Superdry Acoustic

PUBLICATION DATE 13 FEBRUARY 2012
Written for londonist.com




If you’ve been to site-specific arts events before, like Punchdrunk or Bum Bum Train or Theatre Delicatessen, you’ve probably ricocheted from one scene or event to another, feeling somewhere between a film extra and a peeping tom.

Heritage Arts and the crew behind Silent Opera bring you closer to the action and whilst there’s a certain amount of herding involved, you’re much more directly engaged with the performers and the drama.

Snap on a pair of Sennheiser HD headphones, snap OFF your mobile, and find first a beanbag or a patch of crowded floor in the ‘attic’ space of the Old Vic Tunnels rigged up as the realistically shabby student squat in which Rodolfo and Mimi fall in love: you can almost smell the stale joints and congealed pizza.

The orchestra’s a recording but the technician in charge is also a trained conductor who can adjust its speed to accommodate the singers: he might not be flailing his arms in an evening suit, but it works.

You don’t really need to know the story of La Bohème either, many of the audience were opera virgins and it’s sung in modern English with laugh-out-loud libretto lines like ‘fetch the Cillit Bang’ and ‘here's a feast worthy of Come Dine With Me ... Beans' enriching what’s basically a story of two boy-meets-girl romances at the end of which one dies.  As with most modernised Bohèmes, Mimi’s condition is updated from ‘consumption’, here to anorexia, but we wish they’d go the whole hog and make her a drug addict, it’s time for a Mimi Winehouse.

So when in the shabby flat the students decide to go off to the Christmas market and then to the night café, it’s YOUR arm they’re pulling to get up off your beanbag, and you join the drunken queue for the nightclub where Musetta’s singing, and eventually you’re standing at Mimi’s bedside when she dies.

You’re certainly carried along, although less emotionally than you might expect for such a heart-tugging tale – the headphone music didn’t seem to swell as passionately as in conventional theatre settings, and we weren’t quite swept away by the romance and the beautiful tunes although Emily Ward's Mimi was in fine voice.

It’s a young cast – when will someone do one of these fantastic immersive site-specifics with established opera singers - some of the acting is clunky, and despite the smooth shepherding of the 150-strong sellout audience up and down stairs and through the different scenes, neither the singing nor the on-stage movement was quite as fluid as it could be, although we were quite early in the run.

We’d have liked even more direct engagement between the actors and audience, in the Gatehouse’s Traviata, Violetta does a lapdance, and Bohème’s Musetta is no less a tart.  Being allowed to bring your wine would help the atmosphere too.

But it’s such an enjoyable night out – well worth the ticket price of £20 – with a young and cool Superdry-chic audience many of whom seemed to be on date night, and supported by a good popup bar, Hammer Horror flick club cinema, comedy, music, interactive film, and the rest of the Vault experience.

You Me Bohème Bohème Train

If you’ve been to site-specific arts events before, like Punchdrunk or Bum Bum Train or Theatre Delicatessen, you’ve probably ricocheted from one scene or event to another, feeling somewhere between a film extra and a peeping tom.  Heritage Arts and the crew behind Silent Opera bring you closer to the action and whilst there’s a certain amount of herding involved, you’re much more directly engaged with the performers and the drama.

Snap on a pair of Sennheiser HD headphones, snap OFF your mobile, and find first a beanbag or a patch of crowded floor in the ‘attic’ space of the Old Vic Tunnels rigged up as the realistically shabby student squat in which Rodolfo and Mimi fall in love: you can almost smell the stale joints and congealed pizza.

The orchestra’s a recording but the technician in charge is also a trained conductor who can adjust its speed to accommodate the singers: he might not be flailing his arms in an evening suit, but it works.

You don’t really need to know the story of La Bohème either, many of the audience were opera virgins and it’s sung in modern English with laugh-out-loud libretto lines like ‘fetch the Cillit Bang’ and ‘here's a feast worthy of Come Dine With Me: Beans' enriching what’s basically a story of two boy-meets-girl romances at the end of which one dies.  As with most modernised Bohèmes, Mimi’s condition is updated from ‘consumption’, here to anorexia, but we wish they’d go the whole hog and make her a drug addict, it’s time for a Mimi Winehouse.

So when in the shabby flat the students decide to go off to the Christmas market and then to the night café, it’s YOUR arm they’re pulling to get up off your beanbag, and you join the drunken queue for the nightclub where Musetta’s singing, and eventually you’re standing at Mimi’s bedside when she dies.

You’re certainly carried along, although less emotionally than you might expect for such a heart-tugging tale – the headphone music didn’t seem to swell as passionately as in conventional theatre settings, and we weren’t quite swept away by the romance and the beautiful tunes although Emily Ward's Mimi was in fine voice.

It’s a young cast – when will someone do one of these fantastic immersive site-specifics with established opera singers - some of the acting is clunky, and despite the smooth shepherding of the 150-strong sellout audience up and down stairs and through the different scenes, neither the singing nor the on-stage movement was quite as fluid as it could be, although we were quite early in the run.

We’d have liked even more direct engagement between the actors and audience, in the Gatehouse’s Traviata, Violetta does a lapdance, and Bohème’s Musetta is no less a tart.  Being allowed to bring your wine would help the atmosphere too.

But it’s such an enjoyable night out – well worth the ticket price of £20 – with a young and cool Superdry-chic audience many of whom seemed to be on date night, and supported by a good popup bar, Hammer Horror flick club cinema, comedy, music, interactive film, and the rest of the Vault experience.

Soho Boho

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 ...