Monthly Archives: August 2024

I IMPERSONATION, ILLUSION AND INTRIGUE

          Cottonwool clouds, a scatter of furniture and instruments, an ancient cine camera, a noble arch and some pillars and fake trees. On a 1920s film set, the director’s bawling megaphone shouts  at ten invisible extras trying to be a throng (‘seven years of fascism and they can’t even walk straight”) .  A chap on a hobbyhorse with wheels arrives dressed as Zeus while the director snaps “i’m refracting reality through the dreams of Achilles”. A  chap in commedia del’arte magician’s striped pantaloons arrives saying “I am the maestro and the air is servant to me”, before  turning a flame into a rose and levitating a table while falling instantly and operatically in love with the  director’s sister. 

       It’s a very good start, admit it. This little theatre under the thundering Charing Cross trains always suits an oddball musical, ideally of modest scale and massive eccentricity, and this is a forgotten late-18c comic operetta about love, women’s rise, Enlightenment science and magic tricks. Only   retold and set in the 1920’s, with an  Italian illusionist on the run from Mussolini and from the  Catholic Church’s  ban on conjurers.  Got it so far?

     The 18c science-v-magic-v -religion theme  remains, as does the classic operatic plot about a father disapproving of a suitor; and the  music is  the original . It’s by Napoleon’s Kapelllmeister, Giovanni Paisiello, a composer of great  bounce and tunefulness admired by Catherine the Great and respected by Rossini. 

        The rework is a labour of love and it shows, in a good way. The new book and lyrics are by  James P. Farwell, who when not writing  is an exper on cyber-war and bio-defense, working in numerous international bodies. And I  tell you, if he  brings the same cunning and detail to zapping digital villains  as he does to this, they must watch out.   It’s an  enterprise which hovers pleasingly netween pastiche, philosophy and  homage to opera’s more florid period. 

       Directed  by John Walton,  it has six skilled singers (notably Reka  Jonas as Clarice)  , a tiny but elegant band aloft, and magic tricks devised by Harry de Cruz and performed  by Dan Smith as Julian aka the Great Agrofontido (How hard must it be to find a decent bel canto tenor who also belongs to the Magic Circle?) 

      It fizzes along, duets growing to quintets, spirited quarrels, ridiculous disguises, expostulation from an endearing James Paterson as the scientist-Count father,  and the growing menace of the Cardinal’s pursuit.  The dialogue is sharp, and the lyrics no more  absurd than any Italian-to-English translation of Rossini or Donizetti.  Actually many are well shaped to the music and smart, in the patter somgs or gloriously ridiculous rhymes like the Cardinal’s defence of torturing  heretics with electrodes “Don’t be so prickly, it’s all done very slickly”.  Some arias are lovely, especially from Jonas as Clarice. And one duet is gamely sung  by the  magician and his sidekick Pupupptino  (Constantine Andronokou) dressed as Trojan slaves  tied up back to back, in rags. 

     By the interval I was well content with it as an entertaining absurdity . When your basso profundo is a fascist Cardinal, your scientific Count has an Einstein hairdo and your sopranos soar and bicker at  speed in a hair-pulling  spat while the magician turns  another hankie into a rose , who’s complaining?  But proper magic crept up in he second half: Stuart Pendred’s villainous (and gloriously pompous) Cardinal prowling   the gallery and the aisles with a torch looking for heretics,  while the fleeing pair reappear in ridiculous drag to the  panic of their womenfolk.  But then the two basses sang Addison’s great hymn “The Spacious Firmament” to Paisiello’s music with the backdrop of stars behind,   and a shiver went through the house.

     On went the stratagems and disguises, Julian and Pupuptino  disguised as  a pair of renowned Greek scientists for  a marvellously heartfelt debate between the Count and the conjurer about how  science must be willing to believe in the impossible..But  for all the jokes and the false whiskers  it was working towards a dimming of lights and a sombrely  splendid  magic demonstration, levitating the golden globe from the orrery into the  shimmering air. With the rapt watchers , us among them,  wreathed in music from above.  And I thought yes, this is what theatres are for. To be transported. 

   Which is more than I was for some long time stuck at Colchester in the late train home, writing this. But it was well worth the effort.  The tixkets, by the way, start at £20 and the best are £45.  A  steal.

charingcrosstheatre.co.uk   to 21 Sept

rating four

and a musical mouse in respect to Giovanni Paisello

ROLL UP, ROLL UP…

       What sharper summer draw than “The Greatest Show On Earth” remembered within one of the smallest theatres?   Jonathan O”Boyle’s production has the pretty little theatre  decked out with bunting ,  retro posters and  a circus-diner stall with hot dogs;  worth getting to your seat early to see three of its performers swinging and twirling around on hoop and trapezes,  costumed not in forbidding modern Lycra but white tights and – even for males – sweetly absurd modest bloomers with blue ribbon.    

         This odd musical by Cy Coleman, Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble is  as much about spectacle as story, which can be quite frustrating:  the retro romance of the circus usually tends to blot out the interest of Phineas T Barnum’s actual life in business, philanthropy and fierce political battles as well as showmanship.  But then,  he himself demurred at any “gilding” of seriousness saying “I am a showman by profession” and nothing more.   

       But curiously, I like this small-scale production better than any of the big theatrical extravaganzas :  close up to them all you become more aware of the risks, business as well as physical,  and of the hardscrabble nature of 19c touring showmanship .  Matt Rawle is a very engaging Barnum,  all flop-haired enthusiasm for the noble art of humbug and hauling in the punters. 

     And, indeed, getting rid of them when you need to:  when the crowds in his big New York museum lingered too long, going several times round to see the White Whale , Elephant and assorted freaks,  he brilliantly ordered a sign at the exit saying TO THE EGRESS,  correctly assuming that thrill-seekers without dictionary-learnin’ would expect some giant eagle or ogress and leave.   Thus demonstrating the great truth that you can use big words and panache to fool people into piutting your interest before their own.   In fact, more than once I kept remembering the rise of Boris Johnson.  

           Barnum did less harm, though, and  Rawle also has quite enough charm to convince the parents of the undersized Tom Thumb that making him a spectacle was displaying his abormality as “a gift from God”,  and making you believe that his wife Charity (Monique Young, sweetly grave) would stay with him even after his fascination with the dazzling operatic soprano Jenny Lind (Penny Ashmore , glamourously operatic and melodious).    O’Boyle has found some grand circus performers and with Oti Mabuse as choreographer moves a big cast joyfully around with extraordinary discipline  in the small space,  and some standout moments with “One Brick at a time’  and the big Follow the Band;    there’s a good coup-de-theatre when the curtain and costumes turn monochrome because “I humbugged myself into being respectable” in politics.   Altogether, satisfying: you leave after only two hours ten minutes with a spring in your step.  What more to ask on a summer’s day?  As usual, the Watermill proves worth any detour…

watermill.org.uk  to 8 September

LAUNDRY, LECHERY, LADIES, LAUGHTER 

     if anyone is ever so impertinent as to demand an audition piece from the RSC-seasoned John Hodgkinson, I suggest he delivers – with or without a mud-stained city suit – Sir John Falstaff’s indignant description of his ordeal in a basket of greasy stained laundry and the deep Thames mud, and tops it off by drinking a full quart of ale,  while glaring furiously. A rapturous audience gave that effort of imbibing a slow handclap, rising to tumultuous applause.

    The three piece blue city suit ,by the way,  definitely adds to it, for Blanche McIntyre’s modern Merry Wives is set in today’s suburban Windsor, and this Falstaff’s knighthood clearly derives from some shady City deal rather than a royal court or noble ancestry.   He is sleazily magnificent, venal, overconfident bossman of his scruffy pack, charming until panicking.  The women in his eye are Siubhan Harrison’s Mistress Ford and her best friend Mistress Page (Samantha Spiro):  both full of matronly  mischief and schoolgirl theatricality,  middle England neighbours, decked out at one point like gymbunnies in colourful Dryrobes with  young Anne in tennis gear. 

      Around them Falstaff’s hooligan mates caper and quarrel and plot to get one of them the heiress Anne Page. Each of the posse is glorious in their own way, Emily Houghton finely crosscast as a punk Garter Inn host. Among the suitors Patrick  Walshe McBride is a  gawky, effeminate  Slender, who can’t even stick his thumbs arrogantly in his pockets with the  right buttons done up, and  Ian Hughes the dodgy Welsh parson who,  when panicking about the supposed duel,  breaks quaveringly into Calon Lan while wielding his bike pump. Jason Thorpe creates  Dr Caius as a vain French dentist whose accent  confuses ear with arse, and Shazia Nicholls is a  sportive, two timing  Mistress Quickly working towards general confusion.  

     So far so sitcom, and beautifully done it is too. In the central scam, nothing could be more glorious than a man of Hodgkinson’s  padded majesty coming on all kittenish, turning a tumble from the sofa into a beguiling Recamier pose and doing playful tiger snarls reminiscent of nothing more than certain accounts in the past of MeToo approaches of the kind later claimed as the woman’s idea.   Treasure too the moments when Mistresses Ford and Page,  with Falstaff,s vast waistcoated gut  bulging behind the curtain,  play their scene of affrighted panic very loud while struggling – in character, cushions on faces –  to keep themselves from corpsing.

      One notable thing McIntyre does – with a full rounded careful performance from Richard Goulding – is to give realism and real pain to Ford, the jealous husband, and also to  the painful insult that his suspicion means to his wife: when he abases himself in apology she stands a moment, queenly, before forgiving him. That gives a tang to the comic nonsense, and strengthens it.

      Until the final woodland scene it all takes place in Robert Innes Hopkins’ ingenious revolving neighbourhood, all half timbered  pastiche houses with pylon wires overhead and, a TV aerial and a Yale burglar alarm (which I hope was product placement, if not they owe the RSC a bung, see how venal Falstaff makes you).

      I must admit that I always fear anticlimax in the final fake-fairy scam about Herne the hunter, the fleeing couple and Falstaff in horns – too whimsically  Elizabethan for now – ; but it was alldone with such style and  dispatch, and offered such hilarity as Hodgkinson thinking  for a moment he’s scored a threesome, that I loved it. That’s judgement, that’s pace, that’s RSC in one of its merry moods.  

    It got many stars and plaudits this summer, but I was away, so since it  runs four more weeks I thought to  catch up. A riotous matinee proved them right.  Get there, do: Stratford is on a roll right now with this and Pericles and School for Scandal (scroll down, rvws both there). Worth anybody’s visit…

Www.rsc.org. To 7 september

rating. 5 mice

A TALL TALE, A SHIMMERING MAGIC

Of all Shakespeare’s plays this is now the rarest staged, not without reason: some early scenes are co- written with a contemporary John Wilkins, its tale is dependent on intricate interrupting narration by the medieval poet Gower, and the scene ricochets around the ancient Mediterranean kingdoms and cities  – Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Pentapolis, Ephesus, Mytilene . Our hero escapes murder after discovering in horror a ruler incestuously abusing his daughter ,is  shipwrecked, finds a wife, loses her and the newborn Marina in yet another storm, only to find both again years later in a  blaze of healing magic and coincidence. It is messy.  Moreover,unusually in Shakespeare its hero the Prince of Tyre is an innocent: no tragic flaw, no envy or malice, Pericles is a proper gentleman, trying to do right.

      So salute director Tamara Harvey for choosing this as her first outing as the RSC’s new co-director,  and making of it something remarkably beautiful. It is dreamlike, moving, long-memorable.  She artfully uses, early on,  dim-lit tableaux of movement and stillness,  veiled dance and half-glimpsed action behind a curtain of ropes (Jonathan Fensom’s design is framed by cordage, and the storms at sea are an elegant tangle of wild movement by Annie-Lunenette Deakin-Foster). All this reinforces the folktale-epic strangeness of the story, lulling and enchanting us.   Claire Van Kampen’s score is no small part of that enchantment: when the healer Cerimon (Jacqueline Boatswain) calls for music as she looks into the coffin of Thaisa, the spine tingles. 

     Against this dreamy storytelling  stand the real  humans. Alfred Enoch’s Pericles is perfect casting: youtful, natural, steadfast, boyish, alarmed by wickedness and hostility, childlike in his beginnings but  deepening into the immense broken grief of his losses,  and a hysteria of final relief which brings actual laughter from the audience. Around his story circle bad people and better ones: honest Helicanus and creepy Antiochus, Cleon grateful for his aid but collaborating in murder and lies with his evil wife Dionyza (Miriam o’Brien stepped in with panache on press night). And there’s a scene-stealing Christian Patterson as King Simonides, presiding over a comical setpiece tournament for his daughter Thaisa and, after some top grade teasing of Pericles and audience,  handing her over to shabbier shipwrecked Pericles as a bride with Lychorida giggling behind him. For yes, there is human comedy here as well as magic: the fishermen of Pentapolis, the infuriated bawds of the Mytilene brothel, are all a joy. 

       And beautifully, the narrator is not Gower: here it is,  we discover, the lost daughter  Marina herself.   Rachelle Diedericks tells  her father’s  tale from before her birth  until she becomes in the late scenes a protagonist, kidnapped and enslaved to the brothel where – in some more  wonderful scenes – she ruins their business with her steadfast purity.  

     For all the play’s oddity the playwright’s   best tones  ring true   through Marina: “Born in a tempest when my mother  died, the world to me is like a lasting storm..”  As  she pleads for her life before the pirate kidnappers swing down on yet more ropes, Shakespeare’s voice echoes unmistakeable  “I never kill’d a mouse, nor hurt a fly:I trod upon a worm against my will, But I wept for it.”   Wonderful. 

     And wonderful to give her, back as narrator, the epilogue with its  blessing of us all, for gathering to hear the old tale :  “New joy wait on you!”  So it did.

Rsc.org.uk to 21 sept.

Rating 4.

 L’CHAIM ! THE VERY STUFF OF LIFE 

   Of course it helps to be under a real sky:  a lone fiddler high above the cornfield scratches out the first lonely notes against the evening clouds,  the great “Sunrise, Sunset” wedding number falls just as the last light fades,  making the brutal burning of the cornfield a vivid shock minutes later;  and a single star appeared behind the trees as the villagers of the Anatevka  were at last driven from home on the Ukrainian plains to scatter across the world. 

          But Jordan Fein’s perfectly judged production does not rest only on this glorious setting under the trees; its vigour and tenderness and humour and dazzling pace would stand out anywhere.  Nor, with a wonderful ensemble,  does it even need to rest only on Adam Dannheisser’s Tevye, though it almost could have:  here’s  a great wild booming bull of a man,  huge-hearted and choleric ,  emotional and ruefully self-aware,  turning in bafflement to his God or to the audience with sudden impish wit.  He’s irresistible, fully human, idiosyncratic.   

      One can forget sometimes that ,as Fein himself observed, this show is the very definition of musical theatre.  It moves from one great number to another at speed but never lets them stop the impetus of the story, rolling it on, as Bock and Harnick’s songs  define characters’ doubts and longings.  It  builds up to great  set-pieces like Tevye’s nightmare (you need to see it, I defy description, a lot of sheets are involved) or the marriage scene,    where the moment of profound emotion in “Sunrise Sunset” merges rapidly  into a classic Jewish-wedding breakfast taking trouble to develop  abruptly up into rows about chickens and dead grandmothers before some forbidden dancing.  

       On which subject let’s say that  all the choreography  – by Julia Cheng  – is wild and Russian and stampingly, clappingly brilliant.   Bravura moments like the bottles-on-heads quartet are memorable of course,  but even more so is the way Raphael Papo, the fiddler who roams and haunts the set high and low,  will sometimes move sinuously with and around Tevye in his moments of vexation,  playing,  his notes a dramatic living expression of inner conflict.  

      There is not one detail that does not touch the heart or make you reflect – in this of all years – about the ancient character , tenacity and evolution of the diaspora.   Even the black-bundle busybody matchmaker Yente (Beverly Klein) has her broad comedy suddenly and late shading into poignancy as she resolves, quixotically, somehow to move to the Holy Land.     The daughters are all wonderful, Liv Andrusier’s Tzeizel, Georgia Bruce’s pleading Hodel and Hannah Bristow’s magnificent defiant Chava each distinctive in their confrontations with the furious but adoring father as they marry for love even – in Chava’s case – breaking with race and faith.  Mark Aspinall’s musical direction and new orchestrations  chart these  emotional lines almost uncannily: the parents’ lament “Chavaleh” dissolves into a harsh wild instrumental duet which makes your hair stand on end:  when the milk-cart,  which so often fed the comedy, crashes over,  Tevye’s back turned to his daughter expresses a vast deep primitive grief that takes your breath away.    A quite wonderful production on every level. 

openairtheatre.com. to 21 September.  

rating five