Tomorrow Morning - Review

***

Music, lyrics and screenplay by Laurence Mark Wythe

Directed by Nick Winston

Certificate -   12

104 minutes, 2022

Samantha Barks 

Last seen on a London stage some 12 years ago and having amassed a number of productions off-Broadway and elsewhere around the globe Tomorrow Morning, Laurence Mark Wythe’s musical about a couple’s falling into love, marriage, parenthood and subsequent break-up makes it onto the big screen.

Charting the doomed relationship's ten-year lifespan, Wythe’s tale is in many respects a fusion of The Last Five Years melded with Kramer vs Kramer, albeit based in London rather than New York City. But it is not just the Atlantic Ocean that separates these anti-love stories. Both of the American plotlines offered far greater emotional heft in their narratives together with wittier and more perceptive writing in screenplay and lyrics. Wythe’s songs are heavy on exposition, demanding little intellectual connection from the viewer and too often revert to cliché.

The film’s production values however are gorgeous. Ramin Karimloo and Samantha Barks are Will and Cat, the ill-fated lovers and both make fabulous vocal work of Wythe’s compositions. There is also a strong debut from Oliver Clayton as the couple’s young son Zachary who gets caught in his parents’ crossfire.

Nick Winston has helmed a beautifully filmed love letter to London, and to Wapping in particular. There are even cameos from Omid Djalili (in the bath) as Will's dad and the incorrigibly scene-stealing Joan Collins (in full The Bitch mode) as Cat’s protective grandmother Anna.

Crack open the prosecco and chocolates and you’ll be in for an evening of finely sung entertainment.

In UK cinemas from 9th September and on DVD from 17th October

Honeymoon In Vegas - Review

London Palladium, London


*****


Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
Book by Andrew Bergman
Directed by Shaun Kerrison

Jason Robert Brown celebrates the show's reception at  the Palladium

Showbiz, entertainment and glamour are three things one expects on a trip to Las Vegas. Well for one night only, courtesy of the London Music Theatre Orchestra; Vegas came to London – with showbiz, entertainment and sheer musical class in abundance. It took 20 years for Andrew Bergman’s 1992 movie to be given a musical theatre treatment – but in the hands of Jason Robert Brown, arguably one of the most incisive songwriters for the stage after Sondheim, the show opened on Broadway for a brief run in 2015. For one night only and under the inspired baton of Brown himself, the show has just played the London Palladium in a polished concert performance delivered by the London Musical Theatre Orchestra and a star-studded cast.

Bergman’s is a tale that’s pure Hollywood fantasy. Jack and Betsy are young lovers who after a convoluted back story, decide to get married in Vegas. On arriving in Nevada however, the beautiful Betsy catches the eye of Tommy, a nefarious but shrewd veteran gambler who sees in the young woman, the image of his late wife. Thrashing Jack in a rigged card game, Tommy strikes a deal to relieve Jack of his poker debt, in exchange for the older man being able to spend a weekend with Betsy. The unfolding narrative is as unbelievable as it is hilarious, with the tale stretching to Hawaii and including a troupe of Flying Elvises before its ultimate, happy resolution.

As Jack and Betsy, Arthur Darvill and Samantha Barks drove the performing excellence at the core of this concert-staged piece, with Darvill giving a wonderfully charismatic performance, matched by stunning vocals that were best exemplified in the opening number I Love Betsy. Barks was equally flawless, but what made these two so watchable was the chemistry and comedy in their connection. Despite delivering almost all of the text out front, including referencing scripts where needed, they offered a masterclass in delivering a staged concert performance. Alongside Barks and Darvill, Maxwell Caulfield’s Tommy was similarly magnificent in voice and character.

To be fair, there wasn’t a weak link within the entire company, but stand out performances came from Rosemary Ashe as Jacks possessive, crazed mother Bea and Nicholas Colicos playing the comically clumsy and conniving Johnny Sandwich.

It is rare to find a one-off concert staging delivered to such an impeccable standard throughout cast and orchestra. Introducing the evening, Freddie Tapner the LMTO’s founder, invited the audience to allow the music to fill the scene changes and dance breaks and warned that the flying Elvises would have be left to the imagination! Bravo to Shaun Kerrison’s direction - with disbelief suitably suspended, the evening’s magic simply soared.

Brown’s score combined with Bergman’s script is a driving force to be reckoned with in musical theatre. The gags and jazzy tunes come thick and fast as the plot's twists and turns unfold. The saying is that what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas – well it was great to see the secrets of this story spilled in London. The show’s creatives took a gamble that came up trumps, their ambitious production playing to a full house. Flush with their success, let’s hope it’s back here soon.

Reviewed by Joe Sharpe

Photo credit: Nick Rutter

The Last Five Years - Review

St James Theatre, London


****


Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
Directed by Jason Robert Brown

Samntha Barks and Jonathan Bailey

At the heart of almost every musical is the progression and development of a love story that can be often entwined with twists, turns and sub plots. Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years however goes further than that, offering an audience the ambitious conceit of focussing solely upon the relationship itself and how, before their eyes, it simultaneously both forms and unravels.  

Opening with two lovers sharing a kiss, for Samantha Barks' Cathy, an aspiring actress it is her tragic last, while for writer Jamie, played by Jonathan Bailey it is a trepidatious first. And thereby hangs the bittersweet time-bending vortex of Brown's work. As his show plays out, Jamie's story runs forward in time, watching the relationship grow and then decay, as Cathy's perspective is in reverse, opening with the couple parting as their marriage ends – their two timelines only tanatalisingly coinciding at the "half-way" moment of their wedding day - and her story ending on the heartbreaking excitement of newly discovered love.

Both Barks and Bailey are magnificent, mastering the show's anti-romantic chemistry. With only the pivotal wedding day scene pitching them opposite each other in real time, rarely do they elsewhere even share the stage, with the plot's developments and its roller-coaster of emotions typically being played out in alternating solo numbers.

Barks tackles Brown's complex score with ease. Arguably as good as it gets, Barks' take on I Can Do Better Than That is a highlight of the evening, truly defining her as one of today's leading ladies. Equally, Bailey's quasi-autobiographical Jamie bursts onto the stage like a ball of fizzing testosterone, nailing the outer-cool veneer that masks a molten tumult of desire. The pair's comic moments come naturally, even when least expected, with the honesty in both Barks' and Bailey's work making the contrasts of heartbreak and hysteria even more poignant. 

In a rare treat for the capital, Brown himself has crossed the Atlantic to direct his work with an incisive precision. The set-up is clear from the beginning with a progression that is so carefully constructed that each step of this love story really leaves one wanting to discover the next chapter. For sure, Brown's beautifully detailed score does a lot of the work for the actors, but with the man himself directing, every nuance is sweetly elicited. 

For the most part the show is enhanced by Derek McLane's design. Two simple sets of typical New York window panes creating the sense of separation. Annoyingly though, other pieces of scenery awkwardly squeak their way on stage and are a minor distraction. 

Any score with such complex melodies demands a musical director that can give it life and with his 6 piece band. Torquil Munro does exactly that. With the majority of stand-alone numbers exceeding 5 minutes and limited text, The Last Five Years is no mean feat for both its actors and musicians alike. 

Already extended to December and with a stellar cast and the writer himself directing, this production of The Last Five Years is an exquisite display of musical theatre performance. A show for both connoisseurs and fans alike and not to be missed.

Runs until 3rd December
Photo credit: Scott Rylander

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

Les Miserables - Movie

Certificate 12A - On general release

***

Screenplay by Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schönberg and William Nicholson

Lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer

Music by  Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg

Directed by Tom Hooper

Samntha Barks as Eponine

Evolving from 27 years of spectacular live performance, Tom Hooper has taken Boublil, Schonberg and Kretzmer’s Les Miserables and  transplanted  their masterpiece from stage to screen.

As an exercise in pushing the technical boundaries of some aspects of musical performance in cinema, the film is an unqualified success, but as an adaptation of one of the most celebrated works in the musical theatre canon, it fails to satisfy.

In the Prologue, an impressive blend of performance and CGI, we first encounter Jean Valjean the convict amongst a team of prisoners hauling in a massive shipwreck. The scenery is breathtakingly vast, but the vocal work is intimate and up close and thereby hangs the movie's flaw. Boublil and Schonbergs' compositions are grand and beautiful and do not lend themselves well to the repeated scrutiny of solo close up that is Hooper's signature. His directorial style worked well in The King's Speech, and also in television's EastEnders, where individual intimacy is crucial to the flowing of the story. Few canvases however are as vast as that of Victor Hugo's french classic and an enormous tale demands a similarly proportioned sense of perspective from the director and not just in the rumbustious ensemble numbers.

Hugh Jackman as Valjean is not only an actor of global presence but also possesses a fine pedigree in musical theatre. His performance of Valjean, that has already garnered a Golden Globe, is a noble depiction of a heroic journey. But where cinema has permitted the “zooming out” of the visual experience of this story,  the decision to “zoom in” on the vocal work robs these songs of the impressive majesty that the writers conceived some thirty odd years ago. In One Day More, arguably one of the finest “Act One Closers” ever written, the fragmented camerawork, with Jackman making Valjean’s contribution whilst fleeing in a stagecoach, robs a fantastic number of its impact. This is a song written for the stage, not the screen and Hooper’s adaptation has stripped the number of both magic and also of its gut-wrenching power. On stage this song is pivotal but on screen it is reduced to not much more than an inventory of different character's perspectives, adding little value to the tale.  All too often in this film, wonderful songs are reduced to simply rhyming dialogue with a muslcal background.

Jackman’s fellow antipodean Russell Crowe is Javert, Valjean’s nemesis, and the face of authority that pursues him throughout the story. Thankfully, Crowe is a masterful actor because his singing disappoints. His big number Stars, a song that has a beautiful poetic lilt to its construction is terribly mauled in his rendition, sung as it is from a high rooftop parapet looking out across a Parisian backdrop in a setting that suggests the singing gargoyles from Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Much has been made of the use of live singing to camera, rather than the miming to a previously recorded soundtrack, that this movie espouses. Technically, this is impressive, and it is generally pleasing to see voice so well linked to face.  Perfect musical theatre (or musical cinema) however is a trinity  of voice, physical movement and music and whilst in earlier filmed musicals the pre-recorded vocals may have been disconnected from the on-screen acting, in Les Miserables, the performers' acting has been severed from the orchestral accompaniment that plays through almost the entire length of the film. This was of course not the intention when these songs were first written and whilst the score has by its nature required adaptation from stage to screen, the adaptive process has diluted much of the brilliance of Boublil and Schonberg's composition. It is of no small significance that on the website of Working Title, who co-produced the movie, writing credits are displayed but no credit at all is shown for the composers of the music.

Where scenes and structure do permit, then the ensemble performances in the film are glorious. Sasha Baron-Cohen and Helena Bonham-Carter as the Thenardiers lead a wonderful Master Of The House, whilst the students'  Red & Black also stirs. Up close, Ann Hathaway’s I Dreamed a Dream and Come to Me reach out to touch the emotions alongside Eddie Redmayne’s Empty Chairs At Empty Tables that is equally a performance of powerful poignance. But when Samantha Barks performs On My Own and A Little Fall of Rain, the barrier of the screen between audience and actor descends and whilst her singing is exquisite, she fails to tug those same heartstrings that Boublil, Schonberg and Kretzmer so cunningly detected all those years ago in composing these tragic blockbusters.

It is impossible not to compare this film with the stage show. It is certainly as long as what one will find in the West End, albeit without the interval, although at least one advantage of the inevitable DVD release will be the ability to pause the movie after One Day More to take a comfort break. Stripped of its on-stage majesty, whilst the acting is magnificent throughout, the adaptation as a whole is a somewhat castrated version of the original work.   Some of the singing is wonderful and many of the visuals are magnificent. The credits list a vast team of talented and crafted folk who have laboured hard to deliver this film, which does deserve to be seen. Just don’t set your expectations too high.