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Bette and Joan (Susan Elkin reviews)

Show: Bette and Joan

Society: Bromley Little Theatre

Venue: Bromley Little Theatre

Credits: Anton Burge

 

Performance Date: 14/01/2022

Bette and Joan

4 stars

Anton Burge’s play (2011) is a taut two-hander exploring the famously stormy relationship between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. It is set in 1962, when they filmed, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, a phenomenally successful film which revived both their careers and, all importantly, “turned a profit” for Warner Brothers.

The two actresses ( I usually write/say “actor” but they wouldn’t have done) are on either side of the stage in their dressing rooms surrounded by costumes, props and personal belongings (set by Paul Doust). Upstage and up a few steps is a window and an area to suggest the film set itself.

We watch Donna Dawson as Crawford knitting and being sweetly feminine or pretending to be. Then Pauline Armour turns up, coarse, forthright and aggressive as Davis. There is a lot of well conveyed tension between the characters and professionally managed chemistry between two pretty competent actors.

We watch Armour converting herself into the hideously disturbing Baby Jane, a former child actress who now torments her paraplegic sister. She whitens her face, applies doll-like colour hides her hair and finally dons the scary ringletted blond wig – all the time talking sometimes in monologues, sometimes on the phone, and sometimes directly, bitchily to Crawford.

Dawson’s Joan is nicely over made up – eye shadow and lipstick trickling into the carefully constructed creases – as she tries to hide her fears, inadequacies and resentment of Davis behind a gentle mask suggesting sweetness. Actually, the point of the piece, is that she gives as good as she gets.

Both performances are engaging and the play is well directed (Scott James) but I found the accent work troubling. Davis came from New England (as she reminds us several times in this play). At the beginning, that’s how she sounds but it quickly wanes and soon there’s barely a trace of American left, let alone anything as nuanced as Massachusetts. If this was a directorial decision because accents are hard to sustain and after a while the audience won’t notice then I think it’s a mistake.

Crawford, on the other hand, came from Texas and started out as a dancer – which Davis can’t resist snobbily mentioning several times in Bette and Joan. Perhaps she ironed out the Texan drawl, Dawson gives her no trace of it. In fact, after a few minutes, like Davis, she barely sounds American and that feels odd.

And a final note: there is no point whatever in printing cast biogs in the programme in black on red in a font so tiny that it is totally illegible. Even in daylight with a magnifying class the next morning, I struggled and my sight, with glasses, is perfectly OK for all normal purposes.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/bette-and-joan/

All Saints

The centrepiece of this interesting concert was the world premiere of a work written in 1806. Ferdinand Ries, a pupil of Beethoven, left several substantially reworked versions of his Grand Concert pour le Pianoforte (op 123). Found in the State Library of Berlin in 2005, by Adam Swayne, this is the hitherto unperformed original version. Swayne, who is an academic as well as pianist and composer was at this concert to debut his discovery.

Well, it’s an uneven work. So close to Beethoven in places that you can hear the (unconscious?) quotations, it also seems, at times disjointed. The piano entry in the first movement, for example, is pretty remote from the long orchestral introduction and the very jolly rondeau in the finale – which I went home humming – feels as if it belongs somewhere else especially when it suddenly gives way to Beethovenian heavy chords. After all, presumably Herr Ries wasn’t happy with it otherwise he would not have gone on to make so many revisions? Pleasant as it is, I don’t think this work is going to rival Beethoven’s fifth “Emperor” piano concerto or Schumann’s A minor masterpiece of 1845 in the popularity stakes any time soon.

That said, after a slightly nervous start, Swayne played it with huge commitment and plenty of panache. He was clearly enjoying very much bringing this work to an audience at last and he evidently had lots of supporters in the audience who cheered when he appeared. There were a few problems with timing though and watching Swayne’s involvement with the orchestra I wondered if it might have been better conducted from the keyboard.

The orchestra generally played well – especially given that leader Shereen Godber had stepped up at a few hours’ notice because the regular leader tested positive for Covid on the day of the concert. During the opener Another Orpheus (by local composer, John Hawkins who was present) conductor Andrew Sherwood generated lots of cohesion though the incisive chords at the beginning, the arresting solo viola work (evocatively played by Ros Hanson) and the final dying away to silence at the end.

The second half gave us the much more familiar Haydn Symphony 99. The start was ragged. Haydn’s slow introductions are notoriously challenging. Then it danced off in confident relief with the Creation-like brass interjections nicely pointed up. I also admired the playing of the fugal passages in the finale played with warmth and precision. It will be good, though, when Covid restrictions no longer prevent stand-sharing for string players and they don’t have to negotiate page turns as individuals.

All in all it was a worthwhile and workmanlike concert. It was the first time I’ve heard Lewes-based The Musicians of All Saints and I look forward to hearing them again, preferably somewhere without the slightly fuzzy acoustic of St Mary’s Kemptown – beautiful as its architecture is.

First published by Lark Reviews: https://www.larkreviews.co.uk/?p=6739

Five Guys Named Moe continues at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London until 16 January 2021.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

First produced in 1990 (at Stratford East and then the Lyric in Shaftesbury Avenue), this show still gleams, 32 years later – especially in the intimate traverse space of Upstairs at the Gatehouse.

Yes, it’s a jukebox musical (featuring the hits of Louis Jordan and other music) and yes, the framing narrative is feeble but with a cast as committedly energetic as this and a fine five-piece band (MD is Griffin Jenkins) on view at one end of the stage, it becomes a compelling piece of entertainment.

Nomax (Juan Jackson) has made a mess of the relationship with his girlfriend and turned to drink for comfort. Then five all-singing, all-dancing chaps emerge from the radio to sort him out. Not much of a plot but never mind …

Read the rest of this review at Musical Theatre Review: https://musicaltheatrereview.com/five-guys-named-moe-upstairs-at-the-gatehouse/

AS Byatt writes in colour. There’s a vibrant pre-Raphelite quality about her prose in these stories which instantly reminded me of her wonderful 1990, Booker prize-winning novel Possession which features the life and work of a Victorian poet modelled on Christina Rossetti. In ‘A Stone Woman’, for example, we read of “the first glacial tongues pouring down into the plains, white and shining above the green marshes and under the blue sky.” Byatt is, among things, an art historian and that knowledge shines through on every page. And ‘Precipice-Encurled’ is a fictional study of a specific painting.

A well-known books website describes this volume as “gothic fiction” but that’s inaptly reductive. As David Mitchell points out in his excellent introduction, you cannot pigeon-hole these eighteen stories. AS Byatt simply doesn’t do genre. The longest story in this collection, for instance – almost a novella – is ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’. It nips through fairy tale, travel writing and explores the very nature of story telling because its central character is a professional narratologist – who meets a Djinn in a hotel bathroom. So does ‘Raw Material’ which is about a teacher of creative writing who, at last discovers talent, in his group in an unlikely format. Then he visits the writer’s home and suddenly we’re in a shocking Henry Jamesian world.

‘The July Ghost’ is a story about a dead  child who haunts a garden. “There is no boy” declares his mother fiercely at one point. I once heard Byatt talking about this on the radio and of course it’s a fictional exploration of grief with an autobiographical undertow. Byatt’s own son died in a road accident when he was 11. ‘Racine and the Tablecloth’ is rooted in Byatt’s unhappy boarding school past and ‘Sugar’ clearly owes a lot to Byatt’s own parents. Daughter of QC and a Browning scholar, Byatt has written and talked quite a lot about her difficult mother – as has her sister, novelist Margaret Drabble.

I have read many of these stories before in the distant past when they were published in various collections but some are new to me because they were written more recently and first appeared in various publications. ‘The Narrow Jet’, for instance, was first published in Paris Review 173 Spring 2005 and ‘Sea Story’ in the Guardian 15 March, 2013. Medusa’s Ankles is a new collection published in 2021.

AS Byatt – surely one of our most accomplished authors – is now 85 and it is possible that her best lies behind her. But what a best that is! Later this year I shall re-read Possession a book I adored when I first read it (more than once) in the 1990s.

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Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Tenderness by Alison Macleod.

 

 

Paula Hawkins really is quite something isn’t she? First there was The Girl on The Train (although not her first novel) which got right under people’s skin and now this taut 2021 title which also hits you between the eyes but in a different way. No wonder it was a Sunday Times bestseller last year.

We’re on the canal in the Islington/Clerkenwell area where some houseboats are moored near some houses. A young man, an artist, who lives alone on one of them is brutally stabbed to death early one morning. Four people seem to know something about this: Miriam who lives on the next door boat, Laura who has apparently spent the night with him, Theo a novelist who lives nearby and Theo’s ex wife Carla.

Hawkins’s great strength is the way she drip feeds information as she gradually reveals the complex network of connections between the four main characters. It’s a long way from standard crime fiction and it’s writing for grown ups. You have to pay attention to pick up the subtleties. She sometimes reminds me of Ruth Rendell.

At the heart of the drama are two subplots – how did Theo and Carla’s infant son die when he was in the charge of her late sister, Angela? And did Theo steal the plot of a manuscript shown him by Miriam which is predicated on a dreadful incident in her youth? It’s all immaculately woven together and I didn’t spot the end-twist coming – not the one relating to the opening murder but the one concerning Theo’s novel. You read the last page with a triumphant sense of justice having been done.

The characterisation is delightful too. Laura’s elderly friend Irene is one of the best fictional folk I met in the whole of 2021. And one really feels for poor tortured, anguished Angela whom we encounter only through the memories of others. The sense of canal side life is warmly evoked as well – I’d quite like to live on a houseboat if I could make it as attractive and well organised as Miriam’s.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Medusa’s Ankles by AS Byatt

This is a substantial short story first published in mini book form in 1999. Over the years Bennett has developed a pretty creative relationship with London Review of Books and this story is an example of that – and one of several such tiny, Beatrix Potter-size books on my bookshelves with Bennett’s name on.

Bennett’s characterisic laconic lugubriousness  colours  the story of Denis Midgley’s experience of his father’s death. It’s both funny and poignant –  a Bennett tradmark.

Midgley is called out of the secondary school at which he teaches English to go to the hospital where his plumber father is lying, dying after a stroke. Once he’s there we get a lot of well observed staff comments and behaviour and there’s Aunt Kitty who has set herself up at the hospital and specialises in non seqiturs, often racist. Other family members eventually turn up and Bennett’s depiction of them is a dead pan treat. The dialogue – as you’d expect – is wonderful. This could just as easily be a short play as a short story.

At home Midgley has an unsypathic wife, devoted to caring for her own resident mother, with whom rapport is strained. His relationship with his children is not great either. Midgley is, in short, a bemused man who finds any sort of real contentment elusive. Even Valery Lightfoot, one of the nurses looking after Midgley senior isn’t likely to change that.

It’s an entertaining one hour’s read for a dark evening when you need something intelligent but unpretentious.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins

Show: Pinocchio

Society: Chichester Festival Theatre (professional)

Venue: Chichester Festival Theatre, Oaklands Park, Chichester

Credits: A new adaptation by Anna Ledwich. Music by Tom Brady. From the original novel ‘The Adventures of Pinocchio’ by Carlo Collodi. (Chichester Festival Youth Theatre)

Pinocchio

4 stars

Lewis Renninson and Company in Chichester Festival Youth Theatre’s Pinocchio. Photo: Manuel Harlan

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Performed by CFT’s Youth Theatre.

A year ago I watched this show on Zoom because Covid regulations were tightening by the hour. Then, they had to cancel the rest of the run. What a joy, this year to see it revived and to be there in person.

Now in the hands of revival director, Bobby Brook, Pinocchio which was originally directed by Dale Rook has a cast of sixty-eight, about half of whom were in last year’s aborted production. Some young actors are back but in different roles, all demonstrating what a marvellously developmental experience CFT’s Youth Theatre is.

Anna Ledwich’s adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s novel stresses the family values, forgiveness and redemption which underpin this story of a puppet turned boy who runs away, tells lies and makes lots of mistakes but is eventually reunited, contrite, humble and relieved with his puppet maker father.

It’s a piece which lends itself to working in bubbles (if you need to) because it’s episodic – most  sections using immaculately well directed ensemble to good effect. And I still like the way Ledwich’s text manages to work in a bit of environmental awareness in the underwater scene.

There is a certain amount of cast rotation. On press night I saw Lewis Renninson as Pinocchio, wobbling his way to boyhood with professional panache. I especially liked his donkey dance during that sinister episode when he is turned into a donkey by a cruel circus owner and forced to dance as an attraction.

Funmi Ayaji gives us a very commonsensible but exotic fairy who acts as a sort of invisible guardian to Pinocchio. And Honami Davies does a fine job as the cricket who is Pinocchio’s forthright voice of conscience. Of course he often ignores her and she gets very cross.

It isn’t easy for a teenager to portray an old man but Spencer Dixon is pretty convincing as Gepetto whose unconditional love for his “son” is quite moving. I was moved too by the way they hugged each other. Last year hugs had to be mimed because of social distancing rules.

Tom Brady’s music purrs happily along in the capable hands of an (unseen, unfortunately) six-piece live band led by Colin Billing. There’s a duet between Pinocchio and Geppetto which stands out for its attractive harmony. And as last year I especially liked slinky Cat and Fox number with its hint of Kurt Weill.

I can’t finish this review without a word of praise for Isobel Buckler’s delightful, shiny orange Lobster with the Russian accent. Her nonchalance and stage presence gets a well deserved audience chuckle every time she speaks.

It’s a fine show of its type – and I see quite a lot of youth and student work. As ever Chichester does it splendidly.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/pinocchio-5/

Show: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Society: Cambridge Theatre Company

Venue: Great Hall at The Leys. The Fen Causeway, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire CB2 7AD

Credits: Lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, based on the character of Joseph from the Bible’s Book of Genesis. An ameatur production by arrangement with The Really Useful Group Ltd.

 

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

4 stars

Rarely have I enjoyed an evening in the theatre so unequivocally. The warmly familiar show itself packs more smile-factor than almost anything else I can think of. And CTC’s practice of using its vibrant, enthusiastic, talented youth theatre alongside very competent non-professional adults works a treat.

Director/Choreographer. Chris Cuming. sets the show in a school library with primary school children reading books so the set is a bit Matilda-like but it’s an inspired idea. The children and teachers are re-enacting the story of Joseph in assembly so the headmaster becomes Jacob, the PE teacher becomes Pharaoh and other roles emerge from the community. As the story starts we move from grey school uniforms into colour (costumes by Liz Milway). And it works splendidly; fizzing with visual and aural energy throughout.

Vikki Jones is outstanding as the teacher/narrator, holding the book she’s pretending to read from, “directing” her charges, singing and dancing well  and making it  all look smilingly, professionally effortless.

Ben Lewis, initially a puzzled bespectacled teenager in his school tie, morphs into a charismatic and ultimately authoritative Joseph and sings with maturity.  Rodger Lloyd has enormous fun with the Elvis/Pharaoh number gyrating his hips and pointing at women in the front row and Lake Falconer finds gentle gravitas in Jacob.

But the real star of the show is the ensemble which moves continuously with volumes of slick, well disciplined exuberance. Cuming really knows how to get the very best from them. Even the finale/curtain call is a choreographic gem.  And let’s hear it too  for Jennifer Edmonds’s eight piece band on a high platform at right angles to stage right. Lovely clarinet work from Graham Dolby and I know the xylophone in “Any Dream Will Do” is just a key board switch but it sounds great.

Of course it wasn’t perfect – there was the occasional bum note and missed entry. This was the opening night after all. A superb achievement, though, by any standards.

I couldn’t help comparing this show with my disappointing 2019 experience of seeing the much hyped version with Sheridan Smith, Jason Donovan and Jake Yarrow which I found forced and oddly unengaging. CTC’s lively, imaginative show is anything but and I know which version I much preferred. Thank you, CTC. This was just what I needed just before Christmas and a real antidote to some of the lacklustre pro shows I’ve seen in recent weeks.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/joseph-and-the-amazing-technicolor-dreamcoat-12/