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Showing posts with label jacob brookman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jacob brookman. Show all posts
Sunday, September 21, 2014
Sunday, September 21, 2014
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They say to write what you know. Disappearing Wonderful, a new work by an MA Musical Theatre student, sticks to this maxim like glue. This is a musical exploring the frustrations and lack of direction of recent arts graduates. It's a familiar tale: students blinking in the harsh light of day as they emerge like baby birds from the cosy nest of university. Spread ing their little wings they hurl themselves into the unknown. A few lucky ones catch an updraft and vanish over the horizon. The rest smack into the ground in an unemployed tangle of bones and feathers, easy prey for Starbucks, call centres and questionable medical trials.
Disappearing Wonderful is about the latter crowd. We open to a reunion that marks ten years since college. Egos jostle against each other in a sea of mutual paranoia and competitiveness. Amidst braying arseholes and the smug familied, our leads Steve, Freddie and Lizzie are black holes of disappointment. They shrink together for security, feeling stuck on pause while their former classmates race ahead in fast-forward.
In the depths of their misery we flash back to just after their graduation. Determined to give being an artist one last stab they decide to pool their talents. Steve, wrestling with an incomplete novel resolves to finish it, Freddie will try to rediscover a love of painting and Lizzie will manage both of them. Thing is, we already know they're doomed to fail, cloaking events in a gloomy atmosphere.
This makes for a bitter little pill of a musical. Traditionally musical theatre presents audiences with an escape from reality - to a world of epic romance, cartoonish humour or feelgood triumphalism. Here, James Long, the Goldsmiths masters student responsible for the book, music and lyrics, drags the medium down to the kitchen sink (probably piled high with dirty dishes), externalising worries no doubt at the forefront of the minds of many in the audience.
At just an hour long, character development is compressed down to the bare essentials. We learn just enough about Steve, Freddie and Lizzie to sympathise with their situation, but the limited run-time results in them being sketched out in broad strokes. This means that while it's easy to sympathise with them and you recognise your own fears, it's difficult to become properly involved in their individual dramatic arcs. The upshot is that while there's a few dramabombs launched in the last scenes, these fizzle out rather than explode.
But it's easy to forgive the occasional misstep, fumble or bar of off-key singing. Disappearing Wonderful is undoubtedly rough around the edges, but it's this handspun quality that makes it difficult to criticise too harshly. Musically it's consistently entertaining, the book peppered with lyrical flourishes deployed with gusto by the cast. A common pitfall that Long avoids is the temptation to pause the drama to make way for the songs.
With that in mind, my personal highlight was Dannie Payne's performance towards the end of the show. Beans have been spilled all over the place, leaving her she's distraught and vulnerable. Up to this point most of the show has been low-key stuff, but here Payne sings in loud, cathartic lungfuls - giving the show a crucial injection of passion. It's in this performance that the frustrations that have been building up finally dramatically blossom.
Similarly impressive is a sharply written rant on the psychology of CV construction. In a stream of machine-gunned consonants, Patrick McHugh takes us through the game of who you're writing for. You know that what's on your CV is bullshit, the prospective employer knows it's bullshit and yet you both engage in a complicated dance around the truth. Having to pimp yourself out to employers is a dispiriting, soul-crushing experience - outlined perfectly in this mini-monologue which gets an impressed and much deserved round of applause.
Moments like these go a long way towards making Disappearing Wonderful a worthwhile experience. You get the impression that this is the creative team exploring what they can do with the medium. It's musically promising, works well within the confines of its staging and budgetary limitations and wraps up at just the right time. Promising work from all, I look forward to seeing what this team accomplishes on a larger scale.
Monday, July 22, 2013
Monday, July 22, 2013
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Objectivity is a tricky thing at the best of times, especially when you know the director of a film. Especially when he lives directly below me. With that in mind...
Easy Street is about Easy Street Studios, a recording studio in Bethnal Green with a history of producing reggae and ska music. It's run by UK producer EddyMan, who has recorded some of the most significant UK reggae artists of the last 30 years: including Gregory Isaacs, Denis Brown and Sugar Mintor. But the last few weeks marked the end of an era, soon after completion of this film Eddy Man was evicted from the Cable Street premises and forced to relocate elsewhere in East London. So the film marks the end of an era, acting as a retrospective and history of what Easy Street Studios stands for.
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Saturday, May 18, 2013
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Boy this was a weird one. You should know that objectivity has officially taken a tumble over the cliff and lies in mangled pieces on the rocks below. This is going to take some explaining. So, I've been going to LUPA for over a year now and I usually head home afterwards with a brain brimming over new images, ideas and just plain enthusiasm. My friends get it in the neck; hearing me excitedly babble about rubber mermaid ladies, or a person with a big clay face, or guys maniacally dancing to Justice. This was the final LUPA in this form (there's a final fete on June 15th), so I finally convinced them to come with me. I wanted them to see what I've been doing with my Friday nights.
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