Review The Life

The Life 
Music by Cy Coleman
Lyrics by Ira Gasman
Book by David Newman, Ira Gasman and Cy Coleman
Book Revisions by Michael Blakemore

The Ho's Opera
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

When TLT first arrived in New York, the clean-up of Times Square was well underway. As a yellow cab drew up, out stepped a guy, grabbed her suitcase - ready to put it in the cab. And then stayed expecting a tip.

TLT being English, buttoned up and then unused to habitually tipping, he didn't get one. A short, heated exchange ended with TLT's polite, "Thank you but I didn't ask. It was your choice to pick it up!!".

The somewhat bemused cab driver, a witness to TLT emerging unstabbed, unshot, with her traveller's money belt intact, shook his head in disbelief and then drove her to the Dickensian-monikered (and, naturally, budget) Pickwick Arms Hotel. He didn't even ask for a tip as she waited for him to count out the change for her note.

What prompts this memory of a pompously naive English girl on her first day in The Big Apple? Mary (Joanna Woodward) from Duluth, Minnesota in the Cy Coleman 1997 musical The Life, Samsonite in hand, fresh off the Greyhound bus sucked into Times Square sleaze when a guy grabs her suitcase.

Oh it could have been so very different for TLT.  Whatever The Life is, it ain't Heidi unless the 42nd Street panhandlers have a pension fund stashed away in a Swiss bank account.

The pocket-sized Southwark Playhouse stage plays host to a parade of pimps, hookers, gamblers, murderers, protection racketeers, mobsters and blue movie exhibitors on the piece of prime real estate off 42nd Street in nineteen seventy something.

In many ways this is a musical melodrama filled with stereotypes (but what musical isn't?) with a few twists lifted by thrilling performances from a cast who look like extras ready to be booked, charged or caged up  in the backgroud of many a 70s' cop show. And yet, and yet ...

It works. The book - decent hearted streetwalker Queenie (T'shan Williams) hooked up with no-good 'Nam vet boyfriend, cokehead pimp Fleetwood (David Albury) at its heart -  reflects and is driven on by the songs and vice (ouch!) versa.

With the swelling tones of an 11-piece band headed by Tamara Saringer, the angular corner-of-Times -Square set design  by Justin Nardella,  projections from Nina Dunn and compact choreography from Tom Jackson Greaves, this production is both successful on its own terms and shows the potential for a larger space.

The echos of other underworld musicals and styles, Sweet Charity (also from the Coleman repertoire), Guys and Dolls, Les Miz, Brechtian noir, West Side Story, even Mack and Mabel and Billy Joel amongst many others, and the corporatism of Chicago and The Godfather, are legion. But, rather than derivative, these are handled with a responsive, dark, smokey wit.

Mary turns out to have a backstory worthy of a David Mamet or Sam Shepherd searing drama and eventually takes to The Life like a Gypsy-Rose-Lee duck to water.

Stab-in-the-back Jojo (John Addison) has the Janus-face of the Times Square porn "talent scout" and Hollywood hustler in "Use What You Got" which could equally be in a musical version of that Hollywood users' manual "What Makes Sammy Run".

Jo Servi's bartender Lacy has the easy ways of old vaudeville Broadway while chief gangster Memphis (Cornell S John) trumps Jojo and Fleetwood in the power stakes, pulling in Queenie in the slow chains of "My Way Or The Highway". But it's Sharon D Clarke's old pro Sonja who carries off the laurels with a thrilling rendition of "The Oldest Profession" vibrating through the Southwark auditorium.

Maybe the ending is still slightly problematic as it almost dips into trench-coat parody but the power of the snarling face-off between Queenie and her haunted former soldier lover Fleetwood in "We Gotta Go" is a breathtaking musical theatre moment with a resonance beyond the hooker and the army vet.

Wait a moment, we take it back about Heidi tho', at least in terms of Hollywood history ...

It may seem churlish to mention one other thing after thrilling live performances fluently directed and staged by the original Broadway director, Brit stage veteran Michael Blakemore. But at a time when the mainstream movie industry is gagging for new musicals to film, The Life, in our opinion, cries out for an atmospheric movie version.

This fearless theatre production definitely gets the TLT green light. Oh, and if Hollywood  (West or East), Bollywood or Nollywood wants to option TLT's own taxi-cab penny-pinching New York tale with a Happy Ending, she's open to offers. ;)   

Review Sleeping Beauty

By Susie McKenna
Music Steven Edis
Musical Director Mark Dickman
Choreographer Carl Parris

 





Kick Ass In Fairyland
https://hackneyempire.co.uk/

Panto time! Oh, yes it is! 😁

Hackney Empire triumphs in its unashamedly musical theatre-slapstick-mixture take on Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm's Sleeping Beauty with Alexia Khadime as Tahlia, the princess with powerhouse finger tips and vocal chords.

An auditorium of big and little kids (and one tinsel-trimmed baubled automotive reviewer) settled down to watch, cheer, boo and sing along with the citizens and Royals of Hackneytonia headed by benevolent widowed King Eric the Undecided (Tony Whittle).

Along with a trio of powerhouse fairy godmothers (Sharon Ballard, Georgia Oldman and Kiruna Stamell), King Eric and Dame Nanny Nora (Gavin Spokes) stick together to defy the curse on the unwitting princess by an uninvited naming ceremony guest ... OK, you probably know the broad brush strokes of the story.😉

We loved the Arthur Rackham combined with Disney-style set design by Lotte Collett,  sliding  on the deep Hackney Empire (architect Frank Matcham) stage during seamless scene transitions.

There's a vampish and vampire-ish villainess in the maganificent Sharon D Clarke as wicked fairy Carabosse with a Caribbean accent and a penchant for a, however reluctant, toyboy prince Gabriel (Wayne Perrey) who luckily enough has a princess to rescue him ...😊

Yes, there's a bit of politics (what's a kingdom without politics?!) but even this remains (no pun intended!) just about all-inclusive. Dame Nora's final costume wittily encompasses all sides of the Brexit question and still has enough bright colours and humour to keep even the littlest kiddies in a fit of giggles and engaged in the performance.

There's Denzil (Kat B) a cute orange and red dragon audience favourite who, like a missing character from The Wizard  Of Oz, is searching for his puff. An exremely ogre-ish ogre (Leon Sweeney) and a wonderful time-lapse growth and cutting away of those pesky thorns enveloping the sleeping kingdom (oh dear, have I given the plot away? 😜!!)

By the end of a fast-moving evening, a quick ongoing unofficial referendum amongst the kids in the stalls - whether any of them were sleeping, crying or seemed bored - drew a thumping majority of wide-awake youngsters. Helped of course by the optional glittery, illuminated merchandise sold at a stall tucked away discreetly at the back of the stalls.

It's a loud (the Hackney Empire is a huge, cavernous purpose-built music hall), brash and breezy production with lots of song, dance and spectacle.  There are some impressive sets of pipes ringing the rafters, from Alexia Khadima, Sharon D Clarke, Wayne Perrey's Prince Gabriel and an unusually sweet-voiced Dame Nora from Gavin Spokes. So it's a rootin', tootin' green light for a scrumptious seasonal feast of fun, frolics and a princess with superpowers. What's not to like?!!! 😊

Review Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

by August Wilson

The Day The Music Died 
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Coming home from Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, directed by Dominic Cooke, TLT could have sworn the exhaust of her normally sober little hatchback emitted a series of sobs. But she couldn't ask due to the - ahem - lump in her own throat.

Written in 1982 by Frederick August Kittel Jr, otherwise known as August Wilson, the play follows a band of Chicago session musicians on a day fifty five years earlier when the eponymous Gertrude "Ma" Rainey (Sharon D Clarke), the Queen Bee of the blues, is about to record a new album of songs.

But it's the drones who are at the centre of the action relegated to a basement rehearsal room. Meanwhile, in Ultz's telling set design  the control room is perched on high with white studio boss Mel Sturdyvant (Stuart McQuarrie), allowing only Ma's white management Irvin (Finbar Lynch) to climb the stairs from the studio.

In the words of the play, the musicians are the "nuts in the stew" pulled in to facilitate the session. The bookish Toledo (Lucien Msamati), given to lecturing, neatly playing the piano. Cutler (Clint Dyer) the trombonist and band leader "One, two, you know what to do ..." aware where his bread is buttered.Slow Drag (Giles Terera) on the bass wanting an uncomplicated life. And finally Levee (O-T Fagbenle) the trumpet player, young, vain,  quivering with brashness and undisciplined talent, eager to form his own band.

Seemingly a riff on the music industry and the history of black migration to northern cities from the rural south, the play reaches much further and picks at the scab on the bent knee of collaborative money-driven creativity with intricate precision.

The musicians tell their competing histories, both asserting their right to exist and as a kind of confessional. With the lightest of touches, the playwright evokes the patterns of nepotism and corruption replicated at every level before they blend into anonymity for the recording of the star turn.

This isn't an open ended play of rights and wrongs though, far from it. Ma Rainey sashays in late after a fracas with the police, permitting (yes, that is the correct word in the all-too-human power play of this saga) her manager to bribe the officers.

She battles for control of how she sings her own songs bringing her into conflict with Levee who, having produced modern up-tempo arrangments of Ma Rainey's songs,  believes he has formed an alliance with the white boss.  

How the best-laid plans go wrong is for the audience to discover and the hurt  radiates long after the trap finally snaps shut.This has been a long playing piece since its first performance in 1984 for a reason and TLT gives a green light for this pitch perfect production.