Review Harvey

Harvey
by Mary Chase
http://www.trh.co.uk

What's Up Doc?

The pastel coloured, chubby-cheeked winged cherubs of the rococo Theatre Royal ceiling, floating in their nappies around the rose chandelier, seemed to have an earth-bound twin as TLT and motorised companion watched Mary Chase’s American 1944 play "Harvey" from up in the gods. 

A chubby-cheeked cherubic James Dreyfus as amiable alcoholic but financially well-endowed Elwood P Dowd ambled on and it also struck us “Harvey” has all the elements of an eighteenth century sentimental comedy of manners.

Such plays often have the threat of the “family” (usually males) having the (usually female) beneficiary of family money detained. So bedlam may lurk beneath the shenanigans of wooing before eventual final act resolution. 

Except that eighteenth century plays such as She Stoops to Conquer or The Rivals don’t often, if ever, include a six-foot-plus, invisible, “pooka” rabbit, the eponymous Harvey, with or without knee breeches and tricorne hat.  

And Elwood remains resolutely set on the bachelor life, while still reading out loud Jane Austen’s famous Pride and Prejudice dictum,  “... a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

Yet this Janus-faced play (and later movie), as has been noted, could equally well look forward towards Joe Orton’s high-octane 1960s’  carry-on  What The Butler Saw.

Elwood, to the shame of sibling Veta (Maureen Lipman) and niece Myrtle Mae (Ingrid Oliver), both eager to fit in with the town’s social elite (embodied in a brief but memorable performance by Amanda Boxer), not only fritters his life away in local bars but claims an invisible lanky bunny as his drinking companion. 

Veta and Myrtle Mae therefore seize the chance to take control of family finances aided by family attorney and town judge Omar Gaffney (Desmond Barrit).  The dream of selling up and moving away, leaving their relative, they fondly imagine, in the considerate hands of the psychiatrists at the local private asylum, seems within their grasp.  

But the best laid plans go awry. Callow young psychiatrist Lyman Sanderson (Jack Hawkins) is  let loose by negligent hands-off boss Dr Chumley (David Bamber) on town citizens.  Sanderson wrongly assumes the family seeks relief from its elderly female relative, Veta rather than the hallucinating Elwood. 

Veta  does eventually escape permanent incarceration. But only when lax Chumley, married to a blonde bombshell (Felicity Dean), while preferring  his women prone and silent, realises the possible consequences of illegal detention. The rest of the action revolves around the psychiatrists seeking to contain liability supported by  bewildered Duane, the heavy of an asylum orderly (a galumphingly charming Youssef Kerkour)  and compliant  young nurse  Ruth Kelly (Sally Scott). 

All of which, set down so plainly, makes the play seem a much darker comedy than it plays in Lindsay Posner’s gently sedate production, staged with an affectively detailed music box turntable of a set designed by Peter McKintosh. 

James Dreyfus, after a self conscious start, settles into his role and eventually convinces as the tippler allowed free licence in the town. Linal Haft gives a pleasing cameo as cab driver who acts as the 20^th century equivalent of the deus ex machina. Maureen Lipman and David Bamber as Elwood’s sister and chief psychiatrist respectively give polished performances but, like the whole production, are hampered by pedestrian pacing. 

The grim reality, compared to theatrical comedy, of such “private” parish detentions without trial must now be archaic tragedies in Britain  with medical records  the property of a boss accountable to all of us, the Secretary of State for Health 

Still, on the day we attended the trials and tribulations of Elwood P Dowd and his sister Veta, the family of a woman activist murdered in Afghanistan reportedly were told to claim by police she was mentally ill to avoid reprisals against them.  

It seems stories like Harvey still have the barbs to reflect current events, but the dark undercurrents are muffled in the stately pacing of this production.  So don’t sell your grandmother to buy a ticket, but there’s enough there to keep an audience watching, if not entirely engrossed, and wondering what a sharper production would reveal. An amber light.

Review Shrapnel

Shrapnel: 34 Fragments of a Massacre
by Anders Lustgarten
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

Indefensible   

What to make of Shrapnel – part sly fable, part dramatic slide presentation but also – tragically –   real-life, real-time events when a drone-inspired air strike killed 34 unarmed civilians in 2011 on the Turkish-Iraqi border?

This piece, pivoted on the Roboski Massacre of mostly teenage boy smugglers of Kurdish origin, starts with the schoolchild Kemalist pledge of allegiance to the Turkish Republic and unfurls with stately pace towards a final school register-like roll call of  victims. 

A TLT diversion: During the Cold War, nuclear weapons , if not exactly instruments of peace, were deemed  ultimate defensive deterrents. Any use of the atomic bomb would lead to  inevitable Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), went the narrative, and no side would be MAD enough to use them.  

But what if governments storing end-the-world bombs to keep the peace give way to the fragmentation of private arms firms exporting technology and weapons, picking out random inhabitants outside villages like Roboski, regardless of their rights as citizens? TLT and her thoughtful jalopy pondered these weighty issues after sitting through this aggressively fragmented play by Anders Lustgarten.  

Snapshot scenes roll out on a precise set – variously the garden of a Turkish Kurd village, the mountain passes, an army camp and interrogation chamber, a TV studio, venues for a media awards ceremony and weapons’ company shareholder AGM and the design shop floor of an arms factory.  

Wooden frameworked entrances on one side stand below a huge drone computer screen focussing on fuzzy specks – human beings -  in its viewfinder, in a design by Anthony Lamble.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side, another smaller screen, sticking out like a signpost, gives a Turkish translation of the pithy dialogue.  Interesting because, even without a knowledge of Turkish, the staccato style lends itself to the audience trying to match the English lines with the Turkish. 

Six actors take their places on the stage as narrators, villagers, Turkish soldiers, media workers and personalities, arms’ company executives, drone operatives and British technicians, all living in their own villages  around the globe. 

Director Mehmet Egen manages a tricky balancing act in a finely measured production, ranging from the poetic to the polemic. Lucid performances from a confident ensemble cast also have the benefit of carefully-judged lighting and video design by Richard Williamson and sound by Neil McKeown.  

So back to our original question: What to make of all this? It’s not a bundle of laughs but a prickly pear of a play. For even if the sweeping unfairness of Lustgarten’s “we are all complicit” provocation sets one’s teeth on edge, is it any different from the "strike first, ask questions later" nature of the Roboski massacre? Maybe deliberately too elliptic, both as Turkish history and analysis of world powerbroking and economic leverage, the fragments are still sharp edged enough  to cut. An amber to green light for a play that reveals the skull beneath the skin of new technology.

Review Gods and Monsters Review

Gods And Monsters 

By Russell Labey

Based on the novel Father Of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram

http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/the-large/gods-and-monsters/

The Artful Dodger 

Two months have gone by since you last heard from TLT, your glamorous theatre spy,  and her ruby red limousine. Now she has to confess, after previously infiltrating the theatrical world anonymously, she has broken cover and accepted a Press Night ticket for this newly-adapted play Gods and Monsters.

The novel Father of Frankenstein, already made into a successful film, and the current Gods and Monsters’ play, directed by adapter Russell Labey, charts the final days in the life of openly gay Frankenstein movie director James Whale (an affecting and effective performance by Ian Gelder).

Born British and working-class, after attending art school he reinvented himself  first as World War I army officer, then as theatre director and eventually double-edged success at Universal Pictures in the 1930s as a movie director, whose toolbox included German Expressionism.

Following his Hollywood hits and technical innovations including a cutting-edge 360° panning camera shot in musical Showboat starring Paul Robeson, he nevertheless found himself caught up in studio and world politics and sidelined, retiring in 1941.

.

By 1957, the turmoil resulting from several strokes, dependence on prescription drugs for sleeping and waking and even, gallingly, being pigeonholed as solely a horror movie director, had taken its toll on Whale. The play presents an increasingly fragmented world through his eyes and physical symptoms, alongside the mixed solace of his later years, his painting.   

Finally, he apparently took his own life, knocking himself out in the swimming pool of his Hollywood home and drowning, little knowing his movies would soon have a new lease of life on the new mass medium of television 

Often with the feel of a monologue interrupted and resuming, the character of Whale has its main foils in a Hispanic housekeeper (Lachele Carl making the most of her intermittent appearances), an ambitious fey young horror movie buff chasing his hero for an interview (Joey Phillips) and, as if stepping out of the pages of an Americanized E M Forster or D H Lawrence novel,  the heterosexual gardener Clayton Boone (Will Austin), reluctantly baring his nude torso to pose for Whale’s art – and finding himself the object of the older man’s desires. The play also includes Grecian-statue-style male nudity and strobe lighting.

A lengthy first act of an hour and ten minutes has a tendency to bare its own musculature and insert exposition a little self-consciously, also shoehorning in a somewhat formulaic Cold War subtext.

Yet, despite a few longeurs in this diffuse play, the much shorter second act with dynamic visuals - projections by Louise Rhoades-Brown - and sound design/score by John Chambers, bringing visceral depth, constructs something more original out of the celluloid context, using Whale’s true-life history, art and sketching and a repertoire of movie clichés to interrogate itself. An amber light for new light on a tale of classic old Hollywood. 

Review The Mikado

The Mikado

Music by Arthur Sullivan 

Book/Lyrics by WS Gilbert

http://bit.ly/MikadoCharingX 

The Perils of Nanki-Poo

Just think, before social networks, mobile phones, personal computers, VCRs (and there may now be a generation which does not know what the latter are!), young folks like TLT and her now vintage motorised cabriolet used to attend theatre! Not London's West End, but the local hall for hire - in what was once called 'the provinces' - for the amateur operatic society's latest offering - almost always the product of one of two partnerships, Rogers & Hammerstein or the Victorian double-act Gilbert & Sullivan (G&S).

Little TLT and her school chums glowed with pride as their primary school teachers in the cast, having disdained TV talent show Opportunity Knocks' or New Faces' auditions to remain big fish in a local pond, launched into an over-exuberant "There Is Nothing Like A Dame" or, that satire up there with Monty Python, "A Policeman's Lot Is Not A Happy One". Amateur dramatic society directors in those faraway times seemed to prefer traditional staging, although this may have been dictated by available costumes and scenery. 

Now after that flashback, we are back to the present day - and then back again to 1920s Japan for director Thom Southerland's spiffing The Mikado set in a fan and tailors' shop and re-imagined as a silent movie - with songs of course! 

Think Harold Lloyd with trademark thick-rimmed glasses for renegade Crown Prince Nanki-Poo (Matthew Crowe), in danger of losing his head. Also Gloria Swanson (the original Norma Desmond), an inspired parallel brilliantly reflecting the pathos and venom with which G&S endowed the character of spinster Katisha (a truly wonderful Rebecca Caine). Think of this and you'll get the picture ... 

And all kudos to Phil Lindley and Jonathan Lipman for set design and costumes respectively! Two cinema pianists accompany in this pared down production and the cast enthusiastically embrace the sweet dance routines created by Joey McKneely. As is only right, there is a delicious Yum Yum in Leigh Coggins with soaring assured vocals, a suitably craven Koko (Hugh Osborne with spot-on comic timing) and an imposingly expedient Mikado (Mark Heenehan). 

Ok, there is some variability in the unmiked singing - Nanki-Poo seems to be cast for fey comic charm rather than songbird ability. But as a whole it works. And beneath the colourful japonaiserie and tinkly tunes, the shark-like lurking dark satire of English politics and law still bites, perhaps more so than the customary crowd-pleasingly slick topical updating of the Lord High Executioner's 'little list'. 

So, a green light for both a brilliant director's concept and a non-Christmassy Christmas family entertainment! (And how often do you get all that in one sentence, as a Lord High Executioner might pun! ;) )

White Christmas The Musical Review

Irving Berlin’s White Christmas The Musical

Music and Lyrics by Irving Berlin

Book by David Ives and Paul Blake

http://www.dominiontheatre.com/theatre/white-christmas/

  *˛°.˛*.˛°˛.˛★˛˚˛*˛°.˛*.˛°˛.*★* Merry (Better Early *★* 。*˛.
˛°_██_*.。*. / ♥ \ .˛* .˛。.˛.*.★* Than Never) Christmas *★ 。*
˛. (´• ̮•)*.。*/♫.♫\*˛.* ˛_Π_____.♥ ♥ ˛* ˛* ★ 。*  *˛°.˛*.˛°˛.˛
.°( . • . ) ˛°./• '♫ ' •\.˛*./______/~＼*. ˛*.。˛* ˛. * ˛°˛.*★*
*(...'•'.. ) *˛╬╬╬╬╬˛°.｜田田 ｜門｜╬╬╬╬╬*˚ .˛ *.

The Sound of Berlin

It was three quarters of the way through the perfectly enjoyable, toe-tapping “Irving Berlin’s White Christmas the Musical” (based on the 1954 movie) when your blog mine host found herself wracking her brains for the other story which ended up in an inn in Vermont. Suddenly it came to her –  the Von Trapp family of the later musical The Sound of Music (1959)  walked over the Alps – but after the credits rolled set up a successful family music franchise - in an inn in Vermont ! Was this in the mind of movie makers when they changed  location from Connecticut in Holiday Inn (1942) to Vermont twelve years later in the White Christmas movie directed by Hungarian-born Michael Curtiz? Here of course nearly all similarities between White Christmas and the Sound of Music – almost – end. In both there are strict military types who eventually melt into good guys with their hearts in the right place.  But all this is by-the-bye – how does the current musical extravaganza  – a US 2004 creation with several Irving Berlin songs not in the movie – shape up? It’s no masterpiece (and there were a few initial microphone sound issues, although this improved as the performance progressed), but it’s a great seasonal show directed in this West End première by Morgan Young, pressing all the right buttons without feeling too contrived. Classic songs from the Berlin catalogue. Infectious platoons of tap dancing chorus boys and girls. Two couples whose affairs are bolstered by beautiful melodies and smooth dance routines. Three roles for veterans including a comically monosyllabic Phil Cole as handyman Ezekiel and a suitably gruff Graham Cole (are they related?!) as retired General Waverly, and a pigtailed granddaughterly swot of a little lass who by the the show's end holds her musical theatre own with the best of them (not sure which of four Susie Waverlys we saw, but taking turns are Tatum Confrey, Sophia Pettit, Emily Robins and Amy Snudden). No cute dog, but you can’t have everything ;). A few design choices meant some scenery seemed dwarfed by the large stage near the beginning but even a couple of mentions of larceny can’t dim the bright later design, inventive costumes, lighting and happy ending story. Aled Jones as Bob Wallace and Tom Chambers as Phil Davis respectively take on the Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye roles, ex-army pals and celebrity song-and-dance men working to save a mountain inn, the investment into which their beloved former commanding officer has (inexplicably!) poured his savings and pension. Aled Jones has a truly excellent clear melodious voice while Tom Chambers dances, sings and cracks gags with an impish Jack Lemmon-like glee, although their parody “Sisters” number is perhaps not as sharp and hilarious as it could be. Wendi Peters leaves Coronation Street's Cilla Battersby-Brown far behind as entirely believable American Martha Watson - busybody switchboard operator, receptionist and closet-Ethel-Merman in an engrossingly spot-on performance, using her powerful showstopping voice with Broadway ease. Meanwhile blonde Judy (Louise Bowden) and redhead Betty (Rachel Stanley) warble and tap-dance pleasingly and more-than-proficiently through some terrific numbers as the love interests. And who can resist a stand-out song and dance routine on the pleasures of the piano accompanied by lyrics such as "I know a fine way to treat a Steinway"?! ;) With lush sounding orchestra, glorious choreography and costumes, it’s really a show that can’t fail to be a crowd pleaser for those who like their musicals bold, brassy and predictable, so, despite some flaws, a shimmering green light from this happy punter and her jalopy, now garaged, but with an engine still humming those irrepressible songs from the Irving Berlin stable :).

_██_*.。*. / ♥ \ .˛* .˛。.˛.*.★*

˛*.。. (´• ̮•)*.。*/♫.♫\*˛.* ˛_Π_____.♥ ♥

★*.( . • . ) ˛°./• '♫ ' •\.˛*./______/~＼

* 。* (...'•'.. ) *˛╬╬╬╬╬˛°.｜田田 ｜門｜