Teatro

I’ve had another busy theatrical few months, because I’ve started seeking it out in different quarters and paying attention to what’s going on. I even went abroad for it.

London

The first order of business was a trip to London to see a couple of shows that were variously time limited - either closing finally after a five-year run, or a short run to start with.

‘Back to the Future: The Musical’ at the Adelphi Theatre

I don’t know what to think about Back to the Future in its stage incarnation. In many ways, it’s fairly faithful to the film and thanks to involvement from Alan Silvestri it “sounds right”, whatever that means. However, it’s not a good musical, or at least it’s at best fine.

The songs are unremarkable and somewhat unmemorable, somehow including ‘Back In Time’ and ‘The Power of Love’ which are both awkwardly shoved in at the end. The redeeming songs for it are “Future Boy” when they finally start having fun with lyrics, and that’s only for the build from “No future boy” to the full Broadway-style “back to the future boy”, and “The Twentieth Century”.

It’s the only way to ever get you back!
Back to the future, boy!
You are the future boy!
And we know we found a way!
I am a future boy
And it’s gonna be okay

‘Future Boy’ from ‘Back to the Future: The Musical’

Doc has been recharacterised as somewhat bumbling instead of a hyperfocused scientist. They work around the Libyans being the reason for Doc’s death by changing it to him dying suddenly from radiation poisoning because the suit he took while working at Los Alamos has holes in it. Not only does this not make sense from a biological standpoint; the solution ends up with him having bought a new one which loses the drama of the “he’s wearing a bulletproof vest” and makes him seem incompetent. He just wanders on after Marty gets back.

They lean far too hard into the “Marty’s parents are a bit creepy” subplot for humour - which I’d much rather they’d found some way of working around. We really don’t need several songs about snooping through windows and Lorraine wanting to jump Marty’s bones. The car is also nominally voice-activated, which isn’t funny the first time Marty can’t switch it on, and continues not being funny as it happens repeatedly.

What the show has going for it is a budget that allows special effects mostly related to the car, though with weirdly low quality and out of sync 3D renders of projections, and the obligatory “flying” sequence at the end that’s even more tacked on.

It’s nostalgia driven, and that’s fine. I just wanted more.

‘Ride the Cyclone’ at Southwark Playhouse Elephant

‘Ride the Cyclone’ is a 2009 musical written by Canadians Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell which has had an interesting and somewhat troubled life that has led to it being somewhat forgotten about and then revived by TikTok.¹

Its concept as a competition musical in which a bunch of dead teenagers compete to be the one who gets to be reincarnated, makes it a difficult sell. The extremely varied styles and tones of its songs - from a Ukrainian love song to a Bowie-esque song about space cats - make it a difficult sell. Its use of disability, and previous difficulties with casting, has made it controversial and thus a difficult sell.

There were issues with sight lines - due to being very off-axis to the playing space which seems to have been designed to be as awkward as possible to actually stage shows in. We never saw Karnak except for during the curtain call because he was standing in the all of 1m space available between the scenery and the back wall. There were definite signs of illness causing problems in the cast.

Despite all that, it was a great time. From “Space Age Bachelor Man” to “Noel’s Lament”, all of the songs are well written, annoyingly catchy, and were well performed.

There has been a lot said on the subject of whether the character of Ricky is ableist, because he’s initially silent (for reasons which have gradually changed over the years) and then almost immediately is “fixed” after the first song for plot convenience. I’m not sure I have an opinion that matters, not being meaningfully physically disabled, but the change for this production - in which Ricky is disabled after a swimming accident - at least makes more sense than the snake narrative that is used in North American productions. It’s just a shame that the explicit representation of motor neurone disease is lost.

This production, at Southwark Playhouse Elephant in south London was the first time it has been produced in the UKs. The run sold out, and is now coming back for a short period in the summer, so it might have finally found its audience. My hope is that it finally manages to make the leap to the larger and more commercial spaces either on the West End or on a national tour.

Edinburgh

Back at home there’s all sorts of drama going on.

Not reviewed, because I forgot about it: ‘Black Sabbath: The Ballet’. It’s fun, if perplexing.

‘The Seagull’ at the Lyceum

A new translation of Chekhov’s 1895 play, and the first time I’ve watched a production of Chekhov (and the first time I’ve been to the Lyceum). I went to this mainly on the strength of the sheer volume of advertising I saw about the city for it, and went to see the first preview².

My immediately-after-the-fact review was that it’s all character and no plot. The advertising for this production would lead you to believe that the character Irina Arkadina (played very effectively by Caroline Quentin) is the protagonist. Oh how wrong this impression was. She’s barely in it (relatively).

The real heart of the piece is the clash between all of the characters’ personalities, their mismatched loves, and the different ways they manipulate one another leading to their individual demises.

It has to be darned good to get away with the same character shooting himself off-stage twice, and it does get away with it.

Specific to this production, the sets and direction hold together a dreamlike hazy sense of summer at the start that deteriorates into the darkness of the winter as you realise there is not going to be a positive ending. The whole cast did a sterling job at making sure the wheels stay on an otherwise possibly very difficult to follow plot (or lack thereof).

I’m excited to see more Chekhov, and it was exciting to see Caroline Quentin.

‘Miss Saigon’ at the Playhouse

The new touring production of Miss Saigon is very interesting. They’ve pared it back in order to make it smaller and easier to mount on stages which they’ve not been able to do it before. This means that it has lost the big set piece which was synonymous with the show - the helicopter at the fall of Saigon - and instead they’re just awkwardly winched from a roof.

I also don’t altogether agree with quite how camp they’ve portrayed the Engineer as - reducing the hard edges, making him appear less self-centred and out to use any advantage he can get. I was already not a fan of American Dream, because it’s clearly there to pad the runtime to make the show less front weighted, and brings the show to a full stop for the purpose. This is not to say that Seann Miley Moore was not doing a marvellous job, they were, it just doesn’t fit the show anymore, if it ever did.

The other complaint I had was the weird sprechgesang version of ‘Why God Why?’ which they’ve landed on, where it sounded like the actor playing Chris was only vaguely aware he was in a musical at all.

On the positives, it’s still a great show. The value lies in the orchestration where you feel every note of the power in the music. It’s also interesting to watch with the context of the more recent evacuation of the embassies in Kabul, with terrifyingly similar scenes.

The earth moves where I stand
I feel the turning of a wheel³
I feel nothing in my hand
Not even the feel of steel
You will not take my child

‘You Will Not Touch Him’ from ‘Miss Saigon’ by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil

In my dream production, Act 1 would finish after the chorus of ‘This is the Hour’ to force the audience to sit with the death of Thuy over the interval and to invite comparison with Act 2 ending with Kim’s death. Act 2 would then start with the Engineer in the ruins of the club (mirroring Act 1), and the entr’acte left where it is covering the practical scene change, the time change and an opportunity to use a projection to show how difficult the journey actually would be.

I’m just glad they’ve stopped calling it a love story.

‘Matilda’ at the Playhouse

I love Matilda: the film, the film of the musical, the book, and it turns out this production too. The touring version of the original RSC production which I missed the last time it came north, it really is the best adaptation that we could hope for. I am, notably, a big fan of Tim Minchin, and of clever lyrics, so it was pretty certain I was going to find some enjoyment.

I don’t actually have a huge amount to say on the subject. Just be aware of the… somewhat obvious content warning for child neglect.

The child cast all do a great job of what is quite hard work, and the adults occasionally dressed as the older kids, great fun.

‘One Day: The Musical’ at the Lyceum

Back at the Lyceum, though it having been completely reconfigured to be in the round - ish - is the hotly anticipated musical adaptation of David Nicholls’ 2009 book “One Day”. As is almost tradition at this point, I hadn’t read the book, or seen the film, or seen the series, so went in completely blind to the plot.

It’s fine.

The idea that it shows the same day of the year - St Swithun’s Day, which I could not tell you when is (15th July apparently) but the way they talk about it in the show you’d think it was summer Christmas - is somewhat interesting, but it’s just incredibly contrived past a certain point that all the interesting points of Em and Dex’s situationship conveniently happen on that day. The literal car crash comes out of nowhere, and is, in my opinion, wholly unearned. I also don’t really believe they’re friends, which is partly the fault of the structure, as we don’t see them becoming friends until the very end in a flashback.

As a musical, it’s also fine - they’re going for the folk-y vibe that was very popular in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button among others, and it works for the material unremarkably. It’s no Come From Away. There was some hilarious chorography with a telephone cord as they try to not tie up Jamie Muscato on a revolve. The cast do their darndest with a B-tier plot in a B-tier musical. Perhaps I’m just cynical.

It is nice that a story that at least has some roots in Edinburgh is being mounted for the first time here⁴. It’s less nice that the production company is apparently viewing it as an out of town tryout for a West End transfer, once again meaning we can’t have the final product but can absolutely be priced at full ticket prices - for the Lyceum, which are admittedly fairly cheap.

Madrid

I went on holiday! There’s no “Thoughts from a Train” because there were sadly few trains, and there’s not enough time on a metro to ramble, so instead we get “Thoughts on the Theatre”.

It turns out, the Spanish get a lot of high quality theatre, both translations of English-language productions and home-grown shows. They also have a lot going for their theatre industry in terms of theatre tourism:

• English proficiency is pretty good, except amusingly on the European EES machines at the airport,
• Ticket prices are relatively cheap,
• Programa de mano - hand programmes, equivalent to a house programme here - are consistently around 2€ and are really high quality (in my experience),
• Madrid is just nice,
• Spanish is a really good language to sing in from a technical perspective, and boy do they sing,
• Because of the Spanish sense of time, you can get there in the afternoon and comfortably get to a hotel and then to the theatre because shows start at 8pm or later.

I wish we’d import the communicativeness that they have. They announce at the beginning of the interval how long the interval will be. They announce as the interval is ending how long you have left. There was a show stop during Cenicienta, and they announced how long they expected to need - though also oddly left us physically in the dark.

They’re oddly coy about the translators for foreign works - nowhere can I find listed the translator for Cabaret or Cinderella, which is odd to me, since their work is front and centre, and a bad translation can kill a project.

‘Cabaret’ at Teatro Albéniz

Kander, Ebb and Masteroff’s masterwork showing its full range in this “immersive” production at El Kit Kat Club, from its initial “Willkommen! Bienvenue! ¡Hola!” - with its (female) Emcee Abril Zamora dancing on a table around which members of the audience are sitting - to its final horrifying scene of that same Emcee fully naked, ignored by the “safe” characters in gas masks as she proceeds to herself be gassed with the other undesirables.

There’s something powerful in the ideas presented in Cabaret, in the context of the rise of the Right in the world at the moment, and in a country for whom fascism is very much still in living memory and has shaped the modern fabric of their society. Bringing the audience in as the patrons of the club makes them complicit in the creeping rise of Nazism playing out in the drama, elevating the discomfort that comes at the end of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” (Mañana me toca a mi) when the club setting is shown to have a swastika embedded in its design.

This is a subtly different translation to the previous major Madrid production in 2004 that there’s a recording of, not least in how they’ve integrated the Spanish into the multi-language songs.

The rest of the cast, including for Sally, Herr Schultz, Fraus Schneider and Kost were fantastic, even if I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying. Even the band are beautiful.

I also made the mistake of sitting on a table on my own, which meant having ensemble coming up and asking questions in character, getting blank looks, and them seamlessly switching to chatting in English.

All in all, great time. Perplexed by the pineapple⁵ at the time though.

‘Cenicienta’ (Cinderella) at Teatro Ocaso Coliseum

Rogers and Hammerstein’s lesser known - especially in Britain - work, Cinderella, was reworked in 2013 by Douglas Carter Beane to make it more relevant to modern life by setting it in the 50s, adding a subplot about for Ella’s best friend Jean-Michel to be a firebrand revolutionary and the Prince eventually getting him elected Prime Minister to improve the poverty in the kingdom. The fairy godmother is a woman called Marie who is just… about. The pumpkin turns into quite a sporty looking car that flies off in some clever transitions from on stage to projections. One of the stepsisters is in love with Jean-Michel but isn’t allowed to be with him because he’s poor, a plot line borrowed straight from the Disney straight-to-video film Cinderella 2.

It doesn’t really fit.

It’s even more confusing when in Spanish, Cenicienta doesn’t even contract to Ella.

However, from start to finish, it’s just a good time. The songs translate well, there’s clearly a strong technical team behind the scenes such that they have nice touches like having video feeds from the orchestra pit projected during the entr’acte, and it’s just easy to get swept along with the joy of the thing. Also “Prince Christopher Rupert Windermere Vladimir Carl Alexander François Reginald Lancelot Peréz…¿Peréz? ¡Peréz! Gregory James”, very funny, lots of laughs from the local audience. Some terrifying cycling on stage where I thought Cinderella was about to plummet into the orchestra.

‘The Book of Mormon El Musical’ at Teatro Rialto

Finally for this round up, we have the great production of Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Robert Lopez’ “The Book of Mormon” (translated by Alejandro and David Serrano, thank you ATG for actually telling us this information). Unlike the production of Los Miserables but like the production of Wicked in Madrid at the moment, this is a non-replica production where they’ve made some radical changes from the default anglosphere production of the show in terms of staging, costuming and other creative choices.

The actual staging works well with the relatively small stage available at Teatro Rialto, which is a converted cinema. Up in the anfiteatro seating (the upper circle as it would be here, amusingly referred to as turístico⁶ in the show by Elder Price), you can only see the front of the stage by grace of the actual balcony being glass, and the very steep rake.

Some of the translations make non-trivial changes to the meaning of the songs - such as Creo en dios (I believe in God), making it more sincerely religious before the asides about God changing his mind about black people in 1978 and so on. In “Two By Two”, instead of the “soldiers of the army of the church… of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints” they sing of being missionaries, and then end each section with “¡Yo soy Mormón!” which is very different - and the actual LDS leadership claims it’s satanic to call them anything that doesn’t include “Jesus Christ” as part of trying to seem like regular Christians. He has maggots in his huevas.

Elder Cunningham, praise be, isn’t just a carbon copy of Josh Gad, and is all the better for it. Elder Price, too, is something a little new, starting off more believably dedicated to his mission and less self-centred.

This edition of Elder McKinley is even more of a star, really selling the transition in ¡Apágalo! (“Turn it Off!”) into full on sparkly (and rather tight fitting) singlets and then a very Noël Coward dressing gown for most of the rest of the show.

Possibly a function of me not having a good grasp on the language, the Ugandans also come across as less of a caricature, which can only be a good thing.

All in all, a very successful trip, and there’s even more theatre lined up for the next few months.