Panned

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.

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

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 ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ...

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

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

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

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

'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

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 ...

Production photograph by Avshalom Aharony

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

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