Fascinating Aida (Cheap Flights Tour) - Churchill Theatre Bromley, Sunday 4th March 2012

Fascinating Aida are:

Dilly Keane
Adele Anderson
Sarah-Louise Young

Hold on to your hats because Fascinating Aida are back on tour. They're lewd, they're crude and they're bloody funny. We had been due to go see them back in October last year, but because the tickets sold out much quicker than Him Indoors expected, we ended up going to see a load of old rubbish at the Union Theatre instead. Fortunately, a while back TightAsADucksArse saw that the tour was coming to Bromley and booked tickets so we eventually got to see it (over the intervening months there has been much discussion as to whether they would pay for the tickets although all hopes of ever getting something for nothing out of them were dashed during the interval). Neither of us were feeling particularly jolly, as we are both down with some kind of lurgy at the moment, and it didn’t help that the bus got to Bromley quicker than its ever done before and that the rainlashed High Street wasn't a wonderful place to spend 45 minutes - although getting there early did afford us the privilege of a seat in McDonalds watching all the local scary people have their Sunday evening meal. But a couple of hours in the company of Sweet FA, as they are known to their fans (well, me anyway) blew away the gloom.

If you've never seen FA before, I suppose they could be described as "comedy cabaret"- and better described as "three old bags and a piano". They do tend to attract what I would call "the HRT crowd" and there were certainly plenty of Ladies of a Certain Age hovering in the foyer, along with quite a few Husbands Dragged Along For The Evening and a fair number of Gentlemen Who Prefer The Company of Other Gentlemen. Whatever you do, don't take along any members of your family who are easily offended; as Dilly Keane said towards the end "We're not on TV because producers think we swear too much - but I don’t know what the fuck that's all about". Lets just say that their first number was called "Cunts" (that's Companies Using Nifty Taxation Scams") and the second their YouTube Hit "Dogging" and I think I need say no more. This is, of course, grist to the mill of the HRT Crowd, who spent the entire evening shrieking with laughter,  although Him Indoors did notice that the old cow next to him didn't appear to be very impressed by the rude song about Tesco – pursed lips, arms crossed, face like a smacked arse.  FA can get people that way, I find. Perhaps she was still pissed off that all those workshy layabout scum won’t be forced to stack shelves for free from now on. 

I was a little surprised that there was so much old material in what purports to be a new show - "Cheap Flights" itself is a tried and trusted number, "Sing in German" has been around in their act for yonks, as has "Let's go to a hotel" and “Dogging”, and I think there was at least one other number that I’ve heard them do before.  But who really cares?  They were on  stage for well over two hours and Dilly Keane can make me laugh by just raising one eyebrow (regular readers will remember that she was the hit of Cowardy Custard at the Greenwich Theatre last year).  One number, very near the end, which dealt with loss and how friendly faces at the table have been replaced by empty chairs, made me well up slightly and revise my choice of Music I Want Played As The Curtains Close, and I loved the number which closed the first half which took the complete piss out of rap music and which was called “Grey is the new Black”. 

The tour is only half done and there is still plenty of time to get tickets for some of the venues.  So if you’re feeling under the weather and in need of a good laugh at the expense of politicians, bankers, RyanAir and The X Factor, get yourself a ticket soon. 

Website: http://www.fascinatingaida.co.uk/

Much Ado About Nothing - via Digital Theatre, Monday 30th January 2012

Cast:

David Tennant as Benedick
Catherine Tate as Beatrice
Tom Bateman as Claudio
Alex Beckett as Borachio
Joshua Berg as Titus
Jonathan Coy as Leonato
Anna Farnworth as Imogen
Mike Grady as Verges
Clive Hayward as Hugh Oatcake/Friar Francis
Derek Howard as Angelo
Kathryn Hunt as Ursula
Adam James as Don Pedro
Lee Knight as Conrade
Elliot Levey as Don John
Nicholas Lumley as George Seacole
Sarah MacRae as Hero
John Ramm as Dogberry
Enzo Squillino Junior as Balthasar/Sexton
Leo Staar as Messenger
Natalie Thomas as Margaret
Hannah Warren-Green as Maria


Creative Team
Author - William Shakespeare
Director - Josie Rourke
Producer - Sonia Friedman Productions

Having missed out in the general scramble to buy tickets for this production, I eventually managed to catch it via Digital Theatre, an –iPlayer type thingy via which you can watch recordings of live theatre performances. For anyone interested, you can rent or download several different productions. The choice is , at the moment, extremely limited and be warned that the bandwith speed of transmission is very high indeed – it does make for pin-sharp images but anything running on your PC in the background is likely to have a severe effect. In fact, for the first half, it was rather like watching Shakespeare as conceived by Harold Pinter – lots of pauses while the transmission caught up.

This was always going to be a critic-proof production given the starry leads, and I run the risk of attracting ire when I say that, because of this, it seemed s though Josie Rourke had decided to take The Bard down to the level of lowest common denominator – at times it really is “Shakespeare for Beginners” in that that there is little subtlety and the laughs are hammered home with incredible force. Unfortunately this seems to have affected the way in which at least some of the cast give their performances – so broad does the comedy get that at times it seemed in danger of falling off the ends of the screen. The delectable Mr. Tennant works hard at toning this down and subsequently comes off quite well – although he is nowhere near innocent – but Catherine Tate has a worrying tendency to go off the Richter Scale at times and give a performance of definite Panto Level. In the more serious scenes, particularly that after the aborted wedding of Claudio and Hero, however, she is far better, although never really gets to the heart of Beatrice, an intelligent woman who masks her pain with wit. Tate generally plays her as a drunken lad-ette, and indeed obviously lacks the stage experience to realise that recreating several of her comedy series characters and waving her hands about like a baboon on laughing gas is not what the part demands. However, it was obvious from the audience reaction that this is what was expected and wanted, and probably why many of them bought the tickets in the first place. If the population want bread and circuses, it seems folly to give them roses. The direction is often to blame – in the gulling scene, while Tennant has lots of good moments with a trolley full of paint cans, Tate gets the full Peter Pan treatment and spends most of the scene covered with a tarpaulin and being winched up and down on a cable. There’s nothing you an actor can do under these circumstances other than go for broke. 

The production is set firmly in the 1980s, as is evident from the Masquerade costumes – Tennant is dragged up to resemble Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan – although sports a strange Miss Piggy Snout for some reason. Adam Ant, SuperMario, Michael Jackson in Thriller mode and Princess Diana wedding dresses are much in evidence. There’s a lot of unnecessary business with a programmable Casio keyboard and a Rubik’s cube, the solving of which is presented to us at the end as a slightly heavy-handed metaphor for completion and the restoration of harmony. However, there are some interesting uses of the 80s motif which are very successful – the seduction of Margaret on which the plot turns is carried out in a laser-slashed nightclub and leads to a successful explanation of why Margaret doesn’t come forward and explain what has happened – having got slaughtered on alcopops she is taken away by the City Watch to sober up in a cell overnight. I doubt very much whether this subtlety is picked up on by the majority of the audience though. 

One huge mistake by the director is turning the role of Antonio, Leonato’s brother, into Imogen, Leonato’s wife (and thus Hero’s mother). This skews the balance of the household which should be without a female authority figure*, and there is a disastrous and arrogant interpolation of lines for Imogen which don’t appear in the text and which haven’t even been penned by Shakespeare. Rourke also allows Imogen to overhear the conversation in which Don John explains to his crony that he intends to cause mischief in the household by slandering Hero, a plot device which is again unpenned by Shakespeare and which has no rationale whatever. It seems to have been inserted merely to underline the fact that “something’s afoot” and makes no sense whatsoever in terms of what happens afterwards – if Hero’s mother is aware of the plot to discredit her daughter, it makes no sense that she remains silent when the wedding is aborted.

At times the direction is completely overwrought and heavy handed, although the use of the revolving stage is exploited to extremely good effect during the gulling of Benedict – it does away with much of the “popping out from behind scenery to deliver lines” while the other characters set up the situation and which often makes this scene an intense strain on the credibility. The gulling of Beatrice, as mentioned above, is disastrously overdone. Given the presence on the stage of painters (to allow for the presence of the paint cans and the cable), Rourke could easily and logically have had Beatrice disguise herself as one of the painting crew and thus be “hidden in full sight”. Claudio’s attempt at suicide at Hero’s supposed tomb is completely unnecessary given that he has, five minutes previously, vowed to mourn there yearly to expiate his guilt.

The scenes involving the City Watch, always a problem, are laboured and heavily cut, making them (if possible) even heavier going than usual, even though much of the tedious wordplay is jettisoned. John Ramm does his best with the practically impossible character of Dogberry, one of Shakespeare’s unfunniest clowns, and the rest of the Watch are immediately forgettable. Jonathan Coy gives a powerful stillness to the role of Leonato and Tom Bateman does his level best to make Claudio rise above total sickliness. Elliott Levy gives a fine performance and makes Don John into the type of man who makes your skin crawl.

Its all jolly good fun for the audience and far from being the worst production of this play that I’ve seen. But also far from the best – its unsubtle and heavy-handed and very much a star vehicle for Tennant and Tate, who are not entirely successful as old sparring partners giving grudgingly into their true feelings.

* (later) According to The Arden Shakespeare, the character of Imogen did actually make an appearance in the first published versions of the text.  However, she seems to have been quietly dropped by the 1780s, and I can find no references to any lines having actually been given to this character. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/jun/01/much-ado-about-nothing-review

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/8550121/Much-Ado-About-Nothing-Wyndhams-Theatre-review.html

http://webcowgirl.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/review-tennanttate-much-ado-about-nothing-wyndhams-theatre

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/first-night-much-ado-about-nothing-wyndhams-theatre-london-2291991.html

Masterclass - Vaudeville Theatre, Friday 27th January 2012

Synopsis:

In the 1970s, the legendary opera singer Maria Callas gave a series of opera masterclasses at Julliard University in the USA. The play traces the course of one of these classes, as Callas wrestles with her own past and the demons which haunt her while destroying the hopes and dreams of her unlucky students.

Cast:
Maria Callas – Tyne Daly
Stagehand – Gerard Carey
Emmanuel Weinstock – Jeremy Cohen
Sharon Graham – Naomi O’Connell
Sophie de Palma – Dianne Pilkington
Anthony Candolino – Garrett Sorenson

Creative Team:
Written by – Terence McNally
Set – Thomas Lynch
Costumes – Martin Pakledinaz
Lighting – David Lander

OK – here it comes. If you only go to the theatre once this year, make it this. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen such a wonderful show. I’m a huge fan of Tyne Daly anyway, and having seen the other half of the partnership late last year, was looking forward to this evening immensely. On paper, the play isn’t much, but you really do get your money’s worth – and more. Daly truly inhabits the role of the fearsome Maria Callas, a brilliant yet tragically flawed woman. Stalking the stage like some elegantly dressed raven, she tears her victims into emotional shreds and feeds on their flesh, all the while unwittingly exposing her own insecurities and hate.

The set-up of the play is very clever – we, the audience, are playing a part in the action. Its immediately clear that we are not just passive observers but actually there in the lecture hall to observe, learn and have our personal fashion choices subjected to withering scorn (don’t sit in the front row!). Callas/Daly orders us about, instructing how and when to applaud (or not) and takes the reins almost from the very beginning:

“So. How is everyone? Can you hear me? I don't believe in microphones. Singing is first of all about projection. So is speech. People are forgetting how to listen. They want everything blasted at them. Listening takes concentration. If you can't hear me, it's your fault. You're not concentrating.”

This woman is IN CHARGE, and she ain’t gonna let us forget it. In fact, so caught up did I become in the action that Daly and the Vaudeville receded and I was actually there, at Julliard, and not daring to applaud because Ms. Callas had forbidden it. The three hapless students just become conduits for her own memories and recollections, and literally fade from the stage on several occasions as the stage at the Vaudeville/lecture hall at Julliard become the stage of La Scala, Milan where Callas is fighting her art, her audience and her upbringing every step of the way.

"A performance is a struggle. You have to win. The audience is the enemy. We have to bring you to your knees because we're right...Dominate them...Art is domination".

What is doubly clever is that, if you actually pay attention to Daly/Callas, you may very well learn something about the art of theatre and how to work the stage; Callas discusses making an entrance, holding the focus of the audience (in one wonderful moment, Callas retires to her seat and drinks from a glass while one of the students is preparing to sing and comments aside sardonically “Look, I’m simply drinking a glass of water and I still have presence”), interpreting the music and building a character. You’re unlikely to remember most of this, however, as you either dissolve in a welter of laughter or are held completely spellbound when Daly becomes caught up in her reveries of appearing in La Sonambula and Macbeth. Take a pencil.

Of course, every monster needs victims, and Daly has five – a stagehand who refuses to be impressed, an adoring accompanist, a mediocre soprano, an arrogant tenor and a second soprano who is well on her way to becoming just as much a monster as Callas herself and who isn’t willing to play the role of victim. Gerard Carey plays the first, but inhabits such a tiny character that little can really be said about it. Jeremy Cohen makes a very good job out of the thankless role of the accompanist, and I hope Daly buys him a red sweater at the end of the run (an in joke – go and see the show). As the first of the sopranos, Dianne Pilkington makes a good impression at first, (hilariously getting only as far as “Oooooohhhhh……” in her aria before being peremptorily halted in her tracks by Callas) but is unfortunate in that her role is swiftly forgotten once Garrett Sorenson’s bumptious tenor and Naomi O’Connell’s fire-breathing soprano appear. Both actors are legitimate singers in their own right and desevedly get applause for some breathtaking vocal fireworks. But its Daly who – rightly – bestrides the show like a colossus and makes it her very own. This woman can act. She simply becomes Maria Callas. Don’t take my word for it. Just buy yourself a ticket and see for yourself. In fact, buy two tickets – one for yourself and one for me, because I’d gladly go see this again. Tomorrow.

This was a preview performance.  Reviews will be posted when they become available. 

 

The Lion in Winter - Haymarket Theatre, Wednesday 25th January 2012

Synopsis:

Christmas, 1183. His eldest son having died,  an aging King Henry II summons his family (including his imprisoned wife, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine) to a reunion at which each of his three surviving sons hope to be named his successor. Henry favours John, his youngest son, and Eleanor is bend on securing the throne for Richard while Geoffrey is left to scheme for himself. Plots and counter-plots abound as each faction bends and shifts allegiances in an attempt to destroy the other.


Cast:
Henry II – Robert Lindsay
Eleanor of Acquitaine – Joanna Lumley
Richard – Tom Bateman
Geoffrey – James Norton
John – Joseph Drake
Phillip of France – Rory Fleck-Byrne
Princess Alais of France – Sonya Cassidy

Creative Team
Author – James Goldman
Director – Trevor Nunn
Set and Costumes – Stephen Brimson Lewis
Lighting – Peter Mumford
Music – Steven Edis

This is a very odd play indeed. I think James Goldman had just had a particularly horrendous family Christmas (is there any other kind?) and needed to exorcise some demons when he decided to write this; although the action concerns Henry II’s attempts to sort out who is going to succeed him to the thrones of England and France, with a slight tweak here and there, a change of set and the addition of a cocktail cabinet, glasses of whisky and some cigarettes this could easily be a cross between Seasons Greetings and something written by Edward Albee in the “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” vein – you know, vile people being vile to other vile people, but given extra angst by being set at Christmas. In fact, the play is so chock full of anachronisms that it starts to become a contest between what you are seeing (Norman arches, stone flagged floors and medieval costumes) and what you are hearing (modern dialogue, references to Christmas trees and dahlias). Gradually the dialogue wins and you start to tune out the visuals. It takes a while for this to happen, and until it does, the play staggers slowly uphill until you reach the crest, and then you just start to coast down the far side. Its an uneasy blend, however – you start to look for the cocktail cabinet and the ashtrays. Added to the problem is that there are odd elements of farce – two characters end up hiding behind the arras to eavesdrop – and a bizarre “gay clinch” between Prince Richard and the Crown Prince of France, which is interrupted by the entrance of another character, so Richard rushes to the four poster bed, jumps in and pulls the curtains. Its all neither fish nor fowl – neither historical drama nor family comedy but an uneasy blend of both.

There’s quite a lot of pain and hurt in the play and the text isn’t best served by the broad style of acting adopted by most of the cast – Richard Lindsay struggles to make Henry anything more than a direct ancestor of his character in My Family (and in fact now I think of it, the entire play could be summed up as no more than a feature length Christmas episode of this unaccountably popular sitcom. Substitute Zoe Wannamaker for Joanna Lumley and all it needs is canned laughter). Still, the humour isn’t subtle, so I suppose the best way of dealing with this is just to point yourself towards the end of the play and go for it. There is a certain amount of scenery-chewing but compared to the film its all pretty tame stuff.

Lindsay, as I said above, makes Henry just a medieval Ben Fowler and Joanna Lumley is really just Joanna Lumley in a wimple. She mugs just that little bit too much and brings little of Eleanor’s regality to the part, there’s a distinct lack of gravitas here. The three princes are more or less indistinguishable and therefore interchangeable, but Lindsay and Lumley really do show that they are masters of their craft in comparison, with their every consonant pointed and every syllable audible, whereas Messrs Bateman, Norton and Drake all seem to have their volume setting turned down to “indistinct”. The roles played by Ms. Cassidy and Mr. Fleck-Burne are so negligible anyway alongside all the roaring, pacing about and barbed witticisms that they never really register on your consciousness.

The set is pretty and quite clever, with a double revolve disguised as the circles of stone flags around two columns of a Norman-arched nave, and this brings on and takes off various bits of furniture, but its all too clean and pretty to be anything like realistic. There's little sense of it being winter - certainly everything looks bright, warm and cheerful.  Costumes are kind of “all purpose 12th century” and the lighting is effective and well thought out. But the slightly ridiculous plot and modern dialogue make it an odd evening. It’s a little like a theatrical version of “Horrible Histories”.

What the critics thought:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/8892426/The-Lion-in-Winter-Theatre-Royal-Haymarket-review.html
 
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/review-24010434-the-lion-in-winter.do

http://www.whatsonstage.com/reviews/theatre/london/E8831321437061/The+Lion+in+Winter.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/nov/16/the-lion-in-winter-review

Ready for a bit of scenery-chewing?

The Wizard of Oz - London Palladium, Friday 6th January 2012

Cast:
Dorothy – Danielle Hope
Aunt Em – Kate Coysten
Uncle Henry/Guard – Stephen Scot
Hickory/Tin Man – Edward Baker-Duly
Zeke/Lion – David Ganly
Hunk/Scarecrow – Paul Keating
Miss Gulch/Wicked Witch – Marianne Benedict
Glinda – Emily Tierney
Professor Marvel/Wizard/Doorman – Michael Crawford
Creative Team:
Additional Lyrics – Tim Rice
Additional Music – Andrew Lloyd Webber
Director – Jeremy Sams
Lighting – Hugh Vanstone
Choreographer – Arlene Phillips

You know, I really am getting sick to the back teeth of the Andrew Lloyd Webber juggernaut, which rolls on and crushes great theatre under its wheels. Once again, ALW has persuaded the BBC to give him hours of prime-time advertising under the auspices of a “search for new talent”, has persuaded the Great British Public to part with its hard-earned by promising a vast, exciting phantasmagoria and has churned out a cheap, damp squib masquerading as a wonderful new reinterpretation of a much-loved classic piece of history. Not content with butchering Oliver and The Sound of Music, ALW now turns his attention to possibly the best-loved film Hollywood ever made (at least his next outing will be to butcher one of his own works – rumour is that the next BBC talent show will be to look for a new Jesus for Superstar, a thought that fills me with dread). What really pisses me off about ALW is that he promises everything and delivers precious little, much like the title character of this show. Its all smoke and mirrors. ALW has the money and the talent pool to present something spectacular beyond our wildest dreams, and what we eventually get once again is him as Chief Peddler of Tat to The Masses.

Regardless of the fact that The Wizard of Oz is a classic loved by millions with a glorious score, ALW is so convinced of his own superiority that he can’t resist fiddling with it and stamping his tawdry mark all over it. So he’s re-written a script which doesn’t need re-writing (at the expense of several characters), turned it into a star vehicle for Michael Crawford, shoved some of his own music into it (mercifully, most of it is instantly forgettable), stripped out a great deal of the wonderful orchestrations from the film soundtrack and thrown onto the enormous stage of The Palladium an ensemble of 20 who look completely lost on it. They’ve been directed and choreographed (if I can call it that – both are horrifically and woefully thin) with the absolute minimum of effort and with a tiny orchestra and some truly lousy scenery and yet Joe Public lap it up by the bucketful and shout for more. Honestly, I don’t know whether I was more disappointed by this show or by the undiscriminating idiots who think that ALW shits pure gold. Its not as if it hasn’t happened before. But nobody takes any notice of the man behind the curtain who is pulling the levers and throwing glitter in their eyes until they can no longer see his deception clearly enough to call “foul”.

OK, he was up against the films’ reputation and that of its star, so he was on the back foot to start with. This is the stuff that peoples’ memories are made of, and you fuck with that at your peril. But instead of giving us what we want, ALW gives us what he thinks we should have. Take the character of the Wicked Witch of the West. What we want is Margaret Hamilton screeching and cackling in a black pointed hat but what we get is a WWotW watered down to the point where the character becomes merely eccentric and unpleasant – think of the Bette Midler character in the film Hocus Pocus – wearing a split skirt, lacy tights and knee-high boots. There’s no real evil here, and the revisionist script doesn’t help. We want Dorothy sitting on a piece of farm machinery with Toto, backlight against the sunset and tearing our hearts out with Somewhere over the Rainbow while birds sing in the distance. What we get is Danielle Hope front and centre on an almost completely darkened stage, wearing a pair of dungarees and not coming anywhere close to the emotional pull that you get when watching the film. We want dozens of Munchkins waving goodbye as Glinda disappears in a big pink soap bubble, and what we get is ten children backed up by five adult ensemble members waving goodbye as Glinda hitches up her skirt and strolls off Stage Right. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a set so paltry as this Munchkinland, which seems to consist of a small hillock covered in that green pretend grass you used to see in butchers shop windows, dotted with tissue paper flowers that look as if the local primary school kids have made them in a craft lesson. ALW’s bank balance runs into untold millions, yet this Wizard of Oz feels for the most part skimped and cheap. I sat open-mouthed at the gimcrack paltriness of the poppyfield scenery. And the emotional quality is lacking too – just like the man made of tin, this production has no heart. It’s a cynical money-making exercise for ALW, never mind the quality, feel the width. Nearly everything about this show – the amount of people on stage, the orchestra, the orchestrations - needs to be doubled up before it really befits the stage of the London Palladium.

I missed the wonderful underscoring of the original film music. There were no fighting apple trees, no “If I Were King of the Forest” for the Cowardly lion. I didn’t like the way the break between the acts was moved to the point where the Wizard instructs Dorothy and her friends to go and kill the WWotW (ensuring that Mr. Crawford could end the first act by booming through the auditorium in exactly the same fashion as he did in Phantom of the Opera). I hated that there wasn’t a drop of water, real or otherwise, in the bucket that Dorothy dumps over the WWotW.

I did like the fact that the costumes were clearly based on the illustrations from the original book. I did like the fact that the Tin Man was played butch, forming a very solid centre to the ensemble of four who were clearly working as a team, bouncing off each other with no obvious “star” and no obvious “underdog”. I did like the fact that the Cowardly Lion wasn’t played as a raving poofter. I did think the Witches’ castle set was spectacular (no hourglass though – shame). I did think that Danielle Hope gave it her best shot. But I would rather pay to see Ravensbourne Light Opera Society’s amateur production of The Wizard of Oz at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley again were it possible than Mr. Lloyd Webber’s current offering. Yes, I am a grouchy old bugger on occasion and I’ve had readers of this blog wonder publicly whether I like anything but I was so disappointed last night that I could have cried. Like I said, you fuck with a classic at your peril.

One of the pro critics called this production “soullessly efficient” and I would heartily agree. You’d be far better off renting the DVD and settling in with a pot of tea and a packet of chocolate HobNobs on a rainy afternoon to ensure that the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.

What the critics thought:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/8355293/Andrew-Lloyd-Webbers-The-Wizard-of-Oz-London-Palladium-review.html

http://www.whatsonstage.com/reviews/theatre/london/E8831299024429/The+Wizard+of+Oz.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/mar/02/the-wizard-of-oz-review

http://oughttobeclowns.blogspot.com/2011/08/review-wizard-of-oz-palladium.html

http://westendwhingers.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/review-the-wizard-of-oz-london-palladium/

A Round Heeled Woman - Aldwych Theatre, Wednesday 14th December 2011

Synopsis:

Based on a true story. In 1999, Jane Juska, a retired English teacher, placed an advert in the New York Times Review of Books:

“Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me”. 

Cast:
Sharon Gless (aka The-blonde-one-out-of-Cagney-and-Lacey) – Jane Juska
Beth Cordingley – Natalie/Miss Mackenzie
Barry McCarthy – Jonah/Sidney
Kenneth Jay – Eddie/Robert/John (understudying for Neil McCaul)
Gwyneth Strong – Celia/Jane’s Mother
Michael Thomson – Graham/Andy

Creative Team:
Set design – Ian Fisher
Costume – David Blight
Lighting – Nick Richings
Executive Producer – Andrew Welch
Producers – Sharon Gless (aka The-blonde-one-out-of-Cagney-and-Lacey), Brian Eastman

Do do do doooo, dah dah dahdah dada, doo doo do dooo – OK, it’s a tough job rendering the theme tune to Cagney and Lacey in print, but at least I made the attempt. If Ms. Gless had walked on to the stage and started humming that, I think the audience would have probably stormed the set and torn the poor woman to bits in a frenzy of adulation. Me included, most likely. Given the affection in which (apparently) the entire population of the known world hold Cagney and Lacey, this was going to be a success however bad it turned out to be. And honestly, it was better than I thought it would be – and then again not as good as I thought it would be. I honestly thought this was going to be a one-woman show along the lines of Shirley Valentine or Educating Rita- and lets face it, most of the audience would have come along to hear Detective Cagney read from the telephone book. It would have worked very well as a monologue; even Him Indoors cooed “Oooh, there are other people in it” as we walked into the theatre. I’m not sure either of us really got what we were expecting. On the one hand, this is an interesting piece of theatre which explores female sexuality and ageing, nicely adapted for the stage and weaving in some obscure literature (Anthony Trollope’s little-known work Miss Mackenzie). Its slightly raunchy in places, a little melancholic in others, celebratory and life-affirming in others. And on the other hand its trite, hopelessly self-indulgent and created for groups of middle-aged women who feel the need for a girls night out and Ladies and Gentlemen in Sensible Shoes.

It’s a comforting little play, not likely to change the world other than making you feel that your life isn’t that bad and that you too could set of on a voyage of sexual adventure (if only you had the time and it wasn’t for the mortgage and Him/Her Indoors/The Kids. In fact, it’s the perfect “filler” show after Dirty Dancing (indeed, the auditorium looked more than a little bashed about, probably as a result of bottles being thrown by coach-parties of Essex Girls getting over-excited during the encore of “The Time of My Life”. We won’t mention the disaster that was Cool Hand Luke which followed it into the Aldwych and for which they literally couldn’t give tickets away). I just wish that Ms. Gless could have had better support from her fellow cast. She’s a great actress and she seemed surrounded by mediocrity, particularly from the two other women in the cast, who drifted on and off and occasionally forgot which accent they were using. Neither of them seemed particularly bothered, nor indeed talented. And it seemed particularly unfair that Neil McCaul’s understudy was so unlike him physically; from his programme pictures, Mr. McCaul looks tall, slim, quietly good looking and a bit of a catch – whereas his understudy is, well, short and rotund and a bit like yer UnkelArfur. As the other men in her life were being played by short, rotund and somewhat ferrety Barry McCarthy, Ms. Gless seemed to be dating an unending procession of short, rotund and somewhat seedy old men. One feels that a bit of glamour in the trouser department was sorely missing. In an ensemble piece like this, the “star” should be surrounded by a bit more talent, otherwise its all desperately uneven. Perhaps the bill for Ms. Gless is so high (she does, after all, according to the programme notes, have five homes to maintain, poor cow) that the producers didn’t have very much money left to play with.

I’m not entirely convinced that weaving in appearances from one of Trollope’s heroines really worked or was entirely necessary, nor that it was totally above board to give away the ending of the novel she appears in. Some of the writing seemed extremely clunky – there are several occasions when Gless addresses the audience directly, and there’s an excruciating “OK, it’s the interval now so lets all get a drink from the bar and I’ll see you in the second half” moment, which is truly cringeworthy. The show doesn’t really do Ms Juska many favours, as she often comes across as sounding spectacularly self-indulgent and occasionally self-obsessive (indeed, her programme biog reveals that she spent many years in psycho-analysis). I can’t remember from her original book whether this actually deals with her major issues with her mother and son, but these are the bits of the play that start feeling preachy and self-obsessive. The set is multifunctional and multi-levelled, but a bit too “unit set” for true comfort – the whole play is “on” the entire time, leaving one wondering why Ms. Gless has a tomb in her garden. Answer – she doesn’t; there are about 20 seconds in the second half where she visits a cemetery, but the demands of the “unit set” mean that the tomb sits just to the left hand side of the mailbox all night, which is odd and slightly disconcerting.

So, A Round Heeled Woman is OK. Its not a play that’s going to set the world alight, merely divert the audience for a couple of hours. But we both left the theatre feeling that it could have been so much better had Ms. Gless not been like the proverbial thoroughbred in the glue factory.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/dec/01/a-round-heeled-woman-review

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/8929189/A-Round-Heeled-Woman-Aldwych-Theatre-review.html

http://www.divamag.co.uk/category/arts-entertainment/review-a-round-heeled-woman.aspx

Pippin - Menier Chocolate Factory, Friday 22nd November 2011

Synopsis:

Pippin is the story of the French Prince Pippin, son of King Charlemagne. The show begins with the Leading Player and the other players (an acting troupe) inviting the audience to watch their magic as they help to tell the story. They then introduce Pippin as a young man just out of a university. He tells us how he is searching for the meaning of his life, Pippin's father welcomes him home from school. Pippin tells his father he wants to go to war with him. His father eventually agrees with him and we soon see them and some soldiers learning their battle plan.The leading player goes on to tell the audience about the virtues of war and about King Charles’ victory. The soldiers join him in "saluting" their King. Next, the leading player sings a song about how people need some small amount of happiness in life that wealth and fame can't bring you. By now, Pippin has decided that being a war hero is not what he wants to do with his life. So, he goes to his grandmother, Bertha, and asks her what she thinks he should do. She tells him to just live life to the fullest and to enjoy his youth because time goes by so fast. Pippin next looks to women to see if they are the answer to his life. He experiments with sex - symbolically, of course. The act ends with Pippin deciding to lead a revolution against his father.

After this we see Pippin's step-mother, Fastrada, as she plots to get her son, Lewis, to be the heir to the throne instead of Pippin. Pippin is now trying out a political life, revolting against his father and considering assassinating him. When he does do this and becomes the new King he decides that a peaceful time, without war and slavery, is long overdue. When he realizes that this isn't the right job for him, he prays to have his father return. The leading player magically brings King Charles back to life.

Pippin is by now very distraught about his failing search for a meaning to his life. The leading player tells him not to worry, he's on the right road to finding what he is looking for. At the end of this number Pippin collapses to the floor and a pretty young woman, Catherine, finds him and brings him to her house with her small son. She tells him that she is just an "average" girl. Pippin comes to live in her house and do household chores which he finds degrading because he thinks he is above that kind of work. Pippin and Catherine fall in love but when Catherine asks Pippin to become "the head of the household,he runs away.

Pippin has come to the end of the road and has no idea what to do next. The leading player tells him that the only way that he will be remembered now is if he kills himself. Pippin is afraid to do this because he knows that if it is the wrong thing to do, then it will be too late for him to do anything else. The leading player, Fastrada, and all the other players urge Pippin to go ahead and burn himself until he dies. They tell him to think about his life and all of the things he wanted from it. Pippin is almost convinced when Catherine and her son show up. He decides that he will settle for love and not commit suicide.

Cast:
Leading Player – Matt Rawle

Pippin – Harry Hepple

Charles – Ian Kelsey

Lewis – David Page

Estrada – Francis Ruffelle

Berthe – Louise Gold

Catherine – Carly Bawden

Creative Team:

Libretto: Roger Hirson

Music and Lyrics: Stephen “Wicked” Schwartz

Director/Choreographer – Mitch Sebastian

Design: Timothy Bird

Costumes: Jean-Marc Puissant

Anybody who has the unfortunate task of sitting next to me while I suffer through another production of (for example) Jesus Christ, Superstar will know just how much I loathe 70s rock musicals. They’re so irredeemably naff – showing their age but not yet dated enough to become “period” (such as the big Ivor Novello or Noel Coward shows of the 1950s). No doubt to people a generation younger than me, Jesus Christ, Superstar is shit-hot retro. But I think that 70s rock musicals are just shit. And anyone who has had the patience to read the synopsis above will probably be only too happy to agree with me that the plot of Pippin sounds naff to the nth degree. It doesn’t even sound cheerily naff like the plot of Blondel – Pippin just sounds awful. So what would you think when you found that you were going to see Pippin and it had received an 80’s makeover? Reader, your worst nightmare is only just beginning.

Yes, a particularly naff 70s rock musical has been reworked, rewritten and made “contemporary” by being updated to the early 1980s – the decade when every pubescent boy wanted a Atari Games Console in his Christmas stocking. Preferably with a “quest”-type computer-game – slow to load and even slower to play, with heavy, byte-eating graphics and, by today’s standards, laughably ponderous plotlines. Pippin, dear reader, is that quest game. The character of Pippin is now an 80s geek who is magically zapped into his Games Console (“Tron” is referenced not only in the new libretto but also in many of the production’s costumes). The “players” are now no longer of the type described as the “troupe of strolling” kind but that of the “games console character” type. The blank walls of the theatre are covered in projected 80’s games console-style graphics in order to provide scenery etc. Problem is, all the electrical wizardry necessary to achieve this aim, plus banks of enormous stage lights, plus the heat coming off a large audience packed very tightly together heats the small, fairly cramped auditorium to “High Noon on a Midsummer Day in the Kalahari Desert” temperatures. Lord only knows what the actual temperature was, but outside in the interval one can find large groups of sweaty, whey-faced people gulping down the cool night air while they fan each other with programmes and cling to the walls. As it was a fairly chilly night, I’d almost gone to the theatre wearing a jumper over my shirt and a T-shirt under it, but thank god I didn’t otherwise I might just have evaporated – or combusted – completely. As it was, I had galloping indigestion thanks to Him Indoors thinking that its possible to meet friends, eat a two course dinner in a popular restaurant in central London on a Friday night and then get to the theatre in a total of an hour and 15 minutes (I do like Taz as a restaurant and I’m really looking forward to finishing a meal there one day). So I was horribly, horribly uncomfortable.The Menier really need to review the space they allocate to each seat and increase this – they really do love to pack people in until one cannot shift slightly in one’s seat without incurring an accusation of inappropriate intimacy from one’s neighbour. If you’re on the end of the row, forget getting both your buttocks on the seat. You heard it here first.

If you want your plots to be cohesive and make sense, forget it. Updating the story has had no effect on this and it is crazily disjointed and incoherent. The only time you hear groups of previously unknown-to-each-other people actually making conversation is when they have all been involved in some kind of disaster; train derailment, earthquake or on the way out after a show is if its been so dire it beggars belief or nobody has understood a single word of what they have been watching – I heard lots of “What the Fuck was That All About?”-type conversations springing up, punctuated by shrieks of slightly hysterical laughter. Updating the production itself has merely managed to overlay 70s naff with early 80s naff, making it doubly indigestible (or maybe that was just the broad bean salad). Add an attempt at incorporating loads of Fosse-esque choreography (Bob Fosse choreographed the original production, and if you haven’t a clue who Bob Fosse was, he also choreographed Cabaret, so think bentwood chairs, bowler hats, “jazz hands” and cross-kicks) and you really have got a mess on your hands. The graphics are inventive and fun to watch for a while if you like that kind of thing but rapidly become tedious, and when webcam’d “chatroom” heads pop up and start conversations, they are incongruous, distracting, anachronistic (heavily Noughties) and just bloody irritating. God only knows what happens when the computers refuse to co-operate or someone inadvertently hits Ctrl Alt Dlt backstage – no show, presumably. Its bound to happen at least once in the run. Most of the costumes are standard “computer game character” style – a heavy and bewildering mishmash range of Shogun/Monghal/Harem Girl/Medieval European, with a bit of Tron/bag lady/Star Wars thrown in. The supporting chorus are all wearing skin tight grey body suits making them look like your standard computer game avatar in the preparation stage of the game before you get to choose its clothing. I bet the dressing room stinks already – Christ only knows what its going to smell like by the end of the run; the only way of getting rid of the smell would probably be to firebomb the theatre and rebuild.

Its difficult to pick performances out of the mess. Matt Rawle plays the Leading Player as a kind of megalomaniacal Tim Curry lookalike, all greasy black hair and teeth like a cross between Red Riding Hood’s Wolf and a piano keyboard. His diction is at times so bad that regardless of the fact that he’s miked and no more than 15 feet away, a lot of his words sound like he’s got a feather pillow over his face. The dialogue is so toe-curlingly naff (particularly towards the end) that I’m quite relieved that I can’t hear most of it. Harry Hepple is likeable enough as the ingénue-in-Wonderland title character looks uncomfortable and more than slightly embarrassed at what he has having to do to get himself through until another job comes up in the spring. Frances Ruffelle tries to turn the thankless role of Fastrada into a comedy turn from TOWIE but it falls pancake-flat against the high twaddle factor of the libretto. Nobody can really come out with any honours when the material is so excruciatingly bad. You’ll either love this or loathe it, and personally I think that the Menier has a dead duck on its hands of Paradise Found proportions. I’ve been wrong before and not afraid to admit it, but Pippin is a seriously rotten apple.

What the critics thought:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/review-24019218-pippin-menier-chocolate-factory---review.do

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/8941430/Pippin-The-Menier-Chocolate-Factory-review.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/pippin-menier-chocolate-factory-london-35-6273390.html