Footnotes
Footloose
by Dean Pitchford and Walter Bobbie
Selladoor Worldwide at New Wimbledon Theatre until 20th August
Review by Andrew Lawston
Wimbledon Theatre is tonight transformed into Bomont, the town where dancing and rock music are prohibited. Itchy-footed rebel Ren McCormack moves from Chicago to Bomont with his mother, and proceeds to challenge the status quo. Dean Pitchford and Walter Bobbie’s stage adaptation of the 1984 film starring Kevin Bacon, Dianne Wiest, and John Lithgow, has plenty of its own star power, in addition to an iconic soundtrack and music by Tom Snow.
A brief announcement mentions that Mike Nichols, the Musical Director, is conducting the evening’s performance, and excitingly that the actors will be playing instruments live on stage. In practice, most of the musicians on stage are in the ensemble, but Ren and Chuck both pick up an acoustic guitar and saxophone, respectively. It’s a bold move from director Racky Plews to have actors playing live in the middle of choreographed musical numbers, and it adds a sense of danger and rawness to the production. Nichols later takes a greatly deserved bow at the end of the show, brandishing a frankly gorgeous bass guitar.
Read more…Pre Prandial Perplexities
Sense and Compatibility
by Nina Schlautmann and Sarah Tiplady
SchlautladyINK at Etcetera Theatre, Camden, then at The Lion and Unicorn Theatre, Kentish Town until 16th August. Part of the Camden Fringe
Review by Heather Moulson
Not having been to a morning play for a long time, I looked forward to this pre-lunch experience.
As we take our seats in the surprisingly roomy theatre above The Oxford Arms, one of the actors, Nina Schlautmann paces the stage area nervously, already paving a nice build-up. She is joined by two wooden stools and an orange suitcase laid bare, containing toilet seats, and other intriguing props brought in to furnish the stark set. Then a projected backdrop of skilled and detailed sketches showing images, among other settings, of interview rooms and ironic supermarkets appears. However, even bereft of these things, the sharp performances and dialogue would have dressed the set beautifully.
Thin Wire Spectacle
Hotel Paradiso
Lost in Translation at The Beauty, Underbelly Circus Hub, the Meadows, Edinburgh Fringe until 27th August
Review by Eleanor Marsh
Guinness World Record holder Lost in Translation is a collective of international artistes based in the UK, all at the top of their game, and now creating quite a buzz at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Hotel Paradiso is a well-known play and film that has its original plot slightly changed for this production. But the plot is not the thing here and any purists looking for a replay of the movie are in the wrong place.
On the thin wire of the little of the plot that remains, hangs the favourite hotel’s future, which is under threat from the baddies from the bank; needless to say the occasional illicit affair and obligatory police chase are employed to add even more drama to the story and the clever use of proper slapstick is very impressive.
Read more…Dealing With a Sex Pest – Edwardian Style
The Boatswain’s Mate
music and libretto by Dame Ethel Smyth
Spectra Ensemble at The Arcola Theatre until 13th August, then on tour until 9th October
Review by Patrick Shorrock
It seems to be Dame Ethel Smyth’s year, with her opera, The Wreckers, performed at Glyndebourne and the Proms. The Boatswain’s Mate is lighter fare and actually funny (which can’t be always be said for operatic comedies). It’s worth hearing, as the music is pleasing, if not, perhaps, desperately individual. Pianist and Music Director John Warner – well supported by Emily Earl on violin and Meera Priyanka Raja on cello – did a fine job with the reduced score, while giving hints that the full orchestration might have something to add to the overall effect.
The lively overture features Smyth’s famous March of the Women – the anthem of the Suffragette Movement. We see a woman on a deck chair reading. She is subjected to the clearly unwanted advances from a man in beachwear. She is successful in driving him away when she proves that she is better than he is playing with his beach-ball.
Read more…Clued Up
Clue: on Stage
by Sandy Rustin, adapted from a screenplay by Jonathan Lynn
YAT at the Coward Room, Hampton Hill Theatre until 13th August
Review by Andrew Lawston
Anyone who has seen Jonathan Lynn’s 1985 film, or who has spent a rainy weekend playing board games, will have a fair idea what to expect from Clue, Sandy Rustin’s comedy thriller based on the famous Waddingtons’ board game. But YAT’s youthful and energetic cast breathe new vitality into the old favourite, resulting in a highly enjoyable couple of hours of madcap theatre.
Hampton Hill Theatre’s Noel Coward Room is transformed into Boddy Manor, with a minimalist set consisting mostly of a chandelier and a map of the mansion on the back wall. Furniture is wheeled in and out by a slick backstage team, all dressed as domestic staff to maintain the illusion. In one corner, a radio announcer discusses McCarthyism, setting the play firmly in 1950s America.
Against the traditional backdrop of a dark and stormy night, a diverse group of individuals with somewhat iconic names are due to arrive at the country house. Each with something to hide, and each intensely suspicious of the others.
Read more…Changing Lives
Siegfried
by Richard Wagner, adaptation by Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick
Arcola Theatre Productions at the Hackney Empire until 7th August
Review by Helen Astrid
To scale-down any production is not an easy task. What would have been six hours of music and drama became just two. Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick’s reduction of Wagner’s Siegfried, the third opera of the tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen or “The Ring Cycle” as we know it, has certainly made a mark in the repertory for smaller venues with even fewer resources to perform large-scale operas or in this case music-dramas.
The entire Ring Cycle takes around fifteen hours to sit through, which is an endurance test. When it was staged in Seattle in 2003, the opera house issued advice to ticket-holders suggesting they lay off the booze and get plenty of sleep the night before. The great English conductor Adrian Boult said that two acts of Wagner was enough for anyone and he used to skip the middle act to go and have dinner. Grimeborn’s production though was without any intervals.
Read more…Buzz on the Fringe
Bee Master
by Chris Harris and Chris Denys
Blue Fire Theatre Company at Space Two, theSpace on the Mile, Edinburgh until 13th August, then on tour.
Review by Millie Stephens
When the Bard wrote “To bee, or not to bee …”, he had not read Harris and Denys’ witty and educational script, Bee Master. Otherwise, Brother Barnabus’ knowledge of the humble bumble bee could have been a source for the unwritten Merry Hives of Windsor … … However, we should be sticking to Blue Fire Theatre Company’s sweet story of bees and beekeeper, which is creating a growing buzz at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
Bee Master consists of a monologue performed by Steve Taylor, who plays the role of the monastic beekeeper, Brother Barnabus. We in the audience are informed about the bees in his hive, as well as being given an insightful education into the life cycle of the female and male bees. This informative soliloquy is filled with comedic one liners, making it very engaging for the audience.
Brother Barnabus tells a story of self-discovery, learnt in his beekeeper role ensconced in the peaceful surroundings of Clumpton Abbey. Along the way, he uncovers a honeycomb of thoughts about his own existence. These can only be thoughts, as the Abbey houses a silent order of monks.
Read more…Dream Awakening to Shakespeare
Midsummer Mechanicals
by Kerry Frampton and Ben Hales, after William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s Globe and Splendid Productions, at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse until 21st August
Review by Emma Byrne
Well, I’m going to start this review with a confession – I love the Globe. I love the imperfect illusion of stepping back in time. It’s not just the occasion contrail puffing lazily apart above the thatch, or the shriek of a slowing train on the approach to London Bridge. It’s the audience: the way we sometimes approach Shakespeare with reverence or fear, depending on the teachers we were lucky – or unlucky – enough to have.
So I mean it sincerely when I say: Midsummer Mechanicals feels like the most Shakespearean show I’ve ever seen at the Globe. It’s not so much that the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse encloses you, TARDIS-like, and whisks you away from the modern bustle of Bankside, it’s that the audience of young families arrives with none of the baggage, and all of the enthusiasm, for a wild, gripping, hilarious, anarchic show in which they, too, can play their part.
Read more…Powerful, Emotional, Magical
Götterdämmerung
by Richard Wagner, adaptation by Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick
Arcola Theatre Productions at the Hackney Empire until 7th August
Review by Suzanne Frost
Grimeborn, the Arcola Theatre’s annual opera festival, has for fifteen years sought out wildly exciting new productions for curious and brave audiences – and what could be more wild, exciting and brave than a pocket-sized fringe version of only the most epic saga of the opera world, Wagner’s Ring cycle. Fifteen hours of music and an all-encompassing story boasting over twenty individual characters, all tangled up in the same intricate web of greed and deceit, has been boiled down by Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick, to bring the epos to a wider audience, originally in a community setting in Birmingham in the 90s, which proved quite the sensation. During the height of the pandemic, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, home to one of the most legendary and huge scale Ring productions by Götz Friedrich, decided to play Dove’s stripped down version of Rheingold outdoors on the opera house’s own parking deck – tickets sold out within twelve minutes to the culture starved German audience. While in 2019 and 2021, Grimeborn presented the first two chapters, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, the cycle comes to a conclusion this year with the last two instalments Siegfried and Götterdämmerung.
Truthful Musicianship
Get Up, Stand Up! The Bob Marley Musical
by Bob Marley, book by Lee Hall
Playful Productions with Stage Play and Cedella Marley at the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, until 8th January 2023, then on UK and international tour
Jazz and pop critic, Vince Francis talks to Michael Duke, who plays Bob Marley in the West End musical Get Up, Stand Up!
Interview by Vince Francis
Once in a while, an opportunity arises that should be grasped firmly with both hands. Sometimes, the gods conspire to make that opportunity a bar of soap and the attempt to grasp it almost comical. Thus it was with the meeting with the actor, producer and musician Michael Duke, currently playing Bob Marley in the production of Get Up, Stand Up at the West End’s Lyric Theatre. Michael’s availability was understandably limited, and I had an obligation that couldn’t be moved. I’m therefore extremely grateful to those who worked to make it happen.
So, for those who may be unfamiliar, Bob Marley was probably the most influential reggae musician to come out of the home of reggae, Jamaica. Reggae – the word has its roots in the patois word for ‘ragged’ – is a genre of music which evolved from origins in Trinidadian Calypso, through other popular sub-genres, such as Mento, Dance Hall and Ska, for which, by the way, the Jamaican pronunciation is “Skya”, to rhyme with the “Tia” in “Tia Maria”.
Read more…
Mark Aspen 