Review The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui

A World War II play written when Bertolt Brecht fled to the US is still a potent analysis of dictatorship, but Peter Barker wonders if a new adaptation's jokey approach and Trump analogy lessens its impact. 

The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui
by Bertolt Brecht  

Market Forces
https://www.donmarwarehouse.com/ 

Bertolt Brecht wrote The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 1941 during wartime exile from Germany in the United Sates. Last year, we had the National Theatre's take on Brecht and Kurt Weil's 1920s' musical critique of capitalism, The Threepenny Opera. 

Now, after a new wave of crowd-pleasing demagogues and fake news has crashed on the shores of Western democracies, director Simon Evans and adaptor Bruce Norris have turned again to Brecht in an attempt to drew their own analogy with our times.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui presents fascism as gangster-like capitalism, with Lenny Henry in the title role. The play’s premise is easy to understand: it’s an allegory of the rise of the 20th century’s not-so-great dictator.

Market trader Ui is Hitler who, using and destroying the corrupt Cauliflower Trust, takes control. Among his henchmen and victims are Ernesto Roma (Giles Terera)  representing Hitler's ally and then rival Ernst Röhm. Givola (Guy Rhys) is Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Betty Dullfeet (Justine Mitchell) is Engelbert Dollfuß, assassinated Austrian Chancellor,  and  deceitful, profiteering Trust chief Dogsborough (Michael Pennington) is the Prussian junker president, Paul von Hindenburg.

The play catalogues the rise of  Ui and asks the question -- what should we do to stop history repeating itself, once more, as tragedy?

In fact, this staging poses that question to the audience very directly. There is a great deal of audience participation, with members co-opted to play arsonists, those assassinated, a rigged jury, a dead body, a framed innocent and other victims.

There are genuinely horrible, as well as horribly funny, moments; as Henry’s Ui is coached on diction and stance by an actor (Tom Edden), it is chilling to see how Ui picks up the gestures and stance of the Berchtesgarden bully. It is not at all subtle. It is a screaming political allegory repeated again and again and again.

And that is how it should be, in my opinion. Not comfortable, but something resembling a physical assault by a bully armed with a cosh and a knuckleduster.

This production achieves that punch, to its credit. My only reservation is that this version of the play is a bit too much fun; it is almost too good-natured in places. Perhaps even, dare I say it, too English, needing more sourness and anger. The National’s Threepenny Opera last year had the same feeling about it -- it was too nice at times.

Henry as Ui leads the rest of the ensemble cast. He convinces at beginning as the slouching rough beast, who slyly takes a mile when barely an inch is offered and gives in return lies and violence. He also has bags of charisma.

The Donmar is transformed by Peter McKintosh’s intricate, detailed set into a Chicago speakeasy where the audience is seated on saloon chairs on all sides. It’s theatre in the round and a few chairs, benches and tables are used at various times for the different scenes.

Yet the production makes one serious mistake. It directly links Donald Trump and Hitler.

Many may see Trump as a liar, a bully, an incompetent, a misogynist, a racist, a narcissist, a demagogue, a chauvinist, a failed businessman, an evil spirit conjured up through media manipulation, a urophile  -- but he is not Hitler, and I don’t believe it aids public understanding of Trump to liken him to the Nazi dictator.

Perhaps there is a danger now that Trump has become too easy, and too often an inaccurate,  shorthand which in this case diverts attention from Brecht's bruising analysis of the circumstances which brought Hitler to power.

While not an unflawed production, this version of the Brechtian classic has an undoubtedly visceral Arturo Ui in Lenny Henry and merits a green light.

Review Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

by August Wilson

The Day The Music Died 
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Coming home from Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, directed by Dominic Cooke, TLT could have sworn the exhaust of her normally sober little hatchback emitted a series of sobs. But she couldn't ask due to the - ahem - lump in her own throat.

Written in 1982 by Frederick August Kittel Jr, otherwise known as August Wilson, the play follows a band of Chicago session musicians on a day fifty five years earlier when the eponymous Gertrude "Ma" Rainey (Sharon D Clarke), the Queen Bee of the blues, is about to record a new album of songs.

But it's the drones who are at the centre of the action relegated to a basement rehearsal room. Meanwhile, in Ultz's telling set design  the control room is perched on high with white studio boss Mel Sturdyvant (Stuart McQuarrie), allowing only Ma's white management Irvin (Finbar Lynch) to climb the stairs from the studio.

In the words of the play, the musicians are the "nuts in the stew" pulled in to facilitate the session. The bookish Toledo (Lucien Msamati), given to lecturing, neatly playing the piano. Cutler (Clint Dyer) the trombonist and band leader "One, two, you know what to do ..." aware where his bread is buttered.Slow Drag (Giles Terera) on the bass wanting an uncomplicated life. And finally Levee (O-T Fagbenle) the trumpet player, young, vain,  quivering with brashness and undisciplined talent, eager to form his own band.

Seemingly a riff on the music industry and the history of black migration to northern cities from the rural south, the play reaches much further and picks at the scab on the bent knee of collaborative money-driven creativity with intricate precision.

The musicians tell their competing histories, both asserting their right to exist and as a kind of confessional. With the lightest of touches, the playwright evokes the patterns of nepotism and corruption replicated at every level before they blend into anonymity for the recording of the star turn.

This isn't an open ended play of rights and wrongs though, far from it. Ma Rainey sashays in late after a fracas with the police, permitting (yes, that is the correct word in the all-too-human power play of this saga) her manager to bribe the officers.

She battles for control of how she sings her own songs bringing her into conflict with Levee who, having produced modern up-tempo arrangments of Ma Rainey's songs,  believes he has formed an alliance with the white boss.  

How the best-laid plans go wrong is for the audience to discover and the hurt  radiates long after the trap finally snaps shut.This has been a long playing piece since its first performance in 1984 for a reason and TLT gives a green light for this pitch perfect production.

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.