Theatre

I’ve had quite a theatre-heavy summer between actually going to some Fringe shows and the trip to London I’m currently on the train back from.

Since I’ve little better to do, here is the theatrical sequel to the previous post.

Fringe

We started the Fringe with a couple of shows I’d already seen as their national tours, with the corollary issues of comparing productions with very different budgets.

‘Avenue Q’

Avenue Q is difficult to get right. The tone of the piece requires balancing irreverence with the understanding that the content pushed acceptability in 2009. Paired with the puppetry needs and that some of the songs are pretty demanding, there’s a fine, fine line between the funny and not okay.

For an early Fringe production, there were some issues which were infuriating but fixable - bad audio, technical issues - and some which were probably not - the actor playing Christmas Eve was, to put it mildly, not giving her best. This is a problem, because she’s the most difficult character to get right without it just being an uncomfortable caricature.

Others of the cast were muppeting their hearts out - the evening out was worth it just for the rendition of ‘There’s a Fine, Fine Line’.

This combined into a performance that I would struggle to recommend if there were a regular stage version touring or in residence anywhere instead. There isn’t though, and if it’s back next year with tweaks it would be a soft recommendation.

‘Legally Blonde: The Musical’ by Captivate Theatre

I was skeptical of ‘Legally Blonde’ before I saw the national tour in 2017. I hadn’t, and still haven’t, seen the film. It was all just a bit too silly in my head.

The touring version convinced me otherwise. It’s pure distilled joy, carefully adapted and which stands firmly on its own without the need for context from the source material. It’s elevated¹ by being a difficult performance both physically and vocally for its leads. I still talk about how exhausting the 2017 version of ‘Whipped into Shape’² must have been, with all but the core cast properly skipping for the full time, in rhythm, with choreography.

This production was very almost perfect in what it achieved. Elle (Niamh Osborne when I saw it) managed the exhausting job of threading the needle between acting and making it alive to the end of Act 1 and made it look effortless. They had little by way of sets, except some scaffolding, a couple of benches and a table, and this did nothing to diminish the experience.

Captivate are local to Edinburgh (and, indeed, I knew their musical director at university). They’ll almost certainly back with something just as excellent next year.

‘Hole!’ by American Sing-Song

For something completely different, we saw ‘Hole!’ which has the most bizarre pitch I’ve seen for a musical (and I also saw Titanique! this week).

It plays out like a live recording of a BBC radio play with creative foley work, songs and the gayest technically-heterosexual kiss I think that it’s possible to achieve. This was American Sing-Song’s first trip to the fringe, and I think they were genuinely overwhelmed by the response to their silly show about a butt plug cult in the midwest and queer angst.

One to watch.

‘Dune: The Musical’

This is less of a musical and more of a concept album concert - being one man and a 12-string guitar and at one point a pig mask - but still outlines the plot of Dune through the eyes of one of the side characters. Expect lots of growl singing, bardery and complaining that Paul Atreides is just so whiny.

It works so well, especially given it’s part of the Free Fringe. We saw its last show of the run, and even after a month’s performances he was pitch perfect and giving his all. Given some of the less technique-driven work, it’s a wonder he still has a voice.

London

’Operation Mincemeat’ at the Fortune Theatre

Unrelated to the 2022 film which I have not seen in terms of production, but telling the same story, ‘Operation Mincemeat’ is a “five hands playing many characters” style musical written by the comedy group SplitLip. It’s won awards, and it’s won them for good reason.

And they’ll see you did more than your part
For Hester who served her nation
Yes! A timeless inspiration

…

I don’t think that it’s people like you or me
That the crowds come to see
And if there’s one thing I know
It’s that I’m no good with things that need help to grow
I’m afraid I disagree

“Useful” from ‘Operation Mincemeat’

It’s hard when adapting a story like that of Operation Mincemeat (/The Man Who Never Was) to not glaze over the smaller players who made the plan come together. This is especially difficult when it was almost 80 years ago, most secret at the time, and the work of countless women was left out to favour the work of “the men who were born to lead”. The musical does this well, highlighting the work of the likes of Hester Leggatt alongside the male leads, half of which are played by women. Thanks to the musical, we now know who Hester was, as her name and story was lost to history until last year, and she has a plaque in the theatre stating “For Hester, Who Served Her Nation”.

This contrasts against the comedy which they lean into of low budget, pythonesque surreality. It flips at breakneck speed between the same actors playing the submarine crew releasing the body of “Major Martin” with a serious song about picking the navy over the more pastoral options - “If it’s down, it’s down together; if it’s up, it’s up as one” - and a party scene in London. There’s Hester singing “Dear Bill”, the letters placed in the briefcase to seal the idea of the fiancée, immediately following the disgraced coroner Bernard Spilsbury (played by the same person) singing and dancing with a diamante encrusted black apron.

It has some cracking lines in it, such as “look up victory in the dictionary / there’s a picture there of me”. Those cracking lines are let down by being a post-Hamilton/Six musical with rap sections which don’t really fit with the Bond-film-in-a-music-hall tone it has going, and are swallowed by the mediocre acoustic in the Fortune, and its Broadway home too. This also makes the song ‘Das Übermensch’, which attempts to fill a similar niche as “Springtime for Hitler” (and thus is treading very difficult ground), almost incomprehensible on stage and feel like padding.

‘Titanique!’ at the Criterion Theatre

From the sublime ridiculous to the ridiculously camp, ‘Titanique!’ is the plot of the film Titanic if Céline Dion was actually there herself and didn’t just sing ‘My Heart Will Go On’.

I haven’t seen Titanic. I don’t really know the music of Céline Dion.

It needs a proper interval, which it is currently lacking due to the logistics of theatre in the US, but it’s 100 minutes on average with few opportunities to do anything. We ended up with a surprise interval due to a deployment of the safety curtain (which for a moment we couldn’t work out whether was diegetic - it’s that sort of show) and it still felt exhausting. It was also an opportunity to google the plot of the film.

Titanique knows what it is: silly fun. It has excellent performances, small bits of improvisation and several incredibly funny jokes, even just with the cultural context of the film. It also has several jokes I think go on for about two lines too long into “raunchy” territory.

It’s telling I thought what happened in Mincemeat where someone in the audience sneezed just as they got to a tense scene, Charles Cholmondeley said “Bless You” and the rest of the cast tried and failed to not corpse was more funny than ‘Céline’ making up the date at the clock scene on the spot to make Jack and Rose corpse. There’s no tension-and-release, just craziness, which has a time and place (7:30pm, the Criterion Theatre…) and I just didn’t quite click into it.

I want Jack’s boots though.

‘The Producers’ at the Garrick Theatre

Not much to say on this: it’s The Producers, it’s reliable, I love it, I could watch it over and over again.

I hadn’t seen it on stage before, but in contrast to everything else, I have seen both films. I don’t know whether this is supposed to be a replica revival production, or if it’s just very difficult to really vary how the pacing and the sets and everything works because it’s very recognisable from the film’s production decisions. The only real contrapoint to this is King of Broadway, which was cut from the film for time after filming but in this production leans heavily into the New York Jewish culture. It’s very Fiddler on the Roof.

‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’ at the Phoenix Theatre

I’ve not seen Stranger Things. At all. It never really grabbed me conceptually, seeing as I’m not really a horror person.

Netflix money is behind this production, and it shows. The production, sound and lighting design are all perfect for what they’re portraying. There’s pyrotechnics, projections, wire work - including a very impressive slow motion fall off a lighting gantry - and more. At the beginning they bring out a large scale ship model which is only used once. Most of the play happens on a revolve with sets moving around or in the “upside down” (or possibly dimension X, the internet can’t decide) when two transparent curtains come down to allow three dimensional projections of mysterious ghost smoke and miscellaneous deaths.

Watching this, I couldn’t tell whether my experience was improved or detracted from for not having a grounding in the side characters or overall plot. It’s a direct adaptation and further prequel to the series written by Jack Thorne who we also have to blame for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. From watching reviews afterwards, there are several continuity questions raised by it. There’s also internal continuity questions thanks to a serious time skip in the last ten minutes.

The Philadelphia Experiment - the reported but probably fictional attempt to make the USS Eldridge disappear - was a gift to writers of science fiction who want an excuse for physics to have broken. Stranger Things uses it as a way to get someone to have accidentally come in contact with one of the monsters in the 40s. It was used to much better effect I thought in the podcast ‘Ars Paradoxica’ which I’ve talked about on the blog before.