Review – Dickens Unplugged – The Comedy Theatre

Choosing theater as a pick-me-up may seem a little odd to some, but I find that a really good show will really raise my mood. With that thought in mind, I invited a friend who’s a big Dickens fan to accompany me and my husband to see Dickens Unplugged at the Comedy Theatre last night. My uncle had seen it two weeks back and given it a rousing review, so I had high hopes that I had a good evening ahead of us. To improve the matter, Last Minute has been consistently flogging tickets at £10 a pop (and the Ambassadors themselves are doing a two-fer), so the risk level was very low.

I personally have a bit of a mixed history with Mr. Dickens. I was forced to read A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver, and Great Expectations while I was in high school, and I didn’t like any of them. Now, mind you, being able to refer to these books has been good for me in terms of my ability to get western culture (most recently while I was reading the Jasper Fforde “Thursday Next” mysteries, in which Miss Havisham plays a very important role), but I just found the stories themselves mawkish and trying to finish them was like a death march through fields covered in treacle. Bah. That said, I am very much pro-Dickens insofar as he was a real mover for improving the lot of the poor in Victorian times, and I am a big fan of A Christmas Carol, so I figured a night watching people re-enact scenes from his books in a comic matter would be pleasant enough.

I was not, however, expecting the show to be so musical. About half of it is sung, and, you know what? It’s good. I liked the songs and found myself humming the opening tune after the show was over (which did not happen at Marguerite). The performers were very good – all five of them played something, sometimes three guitars, sometimes an upright bass, once two trumpets (muffled), all acoustic and therefore “unplugged” (how I missed the reference I do not know) – other than one hysterical visit from an electric guitar. The men sang in fine harmony, the lyrics were clear and relevant and very often funny – it was great! And for me, it was nice to see Americans on stage doing comedy in an American style, even though it was a bit odd to hear Mr. D himself talking like a Californian.

In fact, this whole evening was a really good time. The actors interwove bits of Charles Dickens’ life with the stories he was writing, making for an interesting narrative with lots of costume changes as they each wound up playing as many as three or four characters in the course of a given story. They were great comedians and completely had my attention, especially during what I fear was an unscripted bit when Charles Dickens’ wife’s skirts started slipping off. (Ah, improv!) The highlight of the night was either the brilliant bit of stagework when they figured how to have the recently beheaded Sydney Carton come back to finish the last line of the song he was singing or the Tiny Tim rock show at the very end of A Christmas Carol.

I was cheered to see how animated and happy the audience was as we left the theater – people had really had a good time! Sadly, though, this show appears to be closing this weekend, so if you want to see it, you’d better get your tickets bought ASAP. I recommend it highly as a fine value for your theatrical dollar – er, pound.

(This review is for a show that took place on Thursday, June 26th.)

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Review – “The Quiz” – Trafalgar Studios

(Note: this show closes Saturday, June 28th, so make your plans to see it right away if you’re interested.)

I have a reputation for being terminally allergic to one-person shows. Just too often they descend into a bunch of self indulgent twaddle, and I find my mind has left the room long before my body can. However, Venus as a Boy was so brilliant that I’ve been rethinking my feelings toward the form. Perhaps … when performed at one go without an intermission, there is hope.

The Quiz, therefore, hit the right buttons at about one hour in total, and the review I read in Monday’s Metro (why they won’t put the damned things online I do not know) indicated it was a comedic twist to a retelling of the Grand Inquisitor (InQUIZitor, get it?) sequence from The Brothers Karamazov, done as a burnt out actor telling the tale of telling the tale to the audience, like HamletMachine but without being so irritating. As I expected, tickets were available today at the TKTS booth (13 quid a pop – but you can also get them in advance for £15 from the Ambassadors website with coupon code “ATGQUIZ.”), so we had a quick takeaway curry from Thai Cottage, then headed off to Trafalgar Studios this evening with fairly high hopes (though the Pimms at the Wetherspoons next door did help).

I found the show quite pleasant, a good value for the money (I know this is a terrible way to view how good a show is, but since I see so many shows that I wear myself out, it’s one of the yardsticks I use) and the investment of time (I was grateful to be home before 11). I love the “breaking the fourth wall” stuff even though I didn’t know how to react to it – did he really want to have us talk back to him? And how would he have handled it if I answered his endless calls for his prompter? Would he have changed the end of the show? Would it have broken his focus?

Anyway, David Bradley was ace – just the kind of person whose hands you want to entrust yourself to when you’re going to spend an hour locked up in a dark room at someone else’s mercies. He handled the transitions between himself, the Inquisitor, his dad, Jesus, and just whomever else he wanted to be beautifully – and when he had the hood on his head, I swear to God, he looked just like Emperor Palpatine. It’s actually a bit of a shame it was only an hour long, though the BIGGER shame was the fact there were only twenty people there the night I went. Get with the program, people! The audience was laughing and chortling quite merrily so it seemed to me like this show MUST be able to pull in more punters to fill the seats. Bradley didn’t seem to stint but I’d really like to see him preening and glowing in the glare of a full house – I think he would have been even better.

Overall, I think there were a couple of points being made – a parallel between the missing prompter and Jesus (I didn’t catch this myself and fully blame the Pimms), and some more grand stuff about the light being extinguished that slipped through my finer filters for drama. But since it was all quite brief, I think the overall point is that it was interesting and funny, well lit, and a great opportunity to watch a top notch actor do it stuff. Catch it if you can! (But the theater is cold, so bring a jacket or a wrap if you don’t have sleeves.)

(This review is for a show that took place the night of Wednesday, June 25th.)

Review – Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter – Kneehigh Theatre at The Cinema Haymarket

(This, my favorite show of 2008, is now in New York City at Studio 54. Both The New York Times and blogger Steve On Broadway love this show – don’t miss it!)

Several months ago I heard about a unique hybrid production of the movie of Brief Encounter and the play that inspired it (Still Life), presented in the cinema where the movie premiered back in the day (restored to its glory for the show). I was intrigued but held off going so that I could attend with a gaggle of my friends. Time passed, the event hadn’t been organized, and my uncle was in town looking for a show to fill the slot on Sunday (which in London means slim pickins, no doubt about it). Torn between seeing an opera none of us had much of an interest in and a show that I personally was quite interested in, based on a movie my uncle loved, it wasn’t too hard to make the argument for skipping Covent Garden in favor of the Cinema Haymarket.

And what a good choice it was! Brief Encounter is pure theatrical magic. I can hardly sing its praises highly enough. In part, I think, I just didn’t know what to expect – I thought it was going to be people performing the dialogue in front of a movie screen. This did happen – for about the first five minutes of the show … but as it was performed, two of the actors were in the audience, and one of the “actors” was on the screen, addressing one of the people in the audience – so it was completely unlike the audience participation version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was kind of what I thought the show was going to be like.

Instead, what we got was a full-fledged multi-media show with just that clip of film as its basis, with live music and multi-tasking character actors (a cast of eight, I think?) that occasionally sang and danced and even bounced up and down in unison to indicate the passage of a train. Our star-crossed lovers, Laura (Naomi Frederick) and Alec (Tristan Sturrock) plunged into it all whole-heartedly, taking us on a boating trip, dancing in the air with joy, being kind and thoughtful to each other, and falling in love in most heart-rending fashion.

Meanwhile the rest of the brilliant cast was hamming it up in a variety of roles my uncle claimed saw little screen time in the original, but which added a lot of texture (in the form of two other love affairs) and provided the opportunity for all sorts of hijinks. It all ended in a fairly melancholy way, but we were so energized from the rest of the show, who could care? And as to the (American) woman in the bathroom who said that she didn’t remember Brief Encounter being a comedy – I say, you make a show that works in the medium you’re using, and this was a brilliant piece of theater.

My uncle, who’s retired, said Brief Encounter was worth paying full price to see – and considering he paid for three tickets, I consider that quite a compliment. (The matinee wasn’t available at the TKTS booth, although it often is for evening shows.) Also, after seeing four plays in four days (six for him), we all agreed that this was the best of the bunch – the icing on the cake for his trip to London. For me, it’s the best play I’ve seen in at least three months, possibly the year to date, and the only one that I’d go see again.

Revew – The Revenger’s Tragedy – National Theatre

I am a big fan of the £10 series at the National – top quality shows at a quarter of the normal asking price! – so when I saw that tickets had gone on sale for The Revenger’s Tragedy during the week when my cost-conscious (read = OAP) uncle was coming to vist, I snapped up a set (though I went for £15 seats so that we could be a little closer to the action).

The Revenger’s Tragedy is a sort of anti-Hamlet, with a lead character who is hurting over someone’s death – and determined to make the bad guys pay. This leads to a bit of the silly identity-changing hijinks along the lines of some of the goofier Shakespearean comedies, but with a cast of characters which seems universally unworthy of any sympathy and the most sex and violence I’ve seen since Coriolanus – more, even. It’s kind of fun to see this group of baddies get their come-uppance, but without any one sympathetic characters it became more like watching Natural Born Killers or something of that ilk.

While the show was in no ways boring, it seemed to me like the director felt obliged to overdecorate it with fluff to make it “relevant to the modern audience” or something of the sort. Pounding techno, projections and depictions of people having sex, a woman leading a hooded man about on a leash, animated stage decor – was any of it really necessary? The text itself was pretty clear about what was going on, and clever to boot, but it seemed that there were doubts as to whether or not it could carry the story on its own. Me, I’d prefer less show and more tell. Overall, while this production wasn’t bad, I found it just didn’t capture my imagination.

(This review is for a performance that took place on Saturday, June 14th, 2008.)

Links about ballet and show reviews

I came home from watching “The Revenger’s Tragedy” last night and fooled around online instead of writing up my review. My goal was to read a review of the play I’d held off reading until after the show (though I found even a second), but there was lots of other good stuff on there I’d missed, like a review of “Dances at a Gathering” (which made me feel good that I’d left after it was over and not stayed for the second half of the evening) and a great discussion about the future of ballet (the idea being the culture here is closed and that new works aren’t really being promoted). It made me get excited about the idea of going to San Francisco for their new works season next year.

Review of “Marguerite – the Musical” – Theatre Royal Haymarket

Tonight my uncle, my husband and I went to see Marguerite – the Musical at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. The reasons we went to see this show were simple: it was brand new (world premiere in London less than a month ago) and it was a musical. When it seems like 90% of what we’re seeing on stage in London is now either a revival, an American import, or some limp fish composed of pop songs with a thin through-line, this made it rather a standout. It was also not Gone With the Wind, which for some reason I could never imagine being anything other than cheesy even before the reviews sent it to its early grave (tomorrow, in fact). (Weren’t the Marguerite cast members thanking their lucky stars that they’d put their money on the winning horse!)

It’s actually hard for me to figure out what to say about this show because I didn’t find it thrilling, which is what I’m always hoping for in a musical, but this wasn’t, in fact, what I was expecting. Since the creative cast drew heavily from Les Miserables, a show I’d rank as among the most disappointing things I’ve ever seen on stage, I figured I’d loathe the music, cringe at the singing, and shudder at a banal book. Me, I am a classical musical kind of girl. I consider Oklahoma and Anything Goes the height of the form, and think that Chicago marked the end of the era. The only new musical I’ve really been passionate about is Avenue Q – everything else has mostly just been adequate, or boring, or bad.

As it turns out, the music in Marguerite is actually fairly pleasant. I really listen to the words the cast members are singing, which is especially important in this show, and the lyrics were interesting – they moved the story along without using painfully obvious rhymes to get there. The singers didn’t do that cheesy swooping thing with their voices that I hate, and the ensemble singing (the whole cast but also the trio of Marguerite, Armand and Otto) was quite good. But nothing was interesting enough for me to catch the tune and be humming it after the show, and while Marguerite (Ruthie Henshall) and Armand (Julien Ovenden) had fine voices, I wasn’t wowed by them. (This is not the case for Mr. Ovenden’s biceps, which did have my full attention.)

The story itself is pretty interesting, though not exactly any surprise to someone who’s familiar with La Dame Aux Camellias (or La Traviata, though I felt like this story split pretty far from it). A gorgeous older French woman is being kept by a German general in WWII Paris; she falls for a handsome piano player half her age, a man who makes her feel alive again. (Somehow it was all very Demi and Ashton.) There is, of course, trouble, and the Resistance gets involved. I actually was more interested in the way they wove in the historical fact of people being attacked for being collaborators after the war – and the way many people hid their lack of support for resistance activities afterwards.

I loved the set – it seemed like it was entirely made of glass, a metaphor for “people who live in glass houses,” and the use of projections on the lightly mirrored back walls very effectively created scenes of Paris without being particularly heavy-handed. Armand’s garret was very effectively created with just a bed and a big window, and the transition from scene to scene was seamless. And the costumes were quite good – one of the few times when I wasn’t sitting in my chair complaining about a lack of historical research or inappropriate use of [insert accessory here].

Overall I’d say this is a good musical, nicely set in the jewelbox that is the Theatre Royal Haymarket. For people who like the modern musical style, I think it would be a good night out – it just wasn’t one I was enraptured by, but my uncle and husband thought it was fine (though not outstanding). If you’re debating between this and, say, Jersey Boys or Wicked, I would go for Marguerite in a heartbeat, and even though I personally love Cabaret and Chicago, it would be much better to give a new show a chance. While GWTW deserved its fate, this show deserves much better. That said, will someone please bring Xanadu the Musical to London for me?

(This review is for a performance that took place on Friday, June 13th.)

Review of “Rosmersholm” – Almeida Theatre

Last night my uncle and my husband and I went to the wilds of Islington (which is actually far less wild than Dalston, where Ibsen and I last crossed swords) to the Almeida to see Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. I’m on an Ibsen quest, like my Pinter quest, though Ibsen is making it easier by being dead and thus not making it possible to have new play added. We ponied up for a program, which revealed some important Ibsen tidbits for me, especially regarding the order in which he wrote his plays: Rosmersholm preceded Hedda Gabler by four years (1886 and 1890), and was written just before The Lady from the Sea. This gave me an idea of where he was in terms of his skills as a playwright – oddly, near the height of his powers, given that the nearly perfect John Gabriel Borkman was written in 1896 and his last play in 1899. (I can also now say that I have my list of plays to see: I’m going to plan on skipping the critical failures, which I don’t think will ever be produced anyway, but I also have a dire need to see Ghosts and Peer Gynt.)

Rosmersholm (the home of the Rosmer family is the correct translation, I believe) is an odd play. I ended the first act feeling elated, but the second act left me dissatisfied and the third disgusted. As in Lady from the Sea, this comes down to problems with the script. The first act was very naturalistic, mostly concerning a confrontation between Mr. Rosmer (Paul Hilton) and an old friend of the family, Doctor Kroll (Malcolm Sinclair, last seen in Dealer’s Choice – boy, can this guy act!). Listening to Kroll go on about the values of conservatism, the ignorance of the masses, how wives should get their opinions from their husbands, how liberals are evil and a force of corruption to true and noble values, and how wretched the press is was (etc.) was actually a blast. He was strongly opposed to many of the things I personally believe in, but, even though some of his opinions were merely dated, so many of them seemed to still hold relevance today and I found his rants quite intriguing. I was also fascinated by how quickly he shrugged off Rebecca’s (Helen McCrory) attempts to engage him in conversation – after all, what could a woman know about politics! Then Rosmer dropped his bomb on Kroll, the shit hit the fan, exciting debates about atheism and what liberals believe in ensued, and I was hooked, and ready to recommend this play to all of my friends.

Unfortunately, act two descended into, I don’t know, something like “truthyism” but perhaps better described as “writeryistic.” Plot points need to be made, and what better way to do it than two letters sent by a dead person! (I was kind of reminded of the arrival of heralds in the Greek plays, describing off-screen action, such as murders and wars.) We just weren’t buying it and the endless exposition was beginning to grate. I couldn’t buy Kroll rejecting Rosmer’s friendship outright in act one, and his subsequent return in act two layered a second thick improbability on the first. C’mon, this is all supposed to be naturalistic, have the people actually act naturally!

Speaking of which, I was really having problems with Helen McCrory’s costuming and performance. Victorian women didn’t keep their hair in modern office girl fluffy half-twists, they didn’t slop their bodies all over the place, and, in general, I just think she didn’t do her research on properly playing a woman of the era, even if she was a free thinker. I also found the way she made herself tremble when she was confronting Rosmer just a little too much. How is it that an English actor can go to so much effort to get an accent right and then totally drop the personal representation of a historical era?

The penny finally dropped in the third act, when Ibsen threw reality out the door and suddenly went for a sort of Young Werther gothic drama. Rebecca’s revelations were all a little too much to be believed, Rosmer’s endless mood changes were completely over the top, and the ending was just … ridiculous and as over the top as a pasted on Hollywood ending a la Lady and the Sea. If Ibsen has gone to all of this trouble to create real people with real problems, why have them start acting like silly ninnies just to wrap up the show conclusively? All three of us grumbled as we left – such high hopes, so cruelly dashed! I’ll still keep seeing Ibsen, but I’m hoping he doesn’t let me down as roughly as he did last night.

In other news, my esteemed colleagues the West End Whingers have been blamed by a cast member of Gone with the Wind for that show’s “untimely” demise. I think it’s ridiculous to think that anyone who pays to see a preview as putrid as the one they described should be considered in anyway obliged to keep mum about it – in my mind, they were doing a public service! If you want it to be a secret, then workshop the show or have more dress rehearsals, and if you’re genuinely concerned about what to add and what to keeep and how it will play in front of a live audience, then for God’s sake do what they did for Hairspray and trial it in some smaller theatrical markets (Seattle and Chicago in this example). Could this show have succeeded? Possibly, with months more of rewrites – but from what I heard about the songs, I think perhaps not.

(This review is for a performance that took place on Thrusday, June 12th.)

Review of “Dances at a Gathering” (Jerome Robbins) – Royal Ballet – Royal Opera House

Last night while J was in his French class, W and I headed to the Royal Opera House to see Jerome Robbin’s “Dances at a Gathering.” Both of us were pretty worn out from a long day at work, but with 6 quid day seats, we thought we’d give it a go and just see the first part of the show (the second half, a Midsummer Night’s Dream-based ballet by Frederick Ashton, just didn’t interest me much). We met first for dinner at Inn Noodle, then walked over to Covent Garden in the lovely summer evening.

The ballet was lovely, full of the humor that I expect from Robbins, and the music, by Chopin, was a treat to listen to. While I expected Marianela Nunez (as “Pink”) was going to be the be the star of the evening, it was in fact Tamara Rojo (as “Mauve”) whose performance I enjoyed the most. In one scene, late in the ballet, three men, backs to the audience, are holding three women, facing forward, on their shoulders and Ms. Rojo’s leg arched up just so, an absolutely perfect curving line the other women seemed a bit too tired to emulate. But, really, each of the dancers was a pleasure: “Brown” (Johan Kobborg) and “Brick” (I think – Sergei Polunin if it was) had a great duel (and Brown’s solo near the end of the evening was spectacular), and “Green” (Lauren Cuthbertson) had a wonderful bit as an ignored dance partner, fluttering and flailing and just hamming it up like you think ballerinas could never do.

Part of what I enjoy so much about Robbins is the way each dancer seems to have a personality and character – the dancers aren’t bodies on stage, they are performers with relationships to each other. They flirt, they are shy, they show off, they challenge each other, they are irritated. Watching this show was so fun that I couldn’t help compare it to some of the shows I’d seen earlier in the Linbury this year. It’s probably not fair to compare the dancers of the Royal Ballet, performing choreography by Robbins, to about anything else, but, well, they were great and at the top of the pack, surely a standard by which to judge others. It was a good evening, though I was grateful to have decided to leave early as I was just plain worn out and wanted to get to bed before 11:30.

A special callout to Paul Stobart, who filled in as the piano soloist at the last minute. How he was ever able to figure out the proper timing of the pieces on such short notice is beyond me, but he very much deserved the applause he got at the end of the evening!

(This review is for a performance that took place on June 10th, 2008.)

Review of “The Peony Pavilion” -下本- part three (”Reunion and Triumph”) – Suzhou Kunqu Opera company – Sadler’s Wells

It seems inevitable that a show in which we have a section/act dominated by a ghost (including a bit set in hell) would have a bit of a hard act to follow (as it were) in subsequent scenes, or, in this case, in the final part of the three night Young Lover’s version of The Peony Pavilion. This afternoon’s presentation was far quieter than the previous, high-drama evenings. With a focus on family reunification, it was basically a wrap up for what had gone before. Du Bao has to be convinced that Liniang is his daughter and not a demon in disguise, but it’s a bit of a foregone conclusion how this will turn out (though I was finding it a bit Monty Python-esque and wondered if they were going to bring out the scales and a duck to settle the question). And Liu Mengmei’s trip to the scholarly exams, how could he be anything but a success? It was good to see the old servant of Liu’s finally treated with kindness, and somehow cheering to see the slightly sleazy Confucian scholar Chen Zuiliang promoted to work for the emperor, but … somehow it all seemed a bit like those “what happened to” sections at the end of a movie.

The most dramatic for me were the scenes in which Liu Mengmei hasn’t yet found out about his success, and is unable to so much as buy a bowl of rice … and then is tortured as a liar by his father in law. His situation seemed quite dire – how COULD he be believed (“I know your daughter is dead but I’m married to her”)? How could he feed himself? – and echoed the sufferings of many people in the past, in China and in other countries. Yet as soon as he is awarded his scholar’s robes, he becomes all arrogance – no more struggling amongst the hoi polloi for him! He insults his father-in-law, hinting that soon he will take his job, and threatens the elderly scholar with exposure as a liar – it’s as if all of his years of struggle have taught him not the least bit of sympathy toward others. And Liniang is so proud of herself for having found a number one scholar to be her husband! I just saw her and Liu turning into her parents – she complaining about not having enough honors and comforts, he bullying people lower than him. And I thought, this is a romance? Perhaps at one time this was happiness.

After three nights I felt compelled to give the lovely cast a standing ovation. I’ve decided my favorite performer was Lu Jia, who played Spring Fragrance the first night and Duchess Yang the second and third nights. She really commanded the stage and was a joy to watch – a top notch actress that would bring light to any show. Shen Fengying was, I think, a very good Du Liniang – her voice was sweet and she moped delightfully. However, I felt like the cast was tired tonight – the sleeve flipping seemed a bit slow and uncoordinated, and the energy levels were really down. I can’t blame them, though – it was their sixth night, and I was lucky enough to get Thursday, Friday, and Saturday off while they kept cranking it out.

Now that I’ve been able to absorb this style a bit, I’ve decided that I really love it for its extremely simple sets and focus on “the word.” Throughout the show, staging consisted of little more than chairs and Chinese scroll paintings. The ponds, gardens, rivers, and other exotic settings referred to in the text? They are solely the product of the viewer’s imagination, as activated by the performer describing the scene. The costumes were gorgeous, to be sure, but it was really the lines, spoken and sung, that made this show come to life. Tang Xianzu’s poetry was gorgeous. It’s for this reason that I think the first night was the best of all. Part two was the most fun, with its scene set in hell and seductive lady ghost, but nothing equalled the poetry of Du Liniang in the first evening. Despite the fact this was also the longest night and I felt sure one of the scenes could have been entirely removed, this was the night I ultimately found most moving.

Afterwards we went to The Charles Lamb pub (one of my favorites in London – sure wish it was my local!) to chat about what we’d just experienced, and, lo and behold! We found an article about the show in The Sunday Times. Read and enjoy!

As a footnote, I’m probably going to be taking it pretty easy theatrically for the rest of this month. Wait, that’s a lie – I’m going to see Romersholm Thursday, Marguerite the Musical Friday, and The Revenger’s Tragedy on Saturday, and possibly two more shows on Wednesday and Sunday if I can get tickets. Ah, what a short memory I have!

(This review is for a performance that took place Sunday, June th, 2008, one of the most lovely sunny weekend days in recent memory.)

Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens – Fysh 2 Fry Theatre at The Golden Arms Pub, Bedford

While the idea of a play with a space theme, in which disco music and glittery fashion play a major part, seemed a good idea, in retrospect I’m finding it almost impossible to write about this show. It was clearly done by an amateur theater troupe, and I can’t really find it in my heart to rip them apart. I mean, maybe all of the major talent migrates to the big city from the hinterlands; maybe the middle and minor talents do, too. I doubt that anyone who goes to see this show is expecting, I don’t know, Hairspay, but I’ll say just a little bit about it for those who, I don’t know, like that car-crash feeling.

1. The theater (a side room attached to a pub) smelled like mold, yet through this I could smell the man taking our tickets – as in, as I stood five feet away buying my tickets, I could smell him though the mold. Fortunately, after I walked away from that part of the hall, I could only smell the mold. (I am guessing the Ouse had flooded the bar at some point, or something along those lines.)
2. The bar had neither cider nor hard alcohol, so I was stuck drinking overpriced, tiny bottles of red wine.
3. There were cute lights on the tables you could press to have the saucily clad waitresses slash cast members take your drinks order. This was fun. I only wish there had been more things I wanted on the menu.
4. There’s probably no reason to ever perform all of Baker Street or Leaving on a Jet Plane to a theatrical audience – the songs are just too horrifying, especially when performed by people who don’t sing well, or at all. (I was told the second song was actually supposed to be bad – but it was actually sung well, though that didn’t make up for the horror of hearing this song in its entirety.)
5. The script was trying to be bad, and yet, in the spots where it wasn’t trying, it was still bad, and not in a Flash Gordon kind of way. It was just poorly written.
6. The consistent highlight of the night was watching the expressions on the faces of the 8 year old girl, 11 year old boy, and mother and father sitting at the table across the way from us. From the very start, when we were introduced to characters “Vulva Savanna” and “Willhelm von Whackoff,” I was pretty sure this was not in any way a family friendly show. (I’d also been told that the space vixens used dildos for their rayguns, but this was not the case in this show.) I couldn’t imagine why they were there, unless they were just absolutely lacking in any kind of live entertainment in Bedford. Over and over again I saw the boy smirking at a joke he shouldn’t have understood while the girl looked confused or bored. However, he roared out loud at the necrophiliac moment. And, man, when the bartender and Wilhelm stripped to their lurex short shorts and sang “Fetish Number from Nowhere” – I thought the mom was going to spontaneously combust.
7. I didn’t leave at intermission, but in part this was because I was stuck in Bedford. That said, this still wasn’t the worst show I’ve ever seen, though according to the person who encouraged us to see it (and who is a huge Saucy Jack fan), it was, in fact, the worst version she had ever seen, though she still enjoyed herself in spite of this fact and is going to see it again, somewhere else, next weekend.
8. Both “Glitterboots Saved My Life” and “All You Need Is Disco” were pretty good songs, really. I certainly could relate to them.
9. The Bartender was absolutely the most fun to watch of any of the cast members – he had a real talent for upstaging much bigger roles.