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Let’s hear it for pub theatres

How do we get the word out – really out – about fringe theatre in general and pub theatres in particular? There’s cutting edge work going on all the time at, for example, The Finborough or Theatre 503 which is based in The Latchmere in Battersea.

My observation at many performances is that the audience mostly comprises three groups: very local people who know they’re on to a good thing, industry folk supporting performers and creatives or wanting to see them in action, and friends and relations of the cast The wider public are, usually, absent.

I have, for example, a friend who’s pretty switched on culturally. She goes to a lot of theatre (especially opera), concerts, exhibitions and museums. She also reads newspapers and a lot of books.  When I mentioned the other day that I was going to a show at the Landor that week and another at the Hope the week after I had to explain to her what these venues are. She had, almost incredibly to me, never heard of pub theatres. They had, until I enlightened her, passed completely under her radar. And this is only the most recent of many conversations with different people that I’ve had along these lines.

It means that London’s many dozens of pub theatres, not to mention the sprinkling in other big cities such as Birmingham and Manchester, are missing tricks. I’ve often seen then very sparsely attended.  London Pub Magazine http://www.londonpubtheatres.com is doing its best to raise loads of awareness but we all need to work harder at it.

Of course it isn’t all good. Theatre never is. But I’ve seen some fabulous shows in pub theatres. Charles Court Opera Company’s The Mikado, which I caught at The King’s Head in Islington last week, for instance, was one of the best bits of theatre I’ve seen this year. What a shame that to many people, travelling to Islington from a fair way off just to see “a  little show in a pub” seems not worth making the effort for.

We need to do some public education – the National Theatre and the West End are not the be-all and end-all of theatre. In a decent pub theatre – and there are SO many – you can get a pleasant meal and a pint (or whatever) as well as a show at a fraction of the price you’ll pay in a glitzier venue. At both the Bridge House in Penge and the Brockley Jack in Brockley I have recently arrived having already eaten and ordered just a pot of excellent tea. Yes, pubs really have moved on. Let’s all make the most of them.

There’s something very refreshing about low budget theatre, without fancy sets and costumes, because it forces the focus back to basics. Do the performers convince or move us? You don’t actually need wings and spacious dressing rooms to stage powerful theatre, do you? Surely its words, actions and faces which carry (or not) the show?

Three Little Maids from School. Charles Court Opera’s The Mikado at King’s Head, Islington

As you get older you need less sleep. Right? Well, I’m not at all sure that’s true, although, if you’ve suffered from decades of insomnia as I have then it’s what you tell yourself – to offset all those gloomy media stories unhelpfully informing you that lack of sleep is as harmful to health as smoking and junk food.

My Loved One didn’t sleep well for a long time either. I suspect we’re a pretty typical couple. You sleep like logs, often right round the clock. when you’re young and first together. Then the children arrive. And, after the initial awfulness of night feeds and sleep deprivation, you both eventually learn to sleep with one ear cocked as you get on with life. Somehow after that a few years of that, one’s relationship with sleep is never quite the same again.

Then Ms Alzheimer’s turns up. Unlike the much wanted children she is, of course, a totally uninvited and unwelcome arrival. Odd though that just as children, like Macbeth, murder sleep, Ms A seems to enhance it – or at least that is MLO’s current experience.

He is now sleeping better than he has done since his twenties. Like nearly all men his age he usually needs to pop out to the bathroom once or twice in the night but falls straight back into deep sleep – almost as if he was 23 again, the age he was when we married.

There is an issue though. His night vision is terrible and I think that’s probably yet another Alzheimer’s symptom because it’s a fairly recent development. I can slip out of our bedroom across the landing and into the bathroom without turning on any lights at all – there’s a street light in front of the house which beams in. No so MLO who seems to need floodlights. Similarly, if I’m awake in the night and decide to read for a while I can turn on my bedside light and he is impervious. His tolerance of light is very high.

Now I loathe light in the bedroom. It makes it even harder for me to nod off.  So, for quite a while now, we’ve had curtains with black-out linings – bought for our old house and altered for the one we moved to 18 months ago. For MLO, that has recently become totally unsatisfactory. Every night – sometimes more than once – he would grope round the bed, muttering, usually waking me up (if he hadn’t already done so) by cannoning into the corner and grabbing my feet to save himself. Sometimes he would simply turn on his bedside light and wake me up anyway.  Not good for bedroom compatibility. I thought about this for a few months before coming up with a solution – of sorts.

He now has a child’s nightlight on his side of the room which is just enough to enable him to make his way round the bed. As far as I’m concerned, though, that light is so hideously bright that I could almost read a book by it and certainly wouldn’t be able to rest properly.  So I wear a sleep mask – which makes me look like Isobel Barnett on What’s My Line? (now that dates me!) or a burglar in a child’s comic. But it works. I’m away in my personal darkness – often not even noticing when he opens the bedroom door and turns on the landing light. He, meanwhile, can walk to where he needs to go in the night safely and often without disturbing me at all. It took me a while to get used to it, though. I woke up at least twice at the beginning thinking “Oh blimey. I’ve gone blind – as if I don’t have enough problems!”

Living with Ms Alzheimer’s is like that. She bowls problems at you all the time. The skill is to find solutions and compromises so that you can more or less carry on as normal. It feels like outwitting an enemy in a minor skirmish. We both know we shall lose the war eventually but I, for one, shall go down fighting with very shred of initiative and ingenuity I can summon.

And do you know what? I’m beginning to sleep more evenly than I have for a while too – presumably because I know my “charge” is safely asleep and OK.

please_turn_off_your_mobile_phonesIt’s unusual these days to sit in the theatre for more than a few minutes without the darkness and your concentration being disturbed by someone nearby flashing a mobile phone on. It’s infuriating, offensive and bloody rude to the performers. It’s only a notch or two less obnoxious than letting the device ring,

Any actor or producer will tell you, moreover, that teachers are the worst offenders. They arrive with their school parties who are all strictly instructed to turn their phones off and put them away. Then, far too often, the teacher proceeds to fiddle around with his or her phone throughout the performance thereby conveying to the pupils the message that theatre is OK for kids but when you’re grown up you have more important things to attend to. I’ve even seen teachers active on full size I-pads, completely ignoring the performance they’ve brought their students to see.

So what exactly are these “flashers” doing? Some are glancing at the time and wondering how long it is before they can get to the bar or loo. Do they not wear watches? Others are checking for messages via text, email or social networking – and sometimes responding to them. Well, I sometimes feel my phone vibrate in my bag when I’m in the theatre. Whatever it is has to wait until the interval or end of the show. Nothing remotely untoward has ever resulted.

All this is old hat, of course, but a conversation I overheard in a concert interval at Brighton Dome last week gave me pause for thought. Man A was very politely telling Man B that he found the latter’s lit-up phone use disturbing during the music in dim lighting. Man B was very apologetic but explained: “It’s just that I’ve got the downloaded programme on my phone and was referring to the notes as I listened.”

Well, if concert and show promoters are actually encouraging people to download information in advance then they are actively encouraging the use of phones and tablets during performances. And that’s not on, in my view. Of course it’s a good idea to circulate programme notes so that everyone can be clued up before they come but not if it means they disturb others during the performance.

I think some rules need to be laid down. Anyone downloading a theatre or concert programme should be firmly told that reference to electronic access during the live performance is forbidden. Perhaps they could be encouraged to print off the notes if they want them handy at the time? Theatre staff are already pretty vigilant about mobile phone use but, evidently, not watchful enough.

Time to spell it out that when we say “no mobile phones” we mean light as well as sound?

Swan Lake, the latest abridged ballet for young children danced by English National Ballet School students, filled the Peacock Theatre to bursting on a wet, cold Good Friday afternoon and that’s splendid to see. I wish more family groups included dads, uncles and grandpas but it’s still terrific to attract such a large, enthusiastic audience and I’m sure that will continue to be the case as the production tours.

Choreographed by Antonio Castilla, this show features some fine dancing by some of the thirty five students in the group. Each is profiled in the programme but they are not identified as dancing specific characters because they switch roles and they don’t all appear at every performance.

The Act 2 set pieces – the Spanish, Hungarian and Italian dances – are memorable. The two girls who did the Italian dance at the performance I saw had a real lightness of touch which highlighted the humour. We also had a very promising Siegfried whose leaps were youthfully spectacular and a truly graceful Odette who several times swanned her way right across the stage en pointe with watery arms waving and at one point managed to pirouette for around twenty bars of music.

As always the real star of the show is Tchaikovsky’s gloriously expressive music. Because My First Swan Lake runs for only 90 minutes including interval, the music, which is pre-recorded, has to be cut and arranged. Gavin Sutherland has generally done quite well with it but there are one or two moments of clumsy abruptness as we switch from one thing to another.

The inclusion of a narrator is a mistake.  Credit where it’s due though: Louise Calf, an actor, does a remarkably good job with the saccharine, rather moralistic script she’s been given. She is naturalistic and warm – but completely unnecessary. She has been directed to walk frequently from the downstage left corner across to the opposite spot, often in front of the action, and it’s very distracting. Moreover no one should be shouting over Tchaikovsky when he’s in dramatic fortissimo mode, as she often has to do. And as for delivering the crucial revelation when Odette, Odile and Sigfried all learn the truth in music-free tableau with just Calf’s voice – it’s a travesty.

Ballet is story telling in music and movement. It doesn’t need words added even for three year-olds. Neither should they be handed the subliminal message that it’s perfectly acceptable to talk over great music.

First published by Lark Reviews http://www.larkreviews.co.uk/?cat=3

Charles Court Opera, King’s Head Theatre

The Mikado was one of the first pieces of live theatre I ever saw. I was five years old when the school my father was teaching in did it. Since then I’ve probably see it 50 times. Never have I heard the audience screaming with laughter as much as they do at the fresh, vibrant, compelling Charles Court Opera production. And they’re laughing, please note, not at gimmicks but at WS Gilbert’s 133-year-old libretto expertly acted (by a cast of eight) to squeeze out every possible drip of humour.

We’re in the round in the intimacy of King’s Head Theatre and the setting is The British Consulate in Titipu in the 1950s. So the atmosphere is clubby with a big leather sofa of which much use is made. Men wear suits and the three little maids wear gymslips exactly like the one I wore to school. Heightened RP and strangled vowel adds to the ambience too with, for example, Alys Roberts as Yum-Yum distorting “have” to rhyme with “leave”.

The whole piece is about words and if you use your eight strong principals who double up to sing the chorus parts as director John Savourin (who also sings KoKo at some performances) does then every single word becomes clear – and that’s partly why it gets so many laughs. It’s a very funny text which, of course, includes the traditional topical references (Putin, May, Brexit, Southern Trains and so on) in Koko’s little list and the Mikado’s song.

Koko, the tailor who gets promoted way beyond his competence, is a common man – unlike the others. Philip Lee’s bravura performance makes him sound like a barrow boy, sometimes bemused and sometimes cunning. He looks really cross during The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring and his crafty but insincere wooing of Katisha with Tit Willow is a masterclass in acting.

What a stroke of genius to cast a man as Katisha. It’s a role which cries out for an old fashioned claret red contralto voice but rarely gets it these days. Matthew Siveter, who looks wonderful in turban and floaty clothes and because he’s larger than the others on stage also terrifies the other characters, sings it in the tenor register which puts back all the resonance and passion.

Matthew Kellett’s Pooh Bah oozes slime and self interest and sings beautifully as does Matthew Palme who doubles Pish-Tush and the Mikado.

Alys Roberts sings her soprano numbers with sensitive verve and The Sun Whose Rays at the beginning of Act 2 is the high spot it should be. Jessica Temple is great fun as frivolous, knowing Pitti-Sing always reacting and communicating. And Corrine Cowling is a delightful Peep-Bo who also supports all the chorus numbers expertly.

This top notch account of The Mikado makes imaginative use of a quite small playing area. It is, moreover, surprisingly respectful of a historic piece while also allowing it to beam out at a 21st century audience, many of whom, I could tell from interval eavesdroppings, were new to it. And that’s quite an achievement.

This review was first published by Sardines http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-West%20End%20&%20Fringe-The%20Mikado&reviewsID=3157

The Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra finished the season in fine festive fettle. I don’t often laugh aloud in the concert hall but there was plenty of that in the Dome for this unconventional programme.

Malcolm Arnold’s piano concerto op 104 – new to me, and I suspect, to most of the audience – doesn’t get out much because it was written for husband and wife Cyril Smith and Phyllis Sellick. Cyril Smith had lost the use of his left arm through strokes so the piece was written for three hands and two pianos – which makes it expensive and impractical for most concert promoters.  Stephen Worbey and Kevin Farrell, who work as a witty and very accomplished duo, have arranged the concerto for four hands on a single piano.

Written in 1969, it’s a very listenable piece. Both orchestra and soloists shone, especially in the middle movement which engagingly alternates schmaltz with dissonance. The last movement, for which Worbey and Farrell changed places, is very jolly with cheerful tuba vamp rather similar to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s (imitative?) Jesus Christ Superstar song for King Herod – written a year later.  Worbey and Farrell are showman musicians who warm the audience up with jokes before they start – it sits somewhere between Victor Borge and pantomime – but it’s good quality fun and their flamboyant playing is riveting. Their Sabre Dance encore – played at prestissimo and more – was a tour de force.

The concert had begun rather more conventionally with the Karelia Suite in which Barry Wordsworth allowed every section to have its moment. The busy repetitive string work in the first movement can, for instance, be hard to make lively but in this performance it did real justice to the soaring brass above it.  The warmth and suitable lushness in the two following movements, when the violins get most of the melody, was strong too.

I presume the programming of the second half was partly to create an end-of-season party atmosphere and partly to encourage people to bring children. It succeeded on both counts. It would have been good to see even more under-11s for Barry Wordsworth’s arrangement of three numbers from Act 1 of Coppelia and the Carnival of Animal, but splendid to see even twenty or so. Coppelia – like all good ballet music – is full of glorious melodies and played well, the music itself dances. Conductor and orchestra gave it their all and it was quite hard to sit still and refrain from humming along.

The concert ended with Saint-Saens’ best known piece, which – if you think about it – is another work which doesn’t get many performances in its entirety. We are very used to hearing its 14 separate sections but it’s a treat to hear all of it in one place. At the heart of it were the inimitable Worbey and Farrell who’d written hilarious Hilaire Belloc-style verses to introduce each bit – except for Pianists when Barry Wordsworth stepped forward and read a verse. Of course it was all beautifully played with accomplished solos from principal cello, principal double bass and, best of all, the xylophone. I enjoyed the off stage clarinet as the moving cuckoo too – with many of the audience looking round wondering where the sound was coming from.

The concert took place on the first day of British Summertime so I left the Dome in daylight with a real spring in my step, a head full of earworms and excitement about the next season which looks excellent – yet again.

This review was first published by Lark Reviews http://www.larkreviews.co.uk/?cat=3

It was a concert full of drama, mostly Russian, under Stephen Bell’s incisive baton. The drama included the conductor literally leaping up and down, and part of his score flying off his stand and landing near the leader’s feet during Night on a Bare Mountainwhich also gave us some frenetic high speed string work, perfectly controlled, slightly exaggerated, general pauses (one of his specialities), perky woodwind interjections, syncopated percussion and mesmerisingly lyrical playing after the tubular bell at the end.

This enticing old friend of a piece was preceded, in an usually structured programme, by something much less familiar: the overture to Glinka’s 1836 opera A Life for the Tsar. Heavily textured melodies and chords – more like Brahms than anything Russian – were played with decisive accuracy and Stephen Bell ensured that the cheerful dance-like passages were a real contrast. The ending of the piece is corny to put it mildly but he delivered it with aplomb.

Then we had a dart forward to the twentieth century and to Armenia – which for most of Alexander Arutunian’s (1920-2012) life was part of USSR – so in a sense his one movement trumpet concerto sustains the Russian theme. Soloist Gareth Small produced a very attractive creamy sound with some beautifully sustained phrasing. The elegant piece is free of atonality and full of lush harmonies and Shostakovitch-like jazzy rhythms. It was a pleasing sixteen minutes.

It is a pity though that Arutunian’s name does not, apparently, fill The Brighton Dome because there were far more empty seats than usual. If you chose not to come you missed a real treat, in the highlight which came after the interval – a breathtaking account of Tchaikovsky’s fourth symphony.

Stephen Bell took the first movement at a measured, intelligent tempo with lovingly punctilious attention to balance which made sure, for example, that you heard and noticed the descending scale for horns, the mysterious bassoon passages and the quasi balletic quality of the rhythms. I liked his fluid take on the andantetoo with its pre echoes of the 6th symphony which were leant on attentively.

Then – such a contrast – Tchaikovsky’s pizzicato party of a scherzo was beautifully played, bows down. Stephen Bell, without baton, physically rocking from side to side, shaped the dynamic with immaculate precision and wit. The “wind band” sections were imaginatively slotted in too. And so to the allegro con fuoco finale which was certainly played with plenty of fiery passion in this performance. It blazed its way to a very exciting conclusion followed by well deserved, rapturous applause.

I was very glad indeed to have heard this concert, especially the Tchaikovsky.

This review was first published by Lark Reviews. http://www.larkreviews.co.uk/?cat=3

With his hit celebration of one of the most successful and creative dynasties in musicals, A Spoonful of Sherman delighting audiences across the country, Musical Theatre Review’s Susan Elkincaught up with ROBBIE SHERMAN to talk about his illustrious family business.

As the son and nephew of the famous Sherman Brothers, Robert B and Richard M, the team behind the timeless songs from the soundtracks of classic movies including Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Jungle Book, Robbie Sherman is perfectly placed to tell the story of a musical family which began with his grandfather Tin Pan Alley writer Al Sherman who wrote songs for Al Jolson, Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday, and focuses on the songwriting brothers who created more movie musical songs and acclaimed film scores than any other writing team.

Sherman conceived the show as a way to celebrate the family legacy and mark the publication of his late father’s posthumously published book Moose: Chapters From My Life. “It’s a musical about the Sherman family – a happy memorial. My dad died in 2012 aged 86 and I’d been working on the book with him, but I didn’t want a book launch without him there,” he explains …

Read the rest of this interview at Musical Theatre Review http://musicaltheatrereview.com/suddenly-there-was-quite-a-buzz-robbie-sherman-chats-about-the-success-of-a-spoonful-of-sherman/