Any story-line involving a single woman is inherently more dramatic than a narrative of a single man because of biology’s cruel deadlines.
musicals
Damon Runyan’s short stories inspired what has become an iconic and much-loved Broadway musical and movie – Guys and Dolls.
When Iolanthe in 1882 became the fourth consecutive major success for Gilbert and Sullivan, Gladstone, a Conservative-turned-Liberal, was prime minister and women had no vote.
The London theatre scene could easily manage without another musical about love. But the UK premiere of this Australian-born celebration of the greatest of emotions by Peter Rutherford and James Millar is nevertheless as welcome, even as necessary, as every generation’s attempts to redefine love for themselves.
As far as 1960s audiences were concerned, Lionel Bart – famed for the musical Oliver – had lost his “twang” when he came up with the box office flop “Twang!!”, with two exclamation marks. But if the audiences of the swinging sixties weren’t ready, the 21st century theatre-goers of London’s Union Theatre – renowned for alternative, low-budget, high-entertainment musicals – are.
In a capitalist society, we’re nearly all hired hands, but the extent of the exploitation is more or less pernicious. Melvyn Bragg’s gritty, Northern, sweeping tale ultimately finds the best option for the ordinary man is to accept a pittance to work above ground rather than to toil in a futile World War I trench or in a narrow coal seam beneath the sea.
From big budget to fringe to retro to quirky and ironic, musicals have swept the London stage as a feel-good formula destined to pack houses. A gothic rock musical that requires a team of cleaners to de-gore the stage after the first half and should include earplugs in the programme just could become a cult.
Even in times when rehash is more common than originality, the risk with a revival of Burt Bacharach’s late 1960s musical Promises, Promises, in turn based on Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment, is that it feels doubly derivative.
One of the most vexed questions around prostitution today concerns the legal status and rights of sex workers. Feminists and policy makers fall into two camps.
In our modern, toxic world, the perfect embodiment of the endless struggle between good and evil could be the green warrior versus the polluter.
Ultimately, that’s the premise of The Toxic Avenger, the rock musical, which director Benji Sperring happened to see during one free afternoon off-Broadway in New York in 2009.
Noel Coward wrote of his musical Ace of Clubs that “the idea is to do it as simply as humanly possible”. For the first professional London revival since the original 1950 production, Southwark’s Union Theatre draws on its decade of experience of producing loveable, low-budget musicals and takes Coward at his word.
Five hundred years ago, Peckham was green and pleasant. By the 1980s and 1990s, when two of its most famous fictional characters Del Boy and Rodney Trotter were plying their dodgy wares, even the pigeons wanted to be elsewhere, or so Rodney tells us.
By Barbara Lewis • comedy, musicals, theatre, year 2019 • Tags: Barbara Lewis, musicals, theatre