EVERYBODY'S TALKING ABOUT JAMIE at the Apollo Theatre - The Return!

Nearly a year and a half after seeing it, it was time to revisit Tom MacRae and Dan Gillespie Sells' musical EVERYBODY'S TALKING ABOUT JAMIE at the Apollo; I always thought the show was worth a second look but now it became essential to see again with the news that Roy Haylock was co-starring for a limited run.

What do you mean you have never heard of him?  I think you might know Roy as his alter-ego - the one and only Bianca Del Rio, season 6 winner of RUPAUL'S DRAG RACE!

Bianca isn't the only new face however, Faye Tozer - riding on her STRICTLY success - has joined the company as Miss Hedge, the teacher who threatens to ruin the party for Jamie - and more importantly - there is indeed a new Jamie.  Layton Williams is our new whirling, posing teen queen with a dream and his extended family is now Rebecca McKinnis as his loving mam Margaret, Sejal Keshwala is the family friend Ray, and Sabrina Sandhu is now playing Pritti Pasha, Jamie's best friend at school and fellow-oddball.

Luckily all the cast are more than up to the challenge of helping the show win the hearts and minds of it's audience - and it seems to be working!  The audience were all very loud and up-for-it so it looks like JAMIE will be around for a while yet, attempting to get into his final year school prom in a dress.

If I am totally honest I would say that I felt Layton Williams didn't quite challenge John McCrea as Jamie, he certainly has a winning personality and can dance up a storm but he is vocally light so a lot of his lyrics were inaudible at times, but he still makes a good impression.  Rebecca McKinnis is very good as Margaret, her powerful voice socking over her two solos and they are both supported wonderfully by Keshwala and Sandhu who both show great comic timing.

A big surprise for me was Faye Tozer as the spoilsport careers teacher Miss Hedge who had real presence on stage; as I said, I went to see Roy/Bianca and he didn't disappoint!  It's actually more Roy than Bianca as most of his scenes are as Hugo, the retired drag queen Loco Chanelle, who gives Jamie his first chance of drag realness, but when he came on in full Bianca drag the house went crazy - including me!  The script has not been changed to incorporate Bianca's own persona but his firecracker personality and charisma mean that his casting is inspired.  The only sadness is that 'Hugo' has the weakest number in the score.

The ensemble still work hard and fast - special mention to Luke Baxter as the class bully Dean, and Zahra Jones & Harriet Payne as the two head-weaving, finger-snapping classmates - and the band are great under the directorship of Richard Weeden.

if you have not seen JAMIE, I reckon you should definitely go to see why everybody's talking about him... and if you have, well why not go again?  Bianca is appearing until 29th June so rush to see a real star otherwise the show is booking until January 2020.

EVERYBODY'S TALKING ABOUT JAMIE at the Apollo Theatre - Prom Teen Drag Queen

London has a plethora of shows based on films: ALADDIN, KINKY BOOTS, THE LION KING, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, 42ND STREET, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, BIG FISH, THE EXORCIST, NETWORK - and we have STRICTLY BALLROOM, FANNY AND ALEXANDER, HAROLD AND MAUDE and JUBILEE on the way as well.  Not many based on tv programmes - THE TWILIGHT ZONE at the Almeida anyone? - but even rarer, a tv documentary?  Sashay forward EVERYBODY'S TALKING ABOUT JAMIE.

In 2011 director Jonathan Butterell happened to catch the BBC3 documentary JAMIE: DRAG QUEEN AT 16 and was intrigued by Jamie Campbell, who was indeed 16 and was indeed into drag.  So much so that he wanted to attend his last year school disco - nope, not calling it a prom - in a dress.  The ever-resourceful Jamie googled "how do I make a documentary" and he found his way to BBC3 who commissioned a film of his big event.  Butterell felt the story had musical potential and turned to Daniel Evans, then-artistic director of the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield who also was interested.

Cut to Chichester Theatre - where spookily, Daniel Evans was due to move to - and Michael Ball is talking to two new theatre composers Tom MacRae and Dan Gillespie Sells (from the pop band The Feeling).  Ball put them in touch with Butterell, Butterell told them about his JAMIE idea and a musical was born!  It opened at the Crucible in February 2017, producer Nica Burns saw it's last matinee and nine months later she is producing it at the Apollo Theatre,

Jamie is in his last year at school and has a burning ambition - to be a drag queen.  As the last year disco - nope, not calling it a prom - is all about their launch into adulthood, Jamie decides to attend in drag, a secret he shares only with his mother Margaret, her friend Ray and his closest school friend Pritti, a put-upon Muslim girl who shares the bond of the bullied with Jamie.  Jamie wants the approval of his divorced dad but apart from sending him birthday and Christmas cards he dislikes his son's gayness and refuses to help him.

Jamie plucks up the courage to go into a Manchester drag shop and is befriended by the owner Hugo who still performs in a local drag club.  Jamie decides he will launch his career there and brazenly invites his classmates to it.  Backstage he discovers a dress he has coveted in the shop with a bunch of flowers, seemingly a present from his dad - but it's actually from his mum.  Jamie's club-date is a success and he finds his classmates are mostly happy for him, but the class bully Dean secretly tips off the teachers and Jamie is told he cannot attend the school event in a dress.

Jamie goes to his father for help but he is told the presents were not from him and he thinks Jamie is disgusting.  Jamie confronts his mum with the truth and berates her for her lies, he storms out, gets drunk and is beaten up in a homophobic attack.  Hugo discovers him and helps him home where he and his mum realize their love is too strong to break.  Now for that final hurdle... can Jamie get into the school party?

A bit of dramatic licence has ramped up the conflicts in Jamie's story but the book still cannot quite make us ever doubt that Jamie will get his wish.  There is a lengthy scene where Hugo recalls his drag superstar days but it feels unnecessary as it's Jamie we are emotionally involved with.  The club night is also oddly muffed: it introduces us to three seen-it-all drag queens which feels too much of a GYPSY rip-off to be interesting and Jamie's club debut in front of his schoolmates happens offstage and during the interval.  The next thing we see are all his schoolmates obsessing about it in class the next day - but shouldn't we the audience have seen how our 16 year-old hero fared onstage in front of paying punters for the first time?

It's MacRae's book which stops JAMIE being a total success but don't get me wrong, there is much to enjoy in the show and I left it smiling and thinking about a return visit, and there are relatively few new musicals that can do that these days.  Dan Gillespie Sells' score is great: the songs in the first act quickly establish a real excitement - apart from the soggy Latin pastiche fantasy number about Hugo's drag past - and I was soon thinking "cast album" but there isn't one yet, just a 'concept' album by the composers with guest singers, which isn't the same thing at all; this is a great score with some great hooks which deserves to be recorded with this cast.

The show stands or falls off it's platform heels by the actor playing Jamie who is rarely offstage but John McCrea shines like a diamond in the role: self-assured but doubtful, funny but sad, brazen but sympathetic, McCrea lights up the show and is never less than captivating.  Whether he can parlay this triumph into other suitable roles will be interesting to see but right here, right now, he is quite wonderful.

Josie Walker plays the role of Margaret the loving mum with a resigned lovingness but sings her two solos with tremendous power; they are still travelling when they hit the back wall of the upper circle.  In the programme notes, Gillespie Sells writes that her songs were written in a Dusty Springfield style as Margaret would have grown up listening to her and it shows - her big second act "He's My Boy" immediately had me thinking Dusty *wrist flick*

Lucie Shorthouse as the bookish but loving Pritti has a delightful presence on stage and excels in her big number "It Means Beautiful", Mina Anwar as Margaret's best friend Ray stands around waiting for a killer line which never quites materializes but she does what she needs to do well. It's a show where the women tend to stand out more than the men but Phil Nichol has his moments as Hugo as does Luke Baxter as the bully Dean who ultimately is hiding his own fears too.

Jonathan Butterell's direction is quick on it's heels but takes the time in the second act to give Jamie's loss of confidence a real feeling of sadness, Anna Fleischle keeps springing surprises on her standing set of a grey inner-city school which is well-lit by Lucy Carter, while Kate Prince's choreography is truly non-stop fun and adds greatly to the success of the show.

As luck would have it, a few days after seeing the musical I finally saw the original BBC3 documentary so it was interesting to compare the way moments like the refusal to let Jamie attend the school event in a dress, his bickering with his mother over whether to attend or not and his father's off-camera callousness were ramped up in the show.

EVERYBODY'S TALKING ABOUT JAMIE... and maybe you should do too.  It's booking until April 21st 2018 and will leave you with a spring in your step and a sissy in your walk...

MY NIGHT WITH REG - revisited at the Apollo Theatre

Last year the best production I saw on stage was Robert Hastie's revelatory revival of Kevin Elyot's MY NIGHT WITH REG, a play that had languished in memories for nearly 20 years.  The National should hang their head in shame for leaving Elyot's key work on the shelf.  But then we probably would not have had this revival with this particular cast.  My original blog is here

I was lucky enough to see it at the Donmar twice but now it has transferred for a limited season to the Apollo Theatre - ceiling staying up nicely - and it was great to see it again.  It was interesting to see it on the bigger proscenium stage and to see how the cast were adapting their performances to a bigger auditorium.

I am happy to report that apart from a slight broadening of a couple of performances, Hastie's production is still a marvel, funny and profound by turn with the cast of six working seamlessly together to keep the action ricocheting between them while beneath lies caverns of subtext.

 

Kevin Elyot always plays with the concepts of time, consequences and memory and what struck me seeing REG again was how skillfully he does this, how something significant at the start of the play is dismissed as a half-remembered memory by the end, how things important to one person are forgotten by the other, how when someone dies what remains are half-remembered moments in time.

Geoffrey Streatfeild as art-dealer Daniel, Julian Ovendon as the rootless John, Jonathan Broadbent as lonely Guy, Richard Cant as the terminally dull Bernie, Matt Bardock as the ever-randy Benny and Lewis Reeves as the plain-speaking younger lad Eric are giving memorable, heartbreaking performances that deserve all the plaudits they have received - do yourself a favour and get to see this once-in-a-lifetime production.

What I am now wondering is if I can make it a four-in-a-lifetime production...  Click on the banner to book.

Here the cast give you an introduction to the play:

I would like to give you, Constant Reader, A Tale Of Two Ricksons.

A couple of weeks back Owen and I *finally* caught up with Ian Rickson's production of JERUSALEM which is now back on in the West End. After opening at the Royal Court to tumultuous reviews for Jez Butterworth's play and Mark Rylance's lead performance, it transferred to the Apollo Theatre then onto Broadway winning in close succession the Olivier Award and the Tony Award for Best Actor. Now the production has returned to the Apollo for one last hurrah.

Rylance - in a performance that threatens to eat you alive - plays Johnny 'Rooster' Byron, a drop-out who lives in a caravan deep in a forest in Wiltshere that borders a small town. Byron, although hated by the town's community as a supplier of drugs, is a natural focus for the town's bored and restless youth who party the night away with Johnny and his slacker mate Ginger (Mackenzie Cook).
As the play opens, Lee, one of Rooster's clique, is travelling to Australia and as his friends try to put him off, Rooster faces his own life-changing events - the local council are going to enforce an overdue eviction notice; his ex-lover threatens to stop him seeing his young son and the father of an absconded girl threatens to lynch Rooster if the father finds out Rooster is involved. All this and it's St. George's Day too.

The last point is quite salient as Jez Butterworth's play is a comment on the state of late 2000s England. Butterworth has Rooster represent the anarchic, subversive and pagan side of England becoming more and more threatened by the advance of the dull grey stupidity of the modern world. Butterworth and Rylance have stated in interview that the character of Rooser was further worked on during the preview period at the Royal Court and it shows. Rooster almost seems to have grown beyond the play and all the characters opposing him are made as unsympathetic as possible.Rickson directs the piece with a surety of hand which makes the running time of three hours hardly noticeable and the play's heady combination of scatter-gun scatology, dangerous undertow and ruminations on the English soul are socked over the footlights by the remarkable ensemble.

Particularly impressive were Alan David as a ruminating English professor out of step with the modern world, Geraldine Hughes as Rooster's ex- Dawn and Mackenzie Crook as Ginger, Rooster's slacker friend. A special mention to Ultz' forest setting which in the closing moments takes on a life of it's own.But bestriding the stage and play was Rylance, it's impossible to think of another actor playing the role as it seems to come as natural to him as breathing. He was quite extraordinary.

Fast forward a few weeks and along with Sharon and Eamonn we found ourselves schlepping around the side of the Young Vic auditorium to enter the soulless, authoritarian, high security asylum which was the setting for Ian Rickson's production of HAMLET.
The big selling-point of this production was the chance to see Michael Sheen give us his melancholy Dane - how I wish he had been doing it as a one-man show.

Everything that seemed so right with Rickson's direction in JERUSALEM seemed so wrong here, his first Shakespeare production. The whole thing seemed trapped in the all-encompassing 'concept'. Nicholas Hytner's version at the National Theatre last year was set in an Elsinore that was rife with surveillance cameras and ever-watchful courtiers but at least the production had room within it to live and breath - here any life is drained away by the heavy-handed concept clamped down over the text. It's view of Elsinore as a maximum security nuthouse is strained and simply ugly.What purchase can there be in Hamlet's feigned and Ophelia's genuine flights of madness if they are outdone by Sally Dexter's jittery, scratchy Gertrude, all wild hair and exposed nerves. I was greatly disappointed in her performance but at least she made an impression which is more than can be said for James Clyde's woeful Claudius. He is not helped by having his one big scene - Claudius' speech as he attempts to pray - performed in a glassed-in office, his speech relayed to the audience by intercom.

All through the play, Rickson's annoying tricks kept shouting "look at this - you never expected to see a Hamlet like THIS eh?" It all smacked of a 1970s theatre collective production - is there to be NO progress? It also didn't help that I missed the final coup-de-theatre by having a bloody actor standing in my eye line. Allegedly Fortinbrass removes his helmet and swipe me, it's Hamlet. Ooops. Spoiler alert.Every so often a performance sparked interest - Hayley Carmichael briefly shone in the last minutes as a female Horatio, Pip Donaghy's gravedigger seized his moment, Michael Gould was occasionally effective as Polonius (played in the usual office bore style) and Vinette Robinson was the latest in quietly effective Ophelias but the casting of light-skinned black actresses in this role is becoming depressingly obvious. Again she was saddled with annoying business - handing out pills instead of flowers during her mad scene - did no one realise this leads to the background to her suicide? - and P.J. Harvey's tunes for Ophelia's snatches of song merely dragged out the playing length.

I also have to say that the idea of having the stage resembling a large open grave from Ophelia's burial scene to the end of the play worked excellently when Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes and Hamlet were piled in next to Ophelia and Polonious, really bringing home the sense of two families laid waste.All of which means that Michael Sheen will be needing some serious chiropractor sessions after carrying this damn show for nearly three months.

He was certainly charismatic, switching from Hamlet's soliloquies to his gallows humour in the bat of an eye, and investing the role with moments of real humanity. Sadly the one thing I didn't feel for him was any empathy and when Hamlet is left alone with Horatio facing his encroaching mortality, surely you need to have empathy for him. I also felt I was sometimes watching "the wheels go round" during some of his line readings - by trying to speak the text as naturally as possible I was... aware of... the... odd pauses... during his... lines.

Poor Michael Sheen... Ian Rickson done rained on your parade.

Oh and so did I when I sneezed LOUDLY towards the end of "To Be Or Not To Be"

*crimson*

For the second time within a month I have revisited one of the four classic early works of Arthur Miller, his Tony award-winning breakthrough play ALL MY SONS at the Apollo.
Howard Davies has revived his National Theatre production from 2000, this time the Keller home and verdant garden transplanted from the Cottesloe's traverse stage to the proscenium stage of the Apollo.

The show again bears the hallmarks of Howard Davies' best work: an unhurried, clear-eyed production which frames the text perfectly, a harmony of performance, set, lighting & score and a unity of committed performance from the company.The original production featured a quartet of memorable performances - James Hazeldine, Julie Walters, Ben Daniels, Catherine McCormack - and while the present company are all fine, this new production is dominated by the devastating performances of the two leads, David Suchet and Zoe Wanamaker.

Davies has retained his invented prelude to the play where we see Kate's night-time witnessing of the tree planted in her missing son's memory snapped in two by a violent storm and, in this production in particular, it helps to put the audience on edge from the start as the play otherwise starts fairly uneventfully introducing us to the Keller family and their immediate neighbours.We follow the events of a summer Sunday in 1946 in small-town America. Joe Keller is a contented man, a local businessman doing well, admired by his younger neighbours and his son Chris who works with him. His and Chris' only concern is Joe's wife Kate who, while loving, has been distracted by the disappearance three years ago of her other son Larry who went missing in action in the far east. She is further on edge at Chris' secret invitation to Larry's girlfriend Ann Deever to visit them from NY.

Ann's presence has other implications for the Kellers as it is revealed that her father was Joe's business partner in a munitions factory and is in prison for causing the deaths of 21 pilots by knowingly shipping out faulty parts, an action for which Joe was exonerated in court by being off ill when it happened. Her admission to Kate that she is no longer waiting for Larry's return signals to both the parents that Chris' real intention inviting her there is to propose. However it's the appearance of Ann's brother George that brings down the house of cards that is Joe Keller's life.As I've said Davies elicits telling performances from the supporting cast, each imbuing their roles with an inner life. Tony Vaughan-Lawlor and Olivia Darnley are fine as the young neighbours, particularly Darnley in the scene where Daniel Lapaine's George meets her again and you get a sense of their earlier romance, lost by the intervention of the war.

Steven Elder and Claire Hackett also bring great heft to their roles as the Bayliss' who moved into the Deever house after Ann and George's father went to prison. They both stood out in each of their solo turns - Elder where he ruminates on the life he could have had and Hackett, looking not unlike Kathleen Turner, when she tells Ann exactly what she thinks of the idealistic Chris.While I liked Stephen Campbell Moore and Jemima Rooper as Chris and Ann, I felt they didn't quite eclipse the performances of Ben Daniels and Catherine McCormack in Davies' original production, particularly Rooper who couldn't quite get Ann's desperation - it didn't ring true when she begged Kate not to throw her out as she had nowhere to go. Still they did both give very touching performances.

Nothing however could match the performances of the leads.It doesn't hurt the Box Office of course that Suchet and Wanamaker are as well known to the general public for their television roles as much as their theatre work but here they transcend such concerns and both give performances of a rare intensity.

David Suchet is an actor that doesn't always engage me but as Joe Keller he gives what I think is his best stage performance. From the start his casual underplaying makes you believe Joe's idea of himself as a man trusted and a pillar of his community but as the action continues along the lines of classic Greek drama, this hubris is brought low when the Furies of his past actions catch up with him. Suchet's sheer physicality was astonishing - when first seen he is expansive and genial, safe literally in his own back yard, but when confronted by George Deevor he changes into a sharp business suit and appears more canny and alert but when his culpability is finally revealed, he seemed to collapse in on himself. In a masterful piece of physical acting, when Joe reads the damning final letter from his missing son, you could almost see his life ebbing away from him as the words sunk in. His delivery as well was faultless, in the opening scene his ability to project while still speaking in a conversational tone showed up Vaughan-Lawlor and Elder who were saying their lines In Their Best Theatrical Voices.

Suchet was matched stride-for-stride by Zoe Wanamaker as Kate. With no attempt to play for audience sympathy, she gave a multi-layered performance of a conflicted woman whose life is ultimately revealed to have been built on a lie.

Kate's wary humour, her desperate belief in her son's survival, her barely-disguised distrust of Ann and her lioness-like protection of Joe were woven together to give an outstanding performance.

Like Suchet, she seemed to live in the moment at all times, never dropping her concentration level which made her a hypnotic presence on the stage. None more so than when Kate unthinkingly blurts out an inconsequential remark which in an instant reveals the lie the Kellers have hidden. It was a mark of the audience's involvement in the action that when she said it there was an audible collective gasp of breath!

The production is again helped immeasurably by William Dudley's detailed set of the Keller's back porch and garden which seems to get more claustrophobic as the action progresses, and Mark Henderson's lighting especially in Act II when the characters are slowly bathed in a blood-red sunset as the truth behind the deaths of the 21 pilots is revealed.
This production also made me realise how much of a companion piece ALL MY SONS is to Miller's DEATH OF A SALEMAN in the similar descents of Joe Keller and Willy Loman through their adherence to the work ethic which propels their own American Dreams. In a world where soldiers are killed due to faulty equipment and the ideals of capitalism are questioned, as with the best of Miller's work, ALL MY SONS is as relevant today as it was in 1946.