Shooting Pains
Assassins
music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by John Weidman
BB Theatre Productions at Oakwood Centre, Woodley until 24th July
Review by John Davies
Performing Sondheim is a challenge for any company; conveying the complexity of emotions across a multitude of characters in Assassins doubly so; then making the disparate stories work as a seamless whole – triple whammy! BB Theatre Productions’ recent show, at the Oakwood Centre in Woodley, rose magnificently to those challenges with cast, production team and musicians combining expertly to deliver an enthralling evening.
Read more…Gentle Murm’ring Stream
Acis and Galatea – The Sixteen in Concert
by George Frideric Handel, libretto by John Gay
West Green House Opera at the Theatre on the Lake, Hartley Wintney until 22nd July
Review by Mark Aspen
“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains … that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends”. Thus says Duke Theseus, just before he also implicates the poet in one of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ’s many well-known epigrams, “the lunatic, the lover and the poet …”
He could well be talking about the love-besotted shepherd, Acis, and the raging giant cyclops, Polyphemus, whose brains seethe in their very differing pursuits of the beautiful water nymph, Galatea … whose romanticism is certainly poetic.
Here we have the perilous love-triangle described in Book xiii of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the root source of John Gay’s libretto for Handel’s Acis and Galatea. This particular one of Ovid’s collection of transformation stories was very popular with baroque period composers and their librettists. Indeed Handel had already used the tale in his serenata, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, which was commissioned by the Duchess Aurora Sanseverino for the celebrations in Naples of the wedding her niece, just over a decade earlier.
Handel’s Acis and Galatea is a tale of two halves. Act One is a carefree idyll of joy and happiness, Act Two, with the intervention of Polyphemus, takes a threatening, and ultimately (or rather penultimately) tragic, turn.
Read more…Gilbert and George
Homage to George Grossmith
by Tim Shaw and J.J.Leppink
Blue Fire Theatre Company at the Mary Wallace Theatre, Twickenham, then at The Space on the Mile, Edinburgh Fringe until 27th August
Review by Andrew Lawston
Blue Fire Productions is presenting two of its Edinburgh Fringe Festival shows – Diary of a Nobody and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Nightmare as a double bill entitled Homage to George Grossmith. This is a reference both to the co-author of George and Weedon Grossmith’s 1892 book Diary of a Nobody, adapted by Tim Shaw, and to the fact that George Grossmith was a principal performer in the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, originating many of the baritone roles in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas. Producer Lottie Walker gives a brief introduction before the first show, and we begin without further ado.
Read more…Polished Performances
Two Cleaners
by Chiara Arrigoni
Festival of New Theatre, at Questors Studio, Ealing until 23rd July
Review by Heather Moulson
Concluding the innovative Festival of New Theatre at the wonderful Questors, we saw a fitting and strong production. After an impressive week of plays and workshops, Two Cleaners was an apt climax. The starkness of the studio in which the barren setting of this two-hander took place was an appropriate one. The writer Chiara Arrigoni was said to be inspired by Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, and had paid a justifiable homage to that iconic play. The layers were stripped away at a slick pace.
Read more…Love in a Heatwave Climate
On Me
by Caroline Lamb
Mute
by Emily Glaze
Festival of New Theatre, at Questors Studio, Ealing until 23rd July
Review by Andrew Lawston
The Questors Studio is a black box of air-conditioned solace on the hottest day of the year until the next day. A crowd of theatregoers has braved the heatwave, only to step inside the auditorium and breathe a deep sigh of relief at the blanket of cool air that cocoons them throughout two brand new plays. Festival Producer Alex McDevitt gives a short introduction to the evening, including the fact that three of the five plays selected – from over three hundred submissions – were written by women, including the two that we are about to see.
Other than the writers’ gender, however, these are two very different pieces.
Read more…Jill Beats the Beanstalk
Jack and the Beanstalk
by Louis Rayneau
Future Spotlight Productions at Kidzania London, Westfield, Shepherd’s Bush, then streaming on Broadway on Demand from 22nd July, prior to UK cinema release.
Review by Viola Selby
KidZania is a world of its own, a kingdom for the kids to try out so many different careers and become inspired for their future; and this is just what this musical film production of Jack and the Beanstalk is, a true inspiration for rising and new talent and the magic that can be achieved with such a capable and confident cast and crew in just two days of filming. It is a refreshingly modern twist on the much loved classic.
Read more…Souls, Struggles, and Spin
Clorinda Agonistes
by Shobana Jeyasingh, music by Claudio Monteverdi and Kareem Roustom
Shobana Jeyasingh Dance and Sadler’s Wells at The Grange Festival, The Grange, Northington until 14th July, then on tour until 16th November
World Premiere. Part of Baroque Counterpoint
Review by Mark Aspen
Crusade is a word that must nowadays be used with great circumspection. Cultures have now become less polarised, but in 1591 when the Italian epic poet Torquato Tasso wrote his Gerusalemme liberata, he took an entirely different approach. A poem about the Siege of Jerusalem in 1099 and the First Crusade, it is highly romanticised and weaves in an imaginative mythology. The spin is doctored towards the European standpoint.
Choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh’s new work Clorinda Agonistes focusses in on one character of Tasso’s twenty canto poem, the Muslim maiden warrior Clorinda. It contrasts and compares the Clorinda of 1099 with women, Clorindas, in the Middle East in 2022. At a time when cultures are (trying to become) more integrated, this could be a polemic on religious identity or on feminism. It is neither. It is a balanced, inspired and powerfully gripping account and one that asks more questions than it answers.
Read more…We’re All Doomed; Or Are We?
A Plague on All Your Houses
by Marcia Kelson
Angels Wings, Bitesize Festival at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith until 16th July
Review by Nick Swyft
In the same way that if you start reading a medical handbook, you find out that you have everything in the book, apart from the Preface, I came away from this play feeling quite ill, which probably meant that the play worked. (I’m better now, thanks for asking!)
Now part of the July-long BiteSize Festival, A Plague on All Your Houses is written by Marcia Kelson, who was longlisted for the Papatango prize in 2016 and 2017. She also won the Best Newcomer award at the Brighton Fringe in 2021.
Using various scenes throughout history, we learnt some interesting facts, which were cleverly woven together to show that however people reacted in, say, 1500 BC that we react in the same way today. For example a couple stranded on a cruise ship off Sicily in 2020 at the start of the Covid outbreak had to remain on board, as did the crews of the plague ships who tried to land there in 1347, on pain of death: a sobering thought. Some facts were just interesting in their own right. For example, despite living through a plague-ridden era equally affecting the theatres of the time, Shakespeare never used it as a plot device in any of his plays! (Although the word “plague” is referred to 105 times.)
Read more…
Spring Forth
The Four Seasons
by Jenna Lee, music by Max Richter adapted from Antonio Vivaldi
and Don Quixote, Grand Pas de Deux
by Marius Petitpa, music by Ludwig Minkus
New English Ballet Theatre at The Grange Festival, The Grange, Northington until 14th July
Part of Baroque Counterpoint
Review by Mark Aspen
The Grange, in its idyllic setting in a pastoral bowl in the Hampshire countryside, is reflective place to be in these days leading up to what is largely expected to be the hottest period in recorded history for these islands. On press night, black ties are being shed for silk cravats. Looking out across parkland, lakes and woods, however, nature seems still at peace beneath the shimmering air.
Will it look like this in three months’ time, in six months? Did it look like this three months ago? Of course not. And as the temperature rises, we give thanks for the seasons.
In 1717 Antonio Vivaldi could have been looking out on the countryside in Lombardy or the Veneto and equally thanking God for the seasons. He was clearly inspired to write his best-known work, the group of four violin concerti known as Le quattro stagioni (The Four Seasons and maybe he also wrote the accompanying four sonnets which follow the music in poetry.
Read more…Song to Sing
The Yeomen of the Guard
by Arthur Sullivan libretto by W.S. Gilbert
The Grange Festival, The Grange, Northington until 8th July
Review by Mark Aspen
Is there something Shakespearean about WS Gilbert’s libretto in The Yeomen of the Guard? There are changed identities, an improbable disguise, wooing by subterfuge, a philosophical fool and an ending involving three marriage proposals.
Is there something Wagnerian about Arthur Sullivan’s music in The Yeomen of the Guard? There are touches of grand opera rivalling Verdi, of symphonic style Mendelsohn-like passages, of the classical style of Mozart.
Yes to both these questions, but Sullivan also has folk song, shanties, dance music and musical acrobatics. All work seamlessly and congruently together. Gilbert has his trademark wit, patter songs, and satire (lightly touched.)
The Yeomen of the Guard pulls all these together with homogeneity. Nothing jars. It’s all very civilised, and very English. Yet, although it may be fun, there hovering under the surface is the dark shadow of reality. Hence, it is perhaps the most subtle of the G&S canon, and is widely regarded as their best collaboration.
The Grange Festival production respects, and indeed enhances, this subtlety without losing the joy of the genre, avoiding caricature without losing its sense of self-parody.
Read more…
Mark Aspen 