Monthly Archives: August 2021

ARTHUR SMITH CONJURES UP HIS DAD

    These days our Arfur comes complete with an overture!  It takes the form of Kirsty Newton at the piano (artfully disguised as an upright 1940’s pub-battered joanna, in front of some equally retro wallpaper and a modest screen for the pics).   She appears in a fine and equally retro print frock,  to storm through My Old Man’s a Dustman,  Follow the Van, Tipperary etc while we settle down (in my case in the smart new Mercury in Colchester,  but it’s a tour of one-nighters so heaven know where you’ll be, see below).

       Then on comes Arthur Smith,  and we see that undimmed by lockdown-year is his tendency to merriment and causing merriment, whether in  Barry-Cryer-type gags, geezerish challenges to the audience,  or unmatchable stories.  So we’re soon into this tale:   a memorial ramble around the life and times of his late father Syd Smith.  He was a WW2 veteran of El Alamein, a Colditz prisoner  and  a South London copper.   Syd wrote a journal of much of his life in straightforward, dryly humorous police-report prose:   a handwritten volume which Arthur at the lectern cherishes,  and from which he reads the odd excerpt. 

         The timeline of the story moves zig-zag style, illustrated from time to time with photos and at one point with some wartime footage.  First come the postwar police experiences, with Arthur donning a helmet and jacket to conjure up  both the boredom of the beat and the duties of a good cop towards  Sarf London drunkards.  It’s very funny.  We love Syd already.

         Then it rolls back to the war and El Alamein and hardship and fear, slave labour in copper mines,  then lighter duties at Colditz  where he reckons he was sent to assist the posher officer-class.  He found it pretty cushy.   This experience is  interspersed with Arthur’s own time as a student layabout in 1968 in Paris, demonstrating about things he hadn’t really thought much about, but the shouting was fun.  In one way this double-vision narrative of 1944 and 1968 is distracting, but in another (something which our host could well point up a bit more sharply)  it provides an ironic contrast between the two teenage experiences, and reminds us how our postwar boomer generation lucked out compared to its Dads.     Kirsty Newton pops out from behind the piano to play some of the women they each encounter. 

        And they both sing a few songs, she expertly,  he with characteristic fearlessness (some of us wish he would do his Leonard Cohen show more often).   Many of the songs chosen work in context,   like the Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset,  or a mournful “That’s no way to say goodbye”  when Syd gets a dear-John letter in Colditz from the girl he would have married.   Others are less so, and slow things up a bit.   

           But even then, you mainly think two things.  One is  “This is like a long session in a pub.  Bloody hell, I wish Arthur would come and liven up our local” .  The other is that we really love Syd  almost as much as we’ve always loved Arfur.  That’ll do. 

box office     https://www.arthursmith.co.uk/gigs/   for tour detail. 

   Wallingford and Guildford next weekend 10/11 and so onward across the land for weeks..

rating four

THEATRE’S FAIRY GODFATHER DOES IT AGAIN

We needed this. The return of the big classic shows to packed houses  in the Barbican, Chichester and Sadlers Wells has been invigorating, but Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella is brand new, a lockdown baby strugglingly finished,created and finessed  with once -unimaginable difficulties (dance auditions online…). It’s opened, closed, suffered pings, and cost Lord LW huge sums to back even while the old trouper campaigned and researched Covid-Safety. I wanted to like the actual show. Luckily, I really did.

  Who could not? Emerald Fennel’s exuberant version of the old tale is a sparky modern rom-com, led by a fabulous Carrie Hope Fletcher as the grungy, rebellious Bad Cinderella,  not only slaving for a stepmother but amusing herself in prim Belleville with a bit of vandalism, and a boy-girl friendship with weedy Prince Sebastian, while the foxy Queen and her court of leaping, leather-fetish hunks mourn the manly elder brother, Charming. The opening town scenes are a wicked inversion of old Brigadoonery, as a jolly chorus turns to a pitchfork mob against our sturdy heroine, the “unpleasant peasant, unwelcome present”.   Rebecca Trehearn’s nymphomaniacal queen (that first crinoline is positively explicit) turns out to have an old frenemy in Victoria Hamilton Barritt’s huskily bitchy Stepmother. The motive for the hasty royal marriage ball is the  tourist trade.  Sebastian is a pawn, mocked by the leathery hunks with their choreographed circuit-training push-ups and burpees. 

    The brilliant trick is the show’s have-cake-and-eat-it ability to debunk all the traditional glamour and romance while actually indulging it:  the central couple may address each other with lines like “Shut up you knob!” and question their inner motives in a very modern angsty way, and the transformation scene is actually a powerful and sinister attack on the love-island cult of cosmetic surgery.  But  we still have the spectacular costumes and oh-wow scenery, and the famous revolve of the entire front stalls for the ball scene, bringing the cast breathtakingly closer to every seat, and of course the music.  

    It’s ALW all the way: there’s the overture that tantalises you by  nearly turning into every tune you ever hummed from Loch Lomond to Lady Gaga, the pastiche nostalgia of a French accordion sequence,  a few gorgeous power ballads (Ivano Turco throws it out there as Sebastian, Hope Fletcher moves with fabulous ease between pathos and raucous)  and plenty of big orchestral emotion (are there really only nine musicians up there?)
   So yes, he’s done it, the old fox.  Got the right author, right lyricist, right director, designer and team, and with them pulled the perfect rabbit from his big, glittery-witty, musical revolving top hat. Respect.

BOOKING@LWTHEATRES.CO.UK running well into 2022 I bet

rating five

      Occupied France, 1944.  Two teenagers newly in love meet in an empty house.   Elodie is French,  Otto a German soldier.  They are both endearing and annoying, as befits their age:  she has pinched an unhatched egg from a neighbour’s bombed chicken-coop but has blood on her hands because (symbolism alert!) a fox had got in.  They lay it = in a bed of feathers together.  Something moves outside, a plane flies over,  he crouches in terror, gun out.  She stays jokey.  He speaks of the dullness of Dusseldorf and how he is looking forward to his upcoming trip to England: word is that the invasion is imminent.   

     Twenty minutes pass.  A bomb falls on the local church, and sweary, anticlerical Elodie is pleased because there’s some haunting rumour about an abusive priest there.   ~She  worries about keeping the room nice as “Mrs Levy”, her former boyfriend’s Mum,  always does.

   Otto tells her Mrs Levy won’t be coming back.   “I know what she is. We’ve taken care of her”.   He expatiates on how important it is, this great work for a beautiful future – “One people and they’re all born good”.  He is in love with Mr Hitler, as much almost as with this girl.  He tells her about his previous day’s work on a firing squad, shooting her old teacher and, it appears, quite likely having shot Mrs Levy’s son.    He is not pleased when she tells him the radio has revealed that the Americans are in Normandy, Paris has fallen, and there’s no way he’s going to England.  “You’ve lost”.  A Lancaster roars overhead (it’s a very classy soundscape, by Katy Hustwick,  and a thoughtful design by Niall McKeever)

      As scenes continue we flip forward to the liberation , his death, and the humiliating head-shaving awaiting her as a “Nazi’s whore”, then backward to their first meeting, and forward to the hatching of the chick, a stolen moment of innocence. 

        Rita Kalnejais’ play holds attention for its 70 minutes all right,  and Katie Eldred and a heroically bleached-blond Freddie Wise are compelling, very much any pair of modern teenagers (though perhaps without the social conscience).   Otto’s feeling that he gets ‘respect’ through his uniform is convincing, though Elodie’s ability to screen out the fact that her neighbours and family have been persecuted and shot by the same uniforms as her lovers is a bit startling. Maybe some teenagers did.   When Chirolles Khalil’s production  works it is by laying out before us the hopelessness of innocence in a savage wartime world,  and underlining the banality of evil.  Indeed the opening scene stays banal for so long one almost loses patience, until revelations of Otto’s attitude and his actions under orders jerk you back. 

    So I was halfway there with it, assisted by the fact that this little theatre has shown some of the best (often contemporaneous) plays about the second world war and the years leading up to it.  But much of the potential strength of this small sad, typical story is sapped by the author’s modern pretentiousness,  framing it in unconnected good-resolution voiceovers in the general tone of teenage “If I could do it again”  coffeemug mottoes: about wearing your hair down and believing in love. Maybe if I was younger and less jaded I would be moved by this rather than irritated…

    I wanted to like it more than I did.  If I had teenage kids I would take them, because they would learn much about war, and France, and the limitations of romance.    And it’s an interesting, accomplished attempt, with two fine performances. 

Box office jermynstreettheatre.co.uk   To. 11 September

Rating three.

NOT A REVIEW BUT MIGHT SEND YOU THERE…

Take this as a report not a review, because actual work commitments made me skip at the interval.  But I was persuaded to the long 70 minute first half by a friend, who said “kill for a ticket” . And also by doubt. by having heard about the Spitlip  ensemble as clever, musical, inventively eccentric and – unusually –  60%female comedy troupe. Also I knew for years about the 1943 war office Deception Plan of the title, devised in part by Ian Fleming and recorded in the book The Man Who Never Was , later in Ben MacIntyres book Operation Mincemeat, and in a stiff upper lipped 1956  film lately on TalkingPicturesTV. There’s a new one out in 2022 I see. 

       Anyway, the scheme  was grisly: to persuade the Germans we were invading Sardinia not Sicily, by dressing the corpse of a tramp as  a pilot  with a briefcase of fake plans, and taking it refrigerated by submarine to wash ashore in Spain.  The body came complete with fake personal papers, receipts, theatre tickets and a love letter. Bill never existed in reality, but the paper trail was meticulous, spyproof.

        It worked. But was this something for a band of young singing, dancing, mocking 21c comics to turn into a cabaret show?

I  did wonder, which is why even knowing I’d miss the denouement, I bought a ticket. Southwark after all rarely disappoints. 

      So I cant star rate it, but can faithfully tell you that yes, it works and you’ll not regret it.  It starts full-on jokey, with the three women enjoying being absurd male MI5 stiffs, carolling about being born to lead, with the browbeaten nerd scientist Charles and, deliciously, Jak Malone as a prim Moneypenny. Character comedy doesn’t come much lovelier than a balding chap in a rumpled grey shirt channelling with deadly accuracy a middle aged government clerklady of the 1940s.  

     Until he morphs effortlessly into an  disgracefully guyed Bernard Spilsbury, coroner who locates a body.  Despite the squeamishness of the officials   All good fun. 

      But just as I started to wonder again about the treatment of war and death this way, like all good comedy troupes they turn it round to empathetic humanity. The love letter has to be written,  from the fictitious Bill’s fictitious girlfriend. And after a sentimental aria about birds from two others, Malone’s  Moneypenny primly reminds us that some of them have been through one war already..and she sings the most heartbreakingly , deliberately banal and restrained of wartime love letters.  We guess she had lost a boy, and says…”anything that gives any of those boys a fighting chance”…

    . And suddenly we are on the docks and the five are submarine crew singing deep and sailorlike,  plainer and more serious again, leaving the bright patter songs and clever rhymes alone, just men the mysterious container. Then there is  a nightclub burlesque where the team try to relax, intercut with the moment when the sub crew , horrifiedly obedient, send the body to its destiny.  

       I may go again. Meanwhile, do give it a go yourself.. /Friend who was able to stay says it goes on being wonderful…

          This  is the Mercury rising, rebuilt over two years with a cool café and dance studio, modern eco-glazing and, to respect the town’s history,  a solemn archaeological display of Roman bricks and copper alloy nose-hair tweezers they found underneath.  It’s good sense to reopen with a family-friendly lark: Ken Ludwig’s take on Sherlock Holmes’ adventure with the Hound of the Baskervilles.   It helps that many, like me, remember from childhood the atmospheric terror of the Great Grimpen Mire and the dog with shining jaws,  while actually forgetting who the killer was. 

           It’s a jokey five-actor show in the tradition of the  Reduced-Shakespeare-Company or National Theatre of Brent with a great many hats and wigs,  but has some impressively detailed sudden costume changes.  There are classily brilliant sets and projections  by Amy Jane Cook and Louise Rhoades-Brown,  plenty of theatrical smoke and unexpected trapdoor-work.   Richard Ede remains Holmes throughout and Eric Stroud a mournfully nerdish Watson,  while the other three whip through 38 others from Baker Street to Dartmoor  and an opera house finale.   Phil Yarrow  and  Marc Pickering  are elegant shape-shifters, Naomi Petersen is all the women and two urchins. Seasoned Vaudeville jokes abound: fake wind,  running-on-the spot, an upright bed, talking portraits and at one point the traditional profile gag: an actor in half a suit and half a beard, changing character by whipping round to face the other way.  Never fails, that one.

    Fast small-troupe comedies like this always work best with a degree of knowing self-mockery between the players.   Yarrow and Petersen are both improv veterans  but  this element was a bit tentative at first, maybe rusty after the long performance famine which actors, as well as us audiences, have glumly endured.  But it grows in the second act,  and their glee will ripen as the run goes on.  The new surround-sound system, by the way, does very well indeed by the Dartmoor gales and the virtual Hound. Brrr, Grrr. 

mercurytheatre.co.uk   to 22 August 

rating 4

WONDERFUL OLD COBBLERS ON  ABDICATION STREET 

(longer version of review done for Mail)

      You know you’re in safe hands when a stagestruck Prince Edward, diffident and excitable,   bumbles through the curtains to explain that in this family show he does all the “utility parts” in lots of costumes.   Indeed his first role is as a banquet waiter at a Coronation feast as the tabs open.  Suddenly to gales of laughter a leering Andrew is manhandled out of the front row by a cross usherette, for not having  a ticket.  I saw this on the day he was formally sued by Ms Giuffre.  Imagine the audience reaction…

       The idea of the deliciously rambling plot is that the Queen has abdicated :   Charles in Coronation robes sings  triumphantly how he was as a youth always told  “Be a man!  Be a man! Be tough, be male, be brutish, like your sister Princess Anne!”.   Anxious William and Kate look on.  . Cut to Meghan and Harry in yoga poses, podcasting about compassion while their wheatgrass smoothies are served by the galumphing maid, Fergie (Sophie Louise Dan is glorious).  Back home in the UK Beatrice and Eugenie,  in drawling Sloane voices and insane fascinators, gallantly start a campaign to prove their father’s innocence…

           I loved the Channel 4 spoof by Bert Tyler Moore and George Jeffrie, with Harry Enfield as a deluded megalomaniac Charles, a scheming Camilla and a family of well-meaning dolts with peculiar (and not very royal) pronunciations – “MeGUN” etc.  It is oddly innocent, as only wild exaggeration can be:  less savage than the old Spitting Image and  far less damaging  than the sly inventions of The Crown and  the “insider” gossip reports on which they often seem to be based.   I did wonder whether Enfield’s muggingly preposterous Charles act could fill a West  End stage,  but blessedly,  it doesn’t have to.   Though only three of the TV cast join him – Matthew Cottle’s priceless Edward, Tom Durant-Prichard’s vacant well-meaning Harry and Tim Wallers’ Andrew – this is a joyful ensemble.  We know it has been put together pretty fast, as the Prince of Wales theatre (ha ha)  loses the ghastly racist Book of Mormon,  but they seem to have had fun with it. 

    Anyway,  Camilla’s scheming has made Charles absolute monarch, enabling him to return Britain to his peasant-rich ideal of “chaps with lutes going round maypoles” . Politicians and civil servants were all “ easily bought off with knighthoods”, and they send kindly Wills and Kate on a long world tour.

     Which of course involves LA where the Sussex and Cambridge duchesses have a magnificent physical catfight over who made who cry.   But when they find Britain a  feudal state dominated by Camilla as  Elizabeth I ,  the fab four are reconciled , and resolve to lead a democratic  revolution. There’s  a wickedly funny snog-off in  a yurt in their encampment (amazing what you can suggest with shadow-play)   and some ripe latrine jokes (this show is sweary and rude throughout).  

      No spoilers, because the fun lies in the pile-up of nonsense, all the way to a Stonehenge crisis when we are asked to revive a  royal Tinkerbell  by shouting “We believe in constitutional monarchy!”. Everyone did.  A few huffy blokes behind me but in the end they had to join in. 

       It sails near the wind-  Tracy Ann Oberman as Camilla sings “Diana – Goddam her!” to gasps as well as cheers – but the big numbers are  more village-panto than Broadway. That’s good, because it feeds a sense of  family ridicule rather than satire. The ensemble at last sings:  “We always do our duty, and never-ever fuss – we are the Windsors! – God Save US!”.  Then Enfield explains that it would be inappropriate for them to bow at the curtain call,  so we all have to stand up and bow to them, while they wave..

   Given our national relish for both monarchy and  rude jokes, my instinct is that this one will reign and reign. 

Rating.  Four 

FLOODS OF RELIEF

Ten years have passed since, in a Times Chief Theatre Critic hat, I last saw a former principal  of the Royal Ballet  leaping in puddles , singing his great heart out, and propelling skeins of water into the front rows with the debonair precision of a British Baryshnikov and the joyful grin of a teenager.  Unforgettable.  Everyone fell for Adam Cooper.   I remember running into the director Jonathan Church in the interval,  and pleadingly saying “O please tell me that he’s a good guy as well as..all that?” To which he replied “the nicest human being on the planet!”. Sometimes one needs to know such things to complete the joy.  I can appreciate horrible human beings who are actually great actors,  but it’s nice to know when they’re not. 

       That watery moment, has been something to dream about in this terrible long drought of live performance. And last night there was the complete miracle again:   spray and song and laughter and pizazz, high-kicks in camisoles and a custard pie,  spoofy jokes on the black and white film clips playing st 1920 absurdity,  and Cooper using his dancer’s body not only to tap and twirl and soak the front rows but to recreate the absurdities of early cinema mime-show.   It had come home to us, to a packed London house:  a glory of nonsensical, nostalgia in which theatre pays homage to a movie about  the days when the movies paid homage to vaudeville and to hoofing Broadway legend. A self-referential multilayered trifle to comfort us after the long fast. 

      Jonathan Church’s glorious revival, with Andrew Wright’s fabulously witty (and fabulously demanding)  choreography, transferred from Chichester to the West End and toured; should have been touring internationally  these last eighteen months, with varying casts but always that central marvel of Cooper, who it turned out is as much a likeable actor and pleasing singer as great dancer.   Instead of that world tour, the principal has admitted that as theatre and its people were left to dwindle by a neglectful government, he tried for delivery driver jobs and universal credit.

      So it’s fair to be emotional. We all were. Waves of applause met every big number even before the deluge. Nor was it only for the star: Charlotte Gooch as Kathy and Kevin Clifton are both Strictly veterans,  and more than able to handle the character-comedy elements of the big numbers. The erotic-balletic displays in the second act are spectacular, but the ability the three principals have to seem to stumble and pratfall in the midst of a fast tap or vaudeville number is real class. As they tumble backwards together over a park bench you fear for their insurers and their skulls. 

      And, suddenly sober, fear for their show and their art and the huge daft beauty of their lately abused trade. Let them not be pinged off. Please.  

box office sadlerswells.com   to 5 sept

rating five music n dance mice

A VOICE FROM THE 90’s PREFIGURES THE FUTURE…

    This is a grand intellectual teaser of a show, and under Lucy Bailey’s almost mischievous direction does a good job of shaking up fashionable preconceptions about David Mament’s 1992 play. It’s often cited as his prediction of the MeToo, cancel-culture age which didn’t kick off properly for another decade. Though of course American academia is always ahead of the curve on troublesome developments,  and this one is set in the book-lined study of a liberal arts academic,  meeting – in three separate interludes – with a student ,  female and from a less privileged cohort. She is not doing well on his course and starting to question what he means by  his rather airily patronizing ideas about how higher-education is just ‘hazing’ and delaying adolescence.   

        It’s a play which tends to split opinions . Some think the lecturer is a horrid patriarch who is both patronizing and “grooming” the young woman who accuses him of these things and who regards as sexual rapacity his paternal touching of her shoulder and offer of solo tuition.  Others think the young woman is  an arrogant pain, one of the prim and pitiless young who have in the decades since pretty much taken over the world of judgement and cancellation. When the lecturer, preoccupied by calls from his wife over a tricky house purchase,  finally cracks in fury at his ruined career the thing which sends him over the top (spoiler alert, but its a 20yr old play) is her censorious aside as she listens to his phone call  “don’t call your wife Baby”.   

       But the joy of Bailey’s production, with Jonathan Slinger and Rosie Sheehy, is that she gives just enough to each side – until the final rage at least – and lets Slinger make the lecturer more of a confused, warmhearted human than a Mamettian patriach.   Buy Sheehy,  lounging arrogantly in her jeans or finally done up in a print frock and heels, sldo gets all her say, and her vulnerability is acknowledged while,  to be brutal, her sanctimonious judgmentalism rouses in the viewer an unbecoming stifled desire to chuck a bucket of water over her.. 

       The pace is cunning:  the first section just slow enough to make you think “actually, this man is a boring berk” ,  the second rising to a sense of real danger and hid unwisdom,  combined with a householderly sympathy for the fact that his job and new house are in danger while all the young woman is risking is, frankly, her self-esteem and dignity in the “support group” of the student body she is clearly driving.  For a while you think yes , the man’s a berk, but a well meaning and innocent one.  Then comes the final showdown when there is a sudden reversal of abusiveness, as  after her victimly “I speak for those who suffer what I suffer” becomes more sinister as she puts forward her group’s bonkers demands to have books banned and he fires up with liberal fury  – God, Mamet was ahead of the game there!.  And the disaster happens. And you see that both sides are pretty much hell,  but unfortunately blokes tend to be stronger.   

     I am not a Mamet-fan as a rule, his last one bored me rigid.  But  both performances were superb, subtly nuanced and horribly believable,  so finally this confection of elitism, sexual , psychological and academic politics was an awful sort of treat.   I am glad I bought a late-impulse ticket for a supposedly restricted view which was, in fact, fine.  WIth a slight inclination of the head.  

Artstheatrewestend.co.uk.  To. 23 October.   

Rating four 

VICARIOUS TRAVEL, JUST WHAT WE NEED

   The big musicals are back: two dark-edged, South Pacific at Chichester and Carousel imminent at Regent’s Park, while  halfway between them flowers this delicious, de-lovely, entirely happy lark.    Cole Porter at his sharpest sails his three-funnelled liner on the way to Yurrup:  SS America,  shipping American dreams and fantasies of 1934.  There are  celebrity gangsters and torch-singers, big stock-exchange money and big energy, jazzy lapdancers and a touching belief that  poor old England is best represented by a silly-ass in tweeds who doesn’t understand words like smooch. 

       Add a book co-written by PG Wodehouse, master-designer of silly-asses and sporting gals who invent mad plots to help their chums,   and you’re there.  So are we,  rejoicing in a packed and unmasked house – my first since Covid – where the first glimpse of the conductor bobbing up in  a captain’s hat brought a roar of happy glee.  Already an achievement,  given that the Barbican Theatre is the most dispiriting auditorium in the country:    cavernous yet claustrophobic.  It says much that for once,   that didn’t matter.  The roars of joy kept coming,  starting  at the line “there’s no cure like travel..’.  

         Kathleen Marshall’s direction is straight-up classic Broadway (none of the mischievous camp-edges of Daniel Evans’ gorgeous 2015 touring production) and at its heart is a straight-up Broadway royalty in Sutton Foster’s Reno.  In a series of memorable evening dresses and one sailor-suit she is a smiling, wisecracking well-seasoned stormer, the sort of legend who can lead a massive, all-singing, mass tap routine at the end of the first half and still whirl round with enough breath to hit the money-note.   She dominates – as she should – Samuel Edwards’ rather bland Billy, but finds her true match onstage as well as in-book when Haydn Oakley is at last released from the Jacob-Rees-Moggy tweedy-twit character in the final scenes to growl and swing from the prom deck with the Gypsy in his soul.    There’s a pretty fine match for her too in Robert Lindsay ,  deploying his favourite cuff-shooting, shrugging, hat-tipping gangster mode as Moonface,  never missing a beat or a gag. 

     What more can I say?  All the set-pieces are rocking treats,  the choreography of the charismatic revival-meeting positively alarming (Marshall also choreographs).  The set is elegant, and  the seagull-on-wire only crashed into the funnels once. It got applause of its own, that bird,  because hell, we were all just so damn happy to be back and crowded, and making a noise.  

        And so, by the look of it, were the cast.    

barbican.org.uk  to 17 October

rating five, with musicals-mouse