The Eastern Angles touring theatre company, which has just turned thirty, already has a history of site-specific productions. This includes a disused airfield by Rendlesham Forest, an old engine works at Leiston, and now the famous Flag Fen on the outskirts of Peterborough. Sites do not come more specific than this, since the Dark Earth of the current show’s title is the very location of the ancient conflicts which it dramatises. It is set at the end of the seventeenth century, when the great … [Read more...]
I Can’t Sing The X Factor Musical press launch at RADA
It’s a Maybe from me. The tunes sounded catchy in a hit-musical kind of way, and Simon Cowell really did look an awful lot like himself. He was working with a slight handicap, obviously, as he hadn’t got any acts to big up or put down; just us, the audience of yesterday’s press launch of I Can’t Sing at RADA’s cosy little theatre off Tottenham Court Road, London. So there we were, looking at him on the stage and there he was looking back at us in the auditorium. What was he going to tell us? … [Read more...]
All Star Productions Little Me at Ye Old Rose and Crown Theatre
Here’s one that takes you back. There are two journeys. The first is to the American musical of the early 1960s, just after Bernstein and Sondheim had raised the bar to fresh heights with West Side Story. The second is to the flowering of London pub theatre a decade later; up the scuffed stairs of a big old urban boozer, past the fire extinguisher and the dressing room door, then into a large function room pressed into service for a burgeoning fringe. Faint sounds of a band from somewhere else, … [Read more...]
Pipe Dream by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein
With the perpetually revived Sound of Music playing to packed houses in Regents Park, it would be easy to miss the appearance of one of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s least known musicals down in Southwark. It would also be a mistake; not only is this Pipe Dream’s first London production, it is also a resoundingly good one, full of vigour, poignancy and resourcefulness. If you were making a musical about a musical, you would need to look no further than this for your subject matter, for Pipe Dream … [Read more...]
Review of The Matchgirls
John Wilton could not have foreseen this when he built his East London music hall more than one hundred and fifty years ago, but it would become the perfect setting for a musical about one of the most dramatic episodes in the evolution of industrial relations, the matchgirls’ strike of 1888. Partially upstaged by the dockers’ actions the following year, the girls’ walkout from the grim Bryant and May factory in Bow was the more audacious of the two, flying in the face of two prevailing … [Read more...]
And In The End by Alexander Marshall Jermyn Street Theatre
In the midst of death we are in life. For the purposes of this evening, both belong to the late Beatle John Lennon. No sooner has he been cruelly dispatched to an early death in New York in 1980 by the crazed gunman Mark Chapman than he embarks on the story of his life. Where is this account coming from? Heaven or Hell? If you are a Lennon fan, which is not quite the same thing as being a Beatles fan, he and therefore we are in the first; if you find him dumb with drink or dull with rage, it is … [Read more...]
GamePlan by Alan Ayckbourn at the The Hen and Chickens
It’s the done thing to say Alan Ayckbourn’s humour turned darker as his life and career grew longer. Yet there was always a powerful underpull of despair beneath the shimmer of well-plotted farce as his characters revealed themselves to be suffering from modern versions of timeless woes: isolation, family break-up, snobbery running to class hatred, marital hostility and depression itself. In this one, written and produced more than a decade ago as the first in his 'Damsels In Distress' … [Read more...]