Monthly Archives: December 2024

SACRED MONSTERS IN THE UNDERWORLD

Deep darkness within the U-shaped seating,:   into it on wheels glides the dark gondola:  Charon the ferryman, after millennia punting to and fro across the Styx, is resigned to hearing  jokes like “dead on time” from the clever-dicks he  picks up.    He’s just collected A.E.Housman, poet and professor of Classics:  Simon Russell Beale . But this play being by Tom Stoppard, Housman finds  that Hades is the Oxford of his youth: deans, aesthetes, mavericks, earnest undergraduates athletic or studious, Victorian grandee academics like Jowett of Balliol and  hearty old Ruskin ,  who made his students break roadstone for the sake of their souls. 

         Old Housman finds them in Hades and in memory,  bickering over points of classical scholarship,  playing croquet with invisible balls and beautifully timed “cloks” (sound and movement are immaculate in Blanche McIntyre’s production).  The younger ones row around on wonderfully convincing wheeled boats, getting to know each other.   One of them is the poet’s younger self:  pale, shy ,enthused about classics (they all quote Latin and Greek at one another) .  His joy is finding inspiration in the heroic loves of antiquity, where male friends adventure, fight and die together in chaste but passionate  fealty.  His best friend is Moses Jackson,   studying science and running races,    sometimes in dreams overhead  running towards us white in shorts and singlet .   But the love young Housman yearns for is impossible, illegal:   “beastliness”  as Jowett thunders, sacking another student.    Tricky balance  for those dons: one moment set on giving intelligent lads a classical education (“if you can’t write Latin and Greek verse, how can you hope to be of use in the world?”) , the next having to throw them out for such Greek  “boy-love”.  

        The early scenes with the academics are priceless,  Stephen  Boxer’s Jowett a star turn in itself,  Latin tags and textual arguments flying (let’s admit it) over many heads but stimulatingly :  vintage Stoppard but staying just this side of annoying.   Roaming in Hades through his memories Russell Beale is as usual extraordinary:  able to turn in half a word, a twitch of the brow,  from pedantry to pain and back again through comedy. His Housman is  impassioned, dry, tender ,  cynical of his own worth, exasperatingly lovable.     But alongside him – literally for one riveting ten-minute scene  merely talking side by side on a bench – is his younger self.:  young Housman played by Matthew Tennyson absolutely shines. He  stands alongside masters like Beale and Boxer, playing younger than his years , rose-white boyhood wanting  “the good and the beautiful”,  the Greek and Roman idea of Virtue.   He leaves Oxford early and shares rooms with his adored Jackson as junior civil servants at the Patent Office,   only late and finally admitting  – to the straight, astonished Jackson  in a flare of fatal passion  –  the love that dare not speak its name.

         Not that it had a name till later , when Lord Alfred Douglas coined “homosexual”.  (Housman of course pedantically horrified at the barbarity of blending Latin and Greek)  . But Tennyson’s performance takes the emotional centre of the play, sets fire to its complex anecdotal wordiness.  He stands perfectly alongside Russell Beale , older self and younger, a poet in painful development. The “Shropshire Lad” series about the shine and early death of youth  comes of this period of hopeless and serious love, and watching them old and young you believe it.  Though , as one contemporary casually observes , that he “never read such a man for telling you you’re better off dead”

        Stoppard has wicked, insider-scholar fun with the fact that the period, from mid-Victorian down to 1936, saw an exotic zoo of personalities who ran into one another or one another’s reputations – generally at Oxford .  There are  wonderful lines drily delivered: like Housman’s about the contrast between Walter Pater’s emotional intinctive aesthetics and Ruskin who “stares hard” at art’s beauties and has them stare back hard at him, exhaustingly.   Donnish quips abound (“when he died it was the first time he ever finished anything he’d started”).  In the second half,  on a picnic blanket in London young Housman watches Ben Lloyd-Hughes’ solid athletic Jackson win a race, and their other friend Chamberlain (Michael Marcus) sees how love lies and how it will go nowhere.

             Cameo moments demonstrate the changing times. Boxer reappears as the MP Labouchere, irritated with Dominic Rowan’s campaigning journalist Stead who exposed child prostitution,  but himself amending an Act making homosexual acts even more stringently punishable than before.   Rowan also reappears as Jerome K Jerome, a tiny contemptuous player in the downfall of Oscar Wilde.    Wilde himself (Dickie Beau)  has a vital late moment in Hades, lounging in velvet and reproaching dead Housman for not grasping at love , freedom and life . He reminisces about his own beloved Bosie:  “spoilt, vindictive and utterly selfish , but those are only the facts..He is Hyacinth, ivory and gold..joy” .  We all, he says, invent the object of our love.    Yet  his scorn  at Housman  melts, because A Shropshire Lad justifies its writer.  Beautiful.    

hampsteadtheatre.com. to 1 Feb.  

A HIGH-KICKING WOODEN WONDER

       Serious fun, this.  Never  liked the Disney Pinocchio, or even in childhood the over-preachy Carlo Collodi book about the defiant wooden puppet who defies his creator Gepetto and falls in with a talking insect and sententious fairy.  But Joanna Carrick’s retelling pulls all the right strings with mischievous energy, and  this is a pure delight.    Schools have been flooding in and booking it out, and though I was at the adult-full premiere the children in my eyeline were shrieking with glee.  

      Pinocchio is every small child:  running around breaking rules, looking for excitement, deciding to be good and then not being,  discovering the energy in its body and dancing with manic indiscipline.  A child seizing at novelties, easily fooled, dismayed, repentant.   Evangeline Dickson’s remarkable performance  catches all this.   Her `Pinocchio is entirely beguiling, mischievous grin slumping to sudden realization of the latest disaster . Above all her moves – mad dances in particular – are mesmerizingly wild and odd.  I see she is credited as movement director, but with designer Katy Latham as choreographer:  what is clear is that a lot of work and thought has come in to creating something so gloriously kicking, capering, wild and childlike.  You really need to see the donkey dance.  Really. 

          Alongside her Jack Heydon is a wild-haired Gepetto, Vicino, Fox, Fairy and Wagoner;  LIam Bull is ten others.  Both are adept at the revue-style genre which (ever since the Reduced Shakespeare Company shows)  I have cherished as a favourite:  call it the “Sudden-different-hat” genre,  complete with comic metatheatre acknowledgments of its absurdity.   Both Heydon and Bull are astonishingly deft , and Bull a natural audience-baiter: more happy shrieks from front row, even the adults.  Carrick’s adaptation also takes the trouble to have the giant shark (or whale) swallow the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine so that the friendly tuna-fish which Gepetto and Pinocchio meet in its stomach is actually Paul McCartney. Talking entirely in old Beatles’ lyrics, of course.  

      So pure pleasure, altogether.  The set is built with remarkable folksy old-Italy detail by Vincent Moisy (himself fresh from the copany’s London triumph as Witchfinder General in  Carrick’s The Ungodly and going to Broadway in 2025). The invisible stage management is by Rei Mordue (the said Witchfinder’s victim): she creates  endless deft appearances and set tricks  as the two men dart between characters. At one point Heydon mutates into the Blue Fairy , changing costume in the middle of a song and appropriately shooting up an octave for her last notes.   

           Red Rose Chain is a community, small and locally rooted.   If my account of principles in the last show operating backstage and building sets in this one  makes it sound a bit jolly- am-dram,  be assured it is not.   Professional, skilful  and funny, it is  one of the best children’s Christmas shows Carrick has done,  and the finest  anywhere I have seen for a few years.   Need to say that, because critics  often responsibly have to acknowledge the merits and suitability of kids’ theatre  without actually enjoying it much.  But this one is pure pleasure.  Take a child if you can.  But if not, enjoy.   

redrosechain.com  to 5 Jan

PRESENT MIRTH HATH PRESENT LAUGHTER. AND MELANCHOLY. AND FALSE NOSES

    In a play as familiar as this it is small touches that spring fresh life.  Like the moment when the fool Feste defines drunkards: “one draught above heat makes him a fool; the second mads him; and a third drowns him.” Sir Toby, a roaring Joplin Sibtain in Prasanna Puwanarajah’s new production, is very much a dangerous drunk,  no mere belching buffoon.   Olivia, suddenly anxious, orders the jester  to go after him as he reels off,  and is reassured that he is not yet at the drowned stage.   In that tiny moment of glances between servant and mistress we are reminded that she is a woman in authority over an often chaotic household , where servants collude with invading  kinsmen and her stiff steward merely disapproves. Madam, beleaguered,  is concerned for her kinsman.  Plenty  such small pleasures crop up, comic or touching:  as when in the final scene Orsino starts to declare his love and momentarily picks the wrong twin, setting  Sebastian scuttling  back to his heterosexual ladylove with real pre-gay-pride horror.  In another endearing domestic  touch Olivia’s wedding celebrant is a sweet smiley lady-vicar with white collar and teacup, clearly game but baffled.  Emily Benjamin does it beautifully. 

           Mining the text for refreshing nuance and detail is part of the RSC’s gift, and keeps you going even through early qualms. Which I suffered by initially really disliking James Cotterill’s stark-ish monochrome set, based on Edward Gorey’s spooky, uneasy surrealism.  A vast white glaring screen starts by blanking out the shipwreck survivors coughing and struggling at the start,  and  hangs about too long before turning into a sort of roof.  And there’s a constant presence of a chap (it turns out to be Fabian, Olivia’s manservant) spending a lot of time up a ladder at the side silently slapping on black paint.  It felt for a short while as if the  set was dominating, rather than serving, the play.  But fair enough, I recanted once some gigantic organ-pipes descended to hide the plotters watching Malvolio in the box-tree scene. They even managed to knock out a quarter-chime with their heads as they bickered.  Even more reconciled when, O glory of glories,  Samuel West’s deceived Malvolio made a grand entrance at the top of the monstrous pipes,  wearing  a Santa hat, saying ‘ho ho ho” , and suddenly sliding a fireman’s pole some thirty feet to the stage to reveal that he is trouserless , in a brass-buttoned tailcoat jacket with bare legs cross-gartered over yellow knee-socks.  I hope this national treasure of theatre  is in some way padded at the crotch for that experience, but it certainly raised a wild opening night cheer.   

        The greytoned set and great organ chords which keep popping up are  all part of Puwanarajah’s perception of the layers of melancholy within Shakespeare’s Christmas-season comedy. Olivia is mourning a brother, Viola thinks hers is lost,  Orsino’s love is hopeless, so is Viola”s until the end; Malvolio knows he is disliked,  Sir Toby’s drink problem is getting worse and wilder. Hey ho, the wind and the rain.  Happy endings come, but you can never bet on them.  

        None of the melancholy, however, damages  the lyricism or the comedy.  Gwyneth Keyworth is one of 11 RSC debuts in this cast, a superb Viola:  scared, resolute and dishevelled at first, then a neat little Cesario speaking her mind – shouting, indeed, at Orsino’s contempt of women’s ability to love. She is marvellously, credibly comic in her dismayed scenes with Olivia.  Who is Freema Agyeman, another newcomer to Stratford and a good find:her icy dignity and authority melting into astonished girlish adoration  – “even so quickly may one catch the plague!”made me long to see her Cleopatra one day.

       No cavils in other casting (though an eccentricity in Aguecheek:   Demetri Goritsas who for some reason in dress and voice seems to have come from New York 1945).  Danielle Henry’s Maria is manically lively in her hoaxing defiance; West’s brief early appearances as Malvolio offer enough clarity as to why his woeful deficit of humour has been infuriating the revellers.   And Michael Grady-Hall’s  Feste is a pleasure all through, whether singing with thoughtful tunefulness Matt Maltese’s new tunes to the famous lyrics, looking on drily at the Cesario situation, or  descending from the roof crooning into a microphone.   He’s an adept physical comedian and an effortlessly  likeable presence.  He puts in the extra time in the 25-minute interval by larking around with foam nose-balls , throwing them around the front rows with sharp mimetic humour.  They’re bright yellow,  those noses,  the play’s colour-theme sparking through the Goreysque sobriety just as jokes break through life.   In one of the magnificently spirited brawls, chases and fights near the end, when Feste is hit and whirls round dazed,   his yellow nose magically changes colour.  See? It’s the small touches,  alongside the grandeur of emotion,   that keep us coming.

BOXOFFICE.  Rsc.org.uk. To 18 jan 

SPRINGTIME FOR…EVERYONE 

      Joyful, headlong and full-hearted, here comes sacred outrage.  If director Patrick Marber and the Menier had been minded to issue wet ‘trigger warnings’  it would take up so much extra paper we’d be re-triggered by the environmental impact.  But what was firmly grasped by the great  Mel Brooks (with Thomas Meehan for the musical) is that for all their horror Nazis ARE funny : that preening pomposity ,blind hero worship, ersatz folksiness.   Rich thwarted old ladies in leopardprint and endlessly willing Swedish divas are funny too. So is over-camp gay culture and  the desperate ambition and bitter disappointments of Broadway show-people .  Even  accountants are funny.  And – loud gasps from the be-kind mafia –  so is poor Leo’s anxiety disorder. 

        It doesn’t mean all these things are not also deserving of all serious and gloomy respect in other plays.   It just means that if you don’t sometimes laugh at them and yourself,   you’re barely human.  So rejoice at the cleansing mirth of this legendary musical, and feel lucky to be drawn into it in this quite intimate space,. 

         Marber, fresh between runs of  directing the brilliant “What we talk about..” at the Marylebone Theatre  (scroll below) has assembled a sixteen-strong cast doing the work of sixty, led by Andy Nyman as Bialystock, amiably manic , with Marc Antolin clutching the blue-blanket of reassurance as the sweetest of Leos.  And two sacred monsters of absurd excess : Harry Morrison’s Liebkind and Trevor Ashley as Roger de Bris.  Joanna Woodward’s Ulla is a rose amid these troublesome thorns,  deadpan comic  and a hell of a belter: her  intermission rearranging of Bialystock’s dingy office (credit to designer Scott Pask) got a laugh of its own.    Lorin Latarro’s choreography is witty all the way,  tiny jokes making you want to go again in case there are more.   

         So revel in the klezmer Jewishness of the opening dance around Bialystock,  in the treasurable rhymes (faster pace/master race,  obscurer/fuehrer) . Feel the sudden moments of real emotional empathy even with  Liebkind (“Hitler, there was a painter!”  and “Hitler was BUTCH!”).  Love his chorus of pigeons with swastikas on their wings. Identify with  the crazy progress of Bialystock and Bloom , with Max’s repeated “It’s nothing, I\ll tell you when we’re getting in too deep”, when even Leo sees that they definitely are. 

       Marber has mused that curiously it’s a story about love, and it is:  between the two producers,  between Leo and Ulla, De Bris and himself,  even Liebkind’s devotion to Hitler and the pigeons.  And there’s love pulsing out from a happy audience, too. 

   The fifth mouse is a special and particular  ensemble-mouse.  The ten chorus,  sometimes assisted by principals (Bialystock turns up as an auditionee!)  were nimble , physically witty and perfectly attuned.   They cycle through so many costume changes I lost count – as fans, old ladies in leopardprint, auditionees, pigeons, stormtroopers, police, showgirls. Some of the changes are lightning. They’re a joy.   

menierchocolatefactory.com  

to 1 march  rating 5

MAZELTOV!  JEWISH PANTO STRIKES AGAIN

      Goldie Frocks, rightful heiress to an East End schmutter workshop, has been enslaved by the evil Calvin Brine, whose  behemoth of too-small clothes for annoyingly thin people has driven the bears who run the Circus Oy Vay away from their East End homes to Pinchley Road.  Brine is plotting to capture the youngest  of the dynasty as he prepares for his bear-mitzvah. and  turn him into a coat.   Big Mama Bear in her big frocks – Debbie Chazen no less –   and gallant little Goldie in her skirt of remnants must foil this plan. They are  assisted by the pearly-jacketed Morris Bloom and his conjuring tricks before the curtain  (all of which work).  Morris is the magician  Ian Saville,  one of the oldest performers to make a panto debut this year. 

 As seasoned panto-goers know, the correct way to being back harmony and justice is to pur new words to a lot of songs – from Fairytale of New York to Reviewing  the Situation from Oliver,  and including  Mein Herr from Cabaret  (mein Bear, obvs) .  You must also make a lot of horrifying puns (“I am beartrayed! Says Chazen the  overbear-ing matriarch).  Be sure to woo and taunt the young audience and make them yell, ensure you have a custard-pie fight and a zombie behind-you moment (the zombie is a retired accountant).  Oh, and make sure your characters confuse a kippah with a kipper

       For this is  Jewish panto, a newfledged genre: cue sly cultural references , like the fact that “No Jewish news is good news”, and that every page of the Jewish Chronicle is full of Volvos for sale.  Keep the schmutter jokes going,  with a tailoring plot and props and magic tricks with basting thread. Explain that the Rabbi Schlomo Drake, a squawking puppet,   is “one of those orthoducks” . Ensure that Mama’s final costume is adorned with giant pickles  and a suggestive  gherkin, bagels on head.  . Recruit a truly thundering bass villain. – ..in this case the admirable  Simon Yadoo,  joining the cast  between two five-star seasons as Yerucham in of “What we talk about..etc” at rhe Marylebone theatre (scroll down for review).    His big number in the second half is magnificent. 

        Oh, and  throw some chocolate gelt coins around and have a lively onstage band to keep the songs rolling.  The band’s terrific: Josh Middleton on accordion , Daniel Gouly on clarinet ,Christina Borgenstierna on the Ukrainian klezmer drum “Klezmerize” every song with vigour, the finale blending a celebratory bar-mitzvah dance with “Maybe its because I’m a Londoner’ The 300-odd small children at the first schools matinee clapped and stamped.  

          If any community’s small children needed reassurance of good over evil right now, it’s this one, at a time when morons throw stones at school buses.  Last year, in he shocked aftermath of the Hamas murders and during  the  differently-shocking upswing of shaming  UK antisemitism, JW3 commissioned and ran the first ever Jewish pantomime, complete wih Big Bad Pig.    I wondered at the time why it was the first such joyful cultural melding:  what with the Jewish showbiz pedigree, dame-worthy matriarchy and tradition of sharp selfmocking wit and  decoration,  panto feels  entirely natural. And it was just what was needed,  in its defiant frivolity and heart.   

      So here we are again, once more the book written by Nick Cassenbaum,  directed this time by Abigail Anderson: a new  tradition  born  in an angry century.    I saw the first, slightly raggedy schools matinee but its very raggediness made it warmer.   And oh yes, there are some jokes for naughty adults in the evenings, which mercifully went over six rows of little heads.   Every circus zoo, after all, boasts a beaver.  And there had to be an Alan Sugar joke, Oh yes there did.      Chanukah Sameach!  

box office jw3.org.uk to 5 Jan 

FEARED IT MIGHT BE TUTU MUCH, BUT NO…

    I immediately fell for Frankie Bradshaw’s set: a two- storey house lined with fossil skeletons in cases, and a spirited opening in which the prime mover – Great Uncle Matthew – lectures on their wonders and then in rapid successiom suffers graphic shipwreck, abseiling disaster and an earthquake,  all the while picking up spare infants. Justin Salinger is magnificent in plus-fours , before turning into a massively furred and velveted cod-Russian Madame at the ballet school.    DirectorKaty Rudd keeps it moving and in no time the focus is on the three adopted babies grown into girls being removed from school for brawling (in the book it was mere poverty, but modern kids need lairy role models). They resolve to invent their own surname: Fossil, and aim to make it famousl 

        After the glorious WITCHES last year I had some qualms about what the NT would serve up as this year’s Christmas family treat. Especially as it is based on Noel Streatfield’s earnest 1936 romance about three girls  adopted from varius disasters  by a flaky palaeontologist and left to be raised by his housekeeper,teenage great-niece Sylvia and assorted lodgers, one of whom  gets them into stage school so they can support the household from age 12 on hardearned shillings .  Pauline, Petrova and Posy have fascinated little girls for decades – one first loving to act,  one almost psychopathically focused on  ballet, the third longing only to be a motor mechanic, .  But for all its insight into child actors  in the 30s, today the book feels both farfetched  and (whispering bravely) a bit of a fossil. 

         But Kendall Feaver has tweaked it, dealing  robustly with adjustments of tone for an age less tolerant of friendly random adults mentoring  young girls. The girls are less obediently subservient to gruelling routines,  and ruder to adults,  than the 1930s tolerated.  Grace Saif, Yanexi Enriquez and Daisy Sequerra are fun, adults but very convincing  as young teens; Jenny Galloway, in a big grey shawl and apron, is an entertaining Nana and Pearl Mackie as Sylvia – “Garnie” – gets a romantic plot as Mr and Mrs Simpson become the single Jai Saran, whose irreproachably teaches Petrova car maintenance but in a chaotic tango (the dancing is great)  finally woos Sylvia.  Rather than two lady academics we now  have just one, Helena Lymbery magnificently donnish as a bereaved and scorned lesbian, another example the girls of making your own brave unashamed future.”Depression is the malady of the narcissist” she says sternly, a useful message at any age. 

          It is enjoyable, mostly in a slightly restrained way,  but its strengths are in the messages of optimism through hard work and in the dance interludes: most beautifully in the second half a ballet of Madame Fidolia’s youth,  Bolshoi triumphs and loss first through revolution and then old age: it’s genuinely moving and beautiful.  The other dances are lively,  good in character,  Ellen Kane as choreographer and an 18-piece orchestra.   For me a favourite moment was when the girls are hired for a progressive, 1930’s modernist Midsummer Night’s Dream,  dressed in surreal space-age tinfoil and doing robotic movements under a pretentious director.   A cracking bit of flying, too, right over the front rows.  And I am happy to say that Salinger returns not only as the elusive Great-Uncle Matthew but, fleetingly, as yet another queenly old Russian ballet mistress.  

nationaltheatre.org.uk to 22 feb 

LOOK BEYOND THE LETTUCE

      It is a tribute to Greg Wilkinson’s monologue play that I had not previously seen the rise and fall of Liz Truss as having a gripping dramatic line.  It had seemed like just the final mad flailings of the age of Boris and Covid,  before the Rishi lull:  ridiculous,  a passing joke,  nothing much to do with either Britain’s past or future.  But this tightly researched, unexpectedly fair one-woman drama made a difference.  

       Emma WIlkinson Wright, first seen silent at her desk as we settle in, is waiting for Graham Brady or someone to come in and deliver the expected final chop.  She is, carefully, in appearance very like the real Liz Truss, neat bob and bodycon dress . She observes as she powders her nose the need always to “look good”.   The then embarks on an account of her life,  assisted by the nimble-voiced Steve Nallon recorded offstage doing a series of voices:  the schoolteacher she defied ,  the exhilaratingly political Oxford friends, her Westminster allies and, of course,  the ghost of Margaret Thatcher.  Who is at first Liz’s  inspiration (though interestingly, not as much as Chancellor Lawson).  Thatcher in fact finally delivers a rather damning verdict, pitiless at the Truss defeat. She I suppose was strong willed too , tempting to emulate, but cleverer.

         What Wilkinson – through the performer – has caught and played with is the extraordinary self-confidence that fuels this woman,  combined with a real (and to many of us baffling) sense of her thrill at the very process of politics: leafleting, speaking, working out tactics,  networking, finding mentors and then judging them.  Her economic theory is all about energy:  wanting to move fast and break things and face down slowcoaches, orthodoxy and regulation.    Fighting suits her more than quiet thought, and revealing is her almost girlish adoration for Kwazi Kwarteng – “like an educated Mohammed Ali!”.  She strides around,  thrilled to rise to be Foreign Secretary,  dizzying.   Sometimes she breaks into karaoke, as with her friend “TC” – Therese Coffey.   But she is not made ridiculous.  Like any excellent actor she draws us a long way into herself, uncomfortably.   Scraps of her real speeches – including the cheese moment – are done from a lectern in the corner, straight.  Bits of her theory are banged up on a whiteboard. 

Becoming PM at last she sacks people, crying  “I can really bloody do this!”.   Urged to take her financial reforms slower she barks “what’s the point of moderation?” and says that it would be like getting her friend  “TC” going at the karaoke with just a thimbleful of whisky when what’s necessary is a damn great pint and a cigar.  

          But the crux of the story is not her final downfall – though the slow hard realization of what the markets are doing is brilliantly done,  cracks in her steeliness showing minute after minute,  the lettuce joke genuinely upsetting her – “humour is our national religion” she says, with the fury of an apostate.   Nallon’s brilliant evocation of the  previously encouraging voices of her backers – notably Jacob Rees-Mogg – gradually make her understand what’s happening: national potential bankruptcy. 

      That’s all good, but   the crux beforehand is the moment when the Queen dies,  and suddenly at the funeral Truiss is plunged into something bigger than politics,  bigger than her:  nationhood, ritual, something run by surefooted courtiers and military, apolitical. She has to be taught to curtsey by an unseen Rees-Mogg who ends up having to demonstrate how to do it. After that there is something almost touching about her storming towards “A Budget true and good and beautiful!”  and watching it collapse.    

       It was second-preview I saw, and I suspected the end would be been tightened (and I now gather that it has, the show within its natural 90 mins including interval).  But in that ending there is a real warning.  Off to America, thrilled by its energy and extremes, I watched the stage Truss reflecting on Trump, Farage, and how the key to getting a followership when people feel hard-up is horribly simple: just a identify  a “THEY” as the enemy.

     It’s a pretty remarkable couple of hours.  Honour to performer, author, and director Anthony Shrubsall.  `Not long left to catch it, but if you need something absolutely non-Christmassy….  

whitebeartheatre.co.uk   to 14 December

HIGH SPIRITS, HIGH COMEDY, EVEN HIGHER HEELS

      Elton John, who jumped at the idea of writing the music,  calls the 2006 film a favourite; many of us nod in blissful agreement.    Based on a semi- autobiographical novel by Lauren Weisberger about her time at Vogue, the modern fairytale tells how an   ambitious good-hearted young woman gets sucked into the glamorous but cruelly demanding world of an ice-queen boss (think Anna Wintour, exaggerated for effect in the masterly hands of Meryl Streep).  She risks her private life and moral instincts, but finds her true  nature in the end.  It became comfort-viewing:  glorious clothes , witty put-downs, and – not least – a darker echo of the way that women’s lucrative and hyper-demanding jobs screw up their relationships, especially with touchy men.   And it doesn’t need to be fashion that does it: ask any young lawyer or banker. 

      But I did wonder whether it needed to be a musical,  even in the hands of director-choreographer Jerry Mitchell, who has been making films into hits for years (Legally Blonde! Kinky Boots!) .    Book is by Kate Wetherhead – artfully keeping all the best Streepy sneers (“Florals for spring? Groundbreaking”) and her famous two-note dismissive “that’s all” .  And praise heaven, not musicalizing that tremendous speech about cerulean blue,   or the magnificent moment when Nigel lectures Andrea about her snobbish “disdain” for the real art of high fashion.  

       The lyrics Elton worked on are by Shaina Taub and Mark Sonnenblick:  they’re sharp, properly scanned, often as witty as the film itself.  One song,  Nigel’s passionate “Seen!” about a young gay man finding the fashion world, is stellar: discovering as a teenager  the part of him “never seen yet, found in a Yves St-Laurent silhouette..” .  Another opens up the difficulties of Andrea’s boyfriend “I miss the girl who used to use a 2 in 1 shampoo..I miss the old you!”.   Mitchell’s choreography is fabulously witty, too:  the fashionista  “clackers” falling constantly into those improbable model poses.   Gregg Barnes provides wild costumes  (and brilliant dowdy ones before Andrea succumbs – oh that shirt hanging out under the jumper!) .   The sets do just enough work and not too much.

      So all good then:  it’s a gig, a blast, a apectacular night out .  Vanessa Williams is a fine Miranda (Streeping-it-up a bit too much at the start, but who wouldn’t?  she does the later vulnerable scenes superbly).  Georgie Buckland on a West End debut is sensational as Andy,  Matt Henry a touchingly likeable Nigel and a gorgeous voice. And  as for Amy di Bartolomeo in the Emily Blunt role  as the senior assistant overtaken by Andrea, words fail me.  At first she pretty much shadows the film character, but with the music adds a real crazy vulnerability of her own.  Mitchell picks up on the fact that we have fallen for her (perhaps more than for Andrea, a bit of a prig)“; he adds and choreographs a fabulous “hot nurse” sequence after her broken leg accident, with lads in scrubs doing the full chorus-boy around her.  Then there is a completely new moment in the second half where Emily’s  future becomes even more glorious than her rival’s.  No spoilers but hey, Gaultier…

       So once the second half got well under way with a giant glittering Eiffel Tower,  I said to myself yeah, OK, if we must do this stupid star-rating thing, it’s a five. And yes,     it was worth making a musical of the film:  worth another dose of the shiny , fabulous and curiously wise nonsense of it.  That’s all.

devilwearspradamusical.com    to 31 May 2025

rating 5

C’EST MAGNIFIQUE !     

 Napoleon, defeated at Trafalgar,  vows revenge on Britain and its  “bootlicking monoglot  monarchists”. Stalking around in breeches and bicorn hat,  Matthew Kellett, a fine operatic baritone,  brandishes the arm he claims to have shot off Admiral Nelson.   A worried puppet fact-checker pokes  theough the velvet curtain complaining that this is anachronistic nonsense, the arm was lost years earlier,   and gets shot with Napoleon’s sidearm. Which is a baguette.  

    Back in London, George III in his nightshirt  (Elliott Broadfoot) plays air guitar on his sceptre,  Jennie Jacobs’ slinky Duke of Wellington mansplains annoyingly to Princess Georgina,  who may possibly change gender later (Amy J Payne). Everyone is worried about paying for the next war. Because, obviously,  the nation’s wealth is in a vault with the Black Prince’s ruby which only opens with Nelson’s fingerpint. So they need to get the arm back and “bash ’em in the Beaudelaire!”…  Napoleon must resist this, helped by the returning ghost of Marie Antoinette (Rosie Strobel, no less) and a brief chorus of headless guillotinees.  It is sometimes difficult to remember there are only six in the cast, the newest being Rochelle Jack, on a debut just outta Mountview.     

      And off we go in a torrent of Bonaparte puns, spirited songs from rock and pop to operatic – this is Charles Court opera, after all  – plus magnificent disguises, moustaches,  jokes turning on a sixpence from low to literary (cow puns, Sue Gray puns, George Orwell jokes. And an explanation of why the Trafalgar Square statue of the physically titchy Lord Nelson is 15ft tall: “it’s a 3 to 1 Horatio” ).  There are many ridiculous accents and some top-grade physical  clowning,  notably from Broadfoot and Kellett.  It’s fast, witty, tuneful, and excellently silly. All vital panto moments are here – shoutbacks, a pie, audience members recruited briefly, sly in-jones about costume changes.

       I came to it fresh from cheering John Savournin’s fine bass rants as the Pirate King at the Coliseium,  scroll below .  But here, as every year,  he pops up as co-author with Benji Sperring of the Charles Court OPera  panto.  It should be a nationally recognized event:  last year I meanly only gave their Greek romp 3+ a pantomouse for daftness, adding up to 4.   This one is still sillier,  musically even better, and so damn clever – with its torrent of goofy gags for serious people – that the mice queued up to be included.  My only dismay is that it’s in such a small house so not enough right-thinking people will  see it. But Penny and Stella and their Jermyn regulars are, after all, the absolute cream of small-scale London theatre.   Merry Christmas, Jermyn! 

Jermynstreetheatre.co.uk to 5 jan

TA-RAN-TA-RA !

  Mike Leigh,  a veteran better known for films, Abigail’s Party and theatrical experiments with scriptless rehearsal,  is also a dedicated devotee of the utterly scripted Gilbert & Sullivan, and ten years ago directed this production of their 1879 triumph.   Now revival director Sarah Tipple gives it high spirits and full vigour from an orchestra and chorus visibly enjoying the ride; it  always feels grand when an opera house lets its hair down, and Cal McCrystal’s Pinafore here was unforgettably entertaining.  So, as a fairly recent Gilbert & Sullivan convert (for full confession see here https://theatrecat.com/tag/hms-pinafore/) I couldn’t miss this version.  

       Some may be disconcerted by the way Alison Chitty’s set deliberately sweeps away the Victoriana to place the action mainly in a giant porthole cut out of  a vast blue  space  ( which editrix Miranda,  just up the road in. Devil wears Prada , would call – er – cerulean).  I resisted this  geometric colour-block starkness a bit at first,  as the cutout shapes changed to be seashore or country estate cemetery,  but in the second half  Chitty’s shapes beautifully serve the popping up of hiding,helmeted police.  And there is everything G&S  to love: rhymes both brilliant and disgraceful (gyrate/pirate!)   glorious choruses,  fine sentimental arias sending themselves up.

      Perhaps above all, in the grand Coliseum,  that’s the key pleasure of  Savoy Operas,  forever sending up not only the intense Britishness of their own Victorian age but the medium itself, with wicked pastiche. At their best the duo’s operettas feel like the bastard child of bel canto and music-hall.   When Isabelle Peters’ Mabel bursts into her declarations of love for the stunned Frederic (fellow Harewood Artist William Morgan) she shoots up into almost terrifying Puccini intensity;  John Savournin’s bass-baritone Pirate King is every Verdi villain. Except, of course, for the ridiculousness:   it also kept occurring to me how much Monty Python and Spike Milligan owed to WS Gilbert’s determinedly offbeam absurdism: grand figures unexpectedly illogical, official figures in uniform proffering unexpected values,  imperial-age concepts of heroism ,  duty and patriotism bravely guyed: think what a relief it must have been to the first audiences.  Once or twice before the police vs pirates battle  the Spanish Inquisition sketch floated into my mind.  

           But to come to the point,  it’s a glorious evening, ta-ran-ta-ra.  Richard Stuart, who last played the role here twenty years ago,  launches into his modern-major-general number through a thicket of whiskers,  rattling along like an Olympic hurdler on fast-forward.   James Cresswell, fresh from the Met and Paris,  unforgettably leads the police: his  men wincing beautifully behind him while the ladies’ chorus trills their hope for death as well as glory. Squeaks and gales of laughter.  And as for those ladies in their swagged muslins, boaters and big skirts,  I have to tell you that fearlessly on Greg Wallace Shame Day,  the  spirited kidnap by the pirates (seizing opportunity / to marry with impunity) saw several of them wildly thrown  up in a fireman’s lift over muscular shoulders, flowered bums up and legs flailing to the point that my companion wondered whether ENO had provided an intimacy coordinator.  Merriment all round.   As it should be. 

eno.org.   14 more performances till 21 Feb.

Rating 4

THE COOLEST CAT IN LONDON. AND SOME RATS. 

         Here’s your traditional Christmas outing, proper panto.  No rackety popstar hype or tedious suggestive jokes from worn-out comicS,   just  bright colours, and sets that make a kid want to go home and build their own even if they can’t build a revolve.  Add cheerful sixties tunes and a swinging plot with some genuinely eccentric twists; plus, as it is set in London,   the odd well-deserved swipe at Sadiq Khan.

       Anthony Spargo’s couplets even rhyme and scan properly,   and the author himself takes the role of the evil Ratticus rising, as he should ,  demonically from the floor in a startling 1960’s red-and-black pinstripe with giant shoulderpads.  Not that evil has any chance against the gallant Dick (a likeable Samuel Bailey) and his eyecatchingly very cool Cat. Who is Inez Ruiz, prowlingly ginger in furs,  who slinks around occasionally playing the saxophone.   

        Just enough modernity for the bells of London to be played by a projected clock-face talking in a Kenneth Williams voice,  just enough weird crypto-educational plot for a Dr Who phonebox to swallow various cast members and go back to the Great Fire of London ,  so the  more thoughtful children can muse on the impossibility of changing past history.  Only it does, as back in their present day nice Dame Megg’s bakery has become a dodgy Rat-a-Manger,  and there’s a thrillingly naughty casino.  Those in the young audience who have already  done Tudor History can appreciate  the idea of a shop called Catherine Tarragon.     Oh, and there is the kitchen scene, the fight scene,   and the odd bum and slime joke,  as there should be.  And there’s  Louise Cieleki as a wet minnie-mouse trying to be a convincing powerful rat, a social sensation we have all had in our lives.

         There’s nothing like sneaking early to a  schools matinee to judge a proper panto.  My lot  – I think three SE London schools – were singing along deafeningly to “Last Christmas” well before the curtain,  and more than willing to yell back every catch-phrase.  But just as importantly they were concentrating on the story, properly and quietly when needed and  roaring approval when appropriate.   Close to me one small lad, previously showing every signs of getting “challenging” on his report card,  leaned forward keenly at every twist, especially the time-travel. After the interval he hurried back to wait for part 2.   So there you are: you’ll find starrier pantos and louder ones and ruder ones and far more expensive ones,  but if we still lived in Greenwich that’s where I’d start Christmas. 

greenwichtheatre.org.uk  to  5 jan

rating 4