Guys and Dolls Concert at Royal Albert Hall

The Guys and Dolls concert at Royal Albert Hall promised to be a brilliant event, an A list cast, the thirty one piece Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, the wonderful cavernous amphitheatre and the delightful music and lyrics of Frank Loesser. Yet it somehow fell short in delivering what I regard as one of the greatest Musical theatre pieces ever written. The memory of Richard Eyre’s 1982 glorious NT production and Michael Grandage’s enjoyable 2005 revival hung over this concert version and it failed to reach the level that the recent excellent Camelot concert at the London Palladium reached. This is at least in part due to the venue itself which tended to dominate the whole evening as the performers sang before the huge organ pipes and sitting in row 11 of the stalls  (£70 seat) seemed to be one hundred metre from the stage. You almost wished for a TV screen to see the faces of the cast!

However the wonderful score did fill the venue especially during the overture which swirled around the roof space and occasionally the choreography and performances brought the concert to life as in Adelaide’s Bushel and a Peck, a fabulous Luck be a lady dance routine using two levels of the stage and the show stopping Nicely Nicely Johnson’s (played by the wonderful Clive Rowe) Sit down, you’re rocking the boat. In these well produced numbers the stage filled and focused our attention down to the performances. At other times the performers looked lost in the vast stage.

The other drawback of this style of presentation, neatly avoided by the Camelot Concert was the story telling and character development with just three days of rehearsal. The narrator, the talented Stephen Mangan, did not have a witty damonesque enough script to work with and the performers although they did use New York accents never got a chance to perform the songs as anything but themselves.

The big success of the night is the cabaret artiste Meow Meow as the hot box girl Miss Adelaide; she was perfectly cast, used the stage well and provided most of the best comedy moments in her business and songs as she tottered around the stage in her outrageous costumes and large wig.  Musical Theatre specialists like Lara Pulver as Sarah Brown stood out especially in If I were a bell and I’ve never been in love before and Paul Nicholas as Arvide Abernathy in sweet lament More I cannot wish you.

Jason Manford as Nathan and Adrian Lester Sky Masterson showed they can both hold a tune in Sue me and Luck be a lady respectively but seemed to be well within their full capabilities and I feel would have shown more with more rehearsal and a more intimate staging. The amazing Sharon D Clarke as General Cartwiright was wasted in the limited singing role so we never really heard her powerful voice. There was a nice cameo from Sevan Stephan as Big Jule.

These concert versions are an excellent way of refreshing interest in the classic musicals and giving performers a chance to shine with limited time commitment but to fill the vast Albert Hall more is needed as in the Showboat staging referred to in the rather expensive £10 programme. Nevertheless the large audience seemed to enjoy the experience and gave it a rapturous response and I hope neither the producers nor the performers will be put off from doing another musical concert in 2019.

Nick Wayne

Three stars.

Height of the Storm - "See it twice to fully appreciate the quality of the direction and writing."

Christopher Hampton, who has successfully translated Florian Zeller's French plays before for the West End, says in the programme that it was only when he sees Zeller's plays a second time that they become clear. So having seen this interesting play in Bath last month I was excited to see it again at the Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End to find out if it was correct. I can report that it is absolutely true, as the complicated jigsaw of clues unfolds on a second viewing you can follow the action and begin to understand what we are seeing and more importantly appreciate the quality of the performances and production.

Like in the highly emotional and moving play about dementia, The Father on which the writers collaborated all is not what it seems and for a while we struggle to follow or even work out who is telling the story.

When the curtain rises on the wonderful set by designer Anthony Ward of a grand duck egg blue kitchen of a French countryside house with Andre staring out of the window in the half light as his daughter Anne enters we soon get a sense that not all is right in the family. In the scenes that follow we see time slips, character switches and changes in intensity which seems on first viewing deliberately written to confuse and mislead the audience. This may be intended as it explores the confusion of feelings of dementia in parents and the grief from the loss of a family member or two.

Director Jonathan Kent guides us through this confusion of memories and reality with visual clues and lighting changes that add to the verbal clues within the script. The storm of the title has taken place the night before we first meet them but is also a metaphor for the storm that has hit the family and the impact of the “situation” the two daughters are dealing with.

It is hard to imagine two more appropriate actors for the central roles of the long married couple Andre and Madeline. Jonathan Pryce conveys the tender affection for his wife with a gentle quiet authority. His stillness and slow deliberate movements convey the loss he feels and the confusion of dementia. Eileen Atkins is his wife Madeline, drifting in and out of scenes, fading into the darkness but when centre stage she is in charge, organising and caring for him and the family. Their years of life experience are etched on their faces and in the looks they share with each other. Their dependency on each other is clear. As she says to him in a promise they will always be together.

Amanda Drew and Anna Madeley are their daughters Anne and Elise who arrive at the house from Paris to deal with "the situation" by looking at Andre's old diaries, recalling past conversations and planning for the future. We observe their interactions with their parents in a series of short scenes which create the jigsaw pieces that we need to assemble to understand the play. James Hillier plays a man lurking in the background or on his phone about a house sale in perhaps the strongest clue of all of what we are seeing.

The exquisite lighting design by Hugh Vanstone captures the sunlight streaming through the kitchen windows and subtly fades across the room to create a sense of half life enabling characters to fade into the shadows. On a second viewing he subtle lighting changes help distinguish the switches from realities to memories in each scene.

By the end of this intense moving production each audience member will have view of who has died but on a second viewing there appears only one logical explanation for the switches we witness  and if that logic is true it makes the whole thing incredibly powerful and wonderful. This is a play you should go and see for the quality of the production and the performances of Pryce and Atkins but you should see it twice to fully appreciate the quality of the direction and writing.

Nick Wayne

Five stars

Cock- "This is theatre in the round at its very best"

Mike Bartlett's play Cock is an unusual offering for Chichester. It takes minimalist staging to an extreme place with no set, no props, no costume changes and very little physical contact between the four actors. We are left to imagine the action and concentrate on the rapid fire words they speak which are littered with an excess of the F-word. Yet it works and produces a fascinating ninety five minutes of engaging drama that makes you think about sexuality and your closest relationships.

Bartlett clearly sees these protagonists as opponents in a verbal fight and the director Kate Hewitt has the cast circulating each other as if in a Sumo wrestling circle , a bull ring or two cocks set to fight each other. When one character's father enters the arena he positions himself as a referee or umpire in the verbal exchanges. The setting and direction creates the competitive tension as the man and the woman fight to win over John who is torn between his love for both. We first meet John and the man, his lover, in a series of short witty exchanges separated by a flash of red lights and a buzzer, almost like the bell between rounds. You could also imagine each of the four characters sitting in each corner of the ring and their verbal battle being played out in a tag team bout.

It makes for a gripping and thought provoking play which depends on the four actors disciplined and intense performances as they only have the words, and more importantly the awkward pauses between them to communicate their feelings and thoughts. Even when the scene depicts them making love they never touch but sway and gently move as they each speak. Matthew Needham is excellent as the gay man fighting (at times bouncing and jabbing with his hands) to keep John who Luke Thallon plays. John shows a wide range of emotions from love and excitement, to uncertainty and confusion as he is torn between the two and is unable to reconcile his feelings leaving him trembling by the end. Isabella Laughland is the 28 year old woman he meets on the way to work each day and falls for and Simon Chandler is the man's father. He tells John "I think you need to work out what you are first". The man tells John "it is o.k. to like both men and women, but not at the same time".

It shows the quality of the writing that this production can be so enthralling and moving when staged in such a stripped back simple way. In the end is not about sexuality or sex at all but about what it takes to make a relationship last.  This is theatre in the round at its very best and the Minerva is a perfect venue for the production.

Nick Wayne

Four stars

Mountaintop -"He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land"

On 3rd April 1968 Martin Luther King spoke at a rally in Memphis where he said “I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land." The following day as he left room 306 of his motel he was assassinated on the second floor balcony by James Earl Ray. This extraordinary moment in American civil rights history is the starting point for Katori Hall's remarkable play as she speculates on what happened in that motel room that night and how King felt about the civil rights movement he passionately but almost reluctantly led.

The result is a gripping, engaging and extraordinary two hander drama that runs without interval for an hour and forty five minutes, but the time flies by. King arrives in the hotel room alone, paranoid about being bugged by the FBI and spooked by a bomb threat on his plane to Memphis earlier in the day.  He is thirty nine and has campaigned for racial equality and an end to segregation though non violent resistance for thirteen years. In later years he had widened his campaigns to poverty and against the Vietnam War.
Gbolahan Obisesan plays King with a wonderful combination of intensity and power in speech but at the same time shows fear and uncertainty and regret for the distance from his wife and family. It shows why he succeeded in leading his communities but also the stress he must have endured in his campaigning. When Camae enters the room to deliver his coffee and cigarettes we see the effect this stress has had on him and a sense of loneliness and isolation.

Rochelle Rose is amazing as Camae , growing in power and presence as the show builds to its conclusion and excelling in the sequence looking to the future promised land as the civil rights baton is passed from campaigner after campaigner who have followed King. The chemistry between them is electric as their relationship changes with witty exchanges, sexual temptation and physical tension that build as we learn more about him and where he has reached in his life. Though the situation is imagined and surreal, they both make it believable and real. 

The design by Rajha Shakiry is excellent, the sixties motel room and the balcony outside are cleverly created in the intimate space of the studio with deft touches that tell us all is not as it seems. This is reinforced by a very effective lighting design by Lizzie Powell that flickers as a storm rages outside the room and picks out atmospheric changes on the balcony. The video montage projection by Nicky Dunn on the rear wall is dramatic and stunning whisking us through the US civil rights history after King's death putting his role in the context of change. Roy Alexander Weise brings all the elements together into a moving and educational drama that is one of the most powerful calls for us all to carry the baton of change forward and work for equality.

Nick Wayne

Five stars