Theater

In 1967, when Relatively Speaking first played to audiences, it opened to a roar of approval from the critics, and the first offering of now acclaimed playwright Alan Ayckbourn set him on the path to success. Now, 46 years later, the comedy is back in the West End at the Wyndham’s theatre, offering a night of hilarity that is still relevant and completely charming today. The story follows a young couple, Greg and Ginny, who have seemingly just spent the night together (much less of a big deal now that at the time of its premiere) and are in the midst of a relationship which is splintering around the edges. Seemingly oblivious to the bunches of flowers that dot the small ’60s-styled bedsit (with which he mirthfully covers his modesty in one early scene) Greg proposes and is then dismayed when he is told that he cannot visit Ginny’s parents with her that afternoon. Greg decides to visit them anyway, and chaos ensues as he arrives to meet Sheila (Felicity Kendal) who is unhappily married to Philip (Jonathan Coy), who also happens to be Ginny’s secret lover. It’s a incredibly British farce of crossed wires and mistaken identities, and is played out within Peter McKintosh’s swinging 60s set of Ginny’s bedsit and the patio of an immaculately kept garden. Lindsay Posner’s direction of the quartet brings out the comedy to its fullest – Kendal’s timing in particular is superb – and Coy’s portrait of bullishly patronising Philip makes the duo a force to be reckoned with. Kara Tointon, modelling a Mary Quant-style wig, has the right mix of maturity and innocence for Ginny and Max Bennett’s turn as Greg gives us a perplexed, naive partner to balance it out. Michael Bruce (current resident composer at the Donmar) provides us with some apt little jingles to help the evening along, and Howard Harrison’s minimal lighting expertly illuminates the manicured patio where the majority of the action takes place. It is a wholesome revival, but the genius of the show lies in the writing. Ayckbourn is still as relevant now as he was in the ’60s, and has a real knack for bringing out the comedy in its darkest situations. In the second act particularly, I found myself laughing so regularly, that it’s not until the end of the show that you really see the unfortunate misogyny in Philip’s character. Relatively Speaking provides you with an evening of great hilarity and sharp comic timing all wrapped up in the psychedelic 60s era. Relatively Speaking is playing The Wyndham’s Theatre until 31st August 2013. For more information and tickets, see the Delfont Mackintosh website. The post Review: Relatively Speaking appeared first on A Younger Theatre.

Riverside Studios is always a hub of interesting activities. Among the many other shows and films it currently has on offer is Joe Evans’s Hutch, a play charting a period in the life of 1920s cabaret star Leslie Hutchinson. Hutchinson was a lauded pianist and singer of the era who was as well known for his bisexuality and liasons as for his musical prowess. Being black kept him, even at the height of his fame, assigned to the tradesman’s entrances (the back door) of the venues he filled. In the the ’20s he teamed up with Cole Porter, becoming his lover; in the ’30s he cracked America, but an affair with Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the Queen’s cousin Lord Louis, was one too many. A tabloid furore ensued, with Mounbatten going to court. Hutch’s career, and life, fizzled out. If you know nothing about Hutchinson, Evans’ play requires pre-reading. The language is very subtle, with quiet references made to “living lies”, and such like; no overt references to bisexuality are ever made, which can result in much head scratching when things kick off. I went in completely new to the story, so when Hutch’s affairs with men and married women began to unroll, I was more than a little confused. The cast kept whipping out a variety of talents; acting, singing, dancing and piano playing, which was impressive. However the love triangle of Sid Phoenix, Sheldon Green and Imogan Daines as Porter, Hutch and Mountbatten, had little chemistry. I did wonder if they perhaps had been cast on their musical/singing abilities first and their acting second, which makes sense for the production, but leaves the dialogue scenes a little flat and emotionless. Hutch is not a musical, but there are a lot of musical numbers; the stage itself is set out like a cabaret venue: piano, stage, several round intimate tables. While I enjoy the songs of Porter (‘Let’s Do It’, ‘Let’s Fall In Love’, ‘Anything Goes’), because the songs were neither performed as they would be in a musical, nor quite as they would be in a cabaret, once the novelty wore off the constant breaking into song began to drag, and made the play feel longer than it was. Such a complex history as Hutch’s is difficult to cram into 90 minutes. The company evoked the era excellently in their costumes, music and manner of speaking, and the songs were perfomed wonderfully. On the whole though it felt like important information was either rushed through or left unclear. The actors were musically skilled but the emotional extremes of love and bitterness, confusion and hate the characters go through never really came across. A great deal of care and effort has clearly gone into the work, but it lacks heart. Hutch runs at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith until 8 June. For more information and tickets, see the Riverside Studios website. The post Review: Hutch appeared first on A Younger Theatre.

Week four has arrived! Here is this week's musical offering from Shakespeare in the Park's upcoming production of Love's Labour's Lost. The song is entitled "Jaquenetta," written by Michael Friedman

Who knew that Russians would be so hip this spring? The Encores! series just finished its season with a production of Rodgers and Hart’s gangsters-and-Russian ballet musical On Your Toes. And in successive evenings last week, my theatergoing buddy Bill and I saw Natasha, Pierre and The Great Comet of 1812 and Nikolai and The Others, two shows that deal in very different ways with the mad passion for life and the simultaneous melancholy about how it will turn out that define the Russian character. My feelings about the shows are similarly mixed and since last Saturday's post was so paltry, I'm going to go on a bit longer than I usually do and wrap two reviews in one so that I can tell you about both of them. The buzziest of the two is Natasha, Pierre and The Great Comet of 1812, which gained some notoriety this past weekend when a writer for the "National Review" wrote about an altercation with another audience member that resulted in his smashing her cellphone and guards evicting him (click here to read his account of the incident). But even before that drama, Natasha, Pierre had a noteworthy run last year at Ars Nova and landed on several year-end bests lists. I’d skipped that earlier production, thinking that a technopop opera based on a tiny 70-page segment from Tolstoy’s gargantuan novel “War and Peace” sounded too precious. But, eager to see what all the fuss was about, I bought tickets the moment I heard that Natasha, Pierre was coming back. And the news that the producers would be setting up a tent in the Meatpacking District, outfitting it as a nightclub called Kazino and including a Russian-inspired meal in the $125 price of the ticket (we scored a discount) made the show sound even more enticing. The inside of the show's pop-up club turned out to be decorated with 19th century portraits (including a huge one of Napoleon, whose war with the Russians provides the backdrop for the novel and the musical.) Guests are seated at banquets along the red velvet walls or at tiny circular tables. The meal—thimble-sized glasses of borscht and vodka, some wilted raw vegetables, a few slices of tasty black bread, small bits of broiled chicken and salmon over a spoonful of pilaf and a plate of pierogi—wasn’t bad but it left me hungry for something more substantial (I raided the frig when I got home.) And I felt the same way about the show. It pivots around Natasha, a young noblewoman who is engaged to Andrey, an upstanding prince who is away fighting, and seduced by Anatole, a more profligate prince. The plot also includes the goings-on of a half dozen others, including the titular Pierre, a rich and well-meaning aristocrat who is ill at ease in Russian society. Their stories unfold right on the dining room floor, with the actors snaking their way around the tables and clambering up on the small platforms placed around the room. All of them are good but Phillipa Soo is particularly lovely as Natasha and Lucas Steele brings just the right amount of bad-boy sexiness to Anatole. But most of the praise has been directed at Dave Malloy, who adapted the book, composed the music, wrote the lyrics, orchestrated the score, and plays piano and accordion in addition to portraying Pierre (click here to read a Q&A with him. An eight-piece orchestra seated around the room provides the rest of the music—a mashup of techno, Russian folk tunes and emo ballads—and the musicians even join in a couple of the dance numbers, choreographed with great brio by Sam Pinkleton. The whole thing adds up to another of the immersive theater experiences that are packing in the young audiences producers crave and delighting critics who are equally desperate for something new. I’ve become a convert to immersion too (click here to read my review of David Byrne’s Here Lies Love) but, despite all the critical acclaim i

Theatres often seem to programme the same old repertoire. Tell us about the lost gems you would like the chance to see on stageIf you wanted to see Strindberg's Miss Julie over the last year, you would have been spoiled for choice, with productions popping up all over the country. And in Britain you're probably only ever a few feet away from a revival of A Midsummer Night's Dream or Alan Ayckbourn's A Chorus of Disapproval. Alan Bennett's The History Boys can currently be seen in both Sheffield and Colchester, and there is now a Piaf at the Octagon in Bolton hot on the heels of a revival at Leicester's Curve. Winslow Boys and Doll's Houses also seem to come in pairs.Given just how many plays are available to them (with more being written all the time) it seems astonishing that most theatres choose from such a small body of work. So tell us the plays – older or more recent – that you are longing to see and which you believe are well worthy of revival.TheatreWest EndLyn Gardnerguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

On entering the Centrespace Gallery, you are ushered into a small and intimate tent with what feels like old friends for an evening of reminiscence and tales. This clever use of space makes you feel completely relaxed and comfortable as the girls welcome you in with their friendly smiles and greetings. This closed space allows Ella and Nicki to really connect with their audience as they make you to feel as though they are speaking directly to you, by making eye contact with everyone in the audience at some point. The girls cleverly included the audience by passing around photos and cutting a peanut butter-flavoured ‘Hiker’s bar’ for us all to taste, making everyone feel connected and completely intrigued. They cleverly used everyday items as props, such as a large map of the parts of America they visited, string, desk lamps and many more household items which all fit perfectly into the space and the theme of the show. Their videos and phone recordings helped you to understand their experience and make you feel as if, in a way, you were experiencing their trip with them. The personal videos and photos also helped to make the show feel very intimate as it was clear that the girls were sharing their very special time with the audience. The use of miniature, hand-made props to set scenes, such as paper houses, trucks and gas stations, helped to fully build an image in the audiences’ minds of rural America, again helping us to feel as if we were experiencing it with them. All of the props can be seen as basic, but they were completely effective in making the show so successful and understandable, as they encouraged the audience to visualise what they were describing for us in a much broader scale. The use of gentle comedy, such as replicating the American presenter Bobo’s accent, helped to keep the show quite light-hearted in the dark environment, and helped to keep you engaged and focused throughout the evening. By ending the show with time for the audience to ask questions about their time hunting for Big Foot, the girls brought the show to a peaceful and perfect end as they cleared up any overhanging enigmas and resolved any confusion or misunderstanding. The questions also reminded you that this was a true life experience, all the stories and videos were real, which helped to make the show feel more exciting and powerful. This show could be seen as really basic, but it was most definitely an effective and successful piece of art. Wild Thing I Love You  is playing at the Centrespace Gallery until 23 May as part of Mayfest in Bristol. For more information and tickets visit the Mayfest website. The post Mayfest review: Wild Thing I Love You appeared first on A Younger Theatre.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with the world, isn’t there? War, hunger, pain… the list goes on. I could list all the things that are wrong, but I won’t because it would get tedious pretty quickly. All That Is Wrong manages not to be tedious despite listing tens and tens of things that are wrong with the world, but it does feel rather flat. Belgian company Ontroerend Goed bring their show to Mayfest after rave reviews in Edinburgh last year. Perhaps it has fallen victim to its own hype, but it didn’t do much for me. I wanted so much to like this show, to feel moved by or to have it provoke me. Instead, I found its refusal to engage head-on with any of the issues it raises to be frustrating and difficult to know how to take. It unsettles but to what point and purpose I am not sure. While the craving for resolution and a return to a cosy, safe world is a natural impulse – and one which the show resolutely refuses to give – it doesn’t feel as though this show undermines that impulse or examines our decisions to ignore suffering. It’s a deceptively simple premise: 18-year-old Kobe is trying to think about her place in the world, while grappling with the fact that the world is a scary and dark place. She writes “I” on the floor in chalk and from there works outwards, writing increasingly frantic, inter-connected words and abstract ideas down across the floor and eventually the walls. The idea, presumably, is that these things are too big to think about inside her head, so they spill out, accosting the audience, as Kobe tries to make sense of all the things that are wrong with the world. It’s an arresting image, and provides an effective visual representation of the confusion and depression that can come with trying to understand the world and fight against inequality and prejudice. Unfortunately, the piece doesn’t actually try to make sense of any of the things that are wrong, it just presents them to us. Without examining culpability (beyond promising to try not to buy Primark or Starbucks) or our place in this system, I found the piece frustrating in its scope. It feels rather like a lecture, and although it’s clear that there are no easy answers to the big questions about our world, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t at least try to find some. They won’t be definitive by any means, but it would make the performance feel less preachy and more engaging if it went further. Perhaps it’s all designed to make a point about futility, apathy and helplessness, but such abstraction leaves us demoralised rather than fired up. All That Is Wrong has powerful moments, mostly when Kobe offers us glimpses into a more personal sphere – she writes “thin” and then wipes it out and replaces it with “skinny”, before adding “not anorexic”, for example. The simple set design and projections don’t help, making it difficult to read everything she’s writing. In a piece essentially without dialogue, it’s irritating not to be able to read every word, especially when one of the things she lists as hating is “miscommunication”. It feels to me like this is a good idea that’s been over-stretched. At just over an hour, the piece needs to go further to justify the time taken, otherwise it’s just a rather bleak raft of things that are wrong without any commentary or content. All That Is Wrong was at the Arnolfini in Bristol as part of Mayfest. For information visit and Mayfest website. The post Mayfest review: All That Is Wrong appeared first on A Younger Theatre.

Brandon Victor Dixon may not have a long Broadway résumé, but he certainly has an auspicious one. After his Tony-nominated performance in the Oprah Winfrey-produced musical The Color Purple in 2006

“You haven’t read the Quran, but you’ve read a couple of sanctimonious British bullies and you think you know something about Islam?” Credit where credit is due (but be warned, this bit of praise will involve a spoiler), Nadia Fall’s production of Disgraced at the Bush Theatre contains one of the most brutally effective and well-staged pieces of stage violence I have ever seen and fight director Kate Waters ought to be commended for it. Too often we mock poorly executed scuffles without really taking into account how tricky it can be to make it convincing and here, it is so well done that the image seared itself into my brain, working its way into a dream I had that night! But to the play at hand – Ayad Akhtar won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Disgraced and a quick scan of its key scene might suggest he played to his audience just a little. A lapsed Muslim lawyer and his white artist wife have friends over dinner, a black female law colleague whose partner is a Jewish art dealer and over fennel and anchovy salad, they explosively debate religion, politics and cultural stereotypes. But the play is more than just Pulitzer-bait, digging into just how deeply faith and upbringing shape our identities and how we carry them through life no matter how one might try to reinvent oneself. In their swanky Upper East Side loft conversion – Jaimie Todd’s design hitting the right notes of tastefully expensive yet vapid chic - Pakistani-American corporate lawyer Amir Kapoor and burgeoning artist Emily live a life of gilded charm. But when she pushes him to meet a family obligation by supporting the case of a local imam who may or may not be being persecuted unfairly, an irreversible crack is forced into the veneer of Amir’s carefully constructed American-dream-chasing persona and as it splinters with force, the collateral damage is considerable. That conflict comes mainly at the dinner table when a conversation meanders into the history of Islam and soon gets caught up in fierce debate as truisms are challenged, preconceptions analysed and unspeakable truths aired, not just on the lofty conceptual level but also on a personal and professional basis as the tangled web between this foursome is slowly revealed. Hari Dhillon makes a compelling case for Amir’s tug-of-war between head and heart, as something deep is stirred within him, and Kirsty Bushell is excellent as Emily, all liberal do-gooder and blithely unaware of the repercussions of so many of her actions. But though Akhtar’s ear for razor-sharp dialogue is undeniable, the plotting does end up feeling a tad schematic in the perfectly multicultural set-up and the visitors don’t feel as richly written. Sara Powell’s Jory is vibrantly performed but isn’t really given enough to do and though Nigel Whitmey’s marvellously antagonistic Isaac makes a strong impact, the trains of thought about the proclivities of the Jewish race are left frustratingly unexplored. And Fall’s attempts to imbue the scene changes with gravitas just give them a lengthy opaqueness that didn’t appeal to me. The pace of the play is otherwise just right though, stretching languorously on its designer sofa until the intensity ratchets up to create one of the most scintillating scenes of drama you will see all year. Recommended stuff. Running time: 90 minutes (without interval) Playtext cost: £3.50 Booking until 22nd June

Review of the Saturday, May 18 matinee performnce at the John Golden Theatre in New York City. Starring Sigourney Weaver, David Hyde Pierce, Kristine Nielson, Billy Magnussen, Shalita Grant and Liesel Allen Yeager. A new play by Christopher Durang. Directed by Nicholas Martin. 2 hours 30 minutes, including one intermission. Through July 28.Grade: AReview starts here