Thursday in the Park with Karen

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.

Black and White Dog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Production photo by Nobby Clark

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'

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

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

The cast of State Fair

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?

Not Cumming Quietly

Alan Cumming told ‘Hello’ magazine his new show was ‘me with a band singing some songs I like, and telling stories about what’s happened to me in the ten years since I moved to America’.

That this is truthfully the middle and both ends of it disguises the fact that it’s a beguiling evening in company of an undeniably charming performer. Although the band seems recruited from music schools and possibly tube stations expressly for this show, they blaze a trail from choky, smoky jazz to bumping grinding Dolly Parton with panache.

Cumming’s musical choices roam the genres from Cole Porter to Cindy Lauper, but also defeat his ability to nail a personal performance style. He occasionally seems tentative in the torch songs but in rocker mode his vocals and his free left hand threaten to punch a hole in the fourth wall.

The confessional anecdotes interspersed with the songs are clearly from the heart but may be familiar to fans of this well-publicised actor, and the name-dropping varies from the deceased (Walter Cronkite, Ann Miller) to the less-than-topically famous, although through a thin story about crashing for the afternoon in the apartment of John Cameron Mitchell he leads in to a blinding medley from Mitchell’s ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’.

When someone is as massively and variously talented in writing, music, acting, film-making and OBE-deserving gay activism as Cumming, and at 44 appears as gamine and youthful as a baby-faced Marc Almond (whose hairstyle and fondness for mascara he appears to have appropriated wholesale) then chirrups gaily for two hours about his transatlantic dual citizenship, public fame and happy marriage, you’re not sure whether you want to embrace him or kill him.

Let’s go with embrace for now.

One Flew Over the Stock Exchange

At a time when bankers and brokers are pilloried in the media for turning the economy into a gibbering basket-case, the idea that a bunch of amateur thespians from the Stock Exchange should get together to perform the inmates-take-over-the-asylum piece ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ is so delicious that it’s a must-see.

The multiple layers of irony positively invite you to make up your own jokes, which is just as well since the script by Dale Wasserman, written thirteen years before the movie is flatter and flabbier than the Jack Nicholson cracker.

Amateur Dramatics in central London is an invidious occupation: there’s so much brilliant professional fringe theatre available for a tenner, that amateurs have to work twice as hard to gain their audiences. But when amateur groups are as good as SEDOS, the lines are blurred and there’s nothing in this production to suggest it’s any the less: production values, inventive lighting and sound, original music, and careful casting are entirely professional in their approach.

Director Rebecca Smith deliberately slants the production to concentrate on the inmates, even bringing in a consultant psychiatrist to help research the characters and most of these are meticulously observed cameos, with Darren Hannant specially strong as the rictus-wearing indecisive Cheswick, and Ben Hale as the tenderly vulnerable Billy Bibbett.

There’s a slight lack of pace which could pick up during the run, although it may be deliberate as in the measured delivery of Lisa Jedan’s coolly-surfaced Nurse Ratched. The ‘star turn’ should be the rambunctious prison-transferee R P McMurphy as immortalised by Nicholson, and more recently by Christian Slater in the sparky 2004 production at the Gielgud. In those shoes, Liam Byrne has a tough task to make RP an explosive mix of delightful and dangerous, and it’s not quite a bullseye. The fault’s more in the dated writing than the intensity of his performance and the wise-cracks don’t seem so sharp any more.

Finally, a plea to the otherwise wonderful Bridewell, and fringe theatres across London to invest in a couple of fifty-quid silent ceiling fans to stop the audience melting on our rare tropical evenings.


Photo by Nick Chronnell

Julie-an Calendar

There are nights in the theatre for which you gladly queue round the block months in advance, secure in the knowledge that the magnitude of the screen star you hope to see outweighs any reservations about the play, the director or the ticket price. It was such considerations paved our way to Ingrid Bergman in Waters of the Moon at the Haymarket in the 70s, to Elizabeth Taylor in The Little Foxes at the Victoria Palace in the 80s, to Madonna in Speed-the-Plow and to Harry Potter getting his wand out in Equus …

… so it was with a similar feeling of excited curiosity we anticipated the stage rehabilitation - in the new cast of Calendar Girls - of the leopard-print legend that was the nation's favourite barmaid Bet Lynch, Corrie’s own Ms Julie Goodyear.

Not that this is really a star vehicle, she plays the third or fourth lead, a character listed as ‘vicar’s daughter, single mother and church organist’ although in a long white-blonde wig, stiletto bootees and sparkly accessories she appears to be dressed for the homeward leg of a particularly gruelling Country and Western tour of Tennessee rather than a tramp up the Yorkshire Dales.

It’s what you might call a ‘carpentry’ performance: she nails many of the comic lines, and screws others. But it’s a genuine delight to see this much-loved veteran of the longest running soap opera confront her core audience in her West End debut.

Apart from that, you could wonder what’s in it for Londonist readers and the answer’s not much: the story of the members of Rylstone Womens Institute who raised half a million pounds for Leukaemia research by posing tastefully nude for a calendar has been better chronicled in the 2003 Helen Mirren/Julie Walters movie. The story’s too well-aired to be gripping, the production too clumsy and cheap, and there are some truly terrible performances. It’s so not cool, it may even become cult viewing.

Hamish McColl’s direction is staggeringly uneven, mixing warm and naturalistic characterisations from the always-reliable Janie Dee and surprisingly strong Arabella Weir as the promoters of the calendar, and solid comic acting from both Goodyear and vintage sitcomista Rosalind Knight. At the other end of the scale is an appalling clumping knockabout turn by Helen Lederer as the prim chairperson of the WI branch.

This shoutily inaccurate, one-dimensional foot-stomping performance is one of the worst in the West End for a long time, although Kelly Brook’s dismally incoherent attempt at an upmarket golf widow runs it pretty close. The production also features the inexplicable casting of ex-BBC newsreader Jan Leeming as the Duchess of Yorkshire or somesuch. She looks bewildered as if she’s just doing it for Comic Relief, which she isn’t.

In a rather sad post-script, Ms. Goodyear lasted just four days in the part before being replaced.

Throwback Mountain

Funny how words take on new meanings. ‘Lockerbie’ used to be a tiny hamlet in the West of Scotland before a PanAm plane came down in its fields, ‘Columbine’ was once an average high school … and ‘Laramie’ was an enormously popular 100-episode TV western in the black-and-white era.

Nowadays Laramie is irrevocably connected with the brutal torture and murder by two rednecks of flyweight gay student Matthew Shepard, beaten and left for dead tied to a fence outside the Wyoming town on the night of 6 October 1998. His death led directly to the hate crimes legislation finally enacted by the Obama administration last month.

When planning a London run, Wild Oats Productions couldn’t have known the awful timeliness of this revival, shadowing the homophobic assault on Ian Baynham, kicked to death in Trafalgar Square and for whom the London gay community turned out in their thousands for a vigil three weeks ago.

The Laramie Project is a kinetic theatre piece based on verbatim interviews with the local population in the days and weeks following Matthew’s murder, covering news reporting, police investigation, trials and a portrait of a close-knit community wrestling with its collective and individual consciences. Eleven years after the event it has an immediacy and a freshness which had every member of the audience wholly engaged, whilst staying the right side of sensationalism or mawkishness. The structure of Joseph C. Walsh’s production is elegant and fluid, and the ebb and flow of 75 distinct characters is handled with incredible skill by a tight team of just 8 young actors.

It’s hard to single out individual performances but among a very focused and committed ensemble, Adam Unze’s doubling of the callow barman who served Matt his last drink, and both of the perpetrators is indicative of a highly developed talent, Francis Adams‘ speech to the jury as Matt’s father held the audience in total stillness, and Amy Clarke‘s ability to switch from glamorous sophisticate to backwoods grandma by the mere donning of a beret (not to mention becoming a dead ringer for Glenn Close every time she put it on) was outstanding.

There is no higher recommendation: for all the important reasons you go to the theatre, it’s a ‘must-see’.

Two's Company, Three's an orgy ...

It’s an old story - a celebrity, er, pulls off in a lay-by - maybe loosening some garments to accommodate a painful stomach condition … or, in the case of high-profile newsreader Geoffrey Hammond (Robert Daws) graphically told in newish writer Sam Peter Jackson‘s Private Property at the Trafalgar Studios, triple-fingering a bare-assed rent-boy in full view of the paparazzi.

The damage limitation is in the hands of Nigel Harman as an oily PR with his own agenda, and since nobody does outraged embarrassment as well as Daws, their dialogue crackles with deft sideswipes at media, celebrity and hypocrisy. Add to the triangle a gauche rentboy played with History Boys knowingness by Steven Webb and you have an entertaining black comedy of cleverly three-dimensional gay characters. This in itself is unusual for the West End, but to have them played by actors of this calibre is an even rarer delight.

The piece mostly moves snappily and unpredictably and whilst the interactive TV footage of baying media mob and preening Stephen Fry are somewhat contrived, there’s a plot pivot towards the end of the first act which guarantees you’ll return after the interval.

Hannah Berrigan‘s production deserves a wider audience - with a bit of tightening this should transfer - but despite the intimate 40-seat setting and a short run of less than 30 peformances, it hasn’t attracted Nigel Harman’s EastEnders fanbase to see him undressed, and there are seats available.

Feeling a right tit ...

production photo by Tristram Kenton

The producers of Legally Blonde The Musical played a long game with five weeks of previews to build a popular word-of-mouth and social media following - and a £2 million review-proof advance - before press night. Broadsheet critics today retaliated by reviewing the audience (really squealy girly escapees from Hairspray) as much as the show.

Processed, which is a good word, from the 2001 Reese Witherspoon movie, LBTM follows vapid sorority girl Elle Woods as she, er, beavers her way into Harvard Law school to stalk her beau who wants someone ‘more serious’. Pink outfits and ditzy charm win the day as she outwits the opposing counsel in a court case. It’s not Inherit the Wind, but it is fun.

What makes the production at the Savoy more enjoyable, apart from a repetitive easy-to-hum score, is the presence of Sheridan Smith as Elle. Although convincingly Valley Girl in her accent, she has a grounded inner-Brit charm as the audience identify with her through Gavin and Stacey and Two Pints of Lager. Her engaging, tuneful and energetic performance carries you willingly and helplessly through the lightweight plot to the romantic clinch with - no not newly ‘bisexual’ Duncan James still playing a teen at pushing 35 - but the rather excellent Alex Gaumond.

She's also a thoroughly good sport, greeting dozens of punters in the rain or snow after every show and, in the case of your humble Londonist reporter, encouraging him to fondle her tits.

Now that's star quality.

Photo: Andrew Rogers courtesy of West End Whingers

Alving's Bright and Beautiful

Sort of enjoyed 'Ghosts'. Hard not to like a play where an orphanage burns down and four out of the five characters get syphilis.

Compact plot: Mrs Alving uses her husband’s legacy to build an orphanage with help of old flame Pastor Manders at whose candlelight supper to open the place, it burns to the ground. Ghostly skeletons springdans out of the family closet when it’s revealed Captain Alving had spread it about a bit, peppering the fjords with genetically-infected illegitimates in the days before penicillin and the son of the house can’t marry the maid he fancies because she’s his sister. He goes blind and dies.



What raises this production so far above the reverential deference typically accorded Ibsen is the design and some excellent performances.

The central dynamic is Lesley Sharp straining at her leash about as far from the cobbles of comfortable Granada dramas as possible and in wonderful contrast to her exhilarating recent performance as bipolar leopard-print Mari in Little Voice. Raw-boned and sharp-elbowed she brings the internal torture of Mrs Alving to the surface in a clear and un-actressy way, abetted by the patently conversational fresh translation by Frank McGuinness.

Pastor Manders is harder to appreciate since Iain Glen, who also directs, chose an accent precisely midway between Mr Hudson in Upstairs, Downstairs and Ian Paisley. As the tortured painter son, Harry Treadaway is beyond remarkable in his overnight progression from pampered prodigal to twitching degradation caught between lover and mother. Someone sign this boy up for ‘Hamlet’, he’s a natural.

Most productions of ‘Ghosts’, like ‘A Doll’s House’ are internalized and underlit. Stephen Brimson Lewis sets this one in a glassy rain-lashed conservatory emphasising the indistinction of the world outside, brilliantly lit by Oliver Fenwick as though by shining light on the family’s problems we can see them, and ourselves, more clearly.

My enjoyment of this performance was greatly enriched by the octogenarian blind lady who sat next to me at the matinee. Her father, who was sixty when she was born, was a Swedish professor of literature who came to England as London correspondent of a Svenska Dagbladet and had been a close chum of Strindberg before being unfortunately killed in the blitz. Her insights into Scandinavian culture, and the rivalries between Strindberg and Ibsen were even more illuminating than the play.

CHICHESTER 2010

Although it can pander to the knitting classes - and a stage adaptation of 'Yes, Minister' in the post-The Thick of It noughties and a potentially average Paul Kerryson revival of 42nd Street are two cases in point - Chichester this year looks promising.

A double bill of Sheridan's 'The Critic' with 'Real Inspector Hound' at the Minerva, Rupert Everett and Stephanie Cole in 'Pygmalion' in the main house AND a new Howard Brenton adaptation of 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' all overlapping in August might make the price of a train ticket and a picnic more than worthwhile.

Particularly as I haven't been for years ...

Chichester Festival

Soapstar to Rock Star, almost

You could be forgiven for thinking that a sitcom actress who pockets thirteen million dollars a season for Will and Grace might indulge herself with any kind of vanity project including hiring a band and the Vaudeville Theatre for a debut week in the West End.

But this isn’t a vanity, Mullally has worked with her backing group ‘Supreme Music Program‘ for twelve years and her range of vocal styles is extraordinary: from blues to country and Sondheim to Stones she nailed song after song with a deft and personal attack, attack being the operative word when her rock voice reaches a controlled screech in a trailer-trash banger like ‘Fancy’ by Reba McEntyre or Ryan Adams’ ‘Shakedown on 9th Street’, but tender and connected in perhaps her best piece, Randy Newman’s luminous ‘Real Emotional Girl’.

Many of the songs are about death and some of the self-pitying country music teeters on the edge of ironic although the audience remained unsure whether her delivery was straight, or tongue-in-cheek.

Whilst Mullally has successfully laid the ghost of ‘Karen Walker’ in the States, partly through a series of disastrous television projects, it’s harder to escape in the UK where Channel 4 daily repeats keep it fresher - and much of Tuesday’s audience was sibilantly disappointed that this wasn’t ‘Karen with a K’ aping Liza with a Z and giving her camp and bitchy all to an in-crowd.

Sexual overtones spike the whole set, in the post-show Q&A Mullally defended her choice of many songs written specifically for men and for which she resolutely wouldn’t change the gender, partly to attest to the authenticity of the piece, but also ‘If people see me performing as a man - so what’, an attitude loudly appreciated by the substantial sapphic claque in the stalls.

Downside is that this is a lazy concert, Mullally told only one averagely funny anecdote about her boring tour guide in Prague and seemed reluctant to engage with the audience, perhaps for fear of resurrecting Karen. She has pitching problems and it’s hard to tell whether it’s refreshingly honest that she re-started a couple of numbers to find the right key, or under-rehearsed.

She could do with a script, and a director to tighten the presentation, but the music’s mostly a knockout.

Continues at the Vaudeville Theatre 8pm each evening until Sunday 21 February, with two shows Saturday and Sunday at 4pm and 8pm. Box Office 0844 412 4663, top price £47.50.

Annie, Get Your Coat

‘The best thing for YOU ...’ sings Annie Oakley in the rootin' shootin' tuner Annie Get Your Gun ‘... would be ME.’ The best thing for YOU, dear reader, would be to stay away from this terrible production.

Written in 1946 by the great Irving Berlin and specifically for its star Ethel Merman, it chronicles the 1880’s rivalry-then-love-affair between Ohio amateur sharpshooter Annie Oakley and champion Frank Butler.

In the Young Vic’s bizarre production, by opera director Richard Jones, it’s somehow transposed to a formica-and-vinyl Midwest diner like a leftover set from ‘Happy Days’, although in a hallucinogenic second-act opener Annie is shown in jerky 8mm footage on a kind of Evita-esque Rainbow Tour meeting Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and de Gaulle.

Featuring showtune standards like ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’, ‘Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better’ and ‘The Girl That I Marry’ the lush, broad, inventive Berlin score is - literally - hammered into submission by the substitution of an orchestra with four upright saloon-bar pianos built into the front of the stage.

The plot carries us across the sweeping Ohio prairies and on a tour of most of the Wild West. The Young Vic is a large and flexible space, but ludicriously-monickered designer Ultz (real name: David Fisher) reduces this to an extraordinary horizontal slit in what looks like Portakabin siding, with the movement cramped into about ten feet depth of stage. The sight lines are so appalling that the final clinch between Annie and Frank, in an upstairs room the size of a broom cupboard, is invisible to more than half the audience.

Merman's voice famously filled theatres without a microphone and she was known as "leather lungs", but by comparison Horrocks has a couple of Tesco teabags flapping inside her puny chest, and her singing is criminally underpowered for the belted standards, nor is it any more appealing in the ballads.

She seems beyond uncomfortable. Pitching the role as a scruffy waif in an early Pauline Fowler wig, she’s barely as tall as her Remington rifle which she wields like it was a caber in the Highland Games rather than an extension of her own right arm. She also has a tendency to compensate for her one-dimensional acting by gurning at the audience, most of whom seemed to know her only as ‘Bubble’ from AbFab.

Julian Ovenden looks charming as Frank Butler, and his fluting tenor carries the tunes beautifully. Too beautifully, perhaps, since Frank’s a rawer and more rambunctious character than this rather polite performance suggests.

There’s a willing and capable ensemble, too few in number for the size of the show, but good contributions from Liza Sadovy as a particularly grim circus harpy, and John Marquez as a Brooklyn showman out of his comfort zone in the wild West.

It’s such a waste. This is a show so ripe for revival, with tunes you could actually go IN to the theatre humming, they are so well-loved, and it deserves the kind of treatment Trevor Nunn gave ‘Oklahoma’ at the National, not this clapboarded ham-fisted high-school rendition.


Production photo by Keith Pattinson for the Young Vic

Low Calorie Breakfast at Tiffany's

What can you remember of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ - Mickey Rooney with an unconvincing set of false teeth and a cringingly awful Chinese accent? Audrey Hepburn cool as a January cucumber in her swept-up chignon, tiara, pearls and yard-long cigarette holder? The gamine, twittery but ultimately loveable party girl around whom New York whirls like snowflakes in a lightweight comedy?

Ain’t none of that here at the Haymarket where undeniably beautiful Anna Friel plays Holly Golightly far closer to Billie Piper in Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Brightly peroxide (collar and cuffs, apparently, from the fleeting glimpse in the nude scene) and occasionally in a picture hat that makes her look disconcertingly like a shiitake mushroom, she may be closer to Truman Capote’s vision of Marilyn Monroe for the party, but captures only some of Holly’s mercurial quality.

To misquote Portia, the quality of mercury has become strained and in 2009 it doesn’t seem quite so ‘appropriate’ for attractive but insubstantial waifs to make a living from merely flirting with middle-aged suitors. Not that this is a morality play about prostitution, or, indeed, about anything apart from the characters who surround Holly, all of them ciphers.

Coming in at a butt-numbing two and three-quarter hours, the play is a succession of quick-change vignette scenes, using what look like two fire-escape staircases left over from a low-budget tour of ‘West Side Story’: there’s no depth, there’s no engagement - in Samuel Adamson’s adaptation of the original Truman Capote novella, it’s simply too hard to care about the characters.

Perhaps appropriately for Ms. Golightly, Friel looks everything but delivers nothing. Style over substance would be fine but she lacks the vital edge which makes Holly emotionally dangerous.

The production’s further damaged by the dismal performance of James Dreyfus, bad enough in Cabaret but here attempting the role of a cigar-chomping movie mogul and still coming out as Tom in Gimme Gimme Gimme. Suzanne Bertish has a better go at the vampish Italian neighbour Madame Spanella, although in a fringed gypsy skirt and paso doble gesturings, she seems to pitch it closer to Madrid than Milan. She’s meant to be an opera singer but mimes her arias, couldn’t they cast someone who could sing?

Capote once said the film was ‘a mawkish Valentine to New York City’ - here it’s more like a Tesco Value birthday card with the Manhattan skyline reduced to a few cheap cutouts against a backcloth lit variously in turquoise and magenta.

At the end, the loose ends of Holly’s story are all tied up, but you’ll yearn for the syrupy closing shots of Audrey and the strains of ‘Moon River’.

Production photo by Johan Persson

A Fine Execution at the Tower

Purism is not the issue here.

The evening started stately enough with Nigel Kennedy, still sporting his Gary-Rhodes-on-steroids butchered pineapple haircut, leading the Philharmonia orchestra through two melodious movements of Bach. So far, so dignified, so what.

What the audience had come for - and got in spades - was a hefty dose of Nige’s blokeish irreverence: chatting to the band, blagging half-finished glasses of champagne from the corporate stiffies in the front row, and generally parading his hallmark punch-drunk staggering routine like a pub comedian on a slow night in his native Brighton.

But when the man picks up a fiddle, and saws in to Duke Ellington’s ‘In a Jam’ it blows away every preconception, and his virtuosity is undoubted.

Perhaps sensing the audience’s preference for the more modern material, he confused the band by changing the running order - as he said ‘you don’t want to work up a sweat with this big band shit and then stop’. Some of the pieces were world premieres, of original 30’s Ellington arrangements re-worked by Kennedy to put more of the emphasis into the strings, and it’s a whole new sound.

It’s a whole new audience, too - many of whom don’t know how to behave in concerts, perhaps the idea that it’s in the open air makes them forget to stop chatting, particularly the chav in row P who answered his phone during the elegant and complex Bach Interventions in which Kennedy sparred electrically with cellist Karen Stephenson, before returning enthusiastically to the Swing era.

And then, just for a moment, with the lush big band sound washing over you, the first stars of the evening appearing over the battlements of the 900-year old White Tower, and the planes lining up for their descent into London City Airport, you begin to appreciate that setting this clumsily brilliant musical anarchist on a vulgar red gash of a stage against the stones of the Tower, in the historical, cultural and commercial heart of the city is what living in London is all about.

Blown by the 'Wind'

Kevin Spacey’s timing is exemplary.

Not just in his personal performance but in bringing to the Old Vic such a dynamic production of the 1955 American war horse ‘Inherit The Wind’ - a courtroom drama based on the true-life story of a young Tennessee school teacher arraigned for promoting the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin against the orders of a Christian fundamentalist school board.

Written in the shadow of the McCarthy trials it is topical today because of the ongoing battle between religious right-wingers in the US who have repackaged their anti-Darwinist stance into a fresh campaign to coerce schools into teaching ‘Intelligent Design’ (by the hand of God) instead of evolution as an approved scientific theory of the origin of man.

It makes Madonna’s Kabbalist babbling look almost rational by comparison, and it’s coming to a courtroom near you pretty soon as they extend their campaign into the UK.

This play has a special resonance for me because, in my tortured youth wrangling with my parents about whether I should be allowed to 'go on the stage' or press on to University, 'Inherit the Wind' marked my 17-year old professional debut in the Harrogate Repertory Company's production. It's perhaps the phase that taught me there was no money in acting, since whatever I earned barely covered the fares for the last bus home each night.

I was pleasantly surprised how much of the dialogue I remembered, and the gospel songs, as taught to us by our unofficial chorus-mistress Zara Nutley, later language school owner Mrs Courtenay in the popular TV rubbish 'Mind Your Language'. I tried to Google some of the other actors from the show, Adam Kuryakin (possibly the first 'out gay man' I'd encountered in Harrogate) and Peter Codyre, or director Barry Howard, but I guess they're all dead.

In the meantime, enjoy the bareknuckle bout in 20’s Tennessee where Spacey is impeccable as the veteran lawyer Henry Drummond (real life Clarence Darrow) twanging his suspenders and twisting the witnesses’ words to barnstorming effect. He’s much shoutier than Spencer Tracy in the Oscar-winning 1960 movie, the internalised anger contorting his already hunched body into a shape that may physically recall Charles Laughton, but continuously commands the stage.

It’s possible Spacey was impressed by the 2007 Broadway production in which Christopher Plummer finally threw off the mantle of Captain von Trapp and won plaudits for his portrayal of Drummond.

For Drummond to have the audience on side is an easy win, you could argue, since the lawyer is fighting for the rights of the common man and the free thinker, but to succeed at this he needs a credible opposition.

In the real story, three-times failed presidential candidate, and tub-thumping bible-basher William Jennings Bryan came to Tennessee as the prosecuting counsel. The character’s called Matthew Harrison Brady and in David Troughton’s strong performance he’s also a lurchingly crippled titan, matching Spacey barb for barb in the war of the words over bible passages and driving himself to a personal resurrection of his political career. If he’s ultimately weakened by the fight, the fault’s in the script rather than the performance. This man’s on his way to King Lear.

Half ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ half ‘Gone With the Wind’, the design whips up a confectionery vignette of the Old South. Director Trevor Nunn punctuates the court action with gospel singing and torchlight processions lovingly dressed in shades of sepia like the Kansas scenes in ‘Wizard of Oz’. Given the script is by Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence - authors of ‘Mame’ - it’s clear Sir Trevor is desperate to turn it in to a musical.

Outstanding among the 40-strong cast, something not usually seen outside the National, Mark Dexter plays the visiting cynical journalist who orchestrates the defence, based on Baltimore satirist H L Mencken, with a handsomely attractive oily charm - as he says ‘I may be rancid butter but I’m on your side of the bread’, and Ian Cunningham adds convincing value as the banjo-twangling court supervisor Ralph Meeker.

An old-fashioned ‘well made play’ but an excellent production. Go.

The sound of one hand Clapham

As I've said before, it's 21 years since Stephen Sondheim took panto by the throat and throttled it into a self-styled morality play called ‘Into the Woods’.

If nothing else, the current production at the Landor theatre highlights the age of the material, and the bum-numbingly lengthy exposition necessary to tell the stories of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and Jack and the Beanstalk before the interval - after which the plot thickens and the cast thins as many of them are picked off by a marauding giant whilst blaming each other for collective and individual misfortunes.

It’s intended as a metaphor for the disintegration of society, but the jury’s out on whether Sondheim was presenting an original metaphysical deconstruction of America at the end of the 20th century, or smoking crack.

The tedious first half needs pace which the cast couldn’t deliver on Friday since they were struggling with too-recently-arrived costumes and a clever oversized bookshelf of a set which demanded mountaineering feats whilst singing in a hoop skirt and minor key.

An announcement asked the audience to treat it as an open dress rehearsal and on that basis, it was just about OK. It also started over half an hour late which allowed us the opportunity to appreciate what a scrofulous pub the Landor really is, perched on the edge of an edgy housing estate. It’s a shame, because the theatre upstairs has a great reputation which doesn’t percolate down to the bar, and at closing time we had to shoulder our way through a number of chavs in what looked like pyjamas, and endure some colouful (I use the word advisedly) banter from dusky youths lounging about on a street corner.

The lead characer of the Witch is in disguise for the first half - and Lori Haley Fox was the only cast member to use a strong American accent so she appeared initially to be Ruby Wax in a burka (not in itself an unattractive prospect) but after the ‘transformation’ revealed blonde streaks and an overbite unfortunately reminiscent of Julia Davis in Nighty Night.

Others were more promising including Ryan Forde Iosco and particularly Luke Fredericks as the swashbuckling but shallow Princes, the latter clearly relishing a second outing in knee-length boots after his stint as Rolf the boy Nazi in Sound of Music, and with a lovely voice.

It’s notoriously hard to sing Sondheim because the lyrics are so often truncated or interrupted, but Sue Appleby as Cinderella and Leo Andrew as the Baker overcame this particularly well, and Andrew‘s ‘No One Is Alone’ had great resonance.

One of the best quotes from Into the Woods is ‘nice is different than good’.

This is a nice production.

A Talent not to amuse

Back in the days when boys became bands without the unwelcome attentions of Louis Walsh, or girls sang aloud without a televised vote - young Victoria Wood penned a simple, funny and sweet piece for the Sheffield Crucible based on her own experiences backstage in a provincial talent show.

Revisiting it thirty years later, she freely admits she had to explain a lot of the references to the cast, so it's not surprising many of the jokes had to be audibly elaborated by the older audience to its younger boyfriends during last Thursday's first performance at the Menier. There is hardly a gay bar in London in which you couldn't hear someone 'doing' a Victoria Wood sketch, and for the previews they were out in force, and lapping up the familiar comic lines.

Asked to comment on her friend Julie Walters' appearance in "Mamma Mia", Wood explained to the Daily Mail that musicals 'really weren't her thing' - which may have been tact as Walters was uncharacteristically dire, but also disingenuous since Wood recently wrote 'Acorn Antiques the Musical' with a swathe of pastiched production numbers. For 'Talent', the musical additions are modest parodies of cheesy cabaret songs which mostly serve to give the male cast members an opportunity to perspire copiously in velour suits with polyester ruffles.

Wood appears to have cast this production with a number of old friends - Jeffrey Holland, once the comedian Spike in Hi-de-Hi is amusing as a pensioner magician, but former Blue Peter presenter Mark Curry rather less convincing as the randy compere of the rotting Bunters night club.

It's like an explosion in the comedy section of the BBC archives, or at least in the skip where they throw the stuff they don't use any more.

The stronger casting is in Suzy Toase playing the role created by Wood, and the ever reliable Mark Hadfield doubling a magician's assistant and the night club's catering manageress in the funniest segment of the show when she organises the table allocations. Both these actors excel at deadpanning the flat northern inflections of Wood's material and illustrate both her easy facility with the language, and its ultimate failure to satisfy.

To genuine Lancastrians, the camp non-sequiturs of Wood's dialogue "she was going to be a nun but they kept having tomato soup and she lost her vocation" are routine, being heard on the bus from Bury to Bolton every day of the week, and Wood's skill was to spot the patterns and write it down. Custard creams aren't inherently funny, but when suggested by a northern housewife as a more palatable alternative to oral sex, it gets a laugh.

Whilst she has undoubtedly become a 'national treasure' through sketches and sitcom, comparison with more structurally capable dramatists like Alan Bennett are inevitably disappointing. In fact, the way Christopher Luscombe's recent production of Bennett's 'Enjoy' outshines 'Talent' despite the fact they were written at similar times, reflect on both Wood's script-updating and directing skills.

Sometimes, Talent alone is not enough.

Captive Audience

Banged up in a US prison two inmates from opposite sides of the tracks forge an unlikely friendship against a background of corrupt wardens, wisecracking murderers and a hanging. The stage version of 'Shawshank Redemption' is ‘Chicago’ for straight men.

Whilst not actually channelling Renee Zellweger and Catherine Z. Jones, leads Kevin Anderson and ‘The Wire’ star Reg E. Cathey draw parallels as Anderson’s innocent-behind-bars learns quickly who not to trust and how to manipulate the corrupt system, while Cathey’s persistent recidivist tries to distance himself from the morality but eventually succumbs.

Like most current screen-to-stage adaptations (Sister Act, Breakfast at Tiffany’s) legal ownership of the movie rights prevented a direct adaptation from the filmscript and the source material reverts to a less sparkling original novel or treatment.

The dialogue’s too fluent for movie realism but works well enough on stage where the supporting cast turn in sharp characterisations, notably Ryan McCluskey’s engaging performance as the cheerful gambler Heywood. McCluskey is billed as first cover for Anderson’s lead role and it would be interesting to see him play it.

Equally outstanding is the least sympathetic character, the violent sodomite Bogs played with utter conviction by Joe Hanley whose priapic readiness to exact the ultimate rite of passage on new inmates gives new meaning to the phrase ‘hardened criminal’.

Ferdia Murphy’s two-tier set of prison bars is simple to the point of emptiness, and bizarre when placed in the blue white and gold cherub-studded proscenium of Wyndham’s Theatre. Lighting Designer Kevin Treacy could have worked harder to reduce the spill on to the auditorium and focus more harshly on the prison.

An interesting echo on the sound system actively suggests the hard surfaces, but otherwise there's little to indicate place, the passing of time or seasons, or to convince us that this is a real penitentiary.

There’s plenty of shouting and banging, and a lot of booted stomping in the fight scenes but ultimately this Shawshank is hollow. As Roxie says - it’s just a noisy hall where there’s a nightly brawl, and All That Jazz.