Summer nights are time for song and dance
Kiln Theatre
Not every theatre needs a play or a musical on its stage. In the summer holidays especially a show need only to be a great evening out to justify its existence , like the mind-reading magician Marc Salem whom the Kiln hosted back in the day when it was the Tricycle. Or, there is this revival of Sheldon Epps’s 1980 off-Broadway show.
Perhaps Susie McKenna’s production could have done more to make this revamped theatre and its auditorium feel like the 1930s depressionera Chicago hotel in which it is set. But on stage all that is needed to suggest the transgressive, seediness of the place — and of the people who live there — is a neon hotel sign.
With its excellent on-stage jazz band the show is much more gig than anything else. But the producers call it a musical, presumably because the cast play characters. Sharon D Clarke is The Lady, a former star singer, she tells us, who predicts she will one day will reclaim her rightful place in showbiz. But for now she is content to
live in her room and with the memories of her glorious past. She also serves as a wry, waspish and humane observer of her fellow residents — The Woman (Debbie Kurup) whose loneliness is made fleetingly bearable by drugs supplied by the Clive Rowe’s preying dealer — aka The Man. Gemma Sutton is The Girl who, unlike her fellow hotel guests, is still hopeful that life can serve up something other than pain and loss — the two ingredients of every great blues song ever written, here by the likes of Ann Ronell (Willow Weep for Me) Bessie Smith (Blue Blues) and Duke Ellington (I’m Just a Lucky So-And-So).
You couldn’t hope for them to be better sung than they are in this production. On the back of her Oliver Award-winning title role performances in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, Or Change, and as Linda Lowman in Death of a Salesman, Clarke commands the evening with the voice and authority that has made her our greatest stage star. But even she is slightly upstaged by Kurup whose performance suggests the kind of tragic backstory akin to Billie Holiday’s, while Rowe’s octave-vaulting range recalls his Olivier-winning form in the National Theatre great revival of Guys and Dolls in which h played Nicely Nicely Johnson. And as if that were not enticing enough, Sutton is like a brunette version Debbie Reynolds — not the all-American girl version, but the sassy, savvy, irrepressible songstress. A great night out for theatregoers who fancy a gig rather than a play for a change. Royal Opera House
The Bolshoi Ballet is back at the Royal Opera House for a short season with some of its most popular productions. The company opened with the spectacular Spartacus, and continued with Swan Lake. The Bright Stream and Don Quixote due to be performed.
All the performances are dedicated to Victor Hochhauser, who died earlier this year. He, together with his wife Lilian, was instrumental in bringing Russian ballet to the West and this season is a fitting tribute to his love of the art.
Swan Lake is always a crowd-pleaser, but Yuri Grigorovich’s version is not a traditional reading. Under the Soviet regime, Swan Lake had to have a happy ending, but thankfully that narrow-minded artistic edict no longer applies. This production reinstates a sad ending but it is less a tragic fairytale and more of an examination of Prince Siegfried’s troubled mind, with Von Rothbart replaced by “The Evil Genius”.
Much of the famous Petipa/Ivanov
choreography remains, but Grigorovich takes some liberties with Tchaikovsky’s score, chopping and changing the order of some of the dances and scrapping the final magnificent climax. The final scene with Prince Siegfried standing alone clearly does not work - we need to see the Prince and his beloved Odette together in their feathery heaven, while the orchestra blasts out those dramatic final bars of Tchaikovsky’s magnificent score.
The dancing is impressive: the corps de ballet are well drilled and sublime as the swans in the lakeside scenes. The Russian style is broad and expansive, with legs curving ever upwards en attitude; arms exotic and luscious.
In the ballroom scene, the national dances were led by various princesses who, together with their retinues, danced their variations en pointe. They performed beautifully, but there is nothing like heeled boots and some real stomping for giving those character dances, well…some character.
Georgy Gusev stole the show at the performance I saw, defying gravity as The Fool, with a series of breathtaking jumps and pirouettes. Yulia Stepanova was a touching Odette and a sparking, sexy Odile, while Artem Ovcharenko looked suitably pained as Siegfried.
This version of Swan Lake may not please the purists, but the dancing is something to behold.