Review Groundhog Day The Musical

Groundhog Day The Musical
Music & Lyrics by Tim Minchin
Book by Danny Rubin

Ready For My Retake, Punxsutawney Phil!
http://www.oldvictheatre.com

A new musical by an already successful songwriter reuniting with the director of his most celebrated work, along with a book by a screenwriter of an acknowledged comedy classic was always going to be an event.

An event which is at least as big as the  folksy Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.

The ingeniously simple but ever giving premise of the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, the ill-tempered TV weather forecaster Phil Connors (Andy Karl) doomed to repeat for ever one day while those around him are unaware of the time loop, is never going to fail.

And for 21st century audiences which have lived through the development of computer games, the repetition and psychological modifications have a modern, familiar feel.

The repeated day is Groundhog Day in a rural borough of Pennsylvania where Puxsutawney Phil is brought out each February 2nd to predict how long winter will last. Perhaps the nearest we have in Europe is British-born Paul the Octopus.

But that's being silly ;). Back to the serious stuff. Matthew Warchus takes the helm as director with an ingenious toy town set design by Rob Howell and energetic choreography by Peter Darling. And of course the music and lyrics by Tim Minchin.

There's a smart-aleck sketch like feel to the show giving this musical more of an updated One Man, Two Guvnors vibe. Complete with snow, it's a kind of seasonal show for every season, Phil in TV Land mixed with Dickens' Scrooge mixed with Moliere's Le Misanthrope (hey, read that last again, once you've learnt to speak French to ingratiate yourself with us just like Phil Connors with producer Rita!).

It has to be said a few dirtier jokes also make it much more 18 than a PG certificate.

Karl as human Phil is far more of a handsome City slicker than the movie version as the town metaphorically and literally revolves around him. The film plot is all there but this Phil Connors is less of a crumpled cynic who has never moved out of local news than a high flying graduate who feels he has come down in the world.

The love interest, TV producer Rita (Carlyss Peer) and cameraman Larry (Eugene McCoy) like the townsfolk dress casually compared with the suited Connors who looks like a Wall Street executive parachuted into a Peanuts-style comic strip or other more kiddie like literature.

The score and plot whip through the story at breakneck speed. At the moment it does feel as if some of the timing for the repetition needs to bed in to extract the maximum comedy and pathos from the  psychodelic time warp (Mary Poppins or a Roald Dahl adaptation, it ain't!) as the marching band and groundhog festivities come round faster and faster.

Song-wise the score  is stronger in the second act than the first but there are quaint rhymes, puns and gags to hold the attention and sell the show.  Georgina Hagen as Nancy, a one-night stand during Phil's don't-care period on the time loop, also brings distinctive vocals to her song Playing Nancy in the second act.

This reflects too the filmic conceit at the heart of the movie and the musical. We're in a fast changing world of  movie  frames continually shot and re-shot. All in all, it's colourful and contemporary, so it's a crowd pleasing amber/green light.

Review Marilyn & Sinatra

A new play about the real-life love affair of two American icons fails to get under their skin and, Francis Beckett finds, relies on celebrity status rather than dramatic insight.   

Marilyn & Sinatra
by Sandro Monetti

They Did It Their Way  
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

The tiny Jermyn Street Theatre tucked away in the heart of London's West End seems to make a speciality of interesting showbiz retrospectives.

Some years ago that I saw NF Simpson’s last play there, written in the great absurdist’s nineties, shortly before his death, his first play for decades.   

A while before that, I had an entertaining and interesting evening there hearing Stefan Bednarczyk revive Flanders and Swann.  And their next production is to be a revival of a really interesting period piece, The Dover Road, by AA Milne, the creator of Christopher Robin.

So why does Marilyn & Sinatra directed by writer Sandro Monetti – on the face of it, just Jermyn Street’s sort of show – offer neither entertainment nor insight?

Partly, I think, it’s the subject matter. This is the second show about the life of Marilyn Monroe I’ve seen this year, and the other one - Norma Jeane: The Musical at the Lost Theatre – didn’t work either. 

On the face of it, Marilyn is a gift: the sex symbol, the pills and drink, the suicide, the famous husbands and lovers – Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Arthur Miller, Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra.  But it’s too much of a gift.  Writers and directors seem to feel that all they have to do it to put the life, or part of it, on the stage, and they have a hit show on their hands.

If there is an insight in this one, it’s that Marilyn played Sinatra records the night she died, which indicates she was probably in love with him. That’s enough to sustain a paragraph in a biography, but not a whole stage show – even just an hour long one, like this.

 

The show tells the story of Monroe and Sinatra’s romance, such as it is, and strings it together with some instantly recognisable songs, some of which we associate with Sinatra.  (And some we don't. I wondered what Rodgers & Hammerstein's Some Enchanted Evening was doing there. Mr Google tells me that Sinatra did sing it once. Not a lot of people know that.)

The two actors, Erin Gavin (Footballers' Wives) as Monroe and Jeff Bratz  (an America's Got Talent alumnus) as Sinatra, do the best they can to lift it, but in such a small, intimate venue like the Jermyn Street Theatre you can’t disguise the fact that they both look wrong.

Bratz has a nice singing voice, and it’s a pleasure to hear him sing songs we know well, but he doesn’t look a bit like Sinatra, and he sounds much too simple and straightforward. 

Gavin is nice looking in a completely different way from Monroe, and it’s painful to watch her caricature of the Monroe sex appeal and the famous Monroe wiggle. And any performance would be fatally wounded by her blonde wig, which looks like tangled white wire superglued to her head.

I can’t recommend this, I fear: it’s a red light. But I’ll trot along to their next show.  I have high hopes of The Dover Road.

Review Allegro

Allegro
Book and Lyrics Oscar Hammerstein II
Music Richard Rodgers

Notes From A Small Town
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/ 

A new day and a new musical - new to us, that is! Allegro, a lesser known 1947 Rogers and Hammerstein show which followed Oklahoma!, the movie musical State Fair and Carousel in their canon and before they thematically travelled outside the United States for South Pacific.

In Rodgers and Hammerstein terms, it was a flop, although still notched up a respectable 315 Broadway performances and even, according to some accounts, made a small profit, although it failed to transfer to London for a run.

Inspired in theme by Our Town, the plot follows the life of Joseph Taylor jr (Gary Tushaw), the son of a doctor (Steve Watts), in rural small town America.

In a kind of Portrait of The Medic As A Young Man (and maybe influenced by Scottish novel The Citadel),  we're taken on a psychological and literal journey from Joe's birth in 1905 to his midlife crisis  after he finds his medical ideals tarnished by Chicago hospital boards, trustees and big business.

And in Thom Southerland's engaging production, it feels like a transitional piece, a show deliberately exploring and willing to confront unfinished business.

After a quick Google about American politics in this period, we feel, in some ways, the trajectory of this musical with unresolved finale reflects a question mark hanging over American government at the time.

Harry S Truman had become president following FD Roosevelt's premature death and was trying to push through his "Fair Deal" with its call for universal health insurance, never enacted during his tenure, and the giving of federal aid for the construction of hospitals in poorer areas of America. 

Indeed there may even be a direct political musical reference with the first song Joseph Taylor Jr reminding us of a July Garland hit, written by Harold Rome, Franklin D Roosevelt Jones.

Allegro, of course, is an Italian word, both a musical term for "fast, quickly and bright" and a dance term meaning brisk or fast steps incorporating any step where a dancer jumps. The choreography for the 16-strong cast by Lee Proud is equally bright and breezy with Dean Austin leading a band of eight with keys, bass, drums, reeds, trumpet, trombone and French horn. 

Played in the traverse, it dawned (we hope correctly!) on TLT and her own little motorised helpmate that the mobile ladders and configurations designed by Alexander Lamble reflected musical, as well as wooden, staves so that the cast itself becomes part of a visual musical notation.

So this innovative show with fragmented songs and choric commentary works on several levels.

A visual musical composition, a straightforward, some would say hokey tale, of a young man drawn away from his vocation to keep up an affluent lifestyle which had become far more precarious since the Wall Street Crash, the career and compromises of Rodgers and Hammerstein themselves and the politcal atmosphere of the time.

While some may criticise the lyrics of songs like"A Fellow Needs A Girl", it struck us with harder edged songs such as The Gentleman Is A Dope sung with characterful verve and vigour by Kate Bernstein as Nurse Emily West and the title song Allegro about the tempo of modern life and money, there's more to this piece than a homely fable. Juxtaposition brings irony and hope.

This is an enjoyable production of a rarely-seen piece. Emily Bull brings depth and takes the audience along with her in  the role of wayward, ambitious wife Jennie while Julia J Nagel displays soaring vocals as watchful mother Marjorie.

It's perhaps not a perfect show, but then life ain't perfect either and we give Allegro an uncompromised green light for a delicately precise and tender production.       

Review Children Of Eden

Children of Eden

Book by John Caird

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz

Based on a concept by Charles Lisanby

The Generation Game

 http://www.uniontheatre.biz/

Along to The Union Theatre, that little ark of musicals which punches above its weight (a mixed metaphor if ever there was one!) for Children of Eden. Giving a new slant to ancient stories, this biblical musical uses the infinitely flexible dramatic framework of the Old Testament, the story of Adam and Eve and then Noah and The Flood.

To be honest, biblical musicals do not always rock our boat, so it was something of a surprise when we found ourselves gripped and, yes, unexpectedly moved by this many-layered fascinating show, directed here with panache and sensitivity by Christian Durham. 

Created by New Yorker Steven "Wicked" Schwartz and English director John "Les Miz" and "Nicholas Nickleby" Caird, this piece has at its core the initially joyous and then choppy and poignant relationship between parent and child and casts an Anglo-American eye on the Book of Genesis.

God, always called The Father in the show, is a Brit (a haughty yet affectionate Joey Dexter) and more like a clean cut corporate Chief Executive, General or modern King cum President, or a kind of Platonic financial regulator - and, above all, a human Dad. 

Yet his complacent best-laid plans go awry when he puts into practice his ideas. He's also a God who, as Children of Eden progresses, shows himself without the experience of sharing his life with an equal. In the end, without an absolute resolution, the Children of Eden have something to teach him.

The show has a chequered history and received less than kind reviews when it rushed into production in 1991 in an available but outsize theatre in London. With audiences then staying away, glued to their TV sets watching coverage of The First Gulf War,  it took several re-writes, community theatre and youth productions to produce the present version.

After a bit of a cheesy beginning (the show rather than the performers), TLT and her own right-hand fired-up chariot found their initial resistance broken down.  The child-like rhythms and simple tunes build up into something more complex as they reflect the increasing complexity and perplexity of this world from joyously newly minted to multifaceted experience. 

But maybe this makes it sound more complicated than it should for a bitter sweet lyrical tale with characterful choreography by Lucie Pankhurst which takes an audience of diverse belief and non-belief with it. 

American-accented Adam and Eve (Stephen Barry and Natasha O'Brien capturing affectively snub-nosed, wide-eyed infant delight in character and song)  joyously partake in everything around them.

Musical director Inga Davis-Rutter plays keyboard in the four-piece band which also includes bass, drums and reeds. In a pleasingly unmicrophoned performance, occasionally words do get lost but this is outweighed by clarity in the narrative and otherwise strong singing and affecting harmonies. 

The score carries the story through like links in the chain with inventive staging by Durham and design by Kingsley Hall with pastel nursery colours changing to harder edged grays and reds.

The journey starts from The Father's mighty preliminary act of imagination "Let It Be" put into reality  through Adam and Eve's entry into Eden with the diverting "The Naming" of animals, the first unaswerable question, all  leading naturally to Eve's divination of a pulsating living world with the possiblity of change in "The Spark of Creation".

The song titles give a clue that the chase for fulfilment is as much about new found lands and creative human aspiration through the company of others, in music or in any walk of life as Godly injunction. 

Gabriel Mokake as the snake brings humour, verve and a credible argument, along with the storytelling chorus, for eating the apple of knowledge in "The Pursuit of Excellence". 

And this is a show which brings dramatic life to fundamental arguments with reason, passion and lyricism on all sides within a family circle rippling out over generations.  

With a dynamic take onthe striking down by Cain (young Turk Guy Woolf) of Abel (wide-eyed Daniel Miles) destined never to reach manhood, the first act of the family saga ends in a touching plea by elderly widowed matriarch Eve for "second chances" fearing For yet taking pride in the brood of her creation. 

The second act is deliberately less fluent, the knots in the human story, as The Father seeks his ideal, become knottier and knottier. The first African-inflected song Generations introduces economically the passage of time and spreading of flourishing human tribes around the planet.

Yet the thread is continued by the doubling of the actors as the descendants of Adam and Eve and the contact with The Father ebbing and flowing as the humans pursue their own course. 

The story is followed though with the tale of Noah and Mama Noah, The Flood and youngest son Japeth (Guy Woolf again), defying his father to take the servant girl Yonah (Nikita Johal, with a native American look, stepping out of the storyteller chorus) as his bride. 

She becomes his wife - and equal - with the aspiration for the ideal always kept alive. Nevertheless there remains a troubling messier hurt, an irresolvable, contradictory unease alongside a story of release and redemption for future generations, giving this piece its modern currency. 

So, as we're only human, we award a green light for an enchanting, fresh minted take on ancient tales. 

Review The Burnt Part Boys

The Burnt Part Boys
Book by Mariana Elder
Music by Chris Miller
Lyrics by Nathan Tysen

 To The Mountaintop
http://parktheatre.co.uk  

It's 1962 in a mining town of West Virginia where, until a fatal underground disaster 12 years previously, the whole of the community depended on the company owning the mine.

The Burnt Part Boys is a coming-of-age musical centring on fatherless 14 year old Pete (a tender performance by Joseph Peacock), obsessed with John Wayne movie The Alamo, who views the closed mine as a shrine and grave to his Dad and the others who died in the accident.  

Hearing on the transistor radio of his older brother Jake (Chris Jenkins) that the company will be re-opening the mine, Pete, inspired by a mixture of grief and his favourite movie, determines to take action. 

He persuades his friend Dusty (Ryan Heenan, sweetly combining bumptiousness and vulnerability), who also lost his father, to accompany him up the mountain to Burnt Part, the mine scorched by a fire following the fatal accident. However Pete doesn't tell his companion the second part of his plan to keep the mine closed for ever. 

This should have the makings of a stonking, much-at-stake story, with a book by Marianna Elder and music by Chris Miller and lyrics by Nathan Tysen. But this tale doesn't deliver the courage of its beginnings.  

The historical, political, native American and cinema references promise greatly at the start with a tinge of sophisticated Sondheim amid the hillbilly country and bluegrass style. Yet the possibilities are not followed through by the creators of this musical who seem content to rest on the laurels of a good idea.

Even so, there's good work here in this theatre-in-the-round production fluidly directed by Matthew Iliffe with Charlie Morgan Jones's lighting design in the Park90 studio space. It also benefits from  a minimal set of ropes, drapes and lamps hanging from the ceiling designed by Rachel Wingate, just enough to let the audience's imagination do the rest.

The band led by Nick Barstow on keyboard with violin, guitar, bass and percussion give lively and nuanced accompaniment.

The characters are all well-defined although there was some struggling with accents causing lines and lyrics to be lost. Nevertheless this musical gives an opportunity for some splendid choral harmonies as well as individual turns and duets by Pete, brother Jake, the latter's friend Chet (Chris Jenkins and David Leopold grasping the mettle and giving depth to teens given responsibilities too soon). 

David Haydn brings singing ability and humour as Pete's movie and American folklore fantasy figures fusing eventually into his lost father. Jonathan Bourne as Dusty's ghostly father also gives a glimpse of a fine voice in an eleventh-hour solo moment. 

Meanwhile Grace Osborn as wildcat Frances also sings characterfully in a pleasingly Katherine Hepburn-tinged performance.

At the same time, it's a curious mixture of  a musical with heart with touching moments and a musical by numbers letting the grit of mining life slip away.  

The story notably drops at what should have been the most dramatic moment just before the delivrance of the boys and Frances from underground. Titles such as "I Made It" and some of the references in the lyrics nevertheless give a clue to what could have been a more complex musical paralleling mining, family trees, filmmaking and the creation of a musical.

So. the potential of the story is never mined (pardon the pun!) by the writers. And yet ... the choral singing gives an indication that a bigger cast might add an epic dimension. 

And while it might be heresy with such spirited performances, we did wonder whether the story would have had more trajectory if it had been the "Burnt Part Girls" and brought in other implications. Ouch, there, we've said it! In the meantime, it's a canary-coloured amber light from TLT and her little wagon at the coalface.

  

Review The Fall

The Fall
by James Fritz

A Leasehold On Life
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk

Celebrating its sixtieth year, the National Youth Theatre (NYT) of Great Britain has taken up temporary residence at bijou theatrical fringe powerhouse The Finborough with The Fall, a youthful play - about growing old.

Award-winning playwright James Fritz, who himself benefited from the NYT actor training scheme, has crafted a quietly ambitious three-part, hour long youth-to-death play, equally as a fable about economics and art as the ageing process.

The character names, "girl" (LaTanya Peterkin) and "boy" (Oliver Clayton)  in the first part give a clue to the literary Everyman quality of the play. A paid daily companion and her boyfriend are eager to find a place to have sex. They invade the supposedly empty private home of a  geriatric client of the young woman, a solicitor approaching his centenary, using the keys entrusted to her.

As they indulge ritualistic animal functions of life and envy the homeowner,  the comfort of the home is only conjured up through words at odds with the clinical looking bed at the centre of the stage space surrounded by the audience on three sides.

The scene is set as we hear about the girl's mundane duties: Watering the plants, cleanng and chatting to her client. Yet the harsh tone cuts through when she preens herself for being "nice" - and then adds "he pays me".

Meanwhile the athletic boy underlines his buff, healthy status, dismissing his link with ancestors for the here and now. He uses the bed for  push ups, his entry into the  "county trials" assured (presumably for athletics rather than the archaic county courts of the lawyer), wooing the girl with a pop song from the sixties.

Indeed, this act has a radiophonic quality and needs slightly more precise direction to bring out the reason for tell and not show. Still, it effectively displays a modern employer-employee relationship with the property-owning moribund elderly lawyer hanging on to life which, in its grotesque finale could still have come out of  Dickensian times.

Remniniscent in style of the BBC TV licence advert, the second part brings us into the much faster moving media age, with director Matt Harrison showing a strong hand.  A couple, numerically labelled ONE (Katya Morrison) and TWO (James Morley), mechanically pulling apart and making up a bed as they age from youth to middle age, courtship to a twisted midlife crisis.

 At first TWO worries about meeting her fiancee ONE's Mum, then it's their tenancy, the roof over their head, jobs and, after procreation creates a male heir,  the future for their own little descendant. The play then slyly curls round to give a different and increasingly desperate focus on the older generation. 

As the years pass, we feel how, as the social insurances for the couple fall away, the woman unlinked to her partner's mother by blood, grows dominant,  willing to accommodate the unthinkable for the sake of her child. While, it seems even the authorities collude with her, unwilling to bring a contemporary generation to book.

The third part links intricately with the past and looks forward to a dystopian future honing in on the last generation clinging to a memory of privacy, family ties,  natural love, geographical roots and, yes, those old-fashioned things, computer games. ;)

Now they are merely letters, A (Hannah Farnhill), B (Matilda Doran-Cobham), C (Simeon Blake-Hall)  and D (Ben Butler) to be filed away in a cell around a bed, away from the sight of the younger generation and with the choice (or so it seems) to live or take medication to die.

Here the lighting of Seth Rook Williams brings an added chiaroscuro dimension while the non gender specific casting reflects the gradual flattening of real people in real places into mere algebra.

With an affecting central performance by Hannah Farnhill as the latest entrant into this limbo land where the explanations of the "Liaison" (Katya Morrison again) for the other disappearing residents link up with her role as younger mother in the previous act.

The whole cast, dressed in grey, go from music festival energy to more militarised robotic disappointment in between the acts around the bed (design Chris Hone). This is a subtle and disciplined piece reflecting on the move from literature to screen, the title and ending indicating James Joyce's epic Finnegan's Wake as a template.

Whereas the Wake concentrated on the atomized artificial speed of lives on film, Fritz examines an age moving into the automated response of  algorithms clashing with the prime and withering of fragile human love, blood and flesh   An amber/green light for a brave and thoughtful production.

Review The Spoils

The Spoils
by Jesse Eisenberg

Jesse-In-A-Box
http://www.trafalgar-studios.com

There's something of a Jack-in-a-box quality to Ben (Jesse Eisenberg) the central character - it seems a bit much even to call him an anti-hero - in The Social Network star's sharply sour own comedy, 'The Spoils'.

Every time he appears knocked back, defeated, disoriented by too much pot smoking, his wizened, jeering face and wiry body pops up again to taunt those within his orbit.

Mind you, he can afford it. His apartment, prime real estate in the midst of New York, is gifted him by his wealthy Dad (no Mom  in sight) who subsidises Ben's lifestyle, passing as a documentary filmmaker, even after expulsion from film school.

Sharing the apartment, overlooking the Empire State Building, is Nepalese MBA student Kalyan (The Big Bang Theory's Kunal Nayyar), living rent free, already a published author of a book on how to bring economic reform to his country.

When Ben runs into soon-to-be married banker Ted (Alfie Allen, one of two superb British replacements for the original off-Broadway 2015 cast), an elementary school contemporary, the scene is set for a dinner party where Ben can exercise his fulsome repertoire of goading skills.

The meal is prepared by sweet-natured Kalyan who is also eager to gain an interview at Ted's prestigious Wall Street firm with his Indian medical intern girlfriend Reshma (Billions' Annapurna Sriram), whom Ben relishes needling, as one of the guests.

Completing an uncomfortable quintet is Ted's fiancée, teacher Sarah (Katie Brayben, the second excellent British cast member, recently seen in My Mother Said I Never Should) who was also a fellow elementary school pupil.

Ben focuses in on Sarah, aiming to break up her relationship with the seemingly amiable Ted while revealing to her a childhood obsession with her of a particularly grotesque scatalogical nature.

It's all terrifically well-acted with memorable characters in an affluent but precarious and savage world.

But in its sitcom-gone-sour mode, while the slick direction by Scott Elliott and performances are inherently theatrical, with the plot hanging on minutiae, this feels like a movie.

What to make of the subject matter?

Watch out for Ben's unexpected anecdotal flash of academic intelligence telling a joke based in US history. Alongside the title 'The Spoils' with its ancient Greek ring of winner-takes-all transmuted into 'To The Victor The Spoils' during a famously corrupt moment in American politics,  this may all give a clue.

There is also just a touch of novelist Philip Roth's character of Merry Levov, the dysfunctional fat rich privileged daughter turned anorexic terrorist (soon to be on screen in a movie version) in Ben.

And there's a double edge to the finale. Some may feel it a sentimental cop out but others may see a disturbing channelling of Ben's perverse energies by the banker and educator couple pitching him a cover (up) story as they put him back in his box.

For surely Ted's affable exterior is able to survive in the cut throat Wall Street environment of which we're given a glimpse through Kalyan's account of his interview when he finally wises up to reality outside academic exchange?

'The Spoils' is slick and powerful but can feel somehow incomplete as a stage production, so an amber/green light from TLT and her motorised theatregoing comrade-in-arms. But judge for yourself before the August 13 end of the run.

Review Young Chekhov Platonov/Ivanov/The Seagull

Young Chekhov

Platonov/Ivanov/The Seagull

by Anton Chekhov

in new versions by David Hare

Chekhov Cluedo

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/

Yes, it was Anton in the drawing room with the revolver. But what led up up to the fatal shot? There is a danger seeing three early plays by the young Anton Chekhov (or in this case Chekhov as adapted by David Hare) in one day that it does become a kind of Cluedo common denominator search.

Well-educated but disillusioned young(ish) men, landowners whose mortgages are being called in, dodgy doctors, scoundrel schoolteachers, easily influenced young females, worldly wise older ones ...  Will the National Theatre's retailing arm soon be selling a "Construct Your Own Chekhov Play In A Day" kit? ;)

To be fair, it seems to TLT and her little troika, that a hint of the boxed set approach, alongside broadcasting of the plays, is probably inevitable in this day and age.

This trilogy, directed by Jonathan Kent, starts in the 19th century and ends with an updating, costume wise, of The Seagull to 1930s Russia. With the set designed by Tom Pye, a Russian estate complete with woods and water seeping onto the stage, there is the implied sense of a saga based not on one family, unless that family is the family of actors, but centred on one property. 

Platonov was never staged during Chekhov's lifetime with more than five hours' of play discovered in archives many years after his death.  Although untitled, it usually takes its name from the central character of the schoolteacher, bitter cynic Platonov who nevertheless proves an object of desire for the women around him. 

These are his wife Sasha (Jade Williams) with whom he has fathered a child, the forceful landowning general's widow, Anna (Nina Sosanya) her daughter in law Sofya (Olivia Vinall)  and the blue stocking Maria (Sarah Twomey) both repelled and attracted by him. Written by a 20 year old Chekhov for an actress who rejected the script, it remains, although cut down to two hours and 40 minutes, a baggy monster of a play. 

In Hare's version there is a vitality but also a sense that maybe it is a piece rooted in another literary form. There are a plethora of short stories contained within its flexible frame. 

Familiar Chekovian themes of debt and disillusion mix with broad melodrama, including a bandit (Des McAleer) prepared to do the violent bidding of a moneylender (David Verrey),  alongside farce. Farce, despite that tragic ending when Anton leaves the loaded revolver in the dining room. 

It's certainly a tour de force for  James McArdle as the eponymous schoolmaster, who casts himself part as Don Juan and part as Hamlet,  swirled between these women. 

There is a repertory company for all three plays with some of the actors cast in two (Peter Egan, Joshua James, David Verrey, Jade Williams, Nina Sosanya, Jonathan Coy, Pip Carter, Brian Pettifer, James McArdle, Des McAleer, Sarah Twomey Mark Penfold, Beverley Klein, Col Farrell, Geoffrey Streatfeild. Debra Gillett) or three roles (Mark Donald, Olivia Vinall, Luke Pierre) across the entire Young Chekhov opus. 

Yet in some ways Ivanov felt the most successful of the three plays for your own spritely duo. Firmly hooked in the melodramatic tradition, Ivanov is about a thwarted reformist landowner (Geoffrey Streatfeild), up to his ears in debt while obligated by his pre-announced ideals to pay his workers as well as his lenders in full.

He is obstinately set on a economically doomed course of action, railing against his dying Jewish wife (Nina Sosanya) while he knows her own lack of blame and power over the situation. Interestingly, the Young Chekhov programme notes the playwright claimed to have been engaged for a brief time to a young Jewish woman (later, unknown of course to Chekhov who died in 1904, to be arrested in her eighties in Vichy France and gassed in Treblinka). 

Before one dismisses the Ivanov story as a mere melodramatic trope, TLT can verify a similar situation in an American branch of her family - although without that familiar revolver turning up in the drawing room. 

The third play is also the most familiar - The Seagull. Olivia Vinall completes an impressive trio of roles, this time as the betrayed young Nina. 

With costumes updated to, presumably, 20th century Communist Russia, an actress mother  Irina Arkadina (Anna Chancellor) of aspiring playwright Konstantin (Joshua James) returns to her estate with celebrated writer Trigorin (Geoffrey Streatfield again). 

Naive Nina, initiated into the world of theatre in more ways than one,  pulls away from besotted Konstantin after his mother introduces her to Trigorin. 

This third play felt much more like a screen interpretation - indeed there is a visual hint that the tragic fate of Konstantin, even after some success in the literary world, is linked with the movies. Surprisingly nevertheless Irina Arkadina and Trigorin felt too sincere about their art for us in this version.  

As we have noted before, Nina's last appearance can equally encompass revenge for being lured into life as an actress and spurned lover as well as a genuinely unhinged aspect to her behaviour. This dual resonance was something we felt was lost in this adaptation. 

At the same time, Young Chekhov gave us generous dose of the playwright and the intertwined trio of plays added one more character: the Creative Tension between playwright, actors, directorial interpretation and, even if it is a big word, life.   

Above all, seeing these three productions together in one day brought home to TLT and her motorised theatre-going comrade the complex humanity which lies behind Anton in the drawing room with his characters and a loaded revolver.  An amber/green light.

Review Breakfast At Tiffany's

Breakfast At Tiffany's

by Truman Capote 

adapted by Richard Greenberg

My Fair Lady

http://www.trh.co.uk/

According to the 1961 New York Times review of the Hollywood movie adaptation of Truman Capote's, Breakfast At Tiffany's written three years earlier, protagonist Holly Golightly is an "amoral pixie".

Well, we are not commenting on her moral virtue, of which we know naught. But maybe this throwaway newspaper phrase inspired the casting of chanteuse Pixie Lott in the role of Texas billbilly turned New York high society escort, or in Capote's own words an "American Geisha".

A bar room memory play, the older self of young would-be writer (Matt Barber), let's call him Fred like Holly, looks back to his arrival in New York, after the Pearl Harbor attack during the Second World War, where he rents a room in a sprawling Manhattan brownstone house..

Lodged amid a bevvy of eccentrics, he is alternately fascinated by and then almost jealous of his will- 'o-the-wisp mysterious young neighbour,.a mere fire escape climb away. 

Greenberg's somewhat heavy handed adaptation draws on Capote's novella first published in men's style magazine Esquire in 1958,  but hit the footlights in 2013 in a short-lived Broadway production.

Holiday (Holly) Golightly lives off "powder room" tips from men she escorts and payments for regular Sing Sing prison visits to and the passing on of messages from a mafia mobster. 

Living for the here and now, Miss Golightly develops her very own form of psychological myopia,  treading water in and floating with the cream of New York high society, while being entirely out of her depth. 

Despite the movie's liberties with the novella, it's Audrey Hepburn's exotic looks and fashion magazine embodiment of Holly, created by scriptwriter George Axelrod and costume designers Hubert de Givenchy and Edith Head, which dominates the public perception of Capote's story,

Even so, Capote apparently wrote the tale with Marilyn Monroe in mind and felt double crossed with the casting of the more elfin Miss Hepburn.

However sitting in the upper circle, the shifting scenery of the New York skyline and the skeletal brownstone building felt dwarfed by the huge Haymarket stage, although the experience may be different in the stalls. 

It's a serviceable rather than a fluent production, literal rather than a literary jewelled bauble of a play. For even if it were not a faithful adaptation, the film's strength was perhaps its own combination of an Esquire-like fantasy for the fashionable male with, yes, an American geisha.

Barber as Fred works hard as the narrator of this memory tale, explicitly gay here rather than the implication in the source material,  increasingly skipping around the stage like a springy young gazelle. 

But a delicate, fluid, chameleon piece of writing  on New York's human zoo becomes too Chandleresque. Whether it's the script or direction by Nikolai Foster, it's too straightforward and flatening a rendition to make the narrative and characters run out of  the callow young writer's control which we're guessing may have been the original intention.

Lott also works hard as the "real phoney", reinvented Pygamalion-style by a Hollywood agent (Sevan Stephan),  but apart from the singing, it feels like an arduous uphill task for her with a self-conscious accent with more than a tinge of  Zsa Zsa Gabor. 

Still, there is Robert Calvert as Doc Golightly, Texan horse doctor, Holly's soft-hearted benefactor who made our wild heroine his child bride. While Charlie De Melo makes a memorable smoothly plausible Brazilian politician playboy. 

And, last but not least, the impactful disciplined brief appearances, eliciting admiring noises from the audience for his professionalism, of Bob the cat as the "no-name slob", a feline of indeterminate sex. So,  it's the lower end of an amber light for  a perfectly respectable if uninspried version of  the meaningful cartoon that is Breakfast At Tiffany's.

Review Exposure The Musical

Exposure The Musical

Book, Music and Lyrics by Mike Dyer 

Out Of Focus

https://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk/

For a musical about a photographer, Exposure  is curiously uninterested in photography. There's a hint of something here and there but it's never - please pardon the old-style film pun - fully developed.

The strapline is "Life Through The Lens" and we're first presented to embryo photographer Jimmy when  he's -well - an embryo.in an ultrasound image. A projected photo of  the baby in the womb, a photographic process not entirely without risk and pain itself, towers over the stage.

Nevertheless the backers of this new musical have taken the risk and may still feel the pain because this kind of insight and coherence is never followed through in Exposure.

The set design by Timothy Bird clicks open like a camera shutter onto an African landscape. It's a clever enough concept but gets entirely lost in the random scenes and grab bag of styles, stories and clichés which follow.

Jimmy's photojournalist Dad (Kurt Kansley) is in a drought-stricken African country where an aid worker (Jahrel Thomas) pleads with him to take photos to tell the world of a starving people's plight with hoardes crowded into refugee camps.

But the photographer crosses the line when he takes a photo of a rainmaking ritual conducted by a local shaman who along with his tribe believes a photo steals the subject's soul. Cue for a song maybe? A bit of simple research on the internet reveals real experiences of photographers  and ruminations of others on soul stealing  

But the songs have only the frailest connection to photography and any development of the story. We're always willing to give new writing latitude. But a musical progressing from Africa to a projection of a foetus in a womb with the buff topless Jimmy (David Albury)  emerging singing from the shadows after his father's death, part beautified Frankenstein, part Chippendale (wait a moment - we haven't reached it yet!) with the memorable lyric "A womb with a view"?  (EM Forster and Noel Coward must be groaning at the well-worn pun, as well as turning in their graves.)

And so it goes on. It's an obviously fine cast, directed by Phil Willmott, who give their all and in grappling with the unwieldy material rise as far as they can above it all.

To try and sum up the story - Jimmy is determined from his schooldays to become a photographer while his mate blonde Janet (I'd Do Anything's Niamh Perry) has designs to become a vocal superstar, but ominously chooses the name "Pandora's Box" for her combo. Cue a lively schoolyard routine (choreography Lindon Barr) which might fit well into a youth musical.

Roll on the years, and Jimmy and Pandora are now all growed up pursuing their respective careers but bound to "fixer to the stars" Miles Mason (Michael Greco) who locks Jimmy and Pandora into draconian contracts and  turns out to be the devil in disguise. One of the contractual stipulations seems to be that Jimmy should ride off into the twilight zone and photograph the Seven Deadly Sins.

Cue a totally off-the-wall underground Faustian parade of the Seven Deadly Sins. That's underground as in the London Tube with station puns ranging from Anger Lane to Lusting Bec. Plus a range of influences from Cats to Roald Dahl. And there's Jimmy's traffic accident, on the motorbike gifted to him by Miles after receipt of his soul, with a hospital scene like a cross between All That Jazz  and Angels in America. 

Oh and pregnant Pandora takes an overdose while her elderly sugar daddy is on the phone arranging for her to have an abortion while Jimmy has a love interest in a homeless Irish lass, Tara (Emmerdale regular Natalie Anderson), who sells angels made out of Coke tins on Jermyn Street..

Apparently the legacy of the never-mentioned archive left by Jimmy's late Dad isn't enough to sustain his son and pay the bills. Jimmy's life and exploitation by Miles Mason is played out with classic images from the Getty archive flashed before our eyes, but there's no valid exploration of the photographer's trade.

The superficial clunky clichés only serve to highlight the curiously dated view of photography where the paparazzi are still viewed as all-powerful with  no competition from amateurs with mobile phones. 

Sure it is artistically fine to have the father dressed like an old style war photographer of the Frank Capa/Don McCullin mode. 

However when the costuming (designer Carla Goodman) and make up have a far more interesting narrative than the book, it's a musical with the wrong zoom lens. So it's a TLT rare red/amber light, red for the musical and amber for the cast and musicians who do their best with a piece which should have stayed in the darkroom