ajhlovestheatre

INDECENT

by Paula Vogel

Directed by Rebecca Taichman

Menier Chocolate Factory – until 27 November

https://www.menierchocolatefactory.com/Online/default.asp?doWork::WScontent::loadArticle=Load&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::article_id=FA6A2A98-C9F4-464C-BFEC-25A2A4937DC2

This may be a sweeping statement, but if you’re not profoundly affected by Paula Vogel’s provocatively titled powder keg of a play, as staged here in Rebecca Taichman’s Tony Award-winning production, then can you really call yourself a theatrelover? I’m quite serious: it’s hard to think of any other show in recent memory that is quite so steeped in the seedy magic, the graft, the mechanics, the egos, the passions and eccentricities, and the sheer storytelling of live theatre.

Taichman’s dream-like, occasionally eccentric vision, played out on an almost bare stage under Riccardo Hernandez’s gorgeously tarnished false proscenium arch, revels joyfully in the myriad of possibilities, and the visual and emotional shorthand, that theatrical staging affords. In conjunction with Vogel’s dynamic but weighty script, the show also rams home the importance and relevance of the performing arts in day-to-day life, something so many of us have been uncomfortably aware of during the last eighteen months.

Both Vogel’s writing and Taichman’s production are delightfully and deceptively simple, with a laser sharp precision, but also richly textured, sublimely witty, and, ultimately, heart-stoppingly moving. It’s a history lesson – the true story of a controversial 1920s Broadway play that saw the entire company charged under obscenity laws for depicting lesbian love on stage – but one with passion, fire and heart, presented against the broader backdrop of the treatment of Jewish people throughout history. While there are countless plays, films and books depicting the latter, few do so as hauntingly and inventively as Indecent.

The numerous locations, time zones and even languages are beamed up on the bare brick wall at the back of the stage, and the story is contextualised further by the inclusion of projections listing the complete works of Sholem Asch (author of the “offending” play God Of Vengeance). We even get a compendium of 20th century Jewish creatives at the helm of the golden age of the Broadway musical, with the mock-rueful caveat that they don’t tend to write in Yiddish any more.

When the audience enters, the seven actors and three musicians are already seated on stage facing out front. When they start to move, notice how rivers of dust pour from their swirling limbs. It’s an enchanting, but unsettling, effect, and one that will acquire a terrible significance as the story gathers pace and we return to a similar visual near the show’s conclusion. Taichman’s production is filled with instances of similar ingenuity (the moment when the infamous yellow stars appear, is like a shock of icy air blasting through the house) but only ever at the service of the play, never just to be a striking gimmick. The humanity here is all, and it’s beautiful and frequently unsettling.

Almost the entire Broadway creative team has reassembled for the Menier version because, really, why mess with perfection. All of their contributions (David Dorfman’s choreography, Emily Rebholz’s costumes, Christopher Akerlind’s lighting, the aforementioned Hernandez’s set) are seamless and invaluable. Everybody here is working at the top of their game, and the results are spellbinding.

The same is true of the onstage company, who emerge as figures from the mind and imagination of stage manager Lemml (a mesmerising Finbar Lynch). This is truly an ensemble piece, with endless doubling up of roles, and it’s not always clear where the boundaries between actors and musicians exist: they really feel like the troupe of wandering players they represent. Apart from Lemml, all other roles are listed in the programmes simply as “Actor”.

Beverley Klein and Peter Polycarpou as the senior actors are so effortlessly accomplished that you’re only made aware of the brilliance of their technique at the exact moment where they want you to see what they’re doing. Joseph Timms and Molly Osborne – both magnificent- bring multiple layers to the playwright, his wife, and several other roles.

An astonishingly good Alexandra Silber invests the leading actress with a beguiling neuroticism and brittle glamour that gets swept away in moments of high emotionalism: it’s an unforgettable performance, deeply felt and exquisitely detailed. Corey English, known in London perhaps most for his terrific, high energy musical theatre work, proves what a devastatingly fine actor he is, impressively transforming from garrulous Irish-American cop to righteously ranting rabbi in the space of one speech.

Indecent is a Jewish story – the final, rain-soaked scene is actually performed in Yiddish, and it is one of the most moving things you’ll find in any theatre in the land right now – but in it’s clear-eyed compassion, it’s gorgeous theatricality, and it’s quiet but powerful insistence that attention be paid to the past and the departed, this is a play for everyone. This production was closed in preview by the first lockdown but proves a hell of a powerful reopening for this mighty venue. An unmissable, breathtaking piece of theatre, pitched somewhere between a ritual and a seance, I will be experiencing it again as soon as I feel emotionally robust enough. A shaynem dank to everyone involved.

“Tell the guards to open up the gates”, it’s finally here… and Frozen is big, bold, beautiful, bombastic…and better than Broadway! A lot better actually. On almost every level, this West End iteration of Disney’s entertainment juggernaut is a considerable improvement on the rather wan spectacle – not magical enough for kids and insufficiently meaty for the grownups – that opened to muted reviews in New York three years ago. At the Broadway performance I saw, the small children sitting behind me started angling to leave as soon as the intermission lights came up following Caissie Levy’s roof-rattling rendering of the belting ‘Let It Go’, before whining loudly throughout the second act about how bored they were.

It’s hard to imagine that being the case in the West End, where Frozen London proves an infinitely more enchanting proposition: more spectacular, more emotionally engaging, funnier, faster paced, it’s a lovely time in the theatre. Most of the original creative team is still attached (Michael Grandage directing, designs by Christopher Oram, Rob Ashford choreography, sound by Peter Hylenski, truly sensational video and puppet design by Finn Ross and Michael Curry respectively) but a lot of the work feels new and fresh. There’s even a couple of superb new numbers that blend seamlessly into Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez’s eclectic, stirringly memorable score.

You know you’re at a Disney musical when it’s set in a fictional Nordic country but almost everybody speaks with American accents, and Frozen suffers from a similar inconsistency of tone to the one that afflicts The Lion King, whereby cartoony comic shtick (in this case lovable snowman puppet Olaf, forever craving warm hugs and wondering what summer must be like) sits uneasily alongside soaringly beautiful serious stuff (in some of the interior scenes, Oram’s designs, moodily lit by Neil Austin, resemble neo-classical paintings come to life). It’s all massively entertaining but it never fully coalesces in Jennifer Lee’s book, adapted from her own screenplay, which staggers schizophrenically between pratfalls and portentous.

Few will care, when the production values are so extraordinary and the performances are so high octane. Samantha Barks’ ice queen Elsa has presence, elegance and powerful but sweet vocals, carving showstoppers out of the aforementioned ‘Let It Go’ and also ‘Monster’, the cri de cœur second act power ballad. Lee’s script doesn’t require her to do much beyond wander about looking troubled however, and the show’s emotional and comic heavy lifting falls mainly to her younger sister Anna. In this role, Stephanie McKeon is a thoroughly satisfying “tornado with pigtails” and could well turn out to be the production’s break out star. She’s very very funny, completely endearing and with a gorgeous voice. On press night, Sasha Watson-Lobo and Summer Betson respectively played Young Elsa and Young Anna so delightfully it could have been a disappointment when the adult versions of the characters took over, had Barks and McKeon not been so winning.

Although he feels like he belongs in a different musical entirely, Craig Gallivan is tremendous fun as Olaf, and Richard Frame is a comic joy as a conniving potential Royal suitor with a nasty case of short man syndrome. Obioma Ugoala, last seen in the West End as a stunning George Washington in the original London cast of Hamilton, is absolutely wonderful as Kristoff, the feisty, big hearted ice harvester who befriends Anna. Physically imposing but with an off-the-wall wit and warmth, and a beguiling lightness of touch, he commands the stage, with buckets of charm, killer moves, and some serious vocal chops. Sven, his reindeer companion, is an astonishing puppet creation that needs to be seen to be believed: think Joey from War Horse meets Disney cuteness and you’re part of the way there.

The vocal arrangements are exquisite, and magnificently sung by a large cast, and Dave Metzger’s orchestrations sound richer and fuller than we’re generally used to hearing in the West End these days. Personally I could have lived without the excessively kitschy second half opener, ‘Hygge’, a bizarre production number extolling the joys of cosiness in the face of extreme weather conditions, and featuring a chorus line of sauna-loving, nearly naked Ensemble members protecting their modesty with outsize tree branches. In all fairness, the audience went wild for this section, but it reminded me of something that might have scored “nul points” in the Eurovision Song Contest back in the 1980s.

Regardless of my reservations, Frozen is most assuredly a show to see: an epic, dazzling, transporting extravaganza that fits the gorgeously restored “new” Theatre Royal Drury Lane like an exceptionally sumptuous new winter coat. It’ll probably run for years and, what’s more, in this excitingly revamped version, it deserves to. “Do you want to build a snow man?” Yes, yes I do.

Note – this review first appeared on Fairy Powered Productions http://fairypoweredproductions.com/

THE WINDSORS: ENDGAME

Written by George Jeffrie and Bert Tyler-Moore

Composer: Felix Hagan

Directed by Michael Fentiman

Prince of Wales Theatre – until 2 October

https://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk/whats-on/the-windsors-endgame

I approached George Jeffrie and Bert Tyler-Moore’s comedy with some trepidation: stage spin-offs of TV shows can be decidedly naff. I wasn’t sure what to expect, especially after some of the dodgy reviews but I actually loved it. It reminded me a bit of Death Drop in that it is just out to give the audience a rollicking good time, to hell with coherence and indeed sanity. This it most assuredly does: the crowd I saw it with was screaming with laughter.

Maybe some shows just don’t need critical input (he says while reviewing it….go figure). This is about as subtle as being smacked around the head with several old copies of Tatler – the “joke” (not that one can even call it that) that stopped the show was Tracy Ann Oberman’s magnificently nasty Camilla telling Kara Tointon’s joyously vacuous Kate (who comes over all Ninja at the first sign of trouble) to fuck off when she opined that she missed Jamie Oliver’s restaurants – but it is a heck of a lot of knowing fun, which sees Fergie (Sophie-Louise Dann, absolutely hilarious and frequently filthy) working as Meghan and Harry’s cleaner in L.A. and habitually lacing their wheatgrass smoothies with Smirnoff, Andrew (a commendably non-sweaty Tim Wallers) discovered looking furtive in the front Stalls, and Matthew Cottle’s gormless Edward picking up all the spare roles on account of his theatrical experience (“I once worked for Andrew Lloyd Webber you know”).

I also loved Tom Durant-Pritchard’s weirdly hot himbo Harry and the genius comic pairing of Eliza Butterworth and Jenny Rainsford as a wonderfully clueless Beatrice and Eugenie so vowel-manglingly posh that it’s quite a challenge to work out what they’re actually saying half the time. Crystal Condie as Meghan is so accurate she borders on the uncanny, and Ciaràn Owens makes a lovable Prince William. Oberman’s Camilla is so good she deserves some sort of award, or possibly a restraining order. Harry Enfield as Prince Charles engineers one of the most bizarre standing ovations I’ve ever been part of, reasoning that since the cast are Royal, we in the audience should stand and bow TO THEM while they wave half heartedly.

Michael Fentiman’s surprisingly opulent production (Madeleine Girling’s set is gorgeous) resembles a panto with Tourettes. This is a ton of disrespectful fun, both for us and the cast, although I’d be fascinated to know what an ardent Royalist makes of it all. The Prince of Wales (the theatre that is, not the eccentric Royal) is being kept very warm while The Book Of Mormon is on hiatus. My face ached from smiling.

13 – The Musical

Music and Lyrics by Jason Robert Brown

Book by Dan Elish and Robert Horn

Directed by Dean Johnson for The British Theatre Academy

Cadogan Hall, London

one day only – Tuesday 31 August 2021

The British Theatre Academy has a constantly growing reputation as being an exceptionally fine, commendably diverse, training and play ground for budding young performers, as evidenced by the acclaim for their recent residences at Southwark Playhouse (Once On This Island, Bring It On!), and the fact that alumni include Dear Evan Hansen’s Sam Tutty. This is their second production of this punchily enjoyable Broadway musical – the first was part of their 2017 season at the West End’s Ambassadors Theatre, but with a different creative team – and it proves a frequently uplifting ninety minutes.

13 is an unusual proposition for a number of reasons: for starters, this tale of a Manhattan Jewish kid supplanted to rural Indiana and struggling to make friends when his parents’ marriage fails, features not a single character over the age of 13, and furthermore the creatives specified at the outset (the show was first seen in New York in 2008 with an original cast that included a pre-superstardom Ariane Grande) that it can only be performed by an age appropriate company. So, no adults pretending to be kids à la Blood Brothers or the various American musical distillations of the Peanuts cartoons. Also, to be fair, very little of the angst of Spring Awakening either. Personally I love that angst, but that’s not what 13 is about.

The other anomalous thing about 13, at least to musical theatre geeks, is that the catchy score, covering everything from bops to soft rock to a mild but unexpected flirtation with reggae at one point, is the work of Jason Robert Brown. Yes he of the majestic grandeur of Parade, the sharply observed urbanity of The Last 5 Years, the edgy but witty heartbreak of Songs For A New World and the full blown romanticism of The Bridges Of Madison County. True, his ear for pastiche has always rivalled Sondheim’s, as does his sharp, ingenious way with a lyric, but here he crafted a real pop score, and it’s as much fun as it is unexpected.

The young performers (there’s a core of thirteen principals augmented by a gigantic but superbly drilled ensemble) in Dean Johnson’s high energy but focussed staging were clearly having an absolute ball, but impressively never sacrificed clarity to exuberance. Corin Miller’s choreography – pitched somewhere between raw and slick, but never less than exciting – fares similarly. The only technical aspect of the production that didn’t quite work was the sound design which unfortunately rendered the lyrics almost completely incomprehensible for the first half of the show whenever there was more than one person singing.

Edward Flynn-Haddon was charming and likeable as bewildered New Yorker Evan while Ivy Pratt was genuinely touching, as well as vocally terrific, as Patrice, the funny, quirky school friend who adores him. Zoe Forward and Rebecca Nardin were great fun as a pair of Teen Queens falling out over the same boy, and Ethan Quinn (who was also in the 2017 version) was utterly brilliant as Evan’s friend Archie, a hyper-smart, manipulative youngster suffering from a degenerative disorder and entirely prepared to use his physical shortcomings to get whatever the hell he wants. Quinn’s comic timing is already that of a master.

Where 13 doesn’t quite work is in the disconnect between the vivacious score (Chris Ma’s band were excellent) and much of the dialogue in Dan Elish and Robert Horn’s amusing but – apart from the lack of any adult figures – hardly groundbreaking script. These young people (meaning the characters themselves, not this cast, all of whom are doing sterling work) sound authentically youthful when negotiating the peppy, poppy songs, but are saddled with a world weary borscht belt humour, that is frequently funny but seldom convinces as the utterances of school-going pre-teens. For instance, Evan, referring to his upcoming Bar Mitzvah: “For us it’s the one day everything in your life is supposed to be happy and perfect” elicits Patrice’s response “See, Catholics don’t have that day. It would go against everything we believe in” ….I laughed a lot but it sounds more like something one would hear on Seinfeld rather than in a school yard.

That’s a pretty small quibble though in a piece of upbeat musical theatre that could well prove a calling card into the industry for enthusiastic young people on both sides of the footlights. It’s a shame that BTA’s delightful new staging only got two shows at Cadogan, though it wouldn’t be a huge surprise to see it back but on a more permanent basis soon.

CINDERELLA

Music by Andrew LLoyd Webber

Lyrics by David Zippel

Book by Emerald Fennell

Gillian Lynne Theatre – open ended run

https://andrewlloydwebberscinderella.com/

Andrew Lloyd Webber may have composed better scores than his new Cinderella, but he has certainly never created anything camper, and no, I haven’t forgotten Sunset Boulevard. This collaboration with Oscar winning book writer Emerald Fennell and lyricist David Zippel (City of Angels, ALW’s own The Woman In White) actually feels like something of a return to form, not because it’s much like anything else in the Lord’s canon thus far, but more because, after well over two decades, a new musical by this country’s most successful theatrical composer actually feels, once again, like a major West End event. School Of Rock doesn’t count as it was already a solid Broadway hit by the time it opened at the same Gillian Lynne Theatre that Cinderella is now gaudily occupying.

Of course, the pandemic has something to do with the feeling of triumph – any large scale production that gets off the ground at the moment feels like a win – as does Lloyd Webber’s heroic attempts over the last 18 months to get theatres open while other impresarios (not counting Nica Burns) either couldn’t or wouldn’t. More than that though, Cinderella is a thumping good time in the theatre, a rousing, brash, eye-popping bit of escapism filled with terrific performances and an irrepressible confidence in it’s own ability to show us a good time. Which it does. In spades.

In a way, it’s a shame they didn’t opt to call the show ‘Bad Cinderella’, after the memorable number Carrie Hope Fletcher’s heroine introduces herself with, partly so as to distinguish it from the more traditional Rodgers & Hammerstein musical fairy tale or countless pantomimes, and also because they’ve basically Elphaba-ed her up. Gone is the meek scullery maid with the cosy fairy godmother and penchant for befriending small rodents, and in comes a roaring Goth iconoclast, armed with a spray paint can, an acerbic wit and a ton of attitude. Fletcher displays cracking comic timing, as well as her trademark silver-toned belt, and succeeds in creating a character who is as tough as the DMs she stomps around in, but also with a real warmth and undertow of vulnerability. The beating heart of the show is in very safe hands.

Elsewhere, it’s a riot of camp opulence, as Laurence Connor’s romp of a production comes on like a turbo-charged fusion of outlandish fashion show, gay fantasia (the young men of the Royal court are given to disporting in little more than leather pants and harnesses, giving me uncomfortable flashbacks to Magic Mike Live, and a couple of ill-advised clubbing nights in Vauxhall in my youth) and The Real Housewives Of …Versailles. The extravagance of Gabriela Tylesova’s costume design – think Christian Lacroix and Jean-Paul Gaultier in bed with Cecil Beaton – is matched by her own ravishingly over-the-top sets and Campbell Young’s equally crazy wig creations, and the whole thing is lit to twinkly, technicolour perfection by Bruno Poet. It looks a million dollars, several million dollars actually.

Out-camping everybody and everything on stage is Victoria Hamilton-Barritt as Cinderella’s socially ambitious Stepmother, in a joyous, rampaging comic tour de force. With a voice that suggests she has a mouth full of marbles (designer of course) and a laugh like a braying donkey, she conjures up memories of, variously, Fenella Fielding, Cruella DeVil, Joanna Lumley’s Patsy Stone from AbFab …and Dame Edna. She’s simply astonishing, spinning comedy gold out of some fairly hackneyed gags, and it says much for the vital, funny work of Laura Baldwin and Georgina Castle’s stunning but horrid Stepsisters that they don’t disappear into her shadow.

If Rebecca Trehearn’s not-as-wholesome-as-she-looks Queen seems a little muted in comparison, she’s still vivid and amusing, with a fabulous, if underused, singing voice. In this updated, upended version of the story, there is no fairy godmother but there is The Godmother, a slightly demented, darkly glamorous plastic surgeon, reminiscent of Tommy’s Acid Queen, to whom Cinders goes for a makeover before attending the climactic ball. Gloria Onitiri has precious little stage time in the role but is truly thrilling, and deliciously weird. Personally I would like to have seen a whole lot more of her. Caleb Roberts’s Prince Charming is similarly unconventional (go see the show to find out why) but great fun, bowling in unexpectedly late in the second half.

The real male lead of the piece is Charming’s younger brother Prince Sebastian, who gets one of the best songs, a rueful ballad ‘Only You, Lonely You’ where he expresses yearnings for this decidedly unromantic Cinderella. It requires a true tenor range and, at the press performance I saw, it was delivered stunningly by understudy Michael Hamway. There’s been a lot of Twitter chat lately amongst theatre enthusiasts about how covers and understudies are keeping the industry going at the present time. It’s all true. Here, Hamway gives a performance of such insouciant charm and technical skill, he ought henceforward to be at the top of every casting director’s list when they’re lookIng for modern romantic male leads: that’s how good he is.

The other breakout songs are the exquisite ballad ‘Far Too Late’ which would not sound out of place in Phantom and the stirring, folk-inflected ‘I Believe I Have A Heart’ performed with a theatre-shaking passion by Fletcher that brings the house down. Elsewhere, Lloyd Webber’s score feels like comic opera meets Eurovision Song Contest, and, if not particularly memorable and seldom subtle, it matches the baroque excesses of Joann M. Hunter’s stylish choreography and Zippel’s nicely turned lyrics. Fennell’s book is fast-moving and often very funny, if not perhaps quite as fresh and original as one might have expected given her track record.

This is the first show since Cats to utilise the Gillian Lynne’s unique feature of being able to revolve the entire stage taking the first half dozen rows of the Stalls with it, and, while it doesn’t really add anything significant, it’s an extra touch of magic to what is already a richly enjoyable night out. An authentic crowd pleaser where you can really see where the cost of your ticket went, it genuinely feels as though we are looking at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s first solid smash hit for quite some time. Is it perfect? No. Will the majority of paying customers care? Also no. If the Gillian Lynne is looking for a new occupant within the next three to four years I’ll be extremely surprised. To recycle a cliché, I had a ball.

OLEANNA

by David Mamet

Directed by Lucy Bailey

Arts Theatre – until 23 October

https://artstheatrewestend.co.uk/events/oleanna/book

If you want to see what a bunch of people who have been collectively shaken and stirred looks like, hang about outside the Arts Theatre on the fringes of Covent Garden just before 9.30pm. That is when the evening performance of David Mamet’s still-incendiary Oleanna gets out, and the expressions of bewilderment mingled with excitement and fury on the faces of departing audience members is quite something to see. Better still, get a ticket and experience this remarkable controlled explosion of a production for yourself.

First seen in New York in 1992, when the shocking ending regularly provoked outbreaks of fighting in the front Stalls, this superbly constructed two hander about a college professor being professionally and morally demolished by an apparently desperately insecure female student, feels more relevant than ever in the wake of the Me Too movement and in a modern landscape where the patriarchy is under pretty much constant interrogation. The London production was directed by Harold Pinter no less, who was famously angered by his original stars, David Suchet and Lia Williams, making explicit in an interview where their sympathies lay: Suchet felt student Carol was lying and out for blood while Williams countered that her accusations were 100% valid.

Pinter’s staging humanised the protagonists while a 2004 West End revival, with film stars Aaron Eckhart and Julia Stiles, played up the subtly heightened poetry of Mamet’s text, which is uncharacteristically unprofane right up until the very end when the obscenities rain down like missiles through the hitherto civilised canopy of academia. Lucy Bailey’s magnificent, technically flawless new production, first seen in Bath, sits somewhere between the two and may just be the best account of this punchy, provocative play I’ve yet seen.

Rosie Sheehy imbues Carol with a rich but troubled inner life and a tentative watchfulness, almost like a wounded animal…. or at least at first. I’ve never felt so invested in the character’s back story (which is never explicitly told) than here. More sympathetic but also spikier than some of her predecessors, this Carol makes the transformation from endlessly note-taking, walking inferiority complex to driven, sharply dressed, vengeful fury, constantly referring to a “group” that seem to be driving her motivation, with total credibility. It’s a terrific performance, delivered so authentically that it barely feels like acting.

Jonathan Slinger is equally good as John, the benignly patronising professor, thinking he’s helping Carol while simultaneously and unwittingly shooting himself in the foot, and negating her power. Watching him putting words into Carol’s mouth time after time, blurring the line between kindness and insensitive privilege, is as compelling as it is toe-curling, although his American accent wavers a little. His disbelief when his carefully constructed life comes tumbling down is brilliantly done, while his ultimate descent into violence is utterly chilling. The final couple of moments have never felt as brutal and unsettling.

Jon Nicholls’ sound design is subtly ingenious, the insistent but uncomfortable almost-music between scenes coming across as an aural equivalent of the gulf between what these two characters are saying to each other and what they’re understanding. Similarly, Oliver Fenwick’s lighting is naturalistic throughout but then chills down to a stark, white wash in the seismic final seconds as though we are watching specimens in a museum rather than real people. None of this is overly showy, but it all adds up.

Depending on your viewpoint, Carol’s table-turning on John could be seen as a satisfying riposte to him never letting her finish her sentences, as she and her “group” remint so much of what we, as an audience, have heard him say, and effectively put new words, or at least new meanings, into his mouth. Or is she just spiteful and mendacious? You have to see it to decide. There’s a rape allegation made and, for the first time in any Oleanna production I’ve seen, there is an ambiguity in the central relationship, and also in the work of fight director Philip D’Orleans at specific moments, that adds a whole new layer of fascination.

Every bit as relevant, if not more so, now than when it premiered nearly thirty years, Oleanna remains a peak in Mamet’s career (his more recent plays The Anarchist, China Doll and Bitter Wheat were pretty disastrous star vehicles) and has a complexity and breadth of viewpoint that exhilarates as much as it shock. I’d be surprised to ever again see it acted and directed as well as here. Unmissable.

CAROUSEL

Music by Richard Rodgers

Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II

Based upon Ferenc Molnar’s play Liliom, as adapted by Benjamin F Glazer

Directed by Timothy Sheader

Regents Park Open Air Theatre – until 25 September

https://openairtheatre.com/production/carousel

With the theme of domestic violence tethered inextricably to it’s central love story, Carousel has for many a decade, but more so now than ever, resisted prettifying, despite having one of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s most rapturously ravishing scores. Timothy Sheader’s bold, brave Open Air production goes even further, excising abused heroine Julie’s problematically eggy assertion that being hit hard by somebody you love barely hurts (say WHAT?!), yes, but also proceeding to strip the show of it’s American setting: we get a Midlands Billy Bigelow, a Northern Nettie Fowler, a Londoner Jigger Craigin, a Welsh Carrie Pipperidge; also gone are it’s orchestral strings, most of it’s romanticism, and even it’s carousel (although we do get the bare bones of one when dead fairground barker Billy returns to see his troubled daughter, but it more resembles a revolving cage in Tom Scutt’s striking, stark circular design.). The result is a defiantly spare, unglamorous Carousel, one that cannot quite absorb the Americanisms of the original (clambakes, specifically New England references) but is almost as remarkable, in it’s way, as Nicholas Hytner’s astonishing 1992 production for the National, which is still the one that others tend to be measured against.

That version featured the last work of the late Sir Kenneth Macmillan who created dances that were seemingly light as air yet full of passion and weighty feeling. Here Drew McOnie’s choreography is more muscular and earthy, almost as though Jerome Robbins had discovered clog dancing. More angular than elegant, there is a raw dynamism that fully convinces in this gritty reinvention.

It’s Tom Deering’s brass band orchestrations that may be the single most surprising aspect of this production. Out are the soaring violins and melancholic cellos one might expect during the famous ‘Carousel Waltz’ and in are cornets, trombone, tuba and trumpet. It’s as if the Coronation Street theme tune had a musical baby with some old Broadway classics and the result is rousing, unexpected and instrumental (pun intended) in rooting Sheader’s bleak but compelling vision in it’s mid century coastal English milieu.

The ensemble are all terrific – it’s a lovely choice to transform the Heavenly Gatekeeper, traditionally played by a senior actor, into a chorus of women who, there but for the grace of God, could have ended up like Julie or may have had lives like her. The leading casting is a bit of a mixed bag however, with the women faring much better than the men. It’s a coup for Regents Park to have the National Theatre’s original Julie Jordan (Joanna Riding, incapable of giving a less-than-stellar performance) as Cousin Nettie, bringing a vitality and brisk warmth to a role that can sometimes feel a bit like the resident old banger, wheeled out periodically to impart homilies and gamely shake a leg during the company numbers,but not so here where Riding’s glorious but very real creation lights up the stage. Jo Eaton-Kent invests fairground owner Mrs Mullin with an unusual brittle dignity, grace and quiet desperation that makes her more impactful than usual.

Christina Modestou is fabulous, life-enhancing and pretty much show-stealing as a gorgeously funny but still deeply felt Carrie, in a performance that nearly equals the impact a not-yet-famous Janie Dee had in the role nearly thirty years ago. Carly Bawden’s haunting, watchful Julie is excellent but it takes a moment to get used to the fact that all her music is transposed down. Instead of the shimmering soprano notes we get a lyrical, lilting mezzo. The lack of chemistry with Declan Bennett’s somewhat wan fairground barker is ultimately disappointing however, and robs the piece of some of it’s emotional punch.

Bennett is a singer-actor of special quality, capable of remarkable intensity, as evidenced by his titular turn in Sheader’s enthralling reimagining of Jesus Christ Superstar here in the Park, or his starring role in the West End Once, but feels miscast here. The performance seems vocally thin (the notoriously difficult but potentially thrilling ‘Soliloquy’ feels like a real struggle) and dramatically a bit one-note. However, he stabs himself with such gusto that I was getting flashbacks to his Jesus having to nail himself to the cross last summer, presumably because the cast weren’t allowed to touch each other due to Covid risk, in the Superstar concert at this very address. His post-death reaction to the life struggles of the sixteen year old daughter he never knew (a very moving Amie Hibbert at the performance I saw) is genuinely affecting though.

Sam Mackay is a terrific talent but doesn’t find sufficient darkness in the villainous Jigger, not helped by some uncharacteristically inappropriate choreography that substitutes camp for threat in a key number, while John Pfujomena’s amusingly uptight, palpably ambitious Mr Snow could afford to show more authentic affection for Modestou’s sparkling Carrie.

Timothy Sheader’s thoughtful, visually monochromatic rendering won’t be for everyone, it’s too tough and unsentimental for those after a bit of summery escapism – indeed, some of the preview reports were so damning I wondered if we might be in for another divisive production along the same lines as Sheader’s 2012 Ragtime – but it has a lot to commend it, and lingers in the memory. Rodgers’s tunes are indestructible, and Deering’s novel musical approach is a welcome opportunity to re-examine them, and hearing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ performed as if by a (particularly accomplished) Northern community choir, brings a real thrill to the blood. I would absolutely buy/download a cast album of this uncommon Carousel. It’s not traditional but neither is it as radical an overhaul as Daniel Fish did with his bluegrass Oklahoma! in NYC a few years back. Go and judge it for yourself.

PARADISE

by Kae Tempest – a new version of Philoctetes by Sophocles

Directed by Ian Rickson

National Theatre/Olivier Theatre – until 11 September

https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/paradise

The title may be ironic but there is much to enjoy in Kae Tempest’s poetically embittered, anachronistic retelling of one of the lesser known Sophocles Greek dramas. It’s impossible to imagine it presented better than in Ian Rickson’s spare but impassioned staging, featuring a uniformly magnificent all female cast (at least, I think everybody in the acting company identifies as female, and I’ve scanned the programme for information to the contrary, but if I’ve made a mistake then I apologise). The Olivier is still in it’s in-the-round configuration and upon entry, as members of the Chorus wake up, greet each other and wander about looking a little like some of the denizens of the street that exist in real life just yards away from the hallowed concrete of the NT, Rae Smith’s cluttered, intentionally random set suggests we’re in for a sort of tropical Mother Courage.

Women existing in a war-torn environment is actually what this angry but measured script, where speech shades into poetry which in turn gives way to chanting and song to often hypnotic effect, is partly about. The Chorus are brilliant, healers who can turn into pragmatic looting vultures when the opportunity arises and privations make it necessary. Tempest’s muscular, gritty text draws alarming, if essential, parallels with the modern world, referring to a series of environmental disasters that have further ravaged the Earth, and it’s not much of a stretch to see post-Brexit Britain in some of the speeches decrying racism, pettiness, violence (“a shadow of her former might”).

Lesley Sharp’s bull-headed, damaged, oddly sympathetic Philoctetes, simultaneously clear-eyed and deluded, clutching his famous bow like it’s a life raft, is a masterpiece of character acting. She’s matched by a wildly impressive Anastasia Hille as a brutal but stiff-upper-lip Odysseus, the man who left Philoctetes for dead on this island non-paradise a decade earlier. Gloria Obianyo makes something affecting out of the young soldier caught between the two, the idealistic glow palpably dying in the eyes as the play progresses.

Grim and confrontational as much of this is, Paradise is also shot through with a sort of irresistible gallows humour that both relieves the gloom and further points up the darkness at the plays core. At one point, when the women prescribe wild garlic and oregano to treat a potentially fatal open wound, Hille’s Odysseus bellows at them in agonised frustration “I’m not a fucking pizza!”

All in all, Tempest, Rickson and this fine cast succeed in revitalising a little known classic and mining it for all of it’s modern day relevance in an evening that manages to be both thought-provoking and exciting, and not entirely without hope. It’s still sad to see the National as only partially open -hopefully the bookshops, restaurants and all three auditoria will be at full throttle soon- but it felt so good to be back.

MIke Oldfield’s TUBULAR BELLS – LIVE IN CONCERT

The 50th Anniversary Experience

Original composer: Mike Oldfield

Directed and choreographed by Yaron Lifschitz

Musical direction and arrangements by Robin A Smith

Featuring Circa Contemporary Circus

Royal Festival Hall – until 15 August, then touring internationally

https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/performance-dance/tubular-bells-live-concert

Released in 1973 when Mike Oldfield was a mere 20 years old, Tubular Bells was both a technically pioneering project (using multi-track recording to capture the composer playing all the instruments himself, then layering the different sessions together to create the now-epoch-making whole) and a global phenomenon, standing at the crossroads between rock and classical instrumental music. Simultaneously earthy and other worldly, it still exerts a haunting, fascinating pull, with it’s juxtaposition of delicate Celtic influences, thunderous rocking exhilaration, magical bells (tubular, of course) and an unparalleled sense of aural wonder that shades into melancholy and/or sinister at key moments. Not for nothing did one of the sections become the instantly recognisable theme tune to the seminal horror movie ‘The Exorcist’.

This fiftieth anniversary concert is described as an “Experience” and so it proves. Defiantly defying categorisation, it is an exhilarating, hugely satisfying combination of circus, recital, dance theatre, celebration and event. Fans won’t want to miss it but anybody else lucky to be there is likely to be converted.

Perhaps in an attempt to make it into more of a full evening’s entertainment, and to justify the ticket price, the first half of Fiery Angel and Senbla’s co-presentation is a more straightforward concert rendering of a trio of Oldfield’s other works, performed with great panache and sensitivity by Robin A Smith’s magnificent nine piece band. The last number before the interval is a kicking arrangement of the dreamy, memorable 1983 single ‘Moonlight Shadow’, Lisa Featherston’s dramatic, striking rendition a fascinating contrast to Maggie Reilly’s more ethereal original vocal.

The second half is the real event here though, and what an event it is: Smith’s musicians flawlessly perform the entire Tubular Bells album while Australian-European band of gymnasts-acrobats-dancers-superhumans, Circa Contemporary Circus, under the direction and choreography of Yaron Lifschitz, add a soaring, visionary physical dimension. The result is one of the most exciting hours of entertainment you’re likely to experience.

The tricks and feats of the extraordinary ten person ensemble are authentically breathtaking, often astonishingly, starkly lovely to behold, and meld seamlessly with the driving, enthralling music, complementing but never overshadowing it. The mention of interpretive dance can strike hysteria in many theatregoers, often with good reason, but never once does the work here threaten to become risible. It’s impossible not to marvel at the apparent contempt for the law of gravity or the sheer, exuberant athleticism of these human wonders, and the great, gorgeous walls of sound coming at you feel truly enhanced by the tumbling, hand-to-hand work, silks, flying (well almost). Like the performers themselves and like Tubular Bells itself, it’s muscular, beautiful and effortlessly commands the attention.

It’s a hell of a thrillride and a fitting way to commemorate the half century of a cultural phenomenon. Do not miss.

PARK BENCH

by Tori Allen-Martin

Act 1 (digital) directed by Christa Harris

Act 2 (live) directed by Sarah Henley and Timothy O’Hara

Park Theatre – until 14 August

https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/whats-on/park-bench

Tori Allen-Martin is a luminous, one-in-a-million talent: an instinctive, funny, truthful actor with presence and authority but also a remarkable warmth and relatability, she is also an astute writer well alive to the idiosyncrasies of modern speech and the sheer, sometimes beguiling strangeness of apparently ordinary people. These skills reach an apotheosis of sorts with this delightful, often moving, piece of writing.

The idea of Park Bench is so simple, neat and clever that you wonder why nobody’s done it before. A play in two acts, it’s about Liv and Theo, a youngish urban ‘sort-of‘ couple who aren’t quite together (in any sense of the word) but who also care too deeply about each other to leave each other alone. They describe themselves as friends but, as Allen-Martin’s intensely engaging, vulnerable but never pathetic Liv tells Theo in a particularly bruising moment: “I don’t fuck my friends”. The play’s USP, beyond the sheer quality of the writing, acting and direction, is that the first act is only available to watch digitally, in a tense but amusing, scarcely conciliatory Zoom call between the pair. The second act, a park bench meeting set up during the filmed section, takes place live onstage, and it’s a bit of a treat.

The amount of pain and truth, as well as rollicking good laughs that Allen-Martin packs into this beguiling fifty minutes is a wonder to behold, as Liv and Theo unpack a heck of a lot of things: the realisations about themselves that isolation and lockdown have  prompted, jealousy, mental health, miscommunication, much more, but perhaps most potently a tidal wave of mutual affection …. it carries an authentic ring of truth, not least because Allen-Martin’s writing generously spreads the foibles and the (often brilliant) one liners amongst the two characters.

Tim Bowie is terrific as feckless, tentative Theo. He’s not exactly a loser but he’s not a winner and there’s something deeply touching about watching him trying to articulate feelings that are coming as a surprise even to himself. Perhaps the most appropriate thing one can say about Allen-Martin’s marvellous performance as Liv is that when Theo describes her as gold, somebody whose very presence in other people’s lives enriches those lives, is that one can see exactly what he means. Her speech describing her temporary descent into very dark mental health terrain is heartbreaking.

Sarah Henley and Timothy O’Hara’s punchy, pacy staging is so natural and exquisitely calibrated that it genuinely feels like eavesdropping on a conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed this little gem of a play as I was watching it but the more I thought about it afterwards I realised that, like Theo with Liv, I basically loved it.