Review Evita

Evita
Lyrics by Tim Rice
Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber

It Takes Two To Tango
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/evita/phoenix-theatre/

We're about to shoot holes through our credibility by admitting that we've never seen Evita - not Elaine Paige, not Madonna, not Elena Roger. Yes, we remember the Julie Covington and David Essex recordings and videos and have caught bits of the movie, but that's about it.

But it was a nice surprise to find Evita, based on the life and death of Eva Perón, is a stonking musical with an ingenious rock and Latin-American flavoured Lloyd Webber score and a very clever, succinct book written by Tim Rice at a time when another Perón was making news,

This touring production from the Bill Kenwright stable, directed by Bob Tomason with Kenwright, feels uneven but still, we think, enjoyable. Part of the unevenness though lies in our own preconceptions, shared we are sure by many of our generation,  of which more later.

The 1978 stage musical follows the career of Eva Perón, a rags-to-riches true life story, illegitimate child to radio actress to wife of the President, only to be cut short  by an operatic-arc tragic death at a relatively young age.  Or as Lloyd-Webber, who was of course Jesus Christ Superstar's composer, pithily put it, before he was persuaded to do the musical, another death at 33.

Emma Hatton is a vivacious Evita of the Elaine-Paige-type but the show is definitely hampered in the first act by some bizarre microphone sound levels. 

Even so Oscar Balmaseda's minor celebrity crooner Magaldi, in this version of Evita's story, Eva's meal ticket to city bright light's rises above this with a pleasing clarity, along with Sarah O'Connor as Perón's former mistress with "Another Suitcase In Another Hall".

Happily the sound levels become practically perfect for the second act when the hard-edged  money making, the turning of Evita into an almost Marilyn Monroe superstar and then her sanctification really kick in.  

Hatton and Kevin Stephen-Jones's brylcreamed Perón in song thrillingly argue out political possiblities while the iconic songs, Che's earlier "Oh, What A Circus" and Eva's "Don't Cry For Me Argentia" have their impact.

Yet we felt somewhat frustrated by what seemed like a vigorous and beautifully put together musical but we couldn't quite fathom the reason why at the time.

During and immediately after the show we were totally unfair about Gian Marco Scharetti's Che. We criticised his faintly ridiculous broad-chested military stance. 

But we did wonder about the way he donned his military beret very like a member of the IRA paramillitary rather than a romantic view of Che Guevara and another moment when, on his knees, eyes raised, he seemed almost Christ-like. 

We should have trusted our instincts and taken this che (che in Spanish is a colloquial term, he's a guy, any guy) more at face value. 

Lloyd-Webber and Rice's original character was not Che Guevara but a far more generic Brechtian terrorist/freedom fighter. This also makes sense of the casting of Irishman Colm Wilkinson as the Che on the concept album. 

It also turns Evita into a musical about how myths are formed compared with the reality of powerbroking and about how social reform can go hand in hand with corruption and murder. It's also a musical, it seems to us, about men and women and who controls the narrative and storytelling.

So any version loyal to the creators' original conception has a major problem. The preconceptions of people like TLT. 

The 1978 director Hal Prince, it seems to us, turned Evita into a more cinematically ready musical of a certain type. It made sense again when we learned that, admittedly much later, Cabaret's Liza Minnelli did a screen test for Evita.

Maybe also there was a difference between the US's view of Che Guevara and Europe's which makes Prince's choice to turn the narrator into the icon legitimate in American terms but also made the character less universal. That said, the Alan Parker movie with Antonio Banderas did revert back to the original concept.  

It may be that the differing South American, the mainstream US, the Broadway and Hollywood and the British and European views on Che Guevara all come into play. And it all may have been complicated by differing colonial and then post Cold War views of Argentina.  

We thought we detected clever moments - the cathedral scenes had a tinge of The Sound Of Music, the slightest echo of West Side Story and Sondheim's Assassins in the Buenos Aires scenes and a nod towards My Fair Lady as the aristocratic women of upper class Argentina berate Evita behind her back before the musical becomes its own creature.

It's all very light touch and does work but it's also rather lush, full of bright colours and military uniforms and of course that iconic Che Guevara image. We had to investigate this and interrogate our own assumptions, but we'd love now to find out if a cut-down overtly Brechtian Evita would work. 

Our storytelling in this review, it seems to us, backs up our own conflicted reaction to this production. We may have made some assumptions, but we didn't know the steps of this Evita tango. We hope it is of service to those about to see the musical for the first time and wish we had known all this before we went. 

It's not only a great musical but, we think, a barometer of conflicting interests and the politics of showbusiness in 1978. For this 2017 Evita, it's an amber light. 

Review The Wasp

The Wasp
by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm

Hornet From Hell
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

When the internet first took hold, one of the first successes was Friends Reunited - school reunions writ large online. Many of course were delighted to trace those they had known from their schooldays.

On the other hand, for others it was a nightmare scenario ... 

Two married 30 somethings meet up outside a cafe. Carla's character is immediately established - she's a cash-strapped hard-faced blonde (Lisa Gorgin), chain-smoking - and pregnant.

She's joined by a demure, well-spoken, well-off ex-classmate (Selina Giles), with an air of Charlotte Rampling, who has contacted her through Facebook.

They seem to be polar opposites, in the past one a bully, the other a victim, but now the balance of power has changed, they're all growed up with a grown-up proposition in prospect.

This is a drama-thriller that at first shifts the dynamics rather well. It sets up our expectations, often incorporating issues and news stories which have appeared in the media, only to snatch them away.

It also allows the two actors to run the gamut of  their acting repertoire in a positive way. That's its strength and, a few instants excepted when it lagged a bit, the first act is suitably tense and gripping.

It was in the second act, despite director Anna Simpson's best efforts and a pleasing, efficient set design from Mike Leopold, that the moments of lag started to overwhelm the plot and it falls apart.

There are rather too many on-the-nose explanations, including the origin of the play's title which seem torturous to say the least.

In fact, we began to wonder whether we had wandered into some computer mash up of a David Attenborough nature documentary and John Fowles's The Collector with a touch of Stephen King's Misery. 

Or, despite committed performances, we almost expected it would turn out to be some kind of elaborate game knowingly played between two warring friends, trying to outwit each other and we in the audience were the victims of a theatrical "sting" (it wasn't).

The Wasp goes from plot point to plot point and plot to plot, as if it were tasting a whole range of possible stories, a trend we have noticed in a large number of new plays during the past couple of years.

It becomes a curious amalgam of a thriller - welding together a number of themes - more successfully in its first act than in the denouement. The ending was one we had thought of near the beginning but dismissed as one of the snatched-away scenarios.

However, frankly, with all the jumping around from tall tale to tall tale, we stopped caring.

Nevertheless, it's a slick, well-acted  production and if you're not too pernickety about stereotypes and plausibility even in The Wasp's lunatic, smoke and mirrors world, there are worse ways of spending an evening. It's also probably a movie, rather than a theatre, script.   An amber light.

Review Continuity

Continuity
by Gerry Moynihan

Behind The Walls
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Pádraig is a bit of an artiste - he's called upon to perform - to sing - "Once upon a time there was Irish ways and Irish laws" in the pub in the city he calls Derry on St Patrick's Day.

He's also lived through history both literally as a middle aged mechanic from Cold War to 2017 and also keeping alive the flame harking back to Oliver Cromwell's conquest of Ireland through The Troubles.

For he's still a member of what he views as the IRA - the paramilitary Continuity IRA fighting for  32 counties of a united Ireland.

Yet he's living in modern European times as well, having hitched up with a Spanish lover who works as a university administrator, even if the future is now more uncertain.

But he's never believed in the peace process, although at least one close family member has joined the Police Force Of Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile he finds himself in demand for his technical skills and as part of an alternative "legal" set up by men classified as terrorists maiming for life minor drug dealers.

Writer Gerry Moynihan has framed a neat monologue but the evening belongs to Paul Kennedy as the conflicted Pádraig who gradually realises in this 90 minute monologue that he is a man caught between two generations and cannot reconcile the two..

The core of the monologue lays out powerfully and in increments Pádraig's life. There are a few clunky movie references which sound like additional tweaks.

However the ebb and flow of  Pádraig's emotions and  his increasing understanding of others' inner lives  is effectively conveyed, sometimes touchingly and sometimes with disturbing clarity.

While history and organizations seem to have an onward continuity, the grudges and actions are part of a sordid circular internal turmoil.

This is in essence a melodrama where many of the elements may be familiar. Yet there are also some deft touches which put it in both a more global and intimate domestic context, bringing it up to date.

Director Shane Dempsey, with movement direction by Steffany George, insures the solo piece is well-paced with Anna Clock's atmospheric sound effects.

A magnetic, carefully nuanced performance by Paul Kennedy immerses the audience in a world where everyone has only a partial understanding of what is going on and what they are doing, even with a final seemingly defiant act. An amber/green light.

Review Road

Road
by Jim Cartwright

Northern Soul
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

By 1986 the era of the bomb sites left by the Second World War and subsequent demolition was retreating but not forgotten.

This often revealed on city wastelands a cross section of a home in the rented Victorian terraces which still had tenants in the houses next door. Torn wallpaper and homely cupboards up above still visible to children playing down below in the ruins.

The North/South divide had descended and the old industrial revolution industries were either rapidly contracting or had already died a death. The Big Bang and the bank account culture were yet to take over but there were glimpses of the changes they would wreak.

This, it seems to us, is the atmosphere of Jim Cartwright's Road - dilapidation, unemployment where joining the armed forces and almost a war enconomy seemed the only alternatives, a new generation springing up out of the ruins of the old and, yes, an indominitable stereotypical humour and resilence.

Having only read the play and never seen a production, we were excited when Road came up on the schedule of the Royal Court - its original home - directed by John Tiffany to boot.

Road is a mix of communal poetry, soap opera (Coronation Street, Brookside and even Eastenders had all become popular), rage at social circumstances and an exploration of inner psychic space and society. 

We have to say we were a little surprised by a set from Chloe Lamford with a pair of monolithic streetlights towering on each side of the stage and an extremely clean red brick wall with bricked up huge arched windows as the backdrop.

This all seemed more like something out of expressionist Metropolis than a Lancashire town in the 1980s under a Thatcher government.

And instead of us travelling up and down the road with a  febrile Scullery, it's a production made static by the curious choice of a rising and lowering perspex cube giving a feeling of aliens who had just landed on Planet Lancashire.

Up the wide steps at the front of the stage, our guide, Scullery, is a very laid back Lemn Sissay, poet and actor, who takes his time to lean back and watch the action as it plays out before him.

This is not  a pulsating, changing street or a ghetto where people are trapped. It's a far more sterile environment where everybody takes their turn.

You may guess from this TLT found the Lancashire street via Sloane Square particularly lacking in atmosphere. Sometimes this view of a Northern town even felt theme park-like and kitsch rather than a hand-to-mouth existence of a street full of people  regularly cashing the unemployment benefit Giro at the Post Office.

Still, while they have to sometimes fight against some unwieldy design for the intimate scenes, there are good performances. Mark Hadfield as a Hoover-mending resident, leather-skirted Michelle Fairley propping up a passive binge-drinking soldier she's determined will give her a good time and June Watson's understated but pitch perfect turn as a girlish pensioner.  

Written by Jim Cartwright three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Road is a map not so much of a sea change but a new era's tidal wave. It still remains an atmospheric piece of writing with beautiful, visceral use of music.

However we don't feel the overall concept of this production goes with the flow of the poetic text. It just doesn't feel raw red and wounded  enough - as if it were all behind an airless perspex box with the politics and soul sucked out. It's an amber light.

Review Rabbits

Rabbits
by Joe Hampson

Strange Stew
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Rabbits puts itself out as a play about what middle-aged people do behind closed doors. Hmm, well, it's  very much a series of sketches with common characters and - eventually - a theme.

However, while an excellent three-strong cast try their best, it's a crab-like would-be comedy of the absurd which doesn't so much develop as try to manoeuvre clumsily sideways.

And there were times when we thought perhaps we were being inducted into the stage equivalent of the cult of mini movies remade with bunnies.

Working in reverse, we learn the rather anticlimactic and curiously old-fashioned whys and wherefores of what turns out to be a sex comedy near the end when it finally pulls the proverbial long-eared mammal out of the hat.

The play revolves around three characters, one apparently a husband and wife, the other a chameleon man who metamorphosizes into three different characters.

When we say metamorphosize, that's a little misleading as it implies fluidity between the three sections of the play.

The dialogue and jerky twists and turns seems to breed more possible plots than a fluffy bunny breeds offspring, going through approximations of numerous TV and movie premises,

So it starts off with a hitman plot where a sitcom-type husband, rather than wanting to get rid of his wife by violent means, is focussing on the disposal of an unwanted gift.

Maybe the baseball cap with a prominent "LA" on the head of the hapless male spouse is a clue. The actors make it characterful but we found the set up and gags distinctly weak and forced.

The experimentation with structure felt less a choice growing organically out of content, but a means of inserting gags and set ups the writer wanted to include. We did also wonder whether this piece may have started off as a radio play.

We noted the repetitions and differences between the first two parts. We can't say there was "Ahhh, brilliant, I never saw that coming" or "Wow, that was wonderfully trailed but it's still a surprise" before the downbeat third act revelation.

Alex Ferns takes on a trio of characters and the first scene is the strongest where visually he cuts a distinctive figure as the hitman in Alex Berry's bedsit set. David Schaal also brings energy to the perculiar ticks and helplessness of the husband.

Karen Ascoe as the spouse who wears the trousers in the household is the stand out in the cast, but this is probably because her transformations as a character are the most extreme.

As far as we could tell, there is also some attempt to make a difference in acting styles between heightened cartoon fantasy with some deliberately coarse acting and more naturalistic scenes.

Staging wise, a raised platform stage or at least more thought given to sightlines for all the rows may have proved beneficial. The space has raked seats on two sides and, about three rows back, we had our view severely impeded when the action descended onto the floor.

Director Sadie Spencer by necessity forces the pace on a script which feels very stitched together and artificial.

Of course at this point it would be easy for the creatives to argue it is meant to be an artificial environment created by the characters themselves and we could dispute about this ad infinitum ... It's that kind of irritating script and situation.

For us this felt like a play that isn't as insightful, experimental or funny as it thinks it is. Still, bunny casting must be hoping it's part of a trend with fluffy mammals appearing in both The Ferryman and now hopping over to the Park Theatre here. A red/amber light.

Review Coming Clean

A brittle comedy drama revealing the cracks in a seemingly stable relationship provides a funny and wistful evening for Peter Barker.

Coming Clean
by Kevin Elyot

The Love Knot
http://www.kingsheadtheatre.com/

Long-standing gay couple Tony and Greg are celebrating their fifth anniversary in a Kentish Town flat.

Greg is a worldly, acerbic academic, while would-be writer Tony and unattached serial cruiser friend William enjoy partying.

Tony and Greg have an open relationship, tolerant of each other's one-night stands, but the two men still remain serious about and committed to each other 

That's until the arrival into their domestic milieu of buff young "resting" actor Robert whom they hire to clean their flat. Finally Tony begins to realise that he might want something more out of his relationship with Greg.

Coming Clean was first put on in 1982 at the Bush Theatre, the debut play of the late playwright and actor Kevin Elyot .

This was 12 years before the playwright's most successful play My Night With Reg brought him to playwriting prominence..

The earlier play asks, in the era before AIDS but after 1967 decriminalisation of private homosexual acts,  when does an open relationship cross the line into infidelity?

Now this thought-provoking and touching play has been revived at Islington's King's Head.

Jason Nwoga is the college lecturer, Greg, Lee Knight is his partner Tony who finds their relationship severely tested, Tony Lambert the domestic help of the love triangle and Elliot Hadley is comically engaging as William.

The plot, issues and humour of Coming Clean have worn well and it remains a witty and insightful look into the nature of relationships, love, loss and betrayal with believable characters.

Adam Spreadbury-Maher has assembled an excellent cast on the detailed set designed by Amanda Mascarenhas.- a Kentish Town flat of the early 1980s complete with sofa, hi-fi, kitchenette, Lady Di tea caddy and Mozart records.

Elyot, who came from Birmingham and was a former choir boy,  originally called the play Cosy after the Viennese composer's Cosi Fan Tutte.

Spreadbury-Maher's direction is assured and sympathetic. Even though the drama includes darker issues, bitterness and recrimination, the play and performances remain funny, warm and natural and part of a green light production.

Review Just To Get Married

Just To Get Married
by Cicely Hamilton

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Georgiana?
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Poor Georgie has a lot on her plate. If only it were a china service plate of the kind normally given as a present to brides to set them up in their new home.

Instead, with the hopes of her aunt's snobbish but shabby genteel family fixed upon her, she's still hoping, at the ripe old age of 29, that a man will make a bid for her in the marriage marketplace.

Playwright Cicely Hamilton was an actress in the early 20th century and also an active feminist concerned with freeing up the social and economic position of women.

Just to Get Married, first performed in 1911, has at its centre Georgiana Vicary, well-educated but financially and socially dependent on her Aunt Catherine and Uncle Theodore.

Her one fervent wish in life, she believes, is to take herself off the shelf and get married, despite her own misgivings.

Everybody is full of expectations when she seems to attract the attention of Adam Lankaster in possession of a fortune and recently returned from Canada, then still part of the British Empire.

What is to be done? It's a case of will he or won't he, as everyone holds their breath, as to whether the retiring, tongue-tied Mr Lankaster will pop the question bringing credit and social status to Georgie and her aunt's Grayle family.

For despite their patronage of Georgie, the Grayles also have a military son in India running up debts, another Tod, whom they can barely afford to send to Cambridge University,  and a daughter, Bertha, of 16 going on 17, approaching the age - and expense - of coming out as a debutante.

Hamilton herself was single,  the daughter of a colonial officer whose mother disappeared early from her life, possibly committed by her husband to a lunatic asylum.

A single woman's fears about her social and financial status in society, despite the introduction of old age pensions three years earlier, were of course well-founded. However, while these anxieties take centre stage in the play, we found a subtext allying the spinster's fate with the already ailing British Empire just as interesting.

There are literary influences - or are they satiric send ups? - of  Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde  and Bernard Shaw but also a sophisticated structure which, seems to us, to point towards much later playwrights like Emlyn Williams and Terence Rattigan among others.  

Melissa Dunne directs a lucid production, although the play itself has an enormous amount of initial exposition, rather going against modern tastes, until the characterful plot really kicks in.

Philippa Quinn as the tomboyish conflicted Georgie cuts a distinctively tall figure in the Grayle's drawing room.

As the blushing, decent but unintentionally male chauvinist Lankaster, Jonny McPherson manages the deliberate pauses and near-stutters beautifully and gives us a glimpse of the efficient colonial businessman beneath the gauche exterior.

The Grayle family, Nicola Blackman as the ambitious aunt, Lauren Fitzpatrick as her young cousin, a barometer of the clashing interests, Joshua Riley as her self-interested elder brother and Simon Rhodes as the mitigating, seemingly benign, Uncle also evoke the pecuniary and mercenary atmosphere.

Although we must also admit we were unduly distracted by the excessively high, but maybe sartorially accurate, collars of the menfolk from costume designer Lottie Smith!

Stuart Nunn's small role as the footman is also effective. His appearances added to the domination of male action over enforced female passivity in the household.

Designer Katherine Davies Herbst makes excellent use of the space in a well-angled elegantly simple set with neatly positioned mirror over the mantelpiece reflecting the action.

Yet the play only fully comes together for TLT and her own motorised consort when it's set against an imperial and political context.

Hamill came from an insecure background where her mother was perhaps incarcerated against her will and the play's third act (it's a two hour play with one interval) is especially ambiguous pitting possible destitution and its consequences against marriage and colonial wealth.

There's also an uneasiness about Britain's place in the world comparable to Georgie's insecurity as a woman in a world where allies are hard to find in both cases.

This was a time when imperial adventures in the Antarctic had gone sour and the monarchy and the state seemed more dependent on their dominions than vice versa.

While the leadership of the increasingly economic and politically dominant English-speaking America was still prepared to mitigate, the family of countries, the Royal Families of Europe and Russia and the family of Georgie all  seem increasingly unstable.

This makes somewhat more sense and also leaves a prescient question mark over what would otherwise be an expedient and unbelievable status quo ending. It's not a perfect play by any means.

However, it strikes us as a strange but farsighted pre First World War and Russian Revolution piece in a perilous age for women campaigning for their rights and for the state of the world . An amber/green light.    

Review Beast

Peter Barker enjoys an ambitious and energetic production where the workplace becomes a battlefield.

Beast
by Mariko Primarolo

Work Is A Drug
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/show/beast

Banners Corporation is marketing a new product, an emotion-manipulating drug  treating soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress, especially after service in wars overseas.

Yet, according to the marketing, it has wider applications, for the liquid appears to calm and to concentrate the mind wonderfully

Invevitably though, there are other less desirable side effects.

This is the intriguing premise of Southwark Playhouse Young Company's latest offering at the South London venue.

Playwright Mariko Primarolo combines this plot with another analysing the competitive nature of modern-day internships.

Banners recruits four interns but only promises to give one of them a permanent job. For many in the Millenials' generation now, this is certainly not an exaggeration but reality.

Beast is performed energetically, directed by Chelsea Walker in a vibrant but unfocussed production.

At its best, it is a wry, sharply-observed and trenchant look at corporate culture and marketing where there is often an inextricable link between the office and bullshit.

In truth, while the problem has become magnified for graduates and others in today's economy, there is an honourable tradition of plays in previous generations making the same kind of points as Primarolo about young people's employment.

For example John Biyrne's examination of apprentices, The Slab Boys, written in the 1970s but hearking back, even if it was an era of full employment, two decades before that.

Despite Beast's initial good, clear idea, the play and production need more crafting as the switching back and forth between individual story lines feels awkward and are hard to follow.

The writer's promise to "enable everyone in the company to showcase their talents", while an admirable intention, leads to a muddled overall dramatic arc. Director Walker could have done with pacing the play in a more nuanced way.

There's plenty of talent on show, particularly Olive Supple-Still as intern Max, and the cast as a whole works well together. There are highlights - notably when the disgruntled workforce mutinies against the management

while the production does sometimes lose its way, there's certainly value in seeing it before the last performance on July 29 and enough in it to make an amber light.

Review Your Ever Loving

A new drama using the letters of a wrongly-convicted man sheds fresh light for Francis Beckett on a disturbing miscarriage of justice.

Your Ever Loving
By Martin Mcnamara

After They Threw Away The Key
http://www.londonirishcentre.org/events/

The voice of  Paul Hill, one of the Guildford Four wrongly convicted of pub bombings carried out by the IRA on 5 October 1974,  speaks loud and clear across the years in this two-hander play based on his letters from prison.

With a confession beaten out of him by the police, he served 15 years in jail for a crime he did not commit.

Journalist-turned-playwright Martin Mcnamara discovered the letters in an archive and has turned them into a thoughtful, compelling piece of theatre.

Your Ever Loving is unmistakeably a radical journalist’s play. It uses, as far as possible, Hill’s own words to condemn the injustice done to him, and to provide an intensely theatrical cry of rage at a society that behaves in that way.

The casual cruelty of underpaid and under-regarded prison officers is a part of Hill’s story and there are too many other former prisoners attesting to it for us to doubt it.

“You’ve got a grandmother called Cushnahan?  She’s dead.”

The former MP Denis MacShane similarly describes the same brutality, insensitivity and just sheer incompetence during his recent and relatively short prison sentence for fiddling his expenses in his book Prison Diaries.

Your Ever Loving is, in short, an hour-long cry of outrage, held together as a piece of theatre by the interesting and sympathetic character of  Hill.

That it works theatrically is a tribute to the strength and economy of Mcnamara’s writing and to Stefan McCusker’s strong, thoughtful, low-key performance as Paul Hill.

Between them, playwright and actor have turned Hill from a mere victim into a human being the audience cares about.

Hill’s daughter was not born when he went to prison. She was 15 when he came out.  “I need to find softness and gentleness. I have a daughter” he says as he is brutalised by the prison system.

The only other actor, James Elmes, copes magnificently with more parts than I could count – prison officers and policemen, former Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, and even, on a couple of occasions, the author.

Director Sarah Chapleo skilfully paces the piece, also adding well-chosen music. The minimalist set has a bare wooden table as its centrepiece and feels a little like a prison waiting room.

Much political theatre, in its frenzy about the politics, forgets to be theatrical and starts to lecture the audience. Your Ever Loving does not make this mistake.

It holds the attention throughout, even though you know the ending.  A green light to rush off and see this fine polemical play, either in London until July 29 at the London Irish Centre or in Edinburgh  at the Underbelly from August 3..

Review The Marriage Of Kim K

The attractive concept of a reality TV musical and Mozart opera mash-up is marred by technical sound issues, finds Peter Barker.

The Marriage Of Kim K
Music: Stephen Hyde
Words: Leo Mercer

Spouses Settling The Score 
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/ 

The timeless themes of love and relationships underpin this musical riff on reality television's "famous for being famous" Kim Kardashian's brief marriage to a basketball star.

The Marriage of Kim K is a clever attempt to fuse old and new - Kardashian's nuptials with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's and Lorenzo da Ponte's The Marriage of Figaro.

It's a marvellous idea with new compositions from composer Stephen Hyde, who also directs and stars, and lyrics and book from Leo Mercer. A flippant tale of celebrity culture plays alongside the Count and Countess Almaviva in the eighteenth century opera.

We follow the lives of three couples in three different, yet linked, domestic situations characterised by three different musical styles. The couple on a sofa in New York, the celebrity couple in Los Angeles and the Count and Countess in Spain.

The design by Anthony Newton divides the stage into three - the metropolitan apartment of the New York couple, the Kardashian and Humphries media blitz in Los Angeles and the Seville of the original Mozart opera.  

This set enables the action to go to and fro and run in parallel, kicked off by the different priorities of couple lawyer Amelia and composer Stephen - she is hooked by Kim's appearances on TV, he's untouched by celebrity culture and wants to listen to Mozart.

Meanwhile Kim Kardashian (Yasemin Gulumser) and sportsman Kris Humphries (James Edge)  have a tempestuous time in their private lives, publicly expressed on social media. Back in Spain, Count and Countess Almaviva  are similarly having a bit of a barney.

However the major problem of the evening (and it is a very big and unavoidable problem) was an extremely dodgy sound system, the microphoning making unintelligible much of the story and the satire of The Marriage of Kim K.

This was very frustrating, especially as iy appears to be a show full of invention directed by Stephen Hyde who, also merging life and reality, takes the part of composer Stephen with his real-life partner as his wife Amelia who also happens to be called Amelia Gabriel.

The real Stephen also has composed the music, a mixture of classical, pop and electronic,  played by a band of cello, violin, viola, percussion and keyboards.

The Marriage of Kim K is part of the Grimeborn opera season at the Arcola Theatre but the majority of the cast are from musical theatre who don't emerge well from the sound problems.

Emily Burnett as the Countess stands out among the singers. However it is noticeable she and Nathan Bellis as the Count are the strongest performers -  and the only trained  opera singers amongst the cast.

In true opera buffa style, the audience thrills at the wild swings of emotions and a satisfyingly neat and emotionally fulfilling conclusion. There was enough energy to intrigue me at times, but the overwhelming sense was of unfulfilled potential.

Even though it's a good idea and the second act was an improvement on the first, the technical blunders make it a red/amber light.