Showing posts with label Emily Burnett. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emily Burnett. Show all posts
Thursday, 27 July 2017
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.
Thursday, 16 June 2016
Review Karagula
Karagula
Back
To The Future
Another night, another Midsummer Night's Dream. Well, not quite, but there's
something of the lover, the lunatic and the poet trumping the industrial estate
surroundings around the newly converted ambulance repair depot venue,
The Styx.
This new piece from Philip Ridley and Shawn Soh may be situated in The Styx but belies the obvious pun being a very short walk from Victoria Line and overground Tottenham Hale stations. The play is three hours or so. And hell, if you can sit through American Graffiti followed by back-to-back Game of Thrones or Dr Who, you'll find this an absolute doddle.
To be accurate the play is Philip Ridley's while the design is Shawn Soh's, but this feels like a piece which started with a storyboard.
An epic seriously tongue-in-cheek post apocalyptic tale, it shares something with Anne Washburn's 2012 Mr Burns which if we want to be arty-farty, academic schmackademick drew on the structure of Boccaccio's The Decameron, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Scheherazade's fate in The Arabian Nights.
However unlike Mr Burns, this piece widens out to a psychic space full of cultural shards against a fragmented, kaleidoscopic human story of life, death and reproduction.
First the fundamentals, or rather the fundament. If you have a bony bum, bring a cushion. TLT's posterior (she can't speak for her gas guzzling companion) is fairly slimline but a bit of seat padding wouldn't have gone amiss.
The action takes place in the cavernous ambulance repair shop - in the first act a traverse playing area with scaffolding and a balcony stage at each end and a transparent cube puled on by a rope. The second act is more traditionally face-on for the audience, single rows of seats sloping down to the playing space, although the patchwork tent backdrop also falls to reveal part of the initial set.
It starts with a dream and voices, maybe from the future, maybe from the past, maybe from a parallel universe, maybe a younger and older mind communing. While there is plenty of inventive visual design to keep one gripped, it struck us as very much a radio play with this template set from the beginning.
Talking of communing, look up at one end balcony and it's a clean cut American Romeo and Juliet or Happy Days (the bubble gum 1950s' series, not the Samuel Beckett version) couple, as High School teens Dean (Theo Solomon) and Libby (Emily Forbes) neck under two moons. Ah, that's a sign of, of - something - isn't it?
This is a world where everyone seems to be a pinko - no, not secret agents - but dressed uniformly in pink and white in a regimented world of milkshakes, proms, cheerleaders (Emily Burnett and Charmaine Wombwell), hereditary leaders ( Lanre Malaolu with obligatory secret service heavy by his side Obi Abili) and assassins.
Yes, there's also something of Evening At The Talk House in all this but also a touch of The Crucible with an aphid version of a witch trial where the "future is decided on a sting" (it may be pertinent to comment that in TLT's dystopian state, it's definitely not a thought crime to consider the role of puns).
Of course - shhh, be careful it's a secret! - science fiction dystopias have always been metaphors of and satires on contempory life. This play both taps into and satirizes the current frenzy of fantasy TV series and movies. And in an interesting twist equates official faith based states and the official and unofficial fanatical spin offs with science fiction, its official and unofficial spin offs and fan fiction. "Religiions and cults spring up so fast", we hear, that followers massacre or are massacred in a day.
It's also about a world where family ties may be discarded and history rewritten for expedient and sterile accounting and recounting but the family tree with its descendants lives on.
If you don't have a mind colonized by popular culture, soaps, conspiracy theories, scifi movies and even Philip Ridley's previous plays, you may be rather Lost (sorry, pun alert!). You may be Lost anyway but at least you'll have smug fun spotting the references as diverse as the Hitler Downfall parodies, Dr Strangelove, The Help.
OK, behind it all there's a straightforward story with the cards shuffled, dependent on your willingness to piece together the tale from the swapped scenes' story board.
At the same time it feels very much a work in progress which will probably sharpen up technically as the run progresses - some of the acoustics, for example, in the first act made for inaudibility although one could grasp the main gist of what was going on,
It feels also as if it needs thinning down but not necessarily totally re-shaping because that would undermine its whole point. Our one thematic (perhaps very personal) proviso is while it's extremely legitimate to criticise America's historical and current actions, domestic and foreign policy, there is sometimes a danger of subtracting knowledge by becoming patronising.
Still, there are many moments of arresting images and performances which linger in the mind. It could have been shorter but it's certainly an event which we wouldn't have missed and it's an amber light from we two critical mutants.
by
Philip Ridley
This new piece from Philip Ridley and Shawn Soh may be situated in The Styx but belies the obvious pun being a very short walk from Victoria Line and overground Tottenham Hale stations. The play is three hours or so. And hell, if you can sit through American Graffiti followed by back-to-back Game of Thrones or Dr Who, you'll find this an absolute doddle.
To be accurate the play is Philip Ridley's while the design is Shawn Soh's, but this feels like a piece which started with a storyboard.
An epic seriously tongue-in-cheek post apocalyptic tale, it shares something with Anne Washburn's 2012 Mr Burns which if we want to be arty-farty, academic schmackademick drew on the structure of Boccaccio's The Decameron, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Scheherazade's fate in The Arabian Nights.
However unlike Mr Burns, this piece widens out to a psychic space full of cultural shards against a fragmented, kaleidoscopic human story of life, death and reproduction.
First the fundamentals, or rather the fundament. If you have a bony bum, bring a cushion. TLT's posterior (she can't speak for her gas guzzling companion) is fairly slimline but a bit of seat padding wouldn't have gone amiss.
The action takes place in the cavernous ambulance repair shop - in the first act a traverse playing area with scaffolding and a balcony stage at each end and a transparent cube puled on by a rope. The second act is more traditionally face-on for the audience, single rows of seats sloping down to the playing space, although the patchwork tent backdrop also falls to reveal part of the initial set.
It starts with a dream and voices, maybe from the future, maybe from the past, maybe from a parallel universe, maybe a younger and older mind communing. While there is plenty of inventive visual design to keep one gripped, it struck us as very much a radio play with this template set from the beginning.
Talking of communing, look up at one end balcony and it's a clean cut American Romeo and Juliet or Happy Days (the bubble gum 1950s' series, not the Samuel Beckett version) couple, as High School teens Dean (Theo Solomon) and Libby (Emily Forbes) neck under two moons. Ah, that's a sign of, of - something - isn't it?
This is a world where everyone seems to be a pinko - no, not secret agents - but dressed uniformly in pink and white in a regimented world of milkshakes, proms, cheerleaders (Emily Burnett and Charmaine Wombwell), hereditary leaders ( Lanre Malaolu with obligatory secret service heavy by his side Obi Abili) and assassins.
Yes, there's also something of Evening At The Talk House in all this but also a touch of The Crucible with an aphid version of a witch trial where the "future is decided on a sting" (it may be pertinent to comment that in TLT's dystopian state, it's definitely not a thought crime to consider the role of puns).
Of course - shhh, be careful it's a secret! - science fiction dystopias have always been metaphors of and satires on contempory life. This play both taps into and satirizes the current frenzy of fantasy TV series and movies. And in an interesting twist equates official faith based states and the official and unofficial fanatical spin offs with science fiction, its official and unofficial spin offs and fan fiction. "Religiions and cults spring up so fast", we hear, that followers massacre or are massacred in a day.
It's also about a world where family ties may be discarded and history rewritten for expedient and sterile accounting and recounting but the family tree with its descendants lives on.
If you don't have a mind colonized by popular culture, soaps, conspiracy theories, scifi movies and even Philip Ridley's previous plays, you may be rather Lost (sorry, pun alert!). You may be Lost anyway but at least you'll have smug fun spotting the references as diverse as the Hitler Downfall parodies, Dr Strangelove, The Help.
OK, behind it all there's a straightforward story with the cards shuffled, dependent on your willingness to piece together the tale from the swapped scenes' story board.
At the same time it feels very much a work in progress which will probably sharpen up technically as the run progresses - some of the acoustics, for example, in the first act made for inaudibility although one could grasp the main gist of what was going on,
It feels also as if it needs thinning down but not necessarily totally re-shaping because that would undermine its whole point. Our one thematic (perhaps very personal) proviso is while it's extremely legitimate to criticise America's historical and current actions, domestic and foreign policy, there is sometimes a danger of subtracting knowledge by becoming patronising.
Still, there are many moments of arresting images and performances which linger in the mind. It could have been shorter but it's certainly an event which we wouldn't have missed and it's an amber light from we two critical mutants.
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