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Showing posts with label Charing Cross Theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charing Cross Theatre. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
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Rating: 
Finally, a musical that dares to depict the nobility and romance of corpse fucking. It Happened In Key West has been a long time coming for die-hard advocates of necrophilia: fine men and women who all too often have to put up with cruel, misguided comments from frankly unimaginative people who see a dead body and don't see an (over) ripe opportunity for straight-up sexy times.
Set in the sunny Florida keys, this is the true story of Count Carl von Cosel (Wade McCollum) and his (literally) undying love for a woman called Elena (Alyssa Martin). Theirs might have been a traditional love story were it not for Elena dying of tuberculosis, despite his frantic efforts to cure her. Lesser men might have grieved and moved on - but not Count Carl von Cosel.
After two years of mourning he cracked open her tomb and carted what was left of her home, expertly fixing up her with a combination of piano wire, wax and a hell of a lot of perfume. Life was bliss... until her family discovered what von Cosel had been up to.
It Happened In Key West is told from his von Cosel's perspective and with the bonkers forthrightness to treat this as a grand romance rather than a freakin' weird-ass dude obsessed with a mouldy corpse. The show's insistence that this actually isn't that weird a situation after all gives the story a snowballing ludicrousness that's both hilarious and satirises the generally saccharine genre of musical theatre. After all, what better way to poke fun at the objectification of women in a male protagonist-led romance than by reducing her to a literal object mid-way through the play?
Then again, there's also the outside chance that the writers genuinely think this is a romance. After all, the programme claims that von Cosel's story "reverberates through time as a universal tale of the incredible power love wields over each and every one of it" and the von Cosel was subject to an "immense and beautiful power [that] was the driving force propelling our hero every step of his journey".
It follows that up with - I kid you not - a goddamn Bible quote: "Love BEARS all things. BELIEVES in all things. HOPES all things, and ENDURES all things - First Corinthians 13:17" (capitalisation theirs). Hey guys, I'm not no theologian or nothing, but I'm pretty sure the Christian church has a concrete "til death us do part" policy that specifically excludes getting it on with an admittedly quite fetching corpse.
Honestly it doesn't matter whether this is a pointed satire of musical romance OR a genuine paean to the myriad pleasures and romanticism of necrophilia - this is a deeply, powerfully strange bit of theatre that I adored just about every second of.
The songs are great - particularly Undying Love and Don't Worry About A Thing, and they're effectively performed by a cast that skates along the very thin line between sincerity and slyly winking at the audience. The dialogue is funny, providing a genuine cackle from me about every couple of minutes.
The insanely talented Wade McCollum throws himself with zero abandon into portraying von Cosel as broken but basically charismatic, just about managing the Sisyphean task of making us sympathise with his plight, perhaps helped by him booming out his dialogue like an operatic Frasier Crane.
For the sake of a good pun I wish I could say that Alyssa Martin was a bit stiff, but she manages to make an (understandably) under-written role pop. There's something of the virginal Disney princess to the way she approaches the role - her wistful songs about seeing the world and living among the stars cruelly funny given that the show's concept revolves around her imminent death and the Weekend at Bernie's style descretion of her corpse.
I loved It Happened In Key West - it's exactly the kind of head-scratching what-the-fuck theatre that presses my buttons. Though it functions perfectly well as a parody of the kind of sugary shit that generally clogs up the West End, I really, really, really hope that this show is entirely straightforward in its goal of turning a necrophiliac into a genuine romantic hero because that is fucking bananas.
In summary, It Happened In Key West is...
(drum roll)
....dead good.
It Happened In Key West is at the Charing Cross Theatre until 18 August. Tickets here.
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
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His life is the subject of Braille Legacy, a new musical written by French musician Sébastien Lancrenon, translated by acclaimed translator Ranjit Bolt, and directed by Thom Southerland, whose previous musicals Titanic, Grey Gardens, and Grand Hotel received positive reviews (though they didn't exactly set my world on fire).
Set in Paris' Royal Institution for Blind Youth, we follow the young Braille (Jack Wolfe), a bright young boy frustrated by the inadequate 'embossed type' books for the blind. Doctor Pignier (Jérôme Pradon) sympathises with his plight, though he's primarily concerned with securing government funding to renovate the dilapidated school.
Parliament simply does not see the point in assigning funding on teaching blind children to understand literature, history, and music - an opinion they share with cruel teacher Monsieur Dufau (Ashley Stillburn). Things look pretty bleak for the children, until Braille receives an experimental system of "night writing" that an army officer thinks could benefit the blind. Braille soon realises the idea might have potential.
Watching Braille develop his alphabet makes for some pretty compelling theatre, with songs like 'An Alphabet' ably communicating the thrill of discovery and applied thought. Wolfe does an excellent job highlighting Braille's heroic nature, making him intelligent, kind, and selfless without sacrificing his more human nuances. He's got a fantastic voice and stage presence and is pretty obviously a performer to watch.
When Braille Legacy is zeroed on its subject it works gangbusters, an entertaining history lesson on the origins, key developments, and gradual acceptance of Braille in France and around the world. But bubbling away in the background of the first act and coming to the forefront in the second is an unsuccessful B-plot revolving around the villainous Monsieur Dufau, played with Disney villain broadness.
This feeds into a distractingly lurid missing children mystery, which eventually reveals that they've been murdered as human experimental subjects in an effort to cure the blind. As far as I can tell, this is a fictional conceit to ramp up drama in the final acts of the show (there were unethical experiments conducted around the same time, but as far as I can tell not fatal ones), and ends up distracting from the show's putative subject.
It's bewildering that most of Braille's life is relegated to a rushed narrative epilogue - especially considering he went on to become a renowned musician. After all, this is a musical about him, and we never see him perform a single note.
Then again, Braille Legacy's book is nothing much to write home about - full of musical-theatre-101 melodies and thuddingly obvious forced rhymes. You'd think a story about a boy devising a new alphabet would indicate a bit of musical experimentation in the book - surely it'd be better for Braille's unique alphabet to be communicated in the musical structure rather than just sung about in the lyrics?
On the upside Braille Legacy is a concise and uplifting biography of a fascinating historical figure that gives a broad overview of how he invented his alphabet. It's well performed, nicely staged, and doesn't demand too much from the audience. On the downside the unnecessary second act subplots distract focus and it's weak tea musically. My verdict? A bit touch and go.
Then again, Braille Legacy's book is nothing much to write home about - full of musical-theatre-101 melodies and thuddingly obvious forced rhymes. You'd think a story about a boy devising a new alphabet would indicate a bit of musical experimentation in the book - surely it'd be better for Braille's unique alphabet to be communicated in the musical structure rather than just sung about in the lyrics?
On the upside Braille Legacy is a concise and uplifting biography of a fascinating historical figure that gives a broad overview of how he invented his alphabet. It's well performed, nicely staged, and doesn't demand too much from the audience. On the downside the unnecessary second act subplots distract focus and it's weak tea musically. My verdict? A bit touch and go.
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
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Titanic... the musical? It sounds disastrous. What better way to remember the tragic deaths of 1,517 souls than with a crowd-pleasing, toe-tapping musical? Even more ominously, it's an off-West End production staged in the not especially large (though by no means pokey) Charing Cross Theatre. How on earth can you do justice to the sinking of an 53,000 tonne ocean liner in a small theatre on a relatively limited budget while singing and dancing?
There's a quote from writer Maury Yeston on the back of the programme: "I think if you don't have that kind of daring damn-the-torpedoes, you shouldn't be in this business. It's the safe sounding shows that often don't do well". Fair enough. But as I took my seat I couldn't help but feel uneasy: the iceberg took two hours and forty minutes to sink Titanic. I had a feeling a musical adaptation could do the job far more efficiently.
In the end it's not half as awful as you'd expect, though there's a constant nagging sense that the basic idea of a Titanic musical is ridiculous. It's primarily a show about social class: the narrative dividing its characters between third, second and first classes (and prominent crew members) and treating the ship as a microcosm of Edwardian society. On top of that the musical places Titanic in the context of mankind's technological instinct: "In every age mankind attempts / To fabricate great works / At once magnificent / And impossible..."
And so we board the mighty vessel, represented on stage by a some railings, a raised balcony, a set of wheeled stairs and a riveted steel proscenium arch. It's almost minimalist, smartly realising that the audience's imaginations, no doubt bolstered by the iconic movie, will fill in the blanks (though it later makes an unfortunate and underwhelming attempt to simulate the ship sinking by tilting part of the stage a couple of degrees). Helping our imaginations on is an evocative collection of period costumes, from the dowdily cosy coats of the third class to the top hats and tails of the first.
The twenty-strong cast are no slouches either. Each character is based on a real person aboard and each seems determined to do their memory justice. Highlights are Sion Lloyd's Thomas Andrews; a character as sturdy and steadfast as the ocean liners he designs. Though he spends too much time waving around a blueprint (we get it, he designed the ship...), his mathematical realisation that Titanic and the majority of its passengers are doomed is played with precision and subtlety. Other stand-outs are Philip Rham's Captain Smith, whose haunted gaze ably communicates guilt as the ship begins to list, and Jessica Paul's Kate Murphy, full of hope as she transitions from the bondage of the old world to the freedom of the new.
Lyrically, the songs increasingly reminded me of the famous Onion headline (and excellent front page) "WORLD'S LARGEST METAPHOR HITS ICEBERG". Yeston misses no opportunity to bludgeon the audience with the imagery of Titanic as symbol of technological prowess over nature and the ultimate manifestation of the 20th century craving for speed and convenience. As such, most characters end up not feeling so much like human beings as prisms through which we can deconstruct a very, very big boat.
Unfortunately, the rare moments when the characters are allowed to be people and not metaphor facilitators quickly collapse into hackneyed cheesiness, the show hamstrung by a a crippling addiction to incredibly blunt foreshadowing. You can tell things are a bit on the nose when Ismay, Captain Smith and Andrews' repetitive macho posturing about how their prized ship is unsinkable is eventually greeted with scattered chuckles.
The indisputable low point is the puke-inducingly saccharine Still, in which an elderly couple who've resigned themselves to a miserable death serenade one another with the glurgiest lyrics you can imagine. You sense if that the show could get away with having ushers walk the aisles waving freshly sliced onions under the audience's eyes they absolutely would. I'm not an opponent of all sentimentality, but this is just clumsy, particularly when contrasted to the clever finale of simply displaying the names of the 1500 victims of the disaster.
These stabs at emotional manipulation amass like barnacles on Titanic's hull and gradually decelerate the show, and with it the audience's interest. It's overlong at a touch under two and a half hours, to the point where a descent into yet another subplot (I think there are nine concurrent romances going on) gave me a severe case of numb bum syndrome. Even though this production already trims some of the fat from the diffidently received Broadway original you begin to wish that iceberg would hurry the hell up.
I just don't think the story of Titanic can really be done justice to through musical theatre and, though there are moments of delicacy, having characters based on victims of the tragedy singing and dancing through their imminent deaths feels faintly tasteless. Granted, the show hits its emotional, psychological and political targets, but these targets are so big (and also kind of obvious) that hitting them is akin to hitting the side of a barn: not that worthy of praise.
The idea of a Titanic musical is silly, but if it has to exist then fine, this is probably the best it can be done. Though the show strains against the limitations of the musical medium, struggling to find ways to shoehorn in yet another song as the ship comes crashing down around the characters, it just about squeaks through. But it's a close call.
★★★
Titanic is at the Charing Cross Theatre until 6th August. Tickets here.
Thursday, April 14, 2016
Thursday, April 14, 2016
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You'd be forgiven for not having heard of Tennessee Williams' 1969 play In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, falling as it does from his less-praised and less-examined later career. Griefstricken by the death of his long term partner and repeatedly hospitalised for depression and substance addiction, contemporary consensus when this was first staged was that he was past his prime.
Critics were merciless, witheringly comparing his latter plays to glories like A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie. In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel was no exception, closing after just 25 performances and only sporadically revived since.
And I can kinda see why.
And I can kinda see why.
The narrative centres on Miriam (Linda Marlowe), the cynically booze-soused wife of well-regarded artist Mark (David Whitworth). The two have decamped from New York to Tokyo to allow Mark space to explore his latest creative breakthrough, which involves writhing naked on a canvas while screaming abuse. This plunge into the avant-garde amps up Miriam's alienation, sending her off to the titular bar to find solace. Her method for achieving this is cocktails and groping the unhappy barman's (Andrew Koji) genitals.
As is expected in a Tennessee Williams play, things soon spiral into drunken, angry bickering. Miriam craves escape: either to Kyoto or the grave (she keeps a suicide pill she a silver snuff box). Her husband, possibly suffering from a brain tumour, has lost his sense of balance and coordination, not to mention that his manic ravings that he's discovered 'true' colour. The situation isn't improved by the arrival of Leonard (Alan Turkington) a mutual friend and gallery owner from New York who blithely dismisses Miriam's concerns and writes off Mark's bizarre behaviour as artistic eccentricity.
Almost from minute one fuzzily disconnected, numbness bubbles up and billows off stage. Characters talk in clipped, half-finished sentences that accentuate artificiality. In the programme, Tennessee Williams expert David Kaplan explains that the distinctive style arises from the playwright's dabblings in Kabuki, Noh and Gutai performance art, an interest stemming from long conversations with genius novelist/supervillain fascist Yukio Mishima. The result is a play that feels zonked out on a codeine binge, crewed by a cast of characters who've mentally checked out of life.
Intellectually there's a lot of gristle to chew on. It's real easy to transpose what you know about Williams' mental condition to his writing. Most melancholic is him creating a former master artist losing control of his faculties; reduced to stumbling daubing in place of the precision he once wielded. When he slurs "pretension is the unpardonable offence" you feel a stinging sense of self-criticism and pity. This production exhorts us to "stop paying attention to Tennessee Williams' life and pay attention to what he wrote", but for my money this play only really succeeds if you approach it as a cracked prism through which to approach its author.
That's all well and good, but the thing is... well... actually sitting down and watching In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel isn't much fun. It's even (whisper it) a bit boring. It's difficult to criticise a show where the cast have (presumably) been explicitly told to play it flat and iron away any spontaneity from their interactions, but that doesn't wholly excuse an experience that, for all it's artistic worth, had me distractedly flicking through the programme and daydreaming about what I was going to have for dinner.
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel ultimately lands in the awkward category of productions it's far more interesting to discuss than experience. I respect what Tennessee Williams was going for and I respect what director Robert Chevera is trying to achieve here. But it's a huge curate's egg and probably only of interest to extreme Tennessee Williams fans.
★★
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel is at the Charing Cross Theatre until 14 May. Tickets here.
★★
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel is at the Charing Cross Theatre until 14 May. Tickets here.
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