Photos by Pamela Raith

An intelligent, moving, original, tangential response to Romeo and Juliet, Starcrossed  feels, in many ways, like traditional Shakespeare. The three actors are in Elizabethan dress. And I was constantly impressed by the language. Rachel Garnet’s text weaves Shakespeare’s  familiar verse and her own so neatly together that it’s seamless fusion. Most of the play is in iambic pentameter, complete with occasional rhyming couplets and contemporary usage such as “Art thou” and “Go forth”. It’s clever stuff which pounds along with great clarity.

The narrative conceit is that, at the same time as Juliet and Romeo  meet and fall for each other in the background, Tybalt (Tommy Sim’aan) and Mercutio (Connor Delves) realise they are in love. Tybalt tries very hard to resist it but eventually succumbs. The scene in which they wake up after spending the night together, uses Shakespeare’s beautiful lark/nightingale dialogue. Thereafter – when they’re almost caught together – we get a hilarious traditional bedroom farce with much hiding under the bedclothes and quick fire on stage misdirection. It’s a very well paced play.

Gethin Alderman plays almost all the parts except Tybalt and Mercuitio and he is a magnificent, often very funny, actor, Among other incarnations he finds a lofty, gobbled voice for Capulet, a light soppy one for Romeo and a rough bellow for Salvatori, a character not in Shakespeare’s play but essential to the plot here. Alderman exploits his towering height too.

Delves makes Mercutio mercurial and very seductive and Sim;ann brings serious gravitas tempered with warmth to Tybalt. And the  three cast members are finely attuned to each other.

The piece is peppered with wistful folk songs and Elizabethan ballads – mostly in minor keys led by Delves on small guitar, They feel atmospherically appropriate.

Many Shakepeare spin offs – and Juliet or Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet ballet for instance move a very long way from the source material. Starcrossed is refreshing and enjoyable because, despite its plot twist, it actually celebrates Shakespeare’s play. When Mercutio dies, for instance, we’re straight back to the lines we’re all familiar with. Of course there’s room for both approaches.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/starcrossed/

Photos: Pamela Raith Photography

This warmly engaging show is a one-man, song-based autobiographical piece. First aired in 2014, it was originally produced at Manhattan Theatre Club and toured all over the US with the author/composer performing it himself. The 2022 revival features the very talented Max Alexander-Taylor as Ben.

Ben’s life story is eventful. The son of an American father and British mother, he grew up in New York. When he was 14,  his father died suddenly after which his mother returned to the UK with his two younger brothers and Ben who was sent to an English boarding school. As soon as he could he returned to New York, established himself as a musician, had a long relationship with a girl (“freckled face and eager mind”) and, before he was 30, survived Stage 4 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma – a very serious form of blood and bone cancer.

We start with Ben as a child playing a home-made toy guitar with his musically accomplished, mathematician father who eventually gets the boy a proper guitar and shows him one chord from which the rest develops. The relationship with his father is troubled because Ben fails to live up to expectations and Scheuer senior is very short tempered. He and Ben were locked in an unresolved  quarrel at the time of his death so the boy is wracked with guilt and feelings he doesn’t understand. And those feelings are later threaded through the love for Julia and the cancer as we watch, and listen to, Ben unpicking his emotions.

Effectively a musical monologue, this show has some very beautiful songs especially the loving one about how Julia makes him laugh. Alexander-Taylor is perfectly cast. He is an accomplished guitarist (the five instruments on stands behind him are the only props). We are way beyond anything like strumming and the “three chord trick”. He uses plectrum and/or plucks the strings like a harpist to create some complex rhythms and riffs. He plays a lot of melody – often in chords as a pianist would. His high tenor voice does wistful sweetness well and his diction is very clear. He uses an English accent except when he is voicing an American such as his father. It’s a very balanced and impressively sustained 75 minute performance.

He’s also unflappable. Because Lion is performed on a small, intimate thrust stage it makes some use of aisles and the audience is very close. When a  front-row audience member was taken ill on press night, Alexander-Taylor – thrusting his guitar into the hands of a front of house person – was the first to reach him. Once the man had been helped out, Alexander-Taylor simply took back the guitar and continued from where he had stopped, almost without missing a beat. What a pro!

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-lion/

Photos by Suzi Corker

You can rely on Little Angel Theatre to produce oodles of charm and I Want My Hat Back delivers it. Personally I am more charmed by work staged in the exquisite main house than in the rather banal studios, but under fives don’t notice and I’m sure there are good practical reasons for using a building with more space and fewer constraints.

The show – only 35 minutes in total – dramatises a trilogy of tiny stories by Jon Klassen. The first is a quest for a hat by a bear who has lost it. The second is a blue-lit underwater, rather moral, tale of a little fish who steals a hat from a whale and meets an appropriate end. Lastly we meet a pair of desert tortoises who have found a hat which they both want.

Of course the puppets, mostly framed by a mini proscenium standing on a big wooden table with drawers, have to look like the drawings in the books the children are already familiar with. And they do: flat, two dimensional creations operated by two black-clad puppeteers who voice them and slide/whizz them round the space. Eyes, presumably operated by lever from behind are particularly effective.

There are literally dozens of puppets in this show – they come in a whole range of sizes and guises with the bear, his rotating legs flying round as he chases a naughty rabbit,  being my definite favourite. The slick stage management of all these changes is quite a feat.

Simon Lyshon has a very unflappable demeanour and a splendid range of funny noises – the underwater glooping being particularly good. Imogen Khan’s voice work is fine too – she gives every animal a different accent or voice. And the two work seamlessly together.

So all in all, a delightful, engaging show for preschoolers. The little girl (4?) next to me  gleefully shrieked “O my God!” thus making the audience laugh when she saw the sperm whale’s teeth. The show clearly works.

It’s a real pleasure to find a non-professional company still staging an annual show mostly G&S (twelve out of twenty this century) as they have been doing since 1973 – and doing it pleasingly.

Director Leon Berger takes us to the land of make-believe with this production. Frederick is, after all, reckoning by his “natal day” just a “little boy of five”. So with 21st birthday balloons aloft, we’re in a colourful nursery classroom in which pirates with scarves round their waists play with wooden swords and there are lots of wind-up dolls and policemen. But it’s a gentle conceit. Beyond that it’s a pretty straight account of Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 piece.

Someone at Ferrier Opera Company understands that the important thing about making G&S work in the 21 century is to respect the music and have faith in it. And Gilbert’s words are as funny and clever as ever. For the most part they don’t need tinkering with.

I was thrilled, therefore, to hear Hail Poetry – the lovely four line anthem which Sullivan pokes in apropos of nothing in particular – beautifully sung by a totally still cast, lights dimmed and an illuminated photograph of Sir Arthur at the back. Later I was also delighted to hear another anthem To Queen Victoria’s Name sung with the same respect and precision in the second half – this is an unusual inclusion because there are three versions of the Pirates of Penzance owing to “cock-ups” relating to first performances, copyright issues and the first production in New York.

Of course some cast members are a lot stronger than others but Andy Lee excels as Frederick. His tenor voice is delightfully resonant (nothing as crass as radio mics in this production) and he convinces completely as the dutiful young man who falls passionately in love with Mabel (Rebecca Foster). She matches him perfectly with her piercing soprano voice. Yes, she has great fun with her show piece top notes but also duets very sensitively with Lee. Every note and every word is placed with accurate warmth. Both are accomplished actors too.

Other cast members doing a fine job include Jackie Mitchell as Ruth the “piratical maid of all work” whom Frederick loves as his nursemaid but rejects as his bride. She has some good low contralto notes. Nice 2022 touch to have her team up with another woman at the finale so she gets a happy ending like everyone else.

Andy Noakes is a pretty competent Major General – making his first entrance in 19 Century striped bathers, flippers and bearing an inflatable unicorn because he’s come straight from swimming in the sea. Much is made of pretending he can’t manage the rhymes and needing cast help in his famous song. He’s also a strong lyrical baritone as well as a watchable actor. I also enjoyed  Nathan Killen’s deliciously Irish Samuel – he sings well too.

Musical Director, David Stephens gets a nice sound from his bijoux 12-piece band – working from the proper, if cramped, pit offered by the Bob Hope Theatre.  And three cheers for the decision to play the overture and let us listen to it without stagey distraction. The enthusiastic chorus escaped from him several times during the performance I saw but each time he managed to get them back on track after a few bars. I suspect some cast members are not very good at keeping a discreet eye on the conductor.

It’s a decent show, though, and I’m really thrilled that Ferrier Opera Company is doing this sort of thing. Princess Ida next year!

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-pirates-of-penzance-9/

Photo: Tim Morozzo

If you can shed every shred of purist pretension then you might be amused by this colourful, musical romp. Who needs Pyramus and Thisbe, an ass’s head, Athens or a happy ending for the lovers?

We’re in a 1970s club in Blackburn run by Theseus and Hipplolyta (about to celebrate their Silver Wedding) with Philostrate as the MC. Unlikely names for the setting but so be it.  Various weak acts are presented and it’s a long time before we hear any Shakespeare text. And that’s where it flounders because the words are at variance with the situation. Why should a nightclub owner have the authority to condemn a woman to death or banish her to a convent simply because she disagrees with her father? Even given that everyone is – to a greater or lesser extent – dreaming it doesn’t make sense.

The show begins and ends with Puck (Guido Garcia Lueches) teetering about in sparkly shorts, platform boots and long white socks, camply flirting with the audience and being pleasantly outrageous. He has a nice range of facial expressions and lanky body statements. He sings with wistful lyricism too – not the songs which Shakespeare included but lots of others because this show is almost a juke box musical punctuated with popular 1970s numbers which loosely fit the context of what’s going on.

This version has Quince and his mates forming a band to perform at the anniversary party – they’re all competent actor musos and of course, the high quality of their performance destroys all the traditional humour when they play for Theseus and Hippolyta and their friends. It’s as if one of Shakespeare’s funniest scenes has been thrown out to make room for bits of pantomime and stand-up comedy.  It is a neat idea, however, to pop wings on their backs as we move into Discoland (a replacement for Shakespeare’s fairyland) and turn them into a fairy band.  Jon Bonner as Quince on trumpet is good value.

Daniel Hall is entertaining as Bottom although his conversion into a white suited, fuzzy dark wigged doesn’t cut the mustard. Why is it so absurd that the drugged Titania (Emma Wright) would fall for him? He isn’t extreme enough.

Wright does an interesting shift from the glass washing, wise Hippolyta into the glamorous Titania dreaming of sexier things and Ben Whitehead morphs from the down to earth northern pub owner into a strange American (accent iffy) film idol-type as Oberon.

There is an outstanding performance from  Eloise Westwood as Helena. She does desperation, confusion and anger beautifully and her humiliation in the woods is masterly. So is her loneliness at the end when it doesn’t work out with Demetrius (good idea – he has treated her shamefully, after all),  Motherly Hippolyta comforts her and takes her off stage muttering about cups ot tea.

There is a lot of that sort of language in this version with gives us things like; “Stand forth Demetrius – Come here, lad”  or “Full of joy and mirth and byriani”. And the substitution of Blackburn for Athens made the audience laugh every single time on press night. It is also fun to have Lysander (Lyle Fulton – nice work) describing the motorway route to his dowager aunt’s house as a way of coaxing Hermia (Emilia Harrild – good) away from Blackburn.

There’s a lot of talent in this show – especially in the music and the choreographing of the big quarrel scene  – but I doubt that Shakespeare would recognise his play. It’s like Stanley Holloway’s axe joke (new handle, new blade but still the same axe). How much Shakespeare can you strip away and still call it Shakespeare?

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/a-midsummer-nights-dream-10/

Critics, actors and teachers of acting often talk about “truthfulness” in drama. Well, although it’s not quite what such people mean, you couldn’t have anything much more truthful than this play which is overtly about the playwright’s parents and grandparents. Even the names are unchanged. Barney Norris admits in his Author’s Note in the Faber edition, which doubles as a programme, that he wasn’t present at most of these scenes and that some of them “never exactly happened – they’re true stories in a slightly different way”. Or as one long-dead character says just before the end “Then am I here in someone’s dream? Someone doesn’t want me to have gone” to which the rueful reply is “My son is writing us”.

The problem with all this slippery truthfulness is that there’s no real plot. It’s simply a series of scenes set across 30 years in which we see an elderly couple whose son is a professional pianist along with his wife and, later, her second husband. There is tension – of course – and a great deal of wistfulness along with anger, anxiety and frustration. It’s beautifully observed but nothing much happens beyond two people getting very old and a marriage breaking up – pretty ordinary family life, in fact. Norris is probably smiling at himself when his father David (David Ricardo Pearce) tells his grandmother Peggy (Barbara Flynn) about Barney’s first project after university: “There are these people, who meet each other. And they sit around. And then one of them dies. And that’s it really … It’s got songs.”

There is some very good acting, though. Flynn endows Peggy with common sense and sensitivity and skilfully ages her with body language over 30 years. As her practical, straight talking husband, Bert, Robin Soans makes it absolutely clear that he adores his wife while boring the pants off his family with World War Two anecdotes. Ricardo-Pearce is totally convincing as David – trying to be reasonable, often in the face of difficulty and he does awkwardness as well as I’ve ever seen it done on stage. As Fiona, initially David’s wife, Naomi Petersen does with aplomb  the transition from young, happily married woman with a singing career to middle-aged second wife running choirs in the Welsh borders. And George Taylor finds stillness and warmth in the ever decent Rob who takes on David’s two children and has a daughter of his own with Fiona.

Because this play is about a musical family, the cast are all musically adept.  David (David Owen-Norris) has a successful career as a pianist, composer, broadcaster and teacher so the casting director did well to find an actor who could play the piano as well as Ricardo-Pearce does. The play is interspersed with music including a moving account of Dido’s Lament sung by Petersen with Ricardo-Pearce at the piano. And there’s a lovely moment when all five characters join together in a full harmony version of Sullivan’s The Long Day Closes as they busy themselves with tidying the stage.

It’s an enjoyable two hours which gets under your skin even if it makes you feel voyeuristic as you watch actors as “real” people working through the private issues of everyday life. I’m not surprised, though, to read in the Author’s Note that Norris was estranged from his brother for several years because “we disagreed over the ethics of telling”.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/we-started-to-sing/