Showing posts with label Gary Condes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gary Condes. Show all posts
Thursday, 15 December 2016
Review Luv
Luv
by Murray Schisgal
The Graduates
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/
The spelling of Luv, according to the New York Times, as "luv" was popularised by New Yorker Murray Schisgal's 1963 manic lampoon on the vagaries of marriage, divorce, success and failure in life. So covering more or less - er - everything.
The play, first produced in London before opening to great acclaim in New York the following year, is a period piece, in its satire firmly rooted in the theatre scene of the 1950s and 1960s and the sensibility of "GI Bill" East Coast writers.
Two former college buddies meet fifteen years later by chance on Brooklyn Bridge. Time has not treated the once brilliant scholar, now desperate, dishevelled would-be suicide Harry (Charlie Dorfman) kindly. It seems life has see-sawed in favour of stockbroker Milton (Nick Barber).
However Milton, who is unhappily married and unable to divorce his wife to live with his lover, sees an opportunity amongst the trash and detritus of Harry's (single) life.
It's less murderous than the later comedy "Throw Momma From The Train" (based on Hitchcock's Strangers On the Train), but Milton engineers a swap. Milton, certain they will hit it off and marry, determines to (and does) transfer his wife Ellen (Elsie Bennett) to Harry.
Sure enough, his plan comes to fruition in the absurdist manner of the play which combines social and sociological satire using vaudeville and musical theatre tropes.
Luv turns out to be a rather quaint piece, in many ways an extended sketch, even if a bitter cyclical political and economic allegorical strain lies beneath, It seems to be drawing on the same atmosphere as Cole Porter's Too Darn Hot where The Kinsey Report, a sociological report on sexual behaviour, merited a mention in the lyrics.
Even so, while being thoroughly steeped in New York from the same pool as SJ Perelman, Neil Simon and Woody Allen, French intellectualism comes in as an equal runner in the parody stakes - in the shapely form of Ellen (name shortened to Elle), over-educated for a housewife but torn between a wish for motherhood and a career.
Set against Max Dorey's evocative backdrop with sunset sky and grey bridge girders, this is a play depending very much on sharp direction and the timing and talent for farce displayed by the three-strong cast.
Nicely stylized in both performance and costumes, and despite a short break owing to technical difficulties on press night, the attention to detail pays off.
Nick Barber's Milton changes from flatpack 1920s' jock to a more complex 1960s' creature. Meanwhile Charlie Dorfman manages to embody childlike Harry saved from drowning with deadpan physical humour. Elsie Bennett as the put-upon Ellen turns from sneering fur-coated kept wife to Left Bank intellectual hottie with aplomb.
We can't pretend we didn't find this a determinist sketch stretched out to two acts, but it still held us all the way through. It's a curio of a play which is just as iconic of a cultural moment as The Graduate.
Yet as TV invaded the homes of citizens then, so we are now living in the age of the internet. There's still room for Luv to resonate in our computerized times and it's an upper range amber light from TLT.
Thursday, 21 July 2016
Review Some Girl(s)
Some Girl(s)
by Neil LaBute
The Glittering Prize
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/whats-on
Guy, or maybe it would be more accurate to say (Some) Guy is a writer. He's reached a kind of pinnacle, a short story in The New Yorker. Wow, let all college educated would-be writers envy him! Now he's going on a pilgrimage through America. Many would say a peverse pilgrimage.
Instead of a Stag Night before his marriage, he's going on a stag journey to search out his former girlfriends, all of whom he has dumped in one way or another, after his beginnings working in a grocery store in Seattle through to the quest finale in Los Angeles or, more accurately, Hollywood.
Our latter day (almost) chaste pilgrim (Charlie Dorfman) seems bent on extracting every exquisite ounce of experience from his budget hotel room odyssey, locking horns and messing with minds of his ex-squeezes. Women he has known previously both mentally and in the biblical sense, before he gets, in his words, "hitched".
Mom of two redhead Sam (Elly Condron), his High School sweetheart, still flushes with anger as she recalls he dumped her just before Prom Night for another Yearbook princess whom he claims was like a "sister" rather than love interest.
Good time gal Tyler (Roxanne Pallett) has an inventive way of introducing him to French cigarettes, but he left her after finishing his Masters in Illinois, while being neither quixotic enough nor villainous enough to make it as the literary character he imagines.
Then his own Mrs Robinson at Harvard, lecturer in gender studies steely Mrs Bergstrom (Carolyn Backhouse), whose husband, his college mentor, is characterised in Shakespearean terms as "a cuckold".
All this, before the ultimate link in the chain, both hotel-room-wise and career wise, Hollywood Bobbi (Carley Stenson) whom we may expect to be actress, but instead turns out to be a medic who apparently exposes his injurious way of rewriting history to suit his own clumsy literary predilections.
Guy moves through hotel rooms and past flames with an almost polygamous relish, a collector, where his words have a scriptural resonance in their cross referencing as much as being part of his self-appointed script.
At the end of the first act, TLT and her ongoing automotive companion was willing to class this slick production and the play as merely enjoyable and well-acted with a schematic feel.
It's the deepening of the play in the second act which changed their minds as the commercial, the political, the craft and Guy's ability to conform to the set byways and highways leading to the Hollywood pitch merge. It's ss if he were some latter day Mowgli methodically educated into the Law Of The Jungle in a society and craft based on the tutor-tutee relationship. As he himself says, "Hey, I'm a quick study
For with every episode, divided by airline video projections and rock music, we look forward and backward understanding how his career has progessed. And while each woman has every reason to hate his guts and his ascension to the New Yorker where his story has cannibalised their lives they also participate in his progress towards Hollywood and seem to know they are shaping his success as they act out the stereotypes for him. .
Directed by Gary Condes, this is a production which has some very self-conscious scene changes. Yet this actually is in keeping with the feel of the writer as apprentice moving through the chain and a series of studio-like scenarios where women resign themselves to teaching him about scriptwriting stereotypes.
Guy's not especially talented, he thinks he is autonomous and is allowed to be downright sadistic and ruthless. Yet at the same time he makes all the right moves. For a play and production with skilful hurt and heft, we give a green light.
by Neil LaBute
The Glittering Prize
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/whats-on
Guy, or maybe it would be more accurate to say (Some) Guy is a writer. He's reached a kind of pinnacle, a short story in The New Yorker. Wow, let all college educated would-be writers envy him! Now he's going on a pilgrimage through America. Many would say a peverse pilgrimage.
Instead of a Stag Night before his marriage, he's going on a stag journey to search out his former girlfriends, all of whom he has dumped in one way or another, after his beginnings working in a grocery store in Seattle through to the quest finale in Los Angeles or, more accurately, Hollywood.
Our latter day (almost) chaste pilgrim (Charlie Dorfman) seems bent on extracting every exquisite ounce of experience from his budget hotel room odyssey, locking horns and messing with minds of his ex-squeezes. Women he has known previously both mentally and in the biblical sense, before he gets, in his words, "hitched".
Mom of two redhead Sam (Elly Condron), his High School sweetheart, still flushes with anger as she recalls he dumped her just before Prom Night for another Yearbook princess whom he claims was like a "sister" rather than love interest.
Good time gal Tyler (Roxanne Pallett) has an inventive way of introducing him to French cigarettes, but he left her after finishing his Masters in Illinois, while being neither quixotic enough nor villainous enough to make it as the literary character he imagines.
Then his own Mrs Robinson at Harvard, lecturer in gender studies steely Mrs Bergstrom (Carolyn Backhouse), whose husband, his college mentor, is characterised in Shakespearean terms as "a cuckold".
All this, before the ultimate link in the chain, both hotel-room-wise and career wise, Hollywood Bobbi (Carley Stenson) whom we may expect to be actress, but instead turns out to be a medic who apparently exposes his injurious way of rewriting history to suit his own clumsy literary predilections.
Guy moves through hotel rooms and past flames with an almost polygamous relish, a collector, where his words have a scriptural resonance in their cross referencing as much as being part of his self-appointed script.
At the end of the first act, TLT and her ongoing automotive companion was willing to class this slick production and the play as merely enjoyable and well-acted with a schematic feel.
It's the deepening of the play in the second act which changed their minds as the commercial, the political, the craft and Guy's ability to conform to the set byways and highways leading to the Hollywood pitch merge. It's ss if he were some latter day Mowgli methodically educated into the Law Of The Jungle in a society and craft based on the tutor-tutee relationship. As he himself says, "Hey, I'm a quick study
For with every episode, divided by airline video projections and rock music, we look forward and backward understanding how his career has progessed. And while each woman has every reason to hate his guts and his ascension to the New Yorker where his story has cannibalised their lives they also participate in his progress towards Hollywood and seem to know they are shaping his success as they act out the stereotypes for him. .
Directed by Gary Condes, this is a production which has some very self-conscious scene changes. Yet this actually is in keeping with the feel of the writer as apprentice moving through the chain and a series of studio-like scenarios where women resign themselves to teaching him about scriptwriting stereotypes.
Guy's not especially talented, he thinks he is autonomous and is allowed to be downright sadistic and ruthless. Yet at the same time he makes all the right moves. For a play and production with skilful hurt and heft, we give a green light.
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