Fiddler On The Roof

Wigston Operatic Society's annual production at Leicester's Little Theatre this year was Fiddler On The Roof, a tale of traditional Jews being evicted from their home village in 1905 Russia. The WAOS president expressed surprise in the programme notes that the society hadn't performed this show before. After seeing it I am not surprised.

While a hugely talented cast do the best they can the material is just unrelentingly downbeat. This is not an uplifting, feel-good musical. There are precious little toe-tapping tunes. Even If I Were A Rich Man, shorn of Hollywood's OTT glamour and glitz, is nothing much more than a mildly amusing dirge. There are quite a few amusing little one liners between Tevye and his wife, they are not enough to balance the rest of the downbeat story.

However, the poor choice of material can not take away from the cast their professional performance. Led by a live orchestra of 10 this huge cast of 22 don't put a foot wrong, there is not a weak cast member in the company and Ady Bales's Tevye more than fills the shoes of Topol in the Hollywood film.

Fiddler On The Roof is on at Little Theatre until Sat 23rd May

First published in Westerm Gazette
© Paul Towers 20/5/2015

What The Butler Saw

It has been far too long since I have wandered up Dover Street to Leicester's Little Theatre and tonight's production of Joe Orton's What The Butler Saw by Leicester Drama Society just highlights what a fool I have been to deprive myself of the professional quality productions they put on.

Written in 1966/7 but having to wait til 1969 and the final abolition of the contentious 1737 Licensing Act and 1843 Theatres Act whereby all scripts had to be approved by a Government body, latterly the Lord Chamberalin's office, Orton's final play, probably his most outrageous (for the time), is fittingly staged almost 50 years after being written in the very theatre that Orton made his stage debut in 1949.

Maybe preempting the abolition of censorship on stage, Orton has thrown every taboo he can think of into this fast paced, outrageous farce of cross dressing, mistaken identity and even a spot of nudity. With satirical digs at doctors, psychiatrists and his especial favourite target, the police Orton weaves a chaotic farce out of Dr Prentice's efforts in covering up a potential indiscretion.

A very talented cast of six amateurs (and let me re-emphasie this, amateurs) don't put a foot wrong and the audience are laughing out loud from the off. An ingenious set somehow makes the stage look much bigger than it is and the obligatory swinging doors and french windows provide all the entrances and exits needed to compound the confusion.

It would be unfair to single out any of the actors but Paul Large and Angela Edwards as Dr and Mrs Prentice were superb.

What The Butler Saw is on at Leicester Little Theatre until Saturday 16 May. This show is not for the easily offended but will provoke belly laughs.

© Paul Towers 12/5/2015
First published in Western Gazette

Billy Bow

The final show of Curve's Inside Out Festival 2015 is this glorious workshop production of Ian Friel and Andrew Fisher's Billy Bow, the tale of how an abused black English woman escapes from her alcoholic husband and runs away to sea disguised as a man. Having grown up with tales of daring do related on her father's knee, Wilhemina , a freed slave, becomes Billy and joins the wartime British Navy in, one supposes, the 18th century just as England engages with the French. Of course life under sail is far from the fantasy her Father sold her but she figures anything is better than her abusive husband. 'Billy' falls in love with a black press-ganged slave who guesses 'his' secret. This fails to be a happy ending when the poor unfortunate is soundly flogged and then thrown from the mast-head.

Act two starts off with an hilarious bawdy song by the 'Portsmouth Polls', the working girls who gathered round the arriving ships like flies round tainted meat. This provides very welcome light relief to what is, by its very nature, a largely heavy story.

Two keyboard players, one on either side of the front stage, keep the action moving along in a production that, without dialogue, bears more than a passing resemblance in style to Les Miserables. The huge cast (I counted 34) more than fill the stage of Curve's Studio. Unlike many workshop productions this one does have a backdrop (a ship's sail) and plenty of barrels and boxes to sit and stand on. The theatre itself was imaginatively draped in various ropes to convey a seagoing vessel.

This is, once again, a Curve Young Company production and is a great example of how a theatre's engagement with the local community (in this case mainly DMU) can produce some very professional work.

Billy Bow is on again on Wed 6 May. There might still be some tickets available if you are quick.

First published in Western Gazette
© Paul Towers 5/5/2015

Girls With Balls

Back to Curve for yet another toe dip into the highly successful Inside Out Festival and Off The Fence's contribution to the festivities. While most of us are used to seeing productions staged in either the main auditorium or the studio, we sometimes forget that Curve was designed to be infinitely adaptable with various rehearsal spaces being available for use. Girls With Balls was snugly ensconced in Rehearsal Room 2, converted for the duration into an intimate performance studio, as we eavesdropped on two contrasting ladies' football teams and their respective coaches.

Local author and first time playwright Alison Dunne has crafted an, at times, hilarious play that tells the story of how the thriving women's football sport was killed stone dead by the FA after the Great War when it refused to let them use official pitches. This was supposedly so that the remaining men who came back from the trenches wouldn't be distracted from interest in the reignited men's game, abandoned during hostilities.

The small cast of four double up as both teams as we switch from 1971 and supposedly enlightened modern society and 1921, the between the wars struggle to retain the rights women gained during the conflict. With a one-liner strewn opening the story gradually gets darker as we empathise with the frustrations of the 1920's team fighting a chauvinistic Football Association and celebrate the bawdy bravado of the 1970's team as they embrace modern liberations. It is only in the final minutes, appropriately enough, that the seeming lack of progress is starkly illustrated. The modern women's liberal consumption of cigarettes and expletive laden dialogue starkly highlights what is both right and wrong with emancipation.

This production brings together two of Off The Fence's favoured actors, Becca Copper, last seen as Vesta Tilley in England Expects, and Jonny McClean, seen most recently in Clamber Up The Crucifix. The company is completed with Molly Waters and Jessica Noonan under the expert direction of Off The Fence's artistic director and Curve regular, Gary Phillpott. Plans are already under way for a national tour in 2016.

It has to be said that there is an awful lot of swearing and smoking from the 'modern' team but this does highlight the differences between the two eras. For this reason alone this is not something that children should be taken to see, especially when the final twist in the tale happens.

© Paul Towers 2/5/2015
First published in Western Gazette

The Accordion Shop

In London, in 2011, the world went crazy for a few nights and chaos flooded the streets. Shops were smashed and looted, cars were set on fire and the Police were temporarily unable to cope. What made this situation so incendiary was that, for the very first time, social media played a huge part in spreading the word and inflaming the tension.

This is the background against which writer Cush Jumbo explores how it doesn't take much to kick start the mob but, equally, it only takes a single event to stop it in its tracks.

One day Mr Ellody steps out of the front door of his accordion shop to find the world has gone mad. Everyone has received a text message reading 'Riot. The Road. 7pm Tonight' like an episode of Dr Who where aliens call them to their demise. First the kids rush to find out what is happening and then the adults follow. The resulting mayhem quickly escalates into a full blown riot as an inadequate police force ineffectually tries to scatter the troublemakers. The, just as quickly as it rose up, it died down.

A large cast of talented youngsters create the chaotic night on a stage strewn with the mess that any inner city street is prone to.

This production is supported by both Curve Young Company and The National Theatre's Connections programme and will go on to be performed at Warwick Arts Centre. As part of Curve's Inside Out Festival it was especially aimed at teenagers and it was gratifying to see a large part of the audience was made up of family and friends; many, I am sure, in a live theatre for the first time. A very welcome added benefit of these new shows.

As the piece only lasted 30 minutes we wandered into the Lyric Lounge, the festival's FREE pop-up acoustic music stage in Curve's spacious foyer. We paused for 20 minutes to take in some mellow jazz hosted by local singer/writer Carol Leeming

The Inside Out Festival runs until 6 May. Full details at Inside Out website

First published in Western Gazette
© Paul Towers 29/4/2015

Mrs Green, the musical

As part of Curve's Inside Out Festival we are cordially invited into the shambolic front room of Mrs Mabel Green, ex-soul singer, current arthritic pothead, ASBO'd pensioner and surrogate mother to various lost souls in Nottingham's Basford. Surrounded by the detritus of her past life she is sifting through it prior to a holiday, and possible permanent stay, in Spain or a return to sheltered accommodation. Surrounded by her memories and the various young scallies she mentors she is encouraged to regale them with songs from her past. Then when her old singing partner turns up and the old bitchy rivalry surfaces as the one time friends tear each other apart and then put the past behind them.

This is Nottingham's answer to Gangsta Granny filtered through Mrs Brown's Boys and The Royale Family with loads of original songs by Nic Harvey, artistic director of Sheep Soup, the production company behind Mrs Green, who also wrote the show and played keyboard and guitar onstage. Major plaudits must got to Ben Welch as the eponymous Mrs Green and Shauna Shim as Vivian De Wilde, her old singing partner. These two especially tore up the stage when they went head to head.

Mrs Green, The Musical is on at Curve again on Saturday 25 April and out on tour.More details on their website www.sheepsoup.co.uk

First published in Western Gazette
© Paul Towers 24/4/2015

Shiv

I was again back in Curve's Studio space but this time for a conventionally staged piece of theatre. Shiv is the centrepiece, the jewel in the crown of this year's Inside Out Festival, and rightly so. A lavish story of a girl's lost father, a realisation of the reality of his story telling adventures and a failed love affair all played out at the side of a lake, the scene of her beloved father's shattered dreams.

An atmospheric set of a lone, shabby mattress sat on the decking beside the water is imaginatively lit to flit between the girl's Punjabi childhood and her American adulthood and back again. The story, liberally littered with Star Trek references and allusions, is in turns laugh out loud and almost tearful as old, buried secrets are realised and bared.

This play, having its European premier at Curve and produced in-house, is beautifully constructed by author Aditi Brennan Kapil and reflects the tensions of being brought up 'between worlds'. A feeling which must be resonate with many of Leicester's second generation immigrants, a pleasing number of whom were out supporting this locally cast production.

In the role of Shiv was Emily Lloyd-Sani, a Midlands bred actress working at Curve for the first time; Andrew Josh, playing Bapu her father, is fast becoming a regular at Curve; Ian Keir Attard plays Gerard, Shiv's potential love interest, and is a newcomer to Leicester. Finally Robin Bowerman plays The Professor, Bapu's nemesis, and is a welcome returning visitor to Curve.

Shiv is on until Sat 25 April in the Curve Studio.

Inside Out is in its second year and was created to showcase all manner of local-based productions and performances. A wide range of shows at very accessible ticket prices are on until 6 May. There are also a lot of free events including the innovative Inside Out Park, a mini music festival in the Curve foyer, and The Lyric Lounge, a free pop up live literature festival all day on Saturday 25 April. If any of these events inspire you to get involved there are several workshops covering dance, acting and playwriting.

Full details of all the events can be found on the Curve website at www.curveonline.co.uk

First published in Western Gazette
© Paul Towers 23/4/2015