VIOLET at Charing Cross Theatre - Tesori's Travels...

Up until now, composer Jeanine Tesori has had a fairly low profile in the West End but recently it appears that Everything's Coming Up Jeanine.

First, her musical CAROLINE... OR CHANGE (2004) opened at the Hampstead Theatre then proved so successful it transferred to The Playhouse, closely followed by her Tony Award-winning musical FUN HOME (2011) opening at the Young Vic.  Although I think this is the better musical of the two, there does not seem to be any news as yet of a transfer.  We also - briefly - had a touring version of her 2004 musical of THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE.

And now - with a slight air of wagon-jumping about it - The Charing Cross Theatre is staging her 1997 chamber musical VIOLET in a production directed by the Japanese theatre director Shuntaro Fujita.  I would say her writing has got better but I find her a slippery composer at best.  I always leave a Tesori musical trailing the songs behind me and by the time I have got back home I usually cannot remember a single one.  Her songs usually seem to work while you are sitting in the theatre watching the show saying to yourself "ah this song fits well and is well-written" but turns opaque when thought of afterward - the only one where the score seemed to have left an impression has been FUN HOME.

As I said, her numbers occasionally strike me as interesting when I am facing the characters singing them, and she does have a particular knack of writing pastiche pop numbers - the children's bouncy pretend tv-ad song or Jackson 5-style family song in FUN HOME; the radio numbers in CAROLINE... OR CHANGE - but the main book songs tend to run into each other with no change in tone, as opposed to popping off the stage in contrast to each other.  Maybe the day she writes both songs and lyrics for a musical she will find a real sustained voice?  So to VIOLET... it is based on a short story by Doris Betts called "The Ugliest Pilgrim" and it feels it.  It has the air of generic Southern Gothic Americana, a bit like a cut-and-shunt job from Carson McCullers or Horton Foote.

1964: Violet is a young woman who was disfigured in an accident when a young girl, and is travelling on a Greyhound bus with a motley crew of other passengers from North Carolina to Tulsa in the hope that a brash televangelist will be able to perform a miracle on her face.  Because of her face, Violet is withdrawn and defensive of any curious people's attention but, despite this, she falls in with a poker game between two soldiers at a rest-stop in Tennessee.  Monty is a young corporal who enjoys poking fun at her while Flick, a black sergeant, is more respectful of her and obviously secretly is drawn to her.  After she takes umbrage at Monty's joshing, she sits apart from them but Flick seeks her out, attempting to boost her confidence.

The travellers stop-over in Memphis overnight and while out in a bar, Flick is angered when he sees Monty obviously trying it on with Violet.  Despite Violet calming him down, Monty later visits her room and they make love.  As the bus continues to Fort Worth where the soldiers will leave, Violet and Monty both rehearse how they will jilt the other but at the last minute Monty asks her to meet him at the bus station on her journey back.

Once in Tulsa she seeks out the televangelist who of course disappoints her in not taking her seriously, in her mind's eye she replaces the preacher for her father and rails at him for a lifetime of pain.  This catharsis makes Violet think that she has been cured and on the way back home, gets off the bus to find Monty and Flick waiting for her... who will Violet choose?

Sadly book and lyric writer Brian Crawley makes Violet such a chippy, miserable character that it is hard to feel any sympathy for her and, by inference, any of the other characters as they are mostly seen through her eyes.  Watching her '11 o'clock' ranting number at the Preacher and her Father, I just watched thinking "Ah you did this so much better in CAROLINE.. OR CHANGE", that time of course helped immeasurably by Sharon D. Clarke's titanic performance.

I was also precluded from any real involvement in Fujita's production by the fact that the sound was amplified so loud I was always aware that though the cast were singing only feet away on the in-the-round stage absolutely no sound came off them, everything blared out of the overhead speakers so by the end of the show I had convinced myself that they were all miming to a cd being played somewhere; in a space as small as the Charing Cross Theatre this is ridiculous.  I will give Shuntaro Fujita's direction a nod for making the pace fairly quick with it's minimal staging of tables and chairs being utilized well, it's just a shame that it held no real interest.

Kaisa Hammarlund, who played the narrator Allison in FUN HOME, certainly gave her all as Violet, it's just a shame that she could not make the character interesting.  There was good playing between Matthew Harvey as Monty and Jay Marsh as Flick, while Kieron Crook as Violet's Father and Kenneth Avery Clark as the Preacher also found moments to make an impression.

So there we go, another rather under-whelming production at Thom Southerland's Charing Cross Theatre, where in truth the only good productions have been his own of RAGTIME and TITANIC.  I am happy to have seen VIOLET but I don't think i will be getting on the bus with her again anytime soon.

Redux: CAROLINE OR CHANGE at Playhouse / THE NUTCRACKER at Covent Garden

Now we are at the end of 2018 it was interesting to be able to look back at productions previously seen which are now revived: the Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori musical CAROLINE, OR CHANGE which transferred from Chichester to Hampstead earlier this year and is now shouting out at the Playhouse Theatre and also the Royal Ballet's evergreen - or ever-snowy - THE NUTCRACKER with choreography by Peter Wright.

It was good to see CAROLINE, OR CHANGE again and I found it again to be a musical that resists the urge to make it easy for it's audience, with five characters all locked in their own private mental spaces and who find connecting to be fraught with suspicion and defensiveness which makes for a difficult first act as it's hard to see where the audience's sympathies should lie.  However the second act reveals cracks in the characters' carapaces giving them the possibility of  connecting: mother to daughter, stepmother to stepson.

Sharon D. Clarke is still playing the Louisiana single mother Caroline Thibodeaux who supports her daughter and two sons by being the 'daily' for the Jewish Gellman family.  Caroline spends most of her time in the basement service room with the washing machine, the dryer and the radio - unsurprisingly the creators have these appliances personified and they sing songs that illustrate and comment on Caroline's situation.

Caroline is a defensive, guarded woman, quietly angry at the world and finds it hard to accept affection from any quarter, while her eldest daughter Emmie is quietly angry with society's attitudes and her mother's inability to accept change, Stuart Gellman is a widower still grieving for his dead wife although his has since remarried, his new wife Rose is growing more and more unhappy with her distant husband and his guarded son Noah who is himself still grieving for his dead mother and who constantly tries to engage with Caroline who is amiable but keeps him at arm's length. In the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, the characters all have to face up to change and all the implications of their actions.

Practically all the original cast have transferred to the Playhouse and the performances have grown with their exploration of the deeply woven characters: Lauren Ward and Alastair Brokenshaw as Rose and Stuart Gellman, Teddy Kempner as Rose's firebrand father from New York and Naana Agyei-Ampadu as Caroline's more outgoing fellow domestic Dotty. There is also stand-out support from Me'sha Bryan as the bubbly Washing Machine and Angela Caesar as the ever-watchful Moon.

Abiona Omonua is marvellous as Emmie who yearns to break free from her mother's demands to be submissive and to stay in her place; she has a lovely singing voice and has a vital presence on stage.  However the show is dominated by the mighty Sharon D. Clarke as Caroline, her solitary pain burns off the stage and you are on the edge of your seat waiting for her eventual explosion and indeed when she breaks and sings the searing "Lot's Wife" Clarke releases a tsunami of pent-up anger and pain that hits hard.  With this role, Sharon D. Clarke ascends to being a true theatre great, and her recent tv appearances in the new DOCTOR WHO will surely bring her a much-deserved wider fame.

Nigel Lilly's music direction brings Tesori's challenging score to vibrant life, Fly Davis' set and costumes look fine in their new home, Ann Yee's choreography is still thrilling and Michael Longhurst's direction holds the whole production together, quite the more remarkable for this being his first musical.  CAROLINE, OR CHANGE is booking until 6th April and I recommend it highly.

In a different world totally to Caroline and her basement is Peter Wright's glorious version of Tchaikovsky's THE NUTCRACKER at Covent Garden.  This was our third time seeing it but it is so magical it is always worth a re-visit. I don't think I can improve on what I blogged in 2015 after my first visit to it:  "The production is simply enchanting, radiating warmth and goodwill like a particularly large glass of mulled wine.  Helped immeasurably by the late Julia Trevelyan Oman's designs, Wright's take on the story has the magician Drosselmeyer mourning that his nephew has been transformed by an enemy into a nutcracker, as you do!  His chance to undo the spell comes with a Christmas invitation to a family where he gives the nutcracker to the young daughter Clara."

Clara and the newly-restored nephew have adventures before visiting the court of the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Prince and also experience the the divertissements organized by Drosselmeyer, and all danced to Tchaikovsky's magical score which features some of ballet's greatest hits.

We were spoilt in 2015 as we saw Francesca Hayward as Clara, Alexander Campbell as The Nutcracker, Gary Avis as Drosselmeyer, Iana Salenko as The Sugar Plum Fairy and Steven McRae as her Prince, a truly memorable cast which has not been replicated since, this year we had Emma Maguire as a vivacious Clara, Luca Acri as an athletic Nutcracker, Christopher Saunders as Drosselmeyer, Yasmine Naghdi as Sugar Plum and Ryoichi Hirano as the Prince.  They were all fine but lacking the star wattage of the 2015 cast, however we were lucky to have the wonderful Itziar Mendizabel as the focal point of the Arabian dance, sinuous and statuesque.

Christopher Carr staged it wonderfully again and the ROH Orchestra made Tchaikovsky's score flood the auditorium to the rafters under the baton of Barry Wordsworth.  If you have never experienced this production you really are missing a magical experience: all performances appear to be sold out for the rest of the run but it does get revived occasionally on cinema screens and the DVD of the production is also available.

FUN HOME at the Young Vic - Drawing out the past...

I had never heard of Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic novel/memoir FUN HOME until it's musical adaptation transferred to Broadway in 2015 where it won five Tony Awards including Best Musical, Best Score and Best Book.  I can't say I was particularly interested in it until the Young Vic announced it was going to stage it's London premiere and I thought "Uh-oh, that will sell out there so I had better go - just in case".  I am glad I did because I enjoyed it a lot.

The Young Vic production is staged by the Broadway creative team - directed by Sam Gold, choreographed by Danny Mefford, designed by David Zinn, lighting by Ben Stanton - so it's a rare opportunity to get the full intention behind the original musical over here.  To be honest, I can't say I totally loved the score but allied to the excellent performances, I was won over at the end.

Alison Bechdel wrote (and drew) FUN HOME to come to terms with her upbringing in a Funeral Home (FUNeral HOME) in Pennsylvania.  If that wasn't odd enough, it was only when she went to University - and came out - that she realized she had been unknowingly living in an emotional pressure-cooker: her father - full-time teacher, part-time funeral director - was a closet homosexual who had indulged in risky encounters throughout his marriage, even leading to police involvement.  After a visit from Alison to the now-bleak family home, her father walks in front of a speeding lorry.  Her father might have been destroyed by his sexuality but Alison is liberated by hers...

Lisa Kron's book slides back and forwards in time as Alison reviews her life: from Small Alison first realizing that she might be different to Medium Alison's coming out while confronting her family's secrets.  Indeed I felt that Kron's book is better than her lyrics, I am sure she would say that repeating a line three times reflects Small Alison's limited vocabulary but after a while it got wearing "I wanna play airplanes / I wanna play airplanes / I wanna play airplanes..."  Really Lisa?

Jeanine Tesori is on a bit of a UK roll at the moment: THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE has just toured (cancelled abruptly by shady producers), CAROLINE OR CHANGE is due to open later this year in the West End after a sold-out run at Hampstead and now FUN HOME is sold out at the Young Vic.  Her score was certainly soaring at times and had her usual pastiche numbers - a Jackson 5-style number when Alison and her brothers pretend to be in a tv ad for their Fun Home, and a Partridge Family pastiche about living in a loving family - but they stay in my mind while I am in the theatre, none of them have stayed with me since.  However within the show they worked very well, I really liked the scene where Small Alison and her brothers are visiting New York with their father, and when she catches him leaving them alone at night-time, he sings her a lullaby, almost whispered and a capella, you could hear a pin drop as we watch a moment of tenderness while knowing he wants her to sleep so he can leave them to have sex.  

Sam Gold's direction is excellent however - you can believe all characters have an inner history and motivation - and he brings out performances which draw you in to the story (apart from one).  David Zinn and Ben Stanton's contributions also make this show a surprisingly visual delight - there was a reveal in the second act which even elicited an 'ooooo' from the audience.  The music also sounded rich and full under Nigel Lilley's musicians, hidden away at the back of the stage.

As I said, one of the nine performers, for me, stood out for the wrong reasons: Zubin Varla as Bruce, Alison's father, gave a jangling, odd performance that was resolutely charmless.  As written, Bruce is an unsympathetic character so the actor playing him has to have some spark of charisma and humanity to understand him but Varla remains a cold fish throughout so his desperate suicide makes no impact.

No such problems with Jenna Russell as Helen, Alison's schoolteacher mother, hers is a performance that, from the start, is intriguing.  Tense and stoic, Helen's life is spent watching for signs of Bruce's infidelity and this finally cracks when she tells Alison of her unhappy life; Russell's singing of the angry "Days and Days" was one of the show's highlights.

Kaisa Hammerlund was very good as Alison, hardly ever offstage and totally sympathetic; she also had one of the best musical moments: riding in the car with her father on her last visit home, they struggle to speak to each other and the moment to connect is lost while Alison watches the telephone lines stretching out into the night.  Eleanor Kane also created a sympathetic Medium Alison, stumbling bashfully into her lesbianism.  She was partnered with the delightful Cherrelle Skeete as her fellow-college student lover Joan.

Playing Small Alison was Harriet Turnbull, she was remarkably charismatic and shone with a directness that totally swept you along with her; none more so than in her solo "Ring of Keys" where for the first time, while sitting in a diner with her unobservant father, she notices a butch lesbian delivering a parcel and immediately feels a connection.  Hers was the performance of the evening. She also had a good onstage partnership with Archie Smith and Eddie Martin as her siblings.

Who knows if FUN HOME will transfer, it certainly deserves a chance for it's remarkable originality, production and performances but would it find an audience?  Watch this space...

 

THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE at Richmond Theatre - Tesori Times Two...

Well there you go... you wait ages for a Jeanine Tesori musical - and two turn up at the same time!

After the remarkable CAROLINE, OR CHANGE at Hampstead Theatre (which is transferring to the West End at the end of the year) we had the chance to see her earlier musical re-write of THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE which is currently touring.

Rewrite you say?  But why not just use the film soundtrack?  Well it turns out there wasn't a real score to the film, it was a mishpocheh of songs - THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE, JIMMY and THE TAPIOCA were original, while the rest were songs from pre- and contemporaneous to the 1920s.  Tesori and lyricist Dick Scanlon have only kept the first two for their score, unsurprisingly they are the ones that stay in the memory.  Tesori's score sounds good in the theatre but there are no real stand-out melodies.

The original film is an odd one for me, I had the soundtrack album when I was growing up but never actually saw the film till much later and have never really liked it.  I find it heavy-handed and forced, a straight man's idea of Camp.  Everyone appears to be acting in different films - thank God for Julie Andrews' light playing as John Gavin, James Fox and Mary Tyler Moore all have the touch of a concrete souffle.  Beatrice Lillie and Carol Channing... well, it's hard to accuse them of over-playing when that's their default style.

The stage musical opened on Broadway where it made a star of Sutton Foster and ran for two years, which is more than can be said for the original London production which lasted eight months with Amanda Holden.  Go figure.

The show is back on tour, directed and choreographed by Racky Plews - yes I know, it sounds like an illness in Polari "Ooo doctor, vada well my racky plews!"  Her choreography is great fun however and really keeps the show rolling along but the plot gets rather tired before it's de rigueuer happy end. 

However the biggest failing of the show is the plot line of Millie's hotel being a cover for white slave trade by the it's proprietor Mrs Meers.  The playing of the Mrs Meers character just kept reminding me - as AVENUE Q famously attested - that Evly One's a Rittle Bit Lacist.  Despite Lucas Rush's game performance, line after alleged funny line died as it hit the stage and the whole concept of Mrs Meers being a failed Broadway actor in drag just distanced the character further and further away from any possible interest.  The denouement has one of the main female characters falling in love with one of Mrs Meers' Chinese henchmen but it all felt like having your dodgy comedy oriental jokes with an odd liberal gloss.

The cast certainly gave it their all and the potentially colourless male lead was given a nice spin by Michael Colbourne.  Richard Meek also managed to build up interest in the under-written role of Millie's boss Graydon but an over-played drunk scene made me wonder had he ever actually been drunk himself.  There is also a performance of clanging bad acting by the head of the typing room where Millie works which we will draw a discreet tarpaulin over.

Luckily there are two glittering performances that simply highlight some of the thin performances elsewhere. I had never seen Hayley Tamaddon on stage before but she made a totally winning Millie.  She has a nice belt of a voice and a real watchability on stage; she has had a career in television soaps but she certainly has enough charisma to hopefully become a fixture on stage.

In the role of Muzzy Van Hossmere - which gave Carol Channing her one moment of film fame - we have Nicola Blackman oozing class and bonhomie.  Nicola is one of the increasingly rare performers who, when they come on stage, you know you can just relax in the knowledge that someone on that stage knows *exactly* how to place their performance.  Muzzy's two contrasting numbers gave Nicola the chance to bring a Porter-like throb to her first act paean to New York and to swing out in her second act cabaret number.  Between Tamaddon and Blackman, the show finds it's heart.

I suspect I was the only one in Richmond who groaned loudly when the tallest chorus girl was introduced as Dorothy Parker, who in real-life was as short as her wit was large.  However, I would recommend the show if it comes your way. 

CAROLINE, OR CHANGE at Hampstead Theatre - Sharon D. Clarke ain't backing down...

Sometimes a musical comes along that seems so unique that you wonder will it ever find an audience.  One such show is CAROLINE, OR CHANGE which packs so much in that it makes writing about it tricky... where do you begin??

I must admit most of what I knew about CAROLINE, OR CHANGE was from Dori Berinstein's excellent documentary SHOW BUSINESS: THE ROAD TO BROADWAY which covered the 2004 season and the journey from previews to Tony nominations for CAROLINE, AVENUE Q, WICKED and TABOO among others: CAROLINE was nominated for six but came away with only Best Supporting Actress.

I can't remember why I didn't see it in 2006 at the National Theatre when it won the Olivier Award for Best Musical, but when it was announced that powerhouse actress Sharon D. Clarke would be leading a revival at Chichester last year then I knew it would be something to see and hear.  Luckily the revival transferred to Hampstead and it has been announced that it will transfer again to Playhouse Theatre in the west end.

The collaboration between book-writer and lyricist Tony Kushner and composer Jeanine Tesori had a long gestation period as they workshopped and tried different approaches to the material which came from Kushner's own childhood, growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in Louisiana who hired a local black woman to be their maid.  In 1963 - if you are wondering if the Kennedy assassination is mentioned WHADDYA THINK?? - Caroline Thibodeaux is a single mother bringing up three children in Louisiana, just getting by on her wages for keeping house for the middle-class Jewish Gellman family.

The son, Noah, is eight years old and still coming to terms with, not only the recent death of his mother, but his father's remarriage to Rose Stopnick.  It's an unhappy family all-round, Rose is unsure of her position with the phlegmatic Caroline or how she can establish herself with Noah and his still-grieving father Stuart.  Noah has grown closer to the no-nonsense Caroline who let's the boy light her one cigarette of the day in the utility basement.  Caroline is not lonely down there however.. not with the radio and washing machine that sing to her.

As the country reverberates to the death of Kennedy, Rose admonishes Noah for leaving money in his trouser pockets and, to teach him a lesson, tells Caroline that she can keep any money she finds in his pockets.  Although money is a concern, proud Caroline wrestles with taking the boy's money as she has also refused Rose's extra food.  She gives in however, much to her children's delight who can now buy comics and sweets, but what she doesn't know is that Noah is deliberately leaving the money for his friend Caroline.

Rose's father visits for a Hanukkah dinner but events go awry when Caroline's daughter Emmie answers back when the old man talks about Martin Luther King; Caroline is mortified that her daughter would do this and they argue.  Meanwhile Mr Stopnick has given Noah $20 as a Hanukkah present but he has left it in his trousers by mistake... and Caroline doesn't want to give it back.  Change is in the air... how will Caroline cope?

Michael Longhurst's production has a couple of stutters but on the whole it is a remarkably bracing evening, it helps that the show is sung-through although thankfully no Lloyd Webber recitative is in evidence to provoke yawns.  Tesori's score is constantly interesting, using different styles of music from pop to kletzmer filtered through a Broadway idiom to include the two families' stories.

Kushner's story can look bizarre with it's singing washing machine, dryer, radio and even the bus, but the convoluted lives of his characters, all on the cusp of change, is involving; the only odd note is that Noah's father is so mournful over the recent death of his first wife you wonder how or why did he get married a second time to Rose?

The set and costumes by Fly Davis, Ann Yee's choreography and Jack Knowles' lighting all add their distinctive touches to the show and Longhurst has an excellent company who all have moments to shine.  Charlie Gallacher did very well as Noah, he is rarely offstage but kept up a good performance throughout - it's a tough role for just a boy but he did well.  As Noah's father Stuart, Alastair Brookshaw also did well to give a performance through the overall gloom of his character, and Teddy Kempner was very good as Mr Stopnick, Rose's left-wing father who provokes with his arguments.

Me'sha Bryan, Angela Caesar, and Ako Mitchell all gave fine voice to The Washing Machine, The Moon and the Dryer/Bus while T'Shan Williams, Sharon Rose and Carole Stennett are great as collective voice of The Radio which keeps Caroline going through her work day.  It was great to see T'Shan Williams again after her great performance in last year's THE LIFE.

There are very fine performances from Lauren Ward as Rose, the young wife trying to find her place both upstairs and downstairs in her new home to varying degrees of success, and from Abiona Omonua as Emmie, Caroline's oldest daughter who can see the future coming and wants in, no matter how much it will upset her mother.

But the show belongs to the unstoppable Sharon D. Clarke as Caroline.  In possibly the performance of her career, Clarke is relentless as the emotionally-shutdown Caroline.  Unsmiling, terse, radiating a doughty wariness, her Caroline gives no inch - the scene where Noah and Caroline shout insults at each other was ferociously done.  The show's climax is a fierce solo for Caroline - it's like Tesori and Kushner are doing CAROLINE'S TURN, a number where the character finally lets her pent-up passion burst out.

It goes without saying that Sharon D. Clarke ripped through the song with pain and power; as I watched her I thought there is no reason why she should not play Sally in the National's revival of FOLLIES next year...

As Owen said, it was such a relief to see Sharon's beaming smile at the curtain-call!  The news that came through after we saw the show of it's West End transfer was great - if there are any West End awards going for Best Actress in a Musical next year then our Sharon deserves them all.

If you fancy a show that constantly surprises... CAROLINE, OR CHANGE is the one for you.

It will run at the Playhouse Theatre from 20th November to 9th February 2019...