Fortune smiles on Grinning Man
WHEN the new musical The Grinning Man played at the Bristol Old Vic, audience members began turning up dressed like the title character, who uses a silk scarf to hide the Joker-like smile that disfigures his face.
‘People sent in art work; and they learned the songs,’ marvelled Tom Morris, the Old Vic’s artistic chief, who directed the show last year and will perform the same duties when it transfers to the Trafalgar Studios, where previews will start on December 5.
The Grinning Man is based on Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs. Morris explained that Hugo wrote it while in exile. ‘It’s a classic outsider story . . . an almost Phantom-style love story between a disfigured man and a beautiful blind woman he has grown up with.’
He added that the tale is set in an imaginary, extremely brutal version of England. Louis Maskell, who played Grinpayne (he of the marked face) and Julian Bleach, as a psycho clown, will reprise their roles when producer Howard Panter transfers it to the Trafalgar.
The director said Maskell’s vocal range made him the perfect actor to interpret the numbers written by Tim Phillips and Marc Teitler.
‘Louis is a proper baritone high tenor,’ said Morris, who co- directed the National Theatre hit War Horse with Marianne Elliott.
Finn Caldwell and Toby Olie, who played various parts of horses in War Horse, have created puppets — including a wolf — for Morris’s new show, through their company, Gyre and Gimble.