Review Yank!

Peter Barker finds charm, wistfulness and humour in an American show evoking the golden age of musicals with a World War II story of two men deeply in love. 

Yank!
Music by Joseph Zellnik
Book and Lyrics by David Zellnik

Goodnight Sweetheart
http://www.charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/

Yank! is a lush musical, set mostly in the Pacific during the Second World War, steeped in the tradition of Rogers and Hammerstein who of course also used a similar wartime setting in South Pacific.

It chronicles a pair of lovers in a forbidden relationship, as did Rogers and Hammerstein in 1949, but this time the tender romance is between two gay soldiers.

The score also uses the format and stereotypes of 1940' shows and films. These include patriotic "it takes one of every kind" platoon movies featuring military men of diverse ethnicities in a squad overcoming wartime challenges and coming to appreciate and respect each other.

The creation of two brothers, composer Joseph Zellnik and lyricist and librettist David Zellnik, this musical, originally workshopped in 2005, became an off Broadway hit five years later, before the American army's repeal of the don't ask, don't tell policy.

Now Yank! arrives in London, via a successful run and its European première at Manchester's Hope Mill Theatre. 

At the centre of Yank! is the poignant affair of teenage military recruit Stu (Scott Hunter), who is eventually assigned a role on military magazine Yank!, and charismatic, handsome all-American boy Mitch (Andy Coxon).

Stu, an innocent whose love for Mitch is a sexual awakening, works with gay photographer Artie (Chris Kiely) through whom he discovers more about the secret life of gay men in the military.

The musical uses true life experiences from the book "Coming Out Under Fire" by Allan Bérubé and other stories gathered by the musical's creators from gay World War II military veterans.

The smooth, precise direction by James Baker, James Cleeve's excellent seven-piece band and Chris Cuming's dynamic choreography all add up to a stylish and vibrant production.

The strong story, which also includes plenty of laughs, has beautifully sung performances from Hunter and Coxon leading a polished 12-strong cast. The sole woman on stage is the versatile Sarah-Louise Young showing her mettle playing a variety of female characters.

While there's no tune in the score which made me come out humming, there's still plenty to enjoy. An old fashioned format is given an unusual twist, a likeable hero meets the challenges of life and war and there is an uplifting, though unexpected, ending.

Yank! is a relatively recent musical which pastiches the shows of the past, but still retains a heartfelt and genuine core during its two and half hours and I give it an amber/green light.

Review The Braille Legacy

David Wilkins is a blind and partially deaf print and broadcast journalist who has worked in South Africa and for the BBC in Guernsey and Lincoln.  https://davidwilkinswords.blogspot.co.uk/

The Braille Legacy
Original idea, French book and lyrics by Sébastien Lancrenon
Music by Jean-Baptiste Saudray
Translation by Ranjit Bolt 

A Touch Of Genius
http://charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/theatre/the-braille-legacy 

Louis Braille pioneered a touch system of raised dots which revolutionised the education of the blind, enabling them to read and write as well as their sighted peers.

As Louis was also a gifted vocalist and musician who invented the Braille music code, a musical would seem to be an extremely appropriate way to celebrate Louis' legacy.

The unique story of Louis' remarkable achievement by the age of 15 allows composer Jean-Baptiste Saudray and book and lyric writer Sébastien Lancrenon to use an approach and style in The Braille Legacy beloved by fans of Lionel Bart's Oliver and Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg's Les Miserables.

Losing his sight in an accident when very young, Louis becomes a pupil at a workhouse-like cash strapped Parisian boarding school for blind children in the early 19th century.

He is eager to read but the few books available at the school are in embossed print, making it enormously difficult for the blind children to read at all. However merely airing these frustrations in public results in a ban from France's National Library in Paris.

Yet he overcomes his despair and adversity hardens his resolve to find a way to learn and fight the injustice he encounters. Braille has to battle against the bigotry of both individuals and the state, as well as the difficulties of persuading his school to accept the Braille system as an alternative to print.

Inspired by a retired army officer's system of reading messages in the dark devised for soldiers,  Louis is determined to pioneer his own system - still in use by blind people worldwide after 200 years.

The Braille Legacy is based very loosely based on the inventor of Braille's true-life story. Jack Wolfe is a sympathetic proactive Louis telling his own story through song.

Directed by Thom Southerland, The Braille Legacy's narrative is simple, direct and affecting and includes the obligatory tragic hero and villain. Louis' chief ally is Jérôme Pradon's Dr Pignier and his chief adversary Ashley Stillburn's Monsieur Dufau.

Dialogue acts in a supporting role and the music conveys the characters' deepest feelings. The musical as a whole is heartbreaking but leavened throughout by a sense of comedy. And in the end the audience is left with the impression that the good guy won.

But - and it's a big but - The Braille Legacy as a musical presentation of the Louis Braille story is also deeply flawed. The most blatant flaw is that the entire cast are sighted, but telling a story about blind people.

Obviously it is too much logistically to expect a production to hire an entire cast of blind performers. Nevertheless I would contend that, despite appreciating Jack Wolfe's superb performance, a blind performer with equal singing and acting talent would have been more convincing simply because he would understand what it is to be blind and, just as importantly, how blind people are treated by others, adding a more truthful dimension to the performance.

For somebody who has never been blind, it's impossible to truly understand how it feels to be treated as a blind person.

The sighted actors wear blindfolds to convey they cannot see, removing them when they bond with each other and upon the invention of Braille. This is a clever device making a tangible difference for the performers and showing there should be no exclusion for blind people.

However it also puts the sighted audience at a distance from the action, giving it an abstract quality, rather than including them in the world of the blind.

The Braille Legacy also sometimes veers too much away from the life of Louis to make general points regarding disability instead of letting issues emerge organically from the particulars of story.

Again, while appreciating musicals need to have some dramatic licence and simplification, this musical tells a tale that was too black and white. This significantly weakened the plot and at times made the story difficult to believe.

Monsieur Dufau’s view that blindness is a disease to be cured, principally by surgical intervention,  doesn't reflect the true story and is unconvincing.  I was also frustrated that after Louis invents Braille, he effectively melts into the background, becoming a minor character.

The musical then foregrounds a story of blind children vanishing for fiendish experiments and inserts what appears to be an argument about whether blindness should be understood as an illness or a simple variation of the human condition.

This unbalances a musical that begins well with an exploration of Louis Braille's unique story but has a weak and unconvincing finale.

Those who have seen The Braille Legacy may be pleased to know there were never any experiments to find "a cure for blindness" at the National Institute for Blind Youth.  Monsieur Dufau did exist but no children vanished from the school when it was under his care.

Of course The Braille Legacy is a fictional dramatisation, never intended as an accurate portrayal of The National Institute for Blind Youth in 19th century France.  I still enjoyed the performances and the rousing and touching songs.

I cannot ignore the lack of visually impaired and blind actors and believe the musical's book to be sometimes misguided. Yet this musical also powerfully conveys the legacy of Louis Braille and the debt the blind population owes to him. I give an amber light for a flawed but invigorating production.

Review The Braille Legacy

The Braille Legacy 
Original idea, French book and lyrics by Sébastien Lancrenon
Music by Jean-Baptiste Saudray
Translation by Ranjit Bolt

Joining The Dots
http://www.charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/

The story of Louis Braille of the eponymous punched dot system of reading and writing for the blind is a fascinating one. Not only as, in musical theatre terms, a triumph over tragedy story. But also for the the blind as the nexus of philosophical, political, professional and medical vested interests in France during the 19th century

If this sounds heavy going, it doesn't need to be and there is plenty to enjoy in the new musical with book by Sébastien Lancrenon translated by Ranjit Bolt and music by Jean-Baptiste Saudray - as far as it goes.

For it feels like a piece shorn of context and we suspect essential aspects may have been cut to shoehorn the story into an "Anglo-Saxon" model of a musical.

In terms of musicals, it's a story which remains a curiosity with no love interest except if love of culture and learning and teaching counts as a love interest.

This also feels like a musical which has been put on with the basic elements in place but before a dramatic, entertaining way of explaining the particular political and intellectual circumstances swirling around Louis has been worked out.  

Louis Braille was born in the early nineteenth century when Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was at the height of his powers and died young, just when Napoleon's nephew, previously president of the French Republic, mounted a coup d'état turning France into a hereditary imperial monarchy. So when a blind boy surprises a sighted Parisian recognizing by touch a coin as "a crown", there's a meaning. But frankly who would know?

The head of the Parisian school for blind youth is deprived of funds, called a "zookeeper" - the huge revolving white set from Tim Shorthall is  the centre of the menagerie - and the blind viewed as freaks.

Yet despite the dilapidated, filthy conditions, the school still gave the best education available to the blind. Against the odds and at a time of violent political turmoil, Louis pioneered there a system of touch writing for the blind allowing them not only to become students but. just as importantly, teachers.

The musical directed by Thom Southerland has only unexplained glimpses of the wider context  affecting Louis (Jack Wolfe). We learn that the French parliament is corrupt and of the fight between those who want to educate the blind and those who seek only to "cure" blindness by surgery, believing giving the blind an education to be a retrograde step.

This is principally shown in a philosophical heads-on between the chief of the Parisian school,  Dr Pignier (Jérôme Pradon), and an ambitious teacher Monsieur Dufau (Ashley Stillburn). Their struggle is characterised by the attitudes of 18th century enlightenment philosophers Voltaire and Rousseau. Yeah, those two, we all know what they represent, don't we?😲

Watching The Braille Legacy, TLT and her own automotive compatriote (vive le feu tricolore!) had the impression that something was missing or maybe had been cut. There's a stirring score starting with a habitual celebration of Paris, but with more context, the songs could almost be a satirical rejoinder to the heroics of French culture which had lofty ideals for the blind in theory but in practice subjected them to punishing regimes.

The ancient National Library Of France is flattened into a place from where Louis is thrown out. The role of the imagination, the inner life and resources of the blind is mentioned. However the opportunity to bring forth the ghosts of those philosophers, politicians and writers with conflicting views of the blind in a battle of the books with the potential for humor and wit, and the blind children at the centre, is entirely overlooked.

And yet there is just enough there for us to sense that there should be something more, even if the story is diverted into a series of more conventional conflicts: the hostile teacher ready to administer the cane and damage Louis's precious sense of touch; a struggle with fellow pupil Gabriel (Jason Broderick) and with the army captain (Michael Remick) whose "night writing" devised to help soldiers communicate in the dark was the initial inspiration for Braille.

The use of blindfolds to convey the physical state of blindness and the limitations put on the children seems to draw on a famous painting of First World War soldiers called Gassed where, blinded by mustard gas,  the men stand blindfolded in a line with a hand on the shoulder of the man in front.

The monetary burden on the state of paying pensions for members of the armed forces was indeed another reason why a surgical cure was the preferred route but the image alone cannot convey the commercial imperatives which could have added bite to the story.

As it is, another story concerning the children, which almost has the atmosphere of concentration camp experimentation, added in the second act only serves to underline an unevenness of tone and an uncertainty over the plot. 

Still, the band under Toby Higgins and epecially the choral singing of the cast gives power to the tale. Jack Wolfe is a winsome curly haired Louis Braile with a sweet tone to his voice while Jérôme Pradon makes a distinctive Dr Pignier.

The Braille Legacy gives clues that it is also dealing with France's image of itself in the light of  the Enlightment and Revolutionary ideals and its treatment of its blind citizens. It's just a pity more thought hasn't been given to more entertaining and ironic ways into the story.

Maybe this musical will still be given a chance with further development of the book to to match Jean-Baptiste Sauday's score and Thom Southerland's affecting and effective staging, but this appears to have been put on before it was ready. For the performances we give an amber/green light.

Review Death Takes A Holiday

Death Takes A Holiday
Book by Thomas Meehan and Peter Stone
Music & Lyrics by Maury Yeston

The Lost Weekend
http://www.charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/

With a sweeping melodic score, Death Takes A Holiday is a Tarot card fantasy where the Grim Reaper out of a scientific curiosity, he claims, abandons his scythe for three days to experience life.

He settles on the aristocratic Lamberti family who, along with many others, have known their share of tragedy during the Great War with the loss of their pilot son Roberto, leaving them with a sole child, their daughter Grazia. And of course with Death on vacation, there are no obituaries in the newspapers because there are - no deaths ...  

Death Takes A Holiday the musical, first produced in 2011 but in the pipeline for far longer, is something of a curiosity in itself. For it feels very much like an experiment to find a musical for a bellicose twenty first century which ended up with some beautiful silken songs, maturing from May to December of life, hanging from its skeleton.

Set in 1922 on Lake Garda, it veers in tone between melodrama, pantomine in the comedia dell arte sense, light operetta alongside a shimmy of the 1920s' jazz age, even with a touch of Mozart and a definite nod towards the lush romanticism of Andrew Lloyd Webber.  Bookwise, there's a hint of The Great Gatsby, a smidgeon of The Rules Of The Game. Maybe even a flash of The Magic Mountain and Women In Love.

Death here embodied by dark and square-jawed  Chris Peluso is a war-weary foot soldier, with a trace of a more selfish instinct, who feels he deserves leave from his trade to explore why human beings cling to life so tenaciously

Zoë Doano is a reckless, Scott Fitzgerald type of heroine out for thrills as Grazia.The solo songs, despite the strong voices, mostly nevertheless feel interchangeable. Even if they are an object lesson in how to push forward the story with shades of Beauty and The Beast and the ticking clock of Cinderella.

It's the duets and other songs for the whole company which begin to inject the energy. Starting with the stately Death Is In The House sung by Duke Vittorio Lamberti (Mark Inscoe) and his zany servant Fidele (James Gaunt) with the stirring and finally ironic Life's A Joy, a turning point in mood.

While Alice (a vivacious Helen Turner), formerly engaged to the dead pilot, teaches Death aka  Russian prince Sirki the latest jazz-age dance from Paris streets filled with former American GIs, the aviator's former colleague Eric sings of Roberto's last flight (a superb Samuel Thomas), the very moment of death.

A personal favourite was the change of pace in the operatic opening of the second act Something's Happened. The trio of Grazi, Daisy (Scarlett Courtney) and Alice in the intricate Finally To Know continue the more complex momentus.

The ambiguous but soaring vocals of More and More, a duet for Sirki and Grazia give equal depth and a lift to the story.

Meanwhile the waltzing musical box December Time is a heartfelt multi-faceted reflection from Grazia's ailing grandmother (Gay Soper) and her loyal admirer Dario (Anthony Cable) proving ripeness is all: "All good poetry takes time/You don't hear the final rhyme/Until you reach December time".

With a haunting ivy clad gray stone villa set designed by Morgan Large, delicately and precisely lit by Matt Daw, Tom Southerland directs a fluid production, costumed with panache by Jonathan Lipman.

Yet, as the set opens and closes to reveal the courtyard and then the inside of the villa, it does feel cramped on the Charing Cross Theatre stage and the supernatural, cinematic feel to this tale seems to demand a larger space.   

Death Takes A Holiday was originally a 1924 theatre-of-the-grotesque play by Alberto Casella, two years after Benito Mussolini's ascent to power, the murderous demolition of the opposition socialist party, the dwindling power of the Italian monarchy and its aristocracy. After a slow-burning success on Broadway in an American adaptation, it was first a successful 1934 vehicle for actor Frederick March and much later a three-hour (!!!) movie, Meet Joe Black, with Brad Pitt.

While he was long dead by 1924, this secular parable reminded us of British satirist Saki but played mostly for romance and broad comedy with only a ghost of his mordant, macabre wit.  Part of the problem structurally, it seemed to us, is that the musical's USP (unique selling point) is revealed early on, draining the tension out of what follows.

Sure, Death really is Death, the Grim Reaper. But he could equally be one of the bitter, forgotten men of the post World War One generation, a hypnotising con man (logically taken. the ending actually confirms Death himself is a bluffer) or even a spy with matinee idol looks. He takes on the dead body of a suicide, a white Russian playboy gambler,  Prince Sirki of Belarus. But in 1922 - a Prince of Belarus ...?!! With a more explicit double edge, Death and the Prince might take on a more layered resonance. 

Still  by 2011, we'd had our fill of conflicts again and, with women now front line troops alongside the men, there could be an added poignancy chiming with the rather sudden ending of this rumination on the destruction of the First World War and the breaking of bonds. While it's an uneven musical, there's still a potency in the red rose that does not wilt with the suspension of death, a transient moment of hope and it's an amber/green light from TLT. 

Review The Mikado

The Mikado

Music by Arthur Sullivan 

Book/Lyrics by WS Gilbert

http://bit.ly/MikadoCharingX 

The Perils of Nanki-Poo

Just think, before social networks, mobile phones, personal computers, VCRs (and there may now be a generation which does not know what the latter are!), young folks like TLT and her now vintage motorised cabriolet used to attend theatre! Not London's West End, but the local hall for hire - in what was once called 'the provinces' - for the amateur operatic society's latest offering - almost always the product of one of two partnerships, Rogers & Hammerstein or the Victorian double-act Gilbert & Sullivan (G&S).

Little TLT and her school chums glowed with pride as their primary school teachers in the cast, having disdained TV talent show Opportunity Knocks' or New Faces' auditions to remain big fish in a local pond, launched into an over-exuberant "There Is Nothing Like A Dame" or, that satire up there with Monty Python, "A Policeman's Lot Is Not A Happy One". Amateur dramatic society directors in those faraway times seemed to prefer traditional staging, although this may have been dictated by available costumes and scenery. 

Now after that flashback, we are back to the present day - and then back again to 1920s Japan for director Thom Southerland's spiffing The Mikado set in a fan and tailors' shop and re-imagined as a silent movie - with songs of course! 

Think Harold Lloyd with trademark thick-rimmed glasses for renegade Crown Prince Nanki-Poo (Matthew Crowe), in danger of losing his head. Also Gloria Swanson (the original Norma Desmond), an inspired parallel brilliantly reflecting the pathos and venom with which G&S endowed the character of spinster Katisha (a truly wonderful Rebecca Caine). Think of this and you'll get the picture ... 

And all kudos to Phil Lindley and Jonathan Lipman for set design and costumes respectively! Two cinema pianists accompany in this pared down production and the cast enthusiastically embrace the sweet dance routines created by Joey McKneely. As is only right, there is a delicious Yum Yum in Leigh Coggins with soaring assured vocals, a suitably craven Koko (Hugh Osborne with spot-on comic timing) and an imposingly expedient Mikado (Mark Heenehan). 

Ok, there is some variability in the unmiked singing - Nanki-Poo seems to be cast for fey comic charm rather than songbird ability. But as a whole it works. And beneath the colourful japonaiserie and tinkly tunes, the shark-like lurking dark satire of English politics and law still bites, perhaps more so than the customary crowd-pleasingly slick topical updating of the Lord High Executioner's 'little list'. 

So, a green light for both a brilliant director's concept and a non-Christmassy Christmas family entertainment! (And how often do you get all that in one sentence, as a Lord High Executioner might pun! ;) )