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The Light Princess (Susan Elkin reviews)

The Light Princess – Albany Deptford

Picture: Alex Brenner

The Light Princess continues at the Albany Deptford, London until 24 December 2023.

Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩

The Light Princess is a devised three-hander about a princess in a country called Sneachta who is “different” because she can float, which in this context means fly. Her mother despairs but eventually accepts this otherness, once her daughter has found a supportive friend.

It’s marketed as “a grown-up musical for all the family” with specific mention of ages three to seven in the small print. Actually the sophisticated ideas it tries to convey – at some length – are way too complex for most pre-schoolers. The young children in the two families behind me were literally running about the back of the theatre, totally disengaged, which is pretty distracting for anyone, of any age, able or wanting to watch the show and think about the issues.

And that’s a pity because there’s some good work here …

Read the rest of this review at Musical Theatre Reviews https://musicaltheatrereview.com/the-light-princess-albany-deptford/

Cinderella 3 stars

Nottingham Playhouse

Photo: Pamela Raith.

I saw this show at a matinee along with the biggest school party I’ve ever seen and every one of them was in the mood for a whooping good time. At times the noise drowned dialogue and songs although it must have been a treat for the cast to play to such a receptive audience. It has to be said, though, that perhaps the script should have been adjusted for this crowd because most of the cleverer jokes and puns went over their heads and fell flat.

John Elkington has masses of Dame experience and he plays Rose with flair and neat comic timing. He and Tom Hopcroft, as Violet, the second younger sister play well off each other too, each with  a specific personality.

A number of things made this pantomime better than some. There several songs known to all the children present so, invited or not, they joined in and it felt very inclusive. And you can’t get more traditional than a quick, slick round of “If I were not upon the stage a policeman I would be …” presented as entertainment at the ball.

A rather engaging “scary” (not) ghost sequence with ultra-violet light and disembodied arms apparently moving on their own was such fun that the conventional ghost scene after it seemed lack-lustre.

The  use of a chorus of woodland animals with gorgeous masks is a nice touch and the model flying horse which pulls the coach to the ball and actually achieves lift off is good. Design is by Cleo Pettit and includes an attractive stained glass window-inspired stage frame with lots of glowing pumpkins, There was also a good comedy scene in which Hopcroft plays with the follow spot.

I was amused at the momentary horror when a chunk was hacked off a foot to make it fit the slipper. It seemed gross and rare in Panto. In fact it is straight out of Perrault (1628-1703) who wrote the original pre-Disney, pre-panto story which is much more gruesome than the sanitised version we’re used to,

There are some strong performances in this show. Jewelle Hutchinson delights as Cinderella – all sweetness and dignity. She has a fine singing voice too. So does Alice Redmond who doubles the Fairy Godmother (all soft vowels) with the cackling RP-speaking step mother. Danny Hendrix holds the audience well as Buttons and when he eventually presses his “Big Golden Button” – well it’s a spontaneous applause moment.

 

  • Photos: Pamela Raith

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I spotted this book in the National Theatre Bookshop four or five years ago and bought it. The main attraction was the pretty cover. I don’t normally go in for that. I’m usually all about content. It’s the quality that counts and not the wrappings, as my father used to opine in various contexts. But I really couldn’t resist this elegant Liberty fabric cloth cover and the matching marker ribbon. Tactilty and visual delight, for once, won the day.

Over several Christmases since I have dipped into it, along with my collection of other favourite old Christmas anthologies, but until now had never read it right through. Now that I have, I can report that it’s a goldmine of new discoveries.

Simon Rae’s collection dates from 2017 and of course he includes all the obvious, familiar things such as John Betjeman’s Christmas, the opening of St John’s Gospel, Charles Causley’s Innocents’ Song, some Dickens and lots of carols. But across 260 pages he also assembles lots of extracts, stories and poems which were either new to me or which I’d never thought of in this context. I like the way he ranges across nine centuries (I don’t think I knew that I Saw Three Ships dates from the 14th century) and arranges his material in broad themes such as War, Family, Carols, Animals and seventeen other “chapters”.

I especially enjoyed George Bernard Shaw’s 1898 review of The Babes in the Wood at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in which he gives us a witty condemnation of Christmas and all who sail exploitatively in her, including pantomime makers and participants. He describes Christmas as …. “an indecent subject; a cruel gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject, a wicked, cadging, lying, blasphemous and demoralizing subject”. Oh for an ounce of Mr Shaw’s flair with words. I wouldn’t mind a bit of his fearless cynicism either.

Or take George Monbiot’s short piece which suggests that the image of Father Christmas being drawn across the sky by reindeer may have its orgins in delusions induced by eating hallucinogenic fly agaric toadstools in darkest Siberia.

Of course, moreover, I relish anything by Wendy Cope and  hope I’m not infringing copyright by sharing this witty, bitter little gem here.

At Christmas little children sing and merry bells jingle.

The cold winter air makes our hands and faces tingle

And happy families go to church and cheerily they mingle

And the whole business is unbelievably dreadful if you’re single.

 Rae also throws into the mix Just William, Saki, Mr Pooter, TS Eliot, Jilly Cooper, DH Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, John Milton and a delightful spoof, by Frank Jacobs,  on The Night Before Christmas  among many others. It really is a glorious and eclectic seasonal read – like a tasty Christmas pudding into which every imaginable ingredient has been happily stirred with plenty of brandy.

 

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: All the Lonely People by Mike Gayle

Peter Pan continues at the Rose Theatre, Kingston until 7 January 2023.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Four adult professionals and a splendid cast of 20 performers from Rose Youth Theatre form the gender-blind cast for this show. The young members work in two teams. It was Green Cast on press night.

The music is pre-recorded rather than live but the cast seems to work happily with it. It’s a show with occasional songs rather than full-blown musical theatre. The slinkily rhythmic melody for the pirates is especially effective (music, lyrics and orchestrations are by Vikki Stone).

The show is framed by a lively grandmother (Hilary Maclean, good), probably 1960s, trying to coax her grandson Ralph (Ella Waldmann, Green Cast) to bed in an old-fashioned nursery ….

https://musicaltheatrereview.com/peter-pan-rose-theatre-kingston/Read the rest of this review at Musical Theatre Review  

Show: Pacific Overtures

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: Menier Chocolate Factory. 53 Southwark Street, London SE1 1RU

Credits: Music & Lyrics Stephen Sondheim. Book by John Weidman. Additional material Hugh Wheeler. Directed Matthew White. Presented by Menier Chocolate Factory co-produced with Umeda Arts Theater.

Pacific Overture

4 stars

Until 1853 Japan was an Island in the sea which had kept out “barbarian foreigners” since the seventeenth  century. They were a peaceful people who grew rice and painted screens. Then four American warships turned up to make “Pacific overtures”, aggressive ones if necessary, and things changed very quickly.

That’s the history which inspired this American musical, dating from 1976, which tells a very human story entirely from the point of view of the Japanese. It has been pared down, over the years, to highlight the serious, often tragic, nature of the narrative and this engaging new production, which first ran in Tokyo and Osaka earlier this year, runs for I hour 45 mins without interval.

It has always been specified that the cast should be Japanese and most of this cast have Pacific heritage although many of them trained at UK drama schools. The production was originally played in Japanese. At the Chocolate Factory it’s in English, with one neat little joke when the cast apparently forgets and has to be switched back.

The man who does the switching is Jon Chew, the narrator who, remote video control in hand, presents the story as if it were an illustrated lecture. And it’s a splendid performance. He struts, hops and dances about, catching the eyes of audience members, watches the set pieces from the sidelines and is charismatically convincing. We believe what he says. Occasionally he becomes part of the action. He is very adept in including the entire audience as he speaks. The Menier is configured in a traverse format for this production and Chew handles that expertly.

It’s a big cast of seventeen with some enjoyably energetic ensemble work. Saori Oda is excellent as the Shogun, initially very formal but gradually thawing as the situation becomes tenser. She is also delightful as the saucy, knowing, Madame supervising her “girls” and pragmatically seeing good business opportunities in the arrival of foreigners. And that encapsulates the tragedy of this tale. How are foreign sailors to tell which women are prostitutes and which aren’t in this culture so different from their own? The scene in which Luoran Ding is an exotically pretty woman in an orchard where she is propositioned with money by three eager but pretty harmless young Brits is devastating because her honour is ruthlessly defended by the men who guard her. And that’s based on a real historical incident.

The scene in which boats begin to turn up from all over the world hungry for exploitative trade opportunities is a richly entertaining, beautifully written series of stereotypical pastiches.  Patrick Munday gives us a British Admiral singing a take-off of a G&S patter song.  Lee VG makes his bass voice sound straight from the Volga as he accelerates in true Russian folk-style.  And Sario Soloman is hilarious and an absurdly over-the-top, show-stealing French admiral.

Paul Farnsworth’s set does clever things with a big circular screen, looking like a rising sun to connote Japan, or maybe a world map, at one end which splits vertically as doors. It often frames scenes such as the Shogun’s court too. Ayako’s imaginative costumes range from kimonos to silly hats for Admirals and outfits which include boats and national flags. From the technical point of view, however, the best thing is Paul Pyant’s evocative lighting – bright for an orchard, blood red for horror and delicate light patterns on the floor.

 

And it’s all accompanied/led by Paul Bogaev’s fine nine piece band, just visible on a corner balcony. A lot of the music is very subtle – the Pretty Lady number, for example develops into a very attractive fugal piece. And Sondheim isn’t above the classic but always effective trick in which you use the pentatonic scale, rather than the usual Western eight note one,  to make a melody sound Japanese.

I know that to criticise Sondheim is as crass as finding fault with Leonardo da Vinci or Mozart but, as always with his shows, I found myself wondering whether the music needs to be quite so repetitive. I’m not at all convinced that every reprise actually adds something. And most of the numbers (there are only ten in the whole show) are quite long and sometimes feel protracted.

My other little gripe, in what really is a fine show generally, is my usual problem with stage smoke. And there’s a great deal of it when the first American boats arrive. Yes, I know it’s theatrically effective, lighting designers love it and actors sing through it without a problem but – even though it’s meant to be completely harmless – it makes me cough. Perhaps I am a freak but there it is. We exist.

 

  • Photos: Manuel Harlan

First published by Sardines https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/pacific-overtures/

Messiah

George Frederick Handel

Merry Opera Company

 

Music Director Will Sharma

Organist Jack Stone

Stage Director Hohn Ramster

Revival Director Lorrie Hay

 

It isn’t a proper Christmas unless, and until, I’ve heard a decent Messiah. And this year Merry Opera Company, whom I’ve seen in action many times before, obligingly staged theirs in a church which is walking distance from my home, as part of their 2023 tour.

“Staged” is the key word because this is John Ramster’s attempt to find contemporary stories in Handel’s music and it’s the sixteenth time this production has toured so it clearly ticks lots of boxes for many people.

Twelve people arrive – in many cases emerging from spare seats in the audience – at a church presenting various degrees of anger, distress, despair, puzzlement, complacency and more. Each has been assigned a personal story although the audience never knows what these are.

It brings, however a completely fresh dimension to music that I’ve sung, played and heard many, many times going all the way back to school days. And that’s the moving, magical thing about this production, which I’ve seen before in a village church in Kent but that was some years ago.

For a start, doing it like this, means that it all has to be from memory, which adds to the immediacy. Second – with only three singers to each line including solos – the difference between choruses, solo numbers and recitative gets blurred. And it means you can split numbers between singers.  I really like “I know that my redeemer liveth” shared between two altos and a counter tenor (Joshua Elmore), for example. It feels warm – and like almost every note  in this performance – as if each singer means every single word. Elmore does a beautiful “Oh thou that tellest” too.

These singers sing to each other as if they’re in opera and the acting adds resonance. Elmore weeps as he sings “He was despised”. Glenn Tweedie’s opening “Comfort Ye” is almost shocking in the way he conveys the need for comfort in the lovely dramatic acoustic of St John the Baptist Church.  And just occasionally – and rather effectively – they come together as a quasi-conventional choir for numbers such as “Since man came by death” whose beauty, harmony and agony really has to be listened to attentively. If this were  a different sort ofmusical theatre you’d call it a “show stopper”.

Conductor Will Sharma is positioned so that he can be seen by both organist and singers and they must have to work this out very carefully in each different venue. In the performace I saw he was standing on a chair, score on iPad, next to a pillar a few feet from my seat  near the back. There are times, nonetheleswhen some of the singers can’t see him and there’s a time lag to be negotiated but they do a pretty good job of staying together. Only once in the performance I saw/heard did it lose its way and then it was only for a few bars.

The very best thing about this take on Messiah is the surround sound effect and I remember thinking that last time too. Singers are all around you and it’s like being immersed in quadrophonic magic and that’s rare in live performance. It makes you hear, and listen, to every line if the person with the next entry is, literally, standing next to you or just a few feet behind, And when they get to “Worthy as the Lamb” which comes from all corners and sides it’s electrifyingly magnificent, Finally they group at the front for “Amen” and Sharma obviously loves that summative, sublime top A, nine bars before the end, as much as I do because he puts a dramatic accent on it.

As for the “action”, well, there’s a great deal of arm flailing which puts me in mind of the semaphore I was made to learn in the Brownies or of children playing aircraft. And I have no idea why everyone is in funeral black and apparently at a church service for “Behold the Lamb of God” or why they then change into cricket whites or why most of them lie as if dead in the aisle during one number. I suppose punching the air throughout “Hallelujah” and hopping on and off boxes as if doing a gym exercise, does convey a sense of excitement if you don’t think the music already does that.

Moreover, it’s quite a feat to sing part of “If God be for us”  while hoisted, horizontal and corpse-like six feet in the air by four others as Valerie Wong does.  I simply can’t imagine singing the rapid semiquavers in “And he shall purify” and having to dance at the same time either.  And Glenn Tweadie dons a floaty white shroud/beach robe under which he changes his trousers while singing “But thou didst not leave”. These people are opera singers and, evidently, well accustomed to theatrical multi-tasking.

None of that matters, though. It’s the quality of sound and singing which rules the day. And it does just that – in spades.  My Christmas has really begun now.

 

 

A friend of mine often mentions William Golding (1911-1993) because he taught her late husband English at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. Then came the enormous success of Lord of the Flies (1954) which allowed Golding to quit the classroom in 1956.

One presumes that the Salisbury years led to much reflection on the cathedral’s 404 foot spire. It’s been the tallest church spire in Britain since 1561 when the spire of Old St Pauls fell in a fire (to be followed by the rest of the building in the Great Fire of 1666) which was said to be 489 feet tall. For comparison and context, the Shard in London today stands at 1004 feet.

Salisbury Cathedral’s spire was added in 1320 to a building dating from a century earlier.  And it’s the logistics of that grandiose extension which form the starting point for Golding’s 1964 novel The Spire, although we’re in an unnamed city rather than Salisbury specifically.

Jocelin is Dean of the Cathedral and hell-bent (literally – he’s deeply troubled) on an absurdly high spire – against the practical advice of the masterbuilder Roger Mason who argues that the foundations, such as they are, will not take the weight.

Golding was a visionary and so is Jocelin who sees “his” spire as a monument to his life and to God. He hallucinates and has erotic dreams as he shifts between everyday life including mundane interaction with others and intense other-worldly experience. He’s a monk, of course, and in 1320 the church was still Catholic. At one point he faces a formal Visitor from Rome to question his actions in a quasi-trial.  Eventually we realise that Jocelin is ill – with, one presumes, some sort of agonising spinal cancer. It is eventually described as “a consumption of the spine and back”. “Holy Mother of God. Look at his back!” one onlooker cries when he collapses helpless in the street towards the end of the novel and his robe flaps up. He believes there is an angel on his back, mostly benignly protective but who eventually beats him with a flail – as he tries, racked with guilt, to interpret his pain.

Golding was among many other things a symbolist and, like Lord of the Flies, this novel is full of symbolism. The spire itself, as it grows and thrusts upwards, is clearly phallic and represents Jocelin’s thwarted, convoluted, complex desires. Golding himself, who drafted this novel in an astonishing fourteen days, joked that he was going to call it “An Erection at Barchester.”  The young woman, Goody Pangall (her very name is significant)  who dies in childbirth has oft-mentioned red hair. Then there’s the “singing” of the stones and pillars in the wind as the building gains height.

It’s a densely, intensely written novel with much metaphysical meandering. It’s also strong on the physical level. Golding has extraordinary powers of observation and description: “Presently ropes began to hang down from the broken vault over the crossways, and stayed there swinging, as it the building sweating now with damp, inside as well as out, had began to grown some sort of gigantic moss” or “Her eyes were two black patches in her winter pallor.” It’s written in the third person but presented from Jocelin’s point of view.

He has a highly informed and very impressive grasp of architectural principles and mechanics too. From my first reading of this book back at college in the 1960s to revisiting it now, I emerged understanding a lot more than when I started, about structural octagons, capstones, supporting steel bands, wind resistance and the like. I also had to manage my own fear of heights because some of the description of experience at the top of the spire is vertiginously graphic.

And of course Jocelin, who believes passionately in miracles, gets the one he wanted. Salisbury Cathedral’s  spire is still pointing proudly (reverently?)  to the sky 700 years after it was built.

William Golding, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. Although it was an honour conferred on, among others, Rudyard Kipling (1907) John Galsworthy (1932) and TS Eliot (1948) it is surprising just how few British writers have achieved this.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Faber Book of Christmas edited  by Simon Rae

 

Symphony Orchestra of India

Conductor Richard Farnes

Soloist Marat Bisengaliev

Fairfield Halls, Croydon

05 December 2023

John Williams’s The Imperial March from Star Wars is a good concert opener/warm up. Richard Farnes ensured that we got the measure of this fine orchestra immediately with all heavy down bow work and grand statements from the brass.

SOI was founded in 2006 by its chairman Khushroo N Suntook and tonight’s soloist violinist Marat Bisengaliev. Based in Mubai, it recruits from all over the world.  I went to the concert largely out of curiosity and I’m very glad I did because the quality was outstanding. And it’s interesting to see and hear, a band whose players are predominantly Indian, playing with a British conductor.

The Khachaturian Violin Concerto in D minor, written for David Oistrakh in 1940 was an intriguing choice and if there’s a stereotypical look for a violin virtuoso then Bisengaliev confounds it. Hunched and bespectacled in a comfy overshirt, he doesn’t go in for showy gestures. He just plays every note – and there are a lot of them – with insouciant accuracy and warmth. I particularly admired the bassoon and whispering violas in the second movement and the way the first violins shaped their notes at their entry before the solo muted line from Bisengaliev which was evocative and richly mysterious.

For his encore, Bisengaliev was joined at the front by a flautist from the orchestra with a wooden flute. Accompanied by the orchestra they played the very pretty The Wooing of Etain by Karl Jenkins – complete with elegantly delivered legato notes from the flute and gentle double stopped glissandi from the violin.

But the best bit came after the interval in the form of Tchaikovsky’s 6th symphony “The Pathetique”.  I have known and loved this most anguished of symphonies since I was a geeky teenager borrowing LPs from the library, but it’s a while since I heard a live performance. It is isn’t quite such a popular programme choice as it once was and I was faintly surprised that SOI chose it rather than something closer to home, but I’m delighted that they did because their performance was a sumptuous, rewarding treat. I suspect Richard Farnes loves it as much as I do because he certainly dug out the passion.

Highlights included the perfect balance between the pizzicato descending scales in the strings and the trombones at the end of the first movement. Then we lilted lovingly (beautiful playing from violas and cellos at every stage of this concert, by the way) into that strange 5|4 “waltz”  whose lopsided oddness, tuneful as it is still conveys unease.

The huge, manic Allegro molto vivace, which always fools half the audience into thinking it’s the end of the symphony, was played with an attractive combination of delicacy and strength. The rapid string sections were crisp and the cymbal clashes, perhaps my favourite moments in the whole work, suitably dramatic.

And so to that brooding, introspective concluding adagio into which Farnes moved swiftly to curtail the intrusive applause. The bassoon solo was arresting, the heart breaking main melody delivered with compelling emotion and Farnes really leaned on the general pauses which was effective. Happily, too, he managed to hold the silence at the end as the sound of the very quiet ending died away.

It is a great pity – and presumably disappointing for the orchestra – that the hall was barely a quarter full for this impressive and enjoyable concert. A lot of people missed something really quite special.