What’s New with Pussycats? (Birmingham Rep.)
Verdict: A knicker-tosser glory!
Rating: 
As tempting as it was to bring along a pair knickers, the real Tom Jones is not part of this delightfully kitssch musical. He has gleefully raided his back catalog.
Instead, it’s a brassy, Sixties-style pastiche of Henry Fielding’s 18th-century comic novel about a handsome foundling seeking fame and fortune in the big bad city of London — a youth who goes by the name of… Tom Jones.
It was an act of genius, and whoever thought it was to combine these two Toms should bow.
Instead of a bovine-jukebox bio, this show combines the (rejected), reputation of the Welsh crooner to be a ladies’ man with the larkiness and humour of a Carry On film.
It means keeping up to the Joneses in more ways than one.
Leggy Kelly (right), Cruella de Vil-ish fashion designer Lady Bellaston had a blast with Sir Tom’s raunchy 1965 Bond theme Thunderball
Dominic Andersen’s Tom also has the body of a Chippendale stripper — fitting, since he is universally admired for being ‘like a ripe peach for a woman to bite into’
Here is Tom, a handsome himbo in love with Somerset (a designer for’miniature dresses’).
Alas, her mother is not too fond of him so he leaves for the city…and into the arms a sexually hungry fashion designer on Carnaby Street.
It’s as vibrant and colorful as a summer meadow musically. All the hits are here, including It’s not Unusual to The I Who Have Nothing, Sex Bomb, and the title song.
But Dominic Andersen’s Tom also has the body of a Chippendale stripper — fitting, since he is universally admired for being ‘like a ripe peach for a woman to bite into’.
Bronte Barbe, as his hometown beloved — the sweet, driven and ever-cheerful Mary — gets to bellow a few tunes of her own, including the yearning Without Love.
And Kelly Price, Cruella De Vil-ish fashion designers Lady Bellaston and Lady Bellaston have a blast with Sir Tom’s raunchy 1965 Bond theme Thunderball.
It’s as vibrant and colorful as a summer meadow musically. All the hits are here, including It’s not Unusual to The I Who Have Nothing, Sex Bomb, and the title number.
The songs are all shared with great wit, so that when our hero is thrown into jail, the inmates sing a mournful song of Green, Green Grass Of Home.
Lemuel knights, the prison’s resident psycho reveals a positively Tom Jones like boom for a raucous rendition Delilah.
Joe DiPietro’s dialogue might, at times, struggle to make the cut at an end-of-pier Christmas show (Mary: ‘Mother was right about everything — love is useless!’
However, more often than not there are glimpses of Wildean wit. For example, “women always become disappointed in their husbands but never in the money they make.”
And my favourite, Lady Bellaston’s line to Tom as she lolls about in her negligee: ‘Take me upstairs — use the tricks you learned in prison.’
There is a freedom and gay abandon to the production, directed by the young Luke Sheppard, whose big West End break came in 2019 with & Juliet. He again shows his talent for creating campy, brash, and crowd-pleasing entertainment.
The scenes move at a leisurely pace as the cast of 18, who are all 18 years old, throw aside floppy hats and paisley shirts to strike flamboyant poses.
It all looks great thanks to Jon Bausor’s set design. It features Sixties flower power, album-cover art, and screenprint scenery highlighted with blocks of primary colour.
Dame Arlene Phillips (she behind Strictly and all that) performs a splashy period choreography complete with hip shuffles, sidesteps, and shoulder shimmies.
Howard Hudson’s lighting design also adds fun touches, with pink-colored spotlights that trace the walls.
Sean Foley, the Rep’s Artistic director, was installed right before lockdown and promised Brummies top-quality popular entertainment. We now know that he is true to his word.
Bronte at the top of her game
Wuthering Heights, (Bristol Old Vic).
Verdict: You can’t stand more excitement
Rating: 
A giggly, ungodly ragamuffin wanders on to the stage, opens a clothbound book and cracks a whip — expertly — breaking loose a hellish storm.
Emma Rice, director, has once again thrown out all the rules and harnessed Emily Bronte’s witty gothic monster. Wuthering HeightsIn a thrilling, imaginative piece of theatre.
Nelly, the housekeeper narrator is gone.
Instead an all-singing, all-dancing chorus sounds every note of the novel, raising it into the realms of Greek tragedy and making a magnificent character of the Yorkshire Moors — which stretch from the haunted, forbidding crags of Wuthering Heights to the sunlit pastures of Thrushcross Grange.
Nandi Bhebhe, majestic in a crown twigs, leads the Moors. They howl like a hurricane, warning to be careful what they plant.
Emma Rice, director, has once again thrown out all the rules and harnessed Emily Bronte’s unwieldy, gothic monster, Wuthering Height.
Nandi Bhebhe, majestic in a crown twigs, leads the Moors. They howl like a hurricane, warning to be careful what they plant.
Lucy McCormick’s captivating Catherine dominates the first part, torn between two lovers: Ash Hunter’s brooding Heathcliff and Edgar Linton (Sam Archer), but drawn to the softness and comfort of the pampered, pampering Edgar Linton.
She is a torrent of words until, finally, as a Tina Turner-like rock goddess she sings: “I am earth, and I am sky.”
The story emerges with astonishing clarity. The characters are introduced and their names are chalked onto slates that will become gravestones upon their death.
Rice finds comedy where none was: Rice’s character arrives in a Deerstalker, blown into by the storm, and leans at an acute angle to suggest that the hurtling wind is coming.
Katy Owen plays Heathcliff’s wife Isabella and dances with elastic daintiness. As her son, she is reborn in the role of Just William’s Violet Elizabeth Bott’s lisping sibling.
A skull with its ears fixed to the blade of an axe becomes a hilariously wild puppet hound.
Katy Owen plays Heathcliff’s wife Isabella and dances with elastic daintiness. As her son, she is reborn in the role of Just William’s Violet Elizabeth Bott’s lisping sibling.
Inevitably, perhaps, the intensity falls in the second-half with Catherine gone. But with young Cathy finding happiness and Rice accepting sunshine and hope, Rice is able to embrace the sun and hope.
Rice has given Wuthering Heights spectacular dramatic wings just like the books at the ends bendy sticks conjure the quivering bird on the Moor.
GEORGINA BROWN
You can’t resist a Jaws and Shaws action
The Shark Is Broken (Ambassadors Theatre London).
Verdict: It’s Shaw.
Rating:
It was wonderful to see Robert Shaw, the great Robert Shaw, come back to life through the birth of his son Ian.
This is a behind the scenes tale from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws set. Shaw emerges from the underground speakeasy with his hair greasy and his lips crooked.
Ian is the spit of his dad in Jaws — one of Shaw’s last films before he died of a heart attack in 1978 on a roadside in Ireland, aged just 51.
Ian, now 51 years old, has the same snarl as his father and the same malignant chuckle. He even uncorks some father’s intoxicating stage charisma.
A hit on the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019, Guy Masterson’s 90-minute show, which was written by Shaw Jr along with Joseph Nixon, recreates the idle hours the actor spent with his Jaws co-stars Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss — bickering, playing games and telling stories as they waited for the film’s mechanical shark to be fixed.
It was wonderful to see Robert Shaw, the great Robert Shaw, come back to life through the birth of his son Ian.
The occasion is a behind the scenes tale from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws set. Shaw emerges as though he’s stepped out of an underground speakeasy. His skull is covered in greasy boozer’s hair, and his lips are full of a crooked smile.
Duncan Henderson’s design divides a replica from the movie boat from deck to the keel as if with can openers to give us ringside tickets.
Even more stunning is Nina Dunn’s panoramic video projection of the Atlantic, complete with gulls, fog, sunsets and stars — and waves lapping at the boat’s hull.
Ian nails his dad’s roguish charm and the crowning glory is his speech in Jaws about being sunk in shark-infested waters in World War II — which Shaw wrote and performed for Spielberg on set.
Demetri Goritsas is Scheider’s ‘look of incorruptibility’.
While Liam Murray Scott may be less like Shaw’s whipping boy Dreyfuss than Shaw, he’s still a furry-faced child whose paranoia and lapse into cocaine-induced paranoia are tenderly soothed when Shaw recites a Shakespeare sonnet.
Although there are some redundant scenes, Shaw Jr is a master at delivering a powerful eulogy for his long-lost father.
Now, let’s watch the film!
The devil is in detail. This calm but damning account of Grenfell’s mishaps shows how the details can be deadly.
GRENFELL VALUE ENGINEERING (Tabernacle Theatre London W11)
Verdict: The devil is always in the details
Rating:
72 people died in the Grenfell Tower Fire, which occurred in a building owned by the public and located in the richest borough of London. We had to hear and consider the stories and grievances of survivors and bereavement. These were the first.
Not only that, but we also had to ask technical, engineering, and financial questions in Phase 2.
Why was it remodeled with less-flammable, highly flammable cladding that melted in minutes after a minor domestic fire erupted to the 25th floor?
Who signed off on what, when — and why? Were they aware of the risks they were taking? Were they untrained or careless?
Actors can speak exactly the same lines as lawyers and witnesses. Once, a building control officer was so horrified that he admitted he was the final link’ who might have defied the law.
You shouldn’t expect drama: it is set by Nicholas Kent in a boring room with Ron Cook as the main judge and Thomas Wheatley as Sir Martin MooreBick in the chair. A calm, listening judge with a long history in technical shipping matters,
Or was it more about putting ‘value’ on the tenants than saving money and making a clapped-out tower look smart in a posh neighborhood?
Richard Norton Taylor’s play is based on excerpts from that public inquiry.
You shouldn’t expect drama: it is set by Nicholas Kent in a boring room with Ron Cook as the main judge and Thomas Wheatley as Sir Martin MooreBick. They are a calm, listening judge who has a long history in technical shipping matters.
Actors can speak exactly the same lines as lawyers and witnesses. Once, a building control officer was so horrified that he admitted that he was the final link’ who might have defied the law.
Another woman confesses that she ‘binned her notebooks’ about important meetings even after the fire.
Sometimes, emails are displayed on a screen between the Council and the contractors.
The civility, the calm and the painfully painful questioning grips you, even though no one is continuing dramatically like Rumpole of Bailey.
I sat in silence with some thoughtful, focused, and attentive school parties from the neighborhood. The play is not for profit, and locals are not charged any fees.
Rydon, the suppliers of Celotex material, offers real moments of under-emphasised shock.
Two barristers representing survivors give strong, brief speeches. But the devil is in detail: in failings to exercise careful public duty. It knocks you out.
After London, the play will have a short run at Birmingham Rep. For more information visit grenfellvalueengineering.com
Wilde and a wild night at Reading’s new theatre
Dorian (Reading Rep Theatre).
Verdict: Queer culture club
Rating: 
It must help when you adapt a work by Oscar Wilde to have comedy bones, and Phoebe Eclair-Powell certainly does — her mother is stand-up Jenny Eclair.
Owen Horsley also directs. She co-wrote Dorian, an entertaining queer version of The Picture Of Dorian Gray.
The writers interleave the narrative of Wilde’s only novel with his own story; ‘three Victorian sodomites’ — Dorian, Basil Hallward (the portrait painter) and Lord Henry Wotton (his friend, the libertine who corrupts Dorian) — morph into, respectively, Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas, the cause of Wilde’s downfall), Wilde’s loyal friend Robbie Ross, and Oscar.
The energetic cast of three flit between their dual roles — Nat Kennedy as Basil/Robbie, Che Francis as Henry/Oscar and Andro Cowperthwaite as Dorian/Bosie, who shows some real delicacy as Dorian, a man destroyed first by vanity, then debauchery.
Dorian is a hilarious celebration of queer culture. It also addresses Wilde’s thoughts about art reflecting life.
The broadness of the acting — and it is for the most part very broad — doesn’t always serve the writing; some of its subtleties are lost as the play explores the darker side of Dorian’s story.
Dorian is a hilarious celebration of queer culture. It also addresses Wilde’s thoughts on art reflecting the life.
The broadness of the acting — and it is for the most part very broad — doesn’t always serve the writing; some of its subtleties are lost as the play explores the darker side of Dorian’s story.
E.M. Parry’s set — huge walk-though picture frames, sparkly drapes and fabulous costumes — is nicely evocative of Wilde’s fin-de-siecle world, while Jasmin Kent Rodgman’s terrific sound design pulsates through the show.
Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for gross indecency at Reading Gaol. It’s fitting that Dorian relaunched Reading Rep Theatre. The theatre, which was founded in 2012 by Reading College, is now housed within a new 180-seat venue located in an old Salvation Army hall.
Paul Stacey, the artistic director, is leading the young and enthusiastic team that runs the first professional production house in the area. The opening season features new works as well those by Dickens or Shakespeare. It also has ambitious future plans. It is my wish that it succeeds.