SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS

SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS

Mercury Theatre Colchester

for The Reviews Hub

This sparkling Snow White – Daniel Buckroyd’s fourth panto for Made in Colchester – is a delightful cocktail of glamour, glitter and good old-fashioned fun.

David Shields’ designs feature giant candles, surrounding the flown title, and later the magic mirror and the Princess’s glass coffin. There’s an impressive dungeon laboratory, as well as a charming cottage for the Dwarfs, which opens out like a book as Snow White walks in. The pyrotechnics are safely in the ceiling, and there’s a stunning mirror-ball above our heads.

We begin traditionally, with a stand-off between Good and Evil, familiar banter from Fairy Blossom and wannabe Maleficent, the tamely named Enchantress. Both, incidentally, excellent singers, more than capable of selling their big numbers to a noisy opening night crowd.

Then a wordless waltz behind the gauze - “the artistic bit”, as Nurse Nellie has it; she makes a low-key appearance (how hard must that be!) in this scene-setting backstory.

Antony Stuart-Hicks – his third time out on the Mercury stage – is the Dame - “back to lower the tone”. A masterclass in this unique genre, much harder to nail than many people think. He takes the audience by the scruff of the neck, with quick-fire gags of varying degrees of smut, and astounding audience skills. A late-comer, quite far back in the stalls, is the target for some acid remarks, before Nellie charges up to him, inspects his hands, berates his lateness, and in a priceless pay-off discovers he’s a police officer. And doesn’t forget ...

Other Colchester favourites are back, too: Simon Pontin is promoted to Chamberlain this year; Dale Superville is Muddles, another perfect panto personality. A beautifully youthful Snow White, spirited and excellently sung, from Megan Bancroft. Her “true love” who wakes her with his kiss, is the bookish young Rupert, Alex Green. The ageing king, bewitched by the wicked queen and trapped in the mirror, is James Dinsmore.

The good fairy is a cuddly, bubbly Gbemisola Ikumelo, more than a match for the Enchantress of Carli Norris. This is a remarkable performance, her dialogue peppered with hashtags, managing the evil as well as the vocals and the comedy (a nice bit of business with the apples). She looks stunning too – the devil has all the best gowns here. At the end, of course, she sees the error of her ways, when the frog is snogged and everyone is Walking on Sunshine.

Although the script does not shy away from the darker elements of the Grimm story – the poison, the deer’s heart, the tomb - most of the traditional tropes are in place: A Ghost Routine in the Spooky Wood – no mere king-size sheet here, but a splendidly costumed spectre – a classic mirror number, complete with vibraphone underscore, an audience song (Wiggly Woo, in case you want to practise beforehand) and a shout-out for Lorna the birthday girl and the Rainbows and Brownies packing the front stalls. And scarcely any topical gags – Adele and Theresa May the only victims.

Richard Reeday leads a band of three in the pit, with a nicely eclectic playlist, from Positive Thinking – a great duet that could have come from any panto over the last forty years – to Bieber’s Puerto Rican hit from earlier this year. The Disney songs – now 80 years young - are strictly off limits, of course, though the Dwarfs sail pretty close with the Spanish Jai Ho, and an ingenious reworking of a Jeff Beck hit from the 60s, Hi Ho Silver Mining. There’s even a cheeky Hi Ho at the end of the Wizzard festive encore.

And what of the Dwarfs ?  Not the junior chorus (these talented Apples and Pears, nicely choreographed by Charlie Morgan do the cute woodland creatures and general ensemble) but new and original characters – the Captain, a Scotsman, a French chef, Windy, the last to arrive … done as puppets by Abigail Bing, voiced and moved by members of the cast. Though panto lighting (Mark Dymock) is not perhaps best suited to puppetry, this is a refreshingly original touch in an otherwise traditional treatment.

DAVID CHIVERS AND MARY BLANCHARD

DAVID CHIVERS AND MARY BLANCHARD

lunchtime concert at the Cramphorn Theatre

29.11.2017

One of my resolutions for 2018 will be to go to more lunchtime concerts.

Jumping the gun here, for this very enjoyable selection of twentieth century music for clarinet and piano, part of the Environ Music series curated by Jeffery Wilson.

His Arioso was the encore in this programme, which had two suites by William Blezard at its heart.

The Suite Francaise included a soporific Berceuse, and a playful, punning Partie de Hocquet. Clarinettist David Chivers clearly shared the composer’s sense of humour, evidenced again in the Three Cabaret Pieces, ending with an exuberant Piece of Cake Walk.

Italian composer Alberto Tempestini’s Memories proved a charmingly lyrical piece, after the fashion of movie music, with some virtuoso passages for Mary Blanchard’s piano.

After Essex composer Alan Bullard’s laid-back Blues, the programme ended with the Concertino of Keith Amos, its three movements proudly labelled with English markings – Bright, Expressively, Rhythmically – an impressive piece of accessible chamber music, respecting Amos’s twin trinities: Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, Composer, Performer, Audience.

A manifesto not always followed in the musical circles of the second half of last century, but very much in evidence in this generous serving of lunchtime entertainment.

THE SECRET THEATRE

THE SECRET THEATRE

Shakespeare’s Globe at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

24.11.2017

Like last season’s Wonder Noir White Devil, this atmospheric production opens in complete darkness, and the tale of deception and surveillance is intimately lit by hand-held candles and oblique winter daylight from the Playhouse windows.

The design ingeniously suggests the spymaster’s trade, with built-in concealed filing cabinets and a round window - between the obscured musicians’ galleries – framing eavesdroppers and a lovely London diorama.

Anders Lustgarten’s new piece tells of a nation divided, with the whiff of treason mixed with the candle smoke, the threat of terror and a hostile Europe over the Channel. This is 1585, and a nervous, vindictive Queen, is forced to rely on the powers of darkness to deal with her perceived enemies.

So no shortage of contemporary resonances; we hardly need the crowd-pleasing comments about the tennis. We see the dark arts practised here not by spin doctors and civil servants but by the spymasters Cecil [Ian Redford] and, chiefly, Walsingham. Vague threats are embellished, double agents are rife, dissent spreads from the highest to the lowest in the land.

The playwright is at pains to emphasise the relevance to our own day; we have inherited, he maintains, the system of surveillance set up in sixteenth century London - “an apparatus of security which will never be dismantled”.

Aidan McArdle is Walsingham, a quietly determined man, racked by illness at the end, rising, like Mantel’s Crum, from comparatively humble origins to be the power behind the throne, emerging black-clad and menacing from the darkness. Tara Fitzgerald, a strong presence in richly ornate gowns, white-faced, is an arrogant, often earthy woman in this version of history, while the torturer Topcliffe is given an even less likely persona, semi-literate sadist combining his “interrogation” of Robert Southwell [Sam Marks] with take-away chicken and musings on the Queen’s quim. In fact Topcliffe was an educated landowner and MP, whose association with Cecil and Walsingham is not supported by any historical record.

A fine performance by Cassie Layton as Walsingham’s daughter, Frances, whose eventful life is usually confined to the footnotes of history, and might well be deemed worthy of a drama of her own ...

production photograph: Marc Brenner

THE OLIVE BRANCH

THE OLIVE BRANCH

Harry Christophers and The Sixteen 

at Chelmsford Cathedral

25.11.2017

Their seventeenth Choral Pilgrimage, and once again Chelmsford is lucky enough to be on their camino.

The programme this year is a blend of Palestrina and Poulenc, two composers separated by more than 300 years, each writing in a very different musical idiom. But both creators of sacred choral music that is sublime, expressing a deep personal belief.

The bookends were both Salve Reginas – Poulenc’s tender setting to start, in a beautifully balanced, perfectly enunciated performance, and Palestrina’s renaissance masterpiece to end, performed with the polish and commitment familiar from the series of recordings devoted to this composer - “allowing Palestrina to breathe”, as Harry Christophers puts it.

It’s a fruitful combination, providing new perspectives on each of these giants of choral music. But it is the Poulenc that is the real revelation here – the “moine” and the “voyou” in Rostand’s familiar phrase. Although one of the finest things on offer was the secular “Un Soir de Neige”, written during the final Christmas of the war, it was the “moine” who was most in evidence, in the exquisite Agnus Dei [from the Mass in G of 1937], and the Four Motets from a year or so later, excitingly varied in their approach, and beautifully shaped by Christophers, with the silences given due weight.

Another imaginative pairing for the 2018 Pilgrimage – Benjamin Britten and the Tudor composer[s] William Cornish. Sacred and Profane begins its journey on March 14 in St Alban’s. At the time of writing, no sign of Chelmsford on their tour schedule ...

QUIZ

QUIZ

Chichester Festival Theatre at the Minerva

23.11.2017

“What is truth and what is lies, what is fact and what is fable ?” ponders the Headmaster in Daniel Evans’ first play of the season, Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On.

The same philosophical puzzles are posed in his last, a new piece by James [This House] Graham.

He gets the meta-theatricals in early, as one cast member hesitates before taking the oath in court. The whole truth ? Nothing but the truth ? Is truth really in the eye of the beholder ? There is much musing on the media, the image not the message, Psy-Ops, confirmation bias, the nature of memory and the very British tendency to build someone up only to knock them down. The issues raised run much deeper than popular television.

It’s a remarkable entertainment – funny, thought-provoking, nostalgic, and, famously, interactive. We get a keypad to vote with, as well as a clipboard for the pub quiz questions posed by warm-up man Paul Bazeley.

In the more light-hearted first half, we get, as well as our pub quiz – TV themes, zodiac signs, brother to York and Wessex – a voting key pad, a potted history of the TV game show from Take Your Pick through Bullseye to Mastermind, and an introduction to the incestuous “community” of WWTBAM, including Diana Ingram, her husband Major Charles and her nerdy brother Adrian.

The narrative, and the courtroom snippets, here are skewed to the Production Company’s prosecution case, and the audience vote at the commercial break is 90/10 against the Ingrams. But after the interval, we see the “facts” from the defendants’ perspective. We’re being manipulated again, of course, but less blatantly – the shooting of family pet Buffy the cat – and there’s a wonderful speech by the Portia for the defence [Sarah Woodward]. This time, the vote clears the trio by 57 to 43 – conspiracy theorists might note that, in 20 shows, this is the fifth time these exact percentages were recorded.

It’s given a glossy production almost in the round. “Just like the telly,” with shiny black studio floor and a neon cube centre stage. The intimate family moments work well, and less naturalistically, the choreographed coughing as the couple are hounded on the tube, the talk-back whispers, the invention of the Machine, rising like Frankenstein’s monster to the sound of Handel. As the Major is coached in the closed book of popular culture, there’s a brief glimpse of Coronation Street, and several excruciating visits to a Karaoke in Daventry.

Uniformly excellent performances – Bazely is the prosecution’s QC as well as the pub quiz man, Henry Pettigrew the pathetic brother, Jay Villiers the Judge as well as ITV boss Liddiment, a witness, and an unsympathetic police officer.

Mark Meadows plays Tecwen Whittock who allegedly did most of the coughing, as well as the Major’s commanding officer - a lovely moment where they share a love of G&S “I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral, I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical” ...

Stephanie Street gives us a likeable, though quiz-fixated and determined, Diana – Gavin Spokes squirms and sweats in the hot seat, a man out of his depth and his league. And Keir Charles plays not only Tarrant, all his mannerisms magnified on the huge monitors, but, his quick changes done at the edge of the stage, all the other smiling, smarmy quiz inquisitors [no, not Michael Miles, [who now remembers him?] but Des O’Connor, who took over Take Your Pick in the 90s], even briefly Brucie on VT.

As the show’s sales pitch has it:

Is Quiz:

A) The world premiere of a new play by acclaimed writer James Graham?

B) A provocative re-examination of the conviction of Charles Ingram, ‘the coughing Major’, for cheating, following his appearance on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

C) A hilarious celebration of the great tradition of the British quiz show?

D) A razor-sharp analysis of the 21st century’s dangerous new attitude to truth and lies?

All four, of course, is the correct answer, though I might have voted for B – based on the book Bad Show: The Quiz, the Cough, the Millionaire Major – the play shines an unflattering light on the media, the police, the production company and makes a cogent case, if not for exoneration, then at least for a re-examination of this curious affair.

production photograph: Johan Persson