musical

High energy, high kicks and hijinks

Crazy for You – Ivor Novello Theatre, Booking until July 2012

Fresh from its successful run at the Regents Park Open Air Theatre, Crazy for You has since transferred to the Ivor Novello Theatre. It seems a suitable home for a production that showcases the best of the 1930′s musical songbook. Whilst Novello contributed to a very British version of the musical comedy that had little in common with his American counterparts, Crazy for You’s chorus line routines, zinging one-liners and infectious melodies would appear to be closer to his taste than the overblown power chords, million pound sets and star billing of the modern day musical. It is both interesting and depressing to note Shrek: The Musical is in residency just two hundred metres up the road, and a stone’s throw from the Royal Opera House.

Having seen the show in its original run, it is interesting to make comparisons between the two. The Open Air Theatre is a daunting place to stage a show; the director needs to battle a large auditorium where small. intimate gestures are likely to be missed but without access to the same range of special effects and staging techniques available in a more traditional space.

There have been a few alterations during the transfer to the Novello, clearly with the aim of giving the show a little more spectacle, but these are only minor and there is a pleasing sense that there has been a deliberate decision to stay true to the spirit of the period. Whether it is due to being staged indoors, in more familiar surroundings, the dancing has become noticeably tighter. The routines have been slightly rechoreographed for the smaller stage and the chorus line display a uniformity and invention that is a necessity for reviving the true spirit of Broadway.  Click here to read the full review 

For a quick preview see the trailer below

(warning: this trailer contains moving images of Jeffrey Archer)

Even better than Cook’s chocolate cake

Cambridge Theatre, 21 December 2011 – booking until Oct 2012

There is a long and often inglorious history of converting  much-loved books into musical theatre. The temptation for doing so is obvious; flying in the face of overwhelming critical disdain, Les Miserables has provided a template  for financial success. It has a mantelpiece of audience-choice awards, a global army of devoted fans and by January 2010 it was celebrating notching up 10,000 performances in the West End. In short the tills have not stopped ringing since the original Cameron Mackintosh-Trevor Nunn production in 1985.

A salient and oft-overlooked fact by those who sneer at Les Mis is that this success has seen the RSC (producers of Matilda) through the brutal conditions suffered in the 1980’s under a prime minister who held Andrew Lloyd Webber as a shining example of artistic achievement. No doubt Jean Valjean would not have countenanced betraying his principles in such a manner but clearly the financially imperatives of publically subsidised theatre led to Trevor Nunn’s rather more pragmatic vision.

With Les Miserables finally beginning to flag, transferring to the noticeably smaller Queens Theatre and with the famous Barricade seemingly less than impressive in its new surrounds, the RSC have sought to launch a new cash cow in the form of a major new musical adapted from a well-known book. Clearly it was though that the National’s approach of writing a verbatim musical, ‘London Road’, about the serial killing of five prostitutes in Ipswich was not the way to long-term commercial success.

However the road to the West End is paved with the carcasses of plots from their literary womb untimely ripped. Topping this sad and unfestive tree must be Gone With The Wind, critically reviled and starring a woefully miscast Darius (remember him?), but there is also Carrie The Musical, a concept so clearly problematic that the mind boggles at the commissioning process. For most of 2012 we have been entertained by the sorry stories emanating across the Atlantic surrounding the sheer ineptitude of Spiderman: The Musical; a show that could only have come from trouble-shooting consultants who identified a previously unidentified cross over between comic book fans and musical theatre goers.

The RSC must have approached Roald Dahl’s much-loved children’s book with some trepidation. He is an author who, like Enid Blyton, never seems to go out of fashion despite offering a nostalgic view of England that those reading the books will find hard to reconcile with a world of X-Boxes and Club Penguin. With a central premise built on libraries, it even smacks of radicalism that seems very at odds with Dahl’s natural conservatism.

Continue to the full review here

And for a special sneak preview…

Marvellous (wo)men and their flying machines

Girlfriends

Upstairs @  Ye Olde Rose & Crown, 01 July 2011

While watching All Star Productions revival of Howard Goodall’s 1986 musicalGirlfriends I was reminded of the sheer vastness of new British writing since the 1960’s. It can seem that there is a play for any occasion; metaphor for the crisis in Serbia? Try Sarah Kane’s Blasted. Verbatim reportage on a racist killing? How about Colour of Justice. Dissident Russian’s that require a full-scale orchestra? Stoppard’s Every Good Boy…should hit the mark.

Given this incredible legacy that exists it’s dispiriting to scan the West End and see endless Musicals based on bands – Thriller / Jersey Boys; films – Legally Blonde / Shrek; or written by Andrew Lloyd Webber Shakespeare – seemingly everything else.  All Star Productions should be congratulated for getting their hands on this little known musical that is written by one of our best known composers and with input from a young Richard Curtis. It may not be a classic but a man who has won an Ivor Novello, a BAFTA and been nominated for an Emmy is more than capable of writing a few catchy tunes. The fact it is a completely original musical comes as a huge relief  and at least a modicum amount of time has been devoted to a plot and characters, which if wafer-thin, is always engaging. Continue Reading Here

Getting down with Shakespeare

Funk It Up About Nothing – Theatre Royal Stratford East, 07 May 2011

It comes as little surprise to learn that the The Q Brothers, the group behind ‘Funk it up about nothin’, have previous when it comes to adapting Shakespeare for a modern audience. The show had been a hit at the Edinburgh festival and it’s clear that the cast are much more versatile than the slightly ramshackle approach might initially suggest.

Hidden below the surface is an awful lot of hard graft. Cutting Shakespeare in half and rewriting 95% of the dialogue should not be a task that anyone takes lightly, for no better evidence I point people towards Gnomeo and Juliet. Creating a tightly-written musical score that fits 75-minutes of continuous and fast-paced verse adds a whole another level of difficulty. And a third problem is that by placing it within the context of urban music means the audience you are aiming for will tell instantly whether we are talking genuine Prada or a Rada knock-off.

The choice of Much Ado About Nothing is extremely well-judged. It is very well suited to a hip-hop reimagining. The four leads are all too imaginable in the modern world – the pretty but vapid match of Claudio and Hero undermined all too easily by accusations of ‘being a ho’, while the quick-fire, pithy verbal sparring of Beatrice and Benedict seem a natural fit to a world of hip-hop battles and zinging one-line assaults, as thrown out by our nimble MC’s. Updating the play but remaining in verse creates a vivid sense of old and new combining – deep down we know this isn’t Shakespeare but the continually rhymes blended with the odd-line taken from the original works to disorient the audience until we are no longer entirely sure which play a reference to ‘licking the honeypot’ comes from. Continue Reading Here