If I Had A Stammer ...

The King’s Speech – Richmond Theatre, London

Writer: David Seidler

Director: Adrian Noble

Reviewer: JohnnyFox

The Public Reviews Rating: 

Could ‘The King’s Speech’ work without Colin Firth? Would anything grow on theatrical ground already sprayed by Madonna in her shocking abdication flop ‘W/E’?  In the original movie I had found Mr Firth’s housewife-pleasing charms somewhat distracting despite his stock-in-trade diffidence, so the stage play is an opportunity to hear the story of the 1937 Abdication crisis and the stammering George VI’s reluctant accession to the throne, and engage with the personalities on a less starry but more intimate level.

In two fine central performances, Charles Edwards as Bertie and Jonathan Hyde as self-taught Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue are extremely capable and experienced actors at the top of their respective games, it’s a pleasure to watch the scenes between them. With the addition of Emma Fielding as a too-nice Princess Elizabeth – more evidence of her manipulative shrewishness would leaven a slightly syrupy script whose production had to be long deferred until after the Queen Mother’s death – this could have been a successful and intense three-hander with more of the background plot shifted offstage. Instead, author David Seidler has opted for a pageant of personalities who are too lightly sketched and occasionally too over-acted to achieve the resonance of, say the Churchillian coterie in ‘Three Days in May’ : but again the acting chops of the participants are undisputed.

Joss Ackland is imposing as a short-tempered George V and brilliantly defies the fact his character was barely five foot six in his uniform boots, Ian MacNeice gives a refreshingly rumpled, not to say Rumpoled, Churchill, but Michael Feast flies way too far over the top as a camp Archbishop of Canterbury that owes more to the Archdeacon in BBC2’s “Rev.” than to Cosmo Gordon Lang who was himself famous for his halting and ponderous speech patterns.

The play has different focuses from the film. Queen Mary doesn’t appear, Mrs Simpson has no spoken lines (although she dances up a storm in the background of Anthony Ward’s over-arched and persistently revolving set) and Edward VIII played admirably by Daniel Betts is sidelined as a childish and selfish playboy. Instead, Logue’s wife Myrtle is foregrounded, pining for her native Australia and bullying him to return home. Charlotte Randle’s a fine actress with great National Theatre credentials and fully captures the character’s disappointment and pride. Unfortunately she has been tempted into a slightly too-broad Australian accent apparently derived from ‘Kath and Kim’: there are moments when you expect her to invite Princess Elizabeth into her ‘lounge-room and dinette’ for a glass of 'foine woine'.

Incidentally, that revolve is a problem because it added something like a metre to the elevation of the already-high Richmond stage and patrons from the front six rows of the stalls had to be relocated, deferring the curtain until they were seated. If you have an option, choose a circle seat first.

This is a good production, although director Adrian Noble may need to apply a slightly firmer hand before it reaches the Wyndham’s on March 22nd, but bringing it into town ahead of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations may just guarantee it a loyal and sympathetic audience eager to hear her father’s story told so well.

written for www.thepublicreviews.com and published 7 March 2012

Witch Report

Bell Book and Candle – Greenwich Playhouse, London

Writer: John van Druten

Director: Mark Giesser

Reviewer: JohnnyFox

The Public Reviews Rating: 

It’s Christmas time: as the audience enters, Judy Garland’s chestnuts are roasting on an open stereo, and to spice up the season New York socialite Gillian Holroyd has designs on the handsome publisher upstairs who’s dating her college rival.

But Gillian has womanly wiles she didn’t learn at Wellesley, and John van Druten’s airy comedy spins on the use of witchcraft to ensure she gets her man. Bell Book and Candle is the play (and 1958 Kim Novak/James Stewart movie) which allegedly inspired the TV comedy ‘Bewitched’ and you can see the beginnings of the relationship between witch Samantha and mortal Darren. You might also wonder if a young J K Rowling didn’t also catch the often-repeated movie on TV because there are just as many similarities with the Harry Potter oeuvre, showing the world of urban witchcraft as a natural parallel to the ‘Muggle’ one.

She’s aided and abetted by her feline ‘familiar’, Pyewacket which ought to be a svelte Siamese but here he’s more of a rude mechanical: a ginger-and-white battery operated cross between magical Mr Mistoffelees and Mrs Slocombe’s recalcitrant pussy.

Zoë Teverson gives good witch in a performance which is by turns knowing and vulnerable: she has a distinctive voice evocative of Kim Novak, but also of Maggie Gyllenhaal and she wears some gorgeous 50s vintage selected by costume designer Guilia Scrimieri. Teverson plays it in a upper class British intonation in contrast to Stephen Cavanagh‘s excellent and authentic Ivy-League boyish publisher whose range of stage emotions really is only a couple of inches short of a James Stewart himself.

There’s strong support from Duncan MacInnes as Gil’s perky and impulsive brother Nicky, and from John Shears as shambling boozy author Sidney Redlitch whose inquisitiveness about witchcraft throws the second act into amusing panic, but Carole Street disappoints in the important role of Aunt Queenie. She’s too housewifely and would benefit from the glamorous hauteur and disdain for mere mortals of the Endora character in ‘Bewitched’, nor does she capture Elsa Lanchester’s wide-eyed ‘who, me’ defensiveness when challenged for her naughtier spell-casting.

It’s an interesting revival, author John van Druten was a closet homosexual and there’s a suggestion that the piece is a coded reference to the gay underworld of fifties’ New York. Mark Giesser directs at a fine pace, and whilst the production values are mixed (interesting wall-paintings which glow like Tarot cards in the dark, but no pyrotechnics for the magic and a distractingly weird cardboard concertina sofa) this is a very entertaining production of a vintage script which is just as funny in the post-Potter era.

written for www.thepublicreviews.com and published 18 November 2011

Pointe-less

Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker!

Churchill Theatre Bromley, London

Original Director/Choreographer: Matthew Bourne

Tour Associate Director: Etta Murfitt

Designer: Anthony Ward

Reviewer: JohnnyFox

The Public Reviews Rating: 

The longest journey begins with a single dance step. Not quite accurate, but the Ambassador Theatre Group’s mammoth tour of ‘Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker!’ began this weekend at Bromley and between now and landfall next May in Dublin expects to deliver over 200 performances.

It’s titled ‘Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker!’ in deference to his highly-regarded production at Sadler’s Wells in 2002 (which also had its preview week in Bromley) and whilst Tchaikovsky and original choreographer Balanchine would certainly disown it for its pantomime staging and pre-recorded music, it’s questionable whether even Bourne himself would embrace this diluted and denatured touring version.

A retired Royal Ballet dancer of my acquaintance says her favourite part of Nutcracker is the Snowflake dance but that it was ‘murder’ on her feet and her pointe shoes. Well, not in this production, Darcey, because there’s no pointe work and the choreography is simplified until it could be hoofed by the average West End chorine. It’s the balletic equivalent of de-skilling cooking jobs in McDonalds so they can be done by school leavers.

So perhaps it’s not all about well-executed gargouillades and fouettés en tournant, or the wobbly lifts and unsynchronised corps de ballet work don’t matter in a production where characterization is all? 

The initial setting is strong, a dour monochrome orphanage which could have you think you’d accidentally wandered in to Annie and in which Dr and Mrs Dross (think a camper Herr Flick in vinyl batwing tailcoat, and a more pliable Mrs Danvers with liver-shaded lipstick) preside over an orphanage of toyless teens. Combining Prussian sadism with a touch of ‘Spring Awakening’ it becomes only slightly repetitive in the eternal pouting selfishness of the Dross’ own children across several scenes, although Fritz is decidedly the best of the young dancers. Sadly, the programme doesn’t list names on a day-by-day basis, as three or more share each role in a rotating cast of 20.

In a clever transformation, we move first to the frozen lake where the milieu and the costumes are more distinctly Russian and the skaterish sliding steps make a satisfactory shushing sound on the make-believe ice although the Waltz of the Snowflakes is distinctly dodgy and out-of-time, but as we proceed to Sweetieland it becomes more tackily ‘Seaside Special’ with a three-tier cake set, gaudy costumes pandering to some designer’s leather fetish in the liquorice accessories, a pugnacious humbug in a fat suit resembling a diabetic’s nightmare of Elton John and a lot more lascivious writhing and finger-licking than might be good for the seven-year olds in their first tutus in the front row.

It’s not all bad, and children will love it, but it does feel a lot more like a pantomime than a ballet. All Dick Whittington and no entrechat.

written for www.thepublicreviews.com and published 9 November 2011

Insufficiently Dirty Gertie

Noel and Gertie – The Cockpit Theatre, London

Writer: Sheridan Morley

Director: Thom Southerland

Reviewer: JohnnyFox

The Public Reviews Rating: 

‘Noel and Gertie’ is a confection wherein the music, lyrics and play extracts of Noel Coward are used to illustrate the close friendship between the vastly talented author and his intermittent co-star but lifelong friend Gertrude Lawrence. In their stage heyday, they were as photographed, gossiped about and feted as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

Hanging the music onto a narration is useful because while his contemporaries Cole Porter and the Gershwins, wrote sheaves of ‘girl meets boy’ songs which survive as standards, Coward’s work is more difficult to perform out of context, and modern audiences may not appreciate his themes which lament the passing of the empire or comment on English eccentricities.

Helena Blackman is every inch Miss Lawrence, capturing the hauteur, the recklessness and the insecurities as well as delivering the songs with a pitch-perfect capability Gertie herself didn’t always possess. Sail Away, written for the rasping tones of Elaine Stritch, transcends its source to become a torch song of immense beauty and delicacy.

Ben Stock is a touch too fresh-faced and eager for the langorous and louche mid-career Coward whose suave overconfidence was finely honed by his teens. However he plays the piano splendidly and paces the patter songs very well indeed: Mrs Worthington seems freshly hilarious however many times you’ve heard it.

Sheridan Morley’s 1982 dully chronological script is too politely adoring and glosses over both Coward’s romantic involvements and the racier episodes in Lawrence’s life: the army officer who declined to marry her because she was “pure Clapham”, the matinee her daughter entered her dressing room during The King and I to find a naked Yul Brynner with his head up Gertie’s hooped skirt, or the dubious allegations of a lesbian affair with Daphne duMaurier who famously said she’d rather have Gertie on a chaise-longue than in a double bed.

It’s a pity it can’t be updated, because with a bit of retrospective spice, this musically fine production might be even more enjoyable.

written for www.thepublicreviews.com and published 2 October 2011

Not quite finding Neverland

“You need to let your pirate out” says Captain Hook, advising James Barrie to reduce the glucose content in his story and allow its darker elements to triumph. The writers could have taken the same advice in their construction of Finding Neverland “The New Musical Comedy”.   Whilst the second act is touching and moving once Barrie gets Peter Pan off the ground, so to speak, the first is sluggish and unfocused and does no service to historical accuracy.

Barrie was undeniably homosexual, and maintained a dubious interest in small boys which might have got him into trouble had it not been for the disbelieving morality of the day.  His fascination with the Llewellyn-Davies brothers parallels Lewis Carroll’s infatuation with Alice Liddell and her sisters and will shortly be explored by Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw when, in John Logan’s new play Peter and Alice those two characters meet in later life.

Finding Neverland presents Barrie as a shy romantic whose affections are captured by widowed mother, Sylvia, with whom he eventually falls in love, whilst developing a healthy outdoor friendship with her four sons on whom he tests his tales of piracy and derring-do.   This is wayward, because the boys’ father Arthur didn’t die until three years after Peter Pan opened and when mother later succumbed to cancer, “Uncle Jim” Barrie interfered with a version of her Will to have himself nominated as the person with whom the boys should live. 

Peter committed suicide, George died in battle on the Somme, Michael drowned at 20 in suspicious circumstances at Oxford, with his alleged male lover.  See what I mean, there’s an infinitely better and darker story here although possibly not for a musical. 

The sins of historical omission and commission are directly attributable to the movie, of course, but it feels more immediately ‘wrong’ in the theatre and by sticking to the sanitized made-for-middle-America Miramax treatment, the writers have constructed a show with more spoonfuls of sugar than Mary Poppins, which it too closely resembles.  Producer Harvey Weinstein’s argument would be that it makes it palatable to family audiences: that may be its fatal flaw in a post-Matilda world where children respond to more ambitious plotlines.

In Rob Ashford’s uneven production, it’s hard to define this as musical comedy, there are so many conflicting elements: Julian Ovenden and Rosalie Craig look handsome and sing beautifully at the centre of a slow burning married-boy-meets-widowed-girl romance, as does Clare Foster as the third wheel Mary Barrie.  They don’t seem to be in the same play as Oliver Boot’s camp Captain Hook who appears as Barrie’s alter ego and conscience, a structure which pales by comparison with The Carroll Myth, Nathan Shreeves' fine play premiered at the Edinburgh Festival last year and in which the characters from Alice invade the author’s mind. 

Hook is only a loveable rogue in recent animated movies and for pantomime purposes, 1904 audiences would have found him genuinely frightening.  Also batting for the panto team are the League Of Gentlemen cartooned as Barrie’s best mates, and Stuart Neal overacting as Barrie’s harassed stage manager.  The schoolboys sing brightly and act by numbers, although none of them is a potential Billy Elliot.  Which leaves Liz Robertson, as Sylvia’s disapproving mother, still with Madame Giry’s stick up her backside and delivering a one-woman Downton Abbey.

Despite the randomness of the characterisations, money has been flung at the production: Scott Pask’s sets are vast and impressively detailed, and Paul Willis’s costumes are elegant (although largely linen which wasn’t a fashion textile in 1904, being used mainly for handkerchiefs, shrouds and bedsheets), there’s a car which could do justice to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and a fully-rigged pirate ship afloat on a sea of dry ice to climax Act One. 

John Driscoll and Gemma Carrington’s projection designs are vividly coloured and convey a real sense of movement, but they’re not nearly as exciting as William Dudley’s 3D projections for Peter Pan in London.  I looked for a credit in the programme for the flying technology, but there isn’t one.  It’s so bad it could be two men on a rope at the side of the stage.

Michael Korie’s lyrics and Scott Frankel’s music don’t soar, except perhaps in a derivative anthem which accompanies the pirate voyage – in fact looking at the list of 27 numbers in the programme a day after seeing the show, it’s impossible to recall any of them with clarity.

This is a fully-finished production, not an out-of-town tryout, and having seen it ahead of the London critics it’s tempting to do as Walter Winchell’s secretary Rose – who saw Oklahoma! in preview in Connecticut – and cable home “no legs, no jokes, no chance”.   It has potential, but if it’s to be the show Weinstein says he intends to bring in to London to challenge Book of Mormon (although I’d have guessed they’d attract different audiences) it needs to lose fifteen minutes from the first act, and gain a couple of the sort of knockout production numbers for which Rob Ashford is famous.

Has Carmen Lost the Plot?

PUBLICATION DATE 12 APRIL 2012
Written for londonist.com



We have been here before. Many times, it feels: ‘stripped-down’ pub opera featuring the concomitant apparatus of skinny jeans, transfer tattoos, funky tights, DMs, bad haircuts, jazz beards and studentish ensembles. With its garret-full of debris, vodka bottles, cellphones, laptops and fairy lights, Carmen at the King’s Head does not disappoint.

The chaise-longue on which the eponymous heroine is eventually throttled could as easily be Mimi’s deathbed and we are disappointingly not a creative bus ride away from Opera UpClose’s original staging of La Bohème at the Cock Tavern which sparked the whole thing off in the first place.

London is now saturated with railway-arch and pub opera, and desperate for more of the originality which inspired the pioneering productions: at least this weekend’s opening of Don Giovanni in a gay bar under Charing Cross has promise of gender-bending and a recognisable baritone in the lead.

Critics agree the drama has been pared to the bone, but lost some rationality in the transfer to its North London crime-squat setting, as well as the fire and passion of Seville’s gypsy band. Rupert Christensen in the Telegraph gave it four stars, though, enjoying its “rough-edged vitality, mostly well-acted, crisply directed and inventively designed” in contrast to Kieron Quirke in the Evening Standard who thought it “short, and comically dreadful … a plotless try-hard mess”.

Ace opera bloggista Intermezzo picked on the “clunky English libretto, a bashed-up piano and an underutilised guitar” and we’d have to agree that you long for some orchestral support for the fabulous tunes in Bizet's lush and filmic score: although Elspeth Wilkes fairly hammered the pub piano into submission in a spirited accompaniment, Sam Johnson’s tentative guitar contributed little.

From a cheery start with the cast striking up the Habanera in the bar, the atmosphere’s charged with a convincing catfight and Carmen’s arrest by Don Jose but immediately deflated by a ten-minute wrangle to seat everyone inside the theatre itself.

Leads change nightly, but we enjoyed the chemistry between authentically Tufnell Park-born mezzo Flora McIntosh and East Sheen's hunky 'singing dentist' Andrew Bain as Jose, although he seemed to run out of both charisma and lung-power by the Flower Song climax.

Also, if you’re going to kill your girlfriend, hammering her face repeatedly into a canvas stage flat isn’t terribly efficient, as well as tension-breakingly laugh-out-loud funny.

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.

Daly News

PUBLICATION DATE 8 FEBRUARY 2012
Written for londonist.com




Hard on the round heels of her Cagney and Lacey co-star Sharon Gless impersonating a woman you almost certainly won’t have heard of, comes Tyne Daly in the stage personification of someone you couldn’t possibly have escaped hearing about unless you’d slept through the 20th century, its most famous operatic diva Maria Callas.

It’s also an occasion at Londonist Towers when the box of forbidden review clichés is momentarily unlocked and an editorial permit issued to sanction the usage of ‘tour de force’ and ‘bravura performance’ because this is an opportunity to savour an actress whose abilities were not so stretched by her television work demonstrate power and subtlety and pathos to rank alongside Tracie Bennett’s five-star portrayal of Judy Garland in last year’s barnstorming End of the Rainbow.

This is the second time a big-name American actress has essayed the role in London – in 1997 Patti LuPone gave us her Callas, but with her own reputation as a demanding and dominant stage presence not to mention already having played the ultimate diva Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, hers was more of a caricature whereas Daly’s engagement is both instantly credible and more sympathetic.

The format of the piece is simple – attended by a pianist and a stagehand, Daly recreates the master classes Callas gave at the Julliard School in New York at the end of her 20-year domination of the operatic stage, tutoring ordinary students.

Through the barbs and imperious asides she casts at them, we learn the truths of her own harsh wartime upbringing, hard-fought career path and painful love affair with the world’s richest man, Aristotle Onassis. In a cutaway scene where she plays both sides of the couple, and grunts Onassis’s claim that in return for her glamour and fame he gives her his “thick uncircumcised Greek dick” you can believe she actually has one dangling in her beautifully cut Martin Pakledinaz trouser suit.

A triumph of temperament over privilege, with points scored over rivals with more cushioned lives, it culminates in a magnificent moment at La Scala when she has the glitterati and the crowned heads of Europe where she wants them – standing in ovation to her achievements.

It could be static, and Terrence McNally’s script is undeniably patchy, but Daly’s performance drives the piece continuously, especially when she’s explaining the meaning and the music of an aria to her students – the passion and vigour with which she visualises each piece makes everything so clear and alive, you could wish ENO or Covent Garden would dispense with surtitles and just have Daly explain it all to you.

The Ladykillers

PUBLICATION DATE 15 DECEMBER 2011
Written for londonist.com




It would be hard to find a theatrical concept more Londony than ‘The Ladykillers’, a ‘classic’ Ealing Comedy from the fifties following a gang of bungling bank robbers disguised as a string quintet to hide out in the home of sweetly dotty Mrs Wilberforce, whose windows conveniently face the train tracks at Kings Cross via which they intend to escape with the loot.

Surely all you have to do is order in a cracking composite set from Michael Taylor, hire the wonderful Marcia Warren who has been giving good ‘old lady’ for years and populate the gang with some loveable ‘him off the telly’s – including the half of Armstrong and Miller who isn’t the droll one in the car insurance adverts – and Bob is indubitably your aunt’s husband.

So it’s Londony, but is it Londonist?

Anchoring the action in a single set – even if it does twirl, shake its dangly bits and do the splits more convincingly than Ivy Paige in a midnight show at Madame Jojo's – loses the affectionate nostalgia the Alexander Mackendrick film delivers in its depiction of mid-century London street life, although the bank robbery choreographed by Scalextric is ingenious if a bit unclear.

What’s left is a character-driven farce in which each of the hoods gets a backstory not derived from the film, which is when Graham Linehan’s script draws equally on The League of Gentlemen and The League of Gentlemen, borrowing from both the immaculate heist movie and the TV sketch show for stock British characters and moments of bizarre transvestism.

The print critics fell over themselves to be nice about the show, generally rating it four stars, and few could scrape up even a mildly dissenting comment. It also beguiled political comedian Mark Thomas on BBC2's Review Show as he only tried half-heartedly to convince Martha Kearney that it was a thinly disguised piece of Tory propaganda designed to maintain the old social order.

So it’s great to welcome to the West End a commercial hit which isn’t another jukebox musical – you really can count on the fingers of one hand the number of comedies which expect to sell out on a Saturday night: Alongside Jerusalem, One Man Two Guvnors – and shortly to be joined by Noises Off at the Old Vic – The Ladykillers is among the best shows in London without a band.

Goodness Gracious George

PUBLICATION DATE 10 OCTOBER 2011
Written for londonist.com




After the press night of The Killing of Sister George starring Meera Syal, intrepid Londonist reviewers JohnnyFox and Zefrog hid in a wardrobe in the dressing room shared by characters Alice McNaught (Childie) and June Buckridge (George) as they fought over their postmortem of the night’s performance. Here’s what they may have heard:

Childie: oh come on, George. It wasn’t that bad, the critics are not going to kill the play. People seemed to enjoy it and they did laugh, even if the theme can seem a bit heavy-going.

George: are you insane, Childie? We’re no longer relevant to contemporary dramatic discourse: post-Tipping The Velvet, lesbianism doesn’t have the shock factor and the plot about my dismissal from a BBC radio series is about as exciting as a Clare Balding outside broadcast from the Lord Mayor’s Show.

Childie: you have to admit that the play has probably set the tone for lesbian representation on stage and screen right up to this day. Do you think that’s why it’s so difficult to tell what period the action is supposed to take place? I mean, between the anachronisms in the language and the clothes I am not quite sure whether I am supposed to be in the 1950s or in a Hoxton loft in 2011. I do like the set, though. It was clever of Ciaran Bagnall to include that giant radio speaker in the backdrop. My dolls just love it!

George: The set’s fine, but no more accurate than the costumes by Pam Tait: my Blundstone boots weren’t seen much outside Australia till the 80′s but I thought Mrs Mercy [Belinda Lang]’s suits were as elegant as her finely-tuned performance, an autocratic BBC vixen to the fingertips of her calfskin gloves. Pity about Madame Xenia [Helen Lederer]. Was she meant to be Ukrainian?  The accent travelled from Gdansk to Vladivostok. Via Leeds. And what a clunky overacted performance, it was Calendar Girls all over again.

Talking of accents, Miss McNaught, given that you’re Scottish why do you speak pure Brummie ?

Childie: Oh yes, Mrs Mercy! Isn't she lovely? And sooooo nice!

George?

George: What?

Childie: Don’t you think we could make a bit more of that scene at the beginning when you make me eat the end of your cigar? I mean, for us it’s nothing unusual, you trying to humiliate me, but it’s the first time the audience becomes aware of it and I feel we could do much more  – making it real dramatic and all.

George: I told director Iqbal Khan that George needed to be more menacing. It’s not sufficient just to wear trousers and take longer strides to emphasise her angry masculinity, for the play to pivot on whether or not she’ll go ‘over the edge’ we needed to get closer to her psychotic neuroses: unfortunately he’s read Rebecca West but I saw her more as Rose.

But you’re right about the cigar.  I’ve finished it now, so get on your knees and eat my butt.

A Night on the Bog

PUBLICATION DATE 3 OCTOBER 2011
Written for londonist.com






Have you heard the one about the Irishman who walks into a bar and says he’s killed his father with a potato spade? The landlord gives him a job and immediately leaves him alone with his daughter whilst he goes to a wake… It sounds like the set-up to a shaggy-dog joke rather than the essence of a plot by one of Ireland’s most famous dramatists.

Some London revivals have “important” written all over them. You can tell by the dressy South Bank-ish audience, and by the way broadsheet critics fall over each other to show their Google-enhanced erudition.  The Telegraph’s Charlie Spencer called it a “tragicomic marvel”, Paul Taylor in the Indie cited its “dangerous iconoclasm” and Michael Coveney compared it to Gogol.  They all refer to the riots in 1907 after J M Synge’s depiction of the Irish as bog-trotters too easily bedazzled by storytelling and superstition, and harp on the play’s influence over any and every subsequent writer.

Gobshites, as they say in Co. Mayo.

It was a grand night for half-Ethiopian half-Irish and total babe Ruth Negga. In between wowing the press with her stage performance as fierce barmaid Pegeen she was scurrying upstairs to catch herself as Shirley Bassey on BBC2.  As the wayward patricidal bedazzler, Negga’s ‘Misfits’ co-star Robert Sheehan divided the jury, some seeing him as better at the geeky inadequate and less convincing as a silver-tongued charmer whom all the women adore.

Most of the cast are experienced Irish actors, and play heavily and emphatically on the lilting language – in fact it’s hammered home with such vigour that surtitles might be preferable and give them more freedom to act naturally.  First among equals is surely Niamh Cusack portraying a wily and seductive Widow Quin, and like Negga arguably too lovely to be totally credible as a barefoot goat-breeding peasant woman.

The two acts are bookended with some vogueish Pogue-ish drum and flutery evoking the Corrs on their night off, there’s a goat-skin bodhrán for goodness sake.  The hyper-realistic set depicts the single location of the bar and kitchen of the shebeen, yet it slides and whirls like the Tardis in a totally unnecessary display of stage mechanics: it’s a hundred-year-old Irish drama, not the Sound of Feckin’ Music.

Seville Partnership

PUBLICATION DATE 19 SEPTEMBER 2011
Written for londonist.com



At Londonist Towers, our fondness for Wilton’s – the last surviving ‘grand musical hall’ in the country – knows few bounds.  We love its raffish ‘beautiful state of disrepair’ auditorium, its varied repertoire and its super nice cheap bar.

The shabby chic auditorium is so adaptable and for this week’s performances of Carmen it could so easily have been a flamenco dancehall in early nineteenth century Seville.

It finds an ideal partner in soprano Kate Flowers’ dedicated Co-Opera Company.  Based in an unpromising industrial estate in Sydenham, like Wiltons it’s unsupported by any public funding but manages to offer intensive vocal training and workshops to promising singers through an inventive sponsporship scheme which anyone can join.

The singing is mostly excellent and the acoustic makes it all so clear and understandable – even for a Swedish Escamillo and Rumanian Carmen who emphasise the international scope of the company.  Some of the voices take time to warm up, but the ensemble pieces are as pleasurable as the arias with Tom Lowe, Catherine Rooney, Felicity Buckland and particularly Alex Duliba enriching their quartet of supporting roles with bravura performances, and Ian Beadle brilliantly and confidently doubling Zuniga and Morales.

This is a very ‘polite’ production: Carmen done by the West Wittering Young Conservatives, perhaps. Adriana Festeu looks and sounds more Samantha Cameron than a cigarette-factory spitfire, and despite his lovely and strongly sustained lyric tenor, Michael Scott is too scarily Boris Johnson to convince as headstrong soldier Don Jose.

It’s delightful to hear the voices supported by an excellent sixteen-piece orchestra but the acting lets the side down under William Relton’s awkward direction. It’s quite an achievement to mount Carmen with a cast of just nine, and they all work extremely hard, but  when you think how much more was delivered in the same space by the Union’s Iolanthe, it might do this company a service if they could hook up with some of London’s more imaginative fringe theatre directors to put a spark into the staging and characterisations.

Shaw-fired Success

PUBLICATION DATE 10 OCTOBER 2011
Written for londonist.com




The first surprise in Fiona Shaw’s off-piste production is the all-white revolving maze of a set, peopled by such a troupe of bowing and scraping servantry – alternately linen-folding, bread-baking and boot-polishing – that we could have landed at Downton Abbey. Instead we’re pleasingly detached from time and place in a bravura attempt to modernize the ‘impossible to update’ Marriage of Figaro.

Purists found it distracting, but we suspect most Londonistas would love it as much as the cheeky, punchy libretto by Jeremy Sams. Shaw’s feminist influence tilts the scale heavily in favour of the women characters with Susannah more calculatedly manipulative than typical operatic maids, Barbarina chucking her guts up after bingeing on alcopops, and the Countess packing her Louis Vuittons to leave Almaviva.

John McMurray, ENO’s head of casting, came onstage to announce a substitute Countess in Elizabeth Llewellyn – the British Jamaican soprano who was such a thrilling Mimi in last season’s La Bohème. He should really have taken a bow for not only is she superb, calm and centred whilst the madder characters caper around her, the rest of the principals are outstanding without being household names. Iain Paterson is a robust and barely deferential Figaro while resisting the stentorian overtones of a Bryn Terfel or Thomas Allen, and musically quite brilliantly-matched with Roland Wood’s rather approachable middle-class Almaviva.

The production bowls along till the interval, after which the fourth act could be an anticlimax were it not for the fine renditions of each of the solo arias carrying the evening splendidly to a climax.

This has to be ENO’s ‘genius’ season because it includes so many delicious and brave choices in its repertoire: from Nico Muhly’s edgy exploration of internet sexuality in Two Boys and the harrowing but enthralling rediscovery The Passenger centred in Auschwitz, to a chocolate box of delights in the colourful Elixir of Love and now courting controversy by daring to deconstruct such a traditional and beloved warhorse as Figaro. With standby tickets from £10, this is a London institution to be proud of, and to support. Go.

Tightly Wound Clockwork

PUBLICATION DATE 14 SEPTEMBER 2011
Written for londonist.com




Not many of London’s ‘urban villages’ have been more mauled about than Stratford.

A combination of attritive decay with a succession of ham-fisted local authority interventions begat a poundshop-dominated 70s shopping arcade on a windswept island choked by a red necklace of double-deckers. The construction of the Olympic site and Westfield complex is a further haymaker punch as its unsightly ‘old’ centre is to be screened from the sensitive gaze of Olympic spectators by a 450-metre metallic frieze of fishy leaves known as the ‘Shoal’.

Which is a pity, because behind it shelters a beacon of goodness, artistic endeavour and community spirit that cannot be crushed by planning committees, the 127-year old Theatre Royal. Itself a survivor of a string of redevelopment initiatives, the building is most famous as the home of Joan Littlewood’s pioneering Theatre Workshop from 1953. In the latest incarnation under artistic director Kerry Michael its manifesto is to bring London’s new communities to the stage, and portray their experiences as second and third generation migrants.

What’s almost more exciting than the artistic endeavour is the artsy, intelligent urban black audience that regularly fills the seats, and the vigour of its community marketing. The latest production, a 50-years-on reworking of Anthony Burgess's ‘A Clockwork Orange’ is outstanding.

In post-rioting London, coinciding with the opening of Westfield and government navel-gazing about the management of angry disaffected youth, it could not be more topical as Alex’s gang of ultra-violent ‘horrorshow ninjas’ bursts hooded onto the stage like a looting gang, but drive the plot with such energy and pace that you’re almost attracted to their motives. Ed Duranté’s boxfresh script and Dawn Reid’s direction play with language so much more generously and musically than the original, that the Stanley Kubrick 1971 movie pales by comparison.

Avoidance of cliché seems to be the production’s hallmark: the violence is choreographed by Jonzi D and Katie Pearson with a rare technique which avoids contact while dramatising impact. Fred Carl’s music is wonderfully undpredictable, finessing hip-hop rhythms with Dave Brubek-louche jazz incidentals, blues and soul. The acting’s fine, too, not just the gang members but their families and victims seem more resilient and three-dimensional, particularly in Susan Lawson Reynolds and Marcus Powell’s sympathetic performances.

But the real discovery is Ashley Hunter, fresh out of Central School of Speech and Drama, entirely engaging and charismatic as Alex.  Truly an actor to watch.

Goddard's Polish

PUBLICATION DATE 22 MARCH 2011
Written for Londonist.com

 
A brand new Alan Ayckbourn comedy, his 74^th, celebrating he’s now twice a prolific as Shakespeare, comes as close to London as its six month tour permits (Richmond this week, Windsor next) and seems to ask ‘am I ready for the West End?’

 It has some familiar ingredients: three differently disappointed wives, three feckless or inert husbands, portrayals of the middle-English middle-class so accurate that if he’d set up a giant mirror in the bar of Richmond Theatre during the interval, Ayckbourn could have got a third act out of it – and, as in The Norman Conquests a male protagonist who manages to attract and then disrupt the equilibrium of wildly different women.

The novelty this time is that the ‘Norman’ character, George Riley, remains offstage throughout and his complex personality is revealed only in hearsay when his doctor gives him six months to live. Ayckbourn makes him so many different things to so many different people: mentor, rock idol, teacher, inspirational lover, moralist and endlessly supportive friend – and yet also someone that the other characters clearly don’t know as well as they think they do - that you might wonder if Ayckbourn is playing with faith and they’re talking about God.

 The play’s clever because by restraining actual detail it makes the audience project their own fears, thoughts and doubts into the characters and their situation – what starts out as a surface comedy about amateur dramatics along the lines of his A Chorus of Disapproval turns into something much darker in the stronger second act when some uncomfortable truths are revealed. 

At first it looks headed for a typical farcical ending and a quick curtain, but then twists sharply to a sombre conclusion which had the audience discussing it all the way back to the station. Is it headed for the West End?  Possibly, and with an unexpectedly subtle central performance from Liza Goddard as the oldest of the wives as well as convincing support from Kim Wall as her husband, it already has the feel of a Shaftesbury Avenue production.   But Ayckbourn often re-assesses his plays after their first outing and some judicious tightening and perhaps introducing the darker themes earlier in the process could make an interesting play even better.

Unravelled Jersey

PUBLICATION DATE: 13 AUGUST 2010 on Londonist.com



With a topical reference to ‘Glee Club’, Manuel Simons' late-night show is part paean of praise to Bruce Springsteen, part stretched sketch in which teen wiener Johnny from Jersey wants to model himself on “The Boss” but sings and sounds more like Shirley Temple.

Simons plays all the parts so Johnny’s journey from weak gleek to emancipated gay rocker is submerged under a series of accurately drawn but oddly-voiced friends, teachers and role models.

It's a clever concept and Simons works hard on his characterisations, but the theme seems un-Camden and un-contemporary and the piece is neither academic enough to examine issues of masculinity versus acceptance nor sharp enough to make the same points satirically.

Simons can clearly sing, both in the falsetto and baritone registers, so it’s a pity that this isn’t more of a musical and less a hyperextended version of the scene in ‘La Cage Aux Folles’ when Georges teaches Albin to act butch.



Queer in the USA is at Etcetera Theatre 265 Camden High Street until 15 August, nightly at 10.30pm. Tickets from 08444 771000 or online via Camden Fringe box office at £7.50. Runs about 75 minutes.

Funny Peculiar – Richmond Theatre, London

Funny Peculiar – Richmond Theatre, London

SW19 Pacific

If you thought £92.50 including booking fee was going it a bit for an average Stalls seat at the Barbican’s Lincoln Center production of South Pacific you’ll be delighted to know that substantially the same show, with the same leads, is currently available for less than half that and your Zone 3 Oyster.

When successful London musicals set off ‘on tour’ it’s generally to places like Manchester or Newcastle where despite lower seat prices the train fare would cripple any opportunity to see them on an awayday, but the bonus ball of producers ATG is that they also own theatres in Wimbledon and Richmond to which they bring their number one tours (first rate King’s Speech, Madness of George III both recently at Richmond, top price £35). South Pacific docks at Wimbledon for the rest of the month, tickets £15-45.

It’s a richer and darker South Pacific than you’ll have seen at your mum’s amateur operatic society – Bartlett Sher's production isn’t shy of highlighting the casual racism and sex tourism of American military personnel in wartime postings. Even though a bit fortyish for a newly-recruited Navy nurse, Samantha Womack handles well the anguished reaction of the dumb blonde from Arkansas (racially segregated until 1957) to a lover with two Polynesian children, and the direction, underscore and lighting of the pimping of Bloody Mary’s daughter Liat to Lt Joe Cable is carefully studied too.

As well as the Barbican leads Womack, Alex Ferns and a fetching upcoming Australian Daniel Koek (you’d change that, wouldn’t you?) as Joe Cable there are two outstanding performances – one from Hawaiian actress Loretta Ables Sayre who I saw as Bloody Mary in the original Lincoln Center production and gives a sensational rendition of the complex character, with stunning singing particularly in ‘Happy Talk’ which suddenly doesn’t seem a one-dimensional number any more.

The second is truly a highlight of the show since the new casting of veteran Jean Valjean/Phantom Matthew Cammelle is perfection. He has the dashing forties movie-star look for Emile De Becque, and a glorious combination of unclouded operatic baritone with excellent musical theatre diction. South Pacific is an odd show in that it gives away its money shot number ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ barely ten minutes after the overture, but the second act climax of Cammelle’s powerful and emotionally resonant ‘This Nearly Was Mine’ brought the house down with shouts of ‘bravo’.

If that isn't incentive enough to pop down to Wimbledon, here's a video of Joe Cable/Daniel Koek with his shirt - and everything else - off, for a charity photoshoot.


This review written for www.londonist.com

Gypsy, girl, you ALMOST got it made ...

The world is divided between those people who hear the declamatory phrase “I had a dream …” and think first of Martin Luther King, and those who in their heads automatically append “… I dreamed it for you, June” and call to mind Ethel Merman’s career-defining role as the ultimate tyrannical stage mother in the 1959 Jule Style/Stephen Sondheim musical Gypsy. It charts the childhood and early career of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and the latest revival, well timed for Mother’s Day, just opened at Leicester’s funky Curve theatre.

Broadsheet critics (Spencer, Billington) fell over themselves to discredit the popular suggestion that Gypsy is the King Lear of musical comedy – yet the fact remains Mama Rose is the part you assail at the very peak of your powers because the physical demands and the emotional engagement require tremendous stamina as well as half a stage lifetime of craft experience. Many actresses leave it too late to play credibly the indefatigably pushy three-times-married stage mother of teenage girls, but at 49 Caroline O’Connor has the lungs and the legs to nail it.

Does she? Yes and no. In Paul Kerryson’s curious production the style wavers between modernity and an urge to reiterate the original, and O’Connor seems caught in the same dilemma – whether to channel the fully-leaded Merman she imitated so well in ‘De-Lovely’ or strike out a line for herself and decorate the songs with darker and more original references to motives drawn from Rose’s troubled past which could have led to a disturbingly climactic breakdown in the final number.

Perhaps she’s still working it out, but it feels a shade tentative this early in the run, and at times it seemed as though she was playing someone else playing Rose. With her tiny clenched fists and habit of shaking her head before speaking, you get a glimpse of how Julia McKenzie might have done it given the chance.

One of the great benefits of having an actress in her forties play Rose, is that the relationship with agent Herbie can be more palpably romantic. On Broadway, Tyne Daly made Rose actually sexy and both ‘Small World’ and ‘You’ll Never Get Away From Me’ became more highly charged as a result. I couldn’t warm to David Fleeshman’s sturdy suburban Herbie, he seemed under-charismatic for a man who could distract Rose from her fiery purpose, and there’s no chemistry between them.

The roles of Louise/Gypsy and dancing sidekick Tulsa are both a blessing and a curse: they’re great showcases for talented singers and dancers and yet apart from Tammy Blanchard (Louise in the Bernadette Peters version) currently supporting in How To Succeed In Business , I can’t think of a single actor or actress who graduated from those parts to West End or Broadway fame. Jason Winter has the moves for sure, in David Needham’s energised choreography, but no warmth or depth. Victoria Hamilton-Barritt is so convincingly dowdy as Louise that it’s a genuine surprise when, almost too late, she blossoms into such a fine and self-mocking Gypsy channelling perfectly Natalie Wood’s measured intonation from the film.

The trio of strippers as usual steal the show: the ‘You Gotta Get A Gimmick’ number usually belongs to Mazeppa, here made copious flesh in Lucinda Shaw’s bullishly comic performance, but Geraldine Fitzgerald more than makes her mark as Tessie Tura. Elsewhere in the ensemble it feels a bit understaffed with just 13 actors covering so many parts – Stuart Ramsay gives exceptionally good value – and the local children pressed into service as young June, Louise and their troupe are excellent although it’s a pity more actual boy ‘newsboys’ couldn’t be found.

The understaffing extends to the pit where the orchestrations have been re-worked for a ten-piece band led from the keyboard by Michael Haslam. This is such a lush and epic score, that it’s not best served either by this downsizing or the pace: the show’s pushing three hours.

Transfer? No, but it’s been forty years since the West End saw Gypsy and we should look to the National Theatre, arguably the only outfit that could give this heavyweight of a musical the resources and the staging it demands. If I were Trevor Nunn, I’d also rotate the actresses playing Rose to give “the greys and the gays” in the audience their opportunity to pay twice to see the same show.

Ms. Staunton, Ms. Friedman, Ms. Criswell: how are your diaries for 2014 ?



(This review written for www.remotegoat.co.uk where it gets 4 Stars - but the production hasn’t yet been loaded into its database)

The 'National Pie Week' Musical: 3 Stars

Sweeney Todd is Sondheim's equivalent of Shakespeare's 'Problem Plays' wherein the protagonist struggles with a moral dilemma or social problem, in Todd's case precisely how many throats to slit in revenge for his deportation to Australia. As such, it requires a feat of both acting and singing that prove challenging to the strongest performers, and despite critical acclaim at Chichester, it still seems Michael Ball's stretched.

First of all, and disappointingly for his seat-wetting coterie of housewifely fans, he doesn't seem like Michael Ball.

Uncharacteristically dark and straight-haired, with a dyed goatee, it could occur to you he has sent comedian Phill Jupitus in his place. When I met Ball at Wimbledon towards the end of his Hairspray tour, he admitted he was nervous at the prospect of playing Todd because it was so far out of his normal vocal range, and he's not a trained singer.



Perhaps rightly he hasn't attempted the continuous stentorian delivery of Bryn Terfel or Denis Quilley in the role, because his voice wouldn't support it, but his brooding and introverted performance leaves a hole in the centre of the show which is now filled by a breathtaking Mrs Lovett from Imelda Staunton.

Staunton's ascent from comedy maids to 'national treasure' is well charted but this is something else: when you consider how many fine actresses have essayed Mrs Lovett, from Angela Lansbury to Patti LuPone you would think no-one could wring any more out of the sock of the part ... but Staunton finds nuances and subtleties in the script and the songs that simply weren't there before. It's a marvel to watch particularly, in the darker second half, the equal quantities of maternal affection and murderous creepiness with which she infuses 'Not While I'm Around', and her frantic harmonium playing and perfect Ball-straddling comic timing of 'By The Sea'.

The support is variable: there seems a casting mistake between John Bowe (Judge Turpin) and Peter Polycarpou (Beadle) because Bowe's by far the stronger actor and Polycarpou an infinitely better experienced musical theatre singer: I'd have had them swap roles. Weak contributions, too, from a softly boyish Luke Brady as sailor Anthony, and a frankly dreadful shrill and colourless Johanna from Lucy May Barker, but a scary and strong Old Woman from Gillian Kirkpatrick.

Underlit and over-directed (Jonathan Kent is determined to make it an opera) the piece is bizarrely costumed with 1930s garb, and Pirelli arrives in a motorised van - yet the atmosphere is still Victorian grinding poverty. No one around me could suggest what the 30s (or 50s, who could tell?) hair and clothes did for the show, apart from to wonder if Imelda had come dressed for 'Vera Drake: The Musical" and to put the price of pies up to 'thruppence'.

"Who knows if it's going to run" sings Todd in the pie song ... it's clearly an expensive package, but at over thirty years old the dust's on the script as well as Mrs Lovett's pie crusts, and without Ball playing to his gallery of admirers, it may have a tough time filling the Adelphi across the summer. The producers have some gimmick casting in mind, though, comedian Jason Manford (who as far as I know can't sing) arrives as Adolfo Pirelli in June whilst Robert Burt does a real job at Glyndebourne.

Was the 'Go Compare' man (Wynne Evans) not available?



This review written for www.remotegoat.co.uk