ajhlovestheatre

TAMMY FAYE

Music by Elton John

Lyrics by Jake Shears

Book by James Graham

Directed by Rupert Goold

Almeida Theatre – until 3rd December 2022

https://almeida.co.uk/how-to-get-tickets-for-tammy-faye

An ambitious new musical at a major producing theatre from a team of internationally renowned powerhouse creatives, with a uniformly magnificent cast, featuring the UK debut of a beloved Broadway star (Andrew Rannells) and the greatest leading performance by any actress (Katie Brayben, surely in line for a second Olivier here) in an original British tuner since Elaine Paige as Evita, is cause for rejoicing.

Charting the rise and fall of controversial American televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker (Jessica Chastain won the 2021 Oscar for playing her in the recent biopic), this Almeida extravaganza is flashy but thought-provoking, a musical that succeeds in giving audiences a rollicking good time while never leaving one in any doubt that there is a serious intellect at play under the sequins, mega make-up, elaborate wiggage and showstopping numbers.

Is it worth seeing? Hell yes (if you can snaffle a return). Is it perfect? Actually, no. Richly enjoyable though it is, a certain amount of work needs to happen before it becomes a great example of the genre. Given that the Islington run totally sold out within days of going on sale (the magical creative triumvirate of Elton John, Scissor Sister’s Jake Shears and multi-award winning playwright James Graham saw to that) and rumours already swirl about a swift transfer, whether that work will take place is anybody’s guess, but it would be a pity if it doesn’t, as Tammy Faye, in Rupert Goold’s witty, fast-moving production, is so close to being an absolute world beater.

Many of the individual elements are already terrific. The lyrics, surprisingly sophisticated and heartfelt when not incorrigibly innuendo-laden (a gospel bop entitled “He’s Inside Me” is particularly fun), are some of the finest I’ve heard in ages: Jake Shears shows the same gift for camp poetry and acerbic wit as when writing for the Scissors Sisters; his work here is innately theatrical and it’s a shame that the raucous sound design sometimes renders a small portions of it unintelligible. Elton John’s stirring music -with a few exceptions- isn’t particularly memorable (there’s little here to match the best bits in Billy Elliot or The Lion King, or even Aida) but attractively pastiches gospel, country, blues, disco and torch songs. It sounds great but is seldom distinctive. Tammy Faye’s 11 o’clock number “If You Came To See Me Cry”, coming after her fortune, marriage and credibility have all been lost, and delivered with open-hearted virtuosity and a stratospheric belt by the miraculous Ms Brayben, could become a showtune standard. So could the cynical “Satellite of God”, a beguilingly strange statement of sinister intent for her greatest adversary, the pastor and conservative activist Jerry Falwell (Zubin Varla, brilliant).

James Graham’s book may be the show’s greatest strength (apart from the cast) but also one of its most obvious, if fixable, drawbacks. Graham displays his characteristic chutzpah at presenting serious themes and real life people juxtaposed with a slick of showbiz glitz (Tammy Faye’s dramatis personae includes the Pope, Billy Graham and the Archbishop of Canterbury). However, the script here, while intermittently brilliant, is so over-stuffed with characters and ideas that some pretty vital areas of Bakker’s story feel glossed over or rushed, especially in the second half which moves at a bewildering lick in charting her fall from grace, and never clarifies how complicit Tammy Faye was in the siphoning off of millions of dollars, or how aware she was of her husband Jim’s extramarital activities. And this is without really telling us anything about her early life or her post-Bakker marriage to Roe Messner.

The ambiguity of the storytelling may be intentional but the tone is inconsistent: for instance, an opening scene where our heroine banters with a gay proctologist may reflect the un-PC nature of the time (the late 90s) but feels strangely homophobic when considered against the later sequences that depict what a force for kindness and tolerance Tammy Faye was to gay people. If anything, and given the sheer outlandishness of American televangelism and the mania surrounding it, both Graham’s book and Goold’s production could afford to go bigger, weirder and more outrageous. The act one finale which sees Tammy Faye weeping over her husband’s misdemeanours then turning it around, getting mic’d up then emoting the same song BIG on live television as part of a religious broadcast is sheer showbiz, and a beautiful example of storytelling and manipulation in musical theatre. Brayben’s astounding performance at this point sends theatregoers into the interval in something approaching stunned rapture.

Bunny Christie’s set of a slightly flimsy-looking moving tower of TV screens out of which characters pop as though in a demented musical version of Celebrity Squares, is appropriate for the television milieu in which the Bakkers found fame but feels a bit characterless and lacking in pizzazz compared to everything else on offer. That is certainly not an accusation one could make of Katrina Lindsay’s garish costumes and wigs, or Lynne Page’s showy choreography. Unlike in American Psycho or Spring Awakening, there are moments when the exuberance and sheer scale of this production seem a little hemmed in on the Almeida stage. Tammy Faye isn’t quite an epic musical on the Evita scale but it needs more room to breathe than it currently has.

What is unquestionably epic is Katie Brayben’s rambunctious star turn. Vocally she is breathtaking, but the detail in the acting is phenomenal….the way she ages up and down by a tilt of the head, bend of the spine, a tiny change in vocal timbre….it’s a masterclass, as truthful as it is flamboyant. In lesser hands, this Tammy Faye could be a grotesque, but Brayben makes her live, breathe and feel. Stunning.

The rest of the company are magnificent too. Andrew Rannells has enough charisma to power the electric grid and if at first his performance seems pretty close to his acclaimed original Elder in The Book of Mormon with it’s pop-eyed cheer and skewed wholesomeness, when the dramatic stakes heighten as Jim’s story darkens, Rannells really goes there, and he utterly convinces.

There’s lovely work, energised but detailed, from Richard Dempsey as a feckless business partner, Ashley Campbell as an AIDS sufferer whose life is turned around by Tammy Faye’s kindness, and Gemma Sutton as a young woman royally screwed over by Jim. Steve John Shepherd is an absolute riot as a comically dyspeptic Archbishop and a chilling, smiley Ronald Reagan. Peter Caulfield’s frenetically camp take on Billy Graham is beyond fabulous. At the performance I saw, Georgia Louise was on instead of Amy Booth-Steel as one of the less forward thinking of the Bakkers’s allies, and she brilliantly captures the dangerous mixture of downhome sweetness and poisonous bigotry, plus she sings like a dream.

It will be fascinating to see what happens next with this; I’ve no doubt it’ll go into the West End but even that may not be the final destination. It ultimately screams Broadway transfer and if that’s the case then a certain amount of reworking is essential, as New York critics tend to be a lot less forgiving than their UK counterparts when it comes to a musical’s shortcomings. While there are certainly American actresses who would eat the scenery in the glamorous lead role (somebody put Rachel York, Elizabeth Stanley and Kerry Butler on standby), it’s hard to imagine anybody giving us a stage Tammy Faye as authentic, multi-faceted and downright thrilling as Ms Brayben. It’s great entertainment but she elevates it above even that.

MARY

by Rona Munro

directed by Roxana Silbert

Hampstead Theatre – until 26 November 2022

https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/

The titular Mary of Rona Munro’s brief but absorbing new play is the 16th century Queen of Scots, a fascinating figure whose short, controversial life has already provided rich dramatic fodder for playwrights such as Schiller (the oft-revived Mary Stuart), Robert Bolt (the epic pageant Vivat Vivat Regina), and Liz Lochhead with the bracingly political Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. Although, like Lochhead, Munro comes at Mary’s legend from a distinctly Scottish angle (it’s a companion piece to the same writer’s acclaimed The James Plays cycle, which in modern terms does for Scotland’s history what Shakespeare did for England’s), her text stands apart from all the others mentioned by not concerning itself with the rivalry between Elizabeth I and Mary.

More unexpectedly, the principal character of Mary the play isn’t even Mary herself (although she does briefly appear, hauntingly sketched by debuting actress Meg Watson), but rather James Melville, the diplomat and memoirist who was one of her major supporters. Munro suggests that Melville’s interest in Mary transcended the merely professional, and, queasily, that he turned a blind eye to her maltreatment at the hands of various powerful men. In a terrific return to the stage, Douglas Henshall lends Melville an intriguing mixture of affability and entitlement that is later punctured by the realisation of just how much damage is being inflicted on Mary, and how complicit he may be in it.

Set in the Holyrood Palace where Mary resided from 1561-7, the play interrogates the question of how apparently ‘good’ men can close ranks and do nothing when women are in harms way. Munro’s text doesn’t let Melville off the hook, although he is so meticulously crafted, by playwright and actor, that he is consistently relatable, if often far from admirable. The other male character, Thompson, a zealous young government servant with a misogynistic cruel streak, comes off even worse. Brian Vernel skilfully, convincingly plays him with a callowness that later shades into chilling vehemence.

The third figure in the play is Protestant (and therefore severely anti-Catholic Mary) proto-feminist Agnes, a servant in the Royal household who turns into a rebellious rabble-rouser when off duty. Rona Morison invests her with a spiky intelligence, barely contained energy, and the suggestion that, in a different time and with a different set of circumstances, this young woman would be a true force to be reckoned with. Morison is so good that she almost allows one to overlook the fact that Munro has given Agnes a second act change of heart over Mary that is so unexpected it defies credulity.

Munro’s script eschews ‘period speak’ for salty, contemporary language – often funny and just occasionally devastating – and makes a grimly convincing case for Mary’s incarceration and subsequent marriage to the vividly described Bothwell (who we never see) being essentially euphemisms for extended periods of sexual abuse. Anybody with a heart and any sense of decency and humanity will find Agnes’s pained description of a half-naked Mary screaming desperately for help through a window to the throng below, pretty difficult to shake off.

This is an interesting play but also a supremely garrulous one, definitely preferring to tell rather than show; however director Roxana Silbert ensures that it’s performed with such a pace and energy that boredom isn’t an option. Silbert tends to move her actors around Ashley Martin-Davis’s austerely handsome Palace set in endless triangular formations that don’t make for particularly interesting stage patterns but at least ensure that shifts in perspective and tone don’t get missed.

Enjoyable and challenging as it is, I found myself wondering at several points if Mary mightn’t work just as well on radio as on a stage. Then though, the production ends with a powerful coup de theatre that sees hordes of enraged women explode across the stark monochrome of Martin-Davis’s set design as it blazes into scarlet (the painterly lighting design is by Matt Haskins), in a foreshadowing perhaps of the infamous red gown Mary allegedly wore to her execution. It’s a rousing conclusion to a play that, while often engrossing, lacks much real drama. Still, this is historical drama with an urgent modern edge, and likely to prove very popular.

A DEAD BODY IN TAOS

by David Farr

Directed by Rachel Bagshaw

Wilton’s Music Hall until 12th November then Warwick Arts Centre

https://www.wiltons.org.uk/whatson/763-a-dead-body-in-taos

Science fiction is a difficult genre to pull off in the theatre. There’s something about the warm immediacy of live performance that is anathema to the chilly mechanics of futuristic fantasy. The distance that the screen lends, along with (usually) drastically bigger production budgets, tends to mitigate against the more risible aspects of stories set in an almost unimaginable, frequently unrelatable alternative universe. When it works on stage, it tends to be either as musical comedy (Return To The Forbidden Planet, We Will Rock You) or, as in the recent Yard version of The Cherry Orchard set on a failing spaceship, underpinned by a rock solid, and already familiar, set of characters and circumstances. Even the usually brilliant Mike Bartlett came unstuck, in his 2010 National Theatre epic Earthquakes In London, where the portions set far in the future somewhat undermined what was elsewhere a searing, multi-layered family saga.

David Farr’s new play, briefly in London following performances in Bristol and Plymouth and before moving on to Warwick Arts Centre, is an earnest addition to an underpopulated genre. Undeniably ambitious, but more ponderous than engaging, it doesn’t make a great case for creating stage dramas in this mould. The premise is interesting enough: damaged, disenfranchised Sam (Gemma Lawrence, investing the character with more inner life than the writing might suggest) is summoned to New Mexico to identify the body of her estranged mother Kath, only to discover herself confronted with a robotic avatar of the deceased, the creation of ‘Future Life’, a glossy but shady biotech company “questing to take humanity into the third millennium”.

The play interrogates the nature of grief, what the ending of life really means, monetary greed and family dynamics, and does so in a series of flashbacks showing Kath’s earlier life as a rebellious artist and student protestor in 1960s America, then, somewhat improbably, as a 1970s London punk and, even less believably, a power-suited 1980s big business go-getter. Eve Ponsonby inhabits each iteration with considerable verve, and an abrasive stridency that works for Kath as a youthful agitator but becomes wearisome. Ultimately though, she and the rest of the cast are fighting a losing battle against a turgid, clichéd script. She also has to maintain extensive portions of the play as Kath’s dead-eye, monotoned avatar, who is hardly what one could call interesting theatrical company, but at least isn’t unintentionally funny, which she could be in less skilled hands.

Splicing together sci-fi with a potted history of 20th century social movements and fashions, is unusual and intriguing, but when each section is so eye-rollingly unoriginal, and all the characters so resolutely unsympathetic, it becomes difficult to engage. The dialogue is serviceable but seems calculated more to hammer home Farr’s ideas than to illuminate the people and situations in his story.

Rachel Bagshaw’s production for Fuel doesn’t help much. It has tremendous energy for the most part, but misses a trick in it’s constant use of Sarah Readman’s excellent video designs that exhilaratingly conjure up the trashing of a work of art, or Kath’s fevered creation of a painting, but might equally have been useful in providing indications as to the ever-changing locales and time periods. Instead though, the visual aesthetic remains resolutely abstract, even though it looks rather elegant, and a bewildering text and uninvolving characters remain out of reach. A subplot involving a terminal illness for Leo, the only man Kath really ever loved (played with hangdog good humour by David Burnett), is introduced too late in the play to carry any real tragic weight.

The final image, involving a rapprochement of sorts between mother, daughter and Leo, feels as though it is straining for some sort of catharsis, or at least bleak acceptance, but crowns an overlong story too elliptical and lacking in emotional engagement to provoke much more than relief at getting out of the theatre. Hugely disappointing.

THE CHOIR OF MAN

Created by Nic Doodson and Andrew Kay

Directed by Nic Doodson

Arts Theatre

https://www.choirofmanwestend.com/

They’re back, those big burly men who sing like angels while dispensing free beer….yes, The Choir of Man has returned to town and it’s just the tonic that we need in these grim times. The term “crowd pleaser” was coined for shows like this concert-revue-jamboree hybrid, with a song stack featuring everything from Guns’n’ Roses, Queen, Avicii, Katy Perry and Sia, to showtunes, Celtic folk songs and much more besides.

It feels like a warm bear hug: populist in the most positive sense of that word, deeply sentimental, and musically breathtaking. Since debuting on the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017, this eclectic parade of songs has triumphed across the USA, Canada and Australia, at numerous festivals and in an earlier West End season that opened at the end of last year….frankly, it’s not hard to see why.

It’s practically immersive theatre: the economics of running a production with a cast of nine and a (sensational) band of four presumably couldn’t be made to work in an actual pub, which is where this raucous, loveable melange of fabulous music, jollity, some tears, lots of exhilaration and a fair bit of audience participation truly belongs, the producers have alighted on the slightly ramshackle Arts Theatre. This does feel like the next most appropriate venue, with it’s sticky floors and rickety seating, and designer Oli Townsend has gone to town blurring the line between the fictional Jungle Pub of the show and the auditorium: photos, hung up coats and hats plus other pubby paraphernalia line the walls of the stalls. If the rough-round-the-edges exuberance of Nic Doodson’s production sometimes feels a bit hemmed in on a traditional stage, the sheer talent and bonhomie of the current cast, a mixture of newbies and Choir of Man veterans, make up for it.

Reminiscent at times of Tap Dogs (the stage floor and many of the tables take a hell of a pounding, thanks to Freddie Huddleston’s rambunctious choreography) and Once (complete with onstage working bar but without the plot), the show is as big of heart as it is loud of volume. All of the nine male “choir” members have specific identities and, even if they are too sketchily introduced to make much impact individually, they collectively make a winning team. Lengthy poetic monologues, celebrating the camaraderie of pub life or mourning the loss of welcoming spaces for the whole populace to elitist urban re-development, are beautifully performed and penned by Ben Norris (“The Poet”), and carry rather more emotional heft and sincerity than I gave them credit for when I first saw the show last year.

The singing and instrumental playing (Jack Blume is the musical supervisor, orchestrator and vocal arranger) remain magnificent however. If at times the boisterous sound design gets a little overwhelming in the smallish auditorium, obscuring some lyrics, most people will already know the words to ‘The Impossible Dream’, The Proclaimer’s ‘500 Miles’, Eagle Eye Cherry’s ‘Save Tonight’ and so on. The few lyrical moments are most welcome when they come: there’s a particularly stunningly performed (by Matt Beveridge) and staged version of Adele’s ‘Hello’ which sees the pub loner contemplate a lost love while his oblivious mates react in slow-mo to a football match on TV (all while exquisitely delivering gorgeous multiple part harmonies, because that’s how talented these blokes are).

The whole cast are a likeable, prodigiously talented, testosterone-fuelled bunch and, if all the male posturing gets a bit much at times, the virtuosity of the singing and energy of the performances are pretty hard to resist. There isn’t a weak link in the present crew but I especially loved Michael Baxter’s comically bossy pianist (“The Maestro”), Matt Thorpe’s clarion voiced pocket rocket “Joker”, glorious Lemuel Knights delivering an outrageously camp take on Rupert Holmes’s Pina Colada song, and the stunning vocals of Levi Tyrell Johnson on a soaring version of ‘You’re The Voice’. Violinist Darius Luke Thompson feels like a star in his own right.

If audience participation isn’t your thing (I loathe it) then avoid aisle seats in the stalls, but make sure you get to the Arts for ninety minutes of sheer uplift and joy. This is effectively the male answer to Six, and it’s pretty damn great. A rousing smash hit, and the kind of show audiences flock back to multiple times. I’m so glad I got to experience it’s unique verve and musical bravura again.

THE BAND’S VISIT

Music and Lyrics by David Yazbek

Book by Itamar Moses

Based on the screenplay by Elran Kolrin

Directed by Michael Longhurst

Donmar Warehouse – until 3 December 2022

https://booking.donmarwarehouse.com/events/5801ANBQVBLJQKVGKMVQVKJKLJQMKBTVN?_ga=2.51218858.288472771.1665651419-1175656577.1665651419

Extraordinary what a difference venue size can make. When I saw this highly unconventional Best Musical Tony winner in a 1000+ seat Broadway house a number of years ago, I admired it but didn’t particularly enjoy it: it was beautifully done but felt too esoteric, indistinct and (whispers) a bit boring. In Michael Longhurst’s dreamy new London production however, in a 250 seat theatre where everyone is close to the stage, it’s enchanting and quietly riveting. It also features, in the work of leading lady Miri Mesika, in the role that won Katrina Lenk the 2018 Outstanding Actress Tony, one of the most remarkable British stage debuts in living memory.

The UK premiere of The Bands Visit actually feels like a return to it’s roots. The Donmar is far closer in stature to the off-Broadway Atlantic Theatre’s intimate Linda Gross space where David Yazbek and Itamar Moses’s chamber musical premiered in 2016 rather than the comparatively cavernous Barrymore that it transferred to, and the various theatrical barns it toured to across America. The material is so much better served by being experienced at close quarters.

Based on a multi-award winning Israeli movie, the premise of the show is very simple: the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra travel from Egypt into Israel to play at the opening of an Arabic cultural centre in the city of Petah Tikva but, due to misunderstandings and mispronunciation, end up in the desert town of Beit Hatikva. “Welcome To Nowhere” is a ruefully funny early number as a trio of amused but not unkind Beit Hatikvans explain the mistake to the band of powder blue suited musicians, sweating beneath their formal hats and epaulettes. Due to the town’s remoteness, the men are forced to stay overnight and interact with the locals, and that, on the surface at least, is pretty much it.

The plot of Itamar Moses’s book is that gossamer thin, but the detail, humour and humanity in the characters and their relationships is rich and satisfying. They’re a quirky but relatable bunch, from the character simply known as Telephone Guy (Ashley Margolis, oddly haunting) endlessly waiting at the town’s sole public phone for a call from his beloved, to the gawky, chronically shy sweetheart who’s never had a girlfriend (an adorable Harel Glazer) to the hilarious and all-too-real uneasy rivalry of a pair of band members billeted together overnight (sublime work from Carlos Mendoza de Hevia and Sargon Yelda). Then there’s the young couple (Marc Antolin and Michal Horowicz, both heartbreakingly good) whose relationship teeters on the verge of collapse. Moses’s nuanced script presents these people without comment but crucially never judges them: it all manages, under Longhurst’s perfectly pitched direction, to be utterly truthful yet intriguingly odd.

A tapestry of life and community is created before our eyes on Soutra Gilmour’s deliberately downbeat breezeblock, chipboard and fairy lights set. It’s almost palpably atmospheric. Kindness and resignation trump drama here and the lack of dynamism and dramatic focus may prove frustrating to many (it certainly did for me on Broadway!) but this is a piece that, elusive as it is, repays the effort you put in…eventually. The onstage musicianship is also a thing of joy and wonder to encounter at close quarters.

Once again, David Yazbek proves himself a musical chameleon: his scores for The Full Monty, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, even the slightly inferior Tootsie, bear so little relation to each other that it’s hard to believe they’re all the work of the same person, so completely does he align his craft each time with the specific style and milieu of the show he’s creating. Here he has come up with an authentic-sounding score unlike anything in the musical theatre canon. It eschews Broadway-style emoting and grandstanding for the evocative dissonance, rhythms and cadences of Middle Eastern music and instrumentation. It often washes over the audience like a warm breeze, but thrills the blood when it has to. There’s a bona fide stand-out number in ‘Omar Sharif’, a gorgeous reverie where café owner Dina sensuously recalls a childhood watching Sharif and listening to Egyptian chanteuse Umm Kulthum (“dark and thrilling, strange and sweet…we dance with them in a jasmine scented wind”) to an understandably entranced band leader (the Israeli film star Alon Moni Aboutboul in an understated but deeply touching performance.)

Dina is played in London by Miri Mesika, a massive star in her native Israel….and it’s not hard to see why: she’s magical. With a singing voice like warm molasses and the kind of magnetic stage presence that can’t be learnt, she is the lynchpin of this wayward but affecting musical. She lends Dina a very particular authority and authenticity, making her the kind of woman you’d want as your friend but who you definitely wouldn’t mess with, conveying every iota of her warmth, strength, humour and innate kindness. She compellingly hints at frustrations and roiling passions beneath her bemused surface, and captures with heartbreaking honesty the sense of an urbane, curious soul trapped in a stultifying small town. Mesika is ravishingly beautiful yet earthy, magnetic and mesmerising…. this is a glorious performance, one that elevates a classy, accomplished production into a must-see event.

ONLY AN OCTAVE APART

Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo

Co-created and directed by Zack Winokur

Wilton’s Music Hall – until 22 October

https://www.wiltons.org.uk/whatson/753-only-an-octave-apart

That old adage about madness and genius being closely aligned has seldom been better demonstrated, at least in the theatre, than by this beauteous bitchslap of a show, already an acclaimed sell out in New York and, if there’s any justice, about to follow suit here. The atmospheric, slightly seedy grandeur of Wilton’s feels like an appropriate setting for these two wildly contrasting yet surprisingly complementary, and entirely unique, world class talents and their gloriously offbeat mini-extravaganza.

Pitched somewhere between cabaret and recital, but most definitely a piece of true theatre, Only An Octave Apart (the title refers to the fact that Anthony Roth Costanzo is a classical counter tenor while Justin Vivian Bond possesses a resonant deep baritone at home singing everything from torch songs to disco…so they literally do sing an octave apart) is a strange and compelling melange of the screamingly funny and just (exquisitely controlled) screaming. It’s glamorous and outrageous but, such is the mood-shifting brilliance of the performers and Zack Winokur’s deceptively clever staging, the tone can, and does, turn on a dime from dirty-minded camp joy to breath-holding, tear-jerking poignancy. This is audience control of the highest order.

Other than the unlikely but exhilarating pairing of Costanzo’s ravishing, bell-like sound with the smoke and slate of Bond’s vocal tone, it’s the contrast and chemistry between the two stars as talents and humans that fascinates most perhaps. As Bond (who, from a distance and with every passing year, more and more resembles Cybill Shepherd or the much missed Broadway diva Marin Mazzie) gleefully points out, they’re a star of the sometimes rough and ready downtown cabaret circuit while Costanzo has graced the stages of everywhere from the Metropolitan Opera in New York to ENO and Glyndebourne. If Costanzo’s stage persona is irrepressibly good humoured and boyish, albeit capable of real emotional depth when required (astonishingly, he’s 40 but reads on stage as at least a dozen years younger), Bond is, to quote Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, “mountain beautiful”, a statuesque, louchely glamorous figure with a mega-watt smile, a killer side-eye and zero filter. Costanzo is an adorable Peter Pan, if J M Barrie’s ageless boy had a voice to make angels weep, to Bond’s slightly demented society hostess doling out cocktails while telling cock tales. He’s warm and engaging, they’re magnetic, elegantly naughty and a little dangerous, and together these boutique superstars create some crazy magic.

In between droll, delightful banter, the musical choices are nothing if not eclectic. Costanzo treats us to several pieces from his classical repertoire, including some Schubert, Purcell, Gluck and a breathlessly brilliant (breathless for us that is, not him) version of the Crudel! Perchè finora duet from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in which he fearlessly and successfully takes on soprano and baritone parts. He also joins his co-star in a rip roaring Sylvester disco number and thrilling reinventions of Queen’s Under Pressure and the Bangles’s Walk Like an Egyptian (yes really). Nico Muhly’s terrific arrangements and Daniel Schlosberg’s nine piece band soar throughout.

Bond’s voice, a distinctive fusion of screech and guttural growl, is no less remarkable an instrument than Costanzo’s in it’s own way, emphasising phrasing over tonal loveliness: it’s by no means a beautiful sound but it’s an expressive one that compels you to listen, especially in tandem with it’s owner’s innate charisma. Bond sashays through a weirdly sexy appropriation of Me And My Shadow that bewitches, and delivers a raw, affecting version of Dido’s wistful White Flag that troubles and aches. The programme runs even deeper and more haunting when the stars reinvent the Peter Gabriel-Kate Bush duet Don’t Give Up as a meditative response to the ongoing battle for trans rights, gay rights and basic human decency: it’s tender, profoundly affecting and lifts an already exceptional evening into a rapturous stratosphere.

There’s an authenticity about Bond and Costanzo, both separately and collectively, that goes beyond the glitter, the outlandish almost-matching outfits, the sometimes groan-worthy jokes, the bizarre but inspired musical choices, and Bond’s repeated mantra of “keep it shallow, keep it pretty, keep it moving”… these are two true artists at the very top of their game, and you should do whatever it takes to see them. Fabulous, in the most authentic sense of the word, and, perhaps surprisingly, moving (and not necessarily in the way Mx Bond meant). A must-see.

EUREKA DAY

by Jonathan Spector

Directed by Katy Rudd

The Old Vic – until 31 October 2022

https://www.oldvictheatre.com/stage/event/eureka-day

The scene that closes act one of Eureka Day is probably the funniest couple of minutes on any current London stage. Throughout it, the actors, playing school board members in a meeting live-streamed to dozens of concerned parents as they contemplate quarantine following a mumps outbreak, are barely audible however. The dialogue for these smugly well-meaning educational custodians is drowned out by the screams of delight and recognition from the Old Vic audience, reacting to the escalating online parental slanging match in the comments section of the live stream, which is beamed all up the back wall of Rob Howells’s set, to scintillating comic effect. One parent responds solely in emojis, which becomes funnier and funnier as it goes along, and what starts out as a couple of innocent questions rapidly descends into a barrage of abuse and discord as grievances, intolerances and misunderstandings are aired. Not only is it hilarious, it’s supremely relatable, especially after the last couple of years where everyone is a keyboard warrior and a seemingly innocuous comment can prove inflammatory when taken out of context. Perhaps not since the infamous internet seduction scene in Patrick Marber’s Closer has live performance and online communication been this outrageously and inventively intertwined. Eureka Day may be set in California but it feels universal.

It says much for the rest of Jonathan Spector’s richly entertaining satire and the excellence of the acting in Katy Rudd’s engaging production that the second half doesn’t prove an anticlimax, even as it travels in a slightly different direction from the glorious mockery of the first. Interestingly, Spector wrote the play in 2017 (it was first performed on the West Coast then off-Broadway shortly after that) yet it has acquired a striking resonance in the aftermath of the global pandemic, as it considers the boundaries of personal responsibility in the midst of a health crisis, and how a community responds to such circumstances.

Spector gets a lot of comic mileage out of sending up the benignly dictatorial “woke” brigade who control the school and who are so determined to do, say and think the “right” thing that their own privilege and unconscious biases never occur to them, even as they steamroller over the any opposing voices with the cheery, empty slogan “there are no villains here!” A major thrust of the piece, in the second half in particular, is a debate around vaccinations, their efficacy, and whether the risks outweigh the advantages. Spector doesn’t entirely abandon the humour here but is an intelligent enough writer to ensure that both sides are expressed with some persuasion.

The acting is delicious. The production marks the UK stage debut of Oscar and Emmy winner Helen Hunt, and she is magnificent – understated and precise – as Suzanne, a high level board member who has raised passive aggression to an art form while masking a searing emotional pain, revealed in an exquisitely delivered monologue that grounds and illuminates the second half.

Superb as she is, this is very much an ensemble piece rather than a star vehicle, and nobody drops the ball in this cracking company. Susan Kelechi Watson is subtly, lethally funny as her arch nemesis, a newly arrived Black parent who both wittingly and unwittingly uncovers some of group’s unconscious biases. If she can’t quite make work the character’s unexpected about-face at the play’s conclusion, that is a flaw in the writing, and one of the few things in Spector’s otherwise admirable text that doesn’t ring true.

Mark McKinney is a total delight as the clueless but well-meaning ageing hippie who insists on concluding each meeting with an esoteric Rumi poem and petrifies at the first sign of conflict. Ben Schnetzer and Kirsten Foster unravel spectacularly as a smugly right-on pair indulging in an extramarital affair only to be riven apart when the realities of a health crisis intrude in their illicit union.

Plays that are simultaneously this provocative and entertaining are pretty rare. The forensic observations and trenchant humour are sometimes reminiscent of Alan Ayckbourn in his heyday (if Ayckbourn had been an American writing about Californian yummy mummies, gender pronouns and faddy trendiness) but the attitudes and terminology are bang up to date. Dazzling and uproarious.

BRIGHT HALF LIFE

by Tanya Barfield

Directed by Steven Kunis

King’s Head Theatre – until 1 October 2022

https://kingsheadtheatre.com/whats-on/bright-half-life

Watching Tanya Barfield’s bittersweet two hander, receiving it’s UK premiere here following an off-Broadway run and a couple of American regional productions, it reminded me that last year’s critically lauded West End revival of Nick Payne’s Constellations never gave us a lesbian version. In it’s Olivier award-winning last outing, that time-twisting love story was done by a duo of gay men, two older actors, an early middle aged pair, and a glamorous Black couple… but never two women. Barfield’s play may not be as ambitious or intellectually rigorous as Constellations but shares a similar dramatic DNA and gives an idea of what a female-led iteration of Payne’s modern masterpiece might have been like.

As it is, Bright Half Life has much to recommend it, especially the nimble, inventive direction of Steven Kunis which plays out under a rather beautiful kite shaped neon lighting grid (kite flying is a recurring motif in the text) and the exquisite, detailed performances of Eva Fontaine and Susie McKenna as the women who fall in and out of love across decades but never in a chronological order. Fontaine and McKenna’s weighty stage presences, emotional dexterity and ability to switch in the blink of an eye from playful to grave and back again, are required to do quite a bit of the heavy lifting for a text that, for all it’s intelligence and originality, is sometimes frustratingly short on flavour and specificity when sketching it’s two central, and only, characters.

Both actresses brilliantly fill in the blanks by sheer force of personality, formidable stage technique and the fact that, despite being very different from each other, they are each so damn lovable. Erica is messy and unfocused but McKenna invests her with such charm that it’s not hard to see why Fontaine’s tough but kind go-getter Vicky falls for her. Despite the contrasts between the women, Barfield makes a convincing case for why they got together but also, sadly, why despite having children together as well as a raft of other life experiences, their union wasn’t built to last. There is a romanticism here as well that is sweet without ever cloying.

As with Constellations, scenes are replayed from different perspectives, and the storytelling is determinedly non-linear. A regular preoccupation of Barfield’s writing is a fascination with the tension between air and earth. As well as the aforementioned kite-flying, we see the women skydiving and suspended high on a Ferris wheel, and tellingly it’s the controlled, more “sensible” Vicky who is unphased while the freer spirited Erica is terrified. By contrast, we also eavesdrop on the women in bed, and then displaying a humorous delight in mattress shopping and testing out the product by bouncing on it like a pair of cackling children.

The tragic aspects of the story, such as terminal illness and the breakdown of the relationship, are represented with a commendable lack of sentimentality. If the dialogue is unremarkable, the subtext and chemistry the leading ladies imbue it with, is something to treasure. So too is the exquisitely subtle ways they age up and down scene by scene without changing an iota of their appearance. Alex Lewer’s lighting design is a subtle but powerful aspect of the production as a whole.

Ultimately, this is a highly watchable comedy drama that challenges enough and is spiced up by a novel approach to dramaturgy then further elevated by a pair of superb performances and a spare but energised staging. It isn’t revelatory, but it’s emotional clarity filtered through a clever structure means it’s not hard to see why it made the journey across the Atlantic.

I, JOAN

by Charlie Josephine

Directed by Ilinca Radulian

Shakespeare’s Globe – until 22 October 2022

https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/whats-on/joan-2022/#book

As professional debuts go, Isobel Thom’s central role in Charlie Josephine’s rambunctious, surprising distillation of the fabled life of the Maid of Orléans for Shakespeare’s Globe, takes some beating. Thom gives a beguiling, persuasive performance that humanises Joan of Arc while still preserving the magic surrounding this divisive figure.

What Josephine has created is less a coherent historical drama (and, to be fair, Bernard Shaw and Anouilh already have this story covered in that respect with Saint Joan and The Lark respectively) and more a genderqueer pageant pitched somewhere between Brecht and Black Adder, that reframes Joan as a non-binary poster child for tolerance and rebellion. It’s very much a Globe play too in that it paints in broad brushstrokes (essential when you’ve got noise seepage from the skies above and the Thames just outside), and it’s bold, mouthy, engaging, urgent….

Some eyebrows were raised at the prospect of a gender fluid Joan but it’s hard to see why: it’s impossible to think of another historical figure so well suited to this sort of creative treatment than a person who eschewed every aspect of their traditional gender identifications, and furthermore I’m pretty sure that most of Shakespeare’s history plays were no more factually accurate than what we currently have at the Globe. If this theatre had a roof, Joan would have torn it off by now.

Josephine’s writing is salty, anachronistic, vivid. You may not expect a play about Joan of Arc to have as many belly laughs as you get here, but both Jolyon Coy’s preposterously swaggering Dauphin and Adam Gillen’s dithering, self-effacing sidekick are sublime comic creations made all the funnier by being rooted in a certain reality, however crazy. I also adored Jonah Russell’s rugged Dunois who takes his time to come round to approving of Joan, and Debbie Korley’s comically imperious, Thatcherite regent Queen.

The play is touching as well though: the collective sigh of recognition and acceptance that goes through the crowd when Gillen’s inspired Thomas first suggests the “they” pronoun to a confused Joan is deeply moving, and, throughout, the central character is a figure that, for all their bravery and outward toughness, it’s impossible not to root and care for, especially as embodied by the magnetic, lovable Thom.

The battle sections are particularly exhilarating with stomping, combative choreography, by Jennifer Jackson, that sits low in the body, feels refreshingly spontaneous, and builds to an enthralling climax as more and more company members join Joan’s crusade. The effect is simultaneously joyful and slightly threatening. The audience went nuts for it, and also for the fabulous cast entrances via an enormous slide that takes up almost the entire height of the performing space. Ilinca Radulian’s energetic production consistently succeeds in striking the right balance between raucous, playful and lofty.

Joan’s death, when it comes, is cancelled, or at least postponed, by a Groundling led chant of “change the play!” not dissimilar to the traditional audience participation cries of “I believe in fairies!” in the annual Peter Pan play at Christmas. Josephine gives Thom a rousing, marvellous speech of defiance dismantling the patriarchy and putting two fingers up to gender expectations and limitations. It’s terrifically delivered and whips an already hugely engaged audience up into a further frenzy of enraptured indignation.

Exciting as the writing and the performance is, it does by this point feel slightly grafted on to the legend of the French peasant girl who liberated France only to be betrayed and burnt at the stake for her pains. That won’t matter to many: Josephine’s script relentlessly pushes it’s agenda and is very much preaching to the choir in terms of matching the expectations of the audience coming to see this unique piece of theatre.

Forget subtlety and embrace the big beautiful, messy heart of it: what we have here is a flamboyantly queer-accented slice of uplifting mass populist entertainment. It feels like this season’s Nell Gwynn or Emilia, and I suspect we will see more of it after this brief late summer season. And in Isobel Thom, the theatre has a glittering new star.

THE P WORD

by Waleed Akhtar

Directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike

Bush Theatre – until 29 October 2022

https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/event/the-p-word-2022/

Here’s something you don’t get to experience too often: a gritty piece of contemporary writing that gives theatrical voice to people largely unrepresented on stage, and does so with compassion and comedy; a new play that is at once delicately intimate yet epic in scope, and a cracking piece of storytelling that manages to indict it’s audience without ever feeling preachy or worthy. Waleed Akhtar’s The P Word is a plea for tolerance, a study of the power of friendship, a sort-of love story and ultimately a potent political act that grips like a thriller.

Akhtar’s script kicks off by juxtaposing two men directly addressing the audience: both are in their early thirties, gay, living in present day London and of Pakistani heritage. That’s where the superficial similarities end though: Bilal, or Billy as he prefers to be known, (Akhtar himself, and as fine an actor as he is a writer) is a confidently promiscuous city dweller, working in the fashion industry, getting lots of sex via the apps and leading a fairly hedonistic existence, only occasionally troubled by the realisation that he has no one to rely on but himself, and happy to pander to racial stereotypes if it means he’ll get his end away more frequently. Then there’s Zafar (the equally brilliant Esh Alladi) seeking asylum in the UK having been run out of Pakistan by his own father who had already organised the murder of his boyfriend and was aiming to mete out the same fate to his own offspring. The script makes wry and explicit the contrast between a life where looking good to get laid is of the utmost importance, and one where your very nature could get you killed.

One of the most impressive things about Akhtar’s writing is the utter conviction with which he creates these two discrete voices: Billy’s cocksure arrogance and selfishness contrasts so vividly with Zafar’s haunted timidity and understandable paranoia that it’s hard to credit that they both came from the same pen. Every line, every nuance rings absolutely true and succeed in feeling simultaneously naturalistic yet rivetingly theatrical. Even more impressive perhaps is the way that, as the play progresses through it’s eighty five minutes power-packed playing time and these men reveal more and more about themselves, our perception of each of them changes considerably, yet never once does it feel less than credible.

At first it looks as though we are in for an evening of intertwined monologues à la Brian Friel, but Akhtar throws a curveball by setting up a chance meeting between Bilal and Zafar on a late night Soho street, and sends them careening off into a friendship that initially looks a little unlikely but gradually makes sense as you realise that Bilal is less assured than one had first thought, that Zafar is a whole lot more fun than he initially appears, and that both are in fact desperately lonely. Tellingly, despite the homophobia that forced him to flee his native land, it is Zafar who has pride in his Pakistani origins while to Bilal it seems little more than an inconvenience. Both performers inhabit their roles so completely – Akhtar is all laid back laconicism with an undertow of aggression, while Alladi has a wired, neurotic energy – that it barely feels like acting, but actually what beautiful work it is.

The interest in the will-they won’t they nature of the relationship pales into insignificance beside the bigger picture of what will happen to Zafar if he is forced to return to Pakistan and, without giving too much away, the whole tone and nature of the story alters drastically and devastatingly in the last fifteen minutes or so. Anthony Simpson-Pike’s engrossing production is staged in the round and it’s truly remarkable to see so many people on the edge of their seats, holding their collective breath and, in many cases, fighting back tears.

In the closing moments, the play changes tack yet again as Akhtar abandons the characters and their story, and directly addresses the audience on the subject of asylum seekers and their fate when the UK rejects their plea to stay…it’s like a sheet of ice splitting across the stage, and it’s thought-provoking and maddening, elevating this thumping good story, magnificently produced, into a thing of importance and carefully pointed simmering rage.

Technically, the show is flawless, from Max Johns’s revolving broken disc set to Elliot Griggs’s scene-controlling lighting and an exciting, omnipresent soundscape by Xana and composer Niraj Chag which mixes Pakistani tradition with jagged urbanity and just a hint of camp disco. The pace never flags, the humour truly lands, and the performances are sublime, while the text hammers home it’s points with potency but finds subtlety when it needs to.

Regardless of your sexual orientation or nationality, if you don’t respond to this extraordinary piece of theatre on some visceral level, you may want to check your humanity. Do not miss this terrific play.