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Post by sf on Apr 23, 2024 12:31:16 GMT
In the 1930s, would Laura have used a Walkman to listen to Whitney Houston? But those two things are surely entirely different? Whether Laura listens to a Walkman or records is merely an aesthetic choice, in the same way that the RSC may sometimes do a play in modern dress. Whereas ignoring a key social and racial factor, which helps contribute to the stifling, suffocating and rigid environment that the family lives in, seems to me a very different thing. Yes, that's exactly the answer I thought you'd give. So you can willingly suspend disbelief for a Walkman in place of a Victrola, but not for the colour of one actor's skin? The production isn't "ignoring a key social and racial factor". In a staging that is not anchored to a particular period, as this one isn't, what difference does it make if the production isn't cast entirely with white actors?
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Post by sf on Apr 21, 2024 12:49:10 GMT
The Glass Menagerie is set in the southern US states in the 30s, when segregation was still in place including in the work place and schools. Black and white children even went to different schools and I would have thought it was unlikely that the son, Tom, would have worked alongside someone of another race. In the 1930s, would Laura have used a Walkman to listen to Whitney Houston?
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Post by sf on Apr 20, 2024 19:53:17 GMT
It's worth the journey. I saw it this afternoon; it is very good indeed, and Geraldine Somerville is a fascinating Amanda. Tickets are not particularly expensive, and it is not at all difficult to get to.
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Post by sf on Apr 19, 2024 12:39:24 GMT
I see that after previews end the £20 tickets creep up to £25.
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Post by sf on Apr 17, 2024 22:02:45 GMT
A revival of Follies, using the 1971 script and the National Theatre set but with a bigger string section and a much more expensive, more opulent set of designs for the Loveland sequence, at Drury Lane when Frozen closes. I can dream, can't I? And we get Jo and Janie to do it again? SOLD And Alexander Hanson, Peter Forbes, and Claire Moore.
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Post by sf on Apr 17, 2024 17:55:06 GMT
A revival of Follies, using the 1971 script and the National Theatre set but with a bigger string section and a much more expensive, more opulent set of designs for the Loveland sequence, at Drury Lane when Frozen closes.
I can dream, can't I?
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Post by sf on Apr 16, 2024 22:36:31 GMT
Musical: Pacific Overtures at the Menier.
Play: Dear Octopus at the National.
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Post by sf on Apr 15, 2024 13:43:29 GMT
That NT "celebration" was a pure circle jerk of cringe. It was a bit, but look on the bright side: at least it didn't feature Kevin Spacey playing the harmonica.
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Post by sf on Apr 10, 2024 18:53:01 GMT
Today's matinee.
The play: great.
Brian Cox: good, but not great.
The sons: ditto
The maid: ditto
The direction: ditto
The lighting: crepuscular
The set: why did Lizzie Clachan set it in an Ole and Steen dining room?
Patricia Clarkson: sublime, heartbreaking, devastating, a must-see.
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Post by sf on Apr 3, 2024 12:47:03 GMT
Fully expecting Anna Jane Casey to be in this giving us her jazz hands Won't she be busy in Torquay? (Or rather, at the Apollo.)
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Post by sf on Apr 2, 2024 23:20:24 GMT
The original London production of Chess at the Prince Edward. Jaw-dropping.
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Post by sf on Mar 30, 2024 23:36:51 GMT
Saw it tonight.
When it was announced I noted the similarity to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's 'Appropriate' - and yep, it's basically 'Appropriate' on acid. Lots and lots and lots of acid. It's smart, vicious, surreal, and often VERY funny, and I suspect one of those plays where you'll either go with it and love it or really loathe it. I really enjoyed it - and under the bombast, it's got a rather more complex take than 'Appropriate' on the way we interact with historical atrocities (note how, towards the end, the play's lone Jewish voice is literally erased). And the performances are superb. It's particularly fascinating to see Jane Horrocks, whose work is often characterised by very BIG choices, deliver a tightly-wound, *very* controlled, mostly relatively quiet performance as a woman whose moral compass is utterly broken - although for me the evening belongs to Jenna Augen.
The production also features a notably extraordinary pair of underpants.
Four-and-a-half stars.
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Post by sf on Mar 28, 2024 18:22:30 GMT
Cast recording? WHY?
The show takes an incredibly diverse selection of songs, shreds them into little pieces, and imposes upon them a set of blandly polished arrangements that make them all sound like they've been ground out of the same musical sausage machine. The singers are great, but the arrangements work very hard indeed at making a series of thrilling pop songs sound like elevator muzak, and I can't imagine why anybody who knows anything at all about this music could possibly want a cast recording of this show, even given that the bland arrangements are performed by a great band and terrific singers.
(I did not love the show's arrangements. Does it show at all?)
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Post by sf on Mar 20, 2024 19:31:35 GMT
good the cheap stalls ticket with the pillar so happy with that I got a cheap circle pillar seat, sat there for groundhog Day so know what I'm getting I did the same. I've sat in the seat I booked many times before.
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Post by sf on Mar 15, 2024 19:25:25 GMT
That's supposed to encourage me to book a ticket, isn't it?
Oh dear.
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Post by sf on Mar 12, 2024 22:58:34 GMT
How does Operation Mincemeat qualify as a new musical? I saw it 3.5 years ago and that was a revival. Same way that Next to Normal does. It's the first time it's played a West End house. in 1998 the Oliviers nominated the National Theatre production of Lady in the Dark as Best New Musical. The show was first produced in 1941.
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Post by sf on Mar 12, 2024 15:30:53 GMT
My theory on the cast recording: it will be the Broadway cast. The show is set to run for six months there. Maybe longer? But the sustained marketing opportunity is in New York. It would cost them a hell of a lot more to record the Broadway cast (for recording a Broadway cast album the actors in a show get a full week's pay for each day in the studio). If they've already recorded it in London and it's going to have the same lead(s) on Broadway, why would they go to the extra expense?
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Post by sf on Mar 12, 2024 15:25:47 GMT
currently the Oliviers are intending the best new musical category to recognise the creatives, As I said, the Oliviers are magnificently clueless about music. It's insane that a set or lighting designer can get a nomination for their individual creative contribution to a new musical, but the composer cannot.
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Post by sf on Mar 12, 2024 14:41:37 GMT
Ridiculous/laughable that the orchestrator and MD of Operation Mincemeat get a nomination, but there's no category in which to give a nomination to the people who actually wrote the show's very clever score. But then, the 'musical achievement' category is always completely loopy, because the Oliviers are magnificently clueless when it comes to dealing with original music. At least this year the four nominees in that category are all nominated for doing more or less the same job - but it's pathetic that there's no category in which the Oliviers nominate composers this year. The nomination for best new musical specifically name checks all four members of Spit Lip for music, lyrics and book - they are nominated for their creative work as well as the acting noms three of them have. ...but - unlike the Tony Awards - there is no category in the Oliviers for Best Original Score. And there should be. There is no category in which the Oliviers recognise original music.
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Post by sf on Mar 12, 2024 14:18:42 GMT
Ridiculous/laughable that the orchestrator and MD of Operation Mincemeat get a nomination, but there's no category in which to give a nomination to the people who actually wrote the show's very clever score.
But then, the 'musical achievement' category is always completely loopy, because the Oliviers are magnificently clueless when it comes to dealing with original music. At least this year the four nominees in that category are all nominated for doing more or less the same job - but it's pathetic that there's no category in which the Oliviers nominate composers this year.
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Post by sf on Mar 11, 2024 14:43:14 GMT
The Gillian Lynne auditorium is very comfy, love the high backed gallery seats, but the FOH areas are a hot mess, with there being no toilets or bars upstairs There's a Gents' loo in the Gillian Lynne circle next to door 6. Presumably there's a Ladies up there somewhere too.
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Post by sf on Mar 9, 2024 13:52:53 GMT
That was my main problem here - just like Downtown, there is limited plausibility in an entire wealthy (if in this case uppermost middle class of the time rather than true landed upper class) family accepting what is basically a servant as one of them. A lady's companion is not a servant. An employee, yes, although that fact would never be discussed in front of anyone outside the household, but emphatically not a servant.
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Post by sf on Mar 9, 2024 0:30:17 GMT
Overheard in the lobby:
“I don’t really know anything about this play at all. Is there sex in it?”
So much of it is so good. Beth Steel knows the territory, she knows how to get big laughs, and she knows how to use family relationships to give a close-up on a bigger picture. It's cleverly directed and superbly performed, and Lorraine Ashbourne's Aunty Carol is a spectacular comic creation...
...and if you set out to write a play that is partly about latent racism, it's probably a good idea not to make your one non-English character a two-dimensional cardboard cutout, or to prove with his every line that you have no ear at all for the rhythms of Polish-accented English. It doesn't help, either, that Mark Wootton - who is otherwise very charming as Marek, and who does manage to transcend some of the bad writing - supplies such a bizarrely inconsistent accent, although the inconsistently-accented dialogue he has to deliver probably doesn't help.
It's a shame. This is a very entertaining evening, it's a play with a lot to say, it includes several memorable (female) characters and some raucously funny lines... and it shoots itself in the foot.
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Post by sf on Mar 5, 2024 12:34:35 GMT
Cheryl Baker said on BBC Breakfast today that the story of “Making Your Mind Up” is being written now and will be heading to the West End. (No doubt it tells the story of a woman who couldn’t make up her mind whether to pre-order one or two bottles of Bucks Fizz to drink in the interval) "Look at us now, our golden days are over..."
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Post by sf on Mar 5, 2024 0:30:15 GMT
Oh dear.
I saw it this evening.
It's never less than superficially entertaining, but it's totally superficial. It has a phenomenally talented, incredibly hard-working cast, a good set and great lighting and video projections, and no depth whatsoever. John O'Farrell's book features some buttock-clenchingly awful dialogue, and appears to be aimed at people who find flashcards too intellectually demanding. Matthew Brind's arrangements take an incredibly diverse selection of songs and compress them into the musical equivalent of a bargain-brand sausage. It's never painful to sit through when people are singing (when they're speaking, on the other hand...), and the singers are great, but it's as if Brind set out to sandpaper everything interesting out of this phemomenal stack of music. Particularly in the second act, far too much of it just all sounds the same - at least, if (as I am) you're old enough to have been an obsessive teenage pop fan in the mid-1980s. Very little of this music is bland on the original recordings, and that's a challenge Brind works very hard to overcome.
Nearly every significant moment is short-changed - most obviously I Don't Like Mondays, which loses impact by being given a more bombastic musical arrangement than the original single had. THAT pause during the concert was a heart-stopping moment, even on television; here, it's just yet another piece of bland sentimental uplift, partly because the dialogue surrounding the song is so painfully trite and partly because the song itself doesn't get space to breathe. One of the reasons it stood out during the original concert is that the song began small and was allowed to build, and it didn't sound at all like the song before it (the Style Council's Walls Come Tumbling Down). It was given space to breathe, and giving it that space paid off. Theatre can't precisely recreate what that moment looked like on the day, but it could give us some insight into how it felt and what it meant. That's what this show tries to do, but it fails at just about every hurdle. The show's attempt to discuss the very real issues with a) white saviour syndrome, b) the lyrics of Do They Know It's Christmas?, and c) the entire project's reductive understanding of the continent of Africa are so laughably simplistic that they would insult the intelligence of a seven-year-old. Throughout, the show has the same problem as The Little Big Things, which also didn't completely work but was vastly better than this: the creative team appear to be terrified of engaging with difficult emotional territory or morally complex ideas, to the point where everything is just dumbed down and pumped up into an endless stream of generic uplift.
And yet - as I said, when people are singing it isn't painful to sit through. The arrangements are bland, but the voices are great. It doesn't work - at all - as an examination of the event it's supposed to be about, but it does have some entertainment value as a mindless nostalgia trip. And bless Julie Atherton's Mrs. T for supplying the only moments of genuine wit in the entire evening.
It just could and should have been so, so, so much better than that.
Two stars - and one and three-quarters of them are for the voices, which are excellent.
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Post by sf on Feb 29, 2024 17:31:01 GMT
Saw it last night - from the (very) cheap seats off to the side in the circle.
It looks and sounds great in the Gillian Lynne. I can pick a couple of holes - I don't love the ending of the Poppy/Nikki storyline - but the overall effect of the show is so strong that it's a solid five stars from me. And Rachael Wooding's Rose just keeps getting better and better. Tom Deering's arrangement of 'After the Rain' is gorgeous, and she sings the hell out of it. It's a thrilling piece of theatre, and I'll be back to see it again.
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Post by sf on Feb 25, 2024 18:00:17 GMT
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Post by sf on Feb 21, 2024 22:58:15 GMT
Loved this at today's matinee. Subtle, bittersweet, full of nuance and subtext, flawlessly directed and designed and performed. Yes, it's a play that reflects a particular moment in time, but it's a richly textured examination of family dynamics, it's sharply observed and full of wonderful lines, and it's one of those productions where the whole is much, MUCH greater than the sum of the parts. There, um, may have been something in my eye for most of the last ten minutes. Don't go expecting fireworks - but it's as good as anything I've ever seen at the National, and there should certainly be space for plays like this in their repertoire.
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Post by sf on Jan 30, 2024 11:49:13 GMT
Expensive too. Most of the stalls is £90+ Very expensive. The royal circle seat that cost me £15 for Accidental Death of an Anarchist - at the back and off to the side, booked in advance, it wasn't an on-the-day special offer - is going for £90 for this.
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Post by sf on Jan 27, 2024 12:54:32 GMT
I saw it last night.
It's the first time I've seen the show since the ENO production (no of course you can't believe I'm that old). Beautiful production, beautifully designed, staged, and performed. Yes, a couple of the actors spoke/sang very heavily Japanese-accented English, but I didn't have any difficulty understanding them. 'Someone In A Tree', in particular, was stunning (and I think it's possibly the best thing Sondheim ever wrote). It's the best thing I've seen at the Menier in several years, and I regret that I'm probably not going to be able to go back and see it again before it closes.
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