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Post by duncan on May 11, 2018 22:38:02 GMT
16 - Bright Colours Only - Citizens Studio
Various stories of life but mostly death in Ireland centred around the rituals, happenings and aftermath of funerals.
A one woman comedy show, Pauline Goldsmith is the performer, writer and director and on stage she switches from young girl to old granny to dead person. An agreeable show that people seemed to find far funnier than me - a hug from her on entrance as she greeted us at the door and then some free sarnies and chocolate fingers (I skipped the whisky and tea) and finally we followed the coffin out into the carpark where it was loaded into a hearse and drove off.
Amiable enough stuff but a fringe show masquerading as something a bit more.
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Post by crowblack on May 13, 2018 22:32:27 GMT
Loose Lips, a new piece by Bruntwood prize winner Katherine Soper (Wish List, Royal Exchange and Royal Court) and the Big House Theatre company, is strong and well staged, with passionate, urgent performances by the young cast. I think it's a company that works with care leavers and they were really impressive, though as a Northerner I'm not that tuned in to current London teen slang, so occasionally found bits hard to follow. It's on at Stoke Newington Town Hall (Church Street, 73 bus). The seating/staging is rather like the Pitchfork Disney (Shoreditch Town Hall) - a long room with chairs and chests of drawers on either side for the audience and actors to sit on, and it's about 1 hour 15 mins long.
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Post by Deleted on May 13, 2018 23:29:36 GMT
Loose Lips, a new piece by Bruntwood prize winner Katherine Soper (Wish List, Royal Exchange and Royal Court) and the Big House Theatre company, is strong and well staged, with passionate, urgent performances by the young cast. I think it's a company that works with care leavers and they were really impressive, though as a Northerner I'm not that tuned in to current London teen slang, so occasionally found bits hard to follow. It's on at Stoke Newington Town Hall (Church Street, 73 bus). The seating/staging is rather like the Pitchfork Disney (Shoreditch Town Hall) - a long room with chairs and chests of drawers on either side for the audience and actors to sit on, and it's about 1 hour 15 mins long. Oh, I would really like to see this. I so enjoyed Wish List and think Soper is a writer to watch. |
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Post by crowblack on May 13, 2018 23:54:14 GMT
Soper is a writer to watch. Yes, we absolutely loved Wish List! It was a fantastic debut, and one of the best things I've seen. I saw a mention somewhere that she was doing stuff with the BBC writersroom so maybe she's developing work for TV, but she's not on twitter so it's hard to find out! Loose Lips is on for another two weeks, I think - @bighousetheatre have the links on Twitter. The ticket website may be indicating concession tickets only (it was when I booked a second ticket) but I think this is a glitch in their system and I mentioned it so maybe it's been sorted out - if not, just book a concession I suppose. We thought the town hall was shut when we turned up in Saturday evening's downpour, but one of the gates was open and the entrance door is around to the left of the building. It's worth catching if you can. |
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Post by junet on May 17, 2018 12:18:00 GMT
Last night we saw Merrily we Roll Along at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford. This was brilliant. It was performed by the Alex Parker Theatre Company who I had never heard of before but I will certainly by keeping an eye out for future productions.
The whole cast were phenomenal, the acting and the singing were outstanding so much so that I enjoyed it more than the Menier production from a few years ago.
It is on until Saturday so if anybody is near and wants a treat get down there. It's a lovely theatre and there is a carpark right next door.
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Post by duncan on May 18, 2018 23:02:37 GMT
17 - The Homecoming - Festival (Studio) - Edinburgh
After having lived in the US for several years, the academic Teddy brings his wife, Ruth, home for the first time after six years to meet his working-class family (father, uncle and two brothers) in London, where he grew up. Much sexual tension occurs as Ruth teases Teddy's brothers and father and the men taunt one another in a game of oneupmanship
I don’t think me and Harold Pinter will ever truly love one another - this is an engrossing play but I found the second half to be morally repugnant old toot. Its clear in the first act that Ruth isn't happy in her marriage and that she has more in common with the family than Teddy but the path that leads to in the second act just doesn't sit easily with me. Its clearly hinted that she may have been more than a model previously but I just don't buy her throwing herself all over the other men in the house with such abandon.
As this is a Leitheatre production, the cast are Scottish, clearly Scottish and faced with a near impossible task of doing London accents which in turn are an odd mix of Weegie and Cockernee with at least one cast member seemingly deciding to rasp their lines in the vain hope that we wont notice that he cant do the accent.
Its another Pinter play about Father issues with an ambiguous ending, its holds a fascinating power whilst you are watching it but with the issues I have with it its not something I could ever champion.
7/10
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Post by kathryn on May 19, 2018 17:53:03 GMT
Well, just saw the touring production of Hairspray in Southend this afternoon, and it proved that it’s a good enough show to be fun even with a decidedly ropey production.
I don’t know who decided that Tracy should be played for laughs, but they should be shot. And Link was a bit of a weak link too! (I’ll get my coat...)
Stirling work from supporting cast powered us through to the end.
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Post by duncan on May 26, 2018 9:36:05 GMT
19 - A Night to Remember - Citizens
As the Citizens Theatre prepares to shut down for a refit the ghosts of the past stalk the stage. A woman who died in 1973 in one of the flats that sat atop the theatre wants to know why her father killed himself outside the theatre way back when and via the help of 50 or so other ghosts and our MC for the evening we are going on a journey back to 1914 to find the answers that lie within the community of the Gorbals, of Glasgow and of the Citizens Theatre.
Nothing lasts forever, and this is the end for the Citz in its current format before its £19 million renovation that will close the theatre for the next 2 years.
Closing things off is a specially commissioned production that is there to look back to its beginnings as the Princesses Theatre and its place (and standing) in the local community - and this is a community production, the Citz team have taken 1 professional actor and surrounded them with 60 local community actors in a thought provoking, melancholic, happy, laugher filled, sing-a-long, suicidal mish mash of a show.
As a piece of drama it isn't that great as it takes us on a cliché ridden trip through the Great War and the place that the Gorbals and its residents had in it from army members to munitions factory workers to pacifists to barmen to the mothers of the soldiers and it tries just a bit too hard to cram all of that into its 80 minute run time. Some of the amateurs are a little off in terms of projection and delivery but overall as a remembrance of things past and a celebration of the position of the Citz in the life of the community it’s a knockout.
8/10
That was my third trip to the Citz this year and it seems odd that it will 2 years until I'm there again. Haste ye back.
Star of Lair of the White Worm and long time Citizens supporter, Mr Peter Capaldi, was also in attendance last night.
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Post by duncan on Jun 1, 2018 22:03:33 GMT
20 - The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other - Lyceum
A day in the life of a town square - the world walks by and people interact, love, hate, die and get on with their lives.
A cast of 60 local community volunteers put on this pompous, portentous and utterly tedious 85 minute waste of time. Irrelevant shuffling would be a more apposite title as we spend 5 fecking minutes watching a group of 5 people very very slowly moving across the stage, and then it happens again.
This needs a rocket up the backside to make it more interesting and it also needs to lose the frankly irritating comic relief character who spends what seems like years following and mimicking what we can see. Dire.
Still it had a dog, and people love dogs.
2/10
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Post by duncan on Jun 2, 2018 22:33:37 GMT
21 - Sherlock Holmes - The Final Curtain - Kings, EdinburghIts 1922 and 30 years to the day since Moriarty went over the Reichenbach falls an aged and retired Sherlock Holmes finds a dead body on the beach next to his cottage. Things are further complicated when Mary Watson arrives straight after to tell Sherlock that she has seen the ghost of her and Dr Watsons son, who was killed in the war, at 221B Baker Street.
The game is afoot as Holmes must come out of retirement to find out who is trying to destroy him.There are two problems with this show, 1 - the ending, the piece comes to a natural conclusion and then we have an epilogue and that epilogue is out of place. It should swap the last two scenes around. 2 - the villain of the piece is so shockingly telegraphed that you begin to wonder if they are pulling a fast one by making it so obvious but sadly not the villain may as well have worn a sign saying "BAD GUY!" from the off. I'm no Sherlock but I'd worked out the entire scheme and why apart from a couple of minor details - I'd gone for the projector being in the lighting instead of the cupboard, but had worked out it was to do with the lights going off - and this is too slight a piece to be so obvious. It needs an additional oomph at the reveal, instead it goes for the obvious and the clues that have hit us over the head several times in the past hour are revealed as the obvious obvious things that they were. But despite that I actually thoroughly enjoyed this one, despite the implied incest as its a load of hokey old fun and Robert Powell appears to be having great fun as a jaded Holmes - yes the script is a pile of old cobblers but it carries itself off with some aplomb. This is the sort of thing that the Kenwright mysteries should be - nonsense but actually enjoyable nonsense. An engagingly clichéd night out 7/10
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Post by duncan on Jun 10, 2018 9:38:47 GMT
22 - Agatha Christie's - Love from a Stranger - Kings Edinburgh
Tired of waiting for her wedding to limp lettuce fiancée Michael, Cecily falls in love over the course of a day with the charming Bruce and decides to marry him instead. They then move to a secluded cottage, of course that she has just won £25,000 is of no interest to him……..
Third rate cast in fourth rate production of a fifth rate script. Dreadful from start to finish.
Awful, just awful - everything is wrong with this production, everything! The script is hokey old nonsense with characters acting in such a way as to advance the plot rather than act in a believable way. The local Doctor, for instance, clearly knows what is going on and yet decides to come round with a copy of a book and to try and tell our heroine in exceptionally vague terms rather than going to the police.
The two leads lack any chemistry at all, you cant understand why either of them would seemingly fall in love so quickly - his accent is so astoundingly bad that it comes as a blessed relief for his career when a later plot point tells us is that its fake. But that's a problem of the whole cast, they are uniformly bad, normally a Christie tour can throw in a Denis Lill or a Deborah Grant or someone who has just left a long run in EastEnders or some such but here its a tour without a single name and we have the jilted fiancé, the maid and the "comedy" Aunt playing to the gallery whilst the rest of the cast appear to be sleepwalking through a very clichéd set of characters.
The script doesn't know what its doing - it starts as a comedy, then its a romance piece and then its finally a thriller but it doesn't meld well together in any way. The comedy is way too broad to seamlessly merge into the seduction scenes and the entire second half is played as "when is he going to kill her...." with added comedy maid and gardener characters and it just doesn't work as a cohesive whole. As he's prancing about with that scarf, making us all think he's about to strangle her, we shouldn't be worrying about whether or not the comedy maid will be coming back on instead of whether or not he is going to murder his wife.
And I'm not sure Agatha Christie ever wrote a scene that involved fingering your wife on the living room table.
Since I started recording what I've seen at the theatre in 2000, I've seen over 270 different shows and only 3 of them have I ever scored a 1/10, this would have been the fourth but the play was enlivened when the lady sat 5 to my left decided to open a packet of Maltesers but ripped them open so hard that they all fell out and all we could hear for the next minute was the sound of them rolling down the rake towards the front of the stalls, Damn site more fun than what was on stage.
2/10
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Post by david on Jun 20, 2018 18:38:56 GMT
THE BIG I AM - Everyman Theatre, Liverpool
Set as a reimagining of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, this is the final offering of the 2018 Everyman company’s programme. In this version, Peer Gynt is set in northern England from WW2 to the mid 20th century. What this version brings is a lot of comedy, both visual as well as in the script text juxtaposed with those more thoughtful moments of the tragedy’s that befall Gynt during his life.
The cast really do a fantastic job, and even though the piece is still in preview it was impossible to tell. All the performances are top notch, and with a running time of around 3hrs flowed fluently with the role of Gynt being shared between 3 guys symbolising the passage of time. The comedy really was top notch stuff, with the 1970’s hippie movement as well as the evangelical Gynt easily getting the biggest laughs of the night. Seeing former EE actor Marc Elliott dressed as a nun was worth the ticket price alone. If you love/ hate audience interaction, be warned, there is some in this show, though it is very mild and doesn’t require anybody to get on the stage.
Overall, a great night out and a show that I would recommend to anybody. If there was one downside, because it was done in the round, if you are seated at the under the balcony as I was last night you miss some stuff that happens up there. Though this didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the piece.
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Post by emsworthian on Jul 8, 2018 6:34:06 GMT
THE COUNTRY WIFE - CHICHESTER, MINERVA
After the beautiful set for "The Chalk Garden" in the Festival Theatre, the set for this was distinctly drab; a dark grey backdrop with words such as "SEX", "POX", written in dark pink on it. It was a modernish setting; I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be 60s. Everyone wore black, dark grey or black and white, apart from Susannah Fielding as Margery Pinchwife, who wore Primrose yellow throughout.
Susannah Fielding was excellent and also special mention to Lex Shrapnel as Horner and Michael Elwyn as Sir Jasper Fidget. Belinda Lang also was good as Lady Fidget.
The run ended on Saturday but I couldn't find any comments on the Theatre thread so I posted here.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 8, 2018 18:43:29 GMT
We’ee Going On a Bear Hunt - Lyric
No, not that sort of bear. This is really creative, fun young children’s theatre. It’s full of slapstick, song and audience participation. I often find my mind wandering during childrens’ show, but this kept the pace throughout. Also, there is a wonderful snow storm that absolutely delighted every child (and inner child) there.
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Post by Dr Tom on Jul 18, 2018 7:48:33 GMT
The Pajama Game - Greenwich Theatre (Mountview Academy)
This student production ran at Greenwich Theatre for a few nights. It's the second Mountview production I've attended and again was of high quality. The theatre looked around half full, with a lot of family and supporters in the audience (although not all of the seats were on sale). I sat at the front and found it to be a good comfortable small theatre, with a decent rake to the Stalls (only slightly marred by the guy next to me who couldn't keep still and managed to kick me when adjusting his legs).
I saw the West End production a few years ago, which didn't make much of an impression on me. The whole show is rather slight, but with some good songs, performed well by a small cast. It's one of those shows with a very long first half and a very short second half.
Standouts for me were Kristian Garmanslund, who played Prez with a real wit and charm and Mark McCredie, who played Sid and sang an excellent version of "Hey There". Although it was one of those shows where the (relatively small) male section of the cast were seeing who could outcamp each other the most.
Lots of potential there for the future and these Mountview productions are always good for a low-cost and professional standard night out.
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Post by duncan on Sept 27, 2018 21:41:26 GMT
29 - The Yellow on the Broom - MacRobert
Old Bessie Townsley looks back on her early life in the mid 1930s as part of a family of travelling folk who roam the Angus and Aberdeenshire countryside looking for work and a living. The family must fend off prejudice, illness and the education department in an effort to keep the old ways alive.
A thoroughly entertaining look at the life of "tinkers" in Scotland just before the Second World War performed in the local dialect with the cast performing their own songs and music. An engrossing script keeps you entertained and Gary MacKay is the pearl in the cast as the twinkle in his eye patriarch of the family caught between juggling his daughters school commitments and the lure of the open road - an open road that is closing fast.
And its not a show that glorifies the life of the road as we see and smell the poverty, deprivation, fleas and the hideously out dated concept of giving your wife a good thrashing as she was sitting in public with her legs apart. If one thing dates the piece it is the attitude of the male travellers to the wife's that they see as nothing more than another piece of property _ I was surprised that the references to wife beating didn't seem to resonate with the rest of the attendees, murmuring was not heard.
As with most Dundee Rep productions its all put together very well in terms of sets, costumes, lighting etc but my main gripe is that the ensemble are playing way too broad in relation to the three main characters (father, mother, Bessie) who are being played as solid straight drama leads. We're getting poverty, miscarriages and general solemn downtrodenness from the front three but "comedy" local Lairds, policemen and Thespians coming on to try and lighten the load every few minutes or so and several times this odd combination of styles takes you out of the moment, imagine watching Bodyguard and every five minutes or so David Walliams or Miranda come in doing their normal schtick and you get the idea of what was going wrong.
Its a show that doesn’t know if it is a comedy or an insight into the painful world of being a "tinker" and whilst this production falls between the two stools the script manages to carry the production through.
8/10
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Post by duncan on Sept 27, 2018 22:13:51 GMT
30 - Still Alice - Kings Edinburgh
Alice is a professor at Harvard with a loving (if always working) husband, a son she dotes on and a daughter she is distant from and then aged 50 Alice is diagnosed with dementia. Over the course of the next three years we see her decline and the impact it has on her family and her relationships with them.
Leeds Playhouse present a study of dementia and how it can have an effect on everyone if someone you know becomes struck down. The issue of course being how do you represent on stage the impact of dementia on our lead, as played by Sharon Small, and here they place in a character called Herself, played by Eva Pope, which mirrors the actions that Alice is taking and offers her inner thoughts on what is going on around her. For example as the family argue over whether or not to put Alice in a home our titular lead is seemingly oblivious to what is going on whilst "Herself" makes the point that everyone is being serious but she no longer knows why.
Its a concept that works as the language and insights of "Herself" become more and more befuddled as the show goes on and Small and Pope are both excellent in the role.
Overall its a little too obvious on the relationship side of things, the son she dotes on is shown to be a selfish git who wants his life to carry on as before whilst the daughter she couldn't relate too becomes the one who has a better relationship with the stricken Alice even going so far at the end to take up a suggestion that her mother had made earlier in the show.
The cast were all on form and its a breezy 90 minutes straight through.
On stage the director and designer are trying to be too clever - we start with a scene in a cluttered and closed in kitchen and as the show and the dementia progresses the spaces on stage get bigger and emptier until at the end we are left with characters sitting in chairs on an empty stage. Its as subtle as a brick over the head.
And as with dementia there is no happy and wrapped up ending where everything will be alright in the morning.
A worthy 7/10
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Post by adrianics on Sept 28, 2018 10:44:34 GMT
Heathers (Theatre Royal Haymarket)
My full review is in the dedicated thread.
A very talented and energetic young cast, particularly the two leads, blow the roof off the theatre and elevate slightly disappointing material to must-see status.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 29, 2018 23:29:30 GMT
Queen Margret - Royal Exchange, Manchester (Matinee)
OthelloMacbeth - Home, Manchester (Evening)
A combined review.
In a recent bid to broaden my theatrical horizons and with an impromptu Saturday off I decided to roll out a wild plan. In High School and College I reluctantly 'studied' some of Shakespeare's work (the obvious) but in the 15+ years since then my exposure to his texts has been little-to-none. As I bumble my way through the 30's I'd come to realise I wanted to experience a wider range of theatre and given that I am a Shakespearean novice, despite some apprehension, decided to take in two new adaptions of his works on the same day.
These two productions are very similar in a number of ways but yet wildly different in others. Both had been developed in part as a method of bring some of Shakespeare's overlooked female characters to the forefront of attention. Both fused two or more texts to create the final piece. Both featured diverse casts, in both race and disability with a broad range of accents to boot. Both made the decision to integrate a hymn or song-of-sorts into the text. And both made the decision to make titular characters, Margret & Macbeth, smokers (with real cigarettes). That is pretty much where the similarities end.
Queen Margret is a combination of 4 texts (Henry V, Henry VI, Richard II, Richard III) with new material to glue it all together. OthelloMacbeth, rather obviously from its title, is a combination of the two works, condensed. Of the all source material Macbeth was the only work I was familiar with prior to today.
To someone completely unfamiliar with any of the source material Queen Margret was seamlessly written and perfectly executed. I knew nothing about any character and yet followed it (pretty much) completely throughout. OthelloMacbeth, however, was a struggle. Despite have read and watched Macbeth I found this part particularly disjointed and hard to navigate.
When adapting the works for Queen Margret writer Jeanie O'Hare made the decision to make the text more current by "removing the thous and thees". This was of great benefit to me as it made the delivery far more accessible. The whole piece felt very fluid and as a novice I couldn't tell where Shakespeare's words ended and O'Hare's began (maybe except for the profanity-based moments). Credit to the writing and editing of the work, I was not lost in the journey. I particularly liked the integration of Joan of Arc, which in my interpretation I took to be in part Margret's battle of conscience.
OthelloMacbeth was less subtly formed, stitching together various excerpts with jump cuts and fast-forward lighting/sound cues - a rather cheap way of getting about. A haphazard butchering of two pieces making a fairly disjointed singular piece. Beautiful to look at but hard to invest attention in. Othello forming the first act is played downstage with about 8ft depth of stage, whereas act 2's Macbeth upstages Othello with its greedy form taking up the whole stage - a grand reveal of the full stage taking place at the end of act 1 as Othello's Desdemona, Bianca and Emilia don camouflage jackets to become Macbeth's Witches - possibly the only really creatively inspired moment of the evening, although I'm still not sure what the purpose was in giving Macbeth so much more playing space as it seemed to undermine Othello and defeat the objective in combining the two.
Given that both productions were created to give new light to some overlooked female characters, in my opinion, only Queen Margret was successful in doing so. QM felt like a solid singular piece and really gave the titular character a journey and purpose. None of the women of OthelloMacbeth seemed to have a reasoning behind them to justify such a combination of work and left me rather confused as to what the purpose really was behind the conjoined texts.
Slightly perturbed about the programme from Home for their production. £2 for a 2-sheet A5 with only a 500-word piece of prose regarding the rehearsal process, a couple of pictures and the usual cast blurbs, compared to the £4 A4 7-sheet programme from Royal Exchange which featured a really informative interview with creative justification for the piece and a plethora of insightful scene-setting information. Short changed massively.
Overall a very interesting day in Manchester and a wildly ambitious re-introduction to some of Shakespeare's work. Great fun.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 10, 2018 10:01:52 GMT
Skin a Cat (The Other Room, on tour formerly of Bunker Theatre) Review here: thenerdytheatre.blogspot.com/2018/10/skin-cat-other-room.htmlI loved this. Haven't laughed so much in ages. It's utter utter filth but in that really honest, real way where it's a laugh also about 'oh dear god yes I've been there' or 'oh dear god NO PLEASE OH YOU DID' it's all about sex, and it's complexities. And boy is it complex. I found it incredibly moving in parts, especially the ending. |
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Post by duncan on Oct 10, 2018 10:49:50 GMT
31. Rebus - Long Shadows : Kings Edinburgh Retired police inspector John Rebus meets the daughter of a 2001 murder victim - she wonders if he remembers her mother. This sets Rebus off on the trail of the killer whilst Shioban Clarke has an important trial coming up where she is looking to put away a different killer. Meanwhile the spectre of Cafferty looms over it all....Ian Rankin gives a Rebus plotline to Rona Munro for her to turn into a 110 minute (plus interval) play. Jim McDonald from Corrie was indisposed as Rebus owing to illness so he was by the way Elizabeth so we had the understudy, Neil McKinven. He was complete with script in the 2nd act but the show gets away with it as when he was consulting the script you could believe this was Rebus reading the case files he keeps in his flat. Best performance of the night from our gallant 'study. Cathy Tyson on the other hand is bad, really really bad. I'm not sure if this is the script giving her nothing to do but exposition for 95% of her on stage time or if its just a lamentably flat performance - whatever it is she is sucking the life out of every single line. John Stahl, or Inverdarroch to everyone in attendance over the age of 35, is a mixture of camp bonhomie and vicious thuggery as the villain of the Rebus universe Big Ger Cafferty. And a big boooooo to John for not having Inverdarroch in his bio. The set is minimal but well worked to act as two houses, two bars and a stairwell. But its the plot that drags this down. The first act rollocks along setting up the various plot strands but then the 2nd act is essentially a 50 minute 2 and 3 hander in Caffertys flat whereupon it all falls apart. The twists and turns revealed here would have been chucked out of an episode of The Bill script for being way too coincidental and not a single one of them isnt signposted way too long in advance. If you dont spot the plot point coming the moment Cafferty mentions his lack of children then hand in your detective badge at the counter on your way out. I was hoping that the twist would be that he wasnt the father of the girl who starts it all off.
Similarly, if you dont work out in Act 1 that it was Rebus that whacked Cafferty with the wooden pole 25 years ago then its a demotion to traffic for you. And that second act needs more fizz, it needs more something. The dialogue doesnt sing, people have conversations for no other reason than to move us to the next plot point rather than enhancing their character. Clarke and Rebus both spend too long telling us how EVIL the on trial killer is but he's just a name to us, we are told and told and told. Its a play, we have an actor playing the alleged killer and we have an actor playing the school girl he allegedly killed but you arent in any way invested in the outcome of the trial as we know nothing of him. We need to see something to give this a needed shot in the arm. That in the end it all boils down to Rebus and Cafferty wont come as a surprise to Rebus fans but this makes for a very dull play. If you dont know the history of Rebus and Cafferty its just an odd show, I dont know who would be thrilled by this beyond Rankin/Rebus obsessives. Played to a near capacity crowd last night and we deserved better. This is mundane writing under a well known brand. If Munro had came up with this script on her own without Rankin and Rebus then you'd wonder if it would have been staged. 5/10
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Post by showgirl on Oct 11, 2018 3:43:17 GMT
Better Off Dead - Alan Ayckbourn - Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough
I caught the final matinee on 6 October but this may tour or be revived, given how popular Ayckbourn is (or was); that this was his 82nd play and that though reviews were mixed, some were very positive (eg 4 stars from The Stage).
Maybe this mirrors real life as it's about a once-popular author, now ageing and losing his readership but also finding that his grip on real life is fading as his fictional characters take over whilst his wife suffers increasingly from dementia. So perhaps also best appreciated by an older audience, which is probably Ayckbourn's, and the SJT's demographic anyway, but I certainly enjoyed it and thought it worth the trip (from a weekend break in York), though I noticed one older couple leaving at the interval.
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Post by duncan on Oct 11, 2018 21:59:45 GMT
32. Arctic Oil - Traverse 1Ella is leaving her toddler son with her mother as she goes off to join an environmental protest in the arctic. Desperate to stop her, the mother locks them both in the bathroom and refuses to let her leave, fearing that Ella will never return. Over the course of an hour or so truths will be told and the future of the planet will be placed against the future of a family. WORLD PREMIERE!!!!!! Set solely in the bathroom of the Mother this is aiming to highlight the generation gap - the Guardian reading tree hugger millennial verses the oil rich living in the now baby boomer. The mother who stayed at home versus the mother who is willing to leave behind her son to try and safeguard his future. And frankly its hard to care for either of them…the mother acting in a bizarre way to ensure her daughter cant leave by swallowing the bathroom door key and said daughter being so focussed on the "Mission" that she is essentially leaving behind her own child seemingly without a second thought. BUT for 75% of the time it works as they argue back and forth about the merits of each others viewpoint and reveal pieces of information about themselves - the Mother once left her husband and daughter, Ella has been suffering from depression - and its when the two of them are talking about their lives and why motherhood is stifling or why you sacrifice your career for the sake of your children that its at its best. Two characters discussing how their lives are so very different and yet the same. And then it falls to pieces in the last quarter - first off the Mother kills Ella, well she doesnt but we are meant to think she has for 10 minutes or so as Ella lies motionless in the bath after an attempt to stop her leaving goes wrong and then just as you think the hysteria has peaked as we get a couple of major plot reveals that cast new light on what we have already seen but which means that the play cops out of actually coming to a conclusion about whether or not one or both is right. It’s a shame as the performances carry the material for most of the runtime but the script tears it all down, especially in the last 5 minutes, so we can have a "happy" ending. A would have been a 7 but that ending is utterly horrible so 5/10
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Post by westwaywanderer on Oct 15, 2018 15:09:34 GMT
I recently saw the limited run of Lincoln Centre's production of The King and I and twas breathtaking, had fantastic seats at the back of the stallsof the palladium, perfect view and good price, £25, huge leg room BTW (twas for my mum's birthday).I am slightly biased because Rodgers and Hammerstein are two of my favourite writers across the board let alone just for theatre! However this production was requisite, the set was beautiful, grand and comprised of authentic Thai inspired designs, the cast were terrific, Kelli O'Hara was a revelation, bringing new emotional depth and perceptive use of expression in a role as iconic in the modern theatre as Anna. Ken Wattanabe and the supporting cast delivered in spades too, in terms of acting, singing and dacing (Christopher Gattetelli's blend of traditional eastern Asian dance and ballet was flawless. Costume was meticulous, gorgeous fabrics, colours shapes, and period detail managing to bring glamour and the exotic nature of the piece whilst also being historically accurate and not overly glitzy.
Bartlett Sher's direction brought a wonderful realism to the piece and grounded it in an earnest, modern light, highlighting the themes of colonialism, sexism and east vs west.
Overall stunning, unfortunately the run just ended but it was fabulous and critically acclaimed both in New York and here, all 4 and 5 star reviews.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 20, 2018 10:36:18 GMT
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