Review Le Grand Mort

Le Grand Mort
by Stephen Clark

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner
http://www.atgtickets.com/venues/trafalgar-studios/

Like the comedy duo of the 1970s and 80s Little and Large, there are apparently two sizes of morts. La petite mort meaning - hide your eyes, dear reader, of delicate constitution - an orgasm. And then, rather ungrammatically, there is le grand mort.

A quick google reveals le grand mort here and here meaning the big exit, death, but it seems it needs la petite mort in this double act. One defines the other. Of course, we theatre afficianados aka blasé snobby intellectuals are well accustomed to the ambivalent Shakespearean meaning of dying!😉

After  that circumlocutory linguistic diversion, TLT and her little sidekick with the big  - um -  theatrical heart will now cut to the chase. What do your own theatregoing pair  think of Julian Clary's performance in this two hander (apologies to the other acting half James Nelson-Joyce for this shameless piece of celebrity lionisation)?

Considering this is a verbose, red herring of a play, Mr Clary acquits himself elegantly, remembering his lines and managing to cook an aromatic pasta  puttanesca in a frying pan all at the same time. 

Yet the play, by the late Stephen Clark better known for his musical theatre librettos and lyrics, is a distinct oddity which surely is a first draft rather than a polished play?

Played out in a gleaming stainless steel kitchen set designed by Justin Nardella, Clary's at first unnamed character is preparing for his prospective dinner guest and for our delectation. Yes, he chops and he slices and peels while regaling us - in verse - with his own circumlocutory diversion about voyeurism, fetishism and necrophilia.

TLT and her companion though almost let out a joyful toot when his dinner guest - James Nelson-Joyce - finally arrived and the play GOT ON WITH THE STORY (sort of). 

From then on, it was a case of guess who's coming to dinner because, by the end of the play, TLT & co was still trying to work out the who, whys and wherefores. 

Finally, we could only come to the conclusion that this was some kind of writer's or actor's exercise about lying, storytelling, sex, death and murder which should have remained in the rehearsal room.

All of which is a shame because Clary possesses considerable stage presence and his voice has a clear, versatile tone, all of which deserves a much better vehicle. 

His camp star quality is of course for many the main attraction. However his smooth, bespectacled, sometimes more subdued, demeanour gave a glimpse of an actor who could be cast against type.

Nelson-Joyce is fine, as far as it goes, as the foil, Tim, who apparently can hold his own in intellectual role-play. His Liverpuddlian accent at first caused your theatregoing pair to wonder whether this was a riff on Brian Epstein and a lover. Then, when the talk turned to murder, Jo Orton and Kenneth Halliwell.

In other words, and my oh my there were lots of words!, a whole gamut of popular, arty farty, cod history and literary referenccs strung together. Lucien Freud got a mention, Bacon got a mention, allthough luckily it eschewed a frying pan pun about freud bacon 😉.

Of course Freud, especially, was famous for his nudes and potential punters may want to be alerted that full frontal male nudity is briefly part of the action.

Director Christopher Renshaw imposes a clarity of structure on muddled proceedings aided by Jamie Platt's lighting and Ed Lewis's filmic soundscape.

It  might be a fun night to share a pasta puttanesca and glass of wine with friends and then go and see the show. So Le Grand Mort may still be a recipe for success!  However for TLT it remained a potential crime mystery play more "Strewth!" than "Sleuth" and it's a lower range amber light.

Review Pure Imagination. The Songs of Leslie Bricusse.

Pure Imagination. The Songs of Leslie Bricusse.

https://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk/theatre/pure-imagination/

Thank You Very Much

Years ago TLT,  when her jalopy was not even a twinkling nut-and-bolt on a conveyor belt,  saw the late Anthony Newley  in a 1989 revival  of musical  Stop The World - I Want To Get To Get Off, co-written by Newley and Leslie Bricusse. 

Now film and musical theatre composer Lesley Bricusse is back from California in London with a new memoir and a show, the world première of Pure Imagination, The Songs of Leslie Bricusse. 

It's a non stop Bricusse-fest from the moment the soaring harmonies of Pure Imagination fill the auditorium. Players, Dave Willetts  "The Man", Siobhán McCarthy, "The Woman" and younger generation, Niall Sheehy "The Boy" and Julie Atherton "The Girl", singing, descend the St James Theatre staircases from the audience, on to the stage.  

Devised by Bricusse, director Chrisopher Renshaw and producer Danielle Tarento, the production's whirling concentric circles of songs, written either alone or with an impressive list of collaborators, ripple through the show without the need for spoken narrative.  

A waterfall of musical scores sweep down literally and musically on to the glistening black St James stage with the song medleys linked by the five characters,  their relationships, projections (video: Timothy Bird), dance and symbolic props (musical staging: Matthew Cole).

Stage right  the accompanying versatile six-piece band, led by musical director and pianist  Michael England, testifies to the sheer range of Bricusse's opus from musical theatre through pop songs of the day and jazz to classic film themes. 

The characters,while updated for the mobile phone age and casually dressed,  pick up the archetypal spirit of the Marcel Marceau personalities inhabiting early Newley and  Bricusse hits, Stop The World and The Roar Of The Greasepaint - The Smell Of The Crowd. 

It's an invigorating mash-up of a life in song.

Initiating the stage action, Giles Terera, "The Joker" strolls on, a colourful patchwork suited, bowler hatted  hobo with coloured odd shoes, eventually inviting "everybody to come and dine ... and I will pay the bill" On A Wonderful Day Like Today.

Songs at first tangle themselves up with the speed of office life. 

Nothing Can Stop Me Now sung by Sheehy before a trip to the country with tartan picnic rug and Atherton's red-apple-fresh "Out Of Town" keeping up the pace,  through to Beautiful Things from Dr Doolitte (yes, he wrote Dr Doolittle!) with McCarthy and Willets before we land in Pickwick politics "Gandhi, Mandela and me ... If I Ruled The World" ... 

On to the Hollywood studio lot with an iconic sexy star tended by red aproned make up girl and Love Is ...  from the university studient Bricusse's  Cambridge Footlights' time  before he was plucked out to star with comedy revue star Beatrice Lillie. And there always will be Paris with more songs and love rivals and the inevitable broken heart.  

Then hardly stopping to inhale, back to the rehearsal room piano and costume trunk for a knees-up celebration of London. Bricusse wrote the lyrics to Lonnie Donegan's My Old Man's A Dustman, who knew?!!. Thank You Very Much from Scrooge and The Good Old Bad Old Days from the eponymous music give a rousing end to the first act.

A change-of-tone slinky Le Jazz Hot led by McCarthy opens the second before Willetts and Sheehy launch slickly into the James Bond themes. And who can resist when Terrera's The Candyman from the Willy Wonka movie tosses out sweets "for the critics"! 

Finally having travelled far through a sometimes crazy world, the show two hours older, having made us musically wiser about Bricusse's life in songs, McCarthy leads the cast in Feeling Good (famously covered by Nina Simone).

All the performances are as polished as the shiny St James Theatre stage with the natural stand-out of jester figure Giles Terera including a teardrop-in-the-voice What Kind Of Fool Am I.   

But every performer, hardly needing the mikes, encompasses the gamut of styles from musically Chaplinesque to hot jazz with powerful but nuanced ease.

Interestingly the show also includes unused work and songs from future shows (although with  histories typical of the entertainment world's ups and downs) including lyrics written to instrumental music of Gershwin and Tchaikovsky. 

With Bricusse himself and wife Evie, Newley's former wife actress Joan Collins and chanteuse Petula Clark among the slew of celebrities in the audience, this could only be a Feeling Good evening, dedicated by Bricusse to his friend and musical arranger Ian Fraser who died last year.

 For anyone with a tad of interest in the development of musical theatre or just out for a showstopper-packed night out, this is a must-see. A green light.