Cindy Marcolina - Page 57

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.

With spring quickly approaching and lockdown measures slowly easing, there probably isn’t a better piece of theatre to accompany the warmer weather and cheerier moods than A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Jenny Caron Hall brought a captivating reading filled to the brim with stars to our screens last night.

Adapting classic works for the modern day is a double-edged sword. The usual risk is a clash between a hip makeover and situations that stay too rooted to their original framework. Not in Henry Filloux-Bennett’s take on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. He reframes beauty and popularity for a technology-centric age where our digital lives have essentially taken over.

Lorien Haynes’s Good Grief is hard to pin down. Half comedy, half drama, a bit of theatre with a dash of film. Short enough that it doesn’t become stale, but suitably long to paint an impeccable blueprint of loss. Natalie Abrahami directs the snappy 49-minute one-act play, while Sian Clifford (of Fleabag fame, playing Cat) and Nikesh Patel (Adam) navigate their way through the death of Adam’s partner and Cat’s friend Liv.

Hampstead Theatre are reopening their doors after an exceptionally difficult year with their long-delayed production of Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter. The show features a cast that’s been reshuffled from the conception of Alice Hamilton’s project, with Alec Newman and Shane Zaza taking over from Philip Jackson and Harry Lloyd - who’d previously been announced for the original run in March for the play’s 60th anniversary.

Even though we entered the last month of 202 and we saw the end of a second lockdown in England, the unfortunate theatres around the country that happen to find themselves in Tier 3 are still closed to the public. Like many others, Bristol Old Vic has managed to make lemonade out of lemons and started streaming their projects online with a cracking program that, however, is only a shadow of the real thing. Yet, let’s consider ourselves lucky to be able to enjoy the sweet crumbs of a cruel year.

Not even a pandemic could stop brilliant comedy trio Sleeping Trees to spread their customary Christmas cheer. In a year ridden with uncertainty and the subversion of habitual theatre conventions, the company have created a joyous, hilarious, heartwarming, and absolutely ingenious panto for the whole family to enjoy - preferably in their jammies.

Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's groundbreaking piece Emilia gets another outing in online form after empowering audiences on the Southbank and in the West End last year. The show will be streamed on emilialive.com tonight and made available for two weeks on demand.

There’s no better climate than a global pandemic for the Devil to get married, don’t you think? And they (yes, they - if we need to have one genderqueer character on the theatre scene, it definitely needs to be Lucifer) are inviting you to their hellish royal wedding reception. Dante’s In-Furlough makes for an irreverent, naughty, boisterous, and appetisingly foul-mouthed adventure. A soul-binding contract, an uncooperative fiancée, and plenty of infernal fun await the guests at The Vaults.

After a stellar run at the VAULT Festival, Hayley Wareham's debut play Bottled has been turned by the writer into a radio drama. We had a chat with Wareham about rewriting the piece for a different medium, the impact of domestic violence, and the role of art in society.

Practical guides for writers come a dime a dozen these days, but writer and producer Paul Kalburgi approaches the subject from a different path. As he taps into meditation and the ever-occurring battle with procrastination, he paints an honest and down-to-earth picture of the craft of scriptwriting and building a solid story.

This summera??s final installment of digital theatre shows created by Chronic Insanity comes in the riveting form of 52 monologues that deal with mortality and death. Megan Gates, Nat Henderson, and Joe Strickland co-direct the individual pieces, which are then chosen by the audience themselves randomly, ultimately creating an unrepeatable sequence of videos and a unique train of thoughts. By the end, the spectators will have gone through a singular yet absolutely universal experience - like death itself, one could argue.

The buzz that usually pervades the West End is subdued, even on a Saturday afternoon with the sun shining bright and hot. London still has that feel of a city straight out of a post-apocalyptic film. In a world where all of a sudden theatre as we know it has become a potential threat to the health of the public, the Donmar has managed to reopen in a Covid-safe and all-around exceptionally comforting new version of itself. However, whether youa??re reaching it from Covent Garden or Oxford Street, ita??s impossible to escape the view of all the theatres that still have their doors locked and their windows obscured.

West End star and Dear Evan Hansen's current title character Sam Tutty is taking part in Michael Strassen's 50th anniversary celebrations of Stephen Schwartz and John-Michael Tebalak's Godspell. We had a chat with Sam to hear everything about the show's digital revamp and its topical importance.