Dancing at Lughnasa - Review

National Theatre, London

****

Written by Brian Friel

Directed by Josie Rourke

Ardal O'Hanlon

In an exquisite transformation the Olivier stage is transformed to a farmhouse set in the lush County Donegal countryside against which Brian Friel’s meticulously observed take on 1930’s Ireland plays out.

Very much an ensemble piece, Friel’s dramatic landscape takes in the essence of faith, family, tradition, shame, love and industrialisation - telescoping these vast themes into a play of poignant and ingenious intimacy.

Fictional yet drawn from history, the narrative is focussed upon five sisters and the three men who impact upon their family. All eight performances are magnificent and finely nuanced, combining  to offer an evening of bittersweet observations on the frailties of life and family and of a time, barely 90 years ago, that could almost be from a different world.

At not far short of three hours there are times when one's attention flags, but Josie Rourke directs with a sharp perception and played out on Robert Jones’ stunning set, the evening is an occasion of fine theatre.

Runs until 27th May 

Photo credit: Johan Persson

City of Angels - A Performer's Eye View from Tiffany Graves

In the first of an occasional series in which respected professionals from the world of theatre offer their thoughts on a show, Tiffany Graves gives her Performer's Eye View of City of Angels, currently playing at the Donmar Warehouse....

I know, I know - I'm very late to the party. Embarrassingly so, as City of Angels shall only be at The Donmar for another couple of weeks (the run comes to an end on February 7th). But, better late than never - with soaring reviews and tickets like gold-dust, I was delighted to have been able to secure a seat.

Before the performance, I spotted a fellow performer Frankie Jenna (currently starring as Kathy Seldon in Singing in the Rain at The Gatehouse) who had bagged a standing spot on her night off as she couldn't bear to miss this production either.

Although not a show I was lucky enough to be seen for, it was definitely one I would have loved to have been in (not least because I adore Cy Colman’s work and greatly enjoyed doing his Sweet Charity at the Menier and Haymarket, also choreographed by the wonderful Stephen Mear).

I do, however, have a ridiculously talented friend who got very close to being cast as one of the Angel City Four and recounts tales of sitting up until the early hours learning both female harmony parts and was a mere 'shoo-wap-bee-dooo-wah' away from getting the job - had it not been for the fact that she has glorious long, raven hair (not too dissimilar to Rosalie Craig's locks that adorn all the show’s sultry smoldering posters) and that Josie Rourke decided to give a nod towards LA's racial undertones so fitting of the time. Brilliant choice... not so much for my talented friend.

So where does one start? The show is a veritable smorgasbord of delights, boasting a creative team that would make any performer salivate with joy at the thought of the first day of rehearsals. Think 'Avengers Assemble'. With the likes of Josie Rourke, Gareth Valentine and Stephen Mear at the helm, you know you are going to be in very safe hands.

And the cast that they had 'assembled' were truly at the top of their game. Led by newlyweds Rosalie Craig and Hadley Fraser, the entire cast's diction was a crisp and effortless vocal tone.

Peter Polycarpou excelled playing Fidler/Irwin with just the right combination of cringe, humour and Hollywood sleaze. Quite a masterclass in delivery. And, naturally for Peter (we did Cats together many Jellicle Moons ago), he didn’t pass up the opportunity of going au naturel for our viewing pleasure!

Like every performer, there is the part of my brain that never stops when watching a show, no matter how hard I try to quash it, whispering to me "If you had been cast in this- who would you like to be? How would you play the role and would it be a different portrayal to the one you see before you?"

So - hands up, I admit it - I would’ve adored to play Alaura Kingsley/Carla for the sheer glamour and show-stopping joy that a part like that offers. What a gift! Katherine Kelly was perfect casting for the role (damn her!) and oozed the sophisticated allure demanded of her. 

And with Katherine's unfortunate exit from the cast this week, in swooped Wonderwoman Caroline Sheen to save the day with a mere 24 hours notice. (We did A Funny Thing at the National together, and you couldn't ask for a calmer head or safer pair of hands to step into the show at the last minute) Hats off to you Caroline, from all of us awestruck and envious fellow performers up here in the cheap seats!

Stephen Mear's clever racket-choreography for her Tennis Song duet with the rugged Tam Matu raised all the necessary titters, and I will be doing my level best to steal some of Alaura's bombshell poise when I portray Ulla in The Producers later this year (well, it's the biggest form of flattery after all).

As for my favourite turn of the evening, it was a tough call, as You Can Always Count On Me is one of my all-time favourite songs and Rebecca Trehearn did not disappoint in her rendition. She certainly is a dame who knows how to sell a song. And Rosalie Craig’s It Needs Work was delivered beautifully – and must have been such fun singing David Zippel’s irreverent lyrics across a New York café table to her new Mister.

However, it's a full feast of a production, meaning that not only are the performances sublime, but the devilishly ingenious lighting, creative staging, inventive set and fabulous costume design all play a huge part in the audience's enjoyment and the show’s overall success; seamlessly depicting which story we are in (there are two - the Film Noir and reality, woven together marvellously in Larry Gelbart’s book... do keep up!).

In such a stylish era, the women look spectacularly put together and the men suave. Set against a backdrop of scripts that can be climbed upon and sweeping stairs that glide across the stage, it cannot fail to impress. I always worry when friends see me in a show and comment on how wonderful the set or costumes or lights were as I feel that they are deflecting. Not so here - these features all complement the actors beautifully, making the piece as a whole so perfectly formed.

So. I enjoyed it. A lot. Is it obvious? I would love to tell you to grab a ticket and go, but sadly they are now few and far between. You could try the Barclays Front Row offer if it is still available, or if not queue up for returns. Or feel smug that you were one of the lucky few who got to enjoy such a gem. Or sit on the floor, crossed legged and pray to the great fairy of musical theatre in the hope that it might, hopefully, transfer.

If it does, I for one would certainly go see it again!

Tiffany Graves

Tiffany will soon be appearing as Ulla in the UK tour of The Producers alongside Jason Manford, Ross Noble, Phil Jupitus, Cory English and David Bedella.

Best known for playing both Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart in Chicago, Tiffany went on to be alternate lead in Sweet Charity at The Haymarket, Killer Queen in We Will Rock You, Marlene Dietrich in Piaf, and took part in the 50 Year celebration at the National Theatre. She has also appeared in Cats, A Chorus Line, Sunset Boulevard, Witches of Eastwick, Wonderful Town, Follies and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum.

She will be performing in her own cabaret show Desperate Divas at London's St James Theatre on February 22nd.

Follow Tiffany on Twitter @tiffanygraves4

City of Angels plays until 7th February 2015

City of Angels - Review

Donmar Warehouse, London

*****

Music by Cy Coleman

Lyrics by David Zippel

Book by Larry Gelbart

Directed by Josie Rourke

Rosalie Craig in rehearsal

It's more than 20 years since City Of Angels last played in the West End and it is a mark of panache that sees the Donmar reviving it now. An unconventional tale, mixing morality with the darker side of Hollywood's film-noir era, but for this particular production with a shortish run, a million-dollar cast and production values to match, tickets to the Donmar are like gold dust.

Hadley Fraser is Stine, a writer contracted to monstrous mogul Buddy Fidler's studios. Sat at his Corona typewriter, Stine taps out his pulp fiction screenplay City Of Angels, a mystery of murder and double crossing that centres upon the investigations of fictional gumshoe Stone. All of Stine's movie characters are modelled upon the people who share his world, with a feature of the musical's book being that the actors who play Stine's contemporaries mirror their roles in Stone's fictional existence. With one key exception: although Stone is the writer's alter-ego, he is played by Tam Mutu, in a role that sees the detective slowly usurping his creator's influence. Fraser and Mutu, both giants of their generation in musical theatre, are flawless as the protagonists inhabiting their parallel worlds. The irony as Stine stamps on Stone at the end of act one in the glorious You're Nothing Without Me, a message so brilliantly reinforced by clever projections, is slickly mirrored in the show's closing number I'm Nothing Without You.

The acting is perfect throughout. Rebecca Trehearn smoulders as secretary / other-woman in both worlds and sings sensationally, first in a striking duet with Rosalie Craig's Gabby, What You Don't Know About Women and later stealing the show with You Can Always Count On Me. Flame haired Craig stuns too, with her With Every Breath I Take a fabulous act one solo. The production's list of talent is endless. Samantha Barks pops up (literally) in Stone's bed, singing as beautifully as her looks are deliciously provocative, whilst the show's humour is never bettered than in Marc Elliott's Latin detective Munoz's number All Ya Have To Do Is Wait.

Peter Polycarpou has been busy building a reputation as the master of middle-aged Americana, with his Hines (Pajama Game) and Nathan Detroit (Guys and Dolls) proving to be recent comic delights of the canon. He surpasses himself here, both as Fidler and fictional producer Irwin. Whether it be with trousers round his ankles or cigar wedged firmly between his teeth, Polycarpou is a master.

Josie Rourke directs her first musical with an assured touch that showcases the hallmark precision of the Donmar's Artistic Director. The gorgeously voiced backing ensemble of the Angel City Four (who also play the various serving roles in the LA locations and who include the sensational Sandra Marvin) are black. In a show set some years before the (partial) emancipation that the Civil Rights movement was to yield, Rourke subtly layers her production with a tacit acknowledgment of Tinseltown's racism. Stephen Mear's inspired choreography pushes this exposition just a little further, with his work in particular on Ev’rybody's Gotta Be Somewhere and the song’s underlying theme of the resentment of white privilege proving another example of this dance supremo's excellence.

(read my recent interview with Stephen Mear here)

The Donmar's space is famously, deliciously, tiny. By early into act two the fake stage smoke has been replaced with a rich fug of cigar smoke, filling the auditorium and only adding to the authenticity. Robert Jone's set design is ingenious, with the simplicity of a scene-setting slow revolve fan cutting a swathe through a hazy spotlight beam matched only by the wizardry of Jone's CGI projections that Tardis-like expand the Donmar's confines. (The swaying palms at the Kingsley mansion are inspired!) Gareth Valentine's ten musicians, heavy on the brass and wind, extract every note of genre-laden tension and nuance from Coleman's score.

Gelbart's book is clever but it ain't perfect and there are moments when Stine's stylised "reality" is as incredible as Stone's fantasy world. But when a show is produced as perfectly as this, frankly who cares? The Donmar's City of Angels drips with world class talent. Kill to get a ticket.

Runs to 7th February 2015. The production is sold out, however the Donmar is releasing a number of Barclays Front Row each Monday and a limited number of day seats can be purchased at the box office.

Photo: Johan Persson

Stephen Mear - An Extraordinary Year For An Extraordinary Choreographer

Mear rehearses Lara Pulver in Gypsy (photo Roy Tan)

Since this article was first published, City of Angels has opened at the Donmar Warehouse to rave notices.
My 5* review of this outstanding musical can be found here.

The virtually sold out City of Angels is currently previewing in the intimacy of London’s Donmar Warehouse. As rehearsals were drawing to a close last week, I spent a delightful evening at Joe Allens with acclaimed choreographer Stephen Mear, to learn a little more about this man’s remarkable career and achievements.

As 2014 draws to a close, Mear is likely to have had the rare distinction of having choreographed two of the year’s most highly acclaimed musicals this side of the Atlantic and both away from the mainstream thrust of the commercial West End. As well as the buzz surrounding City Of Angels, he has only recently returned from a brace of theatrical excellence at Chichester. His work on the movement in Rupert Everett’s Amadeus that opened the re-built Festival Theatre was a gorgeous treat of rococo splendor, whilst his choreography of Jonathan Kent’s production of the Sondheim & Styne Gypsy, a giant of a show with a cast led by Imelda Staunton with Lara Pulver, has contributed to the production being hailed as a “once in a lifetime” event. 

(read my review of Gypsy here)

A lean and incredibly athletic 50 year old, Mear speaks of his influences, with his career stretching back to performing in the early years of the original productions of both Cats and Evita. He has both worked alongside and assisted many of the dance greats having known Fosse, worked with Gillian Lynne and counts Broadway’s (and lately the West End too) Susan Stroman as a close friend. And it is probably that rich breadth and depth of Mear’s experience that makes the quality of his work so distinctive. We both recall Richard Eyre’s seminal and groundbreaking Guys And Dolls at the National Theatre in 1982, where Mear was to find the late David Toguri’s choreography an inspiration.

That introduction to Eyre's musical theatre style was to plant the idea in Mear's mind of working with the director in later years. Alongside Matthew Bourne, Mear choreographed Eyre’s multi-million Disney-dollar Mary Poppins. That dance pairing was to prove sensational, with Mary Poppins winning the 2005 Olivier for choreography before going on under the same creative talent to garner a Tony nomination two years later in New York. The vision behind that show was unique - Who can forget Gavin Lee, upside down, tap dancing his way across the top span of the Prince Edward Theatre's massive proscenium? At this point Mear confesses: he is afraid of heights. In rehearsals a swing had been constructed especially for him, to allow the dance maestro to be suspended from the stage upside down alongside Lee. The height proved too much for Mear and he was swiftly returned to terra firma, but it says much for his perseverance and commitment that he even permitted himself to be hoisted aloft at all.

Gavin Lee and ensemble in the famous Mary Poppins Step In Time routine

The Eyre association continues to this day with Mear having worked alongside Sir Richard on Betty Blue Eyes as well as the short-lived Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Don Black offering, Stephen Ward. Mear looks back appreciatively on that show, especially upon being able to have worked again with the likes of Jo Riding and for the first time having the opportunity to have worked with Lloyd-Webber. Eyre was to hire Mear again last year for Chichester's charming revival of The Pajama Game, a show that was to see a 2014 transfer to the West End - and as Gypsy prepares to land at the Savoy Theatre next March, allowing Mear's glorious work to be shared with the wider audience it deserves, the theatre world is abuzz with what is likely to be the 2015 musical theatre revelation… It's Chichester again, this time producing the Jerry Herman stunner Mack & Mabel, with Michael Ball lined up to play Mack Sennett, the genius director of two-reeler silent movies. Again Mear will be responsible for the dance and in a show that offers a famously perceptive and sometimes dark commentary upon the early years of Hollywood, personally I cannot wait to see Mear's take on the slapstick comedy that underlies the brilliantly maverick number Hit Em On The Head!

But right now, amidst the season of tinsel and glitter, the talk of the town is of a show that focusses upon Tinseltown's darkest side, the noir of the 1940s styled City Of Angels. Billed as a musical comedy, the show reflects two parallel plots - a writer desperate for his screenplay to be produced woven together with the fictional story that he is creating. It's a world of gumshoes, hazy cigarette smoke and sleazy intrigue and its been a good 20 years or so since the Prince of Wales theatre last gave the show a West End outing.

City of Angels marks Mear's first time working at the venue as well as alongside director and the Donmar’s Artistic Director Josie Rourke. Another first is that City of Angels is Rourke’s entrée into musical theatre and Mear speaks glowingly of her approach. "She's amazing and hasn't missed a trick" he says, adding that the acclaimed director, some years his junior, believes in a constructively collaborative approach to planning the show. Mear adds that City of Angels is a show not famed for its dance routines - yet without giving too much away, talks excitedly about his staging of the Prologue and refers to how the casting of the show will complement some of the plot's darker racist undertones.

Mear is also fortunate in having been gifted a platinum-plated cast to work with. Hadley Fraser who numbers amongst the cream of his generation is playing the writer Stine, whilst his on-stage wife Gabby is played by real life (and newly wed) missus Rosalie Craig, another British musical theatre A-Lister. That the cast also includes Peter Polycarpou as movie mogul Buddy Fidler only appeals further to Mear - he worked with both Polycarpou and Fraser on The Pajama Game, gleaning a thorough understanding of these performers’ potential. With Katherine Kelly, Samantha Barks and Tam Mutu also on the bill, Mear truly feels spoilt with the talent that he has been blessed to work with.

Peter Polycarpou in rehearsal for City of Angels
photo by Johan Persson

Mear’s talent know no bounds and this piece has not even mentioned his New York achievements with Disney’s The Little Mermaid on Broadway, nor his acclaimed Die Fledermaus last year at the New York Met. The list is endless. For now though, its all about shoehorning the immense craft of this lord of the dance into the bijou confines of the Donmar. City of Angels will be a sassy show performed by the cream of the industry’s talent and in a production sculpted by the finest creatives. What a fabulous way to see in the new year!

City of Angels plays at the Donmar Warehouse until 7th February 2015. The production is sold out, however a number of Barclays Front Row seats are released for sale each Monday and a limited number of seats can be purchased each day at the box office.

Gypsy transfers to London's Savoy Theatre in March 2015

Privacy

Donmar Warehouse, London

****

Written by James Gray

Directed by Josie Rourke

Joshua McGuire

The mise en scene to Privacy is a backdrop that slowly fills with fingerprints as more and more audience members connect to the show’s WiFi. The message is clear. We are all leaving digital fingerprints and James Graham’s play seeks to consider how this geometrically expanding volume of recorded data is used and abused. When George Orwell wrote 1984, shortly after World War 2, the society he envisioned was an horrifically portentous nation, in which all information (and even thoughts) was accessible to a totalitarian state. Orwell’s opus was a magnificent work of literary art. But where Orwell composed fiction, Graham’s work is largely based on fact.

Privacy is an exciting play. A pre-show animation, in the style of an airliner’s safety briefing, asks the audience to break with convention and keep their (silenced) smartphones switched on and connected to the theatre’s network. There is a neat joke that asks children to connect their own phones first before helping a struggling adult get theirs on the network.  The play that follows is a presentation of the author’s research into how information is obtained about us and how that information is (ab)/used by the state and exploited by commerce. Graham has been thorough and a large part of the play is taken up with verbatim reproductions of interview text. The play is fascinating and chilling and his combination of excellent acting with revelatory facts about the data that one’s iPhone is continually recording, makes for occasionally electrifying drama. But whilst the verbatim genre may be new to theatre, its style has been around for a long time on TV and there are moments when Privacy seems little more than a live-action episode of Panorama. A slick projection screen enhances the action and graphically indicates how with the UK sitting at a critical junction of most of the world’s fibre-optic data networks, as one character suggests, the UK’s security services are “basically Sky+ing the internet”, a phrase that is mind-boggling in its simplicity.

Factually the play is terrific and it is only when Graham augments his research with creative writing, that the chinks appear. A police shooting of suspected terrorists is given a kitsch Romeo and Juliet parallel that is almost insulting in its naiveté, whilst the plays denouement lacks credibility. Graham also muddles his arguments. Michelle Terry’s perfectly nuanced take on an (anonymised) 16 year-old speaking of the online bullying stemming from the ask.fm social networking site that has led to numerous teenage suicides, was poignant and painful and touched the audience with its implicit tragedy. In shifting his focus towards the Snowden leak of state secrets however, Graham’s points become blurred. Snowden’s actions are not in question, but whether he was a champion of freedom, or alternatively a traitor, is very much a matter of personal and political opinion and Graham’s prose seems too heavily weighted towards defending the actions of The Guardian newspaper in releasing the Snowden files.

The cast of six are all outstanding, seamlessly interweaving between characters (only Joshua McGuire who plays The Writer is granted one role throughout the play) with Gunnar Cauthery’s take on William Hague and Jonathan Coy’s Paddy Ashdown being particularly fine caricatures.

Josie Rourke directs with pace though at times the second half flags. Whilst there may well be more heat than light to Graham’s analysis and at nearly three hours it’s a long haul, for the most part it proves to be entertaining theatre. Innovative and challenging, Graham does not provide many answers in his work, but he will shock you into realising just how many digital fingerprints we are all leaving, everywhere.

Runs to 31st May 2014