Falsettos - Review

The Other Palace, London


****


Music & Lyrics by William Finn
Book by William Finn and James Lapine
Directed by Tara Overfield-Wilkinson

Daniel Boys

When the patriarchal Marvin leaves his wife and young son for another man his family life is thrown into disarray. Trina, his frazzled spouse hooks up with Marvin’s psychiatrist Mendel, Marvin’s lover Whizzer is reluctantly inducted into the family’s day-to-day activities for the sake of maintaining some sense of normalcy as 10 year old Jason find himself caught in the middle of the pandemonium. 

William Finn and James Lapine’s Falsettos, originally envisioned as a pair of one act chamber musicals, really is a show of two halves. Act one, while slightly disjointed, is a fairly breezy affair, filled with pithy recitatives interspersed with zippy ensemble numbers. It’s all good fun, but while the show is funny, cutting and witty, as the interval arrives it also seems a little bit directionless. 

Not so in the second half. Picking up two years later and introducing Marvin’s delightful next door neighbours, caterer Cordelia and doctor Charlotte (‘the lesbians next door’), Falsettos delves into the confusion and chaos of the AIDS crisis. It’s a gut-wrenching decent – the darkening tone jarring uncomfortably with production designer PJ McEvoy’s kitschy set, with its cartoonish colour palette washed over with blinding bright primary coloured lighting. Tara Overfield-Wilkinson directs the turn from mayhem to tragedy perfectly, seamlessly balancing the laughs and the tears.

And, of course, the production is elevated by an outrageously good ensemble cast. Daniel Boys gives a masterfully complex performance as Marvin, a man who is constantly in the middle of a precarious balancing act with Oliver Savile charming as Marvin’s sardonic and seemingly self-absorbed boyfriend. Meanwhile Laura Pitt-Pulford’s Trina is as brilliant as ever, the jilted wife putting on a happy face for the sake of her family. 

Having picked up a cult following amongst UK musical theatre lovers after its well-received 2016 Broadway revival, the UK premiere of Falsettos was massively anticipated, and this production goes a long way to showing just why. It’s a shame though that it has been marred by controversy, with some in the UK’s Jewish community  calling out the lack of Jewish representation within the production’s cast and creative team. As the story centres closely upon the Jewish experience, including a touching subplot that centres on young Jason’s looming Bar Mitzvah, it remains essential that the show never dips into distasteful parody. There’s definitely a lesson to be learned here for future iterations of this show and indeed, others. 

Judging the production at face-value though, Falsettos is well sung, ultra-smart and ultimately gutting. Those who buy a ticket will have plenty to look forward to.

Runs until 23rd November
Reviewed by Charlotte O'Growney
Photo credit: The Standout Company

Hatched 'n' Dispatched - Review

Park Theatre, London


*****


Written by Gemma Page and Michael Kirk
Directed by Michael Kirk

The cast of Hatched 'n' Dispatched

Much credit to Jez Bond at London’s Park Theatre for boldly staging another innovative and provocative new play.

It is 1959, Arthur is dead and as his family gather for the wake, there are drunken giggles to be had and secrets to be spilled. They don’t write ‘em like this any more and more’s the bloody pity, for in his debut full length play Michael Kirk together with Gemma Page has captured a slice of British social history, hinting at the incisiveness that once hallmarked the BBC’s Play For Today and which latterly Mike Leigh can occasionally capture on screen. 

Kirk and Page place themselves on a literary high wire, such is the potential for melodrama and cliché that their narrative presents. However one can only assume that Kirk, who has based the play on his own experiences of growing up in the 1950’s, enjoyed(?) the most colourful of childhoods, for Hatched ‘n’ Dispatched is at all times credible and often excruciatingly funny. It is as act two unfolds that the carefully crafted text arguably suggests aspects of an English Arthur Miller, as the narrative scrapes away at both layers and years of hypocrisy and deceit, descending into an orgy of shame and humiliation.

Wendi Peters is Dorothy, Arthur’s sister in law. An overbearing matriarch and on the surface every inch a Hyacinth Bucket. But beneath her much manicured and kept-up appearance there’s a gimlet eye that sees everything, even the failings that lie closest to her heart.

Irene played by Wendy Morgan, is Arthur’s widow and Dorothy’s sister and has been (as we learn early in act one) having an affair with her sister’s husband Edward for as long as they’ve been married. The rich complexities of this most acute of sibling rivalries are finely played out by both women, with the sensitivities of their so very different pains represented on stage by the subtlest of movements and gestures. Blink and you risk missing a gem. It was not so long ago that Peters starred in Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, a show famous for amongst other numbers, Sisters. That song includes the line “And lord help the sister, who comes between me and my man” In the light of this play, that lyric can take on a whole new resonance. 

Peters and Morgan lead their flawless company with a masterclass in performance. Kevin McGowan turns in a brilliant Edward (who can't even keep his hands from groping his daughter in law for chrissakes) – all trousers but no backbone. Their son Kenneth (James Wrighton) is a whoring wife-beater, whilst Danielle Flett, playing his abused wife Corinne is tragically believable as the woman who’s had one cracked-rib too many. There is brilliantly fleshed out comic relief from the allotment loving but possibly infertile Oliver (classy work from Matthew Fraser Holland) whilst his wife Madeleine (Edward’s sister, played by Vicky Binns) desperate for a child offers a beautifully nuanced take on the sexual naivetés of the time.

Diana Vickers is a treat as Irene’s young daughter Susan. Sexy, blonde and quite possibly pregnant (unplanned and by a black guy and remember this is a racially troubled Britain in the 50’s), she combines just the right combination of 'ditzy' with compassionate love for her mother. Vickers' is another perfectly weighted performance.

Credit too to casting director Anne Vosser for again assembling a perfect troupe and to PJ McEvoy whose set – and it all takes place in Arthur and Irene’s Front Room – is for once an economic design that is completely justified and in context and whose costume design, including some stunning stilettos, nails the era perfectly. Most of all, further credit to Kirk for directing his own work with such measured assurance.

Hatched ‘n’ Dispatched is glorious new writing that deserves a longer life – either on a West End stage or maybe even on screen. This play is all about the gripping close up of intimate performance and agonised humanity. It is unmissable drama.

Runs until 26th September