CINDERELLA
December 13, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until Sunday, January 17, 2010
THOSE folk at First Family Entertainment have really got Christmas sussed.
They’ve figured out exactly what works best for a firecracker of a festive panto, and they’re prepared to throw money at it to make it sparkle.
The tasty recipe starts with a corny-but-classic script from veteran panto writer Eric Potts (also penning about a dozen others around the country this year), then stirs in plenty of laughs with a dazzling pair of ugly sisters, Chris Dennis and David Langham.
There’s some classy singing and dancing courtesy of West End star Louise Dearman as Cinders and a well-drilled troupe of villagers to delight any eye. And it’s marinated with some TV talent in the shape of smiley Anthea Turner as the fairy godmother and a top-form Bobby Davro securely steering the ship as Buttons.
For some reason, Mickey Rooney has decided he likes Britain in winter and has returned to repeat the Baron Hardup performance he gave the Sunderland Empire two years ago – though why this 89-year-old Hollywood legend feels the urge to totter out on stage every half-hour, utter a couple of lines, sit down for a bit then totter off again, is as much a mystery as why the theatre management should want to make him do it. Still, as Davro acknowledges, he’s a genuine superstar, so let’s not complain.
As always in Milton Keynes, the sets and costumes (Terry Parsons), lighting (David Howe) and music (Matthew Reeve) all make outstanding contributions to a polished, professional, traditional and utterly delightful experience.
If it all feels a little production-line manufactured, maybe that’s a small price to pay for the best-dressed, sparkliest, ho-ho-ho-inducing panto in the region. Again.
DREAMBOATS AND PETTICOATS
November 16, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until Saturday, November 21, then tour continues
JUKEBOX musicals have become something of a hackneyed formula these days, plundering an artist’s back catalogue for some old hits to string onto a flimsy storyline, to the extent that the description has almost become an insult.
Cue comedy legends Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran to the rescue.
The writing partnership with their very own back catalogue of TV hits – from Shine On Harvey Moon to The New Statesman, via Birds of a Feather, Goodnight Sweetheart and a host of others – have saved the sub-genre from mediocrity.
Invited by the record company owners to use tracks from their Dreamboats and Petticoats hit compilation albums for raw material, the duo have turned their hand to writing a stage musical. And done so in utterly winning style.
Their tale of tortured teenage romance within the walls of a 1961 youth club may be about as fresh as a pair of Billy Fury’s crepe shoes, but the raw energy and infectious enthusiasm they bring to it is every bit as lively and exciting as the kids who play it out in the theatre.
And that’s the other fantastic bit of news about this rollicking rock ’n’ roll show: the on-stage band simply blows the audience away. None of your pre-recorded backing tracks here – these are totally live, immaculately performed and utterly thrilling renditions of some of the best-known and loved songs of the era, woven seamlessly into the fun, frothy confection of Marks and Gran’s witty book.
Stand-out performers include Peter Gerald as the reminiscing older Bobby, Josh Capper as his younger self and Lauren Hood as the plain-Jane little sister Laura, while the actor-musicians creating the songs provide a superb back line throughout – including the show-stealing drummer (there’s a phrase you don’t use very often) Daniel Graham.
Direction from old hand Bob Tomson and some authentic choreography by Carole Todd keep the momentum building to a toe-tapping, unstoppable finale that brings the crowd inevitably – and willingly – to their feet.
THE SOUND OF MUSIC
October 28, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until Saturday, November 14, then tour continues
IT seems an awfully long time since Connie Fisher won that first search-for-a-West-End-star telly show, How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?
In those three years or so, she’s played the part several hundred times, both in London and now on tour. And she still lives up to her original on-screen pledge to play every performance as if it was opening night.
There’s no doubting her talent, her sincerity and her eagerness. She loves the role. And, with more than a hint of Julie Andrews charm in her portrayal, she looks as comfortable in the wimple as if she had been born to it.
The rest of the show is built around her, from Michael Praed’s curiously low-key Captain Von Trapp – who seems slightly too hidebound by the formality of his Austrian naval background – to the light touches of the Mother Abbess and the other convent dwellers.
And if everything seems a little underpowered, maybe that can be put down to the long run – by touring standards, at any rate – which sees the Rodgers and Hammerstein favourite harbouring in MK until the middle of November.
It’s a perfectly workmanlike show. The children are delightful, the thankless part of Max Detweiler amusingly inhabited by Martin Callaghan, and Margaret Preece and Jacinta Mulcahy perform admirably as the Abbess and Baroness Schraeder respectively.
It looks big – the sets and sheer numbers in the cast are both expansive – and sounds terrific, with a superb orchestra under the baton of Jonathan Gill wringing every nuance out of the sumptuous score.
So the overriding feeling of something a little less than the sum of its parts is hard to pin down. There’s no shortage of enthusiasm and talent, and lovers of the film will find plenty to amuse and entertain. And yet the memory of the ecstatic reception given to Connie when she first won the part leaves a sensation of something oddly missing from the overall spectacle.
Or maybe I’ve just got a heart of stone...
THE PITMEN PAINTERS
October 20, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until Saturday, October 24
WHEN people talk about Liverpool playwrights, there often seem to be only two: Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale. The same is rapidly becoming the case for Lee Hall and Tyneside.
The man behind Billy Elliot has been picked up and championed by the literati, and his latest work, The Pitmen Painters, is now being toured by the Royal National Theatre, although its cast is virtually intact from its origins at the Live Theatre in Newcastle.
It tells the true story of the Ashington Group, a club of miners who decided they wanted to learn about art in the 1930s, and whose subsequent efforts with the brush became acclaimed for their gritty realism and natural, untutored style.
Hall plays up the grim realities of the northern mining community, contrasting its poverty and working-class socialism with the upper-class caricature of their posh lecturer, Robert Lyon. The first half is immensely powerful and touching, with the miners struggling to come to terms with this strange new world and at odds with themselves over how to react to art.
In the second, which concentrates more on the individual story of one of the men, Oliver Kilbourn, there is a shift towards sentimentalism, and as soon as one feels manipulated by the hand of the playwright, the power disperses, reducing the potentially moving finale to a mawkish political statement.
None of this detracts from the excellence of the production, directed by Max Roberts and designed evocatively by Gary McCann.
All the performances are razor-sharp and rehearsed to perfection, and the interplay between the miners in particular is acutely judged and dazzlingly played.
It’s an evening of rich humour, considerable passion and more than a hint of sadness at a lost world with lost values.
THE STRIPPER
September 22, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until September 26, 2009
IT was a quarter before ten in a ritzy part of town. I’d just spent a couple of hours under cover with some well-dressed types, watching a bunch of crooners and hoofers in a new musical entertainment with the catchy handle of The Stripper.
This wiseguy O’Brien – Richard O’Brien – had taken a pulp fiction novel set in 1961 California, thrown a few jazzy numbers at it with a tunesmith named Richard Hartley, and put it up there on a stage for guys like me to spit at.
Like a dame in a Playboy centrefold, it looked good on paper. It had a pedigree longer than a Royal Corgi, some wisecracking one-liners with all the punch of a Smith and Wesson, and a central character played by Jonathan Wrather who could charm the pants off your maiden aunt.
And that was when it hit me: somebody killed the show. But who? And, more important for a dick like me, how?
I ran through the list of suspects. First up, the crooners. Nope – that Wrather kid was at the front of a queue of talent giving it all they’d got. Next up, the band. No dice: six crazy guys blowing their horns as tight as a strumpet’s corset.
The finger was pointing elsewhere. And there was a smoking gun in the hands of the technical crew. It had a smell. The cruel smell of conspiracy. The sticking set, the mistimed sound effects, the lousy vocal mix: it all added up to a lethal cocktail.
But still there was a nagging feeling at the back of my mind. Sure, these things were dangerous to a performer’s health, but were they really to blame?
Suddenly, from the shadows, a grinning figure stepped out. I should have known it all along – O’Brien. And right behind him came his director, Bob Carlton, waving the success of Return to the Forbidden Planet as his badge.
The show never stood a chance. Saddled with a lame plot, some painful lyrics besides the firecrackers, and a score full of almost great tunes that never quite made it out of the box, The Stripper was done for. It didn’t want to die – that was as plain as a bar of Bournville – but the heart wasn’t there.
I watched as the well-dressed types turned away and hurried off into the dark. It had been a sobering night. And I needed a drink.
RAIN MAN
September 14, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until September 19, 2009
CELEBRATING its tenth anniversary this year, it’s hard to argue with the calibre of top names that Milton Keynes Theatre is able to draw.
With a new season just unveiled that includes Connie Fisher in The Sound of Music, Bobby Davro headlining panto and the National Theatre on tour, there are stars aplenty and some big shows coming to the city of roundabouts.
Hot from a highly successful and acclaimed run London’s West End, the stage adaptation of hit movie Rain Man is the latest to arrive, complete with autistic turn from Men Behaving Badly star Neil Morrissey.
Having proved with Waterloo Road that he can do straight acting, Morrissey here stretches his range still further with a strong evocation of the part that Dustin Hoffman so memorably created on celluloid. And the characterisation is an eye-opener.
Besides the tics and quirks so carefully delivered in this fascinating performance, Morrissey brings a real warmth and depth to the character of Raymond, the autistic savant whose $12 million inheritance from his father incurs the wrath of a younger brother, Charlie, who hadn’t even known of his existence.
As Charlie, Oliver Chris is a fast-talking, cold-hearted embodiment of ambition whose journey – both geographical and emotional – with Raymond sees him unfurl and find his own true nature as well as that of his brother. The two performances are mutually complementary, endlessly illuminating and full of intelligence.
Dan Gordon’s script adaptation is inevitably somewhat episodic, with occasionally cumbersome sets slowing up the pace and vigour of the brothers’ road trip, while Hoffman and Tom Cruise are always going to be tough acts to follow.
But there’s a genuine soul at the heart of director Robin Herford’s production that carries it through any shortcomings and makes this more than simply an exercise in star casting.
DUET FOR ONE
September 8, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until September 12, 2009
MAYBE it’s something to do with the credit crunch, but some of the country’s top performers seem to be increasingly prepared to show off their skills around the regions these days.
Milton Keynes played host earlier this year to the dream pairing of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in the pre-West End tour of Waiting For Godot. Now it’s the turn of acting giants Juliet Stevenson and Henry Goodman.
The pair have hit the road after a highly successful London run in Tom Kempinski’s two-hander Duet For One. And the talent is an absolute joy to behold.
Stevenson, who seems to be able to command any emotion at the drop of a hat, whether on stage, film or television, gives a masterclass performance as Stephanie Abrahams, a concert violinist struggling to come to terms with the multiple sclerosis that has ended her career.
Almost entirely wheelchair-bound, Stevenson transcends the limitations of her physical confinement to plumb the character for all the richness of her tormented agonising. It’s painful, perfectly judged and utterly superb to watch.
Goodman plays her psychiatrist, Dr Feldmann, as an irritating know-it-all with hidden depths of his own emotion, which are slowly wrought to the surface by Stevenson’s verbal grappling. The gradual peeling off of the shrink’s layers is carefully paced, neatly executed and completely believable.
What is less certain is the strength of the raw material. Kempinski’s 1980 play won all sorts of awards and was turned into a film with Julie Andrews, but the memory of a searing, terrifying analysis of dealing with disease is not quite realised with this production, which originated at the Almeida.
Director Matthew Lloyd appears very hands-off, to his credit, and the psychiatrist’s treatment room is magnificently rendered by designer Lez Brotherston. But the passion expressed by the two participants is rarely matched by the dialogue, which now feels to have a tendency towards the pedestrian.
For all its faults, this is an elegant, classy show with a lot of depth and two beautiful performances at its heart.
SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN
May 20, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until May 23, 2009
TALK about a tough act to follow. The film version of Singin’ in the Rain is an iconic piece of 20th century entertainment history, and Gene Kelly’s splashing tap dance through the puddles is regularly voted one of the greatest movie moments of all time.
Even the stage version, adapted as late as 1980 by the original screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green, itself became a landmark production, giving Tommy Steele one of his biggest hits in a hit-filled career.
Now UK Productions are taking the show out on the road again, complete with those fabulous song-and-dance numbers, a superbly drilled live band and, yes, buckets of rain.
Stepping into the two-tone tap shoes is experienced leading man Tim Flavin – not quite a name of John Barrowman proportions, but with all the qualifications and bags of talent. He evokes Kelly’s matchless warmth and ease with understated charm, and both his voice and his feet are unquestionably up to the job.
The winning Flavin plays Don Lockwood, a silent movie star struggling to make the transition to the Talkies. Unfortunately, he’s held back by his co-star Lina Lamont, whose squeaky, irritating voice will spell the end of her career if a solution isn’t found.
That solution comes in the form of sweet-voiced Kathy Selden, who gamely dubs Lamont’s role on screen and naturally steals Don’s heart.
Jessica Punch makes a pleasant Kathy, the physical exertions of the role proving well within her capabilities.
But it’s Don’s sidekick Cosmo Brown – his long-term double-act partner and friend – who nabs the real glory, not unlike the underrated Donald O’Connor in the film.
Cosmo is played by the hugely talented and likeable Graeme Henderson, who also choreographs the show with more than a nod to Kelly’s screen direction. As a performer, Henderson is relaxed, confident and oh so nimble in a part that inherently plays second fiddle to the central pairing. But he also makes use of many of the film’s icons – the lamppost, the sofa tipping over, the clown routine in Make ’Em Laugh – to display a considerable flair on the other side of the footlights.
Director Alison Pollard, of course, has her own part to play in the way the show rattles along through its witty script and luscious numbers, and the resulting production is glossy, smooth and joyous. From the opening notes of the overture, you just can’t help whistlin’ that tune, tappin’ those toes and… well, singin’ in the rain.
LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS
May 11, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until May 16, 2009
HOWARD Ashman and Alan Menken are perhaps the most influential writers of American musicals in the past half century.
Who? Well, they wrote The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast for Disney, and before Ashman’s untimely death at the age of 40 in 1991, they had turned round the company’s fortunes and almost single-handedly revived the glory days.
Little Shop of Horrors had been their first major success back in 1982, based on a Roger Corman B movie and later transformed into a cult film itself. Now it’s touring the UK again in a production that originated at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory, which is fast building a reputation as the home of imaginative, revitalising revivals of half-forgotten classics.
The tale of a rundown florist’s shop in Skid Row, whose nerdy skivvy Seymour breeds a bloodthirsty, man-eating plant he calls Audrey II (after his secret love), is a flimsy piece of nonsense in itself. What lifts it to cult status is the work of the writer and composer, whose nifty little pop numbers and clever, witty lyrics are as fresh and biting today as they were nearly 30 years ago.
In director Matthew White’s production, the design by David Farley gives us a fabulously seedy Skid Row and a brilliantly realised Audrey II, amazingly brought to life by puppeteer Andy Heath.
Damian Humbley is a dorky but loveable Seymour, Clare Buckfield a sweet and sympathetic Audrey, and Alex Ferns camps it up outrageously in the Steve Martin role of the evil dentist Orin Scrivello, whose horrible antics come to a grisly end in the finale of Act One.
But it is the plant itself which always steals this show, and the extraordinary voice of Clive Rowe – who rightly emerges for a curtain call – is perfectly suited to this ‘mean, green mother from outer space’. From its first appearance as a foot-high plant pot to its all-singing, all-dancing finale in which it completely fills the stage, Audrey II is the star.
With the help of a really strong pit band under musical director Toby Higgins – although some of the sound balance makes it painfully hard to hear the singers – it’s easy to see why the show gets the enthusiastic reception it does.
AN INSPECTOR CALLS
April 28, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until May 2, 2009
IT’S hard to believe that this production has been around for almost 20 years now. Can there be any theatregoing folk left who haven’t caught up with it yet?
Well actually, yes. And I’m one of them. Although it’s equally hard to believe that I have somehow missed out on this amazing piece of theatre for this long.
Director Stephen Daldry’s version is widely credited with having rescued a 20th century masterpiece from the dreary doldrums of the rep circuit, miraculously transforming JB Priestley’s 1945 play from safe standby to, in the words of The Guardian’s Michael Billington, “urgent expressionist nightmare”.
And even after all this time on various West End stages and at least half a dozen tours, the show still packs a huge wallop, with its extraordinary set and powerful political allegory.
Daldry’s designer Ian MacNeil creates a vision of bleak post-war austerity, all shadows and smog, in the centre of which he places an Edwardian house on stilts, where the warm gaslight and upper middle-class pseudo-morality of the occupants look down – literally – on the working classes outside.
But as the titular Inspector invades this world and dissects it piece by piece through his incisive questioning, so the trappings of respectability disintegrate and the façade comes crashing down.
The Birling family members – each of whom, it unfolds, has had a part to play in the tragic suicide of a young girl – are uniformly excellent. David Roper and Sandra Duncan provide gravitas as the parents, Robin Whiting and Marianne Oldham are touchingly fragile as brother and sister Eric and Sheila, while Alisdair Simpson is nicely pompous as Sheila’s fiancé Gerald.
Louis Hilyer is, perhaps, less convincing as Inspector Goole, with a studiedly eccentric performance of tics, swoops and sudden shouts, but it’s hard to say how much of this is down to the direction and how much a misplaced effort to distinguish the mysterious copper from his quarry.
In any event, it’s the power of the play and the striking visual presentation of the director’s concept that carry the real weight in a production that looks set to keep on rolling for a good while yet.
GOD OF CARNAGE
March 24, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until March 28, 2009
WITH the play Art, Yasmina Reza put three people in a room together to philosophise about… well, art.
With God of Carnage, the French playwright puts four people into a room together to philosophise about… Actually, the obscurity of the title is a clue: this is a much less clear-cut piece of writing.
Ostensibly, it brings together two sets of parents, one of whose sons has supposedly bullied the other at school. The four are here to sort out the problem in a grown-up, amicable way.
The fact that in the space of 90-odd minutes with no interval they are reduced to slinging insults and scenery at each other amid the wreckage of a ruined Parisian apartment is, presumably, meant to say something about the childishness of adults or the innate violence of humanity.
And if Reza’s point (in Christopher Hampton’s translation) is less successfully made than in Art, and the whole thing feels as if it wants to be far more powerful than it actually is, the fault does not lie with the actors, each of whom plays their part in the gradual disintegration.
Richard E Grant invokes the spirit of Basil Fawlty at times in his portrayal of Alain, an uptight prig of a lawyer with one ear semi-permanently clamped to his mobile. As his wife Annette, Serena Evans turns in a well-judged performance, pitched between doormat and defiance.
In the opposite corner, Lia Williams as Veronique heads progressively for the borders of hysteria, while Roger Allam takes top honours as her husband Michel, ranging enthusiastically between referee and rum-soaked stirrer.
Director Mathew Warchus keeps things moving with pace and style on a blood-red set designed by Mark Thompson, and if the play itself struggles to move as a drama or amuse as a comedy, there’s no shortage of energy and commitment from the four players.
WAITING FOR GODOT
March 16, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until March 21, 2009
IF you want to find a more complete, sublime and classic example of theatrical excellence, you’ll have to go a pretty long way to beat this highly anticipated production.
Director Sean Mathias has assembled surely the dream cast of all dream casts for a revival of arguably the 20th century’s most seminal play. The result is triumphant on all possible counts.
Patrick Stewart can occasionally be a little lugubrious for my taste, but his pivotal performance as Vladimir, one of the two dishevelled tramps doing the titular waiting, is as fine a model of theatre acting as you could hope to see. He displays a wonderful deftness of touch with the comedy, matched by deep pathos in the more affecting passages, and he commands the stage every moment he’s there.
Beside him, Ian McKellen turns in an equally masterful performance as his partner, Estragon, his timing judged to perfection and his mannerisms acutely studied. Together they’re a peerless double act – a fact they understand and acknowledge, even down to the Flanagan and Allen routine at the rapturous curtain call.
But there’s more. Two veteran stalwarts of the profession, Simon Callow and Ronald Pickup, are on hand to lend meaty support in the difficult roles of Pozzo and Lucky, whose interruption of the waiting helps provide an uneasy passing of the time. Callow is majestically over the top as the bombastic Pozzo, while Pickup – in the toughest job of the four – offers a bizarre creation of dominated slavery with the aid of just his physical presence and one extraordinary monologue.
Among an evening of stunning dramatic quality, there are plenty of highlights, from the inspired precision with which Stewart and McKellen deliver Samuel Beckett’s carefully poetic dialogue to the decaying grandeur of Stephen Brimson Lewis’s amazing set.
At its heart, director Mathias retains a clear and defining sense of Beckett’s exploration of the absurd and nonsensical, creating as a result an utterly comprehensive, beautiful and flawlessly performed piece of theatre.
PACK OF LIES
March 9, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until March 14, 2009
NEARLY 50 years have passed since the events on which this play are based occurred in a leafy London suburb. At the time, with the Cold War raging, the notion of one’s friends and neighbours turning out to be Soviet spies must have seemed chilling.
Here, in veteran writer Hugh Whitemore’s adaptation of his own 1971 television play, the domesticity of the family drama is sharply contrasted with the world-shattering implications of treachery.
A stellar cast includes Jenny Seagrove, nervously fragile as housewife Barbara, whose life is first taken over, then torn apart, by the shadowy government agents who use her home as a surveillance post to watch the suspect neighbours, her best friends Helen and Peter.
Barbara’s husband Bob, played sympathetically by Simon Shepherd, struggles to protect his wife and teenage daughter in the tension between loyalty to the nation and loyalty to their friends.
Lorna Luft makes a brash appearance as Helen, while Daniel Hill – best known as Harvey from the TV sitcom Waiting for God – is the sinister authority figure of Stewart.
Among these central characters, Shepherd and Seagrove’s husband and wife emerge most convincingly as three-dimensional creations, trying to get their heads round the scale of the problem with which they have been confronted.
Unfortunately, the play itself can’t seem to get its head round it, and the very contrast of domestic drama with international espionage is what ultimately brings it down. Despite a beautifully accurate period set (Julie Godfrey), it’s all somehow too small. As the plodding narrative unfolds with implacable predictability, nothing much really happens and the characters are forced to reveal exposition and motives through monologues delivered straight out front – always a device that risks the criticism of cheating the audience.
Coupled with some leaden direction (Christopher Morahan) that leaves the actors too often standing square to each other delivering stiff lines, the production seems dated and pedestrian – a double disappointment given the dynamite nature of the source material.
COPPELIA
March 6, 2009
Russian State Ballet of Siberia, Milton Keynes Theatre until March 7, 2009
HELL, as Jean-Paul Sartre cheerily remarked, is other people. Maybe I should have listened to my sixth sense when the orchestra began tuning up. Most of my other five were certainly in for it.
I’ve not had a happy time. A woman nearby was wearing one of those overpowering, headache-inducing perfumes apparently designed specifically to assault one’s sense of smell. Somebody further along my row insisted on tapping their foot through the more rhythmic sections, sending an irritating shockwave through the floor, while the woman next to me rapped her long fingernails against the plastic glass she was holding.
All of which had the effect of seriously impairing my ability to take in what was occurring on stage and in the orchestra pit. Perhaps I should be grateful.
The Russian State Ballet of Siberia is touring the UK with a repertoire that includes Swan Lake, Giselle and The Nutcracker. This performance was Coppelia, surely the flimsiest excuse ever dreamed up for a man to wear tights, but drenched with lush Delibes tunes. At least, that was the theory.
To its credit, it was colourful. The huge corp seemed enthusiastic, in a Siberian kind of way, and I’m told the prima ballerina did a pretty good job. Never having jeteed in my life (outside the privacy of my own home), I’m not entirely qualified to comment.
What I could, as a layman, tell perfectly well was that the performance suffered an alarming lack of precision, which meant that ballerinas dancing in pairs or trios were too often slightly out of synch with each other, and the big ensemble sections looked just a little bit ragged round the edges.
This was echoed – indeed, amplified – in the pit where, among other things, a quarter-tone mistuned horn persisted throughout in rendering the beautiful music almost painful. Fingers down a blackboard could not have induced more nervous tension in the listener, and what should have been a visual and aural delight became instead an ordeal of survival. Thank God nothing happens in the second act and it’s all over in half an hour.
Sight, sound, smell and touch, all set on edge – which leaves taste. Let’s just say it wasn’t to mine.
THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK
February 23, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until February 28, 2009
THERE’S never really any doubt about the main attraction of The Witches of Eastwick, and the curtain-call whistles and whoops for Mr Marti Pellow merely serve to confirm the fact.
The Wet Wet Wet frontman leads the touring company in the role of the devil, here known as Darryl Van Horne, as he wreaks his special brand of randy havoc in the 1950s smalltown American community of Eastwick.
Inspired by the film which was based on the John Updike novel, this version has all the required elements of a proper Broadway musical – a fine score from Dana P Rowe, intelligent (if occasionally hard to hear) lyrics and book by John Dempsey, and a well-drilled staging from director Nikolai Foster.
Other plusses include an evocative set and costumes from designer Peter McKintosh and a brassy 10-piece pit band under the sound, confident baton of Tom Deering.
On stage, too, there are some excellent performances, notably from the trio of women who fall under Darryl’s evil spell. Ria Jones, Rebecca Thornhill and Poppy Tierney work terrifically as individuals and an ensemble and give the piece much of its coherence and pace, while there’s a superb cameo from Rachel Izen as the town busybody Mrs Gabriel.
Ultimately, of course, the success of the show rests on the horny devil at its heart, the part played most memorably by Jack Nicholson in the movie, and created in the West End by Ian McShane. Pellow has a deeply warm and sensuous singing voice, which is displayed to great effect in his musical numbers, but the decision to play Van Horne in a highly stylised, animalistic fashion makes it curiously awkward and exposes too many weaknesses in the delivery of dialogue and interplay with his co-stars.
Not that his many fans in the audience were bothered in the slightest. They were here to see their idol getting down and dirty, and he delivers in spades on that score.
SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS: THE SPONGE WHO COULD FLY
February 18, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until February 21, 2009
SUBLIME? Ridiculous? I’ve been to both ends of the spectrum this week. But if you’d asked me before Flashdance or Brief Encounter what I was likely to enjoy most, I doubt I’d have been saying Spongebob Squarepants.
But the reality is that this is a fabulous, fun-filled freak of a show with all the anarchic, off-the-wall humour of its cartoon original and a bunch of great songs besides.
Neatly timed to run at a child-friendly 90-odd minutes, it’s packed with all the wacky characters of Bikini Bottom (if you don’t have an under-10 you can skip this bit), from a lovable Patrick to a rather worryingly accurate Squidward, with Spongebob himself cavorting merrily in those square pants – and sometimes out of them – in his quest to fulfil his dream of flying with the jellyfish in Jellyfish Fields.
Mr Krabs, owner of the Krusty Krab, gets the best musical number, with a fantastic Broadway-style routine about the mighty dollar, entitled Kerching! But there are plenty of other smart and sassy songs sprinkled liberally through the production, raising it to a quality level far above your average children’s show.
All the things that make the Nickelodeon TV series so outstanding – the high production values, the perfectly judged puerile humour, the sharp wit to please the grown-ups – are replicated in this stage version.
I’d love to be able to give credit to the utterly dedicated 10-strong cast and superb crew who make the two-dimensional characters live and breathe, but unfortunately there is neither a programme nor a cast list available. They will have to take their plaudits in anonymity.
Suffice it to say that Spongebob Squarepants, against all expectations, snuck in and stole the title of Highlight of the Week. Now, all together: Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
December 13, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until Sunday, January 17, 2010
THOSE folk at First Family Entertainment have really got Christmas sussed.
They’ve figured out exactly what works best for a firecracker of a festive panto, and they’re prepared to throw money at it to make it sparkle.
The tasty recipe starts with a corny-but-classic script from veteran panto writer Eric Potts (also penning about a dozen others around the country this year), then stirs in plenty of laughs with a dazzling pair of ugly sisters, Chris Dennis and David Langham.
There’s some classy singing and dancing courtesy of West End star Louise Dearman as Cinders and a well-drilled troupe of villagers to delight any eye. And it’s marinated with some TV talent in the shape of smiley Anthea Turner as the fairy godmother and a top-form Bobby Davro securely steering the ship as Buttons.
For some reason, Mickey Rooney has decided he likes Britain in winter and has returned to repeat the Baron Hardup performance he gave the Sunderland Empire two years ago – though why this 89-year-old Hollywood legend feels the urge to totter out on stage every half-hour, utter a couple of lines, sit down for a bit then totter off again, is as much a mystery as why the theatre management should want to make him do it. Still, as Davro acknowledges, he’s a genuine superstar, so let’s not complain.
As always in Milton Keynes, the sets and costumes (Terry Parsons), lighting (David Howe) and music (Matthew Reeve) all make outstanding contributions to a polished, professional, traditional and utterly delightful experience.
If it all feels a little production-line manufactured, maybe that’s a small price to pay for the best-dressed, sparkliest, ho-ho-ho-inducing panto in the region. Again.
DREAMBOATS AND PETTICOATS
November 16, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until Saturday, November 21, then tour continues
JUKEBOX musicals have become something of a hackneyed formula these days, plundering an artist’s back catalogue for some old hits to string onto a flimsy storyline, to the extent that the description has almost become an insult.
Cue comedy legends Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran to the rescue.
The writing partnership with their very own back catalogue of TV hits – from Shine On Harvey Moon to The New Statesman, via Birds of a Feather, Goodnight Sweetheart and a host of others – have saved the sub-genre from mediocrity.
Invited by the record company owners to use tracks from their Dreamboats and Petticoats hit compilation albums for raw material, the duo have turned their hand to writing a stage musical. And done so in utterly winning style.
Their tale of tortured teenage romance within the walls of a 1961 youth club may be about as fresh as a pair of Billy Fury’s crepe shoes, but the raw energy and infectious enthusiasm they bring to it is every bit as lively and exciting as the kids who play it out in the theatre.
And that’s the other fantastic bit of news about this rollicking rock ’n’ roll show: the on-stage band simply blows the audience away. None of your pre-recorded backing tracks here – these are totally live, immaculately performed and utterly thrilling renditions of some of the best-known and loved songs of the era, woven seamlessly into the fun, frothy confection of Marks and Gran’s witty book.
Stand-out performers include Peter Gerald as the reminiscing older Bobby, Josh Capper as his younger self and Lauren Hood as the plain-Jane little sister Laura, while the actor-musicians creating the songs provide a superb back line throughout – including the show-stealing drummer (there’s a phrase you don’t use very often) Daniel Graham.
Direction from old hand Bob Tomson and some authentic choreography by Carole Todd keep the momentum building to a toe-tapping, unstoppable finale that brings the crowd inevitably – and willingly – to their feet.
THE SOUND OF MUSIC
October 28, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until Saturday, November 14, then tour continues
IT seems an awfully long time since Connie Fisher won that first search-for-a-West-End-star telly show, How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?
In those three years or so, she’s played the part several hundred times, both in London and now on tour. And she still lives up to her original on-screen pledge to play every performance as if it was opening night.
There’s no doubting her talent, her sincerity and her eagerness. She loves the role. And, with more than a hint of Julie Andrews charm in her portrayal, she looks as comfortable in the wimple as if she had been born to it.
The rest of the show is built around her, from Michael Praed’s curiously low-key Captain Von Trapp – who seems slightly too hidebound by the formality of his Austrian naval background – to the light touches of the Mother Abbess and the other convent dwellers.
And if everything seems a little underpowered, maybe that can be put down to the long run – by touring standards, at any rate – which sees the Rodgers and Hammerstein favourite harbouring in MK until the middle of November.
It’s a perfectly workmanlike show. The children are delightful, the thankless part of Max Detweiler amusingly inhabited by Martin Callaghan, and Margaret Preece and Jacinta Mulcahy perform admirably as the Abbess and Baroness Schraeder respectively.
It looks big – the sets and sheer numbers in the cast are both expansive – and sounds terrific, with a superb orchestra under the baton of Jonathan Gill wringing every nuance out of the sumptuous score.
So the overriding feeling of something a little less than the sum of its parts is hard to pin down. There’s no shortage of enthusiasm and talent, and lovers of the film will find plenty to amuse and entertain. And yet the memory of the ecstatic reception given to Connie when she first won the part leaves a sensation of something oddly missing from the overall spectacle.
Or maybe I’ve just got a heart of stone...
THE PITMEN PAINTERS
October 20, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until Saturday, October 24
WHEN people talk about Liverpool playwrights, there often seem to be only two: Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale. The same is rapidly becoming the case for Lee Hall and Tyneside.
The man behind Billy Elliot has been picked up and championed by the literati, and his latest work, The Pitmen Painters, is now being toured by the Royal National Theatre, although its cast is virtually intact from its origins at the Live Theatre in Newcastle.
It tells the true story of the Ashington Group, a club of miners who decided they wanted to learn about art in the 1930s, and whose subsequent efforts with the brush became acclaimed for their gritty realism and natural, untutored style.
Hall plays up the grim realities of the northern mining community, contrasting its poverty and working-class socialism with the upper-class caricature of their posh lecturer, Robert Lyon. The first half is immensely powerful and touching, with the miners struggling to come to terms with this strange new world and at odds with themselves over how to react to art.
In the second, which concentrates more on the individual story of one of the men, Oliver Kilbourn, there is a shift towards sentimentalism, and as soon as one feels manipulated by the hand of the playwright, the power disperses, reducing the potentially moving finale to a mawkish political statement.
None of this detracts from the excellence of the production, directed by Max Roberts and designed evocatively by Gary McCann.
All the performances are razor-sharp and rehearsed to perfection, and the interplay between the miners in particular is acutely judged and dazzlingly played.
It’s an evening of rich humour, considerable passion and more than a hint of sadness at a lost world with lost values.
THE STRIPPER
September 22, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until September 26, 2009
IT was a quarter before ten in a ritzy part of town. I’d just spent a couple of hours under cover with some well-dressed types, watching a bunch of crooners and hoofers in a new musical entertainment with the catchy handle of The Stripper.
This wiseguy O’Brien – Richard O’Brien – had taken a pulp fiction novel set in 1961 California, thrown a few jazzy numbers at it with a tunesmith named Richard Hartley, and put it up there on a stage for guys like me to spit at.
Like a dame in a Playboy centrefold, it looked good on paper. It had a pedigree longer than a Royal Corgi, some wisecracking one-liners with all the punch of a Smith and Wesson, and a central character played by Jonathan Wrather who could charm the pants off your maiden aunt.
And that was when it hit me: somebody killed the show. But who? And, more important for a dick like me, how?
I ran through the list of suspects. First up, the crooners. Nope – that Wrather kid was at the front of a queue of talent giving it all they’d got. Next up, the band. No dice: six crazy guys blowing their horns as tight as a strumpet’s corset.
The finger was pointing elsewhere. And there was a smoking gun in the hands of the technical crew. It had a smell. The cruel smell of conspiracy. The sticking set, the mistimed sound effects, the lousy vocal mix: it all added up to a lethal cocktail.
But still there was a nagging feeling at the back of my mind. Sure, these things were dangerous to a performer’s health, but were they really to blame?
Suddenly, from the shadows, a grinning figure stepped out. I should have known it all along – O’Brien. And right behind him came his director, Bob Carlton, waving the success of Return to the Forbidden Planet as his badge.
The show never stood a chance. Saddled with a lame plot, some painful lyrics besides the firecrackers, and a score full of almost great tunes that never quite made it out of the box, The Stripper was done for. It didn’t want to die – that was as plain as a bar of Bournville – but the heart wasn’t there.
I watched as the well-dressed types turned away and hurried off into the dark. It had been a sobering night. And I needed a drink.
RAIN MAN
September 14, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until September 19, 2009
CELEBRATING its tenth anniversary this year, it’s hard to argue with the calibre of top names that Milton Keynes Theatre is able to draw.
With a new season just unveiled that includes Connie Fisher in The Sound of Music, Bobby Davro headlining panto and the National Theatre on tour, there are stars aplenty and some big shows coming to the city of roundabouts.
Hot from a highly successful and acclaimed run London’s West End, the stage adaptation of hit movie Rain Man is the latest to arrive, complete with autistic turn from Men Behaving Badly star Neil Morrissey.
Having proved with Waterloo Road that he can do straight acting, Morrissey here stretches his range still further with a strong evocation of the part that Dustin Hoffman so memorably created on celluloid. And the characterisation is an eye-opener.
Besides the tics and quirks so carefully delivered in this fascinating performance, Morrissey brings a real warmth and depth to the character of Raymond, the autistic savant whose $12 million inheritance from his father incurs the wrath of a younger brother, Charlie, who hadn’t even known of his existence.
As Charlie, Oliver Chris is a fast-talking, cold-hearted embodiment of ambition whose journey – both geographical and emotional – with Raymond sees him unfurl and find his own true nature as well as that of his brother. The two performances are mutually complementary, endlessly illuminating and full of intelligence.
Dan Gordon’s script adaptation is inevitably somewhat episodic, with occasionally cumbersome sets slowing up the pace and vigour of the brothers’ road trip, while Hoffman and Tom Cruise are always going to be tough acts to follow.
But there’s a genuine soul at the heart of director Robin Herford’s production that carries it through any shortcomings and makes this more than simply an exercise in star casting.
DUET FOR ONE
September 8, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until September 12, 2009
MAYBE it’s something to do with the credit crunch, but some of the country’s top performers seem to be increasingly prepared to show off their skills around the regions these days.
Milton Keynes played host earlier this year to the dream pairing of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in the pre-West End tour of Waiting For Godot. Now it’s the turn of acting giants Juliet Stevenson and Henry Goodman.
The pair have hit the road after a highly successful London run in Tom Kempinski’s two-hander Duet For One. And the talent is an absolute joy to behold.
Stevenson, who seems to be able to command any emotion at the drop of a hat, whether on stage, film or television, gives a masterclass performance as Stephanie Abrahams, a concert violinist struggling to come to terms with the multiple sclerosis that has ended her career.
Almost entirely wheelchair-bound, Stevenson transcends the limitations of her physical confinement to plumb the character for all the richness of her tormented agonising. It’s painful, perfectly judged and utterly superb to watch.
Goodman plays her psychiatrist, Dr Feldmann, as an irritating know-it-all with hidden depths of his own emotion, which are slowly wrought to the surface by Stevenson’s verbal grappling. The gradual peeling off of the shrink’s layers is carefully paced, neatly executed and completely believable.
What is less certain is the strength of the raw material. Kempinski’s 1980 play won all sorts of awards and was turned into a film with Julie Andrews, but the memory of a searing, terrifying analysis of dealing with disease is not quite realised with this production, which originated at the Almeida.
Director Matthew Lloyd appears very hands-off, to his credit, and the psychiatrist’s treatment room is magnificently rendered by designer Lez Brotherston. But the passion expressed by the two participants is rarely matched by the dialogue, which now feels to have a tendency towards the pedestrian.
For all its faults, this is an elegant, classy show with a lot of depth and two beautiful performances at its heart.
SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN
May 20, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until May 23, 2009
TALK about a tough act to follow. The film version of Singin’ in the Rain is an iconic piece of 20th century entertainment history, and Gene Kelly’s splashing tap dance through the puddles is regularly voted one of the greatest movie moments of all time.
Even the stage version, adapted as late as 1980 by the original screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green, itself became a landmark production, giving Tommy Steele one of his biggest hits in a hit-filled career.
Now UK Productions are taking the show out on the road again, complete with those fabulous song-and-dance numbers, a superbly drilled live band and, yes, buckets of rain.
Stepping into the two-tone tap shoes is experienced leading man Tim Flavin – not quite a name of John Barrowman proportions, but with all the qualifications and bags of talent. He evokes Kelly’s matchless warmth and ease with understated charm, and both his voice and his feet are unquestionably up to the job.
The winning Flavin plays Don Lockwood, a silent movie star struggling to make the transition to the Talkies. Unfortunately, he’s held back by his co-star Lina Lamont, whose squeaky, irritating voice will spell the end of her career if a solution isn’t found.
That solution comes in the form of sweet-voiced Kathy Selden, who gamely dubs Lamont’s role on screen and naturally steals Don’s heart.
Jessica Punch makes a pleasant Kathy, the physical exertions of the role proving well within her capabilities.
But it’s Don’s sidekick Cosmo Brown – his long-term double-act partner and friend – who nabs the real glory, not unlike the underrated Donald O’Connor in the film.
Cosmo is played by the hugely talented and likeable Graeme Henderson, who also choreographs the show with more than a nod to Kelly’s screen direction. As a performer, Henderson is relaxed, confident and oh so nimble in a part that inherently plays second fiddle to the central pairing. But he also makes use of many of the film’s icons – the lamppost, the sofa tipping over, the clown routine in Make ’Em Laugh – to display a considerable flair on the other side of the footlights.
Director Alison Pollard, of course, has her own part to play in the way the show rattles along through its witty script and luscious numbers, and the resulting production is glossy, smooth and joyous. From the opening notes of the overture, you just can’t help whistlin’ that tune, tappin’ those toes and… well, singin’ in the rain.
LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS
May 11, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until May 16, 2009
HOWARD Ashman and Alan Menken are perhaps the most influential writers of American musicals in the past half century.
Who? Well, they wrote The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast for Disney, and before Ashman’s untimely death at the age of 40 in 1991, they had turned round the company’s fortunes and almost single-handedly revived the glory days.
Little Shop of Horrors had been their first major success back in 1982, based on a Roger Corman B movie and later transformed into a cult film itself. Now it’s touring the UK again in a production that originated at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory, which is fast building a reputation as the home of imaginative, revitalising revivals of half-forgotten classics.
The tale of a rundown florist’s shop in Skid Row, whose nerdy skivvy Seymour breeds a bloodthirsty, man-eating plant he calls Audrey II (after his secret love), is a flimsy piece of nonsense in itself. What lifts it to cult status is the work of the writer and composer, whose nifty little pop numbers and clever, witty lyrics are as fresh and biting today as they were nearly 30 years ago.
In director Matthew White’s production, the design by David Farley gives us a fabulously seedy Skid Row and a brilliantly realised Audrey II, amazingly brought to life by puppeteer Andy Heath.
Damian Humbley is a dorky but loveable Seymour, Clare Buckfield a sweet and sympathetic Audrey, and Alex Ferns camps it up outrageously in the Steve Martin role of the evil dentist Orin Scrivello, whose horrible antics come to a grisly end in the finale of Act One.
But it is the plant itself which always steals this show, and the extraordinary voice of Clive Rowe – who rightly emerges for a curtain call – is perfectly suited to this ‘mean, green mother from outer space’. From its first appearance as a foot-high plant pot to its all-singing, all-dancing finale in which it completely fills the stage, Audrey II is the star.
With the help of a really strong pit band under musical director Toby Higgins – although some of the sound balance makes it painfully hard to hear the singers – it’s easy to see why the show gets the enthusiastic reception it does.
AN INSPECTOR CALLS
April 28, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until May 2, 2009
IT’S hard to believe that this production has been around for almost 20 years now. Can there be any theatregoing folk left who haven’t caught up with it yet?
Well actually, yes. And I’m one of them. Although it’s equally hard to believe that I have somehow missed out on this amazing piece of theatre for this long.
Director Stephen Daldry’s version is widely credited with having rescued a 20th century masterpiece from the dreary doldrums of the rep circuit, miraculously transforming JB Priestley’s 1945 play from safe standby to, in the words of The Guardian’s Michael Billington, “urgent expressionist nightmare”.
And even after all this time on various West End stages and at least half a dozen tours, the show still packs a huge wallop, with its extraordinary set and powerful political allegory.
Daldry’s designer Ian MacNeil creates a vision of bleak post-war austerity, all shadows and smog, in the centre of which he places an Edwardian house on stilts, where the warm gaslight and upper middle-class pseudo-morality of the occupants look down – literally – on the working classes outside.
But as the titular Inspector invades this world and dissects it piece by piece through his incisive questioning, so the trappings of respectability disintegrate and the façade comes crashing down.
The Birling family members – each of whom, it unfolds, has had a part to play in the tragic suicide of a young girl – are uniformly excellent. David Roper and Sandra Duncan provide gravitas as the parents, Robin Whiting and Marianne Oldham are touchingly fragile as brother and sister Eric and Sheila, while Alisdair Simpson is nicely pompous as Sheila’s fiancé Gerald.
Louis Hilyer is, perhaps, less convincing as Inspector Goole, with a studiedly eccentric performance of tics, swoops and sudden shouts, but it’s hard to say how much of this is down to the direction and how much a misplaced effort to distinguish the mysterious copper from his quarry.
In any event, it’s the power of the play and the striking visual presentation of the director’s concept that carry the real weight in a production that looks set to keep on rolling for a good while yet.
GOD OF CARNAGE
March 24, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until March 28, 2009
WITH the play Art, Yasmina Reza put three people in a room together to philosophise about… well, art.
With God of Carnage, the French playwright puts four people into a room together to philosophise about… Actually, the obscurity of the title is a clue: this is a much less clear-cut piece of writing.
Ostensibly, it brings together two sets of parents, one of whose sons has supposedly bullied the other at school. The four are here to sort out the problem in a grown-up, amicable way.
The fact that in the space of 90-odd minutes with no interval they are reduced to slinging insults and scenery at each other amid the wreckage of a ruined Parisian apartment is, presumably, meant to say something about the childishness of adults or the innate violence of humanity.
And if Reza’s point (in Christopher Hampton’s translation) is less successfully made than in Art, and the whole thing feels as if it wants to be far more powerful than it actually is, the fault does not lie with the actors, each of whom plays their part in the gradual disintegration.
Richard E Grant invokes the spirit of Basil Fawlty at times in his portrayal of Alain, an uptight prig of a lawyer with one ear semi-permanently clamped to his mobile. As his wife Annette, Serena Evans turns in a well-judged performance, pitched between doormat and defiance.
In the opposite corner, Lia Williams as Veronique heads progressively for the borders of hysteria, while Roger Allam takes top honours as her husband Michel, ranging enthusiastically between referee and rum-soaked stirrer.
Director Mathew Warchus keeps things moving with pace and style on a blood-red set designed by Mark Thompson, and if the play itself struggles to move as a drama or amuse as a comedy, there’s no shortage of energy and commitment from the four players.
WAITING FOR GODOT
March 16, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until March 21, 2009
IF you want to find a more complete, sublime and classic example of theatrical excellence, you’ll have to go a pretty long way to beat this highly anticipated production.
Director Sean Mathias has assembled surely the dream cast of all dream casts for a revival of arguably the 20th century’s most seminal play. The result is triumphant on all possible counts.
Patrick Stewart can occasionally be a little lugubrious for my taste, but his pivotal performance as Vladimir, one of the two dishevelled tramps doing the titular waiting, is as fine a model of theatre acting as you could hope to see. He displays a wonderful deftness of touch with the comedy, matched by deep pathos in the more affecting passages, and he commands the stage every moment he’s there.
Beside him, Ian McKellen turns in an equally masterful performance as his partner, Estragon, his timing judged to perfection and his mannerisms acutely studied. Together they’re a peerless double act – a fact they understand and acknowledge, even down to the Flanagan and Allen routine at the rapturous curtain call.
But there’s more. Two veteran stalwarts of the profession, Simon Callow and Ronald Pickup, are on hand to lend meaty support in the difficult roles of Pozzo and Lucky, whose interruption of the waiting helps provide an uneasy passing of the time. Callow is majestically over the top as the bombastic Pozzo, while Pickup – in the toughest job of the four – offers a bizarre creation of dominated slavery with the aid of just his physical presence and one extraordinary monologue.
Among an evening of stunning dramatic quality, there are plenty of highlights, from the inspired precision with which Stewart and McKellen deliver Samuel Beckett’s carefully poetic dialogue to the decaying grandeur of Stephen Brimson Lewis’s amazing set.
At its heart, director Mathias retains a clear and defining sense of Beckett’s exploration of the absurd and nonsensical, creating as a result an utterly comprehensive, beautiful and flawlessly performed piece of theatre.
PACK OF LIES
March 9, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until March 14, 2009
NEARLY 50 years have passed since the events on which this play are based occurred in a leafy London suburb. At the time, with the Cold War raging, the notion of one’s friends and neighbours turning out to be Soviet spies must have seemed chilling.
Here, in veteran writer Hugh Whitemore’s adaptation of his own 1971 television play, the domesticity of the family drama is sharply contrasted with the world-shattering implications of treachery.
A stellar cast includes Jenny Seagrove, nervously fragile as housewife Barbara, whose life is first taken over, then torn apart, by the shadowy government agents who use her home as a surveillance post to watch the suspect neighbours, her best friends Helen and Peter.
Barbara’s husband Bob, played sympathetically by Simon Shepherd, struggles to protect his wife and teenage daughter in the tension between loyalty to the nation and loyalty to their friends.
Lorna Luft makes a brash appearance as Helen, while Daniel Hill – best known as Harvey from the TV sitcom Waiting for God – is the sinister authority figure of Stewart.
Among these central characters, Shepherd and Seagrove’s husband and wife emerge most convincingly as three-dimensional creations, trying to get their heads round the scale of the problem with which they have been confronted.
Unfortunately, the play itself can’t seem to get its head round it, and the very contrast of domestic drama with international espionage is what ultimately brings it down. Despite a beautifully accurate period set (Julie Godfrey), it’s all somehow too small. As the plodding narrative unfolds with implacable predictability, nothing much really happens and the characters are forced to reveal exposition and motives through monologues delivered straight out front – always a device that risks the criticism of cheating the audience.
Coupled with some leaden direction (Christopher Morahan) that leaves the actors too often standing square to each other delivering stiff lines, the production seems dated and pedestrian – a double disappointment given the dynamite nature of the source material.
COPPELIA
March 6, 2009
Russian State Ballet of Siberia, Milton Keynes Theatre until March 7, 2009
HELL, as Jean-Paul Sartre cheerily remarked, is other people. Maybe I should have listened to my sixth sense when the orchestra began tuning up. Most of my other five were certainly in for it.
I’ve not had a happy time. A woman nearby was wearing one of those overpowering, headache-inducing perfumes apparently designed specifically to assault one’s sense of smell. Somebody further along my row insisted on tapping their foot through the more rhythmic sections, sending an irritating shockwave through the floor, while the woman next to me rapped her long fingernails against the plastic glass she was holding.
All of which had the effect of seriously impairing my ability to take in what was occurring on stage and in the orchestra pit. Perhaps I should be grateful.
The Russian State Ballet of Siberia is touring the UK with a repertoire that includes Swan Lake, Giselle and The Nutcracker. This performance was Coppelia, surely the flimsiest excuse ever dreamed up for a man to wear tights, but drenched with lush Delibes tunes. At least, that was the theory.
To its credit, it was colourful. The huge corp seemed enthusiastic, in a Siberian kind of way, and I’m told the prima ballerina did a pretty good job. Never having jeteed in my life (outside the privacy of my own home), I’m not entirely qualified to comment.
What I could, as a layman, tell perfectly well was that the performance suffered an alarming lack of precision, which meant that ballerinas dancing in pairs or trios were too often slightly out of synch with each other, and the big ensemble sections looked just a little bit ragged round the edges.
This was echoed – indeed, amplified – in the pit where, among other things, a quarter-tone mistuned horn persisted throughout in rendering the beautiful music almost painful. Fingers down a blackboard could not have induced more nervous tension in the listener, and what should have been a visual and aural delight became instead an ordeal of survival. Thank God nothing happens in the second act and it’s all over in half an hour.
Sight, sound, smell and touch, all set on edge – which leaves taste. Let’s just say it wasn’t to mine.
THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK
February 23, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until February 28, 2009
THERE’S never really any doubt about the main attraction of The Witches of Eastwick, and the curtain-call whistles and whoops for Mr Marti Pellow merely serve to confirm the fact.
The Wet Wet Wet frontman leads the touring company in the role of the devil, here known as Darryl Van Horne, as he wreaks his special brand of randy havoc in the 1950s smalltown American community of Eastwick.
Inspired by the film which was based on the John Updike novel, this version has all the required elements of a proper Broadway musical – a fine score from Dana P Rowe, intelligent (if occasionally hard to hear) lyrics and book by John Dempsey, and a well-drilled staging from director Nikolai Foster.
Other plusses include an evocative set and costumes from designer Peter McKintosh and a brassy 10-piece pit band under the sound, confident baton of Tom Deering.
On stage, too, there are some excellent performances, notably from the trio of women who fall under Darryl’s evil spell. Ria Jones, Rebecca Thornhill and Poppy Tierney work terrifically as individuals and an ensemble and give the piece much of its coherence and pace, while there’s a superb cameo from Rachel Izen as the town busybody Mrs Gabriel.
Ultimately, of course, the success of the show rests on the horny devil at its heart, the part played most memorably by Jack Nicholson in the movie, and created in the West End by Ian McShane. Pellow has a deeply warm and sensuous singing voice, which is displayed to great effect in his musical numbers, but the decision to play Van Horne in a highly stylised, animalistic fashion makes it curiously awkward and exposes too many weaknesses in the delivery of dialogue and interplay with his co-stars.
Not that his many fans in the audience were bothered in the slightest. They were here to see their idol getting down and dirty, and he delivers in spades on that score.
SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS: THE SPONGE WHO COULD FLY
February 18, 2009
Milton Keynes Theatre until February 21, 2009
SUBLIME? Ridiculous? I’ve been to both ends of the spectrum this week. But if you’d asked me before Flashdance or Brief Encounter what I was likely to enjoy most, I doubt I’d have been saying Spongebob Squarepants.
But the reality is that this is a fabulous, fun-filled freak of a show with all the anarchic, off-the-wall humour of its cartoon original and a bunch of great songs besides.
Neatly timed to run at a child-friendly 90-odd minutes, it’s packed with all the wacky characters of Bikini Bottom (if you don’t have an under-10 you can skip this bit), from a lovable Patrick to a rather worryingly accurate Squidward, with Spongebob himself cavorting merrily in those square pants – and sometimes out of them – in his quest to fulfil his dream of flying with the jellyfish in Jellyfish Fields.
Mr Krabs, owner of the Krusty Krab, gets the best musical number, with a fantastic Broadway-style routine about the mighty dollar, entitled Kerching! But there are plenty of other smart and sassy songs sprinkled liberally through the production, raising it to a quality level far above your average children’s show.
All the things that make the Nickelodeon TV series so outstanding – the high production values, the perfectly judged puerile humour, the sharp wit to please the grown-ups – are replicated in this stage version.
I’d love to be able to give credit to the utterly dedicated 10-strong cast and superb crew who make the two-dimensional characters live and breathe, but unfortunately there is neither a programme nor a cast list available. They will have to take their plaudits in anonymity.
Suffice it to say that Spongebob Squarepants, against all expectations, snuck in and stole the title of Highlight of the Week. Now, all together: Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
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