RHINESTONE MONDAYS

RHINESTONE MONDAYS

at the Mercury Theatre Colchester

01.09.11

for The Public Reviews

As the Rhinestone Cowboy Glen Campbell prepares a UK farewell tour, country music is as popular as ever this side of the Pond. A far-flung outpost of this fan base lurks in the dingy basement of the Warbleswick Sports and Social Club, where Monday night is Line Dancing night.

That's the premise for Joe Graham's slight piece, directed by Phil Willmott, which aims to please lovers of the music and the regular theatre-going crowd.

More than a touch of Girls' Night Out, though a sad lack of boots and hats in the audience. And rarely has the label “karaoke musical” seemed more apposite, with the cast stepping up to sing to backing tracks in the lilac spotlight.

After a front cloth warm-up, we meet the gallery of clichéd sitcom characters – little old lady with flatulence and false teeth, loud Welsh gay tap-dancer, you get the picture – whose fights and feuds, loves and losses, form the flimsy plot on which to hang the songs.

Some interesting performance pedigrees at work. Faye Tozer, from Steps, is the dance teacher who finally finds happiness with dance-phobic, tongue-tied Tom [Anthony Topham]. Also from Steps, Ian H Watkins, giving a strong performance as Duncan the treacherous tap-dancer who engineers the happy ending. One of the best vocals of the show [Willie Nelson's Crazy], not surprisingly, was from Lyn Paul, whose first big hit with the New Seekers was an incredible forty years ago. Less convinced by her Cougar character, however. Lots of comedy potential in the pivotal role of Ronald, who likes to be called Clint, and takes everything a bit too seriously. But Phil Pritchard failed to make it more than a figure of fun, I felt. The best performance by far, combining just a little send-up with real acting and superb comic timing, was Shaun Williamson's Del Boy barman. His rendition of Orbison's Blue Bayou was priceless, a taste of how wryly entertaining this show could have been …

Not much actual line-dancing in evidence until the coda, when we were given a nice 42^nd Street curtain line of stepping feet, and a chance to see how much of Achy Breaky Heart we could dance in the narrow aisles of the Mercury.

This is a World Première for Colchester: the show and its stars set off on an ambitious tour, bringing line-dancing comedy to Wales, Ireland and Scotland.

production photograph: Robert Day

this piece first appeared on The Public Reviews

INSIDE JOB

for The Public Reviews

Ian Dickens Productions at the Mercury Theatre Colchester

14.06.10

Brian Clemens [OBE in last week's Honours List] is better known for his television work – he created the Avengers and the Professionals – but this thriller from the Eighties is the classic kind of ingenious, if stagey, intrigue that aims to keep the audience guessing.

It's set on the Costa del Crime, and the converted farmhouse boasts a big chimney, with gas laid on, fire-irons, and Toledo steel artistically arranged above. Sleeping pills in the desk, a revolver in the safe. More murder weapons than Colonel Mustard's country seat …

The plot is a series of deals, deceptions and double bluffs. “Trapped, twisted and turned”, the three characters prowl like predators. Hard to analyse the plot without spoiling the fun, but the game-playing and the treachery are all to do with revenge and rough justice. It'a all “diabolically clever”, and only at the end do we see how improbable the whole house of cards actually is. The dénouement, when it comes, has to be explained, which involves the two chief conspirators telling each other the very facts and coincidences that prompted them to devise the devious scheme in the first place.

Giles Watling's production bowls along nicely, with a really pacy sequence of panic in Act Two. The scene changes involve a tab curtain and lots of guitar music, and I was unconvinced by the car bomb, the machine gun wounds and the poker.

The cast included two heartthrobs from Emmerdale, including Matt Healey reprising his role as a bad lad, in this case a “bang man” on the run from Interpol. A limited range, dramatically, with eyebrows that seemed to be worked by strings and a cocky leer as his default expression. A sense of real menace, though, when things turned nasty. Suave Christopher Villiers was very watchable as the diamond dealer who is not all he seems, with glamorous Michelle Morris as the woman we take to be his wife.

Will Suzy and Larry make it to Rio ? Will the Spanish police pin it all on the separatists ? Which bullets are blanks, which diamonds are paste ?

This is the kind of cardboard drama that lives on in church halls long after the professionals have left it for dead. But the Mercury audience enjoyed a solid, slick production from the prolific Ian Dickens stable; it's touring to Crewe next week, with Darlington and Swansea later in the summer.

this piece first appeared on The Public Reviews

ROUND THE HORNE

- UNSEEN AND UNCUT

Ian Fricker Productions

at Colchester Mercury

13.09.09

Covering Frankie Valli [Silence is Golden] one day, and the next to the BBC's Paris Studios [in Lower Regent Street] for Round the Horne. Life for a musician in the 60s was not all Mersey sound. MOR ruled much of the airwaves, and even the Goon Show had its musical interludes.

So it was great to hear live music in Richard Bacon's staged revival of a comedy classic, and the actors will have to forgive me if I enthuse about the musicians first.

"Not the Fraser Hayes Four" perfectly resurrected the close harmony quartet who interrupted the surreal comedy every week. They must

have seemed corny and cheesy even then, and it was wonderful to see them in all their oleaginous glory. I specially enjoyed Paper Moon, with its half-hearted basketball hand gestures.

On stage throughout, for cues and bridges, are the eight piece Horn Blowers, featuring a comedy trombone, inventive percussion and two trumpeters who look as if they've bunked off from their Convent School. At the piano, and guitarist for Rambling Sid, was Duncan Walsh Atkins.

The matinée idol on Thursday was definitely Robin Sebastian's delicious Kenneth Williams – Chou en Ginsberg, Gruntfuttock, Jules, all given in pitch-perfect hommage, flaring nostrils and all. Equally impressive was Sally Grace's Marsden, a long list of familiar characters including a spot-on Jean Metcalfe. Michael Shaw made the most of the Bill Pertwee roles, though Seamus Android has not aged well, and David Delve was most successful as ageing juvenile Binkie Huckaback and the unnamed character with the ill-fitting false teeth – down in the scripts simply as “Dentures”.

Straight[ish] foils to these grotesques were Jonathan Rigby as Horne, “bald head and deep, fruity voice”, and a brilliant Stephen Boswell as the archetypal announcer Douglas Smith.

Given that the music was live, I was surprised that the sound effects were all recorded. And, while we're on the SFX script, the pips in the Sixties were all the same length: one tenth of a second ...

Here's the original of one of the sketches they revived:

and here's the original Horn Blowers playing the show out