The plotline in Tasting Notes is not without holes. Not satisfied with one critical incident that has a significant impact on one or more of its characters, there are several. A lot is packed into a twenty-four-hour period in a production that is meant to portray a day in the lives of its six characters. But what goes on becomes increasingly implausible that your reviewer started to wonder if this was a piece of absurdist theatre. The storyline circles back repeatedly over the same … [Read more...]
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe at Gillian Lynne Theatre
In some ways, this is the ultimate form of escapism: Narnia, as portrayed in this adaptation of CS Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, is a fantasy world full of magical powers and talking animals. But both the narrative and the stagecraft can be very dark when they want to be – there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and it seems to work quite well here, if only because for good to overcome evil, there has to be a substantial amount of evil in the first place for this to actually … [Read more...]
Sister Act: The Musical at Eventim Apollo, London
The merchandise stand is selling, amongst other items, the DVDs of the 1992 film Sister Act and its 1993 sequel Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, but don’t expect to hear any of the songs from the films in the musical adaptation. With a relocation of the narrative from San Francisco, CA to Philadelphia, PA, a distance of 2,876 miles, thrown in, this production was supposed to feature Whoopi Goldberg – though filming schedules and other commitments meant it didn’t quite work in the end. Instead, … [Read more...]
101 Dalmatians at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre
I might have attempted, if I were engaged enough in proceedings, a headcount of the final scene of 101 Dalmatians to see if there really were one hundred and one ‘Dalmatians’. If, however, we are talking about Dalmatians, without inverted commas, there is one – if you’ve seen The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, it’s a bit like the scene when an actual dog appears: oohs and aahs reverberate around the auditorium. But unlike Curious, this production doesn’t have a couple of hours of … [Read more...]
Milk & Honey – two absurdist one-act plays
There’s a fair amount open to interpretation in this double bill, in which it is entirely possible to expend too much effort trying to figure out what exactly is happening, and more to the point, why. Is the first half, Milk, doing the sort of thing, albeit on a considerably smaller scale, that the 2004 disaster (in more ways than one) motion picture did? That is, use copious amounts of the world’s resources to demonstrate that copious amounts of the world’s resources are being used by the human … [Read more...]
Horsepower – Written and Performed by Harriet Gandy
It’s a challenging piece of theatre, but not necessarily in a wholly satisfying way: more often than not I found myself trying to figure out what exactly was going on. Horsepower begins with ‘Destructive Desmond’, a cabaret performer who, by his own admission, is also – amongst other things – a children’s swimming instructor, chandelier installer, a trained opera singer and, at weekends, a plumber. Few of the various named professions are actually demonstrated, though there is some good banter … [Read more...]
Fan Girl at Etcetera Theatre
There are people who are so obsessive about their favourite actors that it becomes problematic - I read a news item recently about a man who was given a stalking protection order, prohibiting him from directly or indirectly contacting his favourite actor or the actor’s agent, having sent letters, parcels and thousands of emails, as well as knocking on her front door on numerous occasions. I was once messaged on social media by someone claiming to be a friend of a musical theatre actor who had … [Read more...]