I'm slacking.... I've seen three more plays since then!
So first - an overdue Theatre review from Thursday evening last week. A double bill in the De Grey rooms, complete with chandeliers....
http://www.yorktheatreroyal.co.uk/shows/some_small_love_story_beulah.php#.UUT0OVcp4YQFirst up, Beulah. I saw this in the Studio, last summer, and really liked it. In fact I think I reviewed it somewhere up there ^^^^^. I really liked it again
Very much the same show, although with only one of the two actors I say last time, yet somehow completely different in a different space. A little more slick in the performance, a little less theatrical in the presentation, different but still good. I think, on balance, I preferred it in the slightly less luxurious environment of the Theatre Royal's Studio where the physicality of the performance was less constrained by the space. Plus I always like stuff performed in thrust or the round better, and this show in particular, what with its theme of the construction of a shared imaginative space and all, worked well there with the audience as backdrop. Music sounded gorgeous in the Cocktail bar, mind...
Then, Some Small Love Story. Now musical theatre isn't my thing. Let's get that clear at the start. But if you are going to do a stripped down musical with no stage or set or costumes or props or movement - just spoken lines and sung words performed to the accompaniment of a keyboard by four actors in jeans and black t-shirts looking like they've just wandered out of a Paris jazz club - then it needs to be really really good. As in the content needs to be good. The writing needs to be superb. And the singing needs to be brilliant.
This wasn't. There was a load of
tripe dialogue about someone being in ICU. I sat there thinking "Oh shit, LG will _hate_ this!" because even I could tell it was sentimental bollocks, a view confirmed by our expert-in-attendance. Failed the "arse test" completely - where you spend more time thinking about the fact that the chair isn't particularly comfy than about the show. Meh. We clapped politely, but only because we are British. Deano commented as we exited (as if pursued by a bear) the De Grey rooms that he's never been so glad to leave a theatre in his life.
I sort of wished they'd put them in the other order, to finish on a high. But in the end realised I was glad they hadn't, as otherwise LindaG and That Deano wot I dragged along with the lure of Blake-related folk-musically-rich goodness might have left at the interval and not seen Beulah which was more than worth the ticket price on its own. And they'll probably forgive me for the other one, eventually.
