Review On The Town

On The Town
Music by Leonard Bernstein
Book and Lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green

Revolving Doors
https://openairtheatre.com/

There's something thrilling about a chorus of enchanting voices floating up into the sultry air when twilight draws in at leafy Regent's Park Open Air Theatre. And with songs like Lonely Town, I'm So Lucky To Be Me and Some Other Time with its collective sigh, "Oh well", how can one resist this tale of the fleet and fleeting love?

It was adapted from wartime hit Fancy Free, a short ballet conceived and choreographed by Jerome Robbins with score by Leonard Bernstein - both 25 at the time - about three US Navy sailors on  shore leave who end up fighting amongst themselves for a date with a pair of young women.

A few months later and at the age of 26, Robbins and Bernstein had added a musical to their increasing list of successes with Betty Comden, just a year older, and Bernstein's flatmate Adolph Green, barely 30 years old, writing the book and lyrics.

Its origins in dance and wartime uncertainty give the show a particular ensemble and snatched pleasures' flavour with an open ending. The framework of  sailors whose first trip to New York will always be a transient one.

The departure as another ship with another crew draws into the harbour puts the three young men, Gabey (Danny Mac), Chip (Jacob Maynard, a last minute replacement for the injured Fred Haig) and Ozzie (Samuel Edwards) in the spotlight before they melt back into ranks of the Navy.
 
This is followed through as they descend into the subway to start sightseeing in the hell-uv-a town and encounter Miss Turnstiles - on a poster.  However, unknown to sailor Gabey who is smitten by the image, the publicity turnstiles turn every month to create another short- term subway seductress advertising the city's transport system.

Directed by choreographer Drew McOnie with Tom Deeering's musical direction,  there's plenty of storytelling through dance on Peter McKintosh's dockyard packing crate set (complete with traffic lights!) and with Vogue-style costumes of sparkling colours.

The sailors in the spirit of naval fraternity search for Gabey's Miss Turnstiles aka Ivy Smith (Siena Kelly), the Bronx ingénue in debt to her blowsy singing and dancing teacher Madame Dilly (Maggie Steed), Ozzie and Chip respectively encounter and pair off with a statuesque rapacious, nymphomaniac blue stocking (Miriam-Teak Lee) Claire De Loon and brassy blonde yellow cab driver Hildy Esterhazy (Lizzy Connolly).

With Comden and Green coming from the left-leaning revue nightclub scene, there is a revue structure to the show with plenty of in-jokes  about then current fads for anthropology and psychology and pastiches of opera and the experimental off Broadway theatre scene. 

So it's easy enough to classify it as a period piece with the bonus of luscious tunes and witty lyrics ("The Bronx is up and the Battery's down") and for modern tastes there may be longeurs. Yet this is a solid production and we would feel churlish in withholding a top rating because some of its cultural references feel dated.

The wit still shines and  audience are still whirled through the turnstiles into -  in the words of So Lucky To Be Me - what a day. It's a green light for landlocked romance in a love letter to New York  amid the greenery and birdsong of Regent's Park. . 

Review Running Wild

Running Wild
Adapted by Samuel Adamson
From the novel by Michael Morpurgo

A Family And Other Animals
http://openairtheatre.com/

The herd of humans, collectively known as a theatre audience, showed its usual resilience at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre as the heavens opened. But luckily it passed and even added to the environmental accuracy of park greenery melding with the rain forests of Indonesia for an adaptation by Samuel Adamson of Michael Morpurgo's best-selling children's novel, Running Wild.

On a stage of concentric tree bark rings, we follow the bildung of young Lilly (Ava Potter), left fatherless after her soldier Dad (Ira Mandela Siobhan) is killed in the Iraq War, who travels to Indonesia with her Mum (Hattie Ladbury). Caught up in the tsunami, her life is saved by the beach elephant Oona who senses the impending tidal wave and races inland with the bewildered child on her back.

But Lilly quickly wises up and proves her own resilience and kindness, adapting to her new jungle life, helped in part by her childhood favourite Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book to which her father had introduced her.

It's a tale dramatised somewhat perfunctorily by Adamson and, even with the imaginative staging, such as the sea of undulating blue srips transformed into the tidal waves, at first seems somewhat stretched to fill the capacious Regent's Park stage. But even more of an asset is the triumphant puppetry of Gyre and Gimble's Finn Caldwell and Toby Obié which finally won us over. 

We honestly thought for one heartstopping moment, when the wrinkled grey head of Oona the elephant turned the corner of the theatre entrance and moved towards us, co-directors Timothy Sheader and Dale Rooks had raided nearby London Zoo for a real pachyderm!

And the buffoonery (yes, that really is the collective noun!) of orangutans and the predatory elegant tiger (accompanied by the William Blake verse)  excite awe and poignancy as the story kicks in big-time with a group of poachers led by sleazy Mr Anthony (Stephen Ventura) whose fortune derives from the ecologically disastrous trade in palm oil, as well as the illegal sale of orangutans and other animals.

The character of Lilly becomes Willy in some performances, Potter alternating wiith Joshua Fernandes and Tyler Osborne.While The Jungle Book is in part of manual for life, the translation into twenty first century terms - a condemnation of war, the capture and slaughter of animals and the exploitation of  trees for palm oil - while more than commendable, sometimes dramatically feels rather preachy, probably to the converted.

Still there's plenty of spectacle in the show to enjoy and Lilly is a feisty character for the kids in the audience, especially the girls, to identify with. Plus the relationship of Lilly with the animals is touchingly realised, so an upper level amber light  from we theatre human cubs for the opening play in the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre season. 
 

Review The Seagull

The Seagull

by Anton Chekhov

The Rivals

https://openairtheatre.com/production/the-seagull

The Seagull! Squawk! In a new version by writer Torben Betts directed by Matthew Dunster! Squawk! At Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre! OK, enough of these seagull noises!

Of course, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre made its name with the once annual play-within-a-comedy by the English bard, “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream”. Here we have a Russian classic, Anton Chekhov’s human comedy and viewed as the first of his theatrical masterpieces. 

And it seems like a dream location, outdoors: water (a man-made stage lake), trees, sky.

The Regent's Park stage is reflected by a huge angled mirror suspended from the heavens for a play with a bitter yet loving satiric edge, It’s a clever touch by designer Jon Bausor in this most self-reflexive of plays about life, theatre and art, where all the characters also reflect each other in one way or another. And all just as relevant in our virtual age!  As the characters stroll on stage, the mirror, hanging like Nature's camera, gives a bird’s eye reverse view, yet frames the figures like the French and Russian paintings of the time.

TLT and her horseless scarlet troika have only ever read The Seagull and were keen to experience this early Chekhov classic tableaux 1895 play of unrequited love, disappointment, life, theatre  – oh, yes and comedy :).

 

Writer Torben Betts who adapted this version made quite a splash with crowd-pleasing Invincible. But Chekhov is pretty funny too in his poignant and, in TLT’s view, subtly political sort of way. If fans of Invincible come to this, they may be surprised to learn that most of the best jokes come from Chekhov. 

Irina Arkadina (a finely drawn and gracefully humorous performance by Janie Dee) returns with her lover Boris Trigorin (Alex Robertson), a successful novelist, to the family estate, home of her bachelor brother retired state councillor and lawyer, Peter Sorin (a suitably curmodgeonly Ian Redford). 

Also living on the estate are Irina’s fretful student drop-out and would-be avant-garde playwright son Constantin (Matthew Tennyson) alongside the farm manager Ilia (Fraser James), his wife Paulina (Lisa Palfrey), their disenchanted goth-like daughter Masha (Lisa Diveney). Wandering in are idealistic young Nina (Poldark’s Sabrina Bartlett), living on a neighbouring estate with her landowner father and stepmother, the old lothario of a doctor, Eugene Dorn (a relaxed and engaging performance from Danny Webb) and impecunious schoolmaster Simon Medviedenko (Colin Hoult). 

Like a seagull, the play is a delicate but tough old bird winging its way through stage conventions, symbolism, images, impressions, politics, history, the constant merging yet separation of  life and theatre.  Still, a play is a play and birds don’t normally get reviews ... ;)

While much critical writing dwells on Constantin as artist, his passion for Nina, and the mother-son relationship, perhaps the play is just as much about the rivalry between two actresses.

  

The women are the centre of attention (much to Constantin’s chagrin) but their positions are always fragile.  For example, in spite of her selfishness and self absorbtion, why should we doubt Irina’s assertion that her costumes use up much of her cash?  Nina, infatuated with Boris but also playing her hand against Irina, makes the decision to go to Moscow and take to the stage when she learns the actress and her lover are leaving.

Boris does leave Irina for Nina but finally abandons the young actress and his child to go back to Irina. In the end, Irina is seemingly successful,  Nina  made to drudge from one small town to another with the implication of possible prostitution to make ends meet. Yet both have lost the fathers of their children and, in a final (off stage) coup de théâtre, their children.

In fact, if it one wants to veer towards theatrical artificiality and a detective story, it’s almost as though other characters deliberately lure Nina to her fate of repertory company drudgery:  Irina herself, her brother the lawyer, the doctor all lavish Nina's acting with praise. Boris, indulged by Irina, seduces Nina, then returns to Irina and uses  the young actress’s life, made into tragedy, for his own purposes.    

Part of the unblinking toughness and poignancy of the play is the attraction and resistance to theatrical symbolism, the guying of melodrama, yet the conceding of the truth melodrama reveals. All back-to-back with hard-nosed money matters.

Seeing this production in final preview, TLT and her cabriolet were taken with the ingenious design, especially the play-within-a-play and the soundscape using recorded voice overs giving a satisfyingly visceral resonance. 

But the mash-up and experimenting with styles felt less successful. 

Nina’s pivotal final tussle against identification with the main symbol of the play, to retain her sanity, her dignity, to face reality and continue, did not come through for us. The production therefore lost its rhythm plus some of the play’s clear sightedness about human relations set within the context of a fast diminishing Russian Empire hierarchy. 

In our opinion, it felt sometimes too muddled to turn the audience into fellow travellers, enthused enough to sway at different times in favour of one character or another or to follow the story’s delicately incremental, viciously funny yet tragic development. 

Perhaps the open air location, particularly with some deliberately jarring sound effects, and large stage didn’t lend itself to the style of production. Nor is it surprising to read that director Matthew Dunster comes from the Young Vic and maybe it all would have worked better in that space. Still, an amber light for a stronger first act, ingenious design, some stand out performances and of course a spectacular park setting.

PS  What is it about seagulls? It did occur to TLT that a near contemporary of Chekhov, German nonsense poet Christian Morgenstern wrote a famous cryptic poem about seagulls  Do these writer chaps know something about gulls that we don't?;)