Some theatre memories, you say? Why not! December 1986 to November 1987

Posted on January 13, 2021 by therealchrisparkle

With the return of live theatre looking further and further away let’s immerse ourselves in these memories. A couple of concerts here too, but, as I have the programmes, I might as well include them!

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat – Royalty Theatre, London, 23^rd December 1986

We’re used to seeing Joseph come round every couple of years or so nowadays, but I think back in ’86 a London production was quite a rarity. The Tomorrow People’s Mike Holoway starred as Joseph in this brash and bright little production, which we remember enjoying but in comparison with all the big shows we’d seen throughout the year, it was perhaps slightly underwhelming. I’d like to be able to say more about this production, but I’d be making it up. The Royalty, if you’re wondering, is now the Peacock.

Carmen – English National Opera at the London Coliseum, London, 3^rd January 1987

Miss Duncansby’s first exposure to the world of opera. You can’t go wrong with Carmen – wasn’t it Stephen Sondheim who described it as the best ever musical? This was a heavily criticised production that the purists loathed, as it brought the famous cigarette girl kicking and screaming into the twentieth century, with a translation by Anthony Burgess. Carmen was sung by Sally Burgess, Don José was John Treleaven, Micaela was Rosamund Illing and Escamillo David Arnold. We really enjoyed it, and were patronised by the pompous asses around us for doing so.

The Maintenance Man – Comedy Theatre, London, 14^th February 1987

This was the most self-indulgent Valentine’s Day celebration ever, with Miss D and I going to the Equatorial Restaurant for lunch (a Singaporean place that was a favourite, sadly long gone) and the Paradiso e Inferno on the Strand for dinner (now replaced by a similar Italian restaurant) and fitting in The Maintenance Man (so to speak) for its first house in between. A comedy by Richard Harris, best known for his TV writing, it starred John Alderton, Gwen Taylor and Susan Penhaligon.

Divorced Bob can’t stay away from his ex-wife’s house, much to the annoyance of his new girlfriend. I remember it being very bittersweet (much more bitter than sweet) and without that many laughs. This performance was right at the end of the run. No wonder we remember the meals more that day.

Dr Evadne Hinge and Dame Hilda Bracket in The Arkley Barnet Show – Comedy Theatre, London, 24^th March 1987

Filling the gap left by The Maintenance Man, the “Dear Ladies” launched themselves on the Comedy for a short season with their Arkley Barnet Show, an excuse for some wonderful Hinge and Bracket shenanigans, which if you loved, you loved, and if you hated, you hated. I loved them. Their act managed to mix the historical and the modern in a really clever way. I remember at the time that fear of AIDS was everywhere, and many much-loved performers were sadly losing their lives to it. This prompted Dr Evadne to modernise the old song A little of what you fancy does you good into A little of what you fancy kills you off. Sharp intakes of breath all round, as you can imagine – but devilishly brilliant.

When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout – Whitehall Theatre, London, 2^nd April 1987

We saw this with our friends Mike, Lin and Barbara, and I remember we were very late leaving the restaurant beforehand so we had to run to make the curtain up, and thus sat there panting and sweaty for the first half hour, which is never a great start to a show. The play had won Sharman Macdonald the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright, and I remember it going down with the audience very well, but not much else.

It’s very much a young woman’s play, involving understanding relationships, disappointing parents and struggling to discover yourself. Maybe it didn’t speak much to me? Not sure. Mrs C can’t remember anything about it either. Fabulous cast though; Sheila Reid, Julie Walters, Geraldine James, John Gordon Sinclair.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood – Savoy Theatre, London, 18^th May 1987

Tipping a wink to a touring production of A Chorus Line that we saw in April for my birthday, at the Apollo Theatre Oxford, and starring Caroline O’Connor as Cassie (and with a young Ruthie Henshall as Maggie), our next London show was The Mystery of Edwin Drood, to which we also brought the Dowager Mrs C, and she really enjoyed it. A moderate success in New York but a flop over here, Rupert Holmes’ inventive and interactive musical, took Dickens’ unfinished novel and challenged the audience to solve the murder. Notable for the star billing given to comedy legend Ernie Wise as the Chairman, the production also boasted such talents as Lulu as Princess Puffer, Julia Hills as a cross-dressing Edwin Drood, David Burt as John Jasper and Martin Wimbush as my namesake, the Reverend Crisparkle. This should have been a hit, and I’m still not quite sure why it wasn’t, but it only lasted ten weeks.

Kiss Me Kate – Royal Shakespeare Company at the Old Vic, London, June 1987

Another of the Dowager Mrs C’s favourite shows, we took her to see this RSC production, which I think was played heavily for laughs with a relatively straightforward production by Adrian Noble. By far the best thing about it was Nichola McAuliffe’s fantastically tempestuous Lilli, almost matched by Paul Jones’ smarmy Fred. Interesting to note that Tim Flavin and Cyril Nri appear in the cast, in relatively minor roles. Thoroughly enjoyable, but there again it would have to be a bad production of Kiss Me Kate that wasn’t thoroughly enjoyable.

Three Men on a Horse – National Theatre Company at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, 3^rd October 1987

This highly successful production, directed by Jonathan Lynn, had transferred from the Cottesloe earlier in the year. John Cecil Holm and George Abbott’s comedy premiered in 1935 and concerns a mild-mannered chap who discovers he has a supernatural gift of picking the winning horse, provided he doesn’t watch the race. A fantastic cast was headed by Geoffrey Hutchings, and also included Toyah Willcox, Ken Stott, Desmond Barritt, Cyril Shaps, Alison Fiske and Nicholas le Prevost. Extremely funny and it deserved its success.

The Spinners – Civic Centre, Aylesbury, 6^th November 1987

Miss D (as she still was) was very keen to see the Spinners as they had been part of her childhood, being a Liverpudlian who grew up in Australia – the connection couldn’t be stronger. I knew nothing about them, apart from the fact they tended to have late night shows on BBC TV when there wasn’t anything much else to watch. I think you had to be a real fan to enjoy this show – and there were plenty of those in the audience.

Incantation – Civic Centre, Aylesbury, 10^th November 1987

We were both huge fans of Incantation, the group that arose from the band that played the music for Ballet Rambert’s Ghost Dances, and who had a number of hits with their Pan Pipes of the Andes style. Incantation took their music very seriously and did much research on the streets of Cuzco to achieve truly authentic performance quality, as their line-up consisted of three Brits and three Chileans at the time. Timeless music, brilliantly performed.

Review – Kiss Me, Kate, Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, 5th January 2019

Posted on January 8, 2019 by therealchrisparkle

Every New Year, Mrs Chrisparkle and I treat Lord and Lady Prosecco to a post-Christmas outing: a weekend in Sheffield (bear with me) to stay at the lovely Mercure Hotel, have some scrummy meals and to see both the Crucible’s Christmas musical AND the Lyceum panto – and we’ve not had a duff experience yet. Over the last couple of years, we’ve taken to seeing the panto in the evening – the weight of a few extra wines and a more end-of-term atmosphere always helps. Which left us this matinee with the prospect of seeing Cole Porter’s fantastic, and now grammatically correct, Kiss Me, Kate.

This was one of the Dowager Mrs C’s favourite musicals and I was brought up on a diet of Always True to You Darling in my Fashion and From This Moment On; not a bad way to be brought up, to be honest. But this is only the third time I’ve seen it; once in 1987 at the Old Vic with the redoubtable Nichola McAuliffe, and at Chichester in 2012 where Hannah Waddingham attempted to rule the roost over Alex Bourne. That London production was great; the Chichester one a little disappointing. But I’m going to throw my hat into the ring and say that this new production at Sheffield by Paul Foster tops them both.

I’m sure you know the story – a touring production of The Taming of the Shrew is the vehicle for an on-and-off love story between the two leads, Fred Graham (playing Petruchio, also the producer of the show) and Miss Lilli Vanessi (playing Katherine, the star attraction). Lilli senses that their romance is back on track (they are already divorced at the beginning of the show) but when she discovers that the flowers she received from Fred were actually meant for cabaret starlet Lois (playing Bianca), she gets into a Katherine-type rage and takes it out on him on stage. He, being not entirely a true gentleman, gives as good as he gets, and she spends most of the rest of the show unable to sit down because – well, because, gentle reader, he gave her a damn good spanking. It happens in Shakespeare, so why the hell not here. Only one way to tame a shrew; women respect it. (That was a joke, by the way.)

Lilli’s plans to abandon the rest of the run are brought to an abrupt halt by the persuasions of two gangsters who (erroneously, as it happens) need the show to be a success so that Fred can pay his dues to their Mr. Big. Her new beau Harrison Howell arrives to take her away – but, will she find true love with him, or with Fred? If you don’t know the answer to that by now, you never will.

It’s true; in the current climate, some aspects of this show have dated to become ever so slightly worrying. The physical animosity between Fred and Lilli does border on domestic violence (even though it’s played entirely for laughs) and the subjugation of women’s will to men’s is still as clear as it was in Shakespeare’s day – you have to feel a cringe coming on when Katherine/Lilli sings I Am Ashamed that Women are So Simple. But this is distinctly a period piece, with no attempts (quite right, I think) to update it to the 21st century. Porter’s showtunes are still as 1940s jazz as they can be; the gangsters are still the same Chicago thickos they always were. Porter’s brilliant lyrics anchor the show in his own era; when one of the funniest lines in any of the songs is “he may have hair upon his chest, but, sister so has Lassie”, there’s just no point trying to update it. Provided there are audience members who remember Lassie, the joke works.

We’ve been used over the years at Sheffield to seeing the big choreography routines by Alistair David, who made such a mark in shows like My Fair Lady and Show Boat. For this show, the choreography is by Matt Flint, and I have to say I’ve not come across his work before. But he’s terrific! His style is much more intimate and involved; he sets up scenes with so many varied things happening in different parts of the stage all at the same time, then brings them all together for a big impact. The second Act opens with his fantastic staging of Too Darn Hot, led with immaculate artistry and precision by Layton Williams as Paul; it’s one of those classic dance sequences when you know you’re seeing something special and you never want it to end. As an aside, our performance was captioned – a great innovation, imho – and it was fascinating to read the lyrics to Too Darn Hot (as well all the other songs) – it’s easy to overlook just exactly what this song is all about!

Elsewhere, the show is peppered with memorable moments, mainly involving the big numbers. Paul Foster has concentrated most of his efforts into getting the maximum entertainment out of the songs, so there is no attempt to shorten any of Cole Porter’s mammoth efforts. I guess a downside to that is that if you don’t like the songs much (then why are you here?) you probably won’t enjoy it much. The show opens with (fittingly) Another Op’nin’ Another Show, at first fronted by Lilli’s dresser Hattie (a beautiful, warm-hearted performance by Cindy Belliot) but then it opens out to a wide-ranging musical examination of all the cast and crew arriving at this new theatre, with all the tensions and excitements that can contain – and it’s an exciting and exhilarating start.

Other highlights include Amy Ellen Richardson’s Lois/Bianca teasing routine with the three suitors for Tom Dick or Harry – one of these, Dex Lee, plays Bill/Lucentio and I always admire his brilliant, acrobatic dancing; Rebecca Lock (a brilliant Katherine/Lilli with a stunning voice) throwing herself around in fits of fury during I Hate Men; Edward Baker-Duly (also brilliant as Fred/Petruchio – I loved his ham, and then even hammier, vocal performance as the stagey actor) ripping through the memories of all those women in Where is the Life that Late I Led; Amy Ellen Richardson’s funny and flirtatious performance of Always True To You Darling in my Fashion; and the simple but oh so effective staging of Brush Up Your Shakespeare by Delroy Atkinson and Joel Montague as the two theatrical gangsters, occupying the spotlights – Mr Atkinson in particular gave a brilliantly expressive physically comic performance. I also appreciated the fact that, for much of the performance, James McKeon’s orchestra was hidden at the back of the set, but for the songs that belonged to Taming of the Shrew, it was on view – a very nice touch, I thought.

The only thing that slightly disappointed me was the staging of one of my favourite songs from the show, From This Moment On. It’s a difficult one. The song was never written for Kiss Me Kate; Porter wrote it for another show from which it was dropped at the last minute, but it was obviously too good to waste, and Cole Porter was an expert musical recycler. From This Moment On appears in the film version of Kiss Me Kate, where it works perfectly as a number between Bianca and her three suitors; but the dramatic usefulness of that has already been taken by Tom Dick or Harry. So nowadays the custom is to have it sung by Harrison Howell and Lilli before he sweeps her away to the magicless life of a military wife – or not. Structurally, it makes perfect sense to have it there; but in practice the characters are too old and the situation too cynical (ouch! Sorry!) for the song to work properly. It’s a young person’s song – a starting out in life song – filled with genuinely great expectations, and I’d prefer to give the song back to Lois and Bill. In characterisation and acting, Dafydd Emyr made an imposing Howell, but, for me, it just didn’t work.

But this is one small quibble in an otherwise excellent show that thrilled us all, and we continued to talk about it later that evening and all through the next. One of those productions to savour and recall with happiness for years to come. It’s on until Saturday 12th January. Would be a crime to miss it!

Production photos by Manuel Harlan

Review – Kiss Me Kate, Festival Theatre, Chichester, 21st July 2012

Posted on July 26, 2012 by therealchrisparkle

Still on our annual Chichester visit, we survived dinner and made our way back to the theatre with the amassing throngs of people wanting a good night out. Trevor Nunn directing a new version of Kiss Me Kate? Obviously a prospect just too delicious to resist, so it was with eager anticipation that we took our Saturday night seats at the packed Festival Theatre on what must have been the first beautiful summer’s evening we’ve had this year.

The set is satisfyingly designed by Robert Jones and features a nice proscenium arch stuck at a jaunty angle, cleverly suggestive of a traditional show portrayed in a wacky way. The backstage scenes look suitably unglamorous; and the scene changes that take place within the “Taming of the Shrew” show are realised by unfurling flimsy fabric backdrop sheets out of a travelling trunk, which is a clever and appropriate idea, and would indeed be very useful for the Venice, Verona, Cremona, Parma, Mantua, Padua tour; although in reality they do come across a little tawdry to look at.

Of all the old Hollywood versions of stage musicals Kiss Me Kate is one of my top favourites. In this Chichester production I found it very hard not to compare the performers with others we’ve seen in the roles before. Comparisons are odious, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t come up with a little odiousness in this review. The last time we saw Kiss Me Kate was at the Savoy Theatre in 1988 with Nichola McAuliffe playing Lilli/Katharine. It was a crowning glory of a performance and she has been a particular favourite of Mrs Chrisparkle ever since. Ms McAuliffe’s “I Hate Men” is as strong a reference point as Dame Edith Evans’ “A Handbag?” So any future Lilli/Katharine has a big task ahead of her in Mrs C’s eyes.

But we had high hopes for Hannah Waddingham, whom we last saw turn in a devastatingly brilliant performance in the Menier’s devastatingly brilliant A Little Night Music a few years ago. And I’m delighted to say Ms Waddingham is every bit as good in this show as you would expect her to be. She breathes charming life into that old plodder “Wunderbar”, is very tender with “So in Love”; and does all the comic business as a furious on-stage Lilli getting revenge on Fred in a genuinely funny way. For Mrs C and me, her “I Hate Men” was a little over-controlled. She really didn’t hate men as much as Nichola McAuliffe. But she makes a good shrew and is a great singer and I think definitely gave the best performance of the night.

Alex Bourne plays Fred/Petruchio, and he’s very good throughout. He portrayed the arrogance of both characters very well, and also his discomfort and wheedling around Lilli when he realises the flowers have gone to the wrong actress is very funny. However, being briefly odious, he’s no Howard Keel. He has some great numbers to deliver, and I was particularly looking forward to “Where is the life that late I led” with its mixture of humour and pathos; a song that must be a complete thrill for a confident performer to smash it (in the common parlance). He really played it for laughs – which he certainly got – but musically I felt it was a slight let down.

For me, the best two set pieces came as a surprise – the two TDH numbers. I was very impressed with the whole performance of Tom Dick or Harry, which got the absolute best out of Holly Dale Spencer as nightclub singer Lois, and supported by Adam Garcia as Bill/Lucentio, Kevin Brewis as Hortensio and Samuel Holmes as Gremio. It had great lightness of touch, entertaining choreography and was thoroughly spirit-lifting. The other officially fabulous number – even more so in fact – was the second act opener Too Darn Hot, fronted by Jason Pennycooke as Fred’s dresser Paul; a terrifically well danced routine, full of life and humour, cheekiness and joie de vivre. This is the second time we’ve seen Mr Pennycooke, and I can tell you he is one talented chap.

As Lois/Bianca, Holly Dale Spencer certainly gives a new meaning to the phrase “wide-eyed”, with, for me, her portrayal occasionally teetering on the edge of credibility. There have been some criticisms of her performance of “Always True To You In My Fashion” – a wonderful song – and I have to say I too found it disappointing. Not because she performed it badly – not at all, in many ways it was a remarkably skilful performance; but one that completely misrepresented the essential meaning of the song and its insight into Lois’ character. IMHO, this funny song should make you think that she is indeed, primarily, always true to Bill; but she might be gently naughty with someone else if it will get her a Paris Hat. This sassy Lois cavorts with the raunchiest of moves to a sleazy arrangement so that you feel all she is lacking is the pole to dance around. I’m guessing this is Trevor Nunn and Stephen Mears’ interpretation of the role, and, personally, I thought it was wrong. And yes, with apologies for my odiousness, I did think fondly of Ann Miller.

David Burt and Clive Rowe were an excellent couple of gangsters, ominously muscling in on Katharine on stage to prevent her from making a bolt for the wings, and did a great job of being over the top whilst strangely keeping it real too. The audience loved their Brush Up Your Shakespeare, which was simply staged and brought out Cole Porter’s wordplay with great clarity. I always forget that in the stage show the great “From This Moment On” is not sung by Lois and her suitors, but by Lilli and her General beau. Whilst Ms Waddingham and Mark Heenehan as the General gave a very good performance, I think the number is much better “Hollywooded” up as it is in the film. But then, the stage presentation of Too Darn Hot is probably better than the film. You pay your money, you etc, etc. The minor roles are all played with huge energy and pizzazz by a very likeable company.

The audience adored it. Many people were up on their feet at the end, which is something I don’t think I’ve seen before with the rather polite and – let’s be honest – elderly Chichester crowd. It is a very entertaining production and certainly worth seeing, with some brilliant moments and outstanding routines, which do well to make up for the lapses. I think it will enjoy a lot of success at the Old Vic.

P.S. After a comfortable night in the central, cheap but a bit Spartan Travelodge, we embarked on our usual quest to find a decent gluten-free breakfast that Mrs C would be able to enjoy. Fortunately for us, the Wetherspoons was so incredibly busy that we would have run out of car park time before we’d get served. Instead we found a little place called Spires on Crane Street. Essentially an old fashioned bakery and tea rooms, with tables outside in the welcoming sunshine. We plonked ourselves down and I went to order. A traditional English breakfast for me; then I explained to the nice lady behind the counter that one of the meals had to be gluten-free. She surprised me by suggesting gluten-free toast and gluten-free homemade bubble and squeak, along with the usual baked beans, tomato, bacon and egg. My breakfast was super; and Mrs C was in her element with a decent cooked breakfast that knocked her socks off. Well done Spires!