Treason - TRDL / Tour

I’m not sure what y’all were watching but it just sounded like Carrie singing a song to me? Thats her voice, its what she sounds like. She has been singing like it since her early you tube days, and still has a voice so maybe her vocal folds are made of teflon? It is markedly different to when she is unwell or vocally tired.

She sounds fine to me. It’s what she sounds like. The song doesn’t exactly draw me in though. Odd choice to promote the concert. 
What’s this show actually about? Yes I know it’s The Gunpowder Plot but what’s the angle?

Overall, I liked it and think it has potential, but feel it still needs a lot of work before it’s ready for a full production.

First, some things I enjoyed. I thought the cast did well, especially Les Dennis and Daniel Boys as the comedy relief. In fact, I’d say Les Dennis had the best number of the night with “Paperwork”, and Daniel Boys has some good moments too. That said, we’ve seen it before, in JCS and Hamilton, of the “bad king turned comedian”.

Carrie Hope Fletcher as Martha I also particularly enjoyed, singing the one number I’d heard before - “Inevitable”. There was also a really nice duet in act two between Martha and Thomas - “Blind Fair”

The music I’m on the fence about. When it’s good it’s great (all the stuff for the King and Cecil is very good), the music for Martha I also liked. However the stuff for the guys involved in the “plot” just all blended into one and pretty bland. The lyrics often try far too hard to find the rhyme and thus don’t particularly flow very well. There were a few numbers which ended so abruptly that the audience were unsure whether to applaud or not. I really hated the rapping narrator, felt unnecessary and very out of place.

As a whole, I found it to be very disjointed and difficult to follow in concert format. There are gaping holes of plot that just don’t come through, and we go from number to number with no explanation of what is actually happening. Of course a full production can fix this with scenery/props but I’m not sure if there will be dialogue added or additional music to fill in the gaps. Act one ends suddenly, and for all the build up the last ten minutes or so is rushed and there is no real conclusion. Basically, if someone had gone in with no knowledge of the gunpowder plot, they’d come out none the wiser to what happened other than there was going to be an attempt to blow up parliament, and that there was a romance between a guy called Thomas and Martha…. Guy Fawkes? Who’s he? Yes he appears but the ending is so rushed you have no chance to really understand what role he has and why he became the scapegoats. The show heavily focuses on the relationship between Martha and Thomas to the detriment of the overall plot.

At the moment I’d put it in a basket with the likes of Jekyll & Hyde and A Tale of Two Cities, and those big style 80s/90s style historical shows.

I’m shocked this isn’t good

🤣🤣🤣

It really won’t be fully staged. Unless maybe at the Arts or something.

Just looking at some of the footage. Why did Carrie Fletcher get the final bow? Pretty sure all the plotters were men. Is Martha Percy the main role?

Martha Percy is weirdly central to the story. It feels like they wrote it, realised there were no women in it, then added an unnecessary narrator and (at random? out of a hat?) decided to bring in one of the plotters' wives so they could actually get some women on stage. So Martha begins and ends the show singing at Thomas Percy's grave in a very Hamilton-esque 'when will I see you again, my love' way. The plot was uncovered due to an anonymous letter, which the show has written by the wives ('I may not have a voice, but I do have a pen' - no, really, this is almost exactly (as far as the limits of my memory go) what they sing). They even admit, through the narrator, that this didn't happen, but that because women are always excluded from history, we're going to take a look at what they *could* have done.

I understand and have sympathy for what they were trying to do, but they do it badly. Seems like Catesby should be at the centre of the story, to me. A fraternity akin to the students in Les Mis is what really needs to be at the heart of this for it to work.

Hi everyone! My first post here!

I was also at ‘Treason’ last night and I do think it has some potential but it’s definitely not ready for a full run yet. There were songs in there I loved (‘When will I see you again?’, ‘Paperwork’ and ‘Take things into our own hands’) and some lyrics were wonderful but overall I think the book needs work. For me, the main things include:

- Thomas and Martha’s relationship. We don’t spend long enough with them at the beginning to care enough when Thomas leaves and Martha is left distraught. I didn’t particularly hold any emotional connection with them.
- I think the persecution of the Catholics was glossed over. This is the thing that sets the plot in motion but their misery wasn’t addressed/believable? It needs extending a bit. In ‘Les Mis’ you feel the misery. Here, you don’t.
- The ending is extremely rushed. The plot is discovered and dealt with in about 5 minutes.

Of course, this was a concert version so some of those things might be dealt with in a fully staged version but if they’re going with Thomas and Martha as the central point of the show they need us to care about their relationship.

Spent the whole show trying to work out if I liked the narration - perhaps they’re going with a modern narrator to reflect on our modern divided society mirroring the divided society back then? Maybe I’m reading too much into it.

Very much enjoyed the evening though and looking forward to tracking the show’s progress!

What a story that would’ve made! The stand out song for me is ‘take things into our own hands’. Wonder why they didn’t go with the Fawkes narrative? My guess for the Percy focus to work and to wedge in the singing at the grave ‘Eliza from Hamilton’ parts by his wife Martha they had to have a grave. So the story goes, after being shot Percy was buried, briefly! His body was later exhumed and his head put on a spike at parliament. A similar fate happened to Catesby. Puzzling why they didn’t pick him over Percy, he was married too. By the sounds they were going for a random female. Strange to pick a minor conspirator over two larger players.

Wow that is a different take indeed.
Catesby’s wife Anne was Protestant. Martha was catholic and her brothers also involved in the plot. However for a story with religion at its core it’s interesting to hear this was not really explored in the show. Sounds like it could’ve had great potential.

Saw this tonight and actually loved it, for music and performances, while acknowledging that the book has obvious flaws. . .

Some spoilers follow. . .

The main flaw in this show is the book. If you're going to get us all worked up about the treatment of Catholics, don't make it a history lesson: show us a Catholic being treated really awfully. Make it personal. Make it somebody Mr and Mrs Percy really care about.

Look at Les Mis. The villains grind the lead characters under their boots in the first quarter of the show. It's why we care about the characters. Here they fail to do that, and it's a massive mistake, as audience engagement depends on this sort of thing. Imagine if in Les Mis, instead of seeing Fantine and Valjean suffer, we instead had a conversation between them about generic authorities treating generic French people badly. That's what the set-up of this is like.

And don't tell me that if you make up facts, it won't be authentic. This is entertainment: make up some entertaining facts and entertain me, please, while remaining true to an overall truth and vision. After all, the provenance of the letter revealing the plot is made up in this show, and it's a really great idea. Make up some more facts just like that to give some narrative thrust to the characters.

Once you get over this massive narrative faux pas, most of this show is absolutely fantastic, in my opinion!

Carrie Hope Fletcher's Martha Percy's "The Inevitable" was impassioned, heartfelt and heartbreaking; Simon-Anthony Rhoden's Catesby is a glorious fanatic, his breathless singing of the first half's closing number, "The Plot," inciting his fellow plotters into harmonising "It's gonna blow" with him, while Carrie Hope Fletcher simultaneously tragically reprises "The Inevitable" in the background, was nothing less than sublime: I felt like jumping out of my seat, as Rhoden was like electricity energising both the characters and the audience lol.

In the second half, the Gunpowder related plotting harmonisers still were thrilling me in numbers like "Barrels on the Water" and "Digging down deeper," and the Percys were wholly on the money bouncing the song "Blind Faith" off one another, with Catesby the object of Bradley Jayden's Thomas's blind faith, and Thomas being himself the object of Hope Fletcher's Martha's blind faith.

The song is critically important to the take of the writers, as this musical is as much about the dangers of fanaticism as it is about rising up against persecution. It was pitch perfection in the delivery of Jaden and Fletcher, in my opinion.

In fact, this musical could easily be renamed "My husband, the fanatic," as the similarly themed "Sylvia the Musical," (last seen in a nascent stage at the Old Vic) could equally have been renamed "My mother, the fanatic." However, in Sylvia, we get a better sense of a gradual build-up in Emmeline Pankhurst's growing violent fanaticism and her more pacificist suffragette daughter, Sylvia's response to her mother's violence. Here, once again, the book needs work, as Martha's and Thomas's relationship doesn't sufficiently build into her realisation of his growing extremism, doesn't have her actively respond to it, until it's all a fait accompli. Further, this musical's gendered view of men only being capable of extremism, with women in opposition, feels a little clichéd next to the more nuanced treatment of similar material in Sylvia. I felt at least one of the wives could have been a bit more bloodthirsty lol, and one of the men a bit more reticent perhaps.

The culmination of the theme about extremism, though, reflected in Catesby's final song, "The Cold Hard Ground," was utterly brilliant, Simon-Anthony Rhoden again convincing me that his Catesby, all fire in his eyes, and exploding tremulousness in his voice, couldn't wait to leap into his grave, so dedicated and extreme were his religion and politics. A truly electric performance of that number.

The villains need beefing up, though, in the book. As is, both Daniel Boys's King James and Les Dennis's Henry Cecil are effete, prim, prancing and hilarious. Malevolent and bureaucratic. However, the Hamilton copycat vibe is simply too strong. I couldn't stop thinking about King George. Boys does succeed in being more actively sadistic than King George, in attitude, which helps to differentiate his character from George, who is more casually offhand in his callousness, but I feel if Boys's James were actively to persecute a character in an actual scene, such as the one I suggested adding in the opening scenes, he'd feel more meaty and individual, and the George comparison could then be brushed aside and forgotten.

Bookwise, tonight, I was a little unfulfilled. Musically and performance-wise, I was enraptured, with the fantastic support from Boys, Dennis, Emilie Louise Israel's ecstatic singing, Debris Stevenson's topical hiphopping narrator, Adam Pearce's deep booming echoing harmonising, and Rebecca Lachance's purposeful setting of the scene all contributing to an enjoyable evening.

The central trio, of Carrie Hope Fletcher's Martha emoting furious and delicate folk for her husband; Bradley Jaden's Thomas, hyped up to a mellifluous fever by Catesby; and Catesby ultimately hankering piously and desperately for oblivion were so pitch perfect, I felt I could overlook the weaknesses of the book.

4 stars from me.

The costumes look dreadful

http://instagram.com/p/Chmscyptk8M