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Calming the Tempest (Susan Elkin reviews)

Calming the Tempest – Opera Up Close

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One of a series of online coffee concerts from Opera Up Close, this 30 minute offering celebrates the poetry in music and the music in poetry – and does so with verve and originality.

The high spot for me is actor Althea Stevens reciting Sylvia Plath’s poem The Bee Meeting. She is poised, impassioned and totally compelling as she articulates the words defiantly past her disability. It is a moving account of the poem by any standards as is her later rendering of an Emily Dickinson poem.

Two singers offset the spoken work. Tenor Joseph Doody sings two Guy Woolfenden Shakespeare settings written for a 1987 Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest. Mezzo Flora McIntyre sings settings of three songs by Nicholas O’Neill (who also accompanies on piano), each of them a setting of an Emily Dickinson poem.

The latter is a world premiere introduced by Fiona Shaw who explains that the three songs were commissioned by the mother of three siblings whose birthdays fall in March, April and May – a song cycle for spring, then. We see Flora McIntyre seated elegantly in a sitting room – presumably her own – as she sings these three songs. Given the rich formality of her voice it seems slightly incongruous to see her in a domestic setting, as if she were about to offer you tea, but the songs are warm and tender.
This mini concert – very loosely predicated on The Tempest – begins with Rosabella Gregory’s atmospheric piece about the storminess of the witches in Macbeth with lots of arrestingly jagged rhythm. Also included is actor Jade Anouska reading her own poem The Brave Vessel, which is a response to The Tempest.
The curation of this short concert is interesting – lots of links but nothing contrived. It is yet another tribute to pandemic ingenuity.

First published by Lark Reviews: https://www.larkreviews.co.uk/?p=6327

West End in Blackpool is streaming until 9 July 2021.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

This 30-minute docu-concert is really a homage to the Winter Gardens, Empress Ballroom and all the rest of what makes Blackpool “the entertainment capital of the north” – as Kelsey-Beth Crossley puts it in her intro.

Nostalgia dominates. First we get Jodie Prenger with a suitably emotional, catch-in-the-throat rendering of ‘Send in the Clowns’ to set the scene.

Between numbers participants …

Read the rest of this review at Musical Theatre Review: https://musicaltheatrereview.com/west-end-in-blackpool-winter-gardens-blackpool/

Rapunzel from Chickenshed Theatre, London.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

The online premiere of Chickenshed’s 2017 show is as large scale and glitzy as we’ve come to expect from this ebulliently inclusive company.

Framed by a story about six children falling asleep and embarking on a dreamy quest to find their storyteller/Rapunzel (Cerys Lambert) it also unravels a secondary, episodic quest story about a king and queen who are searching for their long lost daughter.

Lou Stein’s version – inspired by many workshops with Chickenshed members – works at lots of levels with hope, love cooperation and positivity at the heart of the message.

Theatrically it needs …

Read the rest of this review at Musical Theatre Review: https://musicaltheatrereview.com/rapunzel-chickenshed-theatre/

We’re in Tuscany in 1528 where a nun, Alessandra Cecchi, has just died having left instructions that she is not to be undressed. The Mother Superior overrides the old lady’s wishes and commands two young nuns to prepare her body for burial in the normal way. On her body they find a huge tattoo of a snake, starting on her back, encircling her waist and ending with its head and forked tongue pointing into her genitals. How on earth did an elderly nun acquire such a thing?

The rest of Sarah Dunant’s best novel (2003) comprises an explanatory memoir, left by Alessandra in the capable hands of her former black slave and lifelong friend, Erila. She’s bright, feisty, brave and artistically talented but not conventionally attractive. We follow her – the daughter of a prosperous cloth merchant (although there’s a bit of surprise in the mix relating to that) – through the first Medici rule in Florence and then the torture-fuelled horror of the Savonarola years. Along the way she marries for social convenience, safety and because it’s what her family requires. Then there’s the reclusive, troubled man she calls “the painter” from whom she learns much to improve her own art. He is a vital strand in her life. Who exactly is he, you wonder? Most readers will probably work out his identity before the truth is finally revealed and we learn how she came to carry a serpent on her body.

Underpinning all this is a reasonably accurate account of what life in Florence must have been like in the late fifteenth century – and it isn’t pretty. There is also a great deal of intelligent background about art, religion and how the two things complement or confound each other against devastating political power struggles.

The characterisation delights too. Erila is the friend we’d all like to have – frank, sensible, caring and able to use her own independence and courage to make things happen. Alessandra’s husband, the generally decent, reasonable and believable Christoforo is quite something too – he doesn’t want to marry, for reasons which soon become clear, any more than Alessandra does but he needs a wife and child for form’s sake.

I read this book when it was first published nearly 20 years ago and have never forgotten the drama of that opening: the “respectable” old nun and the highly erotic tattoo. Like good cheese or wine it seems to have matured since then and I enjoyed revisiting a fine historical novel which remains fresh and compelling.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

Ordinary Days, streaming via The Theatre Café website until 6 April 2021.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

A revival of a 2007 show first developed at New York Theatre Barn, this is a warm and uplifting piece in the hands of Daniel Smith under whose direction it was filmed in Norfolk.

Yes, the title summarises the plot. Four very youngish, ordinary people live in, or have come to New York. Jason (Will Arundell) is in the process of moving in with his girlfriend, Claire (Nic Myers) but things are initially troubled. Deb (Bobbie Chambers), a student, loses her dissertation notes but they are found on the Subway by Warren (Joe Thompson-Oubari), a gay man looking for a purpose in life.

Of course there is an intersection, of sorts, between these two storylines and a memorable moment when the whole cast comes together in a quasi-operatic quartet.

I liked the use of sung soliloquy in which …

Read the rest of this review at Musical Theatre Reivew: https://musicaltheatrereview.com/ordinary-days-pickle-stage-productions/

The Band Plays On was filmed at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield and has been made available to watch online until 28 March 2021.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

The best shows always have a moment, incident or episode which really stick with you and change you. In The Band Plays On it’s Jodie Prenger singing ‘The Crying Game’ in her arresting three octave voice and then delivering a monologue called ‘Sanctuary’ in which her life falls apart at the onset of the pandemic somewhat more drastically then most people’s. I defy you not to weep for her – and then rejoice with her at the redemptive power of art.

Chris Bush’s play, directed by Robert Hastie and Anthony Lau, consists of five monologues delivered by five women of South Yorkshire, They’re played by Jocasta Almgill, Anna-Jane Casey, Sandra Marvin, Maimuna Memon – and Jodie Prenger. Think Talking Heads in miniature …

Read the rest of this review at Musical Theatre Review: https://musicaltheatrereview.com/the-band-plays-on-sheffield-theatres/

ina and the STEM Sisters from HMDT Music, streaming until 11 April 2021.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

If a puppetry mini-opera about women scientists sounds unlikely, then it is. But it works. I learned a lot, as will the primary school age group at which Jina and the STEM Sisters is, loosely, aimed.

It’s neatly contrived for pandemic restrictions too. Basically it’s a two-hander with puppeteers (Nix Wood and Ruth Calkin) on stage and a lot of puppet voicing, both sung and spoken, by a cast who are elsewhere.

Face masks – bandit style and matching – are, incidentally a good way of depersonalising puppeteers to make them less visible.

Jina, who wants to be a scientist, is in a wood. It’s literal with trees but it’s also metaphorical because she’s on a journey towards enlightenment …

Read the rest of this review at Musical Theatre Review: https://musicaltheatrereview.com/jina-and-the-stem-sisters-hmdt-music/

Oxford Lieder Winterreise

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All the way from the resonant arpeggios of Gute Nacht to the haunting, wistful A minor pianissimo of Der Leiermann, this is an elegant, thoughtfully judged Winterreise. We are taken, very effectively, on the final journey.

Dietrich Henshel is an admirably unshowy performer. He stands simply beside the piano without swaying or arm waving. The drama is entirely in his voice and face but there’s plenty of it. His Der Lindenbaum is warmly impassioned, his Fruhlingstraum finds a lovely lilt in the opening bars and his high notes and big intervals  are nicely controlled in Letzte Hoffnung. I found his Die Wetterfahne a bit breathy but it’s a fairly minor quibble.

Warmest praise too for Sholto Kynoch’s work on piano. These pieces are – when performed as sensitively as this –  definitely duets rather than songs “accompanied” by piano. In Der Wegweiser, for example, Kynoch’s exquisite playing really highlights the breathless effect.  Interestingly Kynoch manages his music by technological alchemy – a tablet on the music stand, presumably controlled by a left foot blue tooth pedal. It’s a neat way of precluding the need for a human page turner in close proximity in these Covid-compliant times – if you’re brave enough.

The concert began with emerging artist Anna Cavaliero singing two Schubert songs. Her singing is crisp and warm and she, too, has a tightly integrated rapport with Kynoch on piano.

It’s good to be back in the Holywell Room, with Petroch Trelawny as the ever urbane, competent, knowledgeable link man. I wish, however, we didn’t have to have those lights decorating the balusters behind the piano which, when you watch digitally, connote all the gaudiness of cheap Christmas decorations.

An advantage of watching digitally, though, is the way the subtitles are now managed. You are given the whole poem at the side of the screen with a moving highlight so that you know exactly where you are and a line by line translation at the bottom of the screen. As a non-Germanist I like this although I suspect purists might find it irritating. It’s new technology for Oxford Lieder so I’ll make allowances for the couple of times when the performance moved to the next number but the printed text didn’t.

First published by Lark Reviews: https://www.larkreviews.co.uk/?p=6292