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The Chimes (Susan Elkin reviews)

The Chimes

Adapted from Charles Dickens by David Willis

Music by Conor Linehan

Directed by Rob Ellis

Tower Theatre, Stoke Newington

Star rating: 2

In his “goblin story”, The Chimes (1844) Dickens was trying to repeat what he had done so successfully the year before with A Christmas Carol. The result is a very sentimental tale, with supernatural elements, laden with moralising. Even in its original novella form, it’s a weak effort after the richness of Ebenezer Scrooge and co.

David Willis’s brave and ambitious attempt to adapt it as a musical  gives us a big cast, a Greek-style chorus driving the narrative, a busy ensemble and lots of walking about. The story, much less familiar to most audience members than A Christmas Carol, tells of Trotty Veck (Dom Ward) a very poor, widowed errand man, living near a church whose chimes dominate his thoughts. He is reluctant to let his daughter Meg (Imogen Front) marry her sweetheart. Then he climbs the church tower, has some scary/warning visions driven by goblins, and wakes up on new year’s day to see sense.

Ward is excellent in this role – sensitive, warm, passionate, distraught and very good at reactive listening of which he has do a great deal in the second act. And Front brings a whole range of emotions to Meg who really does – in the alternative futures scenes – have a pretty rough time. She delights in her love for Richard (Nvaron Anderson – good especially in the second half), and is one of the few people on stage who sings convincingly and in tune.

Sadly some of the chorus singing was neither together nor in tune and many of the solos were weak although Rachel Berg is a highly entertaining show stealer as Mrs Feeder. Some of composer Conor Linehan’s songs are WS Gilbert-style rapid patter and these fail if you can’t hear every word. Part of the problem seems to be that MD, Jonathan Norris – an admirably competent pianist – is seated stage right on the very edge of the Tower’s triangular space where the cast can’t see him. And he isn’t doing much obvious directing anyway. He simply plays the piano accompaniments, often too loudly so that singing is drowned.

 

The moralising gets wearisome in this quite lengthy show too. Much of it comes straight from Dickens but Ellis has worked on the timelessness of the piece: heartless treatment of the poor in society, injustice, shockingly patronising attitudes and so on. At times it all feels a bit obvious, particularly when, amidst all this Victorian stuff, we suddenly and incongruously get Santa Baby played quietly under the dialogue at the Blarney Hall party.

There are offsetting strengths though, of course. The moment at the end of Act 1 when Veck climbs the tower by going right up a ladder into the quasi-flies is enjoyably dramatic. The costumes (by Emma Efkeman) are lovely. The set of tubular bells, stage left, which represent the titular chimes both visually and aurally works perfectly. And the central movable platform is an effective and very versatile set device.

Obviously, I can only review what I see and I saw this show at its opening performance. It has time to bed down and mature before it closes on 21 December and I’m sure it will get better. In general Tower Theatre Company knows what it’s doing.

REVIEW: SLEEPING BEAUTY at Broadway Theatre, Catford 4 – 31 December

Susan Elkin • 9 December 2024

‘Good in parts’ ★★★

It’s a show with strengths and weaknesses. Susie McKenna (who also directs) provides a sparky, original script which is, in places, genuinely funny – a witty summary of the progress from spinning wheels to Amazon, for example. And if a bird dropping lands on your head and you choose to ignore it you are, of course, undeterred. (Think about it).

Moreover, you don’t go to panto expecting plot twists but there a couple of interesting ones in this show. Why shouldn’t the Prince (Surone Stokes – good) meet monsters in the forest he has to hack down? And of course, in 2024 it makes no sense that the princess (Roshani Abbey – of whom more shortly) will come out of her coma to find a man she’s never seen before and instantly agree to marry him. McKenna’s is cheer-worthy feminist reworking. 

On the other hand, the script is absolutely larded with overtly leftish political digs. I am a Lewisham resident and know that our council is 100% Labour. There is no opposition in this borough, so the panto is playing to local allegiances. Nonetheless, all this preaching/pandering to the converted gets tiresomely wearing.

The show’s strengths include Justin Brett as Dame Nanny Norah which he lays for laughs, obviously, but is never grotesque and there isn’t a single joke about bodily functions which is a welcome change. He has moreover strikingly beautiful diction, isn’t afraid to use RP and good at giving jokes time to settle.

Lisa Davina Phillip has glittering purple stage presence as Carabosse and sings commandingly. The decision for her to speak in a very broad Jamaican accent, however, again might do down well locally but at times it blurs the clarity and audibility. Natasha Lewis is dependable as Willowsnap, the good fairy who eventually has to facilitate the downfall of Carabosse – although here, it’s

about redemption rather than destruction.

Roshani Abbey, though, is the real star of this show. She packs Princess Thalia with feisty confidence and grace and her singing voice is outstanding. I was not surprised to learn afterwards that she trained at Royal Academy of Music.

The five piece band in the pit, directed by Ben Goddard-Young does a fine job too and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a harp (Morwenna Brown) worked into a panto score before. Its effect is delightful.

So it’s generally a pleasing show despite some weak links in the casting.

SLEEPING BEAUTY at Broadway Theatre, Catford 4 – 31 December

Box Office https://www.broadwaytheatre.org.uk/events/sleeping-beauty/

This review was first published by London Pub Theatres Magazine: https://www.londonpubtheatres.com/review-sleeping-beauty-at-broadway-theatre-catford-4-31-december

White Christmas – The Mill at Sonning

Reviewer: Susan Elkin

Photo of The Reviews Hub - LondonThe Reviews Hub – LondonDecember 8, 2024

0 1 minute read
White Christmas The Cast Phopto By Pamela Raith
 The cast photo by Pamela Raith

Music and Lyrics: Irving Berlin

Based on  Paramount Pictures Film written for screen by Norman Krasna, Norman Panama and Melvin Frank

Director: Jonathan O’Boyle

3.5 stars

 White Christmas is an unashamedly sentimental, and potentially dated, show, so it has to be taken on its own terms, which is exactly what Jonathan O’Boyle does in this production featuring 14 pretty talented performers.

It tells the story, of course, of two American servicemen who discover, around Christmas 1944, that they can sing and entertain others. Fast forward 10 years, and they’re a well-established duo featuring on the Ed Sullivan Show. The flimsy and gentle plot which follows takes them to a failing hotel in Vermont, which, by coincidence, is owned by their old General. The idea is to stage a show in his barn, which eventually they do, having meanwhile taken up with a pair of sisters with whom the path of true love wavers a bit, but, obviously, there’s a “happily ever after” ending because that’s part of the cheesiness. There is nothing remotely hard-hitting about White Christmas.

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Nonetheless, it’s an energetic production full of impressive tap dancing (impressive choreography by Gary Lloyd) and smiling ensemble numbers danced by supple folk who can repeatedly shoot a leg almost to 180 degrees in their pretty, coordinating costumes designed by Natalie Titchener.

Because this is a show about staging a show, there’s plenty of scope for set pieces. I Love The Piano, developed and orchestrated for this production by MD Jae Alexander, which opens Act 2, is a good example of how this helps to drive the piece – and it’s fun. Another instance, in a different mood, is Gabriella Williams as Betty singing (very well indeed) in a nightclub.

The seven-piece band, which is out of sight in another room, purrs along (exceptionally good bass playing by Matt Hollick) sounding, at times, so vibrant that it could be an orchestra of 20 players, and this is largely down to Jae Alexander’s skilled arrangements.

This mildly soporific show is an ideal Christmas choice for the Mill at Sonning.

Runs until 25 January 2025

Pan – Rayne Theatre, Chickenshed. London

Reviewer: Susan Elkin

Photo of The Reviews Hub - LondonThe Reviews Hub – LondonDecember 7, 2024

0 2 minutes read
Pan Purple Dress Rota EC 323
 Purple Rota

Writers and Composers: Dave Carey, Jo Collins, Hector Dogliani, Ashley Driver, Phil Haines, Will Laurence, Cara McInanny, Paul Morall, Sebastian Ross and Aine Smith

Directors: Michael Bossisse and Louise Perry

4 stars

This powerful show opens with one of Chickenshed’s trademark large ensembles of storytellers, one of several groupings in this strong and moving show. They resemble refugees and come from all over the world, eager to tell, share and adapt their stories, so we’re immediately and firmly on Chickenshed’s inclusive wavelength.

Then Cara McInanny, as Grandmother, begins to unravel the story of Peter Pan with her grandchild, a narrative to which the show returns from time to time to remind us that this is a story about stories. It’s a successful and rather neat device which stresses the ownership of stories.

 

 

Chickenshed, currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, is a theatre company which trains (from infancy to degree level), nurtures and employs children and adults of all backgrounds and abilities using theatre as a development tool. For a show like Pan, it casts in the lead roles a core of talented, experienced adults, most of whom have come up through the Chickenshed training route and now work for the company as teachers, mentors, leaders or developers.

Children and young adults form the huge supporting ensembles. There are five rotas (Purple rota at the performance reviewed on 05 December) at different performances, each comprising over 150 young people. This means that Chickenshed directors are working with a cast of 800. It sounds an unlikely enterprise, but with imaginative, phenomenally well-disciplined choreography, it works astonishingly well. And along with cartwheels and some beautiful down-stage balletic lifts, it sometimes includes a wheelchair or a child who has to be led by other actors. We get a whole stage of pirates and another of lost boys, making good use of all the levels on Andrew Caddies’s set. It all fits together with seamless professionalism.

Jonny Morton is excellent as Mr Darling and Hook, snarling, cackling, plotting, and then collapsing whenever he hears the reptilian ticking. Bethany Hamlin delights as the ever-reasonable, caring, distraught Mrs Darling, and Ashley Driver has the vulnerable but hilarious Smee perfectly. Tristan Manzi, the only character who actually flies on wires, is one of two alternating Peters. He’s perfectly petulant and a very lithe performer.

Shiloh Maersk is charismatically good to watch, too. Integral signing, by most cast and ensemble members at different points, is a given in a Chickenshed show. Maersk, however, is rarely off stage and signing almost continuously, as well as taking part in complex choreographed sequences.

Meanwhile, in a cage above upstage left is a rotating band with over 40 youth members. Skilfully directed, they make a wonderful sound and, along with powerful singing, the music drives the show.

Runs until 11 January 2025

I am a lapsed high Anglican: or rather someone who had suddenly saw light at about 18 and walked decisively away from it, a self-declared unbeliever. I retain, though, an affection for traditional hymns, the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer and that’s probably why I enjoy (The Reverend)  Richard Coles’s Canon Clements novels. Set in the early 1990s they are full of nostalgia for a time when canons still lived in big drafty rectories, were pally with the local gentry and, because there was only a single parish to run, knew everyone in the community. The end of an era.

They are murder stories with Daniel Clements, who is quietly and inactively gay, solving mysteries alongside his friend Neil who’s a local police officer. Of course the plots are wildly, gloriously implausible but I’ve never read a work of detective fiction with a believable narrative.  That’s not the point. The puzzle element is fun and Coles has created a totally believable cast of characters – the sort of people I’m delighted to spend time with, After all Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple are as unlikely as they are engaging. In our own time you could say the same for Roy Grace, Ruth Galloway or Karen Pirie but my goodness they’re entertaining. So is  Daniel Clements.

In the ongoing world that Coles has created so evocatively, Daniel’s mother, Audrey, is busy with her cooking, mild snobbery, dotty pride, kindness and competence. Slightly more distant is her other son Theo, a mildly successful actor who visits, especially at Christmas. Honoria, daughter of the irascible Bernard,  outmoded Lord of the Manor, is down to earth, modern, attractive and fun

This new Canon Clements story is a seasonal novella which gives us Audrey cooking Christmas dinner for ten, at short notice, because there’s an issue at the big house so she invites four extra people including the De Floures family’s rather ghastly cousins from America. It’s an ultra traditional occasion (although Audrey has secretly bought ready-made mincemeat from the Cash & Carry) with crackers, charades, strained group dynamics and Audrey’s “famous” bread sauce. Coles  helpfully gives us the recipe at the end.

But before we get to any of that we attend the Christmas Eve afternoon service, Midnight Mass and the service on Christmas morning – all shot through with Daniel’s thoughts and observations and very funny as well at catapaulting me back to my childhood and adolescence.  Coles’s witty observations often make me laugh aloud “… and after everyone had resolved the peculiarly English challenge of managing side plate, forks, cups and saucers and teaspoons while sitting on a sofa …”

It’s arguably the gentlest murder mystery ever because one is four fifths into the book before anyone dies and then it’s assumed to be natural causes until Neil and Dan spot something amiss and come up with a theory.

Just the job for a winter’s evening in the run-up to Christmas.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Conductor: Riccardo Frizza

Piano: Jeneba Kanneh-Mason

Cadogan Hall

09 December 2024

Part of Cadogan Hall’s Zurich International Orchestral Series 2024-25, this concert featured three warmly popular but contrasting works and made each of them sound arrestingly fresh.

There is something distinctively Hungarian about the sound quality of the orchestra and it rang out clearly in the opening piece: Liszt’s programmatic Mephsito Waltz No I. The muscularity of the playing in the frisky scene-setting section contrasted well with the soulful cello melody, the violin and cello solos and the harp glissandi. Riccardo Frizzi had it well balanced (with, unusually, violas sitting opposite first violins) notwithstanding the lack of orchestral raking at Cadogan Hall which means that there is occasional orchestral fuzziness from stalls seats.

The heart of this concert was a stunning performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto by Jeneba Kanneh-Mason. Probably the best loved and best known of all piano concertos, it takes a pretty special pianist to diffuse the cliché element. Kanneh-Mason, still only 21, played it with astonishing assurance and poise and I heard left hand work in this performance which I have never before noticed. Her account of the adagio was achingly beautiful without ever being saccharine and it blended perfectly with the wind solos, especially flute and bassoon. The incisive string work in the finale and Kanneh-Mason’s apparently effortless fluidity of interpretation brought the concerto to a resounding and powerful end. No wonder the audience applauded so enthusiastically.

The second half of the concert took us back a century to Beethoven’s ground breaking third symphony, Eroica. Frizza gave us a first movement full of tension and excitement and let us feel all the contrasts and moods with some fine horn work. He laid his baton down and conducted the Funeral March with his hands. There were some exquisite pianissimo passages and wonderfully clear triplets under the wind solos. The contrasting third movement was admirably crisp. One can always judge the finale by the quality of the pizzicato at the beginning and this performance  delivered it with incisive elegance. It was good, moreover, to hear the violas so clearly especially in the fugal passage as we worked towards the ending which was, as it must be to work, a subtle blend of gentleness and grandiloquence.

And then, after raputurous applause, Frizza slipped back on stage with a few extra players to play a perfect encore: the most wittily exaggerated account of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No 5 that I’ve ever heard – with long notes snatched off and the intervening passages at breakneck speed. It was a delicious lollipop at the end of an exceptionally interesting, enjoyable concert.

Dick Whittington And His Cat

By Anthony Spargo

Directed by James Haddrell

Greenwich Theatre

 

Star rating: 3

 

A no-frills, low budget panto for family audiences, this Dick Whittington ticks most of the boxes. You don’t actually need a dozen different costumes for the Dame (Phil Yarrow as Meggs) or an ensemble of six or eight professional dancers because children won’t notice. It’s also good to offer work to beginners. The three-person ensemble in this show are all second year Trinity Laban students in their first professional job.

The opening is a bit flat but the show picks up as soon as we meet the baddies: the very talented and funny Louise Cielecki as Muffy, the mouse who wants to be a rat (and my word, can she sing!)  and Anthony Spargo as King Rat. Spargo, who has also written this show set firmly in the 1960s, is glitteringly good in his caddish red and white striped suit and comic malevolence. He is also a casino owner who cheats and that works a treat too as does his very competent rendering of a jazz number at the club he owns. One is sorry every time the pair of them exit.

It’s a musically colourful show with numbers ranging from, among other things, Sinatra to a version of These are a Few of My Favourite Things and I’m a Dedicated Follower of Fashion although the Last Post joke in the rather understated slosh scene (in which nobody gets wet or dirty) is puzzlingly inappropriate.  Musical director Steve Markwick sits in a stage-left box, playing keys and bass guitar opposite guitarist Gordon Parrish and they sometimes emerge to take part in the action which adds a level of immediacy. Drummer Chris Wyles is out of sight.

It’s a good idea to cast an actor-muso as Tommie the Cat. Inez Ruiz plays a fair bit of sax in this show and evinces accomplished musicality with every movement she makes and note she sings.

We think we know panto stories so it’s fun when a writer builds in a completely new flight of fictional fancy – travelling back in time (via a phone box of course) to stop the Great Fire of London with a modern fire extinguisher thereby changing the course of history. I’m not sure the huge primary school party I saw it with quite grasped the finer points of this or the second time shift, but it is bravely done.

Jack and the Beanstalk

Written and directed by Adam Penford

Nottingham Playhouse

 

Star rating: 3

 

A dependable, well crafted, family panto with plenty of local jokes, Adam Penford’s take on Jack and the Beanstalk is unpretentiously pleasing.

One of its strengths is the music played by the four piece live band, led by MD, John Morton.  It ranges across a whole parade of genres including music hall, rap, film, football chants and a lot more with neat – just a few bars for copyright reasons – references to shows such as Les Miserables. And it’s all adeptly delivered.

On stage we get an ensemble of six (two alternating teams), nimble footed, juveniles fully used in most scenes which is a refreshing change from the usual group of smiley, samey dance-trained adults. Choreographer, Rosanna Bates has done a fine job.

Amongst the principals, Tom Hopcroft is a show stealer as Fleshcreep. Not only does he cackle and gloat to the manner born but he sings beautifully, not necessarily something one associates with this role.  And Jewelle Hutchinson delights as Jill – prettily appealing but also very feisty. She shines through both her singing and movement work.

John Elkington, a dame veteran at Nottingham Playhouse, gives the audience what they’ve come to see: outrageous costumes (by Cleo Pettitt), silliness, a hint of vulnerability, coy predictability and notable clarity of diction in songs.

I saw this show at a weekday matinee in an auditorium full of school parties buzzing with noisy excitement and the kindness and bonhomie between children of all abilities which I’ve come to associate with Nottingham – one of the reasons I’m prepared to make the journey.

However, primary school children do not, on the whole “get” puns so it might make sense to drop some of them at matinees, although – as Roald Dahl once observed – “knickers” always gets a laugh. Personally, moreover, I could do without the spitting and farting which I’m not sure most of the children present cared for either.

I shall long remember the giant in this show. Initially he was the usual wobbling upstage horror – one eyed and voiced by Ian McKellen. Then after his fall, we got just a massive stage right hard with the fingers moving and Jack imprisoned beneath it, which was actually quite creepy.

Photography by Pamela Raith