Entering in dark furs and dark glasses, Grant Smeaton’s Bette Davis is a diamonique wink to all that the seventies stood for, cleverly manipulating an original interview into a charismatic lecture on celebrity excess.
The hour-long interview covers the insular nature of Hollywood as seen through the famous eyes of its First Lady of the Silver Screen. In a comedy of manner, if not one of manners, the candid Davis discusses everything from losing her virginity to being attack by wasps in Glasgow, sliding down the rose-tinted Chanel sunglasses of our perceptions of “the good old days” and challenging our tendency to glamorise the past.
Grant Smeaton’s Bette Davis is a grotesque spectacle which could only be channelled through a man in too much make-up. Dolled up in deep red lipstick, sprayed with glittering jewellery and with a blanched face to match Blanche Hudson, Smeaton captures something raw and visceral about the ageing Davis, her grand gestures and elegant inflexions.
Alongside every ponderous star, there must be a host with question cards. As the ditheringly charming Dick Cavett, Gordon Munro casually moves aside the fourth wall, instantly creating a casual rapport between the audience and the actors and subtly challenging the great lady for his share of the spotlight.
The Maids is Jean Genet’s notorious attempt at a social revolution.
Two sisters share their lives as maids to an exquisitely furred Madame. Fantasising of satisfying their venomous hatreds, the two plot to murder their employer and better their position, acting out ritualistic games of fragmented identity and sadomasochism in the claustrophobic privacy of a Parisian apartment.
Derek McLuckie, William Brennan and Richard Pears are an intimidating trio of transvestite actors. White faced and dark eyed, their performances are energetic and entertaining, capturing the sensationalism of the material in a grotesque manner which makes the makes the play feel somewhat like the Friday night conclusion of a week of soap.
Despite the potent poisons which creep through Genet’s subversive script, the tensions at the centre of the narrative are lamentably diffused by the production’s need to be humorous: indeed, the performances at times feel like a community outreach project to get out of work pantomime dames into legitimate theatre. Their wild gestures and comically local accents, whilst pleasing, devoid the play of any genuine drama and much of Genet’s poetry is lost in the cast’s frustratingly rushed delivery.
In terms of design, there’s nothing here that you couldn’t pick up in Ikea and allen key together yourself. A few plain white chests (perhaps over compensating for the lack thereof on the “women”) and a few bunches of gladioli as requested by Genet’s script, Colin O’Hara has done very little to suggest either the decadence of Madame’s apartments or the squalor of The Maids' mental state.
Pauline Goldsmith’s interpretation of The Maids does not wholly work. Whilst the performances are intriguing, it lacks subtlety and, as Madame observes, becomes “the most extraordinary combination of luxury and filth” as a consequence. It’s a wonderful concept, and commendable by it, that Goldsmith hearkens back to the dramatic tradition and has men in drag play its powerful women. It’s a shame, therefore, that the actors have neither the sensitivity of the ancients nor the bilious air of poisonous drag queens.
Finding music in the monotony, Stomp is a fast-paced and pounding celebration of the rhythms of life.
Luke Cresswell and Steve Mc Nicholas have devised a gleefully resourceful piece of dance theatre. Using an extensive range of brooms, gas lighters and kitchen sinks, the eight piece group transform everyday objects into percussion instruments, inspired by their high-energy routines. These primal rhythms, a strange mix of Brazilian samba and African tribal dance, enlist each individual in a rich, worldwide orchestra.
The production’s skits are sharp and narrative driven, changing in tone regularly enough to maintain freshness between scenes. The fool is here, diffusing the tension of some of the show’s more intense moments, and the audience is frequently challenge to follow the increasingly complex rhythms by clapping their hands and stamping their feet.
Stomp’s design is gritty, an internationally ambiguous, two-tiered frame of corrugated iron littered with street signs and water drums patiently waiting to become percussion. Reminiscent of the Broadway RENT design, its bric-a-brac backdrop is full of a mysterious promise which drives the narrative.
Tightly choreographed and wittily produced, Stomp is one of the most exciting pieces of dance which Scottish theatre has seen this year.
A lost weekend of stolen money, expensive champagnes and goth kids with tambourines, David Greig and Gordon McIntyre’s exceptional Midsummer is the funniest play to be staged in Glasgow this year.
Helena and Bob are you and I. They meet in a trendy bar in which they do not belong, find each other in the hazy reflection of a wine-cooler and spend the evening frankly revealing the ulterior motives and subtexts of relationships.
Relationships, it suggests, are to be analysed, their peaks and troughs plotted on a graph. This is an awkward truth that Greig’s self-depricating script returns to again and again. Cocksure and confident, Midsummer pumps up its chest like a drunken flirt before gleefully reaching into its pocket for a pin and savagely deflating itself.
As the mismatched lovers, Cora Bissett and Matthew Pidgeon are extraordinary. Flitting from guitar to ukulele and shape shifting from character to character, this incredible pair fills the stage in a way that a one-hundred strong ensemble could not, delivering the material with all of the conviction of stand-up and performing some of the most moving folksongs in Scottish theatre with affectingly heavy hearts.
Georgia McGuinness’s design is richly inventive. Based around a bed frame, it keeps sex at the centre of the discourse, allowing the script to analyse the changing significance of a one night stand. Carrying all of the hidden meaning of Tracey Emin’s “My Bed”, it is warmly complimented by Claire Elliot’s perfectly conceived lighting design.
Gypsy is coyly dropping her gloves on a Glasgow stage for the first time in thirty years.
The original backstage musical has aged well, held aloft by a sharp book by Arthur Laurents, a memorable score by Jule Styne and rhythmic, complex lyrics by a young Stephen Sondheim. Owing more to the Merman interpretation than the recent, unhinged and manic Lu Pone, the Apollo Players’ production is distinctly vaudeville, straightforward and nostalgic, in both style and content.
Stepping into the heels of the matriarchs of Broadway, Glaswegian singer Terry Neason fills the indomitable yet comic role of Madame Rose surprisingly well. Her booming voice pleasantly shakes like a burlesque girl’s tassels and, although far from perfect, this deliverance brings something to the character: like Sally Bowles in Cabaret, the role benefits from a rough edge, nodding to the character’s failure to succeed in show business.
As a pro-am production, it understandably does not have the design budget boasted by professional tours and suffers, at times gravely, to technical mishap and directorial blindness. However, there are moments of sheer pleasure. Gypsy Susie Thompson-McMahon’s rendition of “Little Lamb” outstrips any other version that I have heard, and Lindsey Ross, Elaine Wilkie and Jennie Wilkie are gloriously comic as the gimmicky, damned burlesque artistes.
John Carlyle’s production breaks little new ground but restores a wonderful piece of musical theatre heritage to centre stage where it belongs.
An unusual pairing of ornithology and apocalypse, Alison Peebles’s Glasgay! commissioned production of Panic Patterns is a bit of a dramatic dead duck.
Two lovers studying the rhythmic patterns of birds become stranded on an abandoned Scottish island. As the distress calls fail and the behaviour of the birds become more panicked, cabin fever threatens to destroy them.
Written by Zoe Strachan and Louise Welsh, two higher flyers in contemporary Glaswegian literature, the script is witty and the characters very well conceived. As a character study, the play is a great success, managing to both align and challenge gender roles in lesbian relationships and clash the scientific consciousness with a more primitive, myth-making one. As a dramatic performance though, the action seems deeply stilted, diffusing the intermittent tension of the situation with time consuming lace-tying and ineffectual emptiness.
This does nothing to malign two excellent performances by Selina Boyack and Veronica Leer. Their ambivalent relationship is genuine and tender, impassioned and bewitched.
Like Icarus, the play is admirably ambitious and raises the spirit of same-sex relationships to a level of realism largely unseen on the Scottish stage. However, the climb to the play’s conclusion is too slow, seldom flying close enough to the sun to blaze with the power of the coming apocalypse.
Jeremy Raison’s new production of A Clockwork Orange is a timely one. Closely adapted from Anthony Burgess’s controversial 1962 novel, it challenges the dictatorial nature of government, the increasingly antisocial behaviour on our streets and the redemptive power of the arts.
This could be any British city. Raison smartly plays with regionalism and accent, hinting at the endemic nature of social degeneration. Their common language, a Russian-English derivative called nadsat, can be immediately bewildering to a contemporary audience but is quickly ingratiating. Like following Shakespearean dialogue without the crutch of a glossary to explain all of those “sooths” and “strumpets”, the linguistic strangeness of A Clockwork Orange soon becomes familiar, initiating you into the gang.
As manic adolescent Alex, Jay Taylor is thrillingly intense, his charismatic performance filled with a frightening eloquence that draws out the poetry of Burgess’s original text. Emerging onto the stage as a silhouette amidst blasts of music, Taylor’s Alex is the ideal overindulged rocker, spitting in the face of society with a Sex Pistols sneer and military blazer. Imagine the lovechild of Russell Brand and Johnny Rotten (biological and chronological contradictions aside).
Jason Southgate’s design is suitably dystopian, a cleverly constructed frame littered with dustbins, and segregated with barbed wire, complimented by Graham Sutherland’s viciously urbanized soundtrack. The joyful, joyful blasts of Beethoven boom through the auditorium during the play’s most significant moments, raising the hair as high as Ludwig’s. Carter Ferguson’s choreographed violence is highly stylised, sparing the audience the gratuity which categorised the film without shying from the glamorised barbarism at the story’s core.
Fascinating and frightening, Raison’s production is the highlight of the Citizens season.
Sea and Land and Sky, Abigail Docherty’s winning entry to the Tron’s Open Stage playwriting competition, is sure to become a great example of contemporary Scottish theatre.
Constructed around the diaries of young Scottish nurses serving on the Russian Front during the Great War, Duffy’s script is a pounding, relentless reckoning of mankind’s inability to comprehend the trauma of human conflict. The collapse of order and reason in the play, marked with an oddly postmodern disengagement with reality, captures the mania of war and simulates the shell-shocked debasement of mental state in the high impact sphere of war.
Their madness is consumptive. It is the same blood driven madness as strikes Macbeth after his murder of King Duncan: "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood/ Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather/ the multitudinous seas in incarnadine,/ Making the green one red."Like Macbeth, the nurses are driven mad by the rising seas of blood which fill the trenches, turning rules to ruins and preservation to desecration.
Director Andy Arnold’s cast of soldiers and nurses is uniformly excellent. Former River City actors Laura McMonagle and Carmen Pieraccini convincingly bear the crutch of insanity alongside Mairi Phillips "retired hedonist" Millicent, challenging the Florence Nightingale image of nurses in wartime with raw sexuality and loss of mental and physical control.
Hazel Blue’s set design is fascinating. A frozen waste of dirt piles, subtle severed limbs and bare, Beckett-esque trees, the grubby white layered two-level stage is akin to a bloody bandage turned septic. The actors mount the stairs as the condemned mount the condemned mount the scaffold, overlooked by Blue's ghoulish, hollow-faced war dead.
Barry McCall’s sound design is also remarkable, marked by the haunting, far-off bellows of Scottish folksong amidst the tortured whine of a violin, depicting a piteous yearning for the familiarities of home in a hostile environment.
Filled with the gallows humour of the trenches, Docherty’s witty and profound new play is certain to be the first in a great career.
A little ray of happiness on a rainy Glasgow evening, Dundee Rep’s Sunshine on Leith is a delightful celebration of the music The Proclaimers, sharply reworked amidst a genuinely absorbing storyline and capturing the nature of the modern Scottish experience without tartan or taste of shortbread.
Thankfully, the songs are quite subtly woven into this kitchen sink drama and at no point do the characters scream needlessly for Somebody to Love or tack on Chicquitita as a term of endearment. Whilst some numbers can be seen five hundred miles on the horizon, others are introduced in creative and at times inspiring ways. Lets Get Married, for instance, becomes a hymn to relationships and to football, a wedding proposal which turns a Hibs bar into a gothic-windowed church of life and of love.
Not unsurprisingly, the play is distinctly Scottish in flavour, drawing on a rich shared cultural heritage of shipbuilding, union protests and the mysterious stench of the steps at Edinburgh’s Waverley station. There can be no other musical in the canon where the stage direction is to throw a pound into a baby’s pram.
River City creator Stephen Greenhorn’s script is a genuinely funny flash of the kilt to Scottish humour, a banter to be shared amongst friends, peppered with ingratiating colloquialisms, irreverent slang and scenes deconstructing the emotional journey of an evening in the pub.
Musical Director Hilary Brooks has cleverly teased the country and western flavours from The Proclaimers’s songs, finding a vaudeville character in the quickness of the violin and the smoothness of the trumpet.
Placed within the context of the storyline and such clever musical arrangement, the songs are breathed into new life, drawing attention to their wit. This is not the last song at a wedding, drunk and slurred, but a carefully crafted celebration of the Leith twins’ work.
Lord of the Rings star Billy Boyd has come from Mordor to Morningside. As recent army release Davy, Boyd is charming, the recognisable loveable “chancer” who could be found in any pub in Edinburgh. Bouncing on his confidence, Boyd belts out the audience favourites with gusto, coaxing the crowd into an uproar in the final ultimo of I’m Gonna Be.
As matriarch, Ann Louise Ross is filled with a powerful resilience recognisable in so many Scottish women. Her performance of the play’s title song is eerily beautiful, a sobering and echoing eleven o’clock number complimented by director James Brining’s staging. As the song expands, as does memory, with the ghosts of the woman’s wedding appearing in a danse macabre as her own future lies uncertain.
In terms of set design and costuming, there's little here to excite or mystify but, then again, there's little extraordinary to excite or mystify in the real world which this play represents. Full replica costumes are available onsale in any C&A circa 1996.
What Blood Brothers has done for Liverpool, Sunshine on Leith will surely do for Edinburgh.
The story of small town America, and d.i.y. cryogenics, Vox Mutus's Fringe hit, The-Not-So-Fatal Death of Grandpa-Fredo has come to chill in Glasgow's Tron Theatre.
In the shadowy woods of Reliance Falls, an economically-troubled backwater any-town in the United States, transcendentalist Norweigian immigrant Fridtijof Fredo hides a family secret in his freezer. Amidst the frozen herring lies the cryogenically preserved head of his grandfather, patiently awaiting the medical Utopia which will raise the dead and defrost the frosty.
As the officious officials determined to defrost the cadaver and melt a potential media storm, Imogen Toner and Harry Ward are comedy gold, the sweet yet cunning villains of a colourful cartoon.
Toner's Mayor Conquest is a wonderfully expressive all-American villain. Riding her motorcycle, decrying the liberal agenda and recounting her life as Miss Teen Reliance Falls, Conquest is an obviously topical parody of everyone's favourite cartoon character, Sarah Palin, crossing over somewhere between the former governor of Alaska and Kat Slater.
As bureaucratic Keystone Cop Mac, Harry Ward is an entertaining pastiche of the over-zealous yet blundering backwoods law enforcer. Mac and his beloved racoon Kojak make a sweet pairing, nuzzling each other and sharing perhaps the most realistic relationship in the performances.
Ewan Donald's performance as grandson Fridjitof Fredo is a cutesy Scandinavian Willy Wonka, naive and innocent in his convictions and underlined with a peculiar sadness over the death of his grandfather. Like Simon Donaldson's overzealous ex-soldier turned diner owner Archie Merkin, Donald knows how to strum a guitar and pluck a bango, wittily performing the charming musical numbers which move the plot along.
Imaginative and creative, Candice Edmund and Jamie Harrison's design is stunning in its simplicity. This revolves around an ingenious, angular wooden shed which unfolds, rotates and splits to reveal quite unbelievable secrets within. Simon Wilkinson's lighting design, too, is striking, juxtaposing the yellowy sunsets of a Midwestern evening with the icy blue of a freezer's light.
An inventive musical comedy which brings the dry ice of the theatre to the dry ice of a cyogenics lab.
A worthy success at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Craig Higginson’s The Girl in the Yellow Dress has returned to its maker at the Citizen’s Theatre.
In a small, book-framed Parisian apartment, obsession over words meets obsession over personality. Pierre, a Congolese refugee, is meeting English tutor Celia for their usual lesson. Over five short parts, the relationship between the teacher and the taught will dissolve and reverse, teasing out the unspoken subtexts which pervade their relationship by close analysis of the double meanings of the English language.
It would be too easy to pull in the phrase “cunning linguist”, get a cheap laugh and undermine a fresh and original concept for a play. Whilst the language barriers between the times are at times comic, they betray sentiments which hide beneath the surface of their interactiongs. “It all sounds a bit perfect, Pierre”, Celia notes. Whether or not she is referring to his idealized description of his Congolese life or to the perfect tense in which he describes it is harder to pin down.
As Celia, Marianne Oldham is simply enthralling, walking a fractured line between the grand inquisitor and the privately condemned. Her control of the tormented persona breaks quite spectacularly, revealing, in one of the most commanding performances of the year, an uneasy vulnerability in the unseen depths of this complex character.
South African actor Nat Ramabulana, too, proves world-class as benign stalker Pierre. The sudden galvanizing of his character from uncertain speaker to unfaltering lover is authoritative and rich, forging a realistic subtlety in this quasi-Freudian relationship and scorching bright yellow in its final scenes.
Under the direction of Malcolm Purkey, the pair are unstoppable, foaming with a genuine, and genuinely awkward, chemistry that propels both characters to the play’s finale. The dramatic tension which builds so casually in Higginson’s scripts degrades Celia’s ability to hide behind her words. Exposed and uncovered, the revelations which come are both shocking and intriguing.
This excellent play is a blaze of that summer Fringe heat in the damp days of autumn.
David Graham's Keeping Up Appearances continues the recent trend of unnecessary staged comedy reruns, following Yes Minister, Acorn Antiques and dinnerladies from the VHS box set to the doldrums of comedy theatre. Written by Roy Clarke, the original series creator, and featuring Gareth Hale of eighties comedy double act Hale and Pace, The Comedy Theatre Company's productions come from the "good breeding" which the Lady of the House so respected. Sadly, the pedigree is sorely inbred.
It's a typical plot, the fodder of a thousand Sunday afternoon repeats. Mrs. Bucket's highly strung and irritably neighbour Emmet decides to stage and to direct a 1930s murder mystery. Hyacinth casts herself as an aristocratic lady. Elizabeth smashes something. There's nothing new to see here. Even Malvern Hostick's tired and drab stage design looks loathed to be there, disappearing into tedious, minute long blackout scene changes soundtracked to Ethel Merman and the theme from the Great Escape.
It all dissolves quite predictably, Hyacinth pratfalls around the stage and the audience are glad to be out of the theatre."Did you enjoy that?", I heard a lady in the exit queue ask another. "Yeah... a little bit... well, bits of it".
Lets not get too negative though. Rachel Bell's perfectly prim Hyacinth is a perfect impression, clutching to her handbag like a crucifix and condescendingly snooping around the stage. Former Brookside actor Steven Pinder, too, surpasses the original Emmet in likeability, whilst sister Elizabeth has none of the silliness of the original. Gareth Hale's Onslow is suitably slobbish in his string vest and rough Liverpool accent and Christine Moore's has the look, if not the delivery, of the wife Daisy. The cast cannot be faulted but are sadly betrayed by a tiresome and poor script.
There's one notable absence in the character list. Richard, Hyacinth's long suffering husband. What Clarke was thinking when he negated the second most important character from the script. To watch Keeping Up Appearances without Richard is like watching Love Thy Neighbour without the neighbour. Would Clarke as quickly divorce Alf Garnett from his wife, reducing the similar comedy of marriage to a ranting Alan Bennett chair monologue?
Hyacinth still takes the time to phone Richard and shout at him in the aisles but he never makes it to the stage. This is an omission as sensible as a Royal Doulton plate without the hand painted periwinkle. By the end of the first act, one cannot help but wonder if he she has been imagining him all along, in a postmodern twist on a nineties comedy, it develops that he has been dead all along.
And perhaps that is the problem. It is hardly fair to view Keeping Up Appearances through the more sophisticated, observational filter of modern comedy. The laboriously predictable punchlines may be seen as far off as the sitcom's original air-date but, like Frank Kershaw's pastel costuming, the production is distinctly of its era and should be treated as such: a camp romp that nicely impersonates the original sitcom but which will nonetheless leave audiences largely unamused, politely declining the invitation to the candlelit supper.
With so many acts not-so-coyly dropping their silk gloves around Edinburgh, Eat Your Heart Out is a much needed revitalisation in the suddenly overexposed medium of cabaret theatre.
Welcoming its audience to climb onto the stage with them, harass them with flash photography and act as strange screens for their even stranger projections, Eat Your Heart Out’s talented London cast have crunched and chewed the heart of cabaret, spitting out cliché and savouring the absurd. Clinging to the inclusive spirit of early century cabaret, the two hour long piece blends magic with comedy, song with sociology and politics with black sequins.
Strolling onto the venue’s small and empty stage, founder Scottee is a striking and enthralling performer. Voted TimeOut performer of 2010, his design and audience control is remarkable, reminiscent of the music hall greats. He is part of a proud lineage of professionals who can earn a crowd’s attention without a radio microphone or the need for special effects, relying purely on his quick wit and sense of spontaneity. In his dishevelled costuming and draped with a multicoloured boa of scalped drag queen wigs, Scottee is a treat to the eye and to the mind.
The thrill of the piece is in its complete refusal to construct the oft-quoted fourth wall between actor and audience. In drag queen Myra DuBois the piece has found a witty and charming mediator, dryly responding to the audience’s input with the conversational ease of a smiling Coronation Street barmaid taking a Hot Pot order. Visually striking in her eagle-like warpaint and towering in stature, DuBois recounts her Rotherham roots in a series of hilarious and well crafted monologues. Through this, she strips away the commonly perceived drag stereotypes and challenges the outmoded nature of end-of-the-pier drag. Unpredictable and wise, DuBois is drag at its most progressive and most comfortable, an admirable quality in heels so high.
Miss Annabel Sings, the group’s talented and wry chanteuse, insists that the audience join her on stage for some helpful group therapy. Gently strumming her guitar and weakly smiling like an over-medicated primary teacher, her songs are passionate yet sensitive portrayals of the melancholy loneliness and isolation of city life. Effectively illustrated by unsettling video installations, her performance is accomplished and multi-facetted, an insightful view into a remarkable way of thinking.
Amidst the song and spoken word are the wonderful Masumi Tipsy and Daniel Somerville. Making her Fringe debut from Japan, Tipsy’s erratic and absurdist choreography bears a strong narrative, smoothly developing from the restrained dance of a Pierot to a thrashing and erratic seizure. Whilst it would be a shame to ruin the big surprise at the end of Sommerville’s act, his interpretation of the evolution of English identity throughout history is one of the Fringe’s most cunning and satisfying tricks, doused in history and countless pints of lager.
A late night in the company of the superb Eat Your Heart Out is a rewarding one. The group have seemingly done the impossible and made the avant garde accessible, bringing to the Fringe a vibrant and diverse showcase of vignettes which strike at the heart of performance art without ever descending into the unintelligible or the disengaging.
In Miss Truvy’s Louisiana beauty parlour, six women discuss the comedy and tragedy of life, analysing the nature of the human condition alongside the nature of their strawberry pie recipes. Passing through a three year time period as quickly as a nail polish dries, Robert Harling’s conversational script is excellent, examining the importance of women in Southern society as mothers and friends without descending into unbearable saccharine.
It was never going to be easy to follow Dolly Parton, Julia Roberts and Sally Field in Robert Harling’s Academy Award nominated 1989 film, Steel Magnolias. Whilst it would not be fair to judge Upstage Theatre Productions’ interpretation against the iconic chick-flick, director [Angela Darcy]’s performance has shorn away much of the sensitivity of the original, bleaching the undefined greys and subtleties of the script and leaving it distinctly black and white.
Whilst the group of actresses are undoubtedly cohesive, the performance lacks the artistic awareness of professional theatre. Amidst numerous slip ups and poorly delivered lines, the casts’ accents travel from the American South to the beauty parlours of California, losing much of the wonderful script’s sharp wit in the constant maintenance of Louisiana drawl.
As Miss Truvy’s rookie hair colourist Annelle, Lucy Mills is heavy-footed and over-reactive, showing very little of the character’s emotional maturation and debasing the drama of the play’s most pivotal scene by trying too hard to look ditzy and, dare it be said, blonde. Lynn Mulvenna’s M’Lynn, too, whilst a likeable stage presence, is disappointingly restrained in the play’s explosive denouement, leaving the conclusion of the piece as uninspiring and as deflated as a buffon without enough mousse.
The production is not without its charm. Amidst the overblown and the underwhelming is Anne McMenemy’s performance as small town entrepreneur, Clairee. Finding a vocal gentleness in her character, McMenemy seems to be the only actress onstage who has thought about the deeper meaning of the play’s title, bringing to her robust performance the delicacy of a magnolia without resorting to the starkness of steel.
Peter Screen’s set design, too, is a well-observed homage to the eighties, covering the walls with floral print and black and white images of once fashionable hairstyles. His intimate staging is well suited to both the conversational script and to the size of the small venue, pulling the audience into the hairdresser’s chair and filling their lungs with the smells of Truvy’s French perfumes.
It may well have been first night nerves or noxious hairspray fumes which undid what could have been an excellent production. In time, perhaps, the production will improve and, like the unfamiliarity of a new haircut, grow into something altogether more likeable.
Seldomly deviating far from the familiar Golden Era film musical, the corn grows just as high in Julian Woolford’s new production of the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein hit.
Jane Austen amidst the haystacks, the story follows the social graces and social conflicts of the Oklahoma territory cowboys and the farmhands, all romantic rivalry and red ribbons. It follows the furtive romance of cowboy Curly and headstrong Laurey, the problems they create for themselves on the rocky road to love and the at times sinister goings on of life between the corn husks.
A genuine leading lady of musical theatre, Marti Webb's voice has matured beautifully since Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote "Tell Me on a Sunday" especially for her, lending itself perfectly to the belting vibratto of the role of Aunt Eller. Her accent is perfect and her delivery of the Mid Western dialogue charming.
Mark Sutton’s commanding Curly is excellent. His strong, rich vocal, particularly on numbers such as "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'", epitomises the romanticised Old Western masculinity without losing a connection with the of the content of the lyrics. Evans performance in Oklahoma! consolidates his status as a lead worthy of carrying a show in the West End.
Gemma Sutton’s Laurey trips lightly on her feet as she delivers a sweetly operatic performance. She excels in the productions lengthy ballet interlude, bringing the first act to a close and the audience to its feet.
There is not a weak player in the production's supporting cast. Laurey's supporting girls singing as sweetly as a row of flowers in a Disney cartoon and Curley's cowboys shake like the rattlesnakes in one of Aunt Eller's folksy, Mid Western similes.
Whilst Michelle Crook’s Ado Annie is at times cartoonish, her zany performance as the girl who just can't say no is charming and Pete Gallagher’s Jud Fry makes an incredible villain, a snarling, animalistic tower of obsession which never betrays the underlying tragedy of this social pariah. The comic turn of the night is Vas Constanti’s peddlar, Ali Hakim, who revels in the stereotype and earns a well deserved exit applause.
We all know that cowboys and rustic farm hands should not prance and dance outside of a barn raising celebration. Chris Hocking’s tight choreography has gone some way in defusing the outmoded, over-enthused kick, ball, heels of such grand, 1940s musicals. The men still dance like the town drunk is firing rapid shots at their feet but it is with a certain ruggedness, all angular arms and proud backs.
Though Julian Woolford’s set is at times sluggish and changes dependent on the old-fashioned cloak of a black out, it serves its purpose in its exteriors, whilst David Howe’s pastel lighting captures the beauty of a gently setting sun.
Thrusting its pelvis between tongue-in-cheek horror and kitsch camp comedy, this flawless production Richard O'Brien's Rocky Horror Show returns to Edinburgh for one last Time Warp before the ongoing tour hangs up its stilettos at the end of the year.
Continuing on the excellent form laid down since the production began in 2006, Christopher Luscombe's charismatic cast have refined their roles, finding fresh nuances in a script nearly forty years and gently tipping their glittering gold top-hats in tribute to the Sweet Transvestites of stage and screen who have gone before them.
It's the classic American love story: boy meets girl; boy falls in love with girl; boy and girl set off to celebrate their engagement, their car tyre explodes and they are forced to take shelter in the arms of a decadent Transylvanian master.
Add to the mix that their host is creating life with human body parts and leopard skin hot-pants and theatre is borne a Frankenstein romance which would make Mary Shelley spin.
David Bedella's strutting Frank N. Furter is consistently excellent and commanding. In the sorry history of star turns, only Bedella has earned his place as a true rival to Tim Curry's original, vocally oozing with a rich, American sex appeal whilst finding an often overlooked vulnerability in the role.
Richard Meek and Haley Flaherty's Brad and Janet relish the journey between cutesy and corrupted, showing a genuine transition in the conscience of characters often treated as having a sexual on/off switch under their chastity belts. As forbidden fruit to the young sweethearts, Dominic Tribuzio's acrobatic Rocky Horror is a joy, to man and woman, initially approaching the role with a charming, babyish simplicity before unleashing a confident swagger in the Floor Show finale.
A newcomer to the role of omniscient narrator, Gerard Kelly is in fine pantomimic form, quickly batting off the audience callbacks with wit and breaking down the fourth wall of theatre without losing control of the rowdy crowd.
Janet Bird's witty set design is an acutely observed homage to the low-budget b-movies of the era, subtle in its content but inventive in its execution, cleverly using the low-fi technologies of early cinema in shadow play and tricks of perspective.
This production is a triumphant return to its roots. With nostalgic costume designs by film designer Sue Blane, it strikes at the heart of the film which has been playing midnight shows in theatres for nearly forty years, filtering it through a comic prism of colour and yet somehow creating, as easily as Frank did, an entirely new Monster.
Flick through our songbook cookbook. Mrs. Lovett's "chicken" pie, Rocky Horror's Rocky Road and a Wicked Defying Gravy. Close your eyes and imagine: food, glorious food.
