Don't bother, they're here
Just a quickie to make sure you’re checking out The Guardian’s Double Acts series of interviews.
A new series of monologues, curated and produced by Michelle Collins alongside the Equity Benevolent Fund, has been released online for charity. Entitled “#FortheLoveofArts”, the scheme sees acting talent come together to raise funds for beleaguered artists and individuals during the ongoing pandemic.
Appearing in the series are Lesley Manville, Ian McKellen, Adjoa Andoh, Miriam-Teak Lee, Derek Jacobi, Layton Williams, Sue Johnston, Jason Watkins, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Pearl Mackie and more. Some of the monologues are brand new works penned especially for the series.
The monologues can be viewed on the Equity Benevolent Fund’s YouTube channel.
The Sonnet Project launched on the theatre’s social media channels on 21 March, when Hannah Morrish performed Sonnet 1. One sonnet has appeared every day since then, with the cycle due to complete with Sonnet 154 in late August. David Suchet, star of Agatha Christie’s Poirot but also a veteran of numerous Royal Shakespeare Company productions, performed Sonnet 34 on Shakespeare’s birthday. Continue reading “News: stars come out to support the Jermyn Street Theatre”
Stars of the West End Stage, Televison, Movies and Theatre Production Staff sing ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’ for the charity Acting for Others
“Microscopic Bobby was my wife”
The world of Mr Gum and the Dancing Bear the Musical (suitable for 7yrs+) as imagined by director Amy Hodge and designer Georgia Lowe is a fantastically bizarre one, full of warm and witty touches that shoud delight children and adults alike. Tiny gingerbread professors, menacing sunflowers, dancing doughnuts, a rainforest of umbrellas, it is an impressive and inventive take on imaginative world-building that perfectly suits Andy Stanton’s storytelling.
All things told, it is a fairly slight tale – bears, beers, butchers, you know the usual, but there’s just such a sense of fun about the whole proceedings. The cast revel in non-sequiturs aplenty (Helena Lymbery, Steve Furst and Gary Wilmot particularly impress), Jim Fortune’s eclectic score builds in post-modern layers that further pique the interest, and the show even manages to sneak in some pretty powerful messaging among all the madness. Recommended. Continue reading “Family theatre in August”
“You can screw my husband but nobody screws my business”
Short on time this week and Madame Rubinstein finishes its run this week so I’m cheating with this one and just going to say that it is a shame that John Misto’s starrily-cast three-hander isn’t as much fun as the photo might suggest.
“If only I were famous from the telly”
Across its two discs and twenty-three tracks, there’s an awful lot of whimsy to Alexander S Bermange’s latest compilation album Wit and Whimsy and not quite enough wit to sustain it. Bermange is a composer who has had as much success writing comic songs for radio as he has in straight-up musical theatre (the two shows of his that I’ve seen – The Route to Happiness and Thirteen Days – were both part of festivals).
That said, he has an impressive contacts list as evidenced by the range of people who have joined in on the action here – Laura Pitt-Pulford, Tracie Bennett, David Bedella, Cassidy Janson, Emma Williams, even Christopher Biggins. And with a guest list of this quality, naturally there are moments that shine here. Continue reading “Album Review: Wit and Whimsy – Songs by Alexander S Bermange”
“Now, the two hours’ traffic of our stage”
One of the more famous cinematic adaptations of any of Shakespeare’s plays has to be Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. Verona becomes Verona Beach, a palm-fringed ocean-front suburb of LA or maybe Miami, where guns rule the roost with an almost-Western-like abandon, newsreaders recite prologues as news broadcasts on the latest violence to shatter the peace, and the world is full of the raucous vividness that is now more common to us given Luhrmann’s subsequent career.
So Mercutio is a black drag queen, Queen Mab is a tab of Ecstasy, the balcony scene takes place in a swimming pool, Paris (a youthful Paul Rudd) is Time(ly) Magazine’s Bachelor of the Year etc etc It’s brashly, breathlessly modern and consequently quite divisive. Purists will baulk at the dramatic liberties taken – there’s a dizzying rearrangement of Montagues and Capulets which takes a little getting used to – and the verse speaking is certainly rough around the edges for the most part. Continue reading “DVD Review: Romeo + Juliet (1996)”
“He might like some of my bottled pears”
A world where the purchase of pilchards instead of coley is the height of excitement seems about right for Ladies in Lavender, the 2004 film written and directed by Charles Dance, from a short story by William J Locke. In a sleepy Cornish fishing village, sisters Janet and Ursula Widdington are living out their days in content co-habitation but the discovery of a shipwreck victim on the beach near their house rumples their quiet existence as they nurse the foreigner back to health.
It’s all very genteel and formally unexciting, the writing veers from soapy contrivances to unsatisfying denouements and it’s hard to get too excited about the film. Where Ladies in Lavender delivers in bucketloads is in casting Maggie Smith and Judi Dench as the sisters, allowing them to work wonders with the slightest of material. Smith’s forthright war widow and Dench’s more wistful spinster imbue their scenes with such aching grace, that you almost forgive the plotting. Continue reading “DVD Review: Ladies in Lavender”
Films films everywhere. Continue reading “Short Film Review #13”