Category: Features

Feature: Miss Belinda Blurb – The Real McCoy Review

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The Real McCoy

A rich treasure trove of etymological humour and history

The old adage – ‘you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover’ – may disagree, but we’ve all felt defeat when we see a striking picture, a fancy font, a famous face, or a well-written pitch on the reverse of our favourite tomes.

Some favour the striking austerity of The Book Thief – ‘You are going to die’ – or the magical mystery of Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, ‘the circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it… it is simply there, when yesterday it was not’. Others prefer the elegiac grace of Kay’s Trumpet, ‘When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive’, or the temptation of The Crimson Petal and the White’s ‘watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them…’

The imaginary beauty on the back of Gelett Burgess’s book Are You a Bromide?, ‘Miss Belinda Blurb’, birthed this publishing practise and even baptised it the ‘blurb’ – and it’s just one of many etymological mavericks in The Real McCoy.

The Real McCoy - Blurb Continue reading “Feature: Miss Belinda Blurb – The Real McCoy Review” →

Feature: Come From Away – West End Launch featuring all performances!

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Come From Away
Come From Away Cast

‘We all come from away…’

We all come from away… but what can you do when the world comes to you? The Canadian islanders from Gander welcomed the strangers that were grounded on their shores in 2001 and stranded there in the week after the attack on the twin towers with warmth, wit, and a kettle that was always on. The musical Come From Away, with its focus on compassion and community, follows these funny-accented locals as they care for, clothe, and comfort these ‘come from aways’, and this touching and uplifting tale is coming in to land in the UK in early 2019.

With as warm a welcome for the cast as for the come from aways, the West End islanders performed the rousing ‘Welcome to the Rock’ to welcome us all. Introducing the islanders, their eccentricities, their accents – ‘you probably understand about a half of what we say!’ – and where they all were when they learned of the 9/11 attacks, the song opens Come From Away with a folk-rock sound.

Continue reading “Feature: Come From Away – West End Launch featuring all performances!” →

Feature: Dead Space Chamber Music & Bava’s Black Sabbath

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Dead Space Chamber Music by Katie Murt Photography 1

Defying Genre, Independence, & Underscoring a Film

The Three Faces of Fear face-to-face with a live three-piece: part performance art, part foley artistry, part improvisation, Bava’s classic terror-trilogy Black Sabbath finds the perfect ambient accompaniment in Dead Space Chamber Music. In an intimate cinematic setting, the music is close and the atmosphere closer, as the closing act of the film is scored by their echoing, neoclassical intensity.

Following the tense, domestic drama The Telephone and the weird and wonderful tale of The Wurdulak, The Drop of Water is the most traditionally terrifying of the trio. The film, lit with gorgeous, incandescent pastels, follows a young woman as she’s plagued by fatal guilt after pocketing a ring from a corpse. Yet, it’s not with the corpse’s fingers that the terror grips tight, but with creeping acoustics: with little dialogue, a droning fly, and the dripping water, a lot of the terror is in the transcendental sound, and it’s something that attracted the trio to the film, says voice artist Ellen Southern.

‘It’s a sonic film, so we took the soundtrack and chose which sounds to keep, fading sound in and out from the original and playing alongside,’ as well as ‘performing the speech not as just a voiceover, but as an eerie sung suggestion of the spoken content, so it sounds more like an incantation, or that the speech is dismbodied, drifting and haunting the proceedings.’ With speech sampled, echoed, and sung-over, the effect is atmospheric, melancholic, and far from simply evoking the scenes in the film, the music, part composition, part improvisation, is existing, elemental and experimental. Continue reading “Feature: Dead Space Chamber Music & Bava’s Black Sabbath” →

Feature: What if it was in Welsh? – RCT Theatres’ Miss Julie

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RCT Theatres' Miss Julie.png

Theatre will never be an English language exclusive, but even for those with English as our native – and only – language, in the UK it often feels like it is. Performances often experiment with foreign tongues – in the South West this last year, witches have gotten to grips with Gaelic and Russian has been whispered on the Ice Road – yet, it’s always an experiment, not an experience. In such an anglocentric world, it’s all too easy to forget that other languages are also native languages, and we even have one just across the water in the South West: Welsh.

Arts Council Wales are backing a Welsh Language adaptation of an August Strindberg classic from RCT Theatres about gender, class, and the engendered war between idealisation and degradation. The titular Miss Julie is the archaic but frustratingly ageless trope of the damaged, degenerate woman in drama, but actor and director Gareth John Bale acknowledges that the ‘playwright’s attitude towards feminism [is] as relevant now as it was when the play was written in 1888. Perhaps more so.’

Playing Miss Julie’s Machiavellian charmer, the valet, Jean, opposite Gwenllian Higginson, Gareth John Bale is well aware of the play’s provocativeness, in all senses of the word: ‘the characters in the play present a challenge to the actors playing them. The temptation is to see them as one-dimensional but there is so much more to them than that. We intend to dig a little deeper.’

This production will inaugurate a tradition of touring  plays translated into the Welsh Language nationally, and it’s something that’s important to impede the degeneration of native languages. So, as Miss Julie and Jean play their dangerous game of ‘what if’, lets ask something similar of more ‘wonderful, naturalistic’ plays performed in Wales: ‘what if it was in Welsh?’

RCT Theatres’ Miss Julie touring to The Coliseum, Aberdare (19th April), Borough Theatre, Abergavenny (20th April), Taliesin Arts Centre Swansea (21st April), Chapter, Cardiff (22nd April), Blackwood Miners’ Institute (24th April), The Miners’ Ammanford (25th April), Theatre Brycheiniog Brecon (26th April), Garth Olwg Community Campus (27th April), & The Lyric Carmarthen (28th April). With thanks to Alan for the press pack and opportunity!

Feature: Wicked UK Tour Launch

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Original feature: Underdog Reviews (26th September 2017)

Wicked UK Tour Launch

Over a century ago, the Wicked Witch of the West first flew into Oz in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; green and ghastly, she was after silver slippers and had only one all-seeing eye. In 1939, she was immortalised, in a certain shade of green and on screen, by Margaret Hamilton in MGM’s musical The Wizard of Oz, this time on the hunt for ruby red slippers to make the most of Technicolor technology.

After frightening families for over fifty years, Gregory Maguire reimagined the green-skinned miscreant as a green-skinned, misunderstood young woman with, for the first time, a name: Elphaba, fashioned from L. Frank Baum’s own initials, in the novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. This previously untold story of the Wicked Witch’s life and times prior to Dorothy’s appearance was adapted into a stage musical: Wicked. With music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and book by Winnie Holzman, the musical opened on Broadway in 2003, starring Idina Menzel as Elphaba, and was nominated for 10 Tony Awards, winning three.

Now, on a September day in 2017, it’s over 10 years since Wicked opened at the Apollo Victoria Theatre in London’s West End and it’s the announcement of a new Wicked UK Tour, to begin in Bristol in the New Year, and a new Elphaba. Continue reading “Feature: Wicked UK Tour Launch” →