Cindy Marcolina - Page 21

Sometimes theatre shows don’t work out. Some can feel like watching a train wreck in slow motion, and others build a brick wall without any mortar to keep the pieces together. It takes nothing, maybe a slight push for the latter to disintegrate. I Could Use a Drink is a mix of both under director Alex Conder.

“So much pain was filled with happiness, at last!” There’s a reason why we call a lengthy, adverse journey “an odyssey”. In 24 books and over 12’000 lines Homer follows Odysseus, the “Master of plots and plans” and King of Ithaca, on his adventures after the decade-long Trojan War. Across another ten years while he was presumed dead, our hero saw all his crew-mates dying horrendous deaths. He was lured by sirens, killed a cyclops, and faced a series of horrible feats.

“My filter goes when I’m nervous!” That’s how we meet Jane Sinclair. The scenario is simple and normal: the 23-year-old young woman is being interviewed for a job. The cold and professionally detached poise of her potential new manager clashes with Jane’s tendency to over-share, but this only seems to amuse him. He slowly warms to her potty mouth and all of a sudden things take a turn for the worst.

“It isn’t where you came from; it’s where you’re going that counts” said jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald. It’s almost as if Hymn embodies this quote. Written by Lolita Chakrabarti (of Red Velvet and the staged version of Life of Pi fame) over lockdown, the play had its premiere in a sold-out live-streamed run in February.

Leave it to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s most colourful musical to date to pull London out of the lockdown blues! After closing down with the rest of the West End last year, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat comes back to the Palladium starring Theatreland’s sweetheart Jac Yarrow as the title character, Alexandra Burke as the exhilarating Narrator, and Jason Donovan - who’s graduated to Pharaoh after playing Joseph in the early 90s. 

The last time Reg was breaking hearts on a London stage was at the Apollo Theatre back in 2015. Simpler times. Much has been said and many comparisons have been drawn between the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and everything that’s happened in this pandemonium of a pandemic.

The hottest Hamlet on the scene is an octogenarian. But Ian McKellen’s latest stage appearance in Windsor is far from being a geriatric production. In the run up to their opening, McKellen and the company described it as “age blind”, almost an experiment to see how the visual aspect of a Shakespeare play impacts the content. The resulting answer is difficult to pin down. Hamlet’s perceived age changes the dynamics. But also, surprisingly, it ultimately doesn’t matter much.

There’s a song by Brad Paisley titled “Little Moments” where the American singer-songwriter celebrates the small instances and idiosyncrasies that make life worth living. Ben Barrow and Lucy Ireland’s new song-cycle From Here feels like the spirit of that ballad was given the space and breath it deserves - although the genre and delivery have nothing to do with Paisley’s hit.

What do Dua Lipa and a French comedy from the 18th Century have in common? Absolutely nothing. They might do in a different adaptation of Pierre de Marivaux’s The Game of Love and Chance, but not in Quentin Beroud and Jack Gamble’s.

Right when summer starts kicking in and restrictions slowly ease, Iris Theatre is putting on an eclectic range of shows at The Actors’ Church in Covent Garden. With bunting all around the grounds and flowers blooming, the new musical The Red Side of the Moon couldn’t have asked for a better ambience. But while the surroundings are a great backdrop with their music festival vibes, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies for the show.

Mr and Mrs Pooter have just moved from Peckham to their new home in Holloway, much to the Mrs P's dismay. She tries her best to be “a dutiful wife” and he is the model Victorian husband. But are they, really? English writer Evelyn Waugh once described George and Weedon Grossmith’s novel The Diary of a Nobody as “the funniest book in the world”. The Pooters have gone on to have quite an onward life over the years and have finally landed at Jermyn Street Theatre in an effervescent revival of Keith Waterhouse’s Mr and Mrs Nobody.

By the pricking of my thumbs, something tipsy this way comes. Iambic pentameter? No, Sh!tfaced Shakespeare is all about inebriated pentameter. After all the various British lockdowns and subsequent theatre closures, the company are back at Leicester Square Theatre to bring the Bard to masses in gallant boozy fashion. After all, there’s nothing like a hilarious tragedy.

“Making money can get intoxicating”, especially the kind of money American banker Nick Bright starts making his capturers from a drab cell in rural Pakistan. Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand comes back to Kiln Theatre directed by its artistic director Indhu Rubasingham.

The United States of America: Land of the free, home of the brave. But also home of filthy rich lottery winners and their subsequent tragic squanderings. It’s summer 1997 in Texas. Billie-Bob Harrell Jr. breaks his back on the daily working at Home Depot and plays the lottery at least twice a week, never winning anything. Until he bags the $31 million jackpot.

“Two households, both alike in dignity”, and so begins arguably Shakespeare’s most popular tragedy. In 424 years since its premiere it’s safe to say not all productions have been alike in status - unlike the famous Capulet and Montague houses of Verona. Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet might as well be the most beloved and regarded couple of the past five centuries. But is Romeo and Juliet a love story? In short, no, not really. It’s a political tragedy that features immature teenage infatuation.

“To begin at the beginning”, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas never got to fulfil his true dream for his troubled radio play Under Milk Wood. It took 20 years of laborious work to put the final touches on the personalities of fictional Llareggub. Alcohol poisoning might have taken Thomas’s life before he heard his drinking - and acting - mate Richard Burton’s take on BBC Radio in 1954, a year after his sudden demise.

Twenty years ago, the world fell in love with a quirky young woman by the name of Amélie Poulain. The French waitress stuck in her own little universe slowly starts to help people find their happiness, finally reaching hers. The stone-skipping and crème brûlée-cracking character played by Audrey Tautou immediately charmed her way into popular culture and by 2015 Daniel Messé, Nathan Tysen, and Craig Lucas had adapted Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s beloved film into a stage musical with Samantha Barks and Phillippa Soo both taking the titular role at separate times in the US.

The boundaries of immersive theatre have always been fairly blurry in London. From shows that happen around a crowd rather than on a frontal stage to properly participative ones, the label started to be linked to the inclusion of the audience in some way or another. Well, The Money doesn’t subscribe to any of these conventions.

In September 2006, all people with an internet connection and a valid email address aged 13 and above were able to sign up to a website that was going to change the world. A year later, Facebook was worth 15 billion dollars. Around the same time, another platform by the name YouTube started to become popular. From then on, we saw a steady rise of social media platforms that connected us and made us feel less alone.

One of London’s most venerated theatres, Shakespeare's Globe has re-opened its doors with Sean Holmes’s gaudy 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With staggered entrance slots and social distance protocols in place, the Globe itself feels it too. The groundlings are masked now (as is the audience as a whole) and are seated on scattered chairs while the actors wear face coverings when they walk among them.