(3 / 5)

Please note this is a review of a preview performance

Floods of tributes for Steven Sondheim have poured in since his death in November. Send in the Clowns often gets in my head, I doubt I could think of a song more perfect. A legacy has been left with highs and lows, featuring lesser known stage work going back decades. Anyone Can Whistle is one such example.

The Grey Area Theatre and Alex Conder have taken a risk with this musical, certainly not one of his shows which comes to mind, more of a Pointless answer on that TV quiz (I remember getting Merrily We Roll Along as a winning answer). It reeks of mid 60’s, on the cusp of free love and the big revolutions of the day. The book by Arthur Laurents is not as sharp nor comical as it should be. Sondheim here has the promise of great songs, with that machine-gun quick lyricism that comes later, more defined more acclaimed pieces. The story tries to put under a microscope miracles, society, identity and the medical professions, yet doesn’t achieve any deep insight or whimsy. Strangely, there was a feel of Mark Twain and Dr Seuss for different reasons.

Past this, here is a peppy, diverse ensemble who put a lot of effort in a confined cat-walk with a band up on a rampart. The theatre has little of a set, a rock for the miracle MacGuffin to occur, some motels signs and a wheelbarrow full of glitter being passed of as the holy water. The leads have charisma. Jordan Broatch is J. Bowden Hapgood, Donovan meets The Darkness in a role full of subtle swagger and a happy-go lucky, deception. Alex Young gets most of the laughs as Cora Hoover Hooper, the silly-billy mayoress in a state of constant corruption, her only paranoia to be struck out of office, an act on a knife edge of occurring throughout. Christina Symone as Nurse Fay Apple, is the up tight sort, losing herself in her daft French disguise, proving some decent vocals. The full cast had enough energy to conduct electricity, the buzz of the space hard to deny. Costumes hark back to the psychedelic, hipster days, with an 80s nod in the second act as well.

I saw the last preview performance and noted the screens with music director Natalie Pound in the last two acts lost a signal, with some desperate attempts by a stagehand to fix this. The band were alive with the upbeat plateau that the musical little left. I feel the show might have suited a slighter large venue, I noted a few near slips off the platform, though nothing dramatic. Perhaps then you would be able to drink in the notorious sanatorium dance numbers, a larger rock set might have added to the drama as well.

There are few things more magical than L. Frank Baum’s tales of Dorothy, Toto and company, and Orbit Theatre’s new version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is sure to enchant audiences when it lands in Cardiff later this month.

Dorothy Gale and her little dog, Toto, are swept away from Kansas and into the technicolour utopia of Oz, a land of lions and tigers and bears – oh my! Her flying house falls on and kills the Wicked Witch of the East, which makes Dorothy a reluctant saviour to the good people of Munchkinland – but all she wants to do is go home, which is a wish only the great and powerful Wizard of Oz can grant. With the Wicked Witch of the West hot on her ruby heels, Dorothy and her new friends – a scarecrow, a tin man and a cowardly lion – race to see the Wizard before it’s too late.

As Wales’ number one amateur theatre company, Orbit has been delighting Cardiff audiences for over twenty-five years. It’s one of the few outlets in Cardiff that gives non-professionals the chance to get involved in professional theatre, meaning that Orbit is not only living the dream, but making dreams come true.

Follow Dorothy and friends down the yellow brick road to the New Theatre this month and you might just find what you’re looking for over the rainbow.

Review to follow!

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz will be playing at Cardiff’s New Theatre from 20 – 23 April.

(4 / 5)

13 or 14 years ago, while studying Drama at school, I was introduced to the world of Melodrama and in particular, Maria Marten. We investigated the parallels between the real life story and its dramatisation for entertainment, performing the show ourselves for both audience and coursework purposes. So when I saw the press release for this, I was both excited and anxious to revisit a story which helped me continue my love of theatre.

The Ballard of Maria Marten is based on the true life events of Maria who, growing up poor, meets and falls in love with a series of fortunate men. Eventually, one of them turns out to be awful, physically and emotionally abusing her, leading to her death. Don’t worry, this is no spoiler – the famous story is known for it’s heroine’s unfortunate ending and a big reason it was taken for the stage. This version looks more at Maria’s side; her background, what she may have encountered, her growing smugness at the attention from rich men, desperately wanting love, when eventually, former failings at relationships leads her to be gaslit and abused. In her story, we also encounter other characters to build this back story, highlighting friendship, family, love and womanhood, motherhood and the difficulties of the era.

Eastern Angels have smartly moved away from the melodrama element. The closest we tend to get these days is the Pantomime, and so, while I would have been intrigued to see a modern day melodrama, this story is taken and performed sensitively and down to earth. It is mostly played straight, with the occasional joke or slight kooky characters, but you for sure believe in them. Once we get to know them and become part of their friendship, the end is all the more emotional and painful.

The performers are all women, and they choose to dress up for the first two suitors. This is effective and genuine and so as we see the relationships progress, it makes her heartbreak and abuse become even more dramatic. Her Father and her final suitor are not shown. While the Father isn’t seen as abusive, it highlights how out the picture he is to her and her life. Not giving the “villain” a face is also effective – Elizabeth Crarer, who plays Maria, uses great physicality, reactions and facial expressions to express his abusive nature and it makes it all the more frightening and disturbing, adding to her deterioration.

There is a huge element of girl power and girl friendships in this piece. My memory to some degree is hazy on both the story and the melodramatic version, but adding these characters makes the show more real. And they are all different as of any friendship group. The amazing thing about this version of the story is that we can relate, and with its reflection on events in the last couple of years. We can relate to a friendship group; of them growing up together and coming of age both together and as individuals. The elements of domestic abuse and murder also pick up on issues in the last few years; of potential home abuse increasing through Covid-19 and the sad death of Sarah Everard and others that have come to the surface. Media makes this shocking and tragic, as it really is but not something, sadly, new.

There is a lovely country feel to this production: in Wilton’s Music Hall, the perfect setting for a play set so long ago. The old furnishings and patchwork walls add to the idea of the countryside, with the wooden barn silhouette on stage – fits as if it has always been there. There is recorded music, music that feels very folk but often they will sing the ballards themselves, harmonising beautifully. Unfortunately sometimes the words were lost to the echo of the space which was a shame when it was so beautiful. They also make their own sounds of objects, babies, horses which adds a real sense of authenticity as opposed to recorded soundbites.

The Ballard of Maria Marten is reclaiming back her story. There are no villains in top hats and capes or over the top gestures as was originally meant by turning this sad true tale into a production, but all the gaps in between are filled in the story with this heartfelt, emotional and at times, funny retelling.

Rocky Horror isn’t just a show: it’s an experience. That’s the promise that has ushered audiences into its weird and wonderful world for nearly fifty years. Starting life as an experimental stage play in 1973, it gained a cult fanbase with the iconic 1975 movie adaptation. The film might have bombed, but its success went nuclear: it exploded on the indie scene, and after the countless midnight showings and Halloween screenings that followed, Richard O’Brien’s counter-cultural magnum opus has made its rambunctious debut in Cardiff to remind us why it’s time to do time warp again.

Brad (Ore Oduba) and Janet (Haley Flaherty) are two college kids who are on the road to marriage – until they get a flat tyre just outside Castle Frankenstein. Pathologically prim and proper, they’ve never put a toe out of line; but now they’ve set foot in the lascivious lair of Dr Frank-N-Furter (Stephen Webb), they’re in for a treat – and a few tricks along the way.

Directed by Christopher Luscombe, Rocky Horror is a non-stop thrill-fest that never comes up for air. The cast are extremely game and honour their filmic counterparts while adding their own unique spin to the characters. And there’s no character more unique than Frank-N-Furter, a role which launched Tim Curry into the celluloid stratosphere. Curry has big platforms to fill, but Webb slips into them with ease. Sensuous, sinister, and seductive, he’s a negligée-d enigma. Masculine, feminine, beautiful, scary: Frank is at the intersection of it all, and nowhere is that better showcased than in Webb’s explosive entrance: “Sweet Transvestite”. From the moment he stepped through the smoke like a demented, diamanté-d Dracula, he had everyone in attendance trembling with antici… pation.

Since his Strictly win, Oduba has proven himself a force to be reckoned with on the stage, moving effortlessly between cutesy doo-wops (“Dammit, Janet!”) and emotive ballads (“Once in a While”). Flaherty is hilariously nervy and nerdy as the vestal Janet, before enthusiastically wooing Ben Westhead’s Rocky (wearing nothing but Speedos and a smile) with the absolute banger that is “Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me”. But there’s nothing that touches the gorgeous majesty of “The Time Warp”, which has the ensemble and the audience alike bopping about in harmony.

Everyone looks like they’re having a ball. Stefania Du Toit (stepping in for Lauren Ingram) is perfect as Columbia, the helium-voiced henchwoman with a heart as gold as her top hat. Equally impressive is Suzie McAdam as Magenta, a simmering flame of charisma with a voice like bourbon on the rocks. Kristian Lavercombe plays her brother Riff Raff, an Igor-like acolyte of Frank’s. Lavercombe moves like an unravelling accordion, all sinewy deference and devilry in a performance of which Richard O’Brien himself would be proud. Joe Allen plays Eddie, a role originated by the dearly-departed Meat Loaf. Eddie only lasts for a single song, but if your number’s up, make sure that number’s “Hot Patootie – Bless My Soul”, a rock ‘n’ roll riot that Allen absolutely kills. He also plays the Strangelove-esque Dr Scott (or should that be, Dr Von Scott?) to hilarious results. And Reece Bundin, Jordan Fox, Darcy Finden, Rachel Grundy and Danny Knott are Phantoms so magnificent they put the Opera Ghost to shame.

The plot might be slight but Rocky Horror isn’t about story as much as it is about pure, magnificent madness. Our steward through the madcap melee is Philip Franks, a stalwart of British stage and screen, who has played Rocky’s indomitable Narrator since 2012. He’s the human embodiment of the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ slogan; unfazed and unflappable, his beleaguered MC fields obscenities and interjections flung at him from the crowd – something for which Rocky Horror is legend. This is a show that’s performed as much by the audience as it is by the cast – and you might well see as many Columbias, Franks and Magentas in the stalls as you will on the stage.

Framed by a swirl of film reel, Hugh Durrant’s set transitions from 50s kitsch to Gothic camp – its mansion set looks as if Gaston bought the Moulin Rouge – and climaxes in a waterfall of crimson tinsel through which the characters, all dressed in identical scarlet corsets, emerge as their true selves. Sue Blane’s costumes are dead ringers for the ones donned by Curry and co. (and even improve on them on in some instances), and the live band, led by musical director Charles Ingles (stepping in for Greg Arrowsmith), really puts the “rock” in Rocky Horror.

Rocky Horror is a love letter to schlocky sci-fi B-movies and pretty ditties from the 50s (opening song, “Science Fiction/Double Feature”, has never sounded so beautiful or so poignant) – but most of all it’s a paean to self-expression; a fearless celebration of queer joy that implores us, “Don’t dream it, be it”. In Rocky Horror, everyone belongs. No-one is thrown away – even if they’re chainsaw-ed to death offscreen. It’s a ripped fishnets and smudged lipstick kind of a show; glamorous, rebellious, and racy, it’s not so much camp as it is a whole glampsite. Hot Patootie, Bless my Soul – you’ll really love that Rocky Show!

The Rocky Horror Show is playing at the New Theatre through to Saturday 12^th February

Images credited to David Freeman

The Millennium Centre is back with a boom – or should that be ‘broom’? – as the UK Tour of Bedknobs and Broomsticks sweeps through Cardiff this week. Based on the Disney classic and featuring original songs by the Sherman Brothers (Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), with new music and lyrics by Neil Bartram, the ambitious production has the unenviable task of making its COVID-weary audience believe in magic again – and I’m thrilled to say it succeeds.

London, 1940: as World War II rages, the Rawlins children are tragically orphaned in the Blitz. Evacuated to the Dorset coast, they are assigned a new guardian: the eccentric Eglantine Price (Dianne Pilkington), a reclusive woman with a penchant for motorbikes and, they soon learn, magic. You see, Eglantine is a trainee witch, and she wants to use her powers to defeat the enemy – until she receives word that her witchcraft academy has suddenly shut up shop with her studies incomplete and a crucial spell unfinished. Armed with the titular bed(knobs) and broomstick(s), Eglantine and the Rawlinses travel back to London to complete the spell with the aid of Eglantine’s erstwhile educator, Professor Emelius Browne (Charles Brunton).

That’s a lot of set up for a story with a comparatively slender plot and a whole lot of animated sequences to translate into live action – but the creative team are more than up to the task. Jauntily directed by award-winning theatre-makers Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison, writer Brian Hill updates the original by adding much-needed characterization and depth to the unlikely quintet. West End star Dianne Pilkington leads an incredible ensemble with wit and whimsicality, channeling the legendary Angela Lansbury while putting her own instantly-iconic spin on the character. She brings a brusque charm and a delightful physicality to the role, and convincingly grows fond of her wayward wards without losing her edge. Her chemistry with Charles Brunton as the relentlessly lovable conman ‘Professor’ Browne is enchanting, and the odd couple has more time here than in the movie to get to know each other, making their romance more believable. And, on the strength of their performances here, the actors who play the Rawlinses (different each night, except for Conor O’Hara as Charlie), all have excellent careers ahead of them.

The show’s premier prestidigitator is Jamie Harrison, who is responsible for the magnificent sets and breathtaking illusions and also co-directs. Short of actual magic, I have no idea how he made beds soar, brooms fly, and brought the beautiful briny to bobbing, brilliant life – Harrison, who was also behind the technical wizardry of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, has really outdone himself here. I genuinely can’t work out how he did it! His illusions complement Kenneth McLeod’s utterly charming puppets, which evoke everything from shoals of dancing fish and an obsequious bird, to a bashful bear and a literal lion king, not to mention a few human-to-rabbit transformations.

The flying bed takes Eglantine, Emelius and the Rawlinses all over the world, from the sleepy Dorset coast to the raucous London streets to the balmy/barmy island of Nopeepo. The vibrancy of these scenes are enhanced by Gabriella Slade’s costumes (Eglantine’s outfits, sequinned sea-wear and Portobello punk couture are standouts) and Neil Bettles’ choreography (the opening scene is a masterclass in movement). As for the musical numbers, ‘Portobello Road’ is a lively highlight, a carnivalesque spectacle of urban chicanery; and ‘The Beautiful Briny’ is suitably sublime, featuring gorgeous underwater locales and an aquatic dance-off – but there’s no substitute for ‘Substitutiary Locomotion’. If you don’t get chills when Eglantine starts chanting, ‘Treguna Mekoides Trecorum Satis Dee’, then, frankly, you haven’t got a pulse.

The pacing could be a little tighter, and while some of the new songs soar, others are a tad unwieldy. For example, ‘It’s Now’, while excellently performed by Brunton, does exactly the opposite of its title by preventing Emelius from entering the fight – which is exactly what he’s singing about doing! Why are you going into a second verse, Emelius? The Nazis are right behind you!

The ending diverges from the film and is sure to divide audiences too, but it doesn’t lose sight of what the real magic of the story has always been: that being with the ones you love is always an adventure. Well, that and a flying four poster… Spellbinding fun for the whole family, take a step in the right direction and catch this show while you can – you’ll beWITCHED, beDAZZLED, and be-CRAZY to miss it!

Bedknobs and Broomsticks is playing at the Wales Millennium Centre until 5^th February 2022