ajhlovestheatre

SEVEN METHODS OF KILLING KYLIE JENNER

by Jasmine Lee-Jones

directed by Milli Bhatia

Royal Court Theatre – until 27July

https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/sevenmethods/

Channelling your white hot rage into a work of art is an incredibly powerful act, and it feels like that is exactly what Jasmine Lee-Jones has done in this ambitious, dynamic piece. Ostensibly, it’s the story of a somewhat complicated female friendship: mixed race, gay Kara has little respect for Black, straight Cleo’s romantic choices, and still holds a degree of resentment over Cleo’s misjudged handling of Kara’s coming out. Set against the overwhelming maelstrom of social media, it also covers gender identity, the dehumanisation online relationships can result in, and the fetishism of Black bodies, both in the present day and throughout history.

It’s A LOT: an abrasive, dazzlingly original text peppered with modern cultural references, home truths and uncomfortable historical information. It’s not hard to see why this was such a sensation when it premiered at the smaller Upstairs theatre in 2019 and has now been brought back for a Main House run, where it still packs a hell of a punch.

It’s also often extremely funny. Lee-Jones has created salty, splendid dialogue for these two women, the kind of things that only people who truly know each other can say, often shocking, frequently wounding and sometimes suffused with the most wonderful affection. She also gets great comic mileage out of juxtaposing Cleo’s politically astute, incendiary ranting with sudden moments of relatable deflation: one moment she’s, with good reason, berating men, the next she’s baldly announcing “I’m craving dick”.

Ingeniously, Lee-Jones -and Leanne Henlon, the superb actress playing Cleo- creates a character who feels fully credible expressing both of those things…she always seems like a real person, not just a mouthpiece. At one point Kara (Tia Bannon, beautifully realising the combination of sweetness and street-tough in this tremendously likeable young woman) says to Cleo “just speak English….not dissertation” and the wonderful thing about this script is that it has it both ways: yes Cleo does do that, but you buy every moment of it.

You also buy every moment of Cleo’s online cataloguing the seven ways she envisions murdering Kylie Jenner, and it’s pretty unpleasant ….until a powerful speech near the conclusion where it becomes clear that what she’s describing is no worse than the fate of South African abductee Sarah Baartman, paraded around Europe in the late 18th Century as some sort of human curiosity before dying mysteriously at the age of twenty six.

There are also tender moments, gently handled, and there is something very moving hearing an audience of predominantly Black women responding audibly to Cleo’s speech about her Grandmother rubbing her nose not, as she initially thought, out of affection but in a vain attempt to make it smaller so that young Cleo would have an easier time of it if she could only conform to more conventional, i.e. white, perceptions of physical beauty.

Milli Bhatia’s production, played out under an immense stringed canopy by Rajha Shakiry like an art-installation representing all the strands of the internet but also the mental and physical bondage of Black women down the centuries as it bears down and closes in on Cleo when the play gathers pace, comes at us with a ferocious energy. I wish there was more clarity in the cacophonous sections where innumerable online voices crowd in to comment, mock, abuse or approbate, and the muddied, deafening sound design doesn’t help. The production, exciting as it is, doesn’t fully represent the published script, much of which is ‘written’ as a collage of gifs, memes and internet slang. Maybe a screen would help? I admired the piece as I was watching it but I understood it better reading it on the tube on the way home.

Jasmine Lee-Jones is a hell of a writer though, and seven methods of killing kylie jenner is a work of rare originality and intellect.

BACH & SONS

by Nina Raine

directed by Nicholas Hytner

Bridge Theatre – until 11 September

https://bridgetheatre.co.uk/whats-on/bach-and-sons/

Music is a potent life force, a non-verbal language capable of cutting right to the heart of an emotion or memory. Nina Raine’s richly engrossing new play also suggests that music can be weaponised, especially by those in thrall to, or in control of, its transcendent power while blithely unaware of the effect of their own behaviour on apparently lesser mortals, even when those mortals are in fact their closest family members.

What makes Simon Russell Beale’s blunt-headed, plain-speaking Johann Sebastian Bach such compelling company, beyond the unquestionable magnetism of the actor himself of course, is the disconnect between the man’s delicately beautiful creations (there is a lot of music in this production, it’s almost like an extra character) and the casual, if frequently oblivious, cruelties meted out to his nearest and dearest, and the brutal (but hilarious) way he dismisses musical artists he deems inferior. It’s a superb portrayal, often fascinatingly restrained where a lesser actor might be tempted to go for broke, and the physical deterioration depicted as Bach ages is meticulously done.

The play centres on Bach’s contrasting relationships with his two elder sons, both of whom are also musically gifted. First there’s Samuel Blenkin’s Carl, eager to please, slight and neurotic. Carl’s a grafter, desperate to earn his father’s approval yet not possessing the divine spark of artistic inspiration that would ignite the bonfire of paternal approbation. Then there’s the favoured son, Douggie McMeekin’s charming wastrel Wilhelm, a sentimental man-boy with all the talent but none of the drive, happy to drink his life and talent away, while being constantly financially bailed out by Daddy. It’s an interesting dynamic, made more complex by the fact that the two brothers clearly adore each other.

Throw into the mix a long suffering but adored wife (Pandora Colin, magnificent), an illicit affair with a beloved soprano (a luminous Racheal Ofori) who becomes the next wife, and an all-seeing, emotionally stunted sister-in-law, hauntingly rendered by Ruth Lass, who carries an endless torch for the composer, and you have something as compulsive as an upmarket soap opera, but in beautiful period frocks.

Raine’s text gleefully mixes anachronistic language with the period setting, and in Pradesh Rana’s quirky, hilarious Frederick The Great, flamboyantly sardonic but irreparably damaged by the unfeelingness with which his forbidden (and only true) love was cut adrift by his late father, throws up one genuinely unexpected and fascinating character.

The production values in Nicholas Hytner’s immaculate, if slightly long-winded, staging are ravishing: elegant set by Vicki Mortimer, costumes by Khadija Raza and wonderfully moody lighting by Jon Clark. Indeed, this is very much the sort of thing one would have expected to see on one of the main stages at the National during Hytner’s tenure as artistic director there. It’s Rolls Royce theatre although it may be lacking in edge for some people. It actually made me go home and listen to Bach. I wasn’t expecting that!

by Yasmin Joseph

Directed by Rebekah Murrell as part of the Re:Emerge season

Harold Pinter Theatre – until 3 July

https://sfp-reemergeseason.com/the-plays/jouvert/jouvert-ticket-calendar/#/

Part celebration, part social document, part history lesson, total triumph, Yasmin Joseph’s gorgeous piece, in Rebekah Murrell’s rambunctious production, tears up the rule book for playwriting in much the same way that Sonia Friedman’s Re:Emerge season -of which this is the second glorious offering- changes up the rules on producing new writing in the West End. Exciting new voices given handsome productions in major playhouses…. this probably wouldn’t have happened pre-pandemic, but what a wonderful thing it is.

And what a wonderful thing J’Ouvert is: a full-throated, big-hearted, potty-mouthed bellow of joy that turns into a scream of pain before changing back again. We need more Black voices telling Black stories on major stages, and when the result is as uplifting and accomplished as this, it’s an enriching jolt of fresh blood and excitement to the art form.

Set during the Notting Hill Carnival of 2017, in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster, it features a live DJ (Zuyane Russell, also a tartly funny actress), an irresistible array of characters (there are only three other actresses but it feels like there are way more), a veritable flotilla of feathered costumes, enough sequins and ticker tape to choke a cart-horse, an abundance of music and dance, the spirit of the Carnival founder Claudia Jones, and some pithy, wise observations on cultural appropriation, sexual politics and embracing ones heritage.

Played out on Sandra Falase and Chloe Lamford’s rising circular set, like the bowl of a giant speaker, under an eye-catching hanging garden of Carnival-esque paraphernalia including street signs, traffic cones and yet more technicolour plumage, it’s a warm, vital collage of a script; messy yes but joyously so, as any play about something as chaotic but uplifting as Carnival has every right to be. Leading an all-female production team, director Rebekah Murrell’s masterfully nails the contrasting tones between the exhilaration and freedom of the dance (superb movement direction by Shelley Maxwell), the simmering undercurrent then explosion of violence when two frustrated young men perceive themselves disrespected, the heartwarming, superbly observed comedy of a pair of Notting Hill old timers who have seen it all, and the fantastical sequences that take place in the heroine’s head. There’s a lot going on here, and most of it is absolutely terrific.

None of this would probably coalesce without performers of the quality of Gabrielle Brooks as fierce dancing queen Nadine and Sapphire Joy as her even fiercer, politically aware sidekick Jade. Seldom off stage, working at full throttle throughout and each playing a plethora of characters -female and male- these magnetic, thrillingly talented women are shape-shifting knockouts. Annice Boparai is also a delight as well meaning, right-on Nisha, daughter of a phenomenally wealthy Spanish-Indian couple and slumming it from nearby Holland Park. Joseph’s writing is so good though that although Nisha starts out as the inevitable comic foil -her squeaky poshness forever at odds with her mates’s streetwise attitude- the character goes on a real journey into something credible and touching.

This is an ambitious work of infinite richness…. poetic, energised, essential, with wings on its feet and fire in its belly. J’Ouvert is ultimately about female friendships as much as it’s about a gigantic celebration, and it sends audiences out on a high but also with full hearts. I absolutely adored it.

.

Written and directed by Eugene O’Hare

Omnibus Theatre until 4 July 2021

https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/the-human-connection/

Eugene O’Hare is truly an actor’s writer, in that he creates richly textured, multi-layered characters that give his casts something to really get their thespian gnashers into: see Miriam Margolyes’s venomously nasty yet oddly haunting old lady in Sydney And The Old Girl or the desperate, damaged, Orton-esque losers that populated his human trafficking tragi-comedy The Weatherman (both of these premiered up at the Park Theatre before the pandemic). These are not people one would necessarily want to spend any time with in real life but they undeniably make compelling theatrical company.

His creations for this double bill of short plays, a monologue for a father and a duet for mother and son, sharing a common theme of dislocation and parental guilt, are more low-key than in his full length work but they still pierce the heart and trouble the mind. His capacity for finding the lyricism in everyday speech reminds a source of real pleasure and wonder.

The first playlet Larry Devlin Wants To Talk To You About Something is a mini-masterpiece of bleak perfection. Stephen Kennedy (to be replaced by Ed Hogg from 30 June) as Larry is delivering a confession: as a late middle aged man, he is still plagued by guilt from a time when he struck his own child. He goes on to relate how this same child now has an adult life of his own, the pair have a friendship of sorts, and yet still Larry frets. Why?

What follows is not even an especially original plot point (which I am not about to reveal, by the way) but what lifts it into something fine and extraordinary is the gritty, detailed melancholy of the writing, and a performance of such delicacy, precision and pathos by Kennedy that it’s almost unbearable to watch. The misery seeps out of every pore, and it’s there in the slouchy, hands-in-pockets stance, the querulous semi-smile under haunted, hopeless eyes: here is a man who has long forgotten what it’s like to be happy. It’s beautiful, detailed work….O’Hare himself directs, and he and his leading actor are alive to every nuance. This is spellbinding stuff, and Kennedy is nothing short of magnificent.

Child 786, the second piece, is arguably more ambitious, being a response to the pandemic, and specifically the UK’s response to it on both popular and political levels, refracted through an almost Pinter-esque prism as a mother (Ishia Bennison, hugely impressive) welcomes her grown-up son Lennox home from what might be some sort of recovery facility. In the meantime, Covid has happened and we watch both of them struggle with a changed world, her retreating into banal musings and buzzwords, he alternating between passivity and frustration, superbly handled by Joshua Williams who is astonishing at simultaneously projecting vulnerability and aggression.

The real dramatic meat of Child 786 lies in Lennox’s conviction that as a young child he was sent by his mother to be part of an unspecified, but highly sinister, vaccination programme. So convincing are both actors, and so unerring is the dialogue O’Hare gives them (apart from a slight tendency to have Lennox spout facts and figures at length, which gets a little wearisome) that it is never clear which, if either of them, is telling the truth. Or is it just a question of perception? The ambiguity is tantalising, and if it lacks the intensity and focus of its predecessor, Child 786 nevertheless succeeds in being an engaging, thought provoking meditation on the unreliability of memory, and a darkly humorous juxtaposition of the humdrum with something potentially much more alarming.

These plays, whose impact is felt long after their short running times are over, were originally scheduled to be part of the Barbican Centre’s Ghost Light festival, which ended up being shelved due to the pandemic, and it is a considerable coup for the delightful Omnibus Theatre to get to premiere them. A brief but satisfying evening.

Written and performed by Amanda Wilkin

Directed by Elayce Ismail

Soho Theatre until 17 July

https://sohotheatre.com/shows/shedding-a-skin/

At a time when Black voices are joyously, if belatedly and still insufficiently, resounding throughout the theatrical community, it is befitting that this powerhouse of new writing reopens with Amanda Wilkin’s spiky but beguiling monologue, winner of the 2020 Verity Bargate Award, and with a press night during the week of the 73rd anniversary of the Windrush migration. The tale of Myah, a young mixed race woman rudderless in the big city after quitting a job and a relationship in quick succession, only to find herself forming an unexpected bond with the feisty, mysterious, older Black lady she lodges with, it’s a rather lovely piece that preaches the importance of never judging a book by its cover, and also of never underestimating or writing off ones elders.

Wilkin is a born storyteller, masterfully evoking vivid locations and situations with a command of language that is at once comic, relatable and concise. As a performer she combines a likeable stage presence, a clown’s goofy physicality and the lithe malleability of a dancer. The wired, coltish energy she brings to Myah is in striking contrast to the watchful stillness with which she invests the saturnine Mildred, who increasingly becomes the central figure as the play draws on, and more of her fascinating back story is revealed.

Running in counterpoint to the central story, and punctuating it at regular intervals, is a succession of snapshots of other, apparently unrelated lives transforming themselves -shedding skins, as it were- starting off nearly six hundred miles away but getting ever closer with each fragment, adding a soothing but urgent universality to Wilkin’s script. Rosanna Vize’s set provides another satisfying metaphor for the play’s title and principal theme, transforming from a soulless, roller blinded box to an organic, light-filled eyrie by the end of Elayce Ismail’s nicely judged, if occasionally over-busy staging.

If Shedding A Skin sometimes feels more like a dramatic storytelling rather than a true drama, only fully coming to powerful theatrical life in a sequence where a frustrated Myah rages at Mildred, it is a wonderfully engaging one, full of heart and humanity. The ending brought a real lump to my throat. This is vital, Black woman-centric writing, but it is absolutely for everybody. Enthusiastically recommended.

Photograph of Amanda Wilkin by Helen Murray

REASONS YOU SHOULD(N’T) LOVE ME

Written and performed by Amy Trigg

Directed by Charlotte Bennett

Kiln Theatre – until 12 June

https://kilntheatre.com/whats-on/reasons-you-shouldnt-love-me/#

Amy Trigg has already won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Playwrighting for this sparky, bracingly honest monologue (which she also performs, brilliantly), and I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if she garners a couple more. This is a captivating script, full of wit and pithy observations, sublimely directed by Charlotte Bennett.

Trigg plays Juno, a sassy, likeable Essex girl with a wicked sense of fun, not to mention a decent circle of mates, wonderfully supportive parents, if not actually a boyfriend then certainly a “friend with benefits” (even if it’s abundantly clear that she could do better), her own flat ….and a wheelchair, owing to the fact that she was born with spina bifida. Trigg’s script covers in some detail the surgeries and scars that Juno bears, and the practical challenges she regularly faces, but the real meat of the writing lies in the compelling, and occasionally very moving, depiction of the gulf between this young woman’s outward confidence and the inner fragility of a person who, through no fault of her own, has been marked out as ‘different’ from birth.

Not for a second does any of this become mawkish, indeed much of it is laugh-out-loud hilarious, but both writing and performance are deceptively clever. With her scarlet trouser suit, mass of curls knotted above a cherubic face, and some formidable comedy timing, Trigg presents a sunny, funny woman that is so easy to immediately warm to and root for. As a result, when she confides that she tried to hurl herself out of a window when she was eight, or she intimates how lonely she sometimes gets, the effect is pretty devastating…. the darkness very much throws the humour into stark relief, and words like “deformed” and “broken” drop like verbal hand grenades. Trigg’s ability to turn on a dime from wryly cheeky to utter despair is seriously impressive.

Juno’s journey as she searches for love and self acceptance, by way of uncomfortable hospital visits, some fairly mortifying sexual encounters, a couple of embarrassing drunken stories, a tribe of faith healers, and seventeen visits to the musical Cats (!), is one that it is emphatically worth going on with her. Ms Trigg is a talent to watch and rejoice in: there are SO many reasons to love both her and this thoroughly engaging piece of theatre.

WALDEN

by Amy Berryman

Directed by Ian Rickson as part of the Re:Emerge season

Harold Pinter Theatre – until 12 June

https://sfp-reemergeseason.com/the-plays/walden/walden-ticket-calendar/#/

Gotta hand it to Sonia Friedman, she doesn’t mess about. As the theatre industry slowly, carefully makes it’s way back into the light, one could completely understand producers playing it safe post-pandemic and only programming sure-fire hits and the sort of “timeless classics” that will have the moneyed classes reaching for their credit cards. Not so Ms Friedman however… Gawd bless her, she is presenting a trio of brand new plays by neophyte writers right in the West End. Frankly, if the other two are even half as good as Amy Berryman’s engrossing Walden, then we are in for a blazing theatrical summer.

High quality, challenging new drama was once a regular part of the West End landscape, but in recent decades the few instances that made it into the gilded playhouses of Shaftesbury Avenue were typically sold out transfers from critically approved powerhouses such as the Young Vic, the Royal Court or the Almeida. Many of these –The Inheritance, Jerusalem, The Ferryman, for example- were also Friedman productions. A notable and honourable anomaly is Jack Holden’s astonishing monologue-on-amphetamines Cruise, but that is the exception rather than the rule.

All the more joyous and remarkable then to welcome this quietly ambitious debut, and in a first class production by Ian Rickson with a trio of flawless performances to boot. It’s the sort of play, staging and casting that haunts you long after it’s 100 minute running time is over.

The play’s title comes from the 1854 memoir of transcendentalist writer Thoreau, chronicling his meditative two year spell living like a hermit amongst nature in a remote lakeside cabin in the woodland wilds of Massachusetts. Berryman places her heart-catching text in a similar such cabin, but this is some time in the future, although the environmental horrors and global unrest described by way of scene setting suggests that this is a year disturbingly close to our own. The overall feel is both bucolic and ominous.

The cabin -exquisitely realised by designer Rae Smith- is inhabited by nervy, fragile Stella (Gemma Arterton, never better) and her big-hearted, apparently more straightforward partner Bryan (an equally magnificent Fehinti Balogun) who is a leading light of an environmental group called Earth Advocates. They bicker amiably if uneasily as they prepare for the arrival of Stella’s estranged sister Cassie (“short for Cassiopeia – a queen” as Stella tartly observes), an astronaut just returned from a space mission. Cassie and Stella’s late father, a brutal task master, was also an astronaut as it turns out.

In a performance of outstanding delicacy and detail (note the way she subtly recoils when Bryan points out that she underwent voluntary sterilisation to qualify for the space programme) Lydia Wilson fascinatingly, painstakingly suggests that Cassie is a brilliantly clever young woman stricken with the creeping realisation that the life she has carved out for herself may not be worth the sacrifices she has made. It turns out that Arterton’s distressed Stella is every bit as brilliant as her twin, having been an architect for NASA before walking away from it all, and the rivalry between the sisters is rivetingly conveyed both in the writing and the performances.

Some of the intellectual excitement of the play -and there is plenty- comes from Berryman pitting Bryan’s über-Green ideology against Cassie’s pragmatic, more dynamic approach to nature and the planet, and then confounding our expectations. I was reminded slightly of Pinter’s haunting, elliptical Old Times, where a female interloper goes into spiritual battle with a male adversary over another woman who they both have shared history with, but the emotional charge here is much stronger. If there is a weakness, it’s in the somewhat predictable suggestion of an attraction between Bryan and his beloved’s identical twin, but even there the resolution to that, insofar as there is one, isn’t necessarily what one would expect.

Nonetheless, this is a bewitching, tremendously rich piece, simultaneously as organic and earthy as the woods where the action plays out, and as ethereal and transporting as the heavens which so fascinate and vitiate the warring sisters. It’s very funny and even joyful at times, as the twins connect fitfully over shared memories, while an amusedly excluded Bryan looks on. I won’t spoil the final scene but suffice it to say that it is deeply moving -grief stricken even, although nobody has died, quite the opposite- and provokes a recalibration of the sisters relationship, and forces one to reconsider which is the more selfish of the two.

Emma Laxton’s moody, menacing soundscape runs in counterpoint to Berryman’s satisfying, accomplished script throughout, evocative but never distracting, and Azusa Ono’s shape-shifting lighting design adds another layer of excellence to this seriously fine production.

Even under normal circumstances, a debut play as strong and thought-provoking as this one would be something to applaud but at a time when every theatrical opening -well, alright, ALMOST every opening- feels like a little miracle, Walden is even more of a cause for celebration. Roll on both Ms Berryman’s next play and the rest of the Re:Emerge season: the bar has been set very very high.

HARM

by Phoebe Eclair-Powell

Directed by Atri Banerjee

Bush Theatre – until 26 June

https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/event/harm/

I’m not sure what they’re putting in the water in Ennis, County Clare, Ireland, but it appears to have enabled the Gough family to produce not one but two extraordinary actresses. Denise Gough understandably became a critics darling and multiple award winner for her intense, enthralling work as a drug addict teetering on the brink of oblivion in the National Theatre smash hit People, Places And Things. If Phoebe Eclair-Powell’s punchy, gripping monologue Harm doesn’t quite end up having the same effect on Kelly Gough’s career that’s only because this is a less seismic and grandiose piece than Duncan Macmillan’s fierce, big-mouthed extravaganza, and not because Ms Gough Jr is any less exciting a talent than her older sister.

She holds the stage – otherwise populated only by an enormous stuffed toy which gets mounted, pounded and eviscerated during the course of the performance – for a riveting, often hilarious 70 minutes, not so much playing as embodying an unnamed London estate agent who develops an unhealthy online obsession with a social media influencer who she has been trying to sell a house to. The pitfalls of fake celebrity, and the massive gulf between ones online presence and real life, might feel like shooting fish in a barrel when it comes to creating a piece of contemporary drama, but Eclair-Powell’s ingenuity as a story teller coupled with Gough’s astonishing ability to come across as sinister, sympathetic and wildly, bitterly, funny, often all at the same time, make this into something unusual and compulsive.

Atri Banerjee’s focussed direction serves the two women’s work exceptionally well, providing a pared back, vaguely unsettling environment – enhanced by Lee Curran’s sulphuric lighting and a compellingly doom-laden sound score by Jasmin Kent Rodgman – for Gough to masterfully chart the principal character’s downward trajectory from cock-sure bantering to hollow-eyed desperation. Gough also sketches in a variety of other characters, including her quarry’s dismissive Aussie boyfriend and a fairly ghastly yoga-advocating influencer, with wit, economy and accuracy.

When we first encounter Woman, as she’s referred to in the playtext, she’s vivacious albeit with a slightly manic edge but over the course of the next hour or so, Gough devastatingly lays bare all the character’s loneliness, neediness and disconnectedness, yet crucially never quite loses our affection. Her body language is fascinating: at once languid and wired, like a physical manifestation of profound unhappiness, it’s a genuine tour de force. Even if the central performance is more remarkable than the play that houses it, it’ll still be essential to see what both Phoebe Eclair-Powell and Kelly Gough do next. Recommended.

Music and Lyrics by Neil Bartram

Book by Brian Hill

Directed by Matthew Rankcom for The Grey Area Theatre Company

Southwark Playhouse until 12 June 2021, live streamed 22 May

https://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

We may be (hopefully) coming out of a global pandemic but there is -despite the one way systems, compulsory face masks, and perspex screens dividing groups of audience members- something comfortingly “business as usual” about this reopening offering at Southwark. YOU ARE HERE may be The Grey Area Theatre Company’s first time at this South London venue, but this frequently delightful chamber piece very much adheres to what feels like the Southwark Playhouse “house style” of quirky, new or seldom seen musicals in nicely inventive stagings with West End standard production values and casting.

Premiered at Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House in the USA back in 2018, Neil Bartram and Brian Hill’s ninety minute musical takes as its starting point the first men on the moon in 1969 and the effect that a whole new universe of possibilities suddenly opening up has on Diana, a suburban Chicago housewife. From Shirley Valentine to Flowers For Mrs Harris and The Bridges of Madison County, centring on an apparently “ordinary” woman transforming her life into something rather more exciting, is not particularly original, but Hill’s book has a couple of twists up its sleeve -one of which colours the way you’ll perceive the rest of the evening- that render You Are Here a particularly absorbing and haunting example of that storytelling trope.

With it’s attractive blend of ‘legit’ MT and 1960s pop idioms, Bartram’s music is occasionally reminiscent of Jason Robert Brown’s Broadway score for The Bridges of Madison County (seen over here at the Menier in 2019) and also of Jeanine Tesori’s exquisite work on Caroline (Or Change) and Fun Home; if it never quite hits the delirious heights of brilliance that this trio of musicals achieves, it provides a witty, evocative and dramatic aural landscape. The rhyme-heavy lyrics are less successful overall but only occasionally descend into triteness. Some of the songs really are lovely, and they sound fresh as paint in Laura Bangay’s small-but-perfectly-formed orchestrations, played by an accomplished all-female trio led by Bangay herself.

Matthew Rankcom’s production flows effortlessly, melding together with considerable skill the more fanciful elements of the story with some unsettling moments of harsh reality. Libby Todd’s deceptively clever set design simultaneously evokes the kitschy, wood-and-stone decor of 1960s Middle America and the sometimes smooth, sometimes cratered, always bewitching surface of the moon itself.

Wendi Peters sympathetically plays Diana with a compelling, entirely convincing combination of anxiety, hyper-vigilance shading into wide-eyed wonder, and sheer heartbreak. She also finds a welcome leavening of mischief in the role and sings with a rangy, medium-sized belt that can flip from sweet to shrill within one bar of music. It’s a very fine performance.

Her three supporting players -providing a sort of watchful, sardonic musical Greek Chorus when not playing a variety of roles- are no less impressive. Rebecca McKinnis invests Diana’s more sophisticated friend with a brittle elegance and humour, and Phil Adèle brings real weight to a traumatised drifter Diana encounters, and satisfying warmth to an unexpected potential love interest. Jordan Frazier displays genuine star quality as a hotel maid with hidden depths who befriends our heroine, she’s a real find.

Ultimately, You Are Here is a bittersweet confection, beautifully presented: at first, it perhaps seems rather slight but as it gathers pace it becomes a genuinely affecting exploration of loneliness and disillusion, and a gently uplifting paean to the spark of the extraordinary in everybody. I rather loved it.

VERY BITTERSWEET RE-READING IN 2021 ….

As the London production of HAMILTON goes on sale amid much fanfare, garnering extensive interest far beyond the usual circle of musical theatre enthusiasts, let’s take a look at some other recent or prospective transatlantic transfers.

Although it feels like they have been in the West End forever, The Lion King, Wicked and The Book Of Mormon all originated on Broadway -where they are still playing- as did more recent successful imports Beautiful, School Of Rock, Kinky Boots, Aladdin and Motown, while Jersey Boys is about to complete near enough decade-long runs on both sides of the Atlantic.

Not every show has fared as well as these however: Memphis won the 2010 Tony for Best Musical but struggled to fill the Shaftesbury for even a year despite excellent reviews and a much praised star turn from Beverley Knight.

The Drowsy Chaperone was even more of a disappointment, financially speaking. This quirky musical-within-a-musical had been an acclaimed hit on Broadway and arrived in London in 2007 with original star and co-creator Bob Martin as well as Queen of British Musical Theatre Elaine Paige, for once revealing her comedy chops as the permanently plastered title character. It had fabulous word-of-mouth, some terrific reviews…and it lasted two months. A notably lavish production, the show had clearly been expected to run -Lulu was reportedly lined up to take over as the chaperone after the first six months-, and in her book Memories, even Paige admits she had no idea why it failed.

Spring Awakening, an alt-rock take on the 1891 German expressionist drama about teen angst and suicide, was the talk of the 2006/7 Broadway season, winning eight Tony awards and launching many of its young cast, which included Jonathan Groff and Lea Michele, to stardom. In an usual move, the London production didn’t open in the West End but over at the Lyric Hammersmith for a limited run, where it proved a hot ticket. The London company included Aneurin Barnard and rising star Natasha J Barnes. The show transferred almost immediately to the West End’s Novello Theatre and folded after a mere two months. The advertising campaign may have been a contributory factor: the posters, featuring the enviously photogenic and attitude-y young cast, were everywhere but looked more like advertisements for a trendy vintage clothes shop than a stage musical. Plus the ticket prices in town may have been prohibitively high for the late teen crowd that would seem to be the core audience of this audacious, exciting piece. Even now when West End musical geeks talk about shows that didn’t make it, Spring Awakening is at the top of the list of “should-have-been hits”.

With Caroline, Or Change and Fela, the National hosted a pair of acclaimed New York musicals that probably wouldn’t have stood much of chance had they opened cold in the West End. The former had only actually lasted three months on Broadway despite an astonishing central performance by Tonya Pinkins -who reprised her role in London- as a disempowered black housemaid living through a time of seismic social and political change in 1960s America. Jeanine (Fun Home) Tesori’s eclectic score -with shades of blues, gospel, Motown, even Jewish klezmer music- is undeniably challenging, as was the spiky, politically potent book by Tony Kushner, whose Angels In America will be receiving a keenly anticipated all star revival at the National this spring. Intellectually and emotionally, Caroline, Or Change was very much an evening “on” -as opposed to a night off- but that didn’t stop it from winning the 2007 Olivier award for Best Musical, beating two other, rather more commercially obvious, Broadway imports in Avenue Q and Spamalot.

Fela was a rollicking, confrontational stage biography of Afrobeat pioneer and activist Fela Kuti that did such great business at the National for the winter of 2010/1 that it was brought back for a return season at Sadlers Wells the following year. As with Caroline, Or Change, the original Broadway star transferred with the production, and Sahr Ngaujah proved a force of nature as the eponymous Kuti.

In recent years, Once -based on the Irish indie film- enjoyed a decent London run to rival its New York success, while Legally Blonde was actually a bigger hit here than on Broadway, although that was undoubtedly much to do with the casting of audience favourite Sheridan Smith in the lead role of Elle Woods. On the other hand, Disney’s Newsies -a solid 2012 success in New York, based on a beloved but commercially disappointing live action film- was rumoured for a London outing that never materialised, even holding preliminary rounds of open auditions over here. Of course, it may still happen one day…after all, we were due to get Dreamgirls back in the early 80s when it was tearing up the Great White Way. That didn’t pan out at the time, but they’re sure here now.

Before the phenomenon that is Hamilton arrives here this Autumn, the Broadway stage adaptation of An American In Paris arrives at the Dominion in March. Featuring the work of classical choreographer Christopher Wheedon, and with New York City Ballet’s Robert Fairchild and the Royal Ballet’s Leanne Cope reprising their Broadway performances in the roles immortalised on film by Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, it will be interesting to see how Londoners take to this effortlessly classy, Gershwin-scored show. Such a dance-heavy, sophisticated piece would undoubtedly have sold out at, say, Sadlers Wells or the Peacock for a limited season, but the producers have taken the bold step of attempting to fill one of the largest houses in the West End for an open-ended run.

The casting process is just getting underway for the London production of Waitress, the Sara Bareilles musicalisation of an indie film about, guess what, a waitress trapped in a loveless marriage and a dead end job in a small town American diner. A solid success in New York, the show boasts a lovely, if not especially dynamic, score, a demanding central role -taken originally by Jessie Mueller who won a Tony for her Carole King in the Broadway staging of Beautiful- and a timely theme of female empowerment.

The two musicals which have received the most buzz so far in this Broadway season, and are consequently selling out on a regular basis, are Dear Evan Hansen and Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. Both would seem likely candidates for a London transfer in the not-too-distant future: The Great Comet is a wildly imaginative, highly eccentric “electropop opera” based on a tiny section of War And Peace, for which the entire Imperial Theatre has been cleverly -and expensively- turned into a lavish pre-revolution Russian supper club with performance platforms and walkways all over the house, and huge swathes of audience onstage. It’s an exhilarating, slightly crazy immersive experience unlike anything else in the musical theatre canon, and a good fit for somewhere like the National in a future season.

Dear Evan Hansen is the biggest news of the current season -although there are still months to go before the Tony cut-off date- and is a very hot ticket indeed. Featuring a universally acclaimed central performance by Ben Platt, best known for the Pitch Perfect movie series, it’s a boldly contemporary, deeply moving look at adolescence, parenting, social media, bullying and the need to fit in. Often as hilarious as it is heartrending, the musical has a score by up-and-coming songwriting team Pasek and Paul, whose work is currently being heard in cinemas worldwide in the award-winning La La Land. Audiences and critics alike have embraced the show and Cameron Mackintosh is rumoured to be looking at it which means it could be on this side of the pond sooner rather than later. The staging is high-tech but not huge so it would be an excellent fit for the Noel Coward or the Gielgud.

It’s not entirely a one-way street of course: Matilda and Billy Elliot enjoyed hugely successful Broadway runs, and later this season Tim Minchin’s musical version of Groundhog Day -a complete sell out at the Old Vic last summer- arrives in New York, with the same leading man, Andy Karl, and British production team led by Matthew Warchus. Broadway will also see Charlie & The Chocolate Factory shortly, albeit in a drastically revised version from the one that just closed at Drury Lane.

Hamilton of course is the biggest news of all, and the ticket pre-sale is now on. The show already has a vociferous local fan base here, and there is additional demand for seats from the US as wealthy Americans realise that they have a better shot -pun intended- at getting tickets to the London production than either the New York or Chicago versions which are booked solid months in advance. A similar thing happened when the West End productions of Rent, Wicked and The Book Of Mormon went on sale, but Hamilton is more of a cultural juggernaut than any of those, and additionally the weak pound makes visiting London more appealing than ever. Unlike Lin-Manuel Miranda’s much loved other success, In The Heights which just concluded an extended run at Kings Cross in a smaller scale British production, Hamilton is arriving here in a replica of Thomas Kail’s magnificent, multi-award winning Broadway staging. By Autumn 2017 everybody will “want to be in the room where it happens.” Good luck with getting tickets!

Sent from my iPad