Dick Whittington and his Cat - Review

Hackney Empire, London

****

Written by Will Brenton

Directed by Clive Rowe

Clive Rowe

This year’s pantomime at Hackney Empire is Dick Whittington, with local legend Clive Rowe stepping up to the double honours of helming the show as director as well as playing (Dame) Sarah The Cook.

The story of course is a perennial treat and there is fine work from Kandaka Moore in the title role, Hackney’s favourite Kat B as Dick’s cat Tommy. Graham Macduff is King Rat, Tony Timberlake is Alderman Fitzwarren, Aryana Ramkhalawon is his daughter Alice, Beth Sindy throws some magic into the proceedings as Fairy Bowbells and Max Mirza is Sarah's comedy sidekick, Idle Jack.

But, as ever, the night belongs to Rowe who this year surpasses himself with perhaps the best panto ever to grace the Hackney Empire’s stage. Amidst literally countless costume changes Rowe drives the evening’s comedy at a ruthlessly hilarious pace, all the while drawing great work from his supporting cast. The gags are fast, frequent and perfectly timed with none more risqué than cook Rowe entering dressed as a pepper-mill and telling the audience that he’d bought it on grinder (geddit?).

As Rowe pitches his humour perfectly, leaving both adults and children in stitches of laughter, act one closes to the scene of this greatest of dames, clad on this occasion as the ocean liner “Hello Buoys”, and singing Don’t Rain On My Parade from Funny Girl. Rowe’s credentials as an Olivier-winning star of musical theatre are long established and to see him nailing this Streisand classic is to witness genius in action. Not only that, but by including such a classic gem of a song, the show also introduces its younger audience to a taste of Broadway’s golden years. No bad thing!

Act two plays out to include our heroes stranded on Ee El Pie Island after a storm at sea. This turns out to be a psychedelic ashram (yes … me neither) which while being of tenuous relevance to the storyline, allows the show a chance to reference music from Bowie, Beatles, Madness, Elton John, The Kinks and Joan Armatrading. Absolute delight for the grown-ups. 

Cleo Pettitt has done fine design work both in the show’s scenery and in Rowe’s spectacular gowns. In the pit, Alex Maynard directs his five-piece band with finesse.

Dick Whittington at the Hackney Empjre, with Clive Rowe’s damesmanship, is one of the finest traditional pantos in town.

Runs until 5th January 2025

Photo credit: Mark Senior

Aladdin - Review

Hackney Empire, London

****

Written and directed by Susie McKenna

Clive Rowe

There’s something truly magical about panto at the Hackney Empire. Writer/director Susie McKenna delivers her 20th (oh yes it is!) festive production with a show that captures the diversity of her London patch, yet cleverly avoids cultural appropriation and all the while managing to maintain the joyous irreverence that makes pantomime such a glorious British Christmas tradition.

Set on the fictional island of Ha-Ka-Ney, McKenna’s company of Mare Street stalwarts launders the age-old Middle-Eastern cum Chinese fairytale into a 21st century iteration that it is anything but washed out. Obeying the genre’s conventions meticulously, Gemma Sutton is the titular Principal Boy (as McKenna lobs in a bravely scripted swipe at gender-fluidity too!). Sutton of course, as this website has long proclaimed, is up there with the best of her generation in UK’s musical theatre and it shows! She brings poise and precision to the role, capping it off with her wondrous voice. Her leading the company in The Greatest Showman’s This Is Me is spine-tingling.

Making his return to Hackney’s panto after a short sabbatical, Clive Rowe shares the bill-topping honours with his wonderful Widow Twankey. Showmen aside, Rowe is arguably The Greatest Dame of our time. His presence is sublime with razor sharp wit and precision timing making each one of the corniest, smuttiest gags sparkle. Rowe’s gift for pantomime is a rarity and his beautifully frocked, twerking Twankey is worth the ticket price on its own.

In time-honoured tradition, McKenna lampoons the lunacy of our leaders, with Brexit and assorted Tories coming in for some well-deserved flack. But if there is one criticism of the piece, it is the bias. Given the current debacle that is manifest throughout our political class, there is no reason to have let Labour off the hook quite so lightly.

Other top-notch Hackney regulars comprise the classy company. Notables are Tameka Empson, released by the Beeb from her duties on Albert Square to play the Empress, Julie Yammanee’s Princess, Kat B's energetic Genie and Tony Timberlake’s dastardly Abanazar. Heck, they’ve even roped in stage legend (and Mckenna’s missus) Sharon D. Clarke to voice a Goddess!

Whilst the show’s budget may not be as palladian as some, not only are Hackney’s tickets affordable but the show's professionalism and panache are a treat, well earning it the moniker of “London’s No 1 panto”. McKenna continues to create the very essence of pantomime - a show that is firmly rooted in its local community, yet packing a hilarious punch with technical excellence. (And did this review even mention Steven Edis' music, the stunning flying dragon scene or Richard Roe’s super-slick tap-dance routine?)

Meanwhile Clive Rowe's Widow Twankey, masquerading as Cher and serenading Abanazar with ABBA’s Fernando, will stay with me for a long, long time.

Runs until 6th January 2019

Photo credit: Robert Workman

Rothschild & Sons - Review

Park Theatre, London


****


Music by Jerry Bock
Lyrics by Sheldon Harnick
Book by Sherman Yellen
Based on The Rothschilds by Frederic Morton
Directed by Jeffrey B. Moss

Robert Cuccioni

Playing at the Park Theatre for one month only, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock’s Rothschild & Sons marks the European premiere of a show that (as The Rothschilds) first played Broadway in 1970. Several years earlier Fiddler On The Roof had defined the pair’s credentials in setting the travails of Europe’s Jewry to music. But where Fiddler’s fictional action never left the village of Anatevka, Rothschild & Sons spans the continent with its history.

There was clearly a lot going on in the late-18th century that was to inspire future musical theatre creatives. In North America Alexander Hamilton was carving out his career, while in Frankfurt’s Jewish ghetto, the young impoverished Mayer Rothschild showed a canny eye in recognising antiquities and selling them to the city’s wealthy classes. His circumstances slowly improved, Mayer married Gutele and they had five sons. As they in turn matured, so too did Rothschild’s shrewdness, with a combination of circumstances and negotiation placing him in the fortuitous position of broking a loan from Prussia’s royalty to the king of Denmark and from there, the Rothschild fortune grew. The narrative soon shifts focus to son Nathan who, against a backdrop of the Napoleonic wars, is tasked with investing the family wealth on the trading exchanges of London.

Mayer Rothschild was driven not only by an inspired combination of chutzpah and prudence, but was also a profoundly driven philanthropist, longing for the Jewish people to be freed from the imposed segregation and ghettos confining them in continental Europe. When the German Prince Metternich was to renege on a commitment that he had made to liberate the country’s Jews in exchange for a war loan from Rothschild, Mayer died broken-hearted. It was to be his sons who in a commercially daring and risky move, were to finally force Metternich into giving the Jews their liberty.

As a musical, the show works as an entertaining and informative one-act history. Its structure however feels firmly rooted in the 1970s (although an off-Broadway take on this reworked version had a creditable run in 2015). Where Fidder’s women were a driving force in that musical (itself drawn from a story originally titled Tevye And His Daughters) Gutele is marginalised, her maternal love and anxieties reduced to little more than footnotes.

A nice production touch sees Robert Cuccioni lead as Mayer. Cuccioni, over from America for the show, played Nathan off-Broadway in 1990 before leading the 2015 production and he brings a rich depth to the character that faintly echoes Topol’s Tevye. He portrays a compelling yet compassionate strength within the visionary Rothschild and is also blessed with a majestic voice that drives the show, convincing in his patriarchal stature. Opposite Cuccioni, Glory Crampton, another American import, replicates her 2015 Gutele with fine vocal work in the comparatively modest role.

Of the five sons, Gary Trainor’s Nathan is the most compelling, with that complex chemistry that can exist between father and son cleverly explored between him and Nathan. In his duet with Mayer, What’s To Be Done? both men smart with the humiliation and agony of Jew hatred that permeated Europe, while in This Amazing London Town, Trainor captures not only Rothschild’s ability to profit from commodities, but also his recognition of the thinly veiled prejudice and cultural contempt shown to him by the English.

In a range of cleverly caricatured cameos Tony Timberlake plays the wigged contemptuous nobility of Europe from both sides of the Channel, with a hint of the satire that underlies Hamilton’s King George here too (men in wigs will always look ridiculous). Harnick’s lyrics cleverly expose the vile moral bankruptcy of the elite, as Bock’s melodies offer up a minor-key medley of melancholy and oppression.

The production is another example of London’s off-West End at its finest, seeing a relatively obscure musical dusted down and shipped across the Atlantic (and under the watchful eye too of a 93 year old Sheldon Harnick, in the Park Theatre audience for press night). Ben van Tienen made fine work of the score, as Pam Tait's costumes were meticulous in their suggestions of both time and place.

In our modern era Rothschild & Sons is unlikely to sustain a full blown commercial revival - but at its core it nonetheless remains yet another paean to man’s inhumanity. While Hitler’s 20th century Holocaust was unquestionably the worst display of industrialised slaughter of a people, he was only executing a long held hatred that had burned across Europe for centuries. Rothschild & Sons reminds us that the ultimate institutionalised racism, the state-sponsored ghettos of anti-semitism, had long preceded the Nazis. The show may date from the 1970s - its message however is timeless.

Runs until 17th February
Photo credit: Pamela Raith

Jack And The Beanstalk - Review

Hackney Empire, London

****

Written and directed by Susie McKenna

Debbie Kurup and Clive Rowe

Who is the nation’s greatest Dame? Maggie Smith, Judi Dench or Helen Mirren? Well think again, for as pantomime season descends upon us, Clive Rowe yet again claims that illustrious honour with a barn-storming performance as Dame Daisy Trott in Hackney Empire’s Jack And The Beanstalk. Who else commands such a usual flair that their entrance, in a cart/chariot drawn by a pantomime cow as they sing Winter Wonderland, other than the lovably rotund and risqué Rowe? There’s a perennially strong community feel to this panto, where TV soap star top billings are ignored in favour of Rowe (the programme suggests that Trott is his 6th Hackney damehood) supported by theatrical excellence.

Aside from Rowe’s pinpoint timing, stunning costumes (brava Lotte Collett) and THAT voice – he offers a great take on Harry Nilsson’s Without You whilst his Climb Every Mountain, sung as he follows Jack to the top of the beanstalk, will stay with me for a long time - Rowe is in great company. Debbie Kurup’s Jack is wholesome and lovable, deftly performed and of course Kurup’s voice and presence is a knockout!

A neat post-modern twist sees local hero Kat B in white-slap as a Jamaican snowman (don’t ask). His hilarious patois along with an excruciatingly funny take on Uptown Funk make for another of the evening’s delights.

There’s no need to summarise the well-worn plot though if there is one criticism it is that writer director Susie McKenna, who has written every Hackney panto for nigh on 20 years, is possibly starting to run out of steam. At close to three hours long, the multi-racial Hackney audience that ranges from toddler through hipster to grandparent, deserve more than the occasional thrown away gag about Jeremy Corbyn or Greece’s debt. 

Even if they’re all top-notch, there’s a tad too much pre-recorded celebrity voiceover – McKenna should have stopped at the genius opening projections of local newsmen Jon Snow and Robert Peston – and a glaring omission from the programme means that we never learn who are the talented duo inside what is a sensationally choreographed pantomime cow.

Mark Dickman's 5 piece band puts in fine work, Jocelyn Jee Esien and Tony Timberlake entertain and earn our boos as the Giant’s henchmen, whilst dear Julia Sutton enchants us all as Mother Nature, out to save the planet. But its Dame Clive Rowe who steals this show!

Runs until 3rd January