Book: Jose Fernandez Music: Steve Margoshes Lyrics: Jacques Levy Director: Pollyann Tanner After being curtailed for three years thanks to Covid, the Stage Experience initiative is back on Birmingham’s Alexandra stage this week. The impressively large group of talented youngsters has chosen the perfect show to symbolise their dreams of finding careers and “living forever” in the performing arts industry with their production of Fame. Adapted from the 1980 film of the same name, Fame first hit US stages in 1988 and has seen numerous incarnations and reworkings since, which have replaced the film’s notorious grittiness with a lighter approach…
Author: The Reviews Hub - Central
The Reviews Hub - Central
The Central team is under the editorship of Selwyn Knight. The Reviews Hub was set up in 2007. Our mission is to provide the most in-depth, nationwide arts coverage online.
Writer: S.Shakthidharan Director: Eamon Flack Sid is an Australian student. His mother is Sri Lankan, but Sid knows little of his Sri Lankan heritage: his mother Radha came to Australia alone and pregnant with Sid and he has never visited Sri Lanka nor does he speak Tamil, the language of his ancestors. When in 2004 Radha asks him to help in the funeral rites for her mother, a process heavy with symbolism, Sid – real name, Siddhartha – is led through the ritual, with little understanding. In Counting and Cracking, we see key points in the history of Sri Lanka…
Music: Claude-Michel Schönberg Lyrics: Herbert Kretzmer (Original French Text: Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel) Directors: Laurence Connor and James Powell Post-Covid fighting fit ‘Les Mis/The Glums’ (to the seasoned afficionados) has become as ingrained into the evergreen touring musicals iconography as the forlorn woodcut portrait waif international poster splash. Victor Hugo’s championing of social justice and advocacy for the eradication of misery and poverty has lasting agency set against contemporaneous social crises, political hypocrisy and ennui. Its pertinent resonance ensures the themes of Les Misérables remain, sadly, as potent as ever. So, think-big creatives, Boubill and Schönberg et al decide, ‘Hey!…
Writer: William Shakespeare Director: Blanche McIntyre Notwithstanding themes of class/status, loyalty, testoster-moronic swagger glorification of war, the febrile context of women’s roles as possessions, there remains the indisputable singularity that heart-throb hero, swash-unbuckling his pants off given half a chance, Bertram, is a teenage, chauvinist, adulterous, glory-seeking, philandering dolt. Point taken. However, being ‘deceived’ into consummating a marriage by a highly questionable justified ‘sex-swop’ plot device (a much darker transaction explored in Measures For Measure) might lend some mitigating sympathy – but not much. Helena and Diana’s wiles and guiles conspiracies meanwhile are seen as holding a torch for the…
Book: Rick Elice Director: Arlene Phillips With a back catalogue of bangers and a career in the entertainment industry spanning six decades, it wasinevitable that the life and music of Cher would one day be brought to the stage. That day came in 2018, when The Cher Show had its tryout in Chicago prior to running for a year on Broadway, in a production that garnered Tony Awards for leading actress Stephanie J Block and costume designer Bob Mackie. The musical has been reworked for UK audiences, and it’s currently enjoying a UK tour, which plays this week at the Milton…
Book: Rick Elice Director: Arlene Phillips For those of a mature, reflective socio-dynamic perspective, there will be fond memories of those adorable USA hippies twinkling through the Top Of The Pops BBC’s 405 lines plighting their eternal troth with, I Got You Babe underscored by its definitive melodic ‘babah-babah-babha’ refrain on the ocarina or maybe oboe? Best not go there – social-media nightmare. The San Francisco Summer of Love inevitably wilted into a winter of discontent when the Haight Ashbury hippy aesthetic turned hate catastrophe with the horrors of Charles Manson and the later chaos of Hells’ Angels murder and…
Book: Alan Parker Words and Music: Paul Williams Director: Sean Holmes Bugsy Malone (the film) started when, the programme tells us, Alan Parker wanted to make a film his children would enjoy. The resultant exuberant film is noted, of course, for its child cast and its use of splurge guns firing cream rather than the usual, more unpleasant variety of weapon. Subsequently, Parker’s stage adaptation came to life in 1983, with several revivals, the latest, of course, being this one initially performed at the Lyric Hammersmith. We’re transported to prohibition-era New York and a story of the rivalry between two…
Writer: George Eliot Adaptor: Alan Pollock Director: Olivia Marie Mary Ann Evans spent much of her early life in Warwickshire and Coventry. Under the pen name of George Eliot, she wrote five novels including Silas Marner, published in 1861. This book is largely set in the fictitious village of Raveloe, which is based, at least in part, on the village of Allesley, now part of Coventry but retaining the feel of a small village. At its heart, Silas Marner is about community so it was appropriate that a production of Silas Marner with a strong community presence be produced as part…