey wig (for London, Garland had cut her hair in a gamine style like Peter Pan) Tracie Bennett has the face, figure, body language and voice of Garland as well as both the flame and the warmth of her fiery, funny character pierced by crystal shards of incessant need for reassurance and fear of separation.

Surely this is an Olivier award-winning impersonation and she carries the evening with power and sinew worthy of Judy’s own survival technique.

William Dudley’s richly pretty set mutates slickly between her suite at the Ritz and the Talk of the Town revealing a band of stunning capabilities thrashed to a frenzy by MD Gareth Valentine when Bennett takes the stage in a range of numbers from brassy You Made Me Love You and the Trolley Song to painfully reflective Over the Rainbow and The Man That Got Away. She’s in such fine, belting voice, that the reverb added to simulate the ‘stage’ acoustic is almost excessive.

In one sense, Bennett fails Garland because in performance she’s just too good. Judy’s London appearances were uneven to say the least: contemporary critics referred to her cracked, flat notes, lack of concentration, that her voice had ‘taken a beating’, or that the show was only successful because of her defiant personality, enduring popularity and ‘instant hysteria among an audience determined to clap itself silly’.

Although this is only a ‘slice’ of the fruit-loaf that was Garland, indeed - being the end slice it’s effectively the crust, Bennett measures the progress from the funny, smart, madcap Judy excited at the prospect of a season in London to the Ritalin-raddled wreck at the end with tremendous control and such authenticity that when, in a faultless best-supporting actor performance delivered with wit and affection, Hilton McRae as her loving gay pianist suggests a quiet mutual retirement to seaside domesticity, you almost believe Judy might take it.

At 2 hours 30, it’s arguably one ‘I’m not going on’ too long, and there’s a sense of cyclical repetition which is perhaps why Get Happy was trimmed from the list of songs.

Garland’s long dead, and when the audience rose to its feet to hail the star at the curtain call, the cheers were for Tracie Bennett, not Judy, and thoroughly deserved.

This review originally written for www.thepublicreviews.com

We are dainty little (6ft) fairies ...

2010-11-21T22:45:00.003Z

SASHA REGAN’S ALL-MALE IOLANTHE
Union Theatre, Southwark, London SE1

Book and lyrics: W.S. Gilbert
Music: Sir Arthur Sullivan
Director: Sasha Regan
Musical Director: Chris Mundy
Choreographer: Mark Smith
Designer: Stewart Charlesworth
Lighting: Steve Miller

Whilst The Mikado and Pirates of Penzance have had a number of recent and successful modern treatments, wresting the rest of the Gilbert and Sullivan canon from the dead hand of D’Oyly Carte and its historically reverential staging has proved more difficult, so Sasha Regan and her all-male company at the Union Theatre are to be congratulated on a production of Iolanthe which is quite so inventive and engaging.

If you need to trouble yourself with the plot – well, the ones in underwear are fairies and the ones in dressing gowns are Peers, there’s a half-breed Arcadian shepherd who becomes a member of Parliament, and a ward of court who wants to marry him, and the Lord Chancellor is married to a friend of the Queen of the Fairies who has been banished to live at the bottom of a river … it’s all too silly for words, so relax and enjoy the ride.

And a ride it is – joyous, uplifting, funny, sweet, occasionally sentimental but mostly comic with moment after moment of sheer delight in both the musicality of the performers who strive for high accuracy in their falsetto and coloratura, but mostly for a genius theatrical device which allows the young cast to drive along the story and the musical numbers without bothering to age up.

It’s smart and sharp and whilst it doesn’t emphasise the satire on politicians which Iolanthe often invites, it brings in references from Harry Potter, and Peter Pan and Narnia which make the story even more accessible, and the ensemble numbers enormously enjoyable, particularly with Mark Smith’s complex and fluid choreography.

There are some remarkable voices: Gianni Onori as Strephon the romantic lead has a Scots accent which is sometimes impenetrable in the dialogue, but his singing is elegant and tender and Matthew James Willis, an Australian tenor making his London debut is outstanding as Earl Tolloller, with impeccable diction and a richly resonant tone almost too powerful for the tiny Union theatre.

Although for me the falsetto works best in the ensemble numbers, there are some highly skilled singers among the ‘girls’ – Alan Richardson as Phyliss reaches high and clear into the soprano range and Kris Manuel, in between stealing scenes as the Geordie fairy queen, exhibits a well supported contralto, especially in the aria ‘Oh Foolish Fay’.

Production designer Stewart Charlesworth’s costumes are a highlight, well matched with the battered attic set and carefully individualized for every character in the chorus. There’s no orchestra and on one piano musical director Chris Mundy emulates everything from fairy bells to trumpeting fanfares.

This is a gorgeous evening.

This review written for www.thepublicreviews.com

Pink and juicy, and that's just the rack of lamb

2010-11-15T10:57:00.002Z

Review: Blues and Burlesque @ Volupte, London
for remotegoat.co.uk

Parked midway between the Kit Kat Club from 'Cabaret' and a jollier, ruddier Fat Sam's Grand Slam Speakeasy from 'Bugsy Malone', Burlesque and Blues at Volupte is one of the best things you can do on a Wednesday night in London.

Remotegoat reviews are meant to be about performance, but it's impossible to overlook the delicious cocktails whipped up by the friendliest of bar staff, the restaurant-quality food (pink and perfect rack of lamb, delicious fish) and the whole seductive atmosphere which on a windy and wet Wednesday welcomed everything from youngish couples on date night, to a team outing which could have been an episode from 'The IT Crowd'.

About the time your main course is served, the music starts with Pete Saunders' powerful attack on the ivories, literally driving the rhythms along Route 66, and his own 'Don't Say You Love Me' where stamping every beat on the floor is perhaps unnecessary when you're accompanied by a talented drummer like Jonathan Lee. But the music really builds the mood up to the entrance of Vicious Delicious whose comic timing is every bit the equal of her burlesque.

Also known as circuit standup Leah Shand, Ms. Delicious handles the audience brilliantly, and both her renditions of 'I'm Tired' from 'Blazing Saddles' and a wickedly funny version of 'Ne Me Quitte Pas' were excellent. What's all the more surprising is how well she also interprets the dancing and burlesque, this is a very classy act.

For both Vicious and her partner Bouncy Hunter, the choice of material is intelligent and hugely entertaining: 'Whatever Lola Wants' from 'Damn Yankees' works very well, and whilst Sondheim's 'Making Love Alone' is hilarious, I'd have preferred it taken at a more sultry pace, particularly before the rousing finale of 'Tool Man'.

The costumes and jewelery are lovely, the lighting flattering even to the audience, and the professionalism and confidence of the performers can't be understated.

Clever, funny, charming, friendly, elegant, sexy but not in the least bit sordid, this really is an outstanding evening delivered with charm, wit and polish.

Wanking in a Winter Wonderland

2010-11-04T10:42:00.008Z

The Reindeer Monologues
written by : Jeff Goode
director : Matthew Lloyd Davies
venue : Above The Stag, London SW1
TPR rating : 2.5 stars

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?
In the lane, snow is glistening.
A beautiful sight, but there’s rape here tonight in Santa’s pervy wonderland …

At North Pole Central, a traumatized Rudolph beats his hooves softly against the walls of a padded cell, Cupid admits his masochistic taste for the whip and describes Santa’s grotesque penile tattoo, feminist Blitzen stages a walkout, kosher Dancer wants time off for Hannukah, ex-hell’s angel Comet finds salvation in St Nick and foxy Vixen explains how she has been taken from behind in the way only Santa knows how …

It’s a brilliant concept, but lamely developed in Jeff Goode‘s script which accuses Santa as a sadomasochistic freak with penchants for everything from bestial rape to child abuse, and his wife as an alcoholic nymphomaniac. One by one the eight reindeer fill in the details of the horrific violation which has led to strike action jeopardizing the Christmas sleigh run.

There are two ways to play this: out and out ‘Jerry Springer’ confessional where the reindeer are snow-white trash dishing the dirt on a monster and the characters exaggerated for comic effect, or here as in Matthew Lloyd Davies‘ flatly directed production where the monologues sound more like courtroom evidence.

Part of the problem is the material which doesn’t seem to have been updated: in 1995 it may have been smart and edgy to use the word ‘vagina’ repeatedly onstage, or to make nudgy jokes about rape and paedophilia, but with a slew of press reportage of everything from Michael Jackson to the Catholic Church, sexual abuse hasn’t exactly retained its rib-tickling appeal.

The structure of the reindeer team is interesting, as are the glimpses of how the Santa industry is run, but apart from revealing that the elves were formerly towel boys in an Irish brothel, there’s very little satire of the Christmas business.

The performances are enthusiastic and earnest: I liked James McGregor’s earthily Northern born-again Comet, and Heather Johnson’s plumply Bristolian Dancer coming dangerously close to the work of Matt Lucas whom she somewhat resembles. Domenico Listorti’s lisping queerdeer Cupid is the easy scene-stealer, but only because the others don’t play up nearly enough and their characters are less obviously drawn.

It’s an evening of missed opportunities: the crime scene is a bare room with three sets of antlers on the walls, the colourless lighting is appalling, there’s almost no music, and the costumes are cheap and dowdy. The audience knows the show’s intentionally funny, but the laughs are few and you can feel the actors straining for them as the monologues grow increasingly repetitive, building too slowly towards Vixen’s anticipated but obvious final testimony.

Sometimes, reindeer don’t know how to fly …

This review written for The Public Reviews

Marx and Spencer

2010-10-28T10:51:00.004+01:00

I think Jeremy Hardy’s show was very good. Every time I woke up, people seemed to be laughing.

That’s a slight exaggeration of course but despite the fact I’m a big Jeremy Hardy fan and try never to miss his appearances on radio, two and a half hours is a long set for any stand-up comedian, and Hardy doesn’t have the hyperactive stage presence of a Michael McIntyre or Lee Evans to keep the joint jumping. Nor as an observational comedian does he have a bottomless inventory of veteran jokes like Ken Dodd whose first notebook must date from Methuselah’s schooldays.

Indeed, in super-sedate Richmond-on-Thames “it’s really South London but you all probably think it’s still Surrey” and a house filled by his core audience of Men With Partings and Women in Husky Jackets, it’s surprising there wasn’t a little more light dozing going on.

It started well enough with topical remarks about Nick Clegg concealing his smoking habit from the children, and he tested the audience’s receptiveness to his foul-mouthed delivery as an alternative to his somewhat modulated Radio 4 appearances. They lapped it up, F-word C-word and all.

He struck at his usual political soft targets including Vince Cable “tasked with shafting the poor in their own accent” and a neat suggestion that after her demise, Tony Blair might bask in her reflected glory by lauding Lady Thatcher as “The People’s Pinochet”, but the newish Coalition team didn’t seem to provide the same range of hairy old coconuts as New Labour, and some of his balls fell short.

Hardy is the first to acknowledge he’s not a household name, and that his stature and Marks and Spencer beige dress sense are as far from celebrity ‘stage presence’ as you can get. When his material is sharp and topical, it doesn’t matter, but after the interval the Marxist political points were diluted and the anecdotes less ordered – several times he asked the audience ‘what was I talking about?’ and often between the several hundred of us we couldn’t come up with the answer.

Later still, he began to reminisce about his political activism and ramble about his Streatham-dwelling Waitrose-shopping domesticity, so it all felt a bit like Billy Bragg’s dad telling you the highlights of his Saga holiday.

Top priced tickets for the show were around £28, and Hardy’s subversism ran only to saying he thought this show was “worth about £14.75” but not encouraging the audience to storm the box office for refunds.

Mark Thomas would have done.

Sondheim's Airs On A Shoestring

2010-10-25T09:21:00.010+01:00

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times pic shows what you could do with a bare stage, although not in Walthamstow

The friend I invited to come with me was vehement: "I ****ing HATE it … screw Follies, and screw Sondheim's pappy pastiche score too". That's the problem with 'Steve', he polarises even his devotees and this is one of his most divisive works, combining a banal and disjunctive book by James Goldman with some of Sondheim's best songs.

The 'book' pairs two retired musical stars, and their interchangeable husbands, with their four younger selves meeting in a condemned theatre - here Ye Olde Rose and Crown Walthamstow was particularly convincing - on the eve of its demolition. The songs explore their current and past relationships and reveal much of the bitter compromises made along the 'road you didn't take'. Oh, and someone has a nervous breakdown.

Unless you can afford to throw vast money and stardom at it as in the glossy revivals in London in 1987 led by Julia McKenzie and Diana Rigg, or the immaculate 2007 City Center concert in New York, it works best as a series of showstopping 'turns' for veteran performers to get a crack at fantastic cabaret solos and duets.

Unfortunately, in the Walthamstow production, these are poorly served: Ellen Verenieks' 'Broadway Baby' was crucified and neither 'Ah, Paris' nor 'Rain on the Roof' (admittedly a difficult number) fared any better. Among the principals there's a lot of popping neck veins and red faces as they strain to support their notes - Frank Loman as Ben carrying the heaviest workload but with limited variety in his performance.

Staging and choreography have two settings: clunk on and off atop a hollow wooden catwalk, or enter sideways in a showgirl glide. The high point of the evening was undoubtedly the tap number 'Who's That Woman' where all eight Follies 'girls' confront their younger selves, and an absolute gift to its lead soloist whether JoAnne Worley bringing the house down in New York, Lynda Baron falling out of her frock in London, or as here the magnetic Mahny Djahanguiri exhibiting genuine talent and confidence, as Stella.

Given her own chance to reveal an inner jazz baby in 'Jessie and Lucy', with stolid left and right hand signals, Julie Ross as Phyllis appeared to be directing the traffic on the nearby Tottenham road, and again threw away an opportunity with an underpowered 'Could I Leave You'. Maggie Robson as Sally had some pitching problems but showed real tenderness in both 'In Buddy's Eyes', arguably Sondheim's most genuinely sentimental song, and brought a convincing climax to 'Losing My Mind'.

It's fairly standard practice in fringe productions like this for the director to back up a van to the loading dock of Arts Educational Schools and fill it with all it can hold in the way of aspiring talent. But Follies requires eight vivacious actresses in their fifties or sixties so Tim McArthur's van must have done a double journey to the back door of Debenhams where surely they can't ALL have been demonstrating food mixers in the basement?

Fiona Russell's set and costume design showed ingenuity and caught the period feel, but crippled by the shoestring budget. Paring the orchestra down to four is fine for a chamber production but the entire score was played ploddingly from the book without any variation of tempo to suit the performers, and far too loud, given that the actors aren't miked. Pity too that they couldn't get a real piano up the stairs instead of the electronic keyboard.

For all its faults, 'Follies' is certainly overdue a revival. In fact, I've had an idea - why not re-cast it with the quartet of 'kids' who played the 'young' parts in 1987 at the Shaftesbury Theatre now playing their adult roles? Why? Because in 1987, Young Sally and Young Phyllis were played by Sally Ann Triplett and Jenna Russell.

Now THAT I'd pay to see.

This review written for www.remotegoat.co.uk

Hens in the skirting board

2010-10-22T12:23:00.004+01:00

In the Victoria Wood 'shoe-shop' sketch, Julie Walters apologises for the haphazard service by telling her customer 'we think we've got hens in the skirting board'. It has the pattern of normal speech, but is patently absurd. The roots of this sort of comedy, in a long line from Monty Python to The Mighty Boosh stem directly from the absurdist writings of 'A Resounding Tinkle' author N.F. Simpson.

The trouble is that in the fifty years since he wrote it, audiences have been exposed to so much more of the same thing in sketch shows and stand-up routines that the original now seems rather less shiny.

Simpson's plays work best when they are delivered with as much naturalism, in set, costumes and acting as possible and you may feel shortchanged in Kim Moakes' production with a mere suggestion of the domestic surroundings of Bro and Middie Paradock. Ben Higgins and Lizzy Mace make a convincing married couple even though their performances may come from observation rather than experience: Simpson was satirizing their middle-class preoccupations rather than middle age, the original actors were also in their 20's.

Mace is best when she steps out of Middie's flatly argumentative character to quiz the audience directly as a white-coated researcher in technical theatre, and this and another couple of short bursts of comedy featuring Alex Morgan and Hayley Richardson as the live 'home entertainment' the Paradocks prefer to the radio are what lift the level of the performance, perhaps because the sketch-like structure and pointed delivery have become more familiar to contemporary theatregoers.

There are two versions of this play: a one-acter compressed into fifty minutes and this full-length extension. In the superfluous second half, the actors become four critics assessing the merits of the play in random accents and drawn-out conversations which undermine the naturalistic dialogue and emphasise how slowly the time seems to pass.

In his ex-pat life in Spain, N.F. is known to his friends as 'Wally Simpson' in homonymic reference to the Duchess of Windsor. This in itself is funnier than the whole of the current production.

This review originally written for www.remotegoat.co.uk

Really dirty kitchen sink drama

2010-10-22T12:16:00.006+01:00

Clenching your cheeks to maintain equilibrium on a collapsible chair in the teeniest of London's fringe venues, it's not hard to believe you're a visitor to the abject little flat occupied by washed up opera singer John McLachlan in 'Bright Is The Ring Of Words' at Wilton's. After all, we are perched on the grottier edge of Limehouse and walking home in the moonlight I wondered how many similar unwanted and unloved pensioners were stacked in the tenements of Tower Hamlets I passed on the way to the station.

The opening banter follows a familiar pattern between the elderly and defiantly unwashed and the fussily dutiful carer who despairs at the filth and the adandonment of standards. So far so 'Steptoe and Son' except that John Garfield-Roberts plays Stanley as a mumsy recidivist whose combination of Lancastrian homilies derived from his beloved 'Nan' and occasional eruptions of violent anger are both wholly credible and endlessly watchable.

Jeffrey Mayhew never shies away from the actualities of his character's complete abandonment of personal standards. Retching and drooling and occasionally immobilized in a helpless contortion of pain and exhaustion, he engages the audience's curiosity and sympathy but spiked with an intellectual acerbity that keeps it mercifully free from pathos.

Although there are some great lines, and the comic moments are well-delivered, it's the authenticity of the central performances that holds your attention, and both the struggle over the alcoholic's grasp on the vodka bottle and the final catastrophe seemed entirely real to me.

This review written for www.remotegoat.co.uk

Brilliant 'Bells'

2010-10-07T12:03:00.009+01:00

When you examine the 1956 credentials of Bells Are Ringing: book by Comden and Green, score by Jule Styne near the top of his game three years before his impeccable ‘Gypsy’, originally directed by Jerome Robbins and choreographed by Fosse, and whose kooky comedienne star Judy Holliday beat Ethel Merman and Julie Andrews to the Best Actress Tony award, you wonder why on earth it hasn’t been revived much till now.

The jolly, silly plot revolves around phone operator Ella Petersen who can’t help helping her disembodied clients with advice and support, falling in love with a stalled playwright, and at the same time exposing an underworld gang which is exploiting the answering service for illegal gambling. On its slender back, however, director Paul Foster and the talented cast build a series of slick production numbers and a truly engaging romance.

Best of all, in the Judy Holliday role, is the outstanding Anna-Jane Casey. In a red-tinted crop she seems to have absorbed all Carol Burnett’s comedy skills along with the hairstyle and captures the audience’s affection from the get-go such that you’re willing her to get out there and get her man. Her singing is impeccable, too, from the wistful ‘Perfect Relationship’ and powerful ‘I’m Going Back’ to a version of ‘The Party’s Over’ that's so tremulous it could be David Milliband's theme song.

This is a strong dance show for which the Union has cleared its stage to the maximum width and, as so often in fringe venues the choreography’s cleverer and more powerful than in the West End – here in the inventive hands of Alistair David - or perhaps proximity exaggerates it as when 15-year-old Sasi Strallen’s high kicks threaten to take your eye out. The combination of acrobatics and half-staggering dance moves in the drunken party scene exhibits rare technical brilliance.

The ensemble work terrifically hard doubling and trebling roles as well as keeping the scene changes moving briskly and whilst they are typically too young for the parts they’re playing, and some of the cameos are slightly more Arts Ed than West End, it’s worth mentioning Bob Harms, Tama Phethean and particularly Marc Antolin as names to watch. Prompted by a distant memory of his unusual surname, I Googled Tama Phethean and it turns out I went to University with his aunt Ellen and directed her in Coward's 'Hay Fever' in 1973.

As Ella’s love interest, Gary Milner brings tremendous energy to the role of the lazy writer and bravely defers his character’s warmth to the last moment possible, making for a far more credible romance when it happens. Corinna Powlesland, excellent as Sue the spinsterish owner of the answering service, looks disturbingly like Princess Margaret but dying to burst into song and dance given the slightest encouragement, even watching her move a table whilst her feet ache to cha-cha is wonderful.

It’s a small theatre, and some performances are already sold out, so book now. Even if it transfers to the West End which is highly likely, you’ll kick yourself if you missed it in all its charming intimacy at the Union.

Limp Dicks in Hollywood Shtick

2010-10-07T11:40:00.007+01:00

Adam Blake and Sid Phoenix in the Courtyard Studio production

With an overlapping plot told partly in flashback, about an ex-Hollywood actor with a 1949 gay past and an unmarriageable son who has acquired an East German mail order bride in about 1989, the first-act setup of 'Secret Boulevard' takes a while. Long enough, in fact to count the polystyrene tiles on the low-slung ceiling of the Courtyard Theatre's studio and reflect how inadequately they protect you from the ruckus of Marat/Sade in the main house where the inmates of the asylum of Charenton sounded to be having more fun.

Dylan Costello's play has the germ of a good idea. His heroes are two closeted gay actors, loosely based perhaps on Lon McCallister, who gave up movies aged 30 after a gay affair, and Rory Calhoun whose career was thrown to the wolves when Rock Hudson's notorious agent Henry Willson revealed his secrets to 'Confidential' magazine to prevent them printing an expose of Hudson's own private life.

Using identifiable named characters like these could have made for a more interesting play, as the ones in Secret Boulevard are somewhat two-dimensional to care about. Sid Phoenix as the ingenue from England is a bright actor worthy of better material. The women are ciphers, Anna Sambrooks is the most convincing as a Monroe-breathy but by no means dumb blonde: her character complains she's not given parts with enough depth and emotional range, and it's equally true for this production which sometimes feels like the book of a musical denuded of its songs.

Two-dimensionality is reinforced by Ilaria D'intinosante's low-budget set which captures none of the glamour of the MGM era and has entrances wedged so tightly against the back wall that the actors enter sideways. Coupled with their difficulties with props, particularly handling the copious smoking, it looks beyond awkward.

The piece picks up in the second half and there are flashes of comedy and the potential for considerable improvement in a rewrite. Talking of flashes, there's full-frontal nudity, but it's surprisingly unerotic and the flaccidity is symptomatic of the whole evening.

Rory Calhoun on whom the story may be based

This review originally written for www.remotegoat.co.uk

World Famous in Australia

2010-09-29T09:49:00.005+01:00

Going to a one-woman show with a big West End diva. Caroline O’Connor. Who? You know, she’s British but very big in Australia, was in the Sondheim Prom and played the taxi driver in ‘On The Town’ at the Coliseum … judging by Tuesday’s audience it was the most gay, geeky or Australian show-tune fanciers who had beaten a path to Ms. O’Connor’s discounted Garrick door.

We even found one who’d paid to get in.

Which is a pity, because she’s bloody good at what she does. And for those of us who share an allergic reaction to the strain of Strallens currently running through the West End like a norovirus, here’s antidotal relief in a musical star that isn’t a shrill leggy blonde with hyperextended stage-school technique.

Neither a narrative production nor a simple cabaret act, the show incorporates anecdotes - the muezzin’s interruption of Chicago in the Lebanon being one of the best - brilliant spoof movie clips, and medleys from several productions as well as well-sung belted standards like ‘Zing Went The Strings of My Heart’, ‘And the Beat Goes On’ and a lovely affectionate version of ‘I Move On’ from the film version of Chicago.

If you compare their performances as Cassie in A Chorus Line or Chicago’s Velma Kelly, Ann Reinking may be more balletic or Ute Lemper more memorably Weimar, but no-one else better captures the characters’ raw-veined desperation - as O’Connor herself puts it - like a cat falling down the wall, clawing to hang on.

But like everything else in this show, she captures it loudly.

If there’s a fault in the otherwise ravishing orchestrations, it’s that they indulge her capacity for arm-raising crescendo once, or possibly ten times, too often. By the middle of the second half, this feels like a two-hour audition as she gives us her Piaf, Judy, Liza, Into-the-Woods Witch and Merman. Setting aside the fact that by the time Piaf was Ms. O’Connor’s age she was dead, this is possibly one diva too far.

There’s a seven-piece band which would be an entertaining act in itself, led by MD Daniel Edmonds whose Rachmaninov variations on Roxanne were the hit of the night - and the production is richly glossed by Andrew Wright’s inventive choreography, ranging from Fosse hommage to unashamed 42nd Street hoofing and delivered with great charm by the young quartet of Cole Kitchenn protégées.

If it's an audition, it may work: rumour says that there's a West End revival of Kiss of the Spider Woman on its way, and Ms O'Connor is ideal for Aurora.

Bazaar Experience

2010-09-28T12:37:00.005+01:00

If you’re the kind of theatregoer who likes to arrive ten minutes before curtain, settle into a red plush seat with a box of Black Magic and a programme, this is not the show for you. Or maybe it should be.

There’s been a tidal spate of ‘site specific’ theatre experience in London recently, from Punchdrunk’s Banksy-inspired underworld in the dripping tunnels beneath Waterloo Station to the Menier’s current ‘Accomplice’ in which 10-strong random groups of audience roam the streets round Borough Market chasing cryptic clues and gangland characters until – some of them – solve the puzzle and make it back to base.

Now enterprising collective Theatre Delicatessen has transformed its temporary offices – in the former Uzbekistan Airways building behind Selfridges – into a popup theatrical marketplace with at least a dozen shows, cabarets, and one-on-one experiences in its corridors, meeting rooms, basements and even toilets.

Predicated on ‘the value of money’ the deal is a £7 entrance fee gets you in to the building but you must barter with the performers touting for business in the hallways to gain entrance to their shows, mostly by small independent theatre companies like Straight Out Of Line and Curving Road, typically £1 or £2 is all that’s needed so even if you saw and did everything it’s coming out less than a ticket for The Mousetrap. The bars are also insanely sanely priced compared to captive-audience West End theatres.

Even though most events run five to twenty minutes, you probably couldn’t sample everything but there’s a huge range from a cleverly realistic suite of mirror-image hotel rooms on the top floor for a piece in which a chambermaid, or possibly two, wrings her hands over the corpse of a customer. There’s a casino in which your stake at the roulette table dictates how the next scenes are acted, and whilst a lot of the material is clearly improvised, there’s a genuine attempt to move beyond ‘acting by numbers’ and to present evolved and three-dimensional characterisations.

Sometimes this works, for example in a three-handed about disillusioned employees set in an office purporting to be that of the marketing manager of Uzbekistan Airlines in which plans for the Tashkent-Frankfurt-JFK route are chalked on a blackboard on the office wall. For me this was startlingly realistic - not least because for eighteen bizarre months in the mid-90s I was actually design director of Tashkent Airport working on a renovation scheme with British Aerospace. The space reminded me of one we found in the old terminal labelled ‘Flight Simulator’ which was a classroom of old school chairs and on the wall a fold-out double-page photo spread from something like the Big Boys’ Book of Aircraft with the cockpit instruments of a Boeing 767, for instruction of putative pilots.

I enjoyed the one-on-one experiences best, mainly for their unpredictability, for example a clever fortune telling booth, with a twist, by Barometric Theatre, or the bizarre opportunity to pluck, wax, shave or tweezer a hirsute male model in private, and Keiko Sumida’s gentle shrink session in which your ambition for the next ten years of your life can be safely explored.

The atmosphere’s excellent, and the audience as interactive as the performers – when a young man rushed along the corridor panting ‘I’m looking for the autopsy’ you’re unsure if he’s cast or customer. And without giving anything away, the most thrilling of the pieces starts with Catherine Cusack falling four flights down a staircase, without a body double …

In many ways it’s like a vertical slice of Edinburgh Festival handily shrinkwrapped into one convenient building just off Oxford Street.

Perhaps because it’s an old and unmaintained building there are a lot of health and safety precautions which means the stage management of the whole event is a bit obvious, and whilst you’re encouraged to open every door in finding your way around, some of them are just bundles of actors taking downtime, although at least one is a bundle of actors pretending to be off duty. Or was it? Still, with a couple of bars and a cabaret space, there’s plenty of opportunity for downtime of your own.

Very worthwhile. Without being selfconsciously ‘worthy’.

This review written for The Public Reviews

POSTSCRIPT

I'm quite chuffed to be quoted on the theatre company's own website - think this is the first time it's happened for me.

Stopping by Woods

2010-08-22T13:51:00.012+01:00

As a child, I was fascinated by the story that Princess Elizabeth had been informed of the King’s death at the exclusive ‘Treetops’ game lodge in the Aberdares national park of Kenya. Forty years later, when I could finally afford to experience it for myself, it turned out to be an arthritically creaking wooden assembly on stilts facing a rain-sodden pit of mulched foliage to which, at sunset, drifted a random collection of forest-floor wildlife.

Soutra Gilmour’s rickety stick-ety four tier set evokes the same image as the cast creeps out of the undergrowth to launch Into the Woods in a blindingly obvious setting that has somehow taken the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre twenty years to realise but in Timothy Sheader’s brilliantly detailed production comes close to a perfect match.

The folklore’s as complex and tangled as the branches overhanging the stage: half a dozen Perrault or Grimm fairytales are Magimixed with an original story about a childless baker and his wife, cursed by a witch and ultimately redeemed in a messily-written second act with a crude motif about everyone needing other people, outing Sondheim as the mawkishly sentimental sap he really is.

The fine cast, strong singing and excellent orchestrations under the enthusiastic baton of Gareth Valentine drive the show, but on a long wet evening you’re uncomfortably aware that Sondheim threw one too many plots into the mix, and that despite the intriguing cadences, too few of the musical snatches mutate into actual songs.

In such a polynuclear script, there are some brilliant turns: Hannah Waddingham first and foremost as possibly the best Witch yet seen in the role: enjoying the crippled disfigurement and working it like Anthony Sher’s three-legged Richard III, then transformed into a page-boy-bobbed vamp disturbingly reminiscent of Fenella Fielding in ‘Carry On Screaming’, but singing throughout with such clarity and distinction it’s like hearing the material for the first time: ‘Stay With Me’ and ‘Children Will Listen’ both quite outstanding.

Not far behind come Jenna Russell, one of the cleverest Sondheim interpreters as she showed in the recent Sondheim Prom at the Albert Hall, as a sardonic and abrasive Baker’s Wife, and Helen Dallimore equally brilliant as an unconventionally tetchy Cinderella with consummate phrasing in ‘On the Steps of the Palace’. It’s harder to warm to Beverley Rudd‘s scene-stealing chavvy Red Riding Hood since she seems directly derived from Suzanne Toase’s clever characterization in the 2007 ROH/Linbury production.

Michael Xavier and Simon Thomas make a pair of preeningly self-absorbed princes, complete with drainpipe leggings and Russell Brand hairpieces, Xavier particularly strong in partnership with Jenna Russell in ‘Any Moment’. It’s also refreshing to see the minor role of Jack’s Mother played by someone who is both an experienced comedienne and a fine singer, Marilyn Cutts (from Fascinating Aida) appropriately wearing a carpenter’s tool belt and nailing this part totally.

In such an exposed setting, you wonder how they’ll ‘manage’ the magic – a beanstalk must appear, a wolf devour a grandmother, a giant tramples the world underfoot and there’s a transformation scene as challenging as any pantomime … suffice it to say that this is where the director and designer’s ingenuity come into their own, and all the devices – particularly the appearances of the giant voiced by Judi Dench in what you could call ‘Dame Ex Machina’, are cracking.

Murder Will Out

2010-08-22T10:54:00.010+01:00

Ed Fringe 2010: Girl, Constantly F*****g Interrupted
Writer/performer: Celia Peachey
Director: Tim Stubbs Hughes
The Public Reviews Rating: 2 stars

Great title, rubbish play.

I was about to launch into a diatribe against this piece – a sketchy, tentative overlong rummage around the physical and mental attic of the solo character Faith’s brain as she retreats from her murdered mother’s funeral to debate her mental state with the voices in her head. It sounds far-fetched, the voices aren’t well differentiated and it feels rather like an extended audition for accents and characterisations, but not good ones.

But journalistic ‘research’ sometimes leads you up a strange path and I came across the blog and website of the uncredited author and performer, Celia Peachey

Turns out the whole thing is true: her mother was indeed murdered – strangled with a dog-lead by her former lover who was himself a previously convicted killer, and her body hidden in a toilet. Here's the news item. Peachey is going through an angry and uncomfortable postrationalisation in a shroud of psychobabble about ‘the universe’ as well as battling alleged maladministration in the Essex Police, and her own recent grief.

So the faults are really in the marketing – if this weren’t scheduled as a comedy (it isn’t) but as a theatre piece, and if preferably the character(s) were played by someone other than Peachey herself, it might fare much better as a scarily well-informed drama about bereavement, mental imbalance and shock. Maybe bring it back to Edinburgh next year in a fresh treatment, and populate it with more of the living/deceased characters?

Meanwhile, I’d suggest a pre-performance voice-over to identify that this is a true story, as experienced by the actress because that’s not apparent from the performance.

written for THE PUBLIC REVIEWS www.thepublicreviews.com

Rea Window

2010-08-21T22:30:00.006+01:00

There’s a plethora and a half of one-woman shows at the Edinburgh Fringe where the material spills from the uncoordinated ramblings of an early-disappointed or pre-menopausal harpy at the microphone. ‘Look at my awful life’ they rant ‘and feel better about your own’.

In 'Pension Plan' at the Gilded Balloon Teviot, the oddly spelled but also oddly engaging Leisa Rea cherrypicks some of this theme but the structure’s markedly different from the other vaginal monologues on the fringe. Her set celebrates the undeniable but rarely-accepted truth that not everyone can be a Winner, and it’s OK to lose sometimes, because therein may lie the key to your sanity.

There’s some lovely home-baked interactive TV, including on-screen graphics that hark back to the ‘Vision On’ deaf children’s programme in their unabashed clumsiness, and an ‘outside broadcast’ clearly from outside Rea’s back door by ‘the biscuit-eyed lady’ that binds you to her in sisterly affiliation and mutual love for sandwich creams. She makes origami birds out of her medical diagnoses and rejection letters, and in a combination of courage and confectionery encourages the audience to eat a biscuit she’s baked in the shape of a foetus.

Like a lot of self-written and self-staged work at the Fringe, Rea could benefit from an ‘act doctor’ to sharpen the focus and presentation of the material. But the content’s her own, and all the better for it.

written for THE PUBLIC REVIEWS www.thepublicreviews.com

No Shoes Company? No Stars Review ...

2010-08-21T18:45:00.010+01:00

A million years B.C., when I was a first-year drama student, we were encouraged to tit about with improvisation and gradually take, from the frankly ludicrous scenarios and inane characterisations we invented every wet Friday afternoon of the Autumn term, some semblance of a skill set which could be useful in actual acting performance, if any of us made it into the profession which at the last count only two of us did. And one of those gave it up after three weeks.

What we didn't do was invite paying customers to observe the painful process, which is the first mistake perpetrated by the No Shoes Theatre Company in its mostly execrable 'Improvised Musical' which shows its shameful face at 6.30pm nightly in C Venues in Chambers Street.

The press release says the 'energetic company' has worked on productions of 'Sweet Charity', Jason Robert Brown's 'Songs for a New World' and 'I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change'. Clearly they learned nothing from this collective experience, since not one of them can put together a coherent melody line or a quatrain of lyrics without dead air pauses, mugging at his fellow cast members and the audience, or dissolving into self-indulgent giggles.

We might have struck them on a bad night. Somebody should.

They invite the audience to propose a title, a theme song, and a location for the show. Our audience chose the location as a Job Centre, on the grounds that it would be good preparation for them, and despite it being a situation which would be largely familiar to most of the population, these actors couldn't posit a plot, or realistic characters, or a song which had any site-specific relevance or commentary. Their lack of imagination was breathtakingly poor and they conspicuously failed to bring the plot to any kind of resolution in the painful hour during which they kicked it around like a dead rat in a midden.

They are hampered by a 'band' comprising keyboard, drums and something which scarcely made an impact, which has a collection of vamps-till-ready so interchangeable and anodyne that there's no possibility of anyone launching into a recognisable 'musical theatre' genre.

The only countervailing comment is that you might admire their tenacity in persevering with a production which so frequently defies their own abilities. They aver that this is part of the 'experience' of the piece, and that there's validity in the activity even on nights when it all falls apart. As an exercise in gestalt therapy for embryo actors, you could agree. But not for paying customers.

The ineptitude is spectacular. And if I see any quotation which says 'spectacular - The Public Reviews' I shall be back to Edinburgh to slap each and every one of them individually.

written for THE PUBLIC REVIEWS www.thepublicreviews.com

Brass Polish

2010-08-21T14:00:00.004+01:00

Not having had previous exposure to this group, I spotted one of the lederhosen-clad soloists in the bar before the performance. ‘What part of Bavaria are you from?’ I asked in all innocence. ‘Fulham’, he replied.

Part of the wise and worthy ‘Five Pound Fringe’, Oompah Brass’s “A to Z of Oompah” can be found in the GRV venue, on the back steps behind C Venues in Chambers Street.

It’s a gem.

Two trumpets, a trombone, a French horn and a tuba form a band not know for its lullaby potential, indeed their proud boast is that people in the front two rows may regret sitting so close. But there’s plenty of subtlety in their musical arrangements and in the virtuosity of each member: it’s extremely hard to coax high clear and sharp notes from a trumpet, or to make a tuba play the lead line of a complicated melody, but these guys (and one girl) just laugh it off.

Apart from ‘Do you play the Trumpet Voluntary?’ ‘No, only for money.’ there’s scarcely a corny pun or old musical joke not explored in the commentary between the songs, but it’s delivered with such natural charm by Oompah founder Nathan Gash and particularly by the handsome trombonist Patrick Johns who had all the ladies in the audience, and a couple of curious men, swooning when he shoved the bell end of his instrument in their faces.

In their random alphabet, they cover everything from Bach to Megadeath but the focus is on recognizable rock and pop thrashers they can serve up with a Bavarian twist.

They’re all music teachers, but performers at heart since the energy and enthusiasm of the show is infectious, you just want to join in – and at the end, in ‘the greatest pop song ever written’ you get your chance in their brilliant climax. Just make sure you know ALL the words to Bohemian Rhapsody.

written for THE PUBLIC REVIEWS www.thepublicreviews.com

Floppy Haired Tossers

2010-08-21T12:04:00.009+01:00

My Edinburgh posse recommended ‘Out of the Blue’, the Oxford undergraduate a cappella singing group. Oh right. Spoilt chinless posh boys frittering away a musical month in jolly old Edinburgh before joining mummy and daddy on the grouse moor? I had to be dragged there.

And on they bounce: hearty chaps in flannel suits, blue shirts and ties all floppy-haired tiggerish adolescence with Bullingdon confidence. I gritted my teeth for the opening piping treble.

“I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar …” breaking in to a beatbox version of the Human League 80s synthpop classic, complete with every note of the backing track vocalized, these guys have you hooked from the first word.

Their solo voices are amazing, any one of the 12-strong collective makes Philip Oakey sound like a tube station busker, and they throw the lead lines around the group like practised handballers, but when they blend in four or eight part harmony it’s physically thrilling. It looks effortless and casual but the reality must be the product of rigorous choreography and constant rehearsal.

This year their show has been blown up from the constraints of a poky venue at C Central to the cavernous and comfortable George Square Theatre (aka C Plaza) where the wide stage gives freer rein to their energetic shoeless choreography, from bopping along to Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’ to simian freerunning in a completely refreshed treatment of the usually-cliched 'Wimoweh'. Their cheeky humour is subtle and worked especially well in Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed a Girl’.

In the rarer still numbers, you’re even more aware how exciting the voices are: if you thought The King’s Singers version of Billy Joel’s ‘Lullaby’ was touching, prepare to weep openly at OOTB’s more finely-judged closer-harmonied rendition at four fifths the speed but which manages to keep Joel’s Long Island sound without drowning it in cathedral cheesiness. This has to be one of the single best-arranged and best-performed pieces you can hear in Edinburgh this week.

It's a strong ensemble and perhaps invidious to pick out individual performers but there's a natural actor in lanky Tim Jones, OOTB's president and tenor soloist so committed to the performance that even his floppy curly lock-tossing is in time with the music.

Need a niggle? Their technique is applicable to more musical styles than they showcase in a tight fifty-minute set, and I wanted to see how it worked on a wider range of material. Maybe next time.

written for THE PUBLIC REVIEWS www.thepublicreviews.com

Bargain Bucket of Sondheim

2010-08-10T23:12:00.003+01:00

This is not the best week to put on an intimate Sondheim revue.

Overshadowed by the glorious Sondheim Prom at the Albert Hall, by Maria Friedman’s all-Sondheim set at Cadogan Hall and the reputedly outstanding Into The Woods just beginning at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre and you’re on a hiding to nothing.

Throw in the fact that acts in the Camden Fringe have minimal preparation and stage time before strutting their fretful hour in the Roundhouse Studio and the cast of Sondheim by Sondheim more than have their work cut out.

And yet - the Tuesday audience was more than receptive, and for many it was an inexpensive opportunity to hear some of Stephen Sondheim’s less well-known material culled from rarely performed shows like Passion, Evening Primrose, Anyone Can Whistle and Marry Me A Little.

All the performers are ‘actors who can sing’ and the three men do much better than the eight women, particularly Peter Kenworthy, recently excellent as Dexter Haven in High Society at the Gatehouse, although even he has trouble with the top notes in ‘Being Alive’, and the very strong and elegant voice of Michael Stacey who rather outshone his partner in the duet ‘It Takes Two’.

Many of the pieces are performed as an ensemble, including an opening ‘Weekend In The Country’ from A Little Night Music which showed up the cast’s nervousness and felt more under-rehearsed than even the hasty staging of a fringe festival should allow. The later ‘The Sun Won’t Set’ from the same show, and the closing ‘Sunday’ from Sunday in the Park were much stronger and hinted at improvements to be expected later in the week.

Musical Director Aaron Clingham is at the keyboard and unfortunately the balance of voices and accompaniment is uneven, as is the cueing in the ensemble pieces when the cast would benefit from being able to see a conductor.

Sondheim material always works best in its original context, and the same company is mounting one of his best, Follies, long due a London revival, at Ye Old Rose and Crown Theatre from 21 October to 13 November. May even be worth the trek to Walthamstow.

written for www.Londonist.com

Speaking in Tongues

2010-07-21T18:59:00.013+01:00

'Up a steep and very narrow stairway, to a voice like a metronome' ... well strictly that's 'A Chorus Line' but it could apply to almost any show in the airless attic that is the Finborough Theatre and particularly to Charlotte Randle's shouty performance as an English teacher in 'Lingua Franca'.

I'm sure she's a subtle and sensitive actress, but veteran Peter Nichols' new play doesn't give her free rein to express it as he confines all his characters trapped in a Florentine language school in the 50's to one-dimensional stereotypes: particularly Rula Lenska visibly straining to add a sophistication and depth to her flatly-written Russian emigre countess, Abigail McKern's hard-workingly crude but ultimately uncomical Aussie lesbian, and perhaps most wasted Natalie Walter as a Nazi-sympathising Mädchen just two telephone plaits short of Helga from 'Allo 'Allo.

What saves the production from the scrapheap is the two semi-autobiographical characterisations: Ian Gelder as an ageing monolingual aesthete who turns to sculpture as a substitute for sex, and Chris New playing Steven Flowers now transplanted from soldiering in Malaya in 'Privates on Parade' and with a burgeoning socialist conscience fighting a complicated provincial diffidence.

It's as if Nichols is interested only in developing these two characters as projections of his own self, and that the others are disposable caricatures. It's how all self-centred people see the world and consistent with Benedict Nightingale's review of Nichols' 2000 autobiography in which he found the writer 'touchy, crusty' and 'disappointed with himself'. Gelder has the best material and gives a careful and considered performance, highlighting the fact this intelligent actor is sadly underused.

Apart from one bizarre scene in which the Italian school manager puts his head up the skirt of the German girl in a realistic display of what you could call cunnilingua franca, the play is terribly static, imprisoned in one room of the language school with only scruffy louvres hinting at windows in the low-budget set, although Will Jackson's sound brings cicadas, street noise and music to colour the space, and James Smith's lighting design occasionally projects Florence in all her glory across the blind windows.

Every teacher's entrance seems to be marked by a rummage in bag or briefcase, the extraction of a book or journal which is never read or used, and its careful replacement or repositioning for use by another actor. There are too many monologues and limited interaction since they are such ciphers, so the emotional climax when two women vie for Flowers' attention is unrealistic, and when the German gets stabbed in the eye the quickly-produced eyepatch just begs for her to sit astride a chair and sing Marlene's back catalogue.

What makes it all worth the effort, though, is the opportunity to see at close hand the work of Chris New. Since graduating from RADA in 2006 he has been the most perfect foil of 'Horst' to Alan Cumming's 'Max' in the Daniel Sherman production of 'Bent' before taking a storming lead himself as Joe Orton in 'Prick Up Your Ears'.

As Flowers, he is the ideal suburban Everyman of Nichols' imagination, combining pathos, humour and inner confliction in a performance of subtlety and understanding which makes the audience impatient for his next entrance. In his vocal delivery, he could be the new Leonard Rossiter and I suspect his comic potential has only slightly been tested to date. He has a very confident singing voice, too, which suggests an option to revive Privates.

He's clearly got a sense of humour because he tweeted the excerpt from Billington's Guardian review which referred to 'the sexiest seduction scene on the West End stage' with "Crow, Crow! ... who says gays cant pull off being straight!??"

Perhaps Lingua Franca would work better as a musical comedy, it's not so great as a, er, straight play.

A Lot of Night Music

2010-07-14T10:38:00.007+01:00

The trouble with Andrew Lloyd Webber …

No, that’s too easy.

The trouble with Apects of Love is that it’s a trite plot centred on characters too self-absorbed to care about, woven with the relentless thread of ALW’s musical recycling. All the new Trevor Nunn production at the Menier Chocolate Factory does is illuminate the weaving flaws.

Apart from the fact the best-known song is hauntingly similar to a theme by Bach, one of the major melodies from Aspects ‘The Last Man in My Life’ is a shameless import from Tell Me On a Sunday, and the second trickles endlessly through Sunset Boulevard like a dose of musical dysentery.

Given this familiarity, and the fact that modern audiences expect less predictable lyrics than Don Black wrote in 1989 - sometimes you can spot the obvious rhymes bearing down on you like double decker buses – this revival of Aspects is less satisfying than perhaps it was when fresh.

It seems a frequent complaint that well-crafted performances are let down by the material, and there are some simply excellent singers in this production: Dave Willetts is outstanding, a beautiful mature timbre to his voice, but wasted on the banality of the music and lyrics, and it is especially refreshing to hear Michael Arden, as Alex, effortlessly hurdle the top ‘A’ in ‘Love Changes Everything’ without Michael Ball’s overexcited coloratura.

The plotting is tedious – self-centred actress Rose bounces between older and younger lovers, themselves uncle and nephew and one of which has fathered her coquettish teenage daughter with whom both men are further competitively infatuated. There’s a side issue of an Italian sculptress who may be mistress of both the uncle and the actress, ooh-er, sapphism Missus, and an uncredited ‘Hugo’ who incidentally has a lovely voice, who may also be shagging the actress. Although he looks like he'd rather do both of the men.

Throw in the wearing of a dress made for a deceased lady of the house, nicked directly from Rebecca, and the older/younger/actress/daughter quadrilateral borrowed from A Little Night Music and the source material becomes more interesting than the resultant musical.

It’s hard to warm to Rose Vibert because she’s such an unlovely character, but Katharine Kingsley’s confident performance shows the calculating coarseness lurking beneath the powder and paint, if rarely the warmth of a genuine romantic.

The production runs 2 hours 45 but you could trim half an hour of that by cutting the pretentious ALW operatic recitative (almost every word is sung) and turning it into dialogue between musical numbers. The set is a series of chipboard doors and picture frames which slide and occasionally reveal scenic implants including an Alpine panorama disturbingly reminiscent of Hilda Ogden’s ‘muriel’ from Coronation Street.

Sir Trevor Nunn is 70.

Feel the knead in me ...

2010-07-08T14:05:00.001+01:00

You may not know much of Finchley: La Thatcher’s old constituency perhaps you recall, a pimple on the forehead of London’s map-face just before it breaks out in to the bushy afforestation of, well, Bushey and the rest of leafy Hertfordshire.

Be grateful though that someone has thought to fund its modern and enterprising ‘Artsdepot’ complex and to host part of the London International Festival of Theatre where Israel’s Nalaga’at troupe is packing not just the Jewish home crowd but people from all over London to its uniquely experiential show.

Nalaga’at is a company of eleven adult deaf-blind actors, most of whom lost their sensations from birth or in infancy, welded into a performing company by director Adina Tal and delivering an ensemble piece in which the group kneads, seasons and bakes bread on stage whilst telling personal stories and acting out pantomime-like sketches. The set is wonderful, warm with carpentry and golden light - we could be in Mrs Lovett’s pie shop, or the Baker’s house in ‘Into The Woods’.

For the hour it takes for the bread to bake, your mind may wander. Once you’ve accepted that this is a tremendous piece of work to inspire, coach and direct the deaf-blind, leading them with cues from a tambour drum or by touch, and that it took two years to develop and rehearse the show, you are allowed to consider where else this could go and what's the balance between occupational therapy and entertainment.

Showing off that you know waggling your hands in the air is the sign-language equivalent of applause is only part of the range of reactions available, but you will certainly marvel at the varieties of communication through signing, mime, translation of one-person’s hand gestures by his speaking neighbour, fractured speech, and the surtitles.

The whole event is best bracketed with the two hands-on options: BlackOut bar in which, rather like Dans Le Noir restaurant in Clerkenwell, you are led by your blind waitress to eat and drink in total darkness, where every movement has to be tentative and (particularly if you are seated with Henry Hitchings the theatre critic of the Evening Standard) every conversation sounds like double-entendres from a Carry On film.

There’s also a full-service and brightly-lit restaurant run as ‘Café Kapish’ in which charming and totally deaf waiting staff will take your orders in sign language. Best brush up on your charades for ‘Goat Cheese Panini’ …

Of Thee I Sing, but not memorably

2010-07-03T11:22:00.008+01:00

ASSASSINS

Book: John Wiedman
Music and Lyrics : Stephen Sondheim
Direction and staging : Michael Strassen
Musical Director: Michael Bradley
Lighting: Steve Miller

Reviewer: JohnnyFox
The Public Reviews Rating: [3 stars]

U.S. Presidents get a raw deal from musicals … in Kaufman and Hart's 1937 I'd Rather Be Right George M. Cohan starred as Franklin Roosevelt who despite his polio paralysis sings and dances - at least in Annie he remains confined to his wheelchair whilst the ginger moppet bawls a succession of shaky key-changes into his ear. Contemporary musical satires like Michael Friedman’s 2009 Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, or Obama: The Musical have yet to build on early promise but at least in those none of the contenders gets shot at, as do the nine (count ‘em) potential victims in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins currently in a new production by Michael Strassen at the Union Theatre, Southwark.

Assassins is a difficult musical to pigeon-hole. Despite comparing its vengeful plot with Sweeney Todd, it doesn’t fall in to Sondheim’s tuneful-and-waspishly-witty category alongside Follies, Company and Into The Woods. Nor is it in the obscure-but-intriguing box with Pacific Overtures, Merrily We Roll Along and Sunday in the Park. Some claim that as a series of sketches about each of the assassinations, it’s more like a revue than a musical – certainly it defeats Sondheim’s ability to make comic capital out of human relationships since the nine would-be murderers in this show scarcely have one between them and losers and loners don’t make for snappy lyrics. It’s the lack of connectivity between the characters that limits the show, and leaves you feeling cheated with only 8 songs in 90 minutes (although this version runs 110 which indicates a need for tightening and cutting).

If it has a theme it’s that in modern America ‘everybody’s got the right to his dreams’ and that even achieving notoriety by killing the President, can legitimise your pathway to fame and a book deal. In this, it shares its theme of unattained dreams and a consequent ruthlessness with Mama Rose in Gypsy, but this music is as far from the pit band jollification of the Orpheum Circuit as possible. There’s a certain cleverness in the way each is matched to its assassin’s historical period whilst still belonging to the Sondheim canon, such as a Sousa March, a Bacharach-and-David styled lounge ballad, barbershop harmony or ragtime, but none can be extracted as a ‘standard’ to survive outside the musical’s context and they don’t stay in your head long enough to hum on the way home.

Despite these structural difficulties, there are some excellent individual performances and a consistently good ensemble. The whole cast sings clearly and accurately without miking, and Glyn Kerslake (as John Wilkes Booth) John Barr as Charles Guiteau (who shot President Garfield) and Leigh McDonald as Gerald Ford’s would-be assassin Sarah Jane Moore, are particularly strong.

Not all the characters are drawn in three dimensions or allowed the full range of emotions, but Nick Holder drew every ounce of humour as well as anguish from his brilliantly realistic characterisation of Sam Byck, a bankrupt salesman in a Santa Claus suit who initiated a plot to fly a 747 into the Reagan White House.

Although there’s no set save the dingy bare walls and floor of the railway arches which form the shell of the Union Theatre, costumes and lighting are of a high standard for what is essentially a low-budget profit-share production. Fresh and thoughtful orchestrations by Richard Bates give new life to the score as played by a versatile six-piece band.

Director Michael Strassen deserves great credit for the illuminated way in which the stories are presented, and for his huge versatility in staging this recondite and convoluted piece as smartly as his much-lauded production of Company in the same space last year.

But now, please - have a go at Follies.

This review written for The Public Reviews

Thursday in the Park with Karen

2010-06-11T10:11:00.005+01:00

Why should you go to a basement venue condemned for redevelopment to hear a tall slender American woman you probably haven’t heard of sing the works of a long-dead composer and lyricist? Because, trust me, you should. For three good reasons.

One : Karen Akers has a ten-album back-catalogue (much of it available on Amazon, some of it actually on cassette) and a Tony-nominated Broadway pedigree but most of her celebrity didn’t cross the pond and she’s a vibrant and elegant delight still to be ‘discovered’ in London. At 64.

Two : closing in a couple of months Pizza on the Park is the nearest thing we have to New York’s Oak Room at the Algonquin, or Cafe Carlyle, where experienced singers appear in a truly intimate cabaret setting. Since Akers has a beguiling way of catching your eye - when she sings directly at you, it’s almost alarming - this is a connection we simply can’t experience in today’s ever-expanding music venues.

Three : The songs are by Cole Porter, arguably the finest 20th century American composer and lyricist - and one of the few to pen all the words and all the music to almost all his works.

Akers works the lyrics in hear clear, strong, just-above-baritone conversational voice (her speaking and singing voices are close in timbre) only occasionally pressing the point too firmly as though lecturing deaf foreigners. She sings eighteen numbers, and you’ll know at least a dozen from classic interpretations by Ella Fitzgerald or Merman or Sinatra.

Porter’s verse introductions are so ingeniously wordy, and Akers milks them so thoroughly that it’s a bit like a game of ‘Name That Tune’ but those you’ll nail easily include ‘Anything Goes’, ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ and 'Always True To You Darling In My Fashion'. She spins them too, taking the usually-belted cowboy anthem ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ at a sultry pace and finding new meaning by delivering it softly as a torch song till you wonder why they never chose her version as the theme to ‘Brokeback Mountain’.

It's good too to hear the chattery pattery songs like 'Thank You So Much, Mrs. Lowsborough-Goodby' or the rarely-performed 'Tale of the Oyster' from Porter's (deservedly) rarely-performed musical 'Fifty Million Frenchmen', and Akers obviously relished sharing these with her audience.

Consummate. It’s a good word. Go and experience it, before it’s gone.

PaulinLondon and I made a slightly scurrilous AudioBoo after the show.

Listen!

Black and White Dog

2010-05-28T11:09:00.008+01:00

A review, for ThePublicReviews of 'Dream of the Dog' at the Trafalgar Studios, 27.5.10

In the living room strewn with tea chests and cardboard boxes it could be cosy Priestley or Coward, ‘Laburnum Grove’ or ‘This Happy Breed’ as an elderly housewife packs away the last of the family belongings before the house move to a peaceful retirement by the sea. But instead of South London we are high on the windswept veldt of KwaZulu Natal where Janet Suzman as Patricia Wiley is leaving the farm she inherited and has sold to developers.

We see her truculent, crude, memory-failing husband Richard, played with brutal intensity by Bernard Kay as an unreconstructed old colonial hand whose bigotry runs deep, before he storms out into the night to do some unexplained task on the hillside. A stranger arrives – another echo of Priestley – the son of one of the farmhands, named ‘Look Smart’ as a boy and whom Patricia had loved like a son and paid for his schooling returning after fifteen years to demand she now face up to some harsh truths about the dreadful event that caused him to leave.

What follows is an hour of possibly the best one-act play seen in London in recent memory.

The writing is so authentic and natural, and Ariyon Bakare as Look Smart has all the fierceness and pride of the emancipated African, but also a far subtler humility when facing an admission of his own self-deception. In other hands, this could have been a predictable exchange of taunts about racism and patronage, but Suzman – who participated in the development of the play with writer Craig Higginson – resists the obvious and in one of the finest performances you can see in London at the moment, delivers an honest and intelligent reading of the white woman who feels responsible for her actions but cannot find the resource to atone for them completely, nor to assuage the pains and isolation she feels from her own perspective on the past.

The strength of Suzman’s acting is palpable when you feel the strain of her frustration in attempting to explain her thoughts and feelings, and realize that this is not stage technique, but actual emotional truth.

It’s true that the plotting is somewhat over-tidy and the political issues familiar from Athol Fugard and other writers, but in an 80-minute piece there must be some compromises.

This is a play about black and white people whose issues are so far from black and white that you must follow them intently to the end which, even if you can see it coming, is enthralling.

Too Trite To Remember

2010-05-27T12:56:00.006+01:00

A lot of people think there’s a pleasure in writing a scathing review. Once yes, once is delicious but twice would be vicious, or just repetitious but when faced with the third theatrical turkey in four days (Carmen at the O2, Paradise Found and now The Fantasticks) you can tire of prodding entrails with a skewer.

These entrails were strewn around the appropriately coffin-shaped stage of the Duchess theatre as liberallly as Jack the Ripper distributed those of his victim Mary Kelly by hanging them from the picture-rails of her sordid bedsit like paper chains.

We had a particularly good view of the post-mortem, having opted for on-stage seating at half the price of the Stalls, although this may not be such a bargain in the future, given that no-one will pay full price for this cadaver once it officially opens.

This is a chamber production - bearing in mind that a ‘chamber’ is a pisspot – and presided over by an all-seeing impresario figure called ‘El Gallo’ – bearing in mind that El Gallo is Spanish for cock – played by the otherwise delightful Hadley Fraser with too much facial hair and a floor-length frock coat in what could have been an audition for the David Tennant incarnation of The Doctor.

He also gives away in the opening moments the show’s only memorable song ‘Try To Remember’.

‘Try to Remember’’ is one of those songs, and 'Send in the Clowns' is another for me, in which every interpreter points each ruddy syllable with a head-tilt and knowing stare at the audience to invest the lyrics with meaning the song simply doesn't own.

Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember
and if you remember
then follow
follow

Follow what? Certainly not the plot, because despite its simplicity it gets bogged down in a counter-argument about the wisdom of planting fruit and vegetables that might be momentarily appropriate (previews began the same day as Chelsea Flower Show) but when ramped up into a jocular point number for Clive Rowe and David Burt as the fathers, singing brightly 'I like a man who knows his way around a carrot' it served merely to cause physical collapse among certain smutty-minded members of the onstage audience, and thereby get the best laugh of the night. Rowe actually turned round to see what was making the auditorium giggle, because it certainly wasn't him.

'Try to remember' is an exhortation to the audience to cast its mind and its suspension of disbelief back to an earlier, simpler age, and to try to engage with the pure 'message' of The Fantasticks which is that love overcomes all, and there's beauty in the simple pleasures.

That's what a cheap date tells you when you got dressed for Gordon Ramsay but finished up on a 2-for-1 deal in Pizza Express.

What you might also 'try to remember' is that this self-indulgent nonsense was conceived in the 60's when there was a lot of hippy philosophy around, as well as a ready supply of inexpensive hallucinogenics.

Even if you gave out Ecstasy tablets with the programmes, this Fantasticks still wouldn't beguile contemporary playgoers, despite an attempt at modernisation in the costumes - 'The Girl' as played by Lorna Want in a ballooning sundress and fashionista unlaced boots looks rather like Peaches Geldof staggering out of Chinawhite at three in the morning, and 'The Boy' wears Gap. They're clearly not suited.

Much of the action is presented with exaggerated acro-balletic gestures and the scattering of generous handfuls of glitter by 'The Mute', a capering pierrot played by Carl Au in a pair of glazed Firetrap jeans so tight they could have their own fan club.

The only thing that saves this piece from self-embalming is the introduction of a pair of strolling players, an incapable elderly actor played by the brilliantly capable Edward Petherbridge and his base comedic sidekick Paul Hunter whose contortions and bantering double-act brought the only genuine laughs of the evening. They should have their own show - probably The Dresser.

The show simply doesn't have the ingredients of modern musicals, for £46 London audiences expect a far richer, saturated experience. Part of the reason The Fantasticks survived so long in New York is it was a substantially cheaper ticket than anything on Broadway. Stripped to its bones by Pacific Overtures director Amon Miyamoto, it should have the beautiful simplicity of a Japanese woodcut, but feels instead shallow and devoid of any entertaining content.

Miyamoto says he drew on the Japanese Noh theatrical tradition of highly codified gestures, collective choral tempo and the Japanese ethic of transience.

So, to paraphrase Walter Winchell's assistant cabling him her review of a new musical from its provincial tryout:

Noh legs, Noh jokes, Noh chance.

Goodnight, Vienna

2010-05-24T00:14:00.003+01:00

There is an array of all-American talent squished onto the Menier Chocolate Factory stage that is both formidable and incomprehensible. From Mandy Patinkin, arguably the finest Sondheim interpreter of his generation, to Broadway back-catalogistas like Judy Kaye and John McMartin, this is the stuff of dreams for many producers.

I won’t hazard a guess at the total number of awards between them, but it must be over fifty. Some dullard from Leeds will undoubtedly tally up the Tonys, Drama Desks, Oscars, Oliviers and BAFTAS listed in the programme and write in to correct me.

Such a pity, then, that they have been assembled, in the no less luminous hands of Evita-to-Phantom director Hal Prince and prima choreographa assoluta Susan Stroman in a complete barrowload of tripe.

It is impossible to fathom what passed through whose mind when it was first suggested that the Shah of Persia’s visit to Vienna in 1873 would make a viable subject for a musical, that modern lyrics could be welded to genuine Strauss tunes, or that it was a good idea to convince Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin to shave his head and play a fey Muslim eunuch in a performance exactly midway between Alec Guinness’s equally racially unrealistic Dr Godbole in A Passage to India, and Kevin Chamberlin’s Uncle Fester in Addams Family the Musical.

It’s called ‘Paradise Found’ but the only reference to Milton I can find is that you’d have to be blind to see the good in it.

Was Max Biyalistock originally Viennese?

Whilst Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar was a fascinating and cultured monarch – a painter, a poet and photographer who held sovereign power for almost 50 years, outstripped only by Queen Victoria whose reign ran parallel to his own. He was the first ruler to visit Europe and the first to publish his diaries – but in the Richard Nelson script, he’s a randy one-dimensional buffoon played half a degree above Baron Hardup and in a series of cheap lurex kaftans by five times Tony nominee John McMartin who looks understandably bewildered throughout.

The gist of the plot is that the Shah becomes infatuated by the Empress of Austria, and demands his servants procure her sexual favours. To spare the court’s blushes, a prostitute masquerades as the Empress and receives from the Shah a massive pearl necklace. Two, if you count the one she can wear in the street.

There’s a duet about masturbation set to the music of a Strauss mazurka.

So far it’s Kismet crossed with The Merry Widow and a side order of Indecent Proposal.

In the second half those of us who returned to the airless auditorium were rewarded with a further descent into farce as first there’s a prison scene where the prostitute is reunited with her favourite client, a cardboard Baron played with more conviction than the production deserves by the explosive bass-baritone talent of Shuler Hensley. Hensley is most noted in the UK for his outstanding portrayal of Jud Fry in the National’s Oklahoma! where he briefly but powerfully diverted the audience’s attention from its seat-wetting adoration of Hugh Jackman, and subsequently in a string of Broadway hits including playing the Monster in Young Frankenstein.

She’s been in prison, he in alcoholic penury, but they come together as actors in a coarse vaudeville which summarises the plot all over again only to oom-pah-pah music, after which the authors clearly got bored with the plotting and tie up all loose ends in a single scene's worth of provincial pantomime. Three Strauss strains are briefly reprised – even though we’re all now back in Persia - and we stagger out to the bar to try to make sense of it all.

Apart from airfares and accommodation for the cast, it’s not an inexpensive production – costumes, set and lighting are way above the Menier’s usual budgets: the programme refers to a number of producer type individuals as ‘Enhancement for this production has been provided by …’. Presumably ‘Enhancers’ are Angels who haven’t a hope in hell of seeing their money back.

Maybe it’s a tax loss, maybe it’s just an aberration on the part of otherwise competent and talented individuals, but this has the feel of a work-in-progress, perhaps a tryout where the European setting will be more familiar to audiences, prior to an opening on Broadway. If so, it will need the kind of eighteen month long re-write that kept Sister Act so firmly out of town, or closed Imagine This in its second month.

Either way, the presence of so many fine actors and singers is a bait to lure audiences to a production which fails to deliver either as musical comedy or a genuine operetta.

Go on then, they should call it The Strauss-Trap.

Apocalypse Soon-ish

2010-05-12T14:08:00.003+01:00

Home to Hammersmith is one of my least favourite journeys on public transport. It's the 'wrong' side of London for me which on a good day never takes less than an hour, and on one particularly horrible Saturday during tubular disruptions of an epic scale, two and three-quarters.

Although I like and admire the Lyric Theatre there - an extraordinary Victorian proscenium box airlifted into a concrete shell atop one of the nastiest shopping precincts in England - it's always with a heavy heart that I dither and defer my departure from home to make for a 'just-in-time' delivery in London W6. Scene set, then, for a preview of 'A Thousand Stars Explode In The Sky', a play about the end of the world.

I was reminded of that moment in Through The Looking Glass when Alice is introduced to the Plum Pudding 'Alice, Pudding. Pudding, Alice' and then cannot bring herself to carve into something she's just met - in that my lovely theatre-blogging friends introduced me at 7.28pm to David Eldridge, one-third of the triumvirate responsible for the new playscript.

He appeared a perfectly nice chap and I now feel hobbled that I can't bring the full weight of my puny invective to bear on a play I really didn't enjoy. Not that it would be legitimate to post a proper review since it sent me to sleep within the first forty minutes.

It SEEMED to be about a disparate family, mostly of fatherless brothers - five of them ranging in age from about seventeen to just past fifty which is surely biologically impossible for the mother unless she had the first in her early teens and the redoubtable but grimly aspected Ann Mitchell certainly didn't look that type - and their need to be together, or not, on a pig farm in Yorkshire at the impending Apocalypse which is neatly scheduled for midnight in three weeks from the start of the play.

Things happen. A charming dog appears in one scene and is subsequently beaten to death with a hammer. The fiftysomething man, who suffers from colon cancer and is otherwise a bit artless, is washed standing up in a tin bath genitals and all, by his mother. I might have preferred it if she'd washed the dog onstage and he'd been beaten to death with the hammer.

Certainly washing the dog on stage would have trumped Meera Syal's nightly preparation of chips and egg in Shirley Valentine, as well as provided some leavening laughs to this rather wordy, rather morose piece. 'Pinteresque' is all very well, but not when it emulates Pinter's capacity for logorrheic tedium.

There's presumably some significance to the leitmotif of smoking - the youngest brother is learning to do it, the oldest one has cancer because of it, the middle-middle brother is concealing the fact he does from his wife, then does so openly as an act of defiance - but all the actors handle it awkwardly and the opportunity to figure out their motivations eluded me as by the end of the first half I had lost the plot and caught the tube.

Trouble at t' Mill

2010-04-05T13:29:00.003+01:00

THE NORTHERNERS

Finborough Theatre

Author: Harold Brighouse
Director: Tim Newns
The Public Reviews Rating: 3/5

It’s general election year, the economy is reeling from the cost and shame of an unpopular war, development of radical new technology has made experienced workers too expensive to employ, and depressed wage rates for the rest. Strikes and confrontations between management and unions have become the order of the day ...

But this is not Brown’s broken Britain, it’s Lancashire in 1820 when the devastating war was with Napoleon and the technology which has turned the cotton industry on its head is Arkwright’s Spinning Jenny, and the steam-mechanisation of the weaving sheds which forced weavers away from home handlooms and into purpose-built mills for the first time.

Ironically, this mechanisation ushered in an era of prosperity for the county right up until the Second World War when it was said that ‘Britain’s bread hangs by Lancashire’s thread’ but in Tim Newns’ illuminating and enthralling production of Harold Brighouse’s rarely-performed play The Northerners that’s not how the cotton workers see it, threatening to emulate the Luddites in breaking the machinery which has replaced so many of their jobs and burning down the factories which provide their livelihood.

Strong performances set the tone, and Peter Broome’s honest weaver and William Maxwell’s mill owner as well as Louise Yates as the weaver’s wife all have the ring of absolute truth in their delivery which underpins the success of the production, since it is played out on the wrapped set of another play with only minimal furniture and props to set the scene.

Brighouse wrote The Northerners only a year before his most famous and successful play ‘Hobson’s Choice’ and in the pivotal character of Ruth, the weaver’s daughter who has to balance her emotional attraction to a factory firebrand and the mill owner’s son, he tests the manipulative abilities and emancipated determination which later emerge in the forthright Maggie Hobson. It’s a difficult role which is not entirely sketched out by the dialogue but Stephanie Thomas makes the best of the material.

There are some equally fine performances in the supporting cast, particularly John Rawnsley, Dickensian-perfect as the rival mill owner, and Adam Stevens who I wished had been give more to say as union organiser Joseph Healey. Despite the age of the piece and the fact it hasn't been professionally produced more than three times in a hundred years, it holds up extremely well - not as fluently scripted as a Priestley or a Shaw, but there was only one 'Wallace and Gromit' moment when the soldiers discover how the mill-workers have staged their flaming-torch protest which interrupted the audience's intense concentration.

The Northerners plays at the Finborough theatre for only eight performances, on Sunday and Monday nights, but it really should be touring schools and colleges because it both entertains and informs about a pioneering period in our social history.

This review written for www.thepublicreviews.com

Desperate Housewife

2010-03-31T17:20:00.003+01:00

Meera Syal as SHIRLEY VALENTINE
Menier Chocolate Factory
30 March 2009

There can be scarcely a Chardonnay-drinking woman on the planet who failed to be inspired by the story of Shirley Valentine, a Liverpool housewife whose confidence and personality were so submerged by her marriage until she rediscovers them on holiday in the Greek Islands, fulfilling an ambition to ‘drink a glass of wine in the country where the grape is grown’.

Struggling manfully to contain her own livelier personality beneath Shirley’s housecoat, Meera Syal is the latest in a long line of actresses to spend the first act cutting chips for Joe’s tea. Except this is the first of the production’s failures since it seems an utter waste not to give Syal, one of the most brilliant of Asian actresses, an opportunity to introduce an Indian element to the cowed housewife’s character.

Instead, she gives us a bumpy tour of the M6 as her accent wanders from summer stock Scouse to her native Birmingham and back. If she’d been knocking up onion bhajjis whilst worrying what her husband would say when he came home instead of egg and chips, this could have been a springboard to illuminate domestic oppression in a far more contemporary and challenging way, and allowed her to develop a third dimension to her Shirley which is lacking in some of the scenes.

This version is directed by Glen Walford, who first commissioned Willy Russell to write Shirley Valentine when she was artistic director of the Liverpool Everyman in 1986 so you’d think she knew her onions. Or chips. But she may be resting on laurels as she directed local comedienne Pauline Daniels in a similarly boxy production there in 2009.

To say that Syal is much better in the second act, when Shirley’s soliloquy takes place on a sunny Greek beach and her personality is also warmer is to suggest she’s not quite ‘got it’ in the first half. This is perhaps slightly unfair since there’s a lot to enjoy in her performance, but there were moments when you might notice that Syal’s experience is grounded in TV, film and comedy and that (thanks Wikipedia) this is only her fourth ever stage appearance, particularly when she’s doing Shirley ‘doing’ the voices of the other characters with rather more technique than the average Merseyside housewife.

Scally In Our Alley

2010-03-08T11:56:00.011Z

ONCE UPON A TIME AT THE ADELPHI – Union Theatre, London SE1

Writer/Director : Phil Willmott
Choreographer : Andrew Wright
Set Design : Charlie Cridlan
Costume Design : Geri Spencer
Lighting : Steve Miller

Ever since Garbo leaned against the door-jamb of her luxury suite and murmured ‘I want to be alone’, the glamour and intrigue of Grand Hotels has captured public imagination. In Liverpool, the landmark Adelphi Hotel had its profile boosted by carriage trade from the ocean liners arriving from the New World and statesmen, gangsters and Hollywood stars all passed through its revolving doors.

Against this background, writer and director Phil Wilmott sketches out an affecting love story between hotel employees, complicated by a timewarp between 1930 and the present day and affording opportunities for contemporary musical theatre songs as well as dynamic big-band numbers and choregraphy that sets the stage alight every time with the second-act opener ‘Thompson From Accounts' being particularly inventive.

Once Upon A Time had a successful debut at the Liverpool Playhouse during the city’s term as European Capital of Culture, and whilst this production makes use of every inch of the tiny Union Theatre’s stage, it would be enriched by a bigger budget for set and orchestra to put over the lavish décor and thirties big band sound.

But that’s not to detract from what is a sensational chamber production – there are no weak links in the ensemble, every one of whom sings (unmiked) and dances up a storm – but the star of the show really is Andrew Wright’s brilliantly executed choreography, eclipsing anything I’ve seen on the London fringe.

In the lead, John-Paul Hevey plays Thompson as a loveable scally and although it’s a bit of a stock character he gives it credibility and warmth particularly in the nostalgic ballad about Liverpool which brings the show to its romantic climax and when there was scarcely a dry eye in the place.

You couldn’t say the same for that ‘other’ Adelphi - the theatre in the Strand, currently showing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s turgid sequel to Phantom where £6 million investment doesn’t tug at your heartstrings half as much.

THE END OF THE PEER SHOW

2010-03-06T15:04:00.010Z

Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber is not a well man. His operation for prostate cancer before Christmas led to complications and Love Never Dies may be his last composition, since he’s now producing Wizard of Oz rather than developing new material. I hope not, because the author of Sunset Boulevard and Evita deserves a better epitaph than the load of old rope currently on full-price £65-a-seat preview at the Adelphi Theatre.

We are in Coney Island, and if Lloyd Webber’s claim that the events are set ten years after Phantom of the Opera is accurate, it’s about 1891. The Phantom has become a sideshow illusionist, bringing with him Madame and Meg Giry, and three henchpersons called something like Felch, Squelch and Gargle whose sole purpose is to strut about in Cirque de Soleil costumes. In a barely comprehensible plot, he invites now-famous Christine Daae to sing in his theatre and she arrives aboard the Lusitania with Oscar Hammerstein (who would have been four years old at the time), Nancy Astor (eleven) and Cornelius Vanderbilt (born 1898). Improbable or what?

Christine’s son turns out to be fathered by the Phantom who entertains the ten-year-old in what looks like Michael Jackson’s bedroom, complete with Bubbles the ape maniacally playing a pipe organ. Other elements of scenery are like an Art Nouveau explosion in a resin factory, interspersed with trapeze and rope twirling from a provincial circus.

ALW’s form is distinctly variable: whilst Cats and Evita pushed the envelope of musical theatre his recent appearances on low-rent television stunts like ‘Any Dream Will Do’ have diminished his profile which was equally dented by penning the dire Eurovision entry 'It's My Time' which I have previously suggested took him precisely three idle minutes to write, including standing up, flushing and washing his hands afterwards.

It now seems outrageous that he should be the recipient of a peerage for his contribution to the nation’s musical heritage, an honour not accorded Purcell, Delius or Elgar.

He does, however, deserve some sort of national award for recycling.

The lead-up to Christine’s performance of the theme song is interminable and gives you time to reflect it’s not a new tune. Setting aside the internet gossip which invites comparison between ALW’s composition and the theme from 1960’s Shirley MacLaine movie ‘The Apartment’, ‘Love Never Dies’ is itself a re-hash of ‘Our Kind of Love’ cut from his musical ‘The Beautiful Game’, stripped of its meaningful lyrics, jacked up an octave and given ludicrous operatic pretensions and drowningly lush orchestration.

Whilst Serena Boggess looks stately – the pink crystal-studded frock is simply gawjus – and sings right to the top of her soprano range until you wonder whether bats will fall from the rafters with their wings over their ears, it’s a soulless performance made even less engaging because it’s so difficult to care about any of these characters.

It’s tantalizing to wonder what might have happened if Christine had been made fully three dimensional, and the piece sung in a normal register with emotion by Hannah Waddingham – as she did on Parkinson some years ago - then this could have been the most electrifying sequel.

The pretence that this is somehow an opera score trips ALW up time after time – Ramin Karimloo’s voice seems to have only one setting: ‘stentorian’, and all his interactions with Christine are overblown and overloud. The recitative sounds directly snatched from ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and is endlessly repetitive, whereas a few lines of spoken dialogue and a couple of jokes would have been more than welcome.

The counterpoint popular numbers like Summer Strallen’s Miss Adelaide style vaudeville routine, a fatuous rock anthem, and a chronically forgettable ‘beach’ ensemble seem jarring, as if they belong in three different musicals.

In the bare-stage climax (hm, seen any Bizet, Andrew?) and for no apparent reason, Strallen’s character shoots Christine and a blood capsule explodes in her bra. She dies in the Phantom’s arms as they kiss one last time.

It takes her six minutes, during which she reprises four different tunes before the orchestra wells to the sort of climax normally reserved for the last night of the season at Verona as Tosca chucks herself off the battlements.

Lloyd Webber probably thinks he’s written Carmen.

I think car-crash.

Sex and a Different City

2010-03-04T16:21:00.003Z

Can she or can't she? Most of the first-night audience were secretly betting Kim Cattrall wouldn't be able to shake off the shadow of 'Samantha Jones' from 'Sex and the City' and turn herself into Noel Coward's wittiest and most romantic heroine.

In assailing the best-constructed comedy in the English Language as well as the first to openly portray sexual attraction, Cattrall sets herself the highest of bars: Private Lives has pin-sharp dialogue which falls flat if a syllable is mistimed, her predecessors in the role include Maggie Smith, Greta Scacchi, and Lindsay Duncan, and the whole play balances on the essential chemistry between the co-stars, reunited divorcees on their respective honeymoons who are supposed to be fatally attracted “like two violent acids bubbling about in a nasty little matrimonial bottle”.

This version is more like the YouTube experiment wherein Cattrall is the Diet Coke - fizzy, colourful, sweet but ultimately not ‘the real thing’, and harmless until Matthew MacFadyen provides the Mentos which make the explosive effervescence.

Eschewing the archness with which Elyot is normally played, MacFadyen opts for an earthier, butcher foil to Amanda’s shrillness and once you accept the famous Coward epigrams won’t be delivered with camp theatrical flourishes, his conversational delivery adds depth and credibility to the character, and makes it more magnetic.

Despite looking the part and staring down any discussion of their age differences, Cattrall doesn’t quite match him - hers is a performance with circus skills: when Elyot shoves her she bounces on to the sofa in an acrobatic parabola. She also walks the tight-rope of English diction: never actually falling but the strain is visible. It might have made for a more laconic and nuanced Amanda if she’d played it in her natural American accent.

Casting the new partners, Sybil and Victor, is notoriously difficult: the parts are written as ciphers, but Simon Paisley-Day gave Victor a chocks-away Squadron Leader background Coward clearly hadn’t envisaged, and in the third-act face-off with MacFadyen provided one of the best comic moments.

There are some issues with the set - in the first act on adjoining hotel balconies, the cast had to fight their way through muslin curtains or round tightly-placed wrought-iron furniture, and in the second act Amanda’s Paris apartment looked cheap and gimmicky instead of coolly art deco and stylish. In Coward, style really is everything.

A Load of Cobblers'

2010-03-04T16:18:00.003Z

A sparking well-paced revival brings fresh life to a family drama with feminist overtones in Thom Southerland’s revival of Hobson’s Choice at the cosy but comfortable Broadway Studio in Catford.

The piece follows three daughters of a bullying shopkeeper struggling to achieve independence and identity against a background of male supremacy, alcoholism and Victorian mill-town poverty.

And it’s very funny.

Its author Harold Brighouse might have been inspired by Chekhov’s Three Sisters when he was at Manchester Grammar, but deserves credit for pioneering the ‘Northern Drama’ twenty years before his contemporary J. B. Priestley. What’s interesting is how modern audiences react differently to the ‘issues’ in the play: it would have been considered completely normal at the time for a master to thrash his apprentices with a belt, and highly comical that a young woman should have the temerity to set up in business in competition with her father.

We identify strongly with the self-improving Maggie, played with conviction by Tegwen Tucker and delivering some of the best comic lines - although she could extend the range of her emotions and gestures without losing the controlled determination of the character, and it’s harder to feel compassion for the ‘abuser’ as we’d probably call him today, despite Anthony Wise‘s fine interpretation of Henry Horatio Hobson which is as authentic and vulnerable as possible within the confines of the script.

As Maggie’s gawkily reluctant fiancée Will Mossop, Sean Pol McGreevy makes an excellent start and his body language is perfect, but as the character grows in confidence his accent takes a trip across the Pennines finishing somewhere in the suburbs of Newcastle, canny lad. Otherwise, the Salford inflections hold up well throughout the faultless supporting cast, defying any potential to slip into Victoria Wood parody.

The mauve silk dresses with tight bodices and bustles sported by the Hobson sisters seemed more appropriate for the Wild West than the North West, but the play is set in 1880, the same year as Southerland favourite Annie Get Your Gun which is also about a strong woman making her way in a man's world, and makes you wonder whether there’s a wonderfully surreal combination show to be cobbled together from the two …

… until then, this is a real and refreshing slice of Lancashire life well worth the journey to Catford.

Right Little Madam

2010-02-27T16:05:00.005Z

There's a rash of American musical revivals in London at the moment, many of the best helmed by director Thom Southerland. This one's sandwiched between a punchy Mack and Mabel in Catford and a promising State Fair at the Finborough.

Madam was Ethel Merman's biggest career triumph after Annie Get Your Gun and casting any part she ever played is a minefield. Here, the role of brassy, crassy party-giving US Ambassador to ‘Lichtenburg’ Mrs. Sally Adams is in the sure hands of Beverley Klein, recently successful as Golde in Fiddler on the Roof, and particularly excellent as the Witch in the Linbury Studio ‘Into the Woods’.

In ‘Madam’ her vocal range is tested slightly as some of the songs fall uncomfortably between her chest and head voice, but she delivers power and pathos in equal measure eventually showing the vulnerable romantic beneath the steel magnolia.

The script has been butchered to fit the scale of the venue and production budget, and the political plot of whether or not the US should give a loan to the tiny Grand Duchy is mown down by the theatrical effect of so many excellent Irving Berlin melodies. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

Chris Love is winning as romantic lead Kenneth Gibson, as is Gido Schimanski - a dark horse of the musical theatre circuit and although in his late thirties still ‘discoverable’ - playing Sally's own love interest. The rest of the supporting cast look slightly as though Klein has invited her grandchildren round to tea, but they work darned hard and some of the choreography is brilliant in such a small space. The whole show's miked by the way, heaven knows why because the theatre's the size of my living room and Klein could, in most circumstances, fill a large hall without any assistance.

The Gatehouse is a friendly venue - actually a Wetherspoons pub with good value food and drink - with the invitation to ‘drink as much as you like’ firmly nailed to the doors of the auditorium, a risk not worth taking with some audience members ...

Sweet Corn

2010-02-27T16:01:00.001Z

The persistent fondness of Rodgers and Hammerstein for corn-fed country settings is at odds with their gritty New York City upbringing. Nostalgic affection for the farmer and the cowgirl is confirmed by Oklahoma!, Carousel and even Ensign Nellie Forbush marooned on her South Pacific island, sings of being "as corny as Kansas in August"

For State Fair, we're next door in Iowa - coincidentally the 159th annual state fair starts today in Des Moines - with the slightest of plots carrying the wholesome Frake family to the fairgrounds to participate in mincemeat, pickle-making, tractor-pulling and hog-raising competitions, with the young 'uns quite naturally (or as naturally as is possible in stage musicals) meeting their romantic matches. Sandwiched as a project between the successes of Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945) R&H were clearly up against deadlines to deliver the score and script to 20th Century Fox and reused both lyrics and melodies that had either been cut from other shows, or only lightly adapted from existing songs in their repertoire. In wartime, you make do with the available material.

Early productions featured huge casts and set pieces, and even a live pig on stage. Clearly ushering a live porker up the many stairs to the tiny Finborough theatre would be impossible, but director Thom Southerland achieves a significant feat in shrink-wrapping this monster onto a weeny set with a perspiring cast of 14, for its first European production in 60 years.

In State Fair the principals are age-appropriate castings, unusual in pub theatre where youngsters predominate, Philip Rham credible as the hog-fancying farmer, with Laura Main carrying the most popular melodies - It Might As Well Be Spring, and It's A Grand Night for Singing - as his daughter Margy.

The ensemble deserve most plaudits, though, for populating the midway with a succession of comic characters. Robert Rees and Martin McCarthy were particularly engaging, McCarthy's dance routines being energetically effective on the pocket-handkerchief stage without causing injury to bystanders, and the second act opener when the whole cast play kitchen implements in an anthem to their home state is a peach.

Some of the lines caused unexpected amusement - "I'm aiming for a pearl necklace in the back row" missed its mark in a variety of ways, and "she's a woman who certainly knows her way around a cucumber" generated hilarity not really appropriate for this age of golden innocence.

It's time someone gave this talented director real money and a decent theatre to showcase his passion and understanding of the genre, since his fine versions of Call Me Madam, Mack and Mabel and Annie Get Your Gun have been seen only by handfuls of theatregoers.

And it's time for a revival of "Pal Joey". Are you listening, Cameron?