ajhlovestheatre

Alan Bleasdale’s BOYS FROM THE BLACKSTUFF

by James Graham

directed by Kate Wasserberg

Garrick Theatre, London – until 3 August 2024

https://nimaxtheatres.com/shows/boys-from-the-blackstuff/

There’s something both invigorating and deeply depressing about watching this blistering stage adaptation of Alan Bleasdale’s seminal 1980s TV drama and realising not only does it still feel relevant but that in fact it resonates more powerfully now than it would have done, say, a decade ago. Make no mistake, this is a deeply Left Wing piece of work, filled with humanity and rage, despair and vitality.

Perhaps it could only have sprung from a city that had the guts ripped out of it by the Tories under Thatcher, and Bleasdale’s all-too-credible tale of working class Liverpudlians doing their best not to get crushed by a societal system not designed to help them, now screams like a clarion call to a nation once again decimated by a bunch of uncaring, dishonest elitists. That this coruscating piece of theatre is playing in the West End as the UK heads into a General Election feels particularly apposite.

Originally commissioned by, and produced at, Liverpool’s Royal Court before a brief stint at the National, Boys From The Blackstuff arrives in the West End like a blast of fresh air. Kate Wasserberg’s staging, performed in front of a projected backdrop of the perpetually rippling waters of the Mersey, has an appropriately warm-hearted community theatre feel, with the actors trundling on set pieces and furniture while forbidding-looking rusty metal frames pivot and position overhead, and is perfectly matched by James Graham’s episodic but bold adaptation of the television scripts. It’s scrappy and a little rough around the edges, but it has tremendous focus, irresistible Scouse energy, moments of surprising lyricism, and a raw, ferocious theatricality that captivates and soars.

Unless you’ve a working knowledge of the original series, it’s hard to know where Bleasdale ends and Graham begins, although the latter adds a heartbreaking coup de theatre concerning the children of one of the leading characters that leaves us winded. As writers they share a flair for channelling politics and history down through the lived experience of individuals we can identify with. If you spend the first half of the stage play marvelling at the ongoing relevance of the themes, in act two the drama moves into a zone where you find yourself caring desperately about the people. The writing is terse, bleakly funny, sometimes overtly sentimental, and ultimately desperately moving. The conflicts between these flawed, angry, frightened people makes for riveting theatre but feels like a challenge to humanity at large to just do better.

It isn’t perfect: the bond between the tarmac-laying men (hence the title) drawing the dole while still taking on manual labour in an attempt to makes ends meet, isn’t as strongly felt as it might be. The storytelling is a little uneven, and, from a design perspective, the wigs for the female characters are pretty awful, while having a young actress playing, however skilfully, a much older woman smacks of drama school end-of-year shows.

These are small cavils though at a rousing production that evokes time and place with such vivid specificity and bold stagecraft. Movement director Rachael Nanyojo’s striking work reaches its apotheosis with the slo-mo ballet, at once brutal and graceful, where the police violently take down poor, mentally incapacitated Yosser (Barry Sloane, inheriting Bernard Hill’s iconic “gizza job” with stunning commitment). Amy Jane Cook’s gritty set, Ian Scott’s lighting and Jamie Jenkin’s video design all contribute to the show’s devastating overall impact. The humour is tart, dark and much needed in what could otherwise be a night of unremitting depression.

Sloane is more physically striking than one might expect somebody in such dire straits as Yosser, abandoned by his wife and apparently unemployable for any length of time, to be, but he nails the swagger, aggression and broken masculinity of a human whose life has spiralled so far away from what he presumed it would be that he barely recognises himself. It’s a tremendous performance. As his pal Chrissie, equally impecunious but managing to hang on to his family…for now, Nathan McMullen delivers a flawless, heartcatching account of a genuinely decent man (“you’re too good!” Yosser constantly rails at him) and his scenes of marital strife with despairing wife Angie (Lauren O’Neill, thrillingly impassioned) are electrifying.

Philip Whitchurch is brilliant as frail, older George, haunted by memories of a more affluent, less desperate Merseyside, and there are potent contributions from Mark Womack, Aron Julius and George Caple as men old before their time and desperately clinging on to what’s left of their sanity and dignity. There’s excellent multi-rolling work from Dominic Carter, Jamie Peacock and Hayley Sheen as a variety of clerks, officials, priests and family members who emerge from the nightmarish landscape to challenge or ameliorate the struggling protagonists’s lives.

Male mental health is more widely discussed than it was forty years ago, so the characters, but especially stricken Yosser, read slightly differently now than they did when the tv series first appeared. Wasserberg’s production wisely doesn’t comment on this but allows the situations and the people to speak for themselves. The result is a piece of theatre that pays tribute to its epoch-making source material but which packs one hell of an emotional punch of its own. See it, and come out simultaneously angered by its resonances and exhilarated by its theatrical bravura. On screen and now on stage, Boys From The Blackstuff proves unforgettable. Bleasdale’s legacy is vindicated.

THE BLEEDING TREE

by Angus Cerini

directed by Sophie Drake

Southwark Playhouse Borough, London – until 22 June 2024

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/the-bleeding-tree/

Poetic beauty and unmitigated revulsion coexist in this remarkable 2015 Australian play, receiving its British premiere in an abstract, note-perfect production by Sophie Drake. A trio of fine actresses (Mariah Gale, Elizabeth Dulau, Alexandra Jensen) play a mother and two daughters who take the ultimate revenge on the drunk, abusive patriarch that makes their home life a domestic hell.

It’s not a particularly original premise but it’s the raw, bare bones that fuels classical tragedy, and the execution -a tantalising combination of revenge thriller, verse play and female empowerment at its most extreme- makes it horribly, compulsively watchable. Angus Cerini’s writing sometimes feels hemmed-in by his decision to have the women speak in verse, but for the most part is vivid and compelling. It runs for a mere hour but that is all we need, and possibly all we can take.

The acting is unflinching and truthful. Southwark’s smallest auditorium doesn’t allow for much in the way of artifice, and there is a ruthlessness yet also a grace about the work of Gale, Dulau and Jensen that takes the breath away. Gale and Dulau are particularly impressive with simplicity and detail at morphing into the men who intrude on the story, the latter excelling as the rural policeman who discovers the women’s crime, and whose reaction comes as a bit of a surprise. There’s a grim satisfaction in the fact that the last living being to come into contact with the bodily remains of the appalling man whose demise lights the touch-paper on the whole drama, is the canine parent of a litter of puppies this human monster kicked to death….and of course she’s female.

Every ounce of horror (be warned that the descriptions of a decomposing human body are extremely graphic) and dark humour is extracted from Cerini’s text, and the overall impression created by Drake’s staging is that we are watching a sort of dark ritual as much as a piece of storytelling. The oppressive, dusty heat of rural Australia is powerfully evoked, as is the sense of elemental fury that is unleashed when women are pushed to breaking point.

Iskandar R Sharazuddin’s movement direction is an important component to the general air of sweaty threat: note the way all three women flinch simultaneously as a violent noise ricochets through the auditorium (outstanding sound and composition by Asaf Zohar). Jasmine Swan’s design, redolent of earth and blood, feels exactly right, and is moodily lit by Ali Hunter.

The Bleeding Tree is strong stuff: brutal, essential, and highly theatrical. It’s a feast of terrific acting, intelligent production choices, bold writing and female-driven righteous rage. It’s not for the faint-hearted, but if you go you’ll probably be processing it long after it’s over.

BABIES

Book and direction by Martha Geelan

Music and lyrics by Jack Godfrey

The Other Palace, London – until 14 July 2024

https://theotherpalace.co.uk/babies-musical/

More than at any time in recent memory, it feels as though the British musical is having ‘a moment’. There’s the perennially popular Everybody’s Talking About Jamie back out on tour, ditto Unfortunate, the rambunctious Little Mermaid bastardisation. Meanwhile, Six continues with world domination, 42 Balloons made hearts soar in Manchester (in what must surely be a precursor to a London run), Operation Mincemeat’s installed in town in its best ever version and garnering every award going, while crowd pleasers Kathy & Stella Solve A Murder!, Two Characters (Carry A Cake Across New York) and Standing At The Sky’s Edge are enjoying West End transfers, and an autumn return is announced for tear-jerking stunner The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button. These homegrown tuners seem mostly to succeed when dealing with predominantly British themes and styles, instead of taking on the glitz and sentimentality of Broadway, but here’s one that potentially has more universality than most: after all, we’ve all been teenagers, right?!

Having already won BYMT’s New Music Theatre Award, and became a fan favourite through workshops and a concert presentation, Babies is built on the unpromising (to me anyway) premise of a bunch of fifteen year olds being given life-like electronic doll babies to take care of as an educational project, mainly because of a plethora of unplanned teen pregnancies in the school year above. Reading the blurb, I assumed this show was for the kids only…but what a pleasure it is to be proved so utterly wrong. Jack Godfrey and Martha Geelan’s unpretentious, deceptively clever show never patronises its youthful characters, instead presenting them in all their contradictory, self-obsessed, neurotic, swaggering, humane glory. It’s refreshing, life-enhancing and insightful, while delivering a couple of uplifting hours, full of heart, hope and wicked humour, in the theatre. The concept provides a useful tool to examine the pressures on young people, from social media, from their families, from each other and from themselves, and it does so with a deft touch and a lot of goodwill.

Babies boasts a propulsive, tuneful pop-rock score -it’s a bit Alanis, a bit Avril Lavigne, a bit Destinys Child, all enjoyable- that employs thematic repetition to telling effect, and replete with pithy, witty, relatable lyrics. There’s at least one bona fide showstopper in ‘Hot Dad’, a sassy, z-snapping paean to (predominantly) male self-image and parenting. If there’s any justice, this six week season should be a stepping stone to a permanent run somewhere prominent for this funny, frank, altogether delightful new musical that, although a shoo-in for the GenZ-ers, is so well crafted and intelligent as to have broad cross-generational appeal. Crucially, you can’t help but care about and root for these kids, and the show reveals a startling emotional centre that throws into sharp, joyful relief the pervasive raucous humour but seldom seems belaboured.

The casting is sublime. Heartstopper star and Big Brother alumnus Bradley Riches makes an adorable stage debut as fledgling gay Toby, while Lauren Conroy captures precisely the unique combination of intensity, insecurity and superiority of the teenage overachiever. At the performance I saw, cover Grace Townley subbed brilliantly for Jaina Brock-Patel as social media savvy popular girl Becky, her regular podcast bulletins unravelling hilariously as the pressures of parenting and a super-needy boyfriend (Max Mulrenan, smashing) start to kick in. Lucy Carter is a delight as gawky Lulu who feels like all her Christmases have come at once when an unthinking Becky turns the light of her friendship unexpectedly upon her.

Ashley Goh, Nathan Johnston and Viola Maisey do beautifully by a trio of queer characters the writing for whom neatly sidesteps cliché. The most challenging, best written role is probably mouthy, rebellious Leah, navigating a tricky course between her absent, probably addicted mum, and the grandmother she lives with, and who goes from cynicism about the baby project to forming a touching, clearly much needed, bond with her ‘child’. Zoë Athena is phenomenal, investing this troubled, porous young woman with sweetness, fire and emotional complexity.

Geelan directs her own work with pace and flair, matched by Alexzandra Sarmiento’s streetwise, high energy choreography. Jasmine Swan’s climbing frame set looks good although it wobbles somewhat alarmingly when the cast are clambering all over it. Paul Gatehouse’s sound design is pleasingly clear so that the lyrics, harmonies and the orchestrations (Godfrey, and Joe Beighton) register as they should.

Any parent with a teenager needs to plan a family visit to this, and don’t be surprised to find tears in your eyes… both of mirth and the other kind. I loved every minute of it. A bit naughty, a lot lovely, Babies is unexpectedly but totally delightful.

ENGLISH

by Sanaz Toossi

directed by Diyan Zora

Kiln Theatre, London – until 6 July 2024

https://kilntheatre.com/whats-on/english/

Since its off-Broadway premiere in 2022, Sanaz Toossi’s quietly brilliant ninety minute play has been seen in several major American cities and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Now English arrives in London, following a brief run in Stratford-upon-Avon, courtesy of the Royal Shakespeare Company in an understated but scintillating, and flawlessly acted, production by Diyan Zora. Watching it at the Kiln, it’s not hard to see what all the fuss is about.

It’s a fascinating piece, set in Karaj, Iran in the first decade of this century, depicting a quartet of adult students learning the English language under the tutelage of Marjan (Nadia Albina), returned from nine years in Manchester, who runs her classroom under the mantra “English Only”, which we see her writing on the whiteboard before even a word is spoken. Of course, her students, each of whom has their own very specific reasons for learning English, struggle with this rule and one of the conceits, not entirely original but dramatically pleasing, of the play is that when conversing in their native Farsi the characters adopt neutral, ostensibly British, accents but when speaking English their speech becomes broken, their accents strongly Iranian.

To people old enough to remember the distinctly un-PC British sitcom Mind Your Language, set in a language school and with enough yellow face and other racial tropes to give present day audiences the absolute ick, this premise might be a tad uncomfortable, were author Toossi not Iranian-American herself, and the depth, ambition and perception of her writing so clear and true. The final scene is played entirely in Farsi, and it’s sublimely moving.

Not all of the characters have been created with equal amounts of detail but the fine actors, under Zora’s restrained but perfectly pitched direction, bring them to vivid life. Roya (Lanna Joffrey, wonderful) wears the permanent expression of mixed-together panic, amazement and disdain so often adopted by older people well out of their comfort zone: she’s learning English so that she can move to Canada and communicate with her granddaughter, although it becomes clear that she and her expat son are tragically not on the same page.

The sole male in the group (Nojan Khazai’s blunt but likeable Omid) is ambitious (“I want to be like you. You could live anywhere. You could learn any language. You could do anything and you’re here” he says to Marjan at one point) but is concealing a surprising secret. Sara Hazemi’s enthusiastic, youthful Goli appears to be the most influenced by, and embracing of, foreign, specifically American, influences, while Serena Manteghi’s facetious, rule-bending Elham is in a race against time to get her English language qualification to go and train abroad, yet is probably the most fiercely nationalistic of the quartet.

Meanwhile, Marjan quietly yearns for England (“I always liked myself better in English”). Albina hauntingly suggests a gnawing loneliness and displacement underneath her usually peppy, occasionally infuriated exterior, and nails a beautiful speech near the end about how the foreigner abroad speaking that country’s native language is somehow always ‘othered’ and seldom fully able to express the full range of their humanity. If great drama encourages the viewer to genuinely open their minds and see things from another point of view then it’s during this illuminating section that English steps up a gear, and becomes something really distinguished. All of the acting is spot-on.

Toossi’s script never belabours the point that language can equally be a cage as much as a passport to freedom, preferring instead to skilfully and lovingly filter the information through her carefully drawn characters. There’s only one challenge to credibility, which is that the bolshiest, least receptive student suddenly passes her final test with flying colours but that, and an occasional tendency to go for the obvious laugh, are minor flaws in this exquisite, life-enhancing play.

Zora’s production has the exhilarating hallmarks of a project where everyone on the creative team is singing from the same hymn sheet, so to speak. Elliot Griggs’s lighting, bathing the unit set in colour to differentiate times of the day, Anisha Fields’s naturalistic, nicely specific costume and scenic designs, and the sound -unobtrusive but punchy when it needs to be- by George Dennis, are complementary and pretty much perfect.

English is a provocative modern classic and it’s hard to imagine a finer production of it. Very highly recommended.

WEDDING BAND A Love/Hate Story in Black and White

by Alice Childress

directed by Monique Touko

Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, London – until 29 June 2024

https://lyric.co.uk/shows/wedding-band-a-love-hate-story-in-black-and-white/

First seen on stage in the US in 1966, this play by African-American writer Alice Childress is only now receiving its British stage debut. Kudos to the Lyric Hammersmith and director Monique Touko for giving UK audiences a chance to enjoy this challenging, thought-provoking piece, whose themes resonate down the ages. Set early in the twentieth century in South Carolina, as Black Americans started the Great Migration north to seek better work opportunities, it focuses on racism, miscegenation, female influences within the community… these are big, important issues, the stuff of enthralling drama and memorable, shattering theatre.

That sometimes proves the case with this production, but not always. It’s not clear if it’s Childress’s script or Touko’s direction, but Wedding Band only intermittently catches dramatic fire. While seldom less than engaging, the tone is bewilderingly inconsistent, at times sultry, at others comical, then edgy, often tragic, occasionally heartachingly poetic.

All of these tones and hues are valid and present in this story of a resourceful Black woman and the Caucasian man she loves, against a backdrop of mistrust and appalling racism. They don’t coalesce into a satisfying whole though, so a couple of impressive or moving moments and inspired acting or directional choices feel isolated from each other, which becomes frustrating so that an ending that should be cathartic feels a bit ponderous, although beautifully realised. There’s a rich seam of welcome humour running through Childress’s writing that plays well against the distressing material. All in all, it’s a heady brew of religious fervour, philosophical discourse, and eroticism, but it feels uneven.

Theres’s a lack of palpable chemistry between Deborah Ayorinde’s Julia and David Walmsley’s Herman though. Although they make a strikingly attractive couple, the heat and feeling between them doesn’t feel overwhelming, which robs the play of some of its urgency. Individually, they make potent impressions but collectively something doesn’t quite gel. She’s strident but sensitive, and when she gives full reign to her anger in the second half, in a bitter showdown with his bigoted mother (Geraldine Alexander, powerful in a deeply unsympathetic role), she’s pretty magnificent. Walmsley delivers an affecting study of a straightforward man caught in a situation that in another life wouldn’t be problematic.

Some of the supporting performances are terrific. Bethan Mary-James delivers flawless work as a dour neighbour with a joyfully eccentric turn of phrase but a kind heart, innate intelligence and a tragic bond to the absent husband who abused her. Lachele Carl excels as a landlady whose surface gentility belies a surprising degree of sensuality and a penchant for mysticism that ricochets between comical and sinister. There’s strong work from Patrick Martins and Diveen Henry as, respectively, a troubled soldier and his mother.

Although it’s spare and elegant, the metal and mesh-framed set by Paul Wills doesn’t evoke a particularly strong sense of place or time, and Matt Haskins’s non-specific lighting doesn’t help. Shiloh Coke’s music is boldly effective and evocative however.

This is a decent production of a play that exerts a certain amount of power but which feels too diffuse to be really satisfying.

CLOSER TO HEAVEN

Book by Jonathan Harvey

Music and lyrics by Pet Shop Boys

directed by Simon Hardwick

Turbine Theatre, London – until 30 June 2024

https://www.theturbinetheatre.com/whats-on/closer-to-heaven

It may not be particularly radical now and the weaknesses in the writing seem more exposed, but the significance of Closer To Heaven in the canon of queer musical theatre cannot be overstated. Twenty three years (the show was first seen at the Arts Theatre in 2001 and has enjoyed two London fringe revivals since) may not be that long in historical terms but huge leaps and bounds have since been made in gay and queer representation, and back in the day this Pet Shop Boys-Jonathan Harvey collaboration felt like having a bucket of cold water thrown over you in that it didn’t sanitise or pretty up the gay experience: sure, we’d had La Cage aux Folles but that was comforting and cute, and Rent which was artsy and so NYC-centric. But Closer To Heaven rubbed our noses into 1990s(ish) London club culture in all its seedy, camp, dysfunctional glory. Where “the love that dare not speak its name” often still cringed in the shadows, this divine, imperfect show dragged it out into the sunshine, or rather the spotlight, and pulled few punches.

Any contemporary production comes up against the fact that attitudes have mightily changed, both to homosexuality, and to addiction, which is a more insidious theme in this darkly exciting confection. Simon Hardwick’s new staging turns the Turbine auditorium into a night club, with a stage-cum-runway and audiences arranged in tables which is a valid take: squint and you could be in Heaven. This ups the ante and the immediacy, but there’s an unfortunate pay-off: the idea that we’re all spectators in a club robs the play of some of its power. Scenes repeatedly have their truth and urgency diluted by performers playing to the audience rather than the characters they’re talking to. Harvey’s script, equal parts sleaze and sentimentality, has a soap operatic feel but when played to the hilt it can be genuinely affecting, but that seldom happens here.

As a result, the tormented relationships (boy meets girl who falls for him but also meets boy who he in turn falls for, a daughter trying to help her gay dad get off the drugs and booze) don’t have the depth or emotional resonance they need to make the catharsis of the ending really work. This is frustrating in a production that has a lot going for it elsewhere.

Chief amongst its glories is Frances Ruffelle as Billie Trix, the bonkers, sexually ambiguous club hostess-cum-cultural icon who presides over the whole torrid proceedings like a female version of Cabaret’s Emcee. Ruffelle is compelling, a pixie-ish (possibly Björk-inspired?) girl-woman who’s got by with charm, eccentricity and a blithe disregard for anybody else who comes into her orbit. In the original production Frances Barber felt more dangerous and feral, but Ruffelle invests her with a deranged charisma and gets some gorgeous comic mileage out of Harvey’s innuendo-infused script. She also sounds fabulous belting out the Pet Shop Boys numbers, most of which still thrill with their unique combination of thunder and melancholy. She proved in the 2017 London premiere of the LaChiusa The Wild Party that she does louche pretty well, and she’s wild, yet likeable, here.

Courtney Bowman is terrific as Shell, the go-getting record company talent spotter who ends up torn between her feelings for the eminently unsuitable Straight Dave and pseudo-parenting her own, deeply troubled Dad. Glenn Adamson’s perpetually grinning Dave has a cracking voice and a degree of swaggering charm but never plumbs the depths of despair and insecurity the role really requires: when tragedy strikes in the second half he seems more mildly inconvenienced than broken. A man telling a woman having a perfectly understandable extreme reaction to an unusual sexual/emotional situation, that “you’re going mad” plays quite differently in 2024 than it did in 2001 (thank goodness) but it does Adamson’s character no favours, and it’s just never really clear why everyone is throwing themselves at this slightly smug chancer.

Connor Carson’s strapping physical beauty and bell-like vocals seem at odds with the desperation and vulnerability ideally needed for nihilistic drug dealer Mile End Lee (“I’m easy to hate” he sadly states, but we get no real indication of that). Both David Muscat as a vile record producer and Kurt Kansley’s drug-addled club impresario, whose dark-night-of-the-soul aria ‘Vampires’ is a vocal highlight of the second half, could afford to go bigger and deeper with their characterisations.

Christopher Tendai’s striking choreography and David Shield’s neon-infused set that resembles a catwalk disappearing into a vortex of hedonism…or hellishness, are effective, and the use of TV screens to show cctv footage of other areas of the “club” is a nice touch.

The show has one of the best opening numbers of any modern musical, the infinitely catchy ‘This Is My Night’, which establishes character, milieu and relationships with wit, economy and booty-shaking dance beats. Hardwick and Tendai stage it exhilaratingly, although the night I attended it was marred by a microphone issue. Given the electronic nature of the score, I guess there is a case to be made for pre-recorded music (I think the Above The Stag version went down a similar route) but it inevitably saps the show of some immediacy and nuance, despite the generally excellent voices.

Still, the songs are earworms, Ruffelle is wonderful and the whole thing bowls along at quite a lick. With unapologetic depictions of drug taking, sexual voraciousness and consumerist greed, Closer To Heaven may be a bit grimy for nostalgia, but it is a piece that irresistibly evokes the grotty underbelly of London nightlife at a very specific time. Maybe to enjoy it at its fullest you had to have been there, but there is something rather lovely about the way it resolutely defies sanitisation. Rodgers and Hammerstein this ain’t, hell, it’s not even Taboo (the less uncompromising Boy George musical also rumoured for an upcoming revival).

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

by Arthur Miller

directed by Lindsay Posner

Theatre Royal Haymarket, London – until 3 August 2024

https://trh.co.uk/whatson/a-view-from-the-bridge/

It has been over nine years since Ivo van Hove ripped up the rule book on staging Arthur Miller with his spare, almost clinical take on A View From The Bridge, which sold out at the Young Vic, in the West End and on Broadway. Astonishing and refreshing as that was, it’s great to see a more traditional, only marginally less powerful version, such as Lindsay Posner’s riveting Theatre Royal Bath production, in London for a limited season and seriously beefing up the capital’s current dramatic offerings.

Posner lets the play speak for itself, mining it for all its rueful, tough-talking humour and aching, erotically complex subtext. The result is a tense, transporting evening in the theatre, one that grips like a thriller and which, although seasoned theatregoers will most likely know how it all plays out, has you on the edge of your seat hoping that this time it’ll turn out differently for Brooklyn longshoreman Eddie Carbone, his tragically devoted wife Beatrice, beloved niece Catherine and the Italian family members newly arrived in America in search of a better life… of course it doesn’t, but the journey to the emotionally shattering conclusion is as nail-biting here as it’s ever been.

It’s also funnier than usual iterations of this American classic, which admittedly pays mixed dividends. While Dominic West finds sly, dark comedy in a lot of Eddie’s mutterings and Martin Marquez invests the troubled lawyer Alfieri with a glorious, garrulous wit, several members of the press night audience, though it’s not clear whether from generous fortification from the bar or misjudging the mood of the play, seemed to find hilarious certain moments that are intended to shock, such as the horrible, tense kisses Carbone plants on first Catherine then the guileless Rodolpho who he believes is about to steal his niece away. They also roared inappropriately at some of the lines delivered by Callum Scott Howells’s heavily accented Rodolpho. On the upside, you could hear a pin drop later as the play hurtles towards its blood-soaked, tear-stained finale.

West is a magnificent Eddie, more amiable and youthful than many of his predecessors, and with a winning emotional openness that charts all too precisely the character’s descent into despair and distress. At the end, he’s like an injured bull thrashing about, blinded and broken by his own folly and shame. Opposite him, Kate Fleetwood struggles a bit with the accent and has a slightly uncertain act one but rises thrillingly and upsettingly to the high stakes drama of the second half. Her restless hands placating then pleading, her sharp features and glittering eyes bespeaking years of unspoken understanding, she makes something fine and urgent out of Beatrice’s loyalty and fury.

Nia Towle’s Catherine is unforgettable as she transitions from subservient, doting child to empowered woman, investing her with a sensuality, kindness and maturity that feels unforced but entirely convincing. Howells captures Rodolpho’s goodness but little of his physical magnetism, and has a tendency to ham it up. West and Towle aside, the most impressive performance is in a role that usually feels like a comparatively minor figure: Pierro Niel-Mee brilliantly charts a devastating course for Rodolpho’s older brother Marco from deference to his American relatives through brooding, contained self-belief to, finally, white hot vengeful rage. I’ve never seen the role performed with so much nuance and power, truly remarkable.

Technically, the whole staging is immaculately done, if seldom surprising, but that’s not a problem when the play itself is this good. Miller’s muscular, poetic writing is beautifully served. Peter McKintosh’s tenement setting, all metal and echoing wood, is simultaneously claustrophobic and monumental, and it’s atmospherically lit by Paul Pyant. Ed Lewis portentous music, liberally used throughout, matches the sometimes melodramatic hues of the text.

The compassion for, and understanding of, the flaws that make up a human, that course through this fine, brutal play ensure that it never seems to date. It’s about passion, jealousy, compromise, family: it’s the ‘big’ stuff boiled down to compelling domestic tragedy, and it’s wonderful and moving to experience it again in this excellent production.

FUN AT THE BEACH ROMP-BOMP-A-LOMP!!

Music and lyrics by Brandon Lambert

Book by Martin Landry

Developed with Mark Bell

Directed by Mark Bell

Southwark Playhouse Borough – The Large, London – until 22 June 2024

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/fun-at-the-beach-romp-bomp-a-lomp/

I’ve seen some fairly bizarre musicals over the years, from the rock opera about dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki (Out of the Blue at the Shaftesbury in the ‘90s), to a Norwegian saga about witch-hunts in medieval Germany (Which Witch at the Piccadilly, same decade), and more recently here at Southwark, who could forget Yeast Nation, a jolly romp set in the primordial slime and where all the characters were single cell organisms. Brandon Lambert and Martin Landry’s rather random confection is right up there with the weirdest though.

If you can imagine Hunger Games filtered through the sunny, mindless Americana that infused mass populist mid twentieth century movies and rock music then you’ll have some idea of what to except at this deeply strange new musical comedy. Fun At The Beach Romp-Bomb-A-Lomp!! marries the apocalypse with farcical comedy and a bouncy pastiche score. It’s not a long show, running at barely ninety minutes, but it still feels stretched to breaking point, despite the efforts of a talented, hard-working cast.

The basic premise is pretty straightforward: like a cartoon burst into life, the show centres on a sextet of fun lovin’, love seekin’ all-American youngsters who express themselves entirely in the gosh darnit clichés familiar to anybody who grew up with things like Happy Days and The Monkees on the telly, all locked in a battle to become King or Queen of the Beach. For all the candy-coloured brightness of Emily Bestow’s design, the competition has a sinister edge, with a Big Brother-like announcer (voiced by Landry) becoming increasingly threatening as the show goes on, and the fact that failure in each set task results in the death of the losing contestant.

What should have been bubblegum laced with cyanide feels like a comedy sketch that has been allowed to ramble on for far too long. Mark Bell’s production starts off as cute and vital but fatally loses pace as it progresses. It barely makes sense and the lack of real humour and relatable characters means that it starts to feel like a bit of a slog. The comic trope of repeating the same gag ad infinitum only really works if there was a germ of wit there in the first place and far too often this show feels as though it’s beating a proverbial dead horse. It’s neither macabre nor hilarious enough, and, aside from Francesca Jaynes’s perky choreography, the staging suffers from an unhelpful imprecision, the transitions from humorous light to apocalyptic darkness done with little finesse.

The cast are selling the material for rather more than it’s worth but there are too many sequences that are only mildly amusing where they should be sidesplitting, and the sense of threat rubbing shoulders with upbeat peppiness is fudged and never as unsettling as it should be. Janice Landry as perpetually spaced-out Chastity and Jack Whittle as the square-jawed supercool Dude (that’s actually the character’s name!) are particularly impressive, never letting their very specific characterisations drop even when the show takes ever more outlandish turns. Katie Oxman and Damien James do nice work as a couple whose primary mutual attraction seems based on an enthusiasm for raucous bird impressions (that gets old pretty quickly), and Ellie Clayton displays genuine comic and vocal chops as a boy-mad innocent who meets a sticky end before returning as a malevolent ‘Beach Ghost’ (the plot really doesn’t bear close scrutiny).

The songs are so closely and lovingly modelled on existing vintage tunes (‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ becomes ‘Mature Women Don’t Whine’, ‘R.E.S.P.E.C.T’ is transformed into ‘A.P.P.R.E.C.I.A.T.I.O.N’, ‘It’s In His Kiss’ vs ‘It’s In His Peck’) as to surely only be a few notes away from copywright infringement. They’re decent pastiches but their flimsy, derivative nature is shown up in the finale when we get an authentic pop banger (‘Rockin’ Robin’) which lifts the spirits without snark. The assertion, near the shows conclusion that “even the stupidest musical” can be turned around with one great song, suggests a certain lack of faith in the art form. The voices and Lambert’s ‘Beach Band’ are very good.

Ultimately this is a curious, frustrating evening. It’s not that Fun At The Beach Romp-Bomb-A-Lomp!! isn’t fun, at least intermittently, but it may leave you pondering what you have just watched, and why.

JUDGEMENT DAY

by Rob Ulin

directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel

Chicago Shakespeare Theater – The Yard, Chicago – until 2 June 2024

https://www.chicagoshakes.com/productions/2324-judgment-day/

I see a lot of theatre, but it has been quite some time since I heard an audience laughing as long and as loud as they did at this utterly delightful, entirely satisfying new comedy. Judgement Day hums along at the lick and pace of superior American sitcom, but also revels in the possibilities of theatre while providing a surprisingly compelling and thoughtful undertow of seriousness.

Writer Rob Ulin has created something with unexpected depth underneath the laughter, a piece that’s surely destined for a lengthy and profitable life beyond this (understandably) well received Chicago world premiere. Tony-nominated director Moritz von Stuelpnagel whips it up into an energised soufflé of good versus evil, belly laughs spiced with bracing cynicism, and a celebration of humanity in all its flawed, questioning magnificence and occasional awfulness.

If it initially plays out like a cartoon for adults, that means that when the emotional punch finally connects, it does so with a potency and piquancy that elevates the whole, glorious show to the next level. Thought provoking comedy isn’t the easiest thing to achieve in the theatre, but Judgement Day 100% succeeds.

The production’s not-so-secret weapon is Jason Alexander (still probably best known as Seinfeld’s George Costanza, but a versatile stage actor with an impressive list of credits) playing selfish, successful, morally bankrupt lawyer Sammy Campo, staring down the barrel of an eternity of damnation following a fatal heart attack when he’s visited by an avenging angel (Candy Buckley) who bears an uncanny resemblance to the Sunday School teacher he loathed as a kid. Buckley’s inspirationally weird celestial being (think Emma Thompson in the Angels In America movie crossed with the eccentric venom of Eileen Brennan as Captain Lewis in Private Benjamin then in her Emmy-nom’d turn as Jack’s acting teacher in Will & Grace) is finagled into giving him one chance to atone for his “disgusting, sinful, really fun life” or face a series of graphically described endless torments in a literal hell.

Campo interprets this as an opportunity to expiate his former lifestyle by performing a number of good deeds as a sort of point system while remaining essentially unchanged at his gleefully rotten core. He starts with his discarded wife (Maggie Bofill, exquisitely broken) who now works as a diner waitress as she struggles to bring up the son Sammy didn’t even know he had. Young actor Ellis Myers genuinely looks like Alexander’s mini-me and skilfully makes this kid diabolically badly behaved but impossible to hate, just like his Dad. Along the way, Campo also comes across Father Michael (Broadway’s Daniel Breaker, all charm, regret and wide-eyed befuddlement, just wonderful), a Catholic Priest having a massive crisis of faith. The uneasy ‘odd couple’ dynamic between Campo and Michael is a particular joy in an evening chock full of them.

Throw in a side-eyeing secretary with devastating comic timing (Olivia D Dawson), a blithely insensitive and downright strange Monsignor (an irresistible Michael Kostroff), a penniless ageing widow about to lose her forever home (Meg Thalken, as funny as she’s pitiful) and Joe Dempsey as the impervious forecloser on said house, and an individual so vile he almost makes Campo look sympathetic, and you have the recipe for a rich comic stew. The outcome – that genuinely doing good has a profound changing affect on Sammy – is predictable, but the journey to get there proves especially gripping, especially when Ulin throws a few plot curveballs which I’m not going to reveal here. It’s also cryingly, seat-shakingly funny, but that humour is made all the more enjoyable by the authentically ‘big’ questions the play poses to Sammy Campo and, by extension, to us.

This is a brilliant piece of writing, that cloaks its ingenuity and depth in a gallery of characters that initially seem stock types but reveal quirks and layers that surprise and delight, and in zany, irresistible humour. The casting of Jason Alexander is possibly the production’s biggest triumph. Sammy is such a repellent character, at least at the beginning, that the actor playing him could potentially be facing an uphill struggle to engage with an audience, and it is here that Alexander’s bolshy charm and infinite charisma prove invaluable. It’s hard to think of another actor other than perhaps Nathan Lane (and there are moments when Campo is reminiscent of the equally mendacious and venal Max Bialystock, who Alexander also played in The Producers’s West Coast premiere), who can simultaneously do irredeemably awful yet strangely lovable. Alexander has a natural dynamism plus the physical comedy of a great clown, the line delivery of a master, and when he needs to reveal his heart, does so with a delicacy that turns the head. He’s such a good actor, and Ulin’s writing matches him so well, that even when a forever-changed Sammy moans that “I walk around all day every day, giving a shit about people who are not me” it’s hilarious yet touching and entirely convincing. It’s a magnificent performance that turns a fine, spiky comedy into a compulsive dance of (possible) death.

The rest of the cast match Alexander’s brilliance, with Breaker and Bofill especially finding depth under the wit, while Dawson and Kostroff hitting every comic beat, and then some, in their roles. Beowulf Borritt’s giant stained glass window backdrop augmented by meticulously detailed smaller set pieces (Sammy’s office, an upscale bar, the vestibule of legal chambers, an antiquated confessional booth) sent slightly off-kilter by strange angles and perspectives works superbly.

So does everything else in this flat-out wonderful piece of theatre. Chicago Shakespeare Theater is currently represented on Broadway by Six and The Notebook, and it’s hard not to imagine this diabolically entertaining offering following in their footsteps, followed hopefully by a healthy international life. An unmissable treat.

LADY DEALER

by Martha Watson Allpress

directed by Emily Aboud

Bush Theatre Studio, London – until 15 June 2024

https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/event/lady-dealer/

Existential despair and rambunctious comedy make unusual but intriguing bedfellows, and Lady Dealer, an acclaimed hit at last years Edinburgh Festival and now back on stage at one of London’s most consistently high quality venues, typifies this. We know we are in for something with a bit of edge as soon as we enter the Bush’s studio space to the sound of aggressive urban music and first glimpse Jasmine Araujo’s grungy set of upturned giant loudspeakers, loose wires and domestic detritus (a full ashtray, a discarded mug) but this seventy five minute play goes on to spring several surprises. One of the most prominent of these being that most of it is in verse.

This sparky almost-monologue, still featuring same stellar actor, Alexa Davies, who won plaudits first time around, starts off as cheeky comedy, almost stand-up except that when we first encounter motor-mouthed drug dealer Charly she’s lying down, then hunched over, retching. Although writer Martha Watson Allpress doesn’t pull any punches – Charly is confrontational (or “ratchet…raggedy and likeable” as the text has it) in her direct address to the audience but endearing enough to get away with it, and clearly extremely smart, both intellectually and in terms of the street – the gritty humour of the set-up wrongfoots us, as the play ends up examining the loneliness, disillusion and societal pressures on modern young people. Its lack of judgement is refreshing, and its compassion enriches the overall experience.

Having read some of the playtext before watching, I wondered if I had spoilt for myself a revelation in the latter stages of the piece. It turns out I needn’t have worried: the surprise, such as it is, feels like a bit of a non sequitur, although it’s nicely done. Anyway, if you’re in the habit of buying a programme/playtext maybe don’t look at it until after the show. Emily Aboud’s production has a lot going for it.

Chief amongst its pleasures is Alexa Davies as the titular lady dealer. A gifted comedienne with a natural rapport with the audience, Davies also skilfully hints at the unease and isolation beneath Charly’s cocky exterior, before achieving real pathos when it becomes clear just how troubled and anxious her life actually is. She’s hugely impressive and totally convincing.

Personally, I felt slightly less convinced by the script Davies is delivering. Watson Allpress shows genuine talent for writing comedy, describes some of the more unhealthy aspects of Charly’s existence with grim relish, and throws some interesting if not consistently plausible curveballs, the main point of which seems to be a warning not to judge a book by its cover (Charly is Oxbridge educated and completely upfront with her feminist mum about how she makes her living). It just doesn’t ring entirely true though, despite Aboud’s pacy, inventive staging and Davies’s top tier performance, and ultimately it’s not clear quite what the point of the story is, and the line into pretension gets crossed when the play seeks to become serious.

Watching a performer as good as Davies at close quarters is always a treat though, and the production has a bracing theatricality that commands the attention. You may not leave the theatre feeling any more enlightened than you did going in, but Lady Dealer is so short, and Davies so fine, that the show never outstays its welcome. At its best, it’s absolutely hilarious.