Sylvia - Old Vic

Ticket going for free on 6th Feb. See noticeboard - thanks.

I noticed yesterday that additional rows have been added in the stalls, with row B currently the front row. I emailed the box office and they’ve kindly moved me forward from E to B, but said it’s likely row A may also be added, albeit labelled as restricted view due to a high stage.

It was great to see Beverley on Graham Norton’s sofa plugging this on Friday, very much looking forward to seeing it!

First preview last night… was anyone there?

I checked it immediately yesterday, thrilled!

No 2hrs 40mins inc interval according to old vic twotter

Poll added.

It's somewhat minimising the achievements of Emmeline to describe the 8.5 million women over 30 who got the vote in 1918 as "rich, older, married women." They or their husband had to own a home or rent one with a rateable value over £5 a year. That excluded a lot of poorer women, but there was no requirement to be married, 30 wasn't 'old' (female life expectancy was 59), and it included some working class women. Of course it wasn't enough, but it is still something we should celebrate.

I saw it on Saturday night with two friends. Although it is not the kind of music I listen to normally, I liked the hip hop/funk sound score (I remember liking it also when I saw the doomed embryonic production at the Old Vic years ago). Sharon Rose and Beverly Knight are great and the choreography is amazing.
It still feels rather long and I guess they could cut something at the beginning to reduce the length because in that first part, the songs sound a bit the same and the story does not progress much. In the first part, I struggled to understand some of the lyrics (I was sitting in the grand circle).
But I loved the idea of the 'suffrajitsu' and it is now part of my vocabulary (although I don't know in what context I will be able to use the word...).

I was scrolling back through this thread whilst I pieced together my thoughts and honestly, I think the main issue is this.

One person was in control of all of this, and it hasn't worked. They needed additional eyes on it with different perspectives.

Performances are great, but the book is woeful and just far too long. Act 2 can easily lose 15 mins and I think they're working on that now, but the pacing is the issue.

Perfectly fine night in the theatre, but it has a lot of problems stopping it soar.

My better half took her mom last night and they both report loving it.

Watched this tonight and more or less agree with most of the criticisms outlined in this thread. It was okay but there were clear issues which I couldn't quite overlook. Slight spoilers ahead...

First and foremost, it felt lacking in narrative focus. It couldn't quite decide whether it wanted to focus on Sylvia herself or the wider movement, but in any case it felt very bloated and in need of trimming.

The pacing doesn't quite work either (for me at least). There are times where it just breezes through things at a million miles an hour, and as a result it never really finds a proper emotional grounding. Likewise, its emotional tone is very one note. The end of the first half ends on the same emotional beat as the actual ending - so you don't quite feel as though you've actually gotten anywhere.

Narrative-wise, I wasn't keen on how it seemed to be pitting Emmeline as the 'villain' (for want of a better word) towards the end. Whatever the historical differences between her and Sylvia may have been (and I confess I don't know anything about the actual historical facts), the narrative for the first 2/3 sets up 'the establishment' as the villain, typified by the Churchill character, so the painting of Emmeline as the foe towards the end felt a bit sudden and unearned. However, I really liked how this was portrayed through the use of costume and colour.

My friend and I both observed during the interval that it had been very difficult to make out a lot of the voices. The sound mixing seriously needs looking into. (We were in the stalls, row E, for reference). We both also noted the clear inspiration this took from Hamilton, as others here have also noted. Whilst I'm all for shows taking inspiration from other shows, this felt a bit too on the nose and the problem was that this simply wasn't as intelligent as Hamilton, especially in the lyrics department. The lyrics were borderline amateur at times but I got the idea that whoever wrote them thought they were brilliant.

I didn't NOT enjoy it and for the price of my £10 ticket it was certainly worth watching... but I'm afraid this production needs a lot of work. That said, the audience seemed to adore it! Different strokes for different folks.

I loved this show 5 years ago, and I still loved it tonight, though it's a very different show.

It's completely refocused on Sylvia now, it's got a propulsive score, with propulsive dance, almost all the way through, which is exciting on the one hand but reduces the individual impact of any particular song on the other hand. What remains constant is that Beverley Knight is AMAZING, and Sharon Rose is wonderful as Sylvia too.

Some spoilers follow. . .

On the one hand, this is the revamp I expected: the show makes the eponymous Sylvia the focus of her own show. On the other hand, this is not the revamp I expected, as it doesn't focus on individuals, nor does it focus on individual moments and individual emotions, the way I expected it to.

Instead, it is a battering ram of a show, a socialist war cry of a show about a socialist war cry of a movement, at least for the first half. Individualistic impulses to dwell on Sylvia's hopes and dreams, or indeed any other character's, as you would typically get in most musicals are resisted for the relentless charge of the women's movement forward in chronological time. Individualistic humour is sacrificed almost utterly, except in the case of the wonderful Jade Hackett as Winston Churchill's bolshy hilarious Jamaican patois singing mother.

It's like the old argument between people that like singles, and people that like albums, and this show typically puts the album first at the expense of the singles.

It's like WH Auden's poem, "The Night Mail," where you can't concentrate on any particular verse because the rhythm of every verse feels like the chugging of a speeding train, and all you feel and remember is the train.

Luckily, Beverley Knight is no ordinary performer, and no amount of flowing hip hop drum beats, coupled with torrents of projected information, urgently pushing their way through every song, barraging towards women's suffrage, can slow her down or dent her impact. She's a phenomenon who swims against this torrent, creating massive individualistic moments of exhilaration: her exhortation to "March Women March," is one of the most impactful moments of the show because at that moment she is singing in concert, rather than against the communal tide, and her deep soulfulness speeds the march of the drums.

One exception to the rule of everyone dancing and singing together, in socialist sync to the hip-hop drumbeat of the suffragist march, that proves the rule, is when the drumbeats stop, the music goes quiet, at the end of the first half, and Sharon Rose commands the stage as an individual, and softly and tenderly sings "Be the change that you want to be." Of course, by the end of the song, the propulsive and communal nature of the show restores itself, but the song is so powerful precisely because we stopped to be quiet, just for a moment.

There are many more such quiet moments after the interval, thankfully, not least one involving Sweeney's Sylvio, which is amusing and fun, and one involving Sharon Rose's Sylvia, when she leads the standout song, "Stand up now," though it could have been even better had Beverley Knight joined in, which she couldn't, for story reasons. Maybe they should have disguised Knight as another character, lol, but they couldn't, cos she's too individual and exceptional to hide lol.

There are many excellent performances among the ensemble, not least Sylvia's two Spice Girl style sisters, with a ferocious Ellena Vincent's Christabel ever up for a fight, like Mel B, and Kirstie Skivington's sweet calm Adela ever ameliorating like a people pleasing Emma Bunton.

I normally prefer my musicals individualistic and emotional, and there are some touching moments of that, courtesy of Sharon Rose's excellent central turn and everything Beverley Knight, but mostly, we get a propulsive commune of socialist sync, in dance and in drumbeats, towards womens' destiny of universal suffrage.

Probably marmite, but I loved it anyway. Four stars from me, duly entered into the poll.