Theatrical Events in Kent/London

Easter is on its way and as we make our way towards the holiday weekend that indulges our every wish for chocolate and a new beginning I have gone up to Dartford to spend a fortnight with LibraryGirl's family. Being just outside the Capital means I am basically staying on the fringe of theatre land and here at the moment there are some really interesting events lining up in the forthcoming months for the area.

Hall Place a 16th Century house built for former London Mayor Sir John Champney's has several events listed as coming to their beautiful property over the coming months. These include Chapterhouse Theatre Company on the 17th of June with their production of 'A Midsummer Nights Dream' by William Shakespeare. Then on the 26th of August the Cambridge Touring Theatre will be doing their musical version of 'Robin Hood'. On Sunday the 6th of June there will be a talk by 'Mr Mackett', played by an actor named John White, a Victorian School Master which is sure to be an interesting educational performance piece. Then on the 3rd of October John White will return as 'Master Peter Simpkin' a Tudor Privateer who sailed round the world with Drake. For more events please go to the very helpful and informative Hall Place website here. Or if you want to read their leaflet on upcoming events you can read their pdf file here.

The Orchard Theatre in Dartford is having a brilliant event on Sunday: an open audition for 9-19 yr olds who want to be part of a 250 strong cast in the summer youth project of FAME. If you want to take part you can find the information at this link here. In the evening of Sunday 28th of March the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra will be playing Mozart, Handel, Grieg and Dvorak. On the 7th of April Rory Bremner will present his satirical stage show 'Rory Bremners Election Battlebus'. Then from the 14th of April until the 17th of April DAODS, Dartford's premier Amateur Musical company, will present The Wizard of Oz.

The Geoffery Whitworth Theatre a reperatory amateur theatre based in Dartford is currently in the middle of their 2010 season and is presenting next week their GWT Youth Theatre show 'Grimm Tales' by Carol Ann Duffy. From the 24th of April to the 1st of May they present 'Miser' by Moliere before moving through May and June with plays by Minghella and Nick Dear. This is a company with a wealth of experience with a real drive to put on good community theatre, I would highly reccommend attending any one of these shows or indeed all of them.

That rounds up my pick of the happenings in the Dartford area, however other people to look up include: The Riverside Players, The Miskin Theatre and Erith Playhouse.

As always, all comments welcome below and if you wish to contact me then email me at chrisandrewpilgrim@yahoo.co.uk

Xtofer

Just a Small One: The Tom Thumb Theatre Margate

Today's addition to the ranks of my 'Just a Small One' columns is the Tom Thumb Theatre in Margate which is one of the most well known small theatres in the country. It consists of a former double garage/coach house built in the late Victorian period which was converted in the 1980s to a theatre space. Between the 80s and late Noughties there was a drama club on the premises and an entertainment agency as well as the Theatre. Sadly the theatre closed and was put up for sale in 2009.

However the good news it that it is now open once again after being purchased last year. It was purchased by a family group who pooled resources to buy up this important venue. They now have their own theatre company based out of the venue called the Tom Thumb Players. It looks like things are on the up once again for the Tom Thumb Theatre and with only 60 seats (according to BBC Kent) it looks to be a nice intimate space. They also seem to be starting some really interesting projects including in April 2 'Play in a Day' for performers 11+ where they will get to create, rehearse and perform a play with professional actors in one day. Priced at £20 for the day it is a very well thought out little project and in this writers opinion the sort of workshop young actors and talents should experience. There is lots happening at the Tom Thumb in the next month or so, so please check out their website here. You can also follow them on Twitter and join their Facebook page/group by just searching for them on each site.

Its great to see a creative little theatre back from the brink of complete closure, I really hope they go from strength to strength.

As always feel free to leave comments below or email me at chrisandrewpilgrim@yahoo.co.uk

Xtofer

PS: Special thanks to reader Andrew for sending me the link to their website in the first place

Northbrook Theatre ND 2nd Year FMP 2004: Motel Styx

So whilst sorting through the vast LibraryGirl archive yesterday we came across the program for my college Final Major Project of my National Diploma course. My final major project would end up being the devising portion of my diploma, we were working towards a piece of decent theatre with something we all wanted to say. We started out under the tutelage of Keryie Vickers a drama and dance teacher at Northbrook who sat us all down and discussed with us how the whole thing was going to work and who we should think about basing the majority of the action around. Now there were only four boys within our year group and I was the only member to not have played a lead. Now when you look at me I can't play the romantic lead because I look completely wrong for that type of role, I couldn't get a lead in either of the two musicals because I never stay in key and during the Shakespeare I was looked over for a more experienced actor. I have never complained about this because I actually quite like playing secondary characters because I know it is them who drive the story forward with their actions and words. I also like trying to make the best of a really deep character researching and exploring them so not getting a lead role ever really bothered me. So when Keryie laid it all out and said we should put our best serious actor forward in a decent role I thought of Robin but she nominated me, which was an honor, so I was going to play the central character. Even now I look back and shake my head at the chaos that ensued because of me being the lead and having the ability to write whatever I wanted. We were also placed under the watchful eye of a final year PGCE student named Keith Wallace, now Keith was such a nice guy and a very good actor. He was a mature student who when I had begun my National Diploma the year before had been in the BA Acting year group so I had watched him perform many times and he was a really good actor, great breathe control and vocal quality with a real talent for putting together complex and disturbing characters. I went into the project with great respect for Keith and he gave it back to us, it was fun devising a show but it wasn't what I would call a clever show or even a good show. The play was called 'Motel Styx' it was about this guy who had gone out drinking with his friends, great premise for a play and it was all my writing (this part at least), gotten so drunk that he became seperated from his pals and ends up stumbling into this creepy looking hotel. Now in retrospective I can see where certain films, programmes and themes permeated my work at 17, yes I was only 17 so please... cut me some slack, films such as the Rocky Horror Picture Show which I must have seen nearly 500 times and the theme of going out and partying came from my own insecurities about the fact that I didn't do those things and thought I should. So we had the typical generic scary old building entered by unsuspecting person, me, we even had a stereotypical creepy Hotel Manager played by our ASM Rick Ayres. Then the show got weirder and more complicated, convoluted and inherently unfunny. I had somehow thought I was writing a wonderful array of sharp and biting comedy when I started writing lines for the hippy character when in actual fact it was worse than any steretypical improvised off the top of the head impression of a concept of a hippy. The plot was a mess and I decided to send up a pop star during the show by referencing Justin Timberlake but I didn't just reference him I did a spin and sang in a high voice a line from 'Rock your body' which fell flat on its face, it wasn't funny. I looked like a prat, I felt like a prat and it wasn't fun LibraryGirl remembers it as being 'just awful' and it was. The show meandered on until mercifully it ended. The only good thing about the whole show was our set which was designed by a lovely designer named Amy Lin Braby and put together, organised by our set builder and foreman Nick Hollingdale, who now works on the Joseph national tours, it was a magnificent moving truck which allowed us to have doors and rooms move during the show. It was the most ambitious set I was involved with at Northbrook. Motel Styx was the final show of the ND that had helped show me what I wanted to do with my life, it also taught me a lot of lessons on how not to do those things. Thankfully I believe the script to this abomination was destroyed many moons ago and is not going to just pop up out of nowhere, however I do have the flyer still which I have photgraphed. If you go to the following link you will be able to read a little more about the production in the words of Rick Ayres.

If you wish to contact me or make a comment then please post below or send an email to me at this address.

Xtofer

Retro Rant! A Show I hated... We Will Rock You! Or how is this show still running?

Yes as anyone who has read my blog, especially the Meatloaf article, or indeed knows me will know that if there is one show I saw that I could not stand it was We Will Rock You.

Now I think I should start this article by explaining that I do not dislike Queen's music, it is not an issue with the music its my disdain for the actual book and perhaps to a certain aspect the performance that got my blood boiling. No Queen are my favourite band of all time, perhaps this jaded me to the show, and Freddie Mercury is the best front man of all time in my eyes. Transcending several different genres of Rock, Queen had done progressive style rock, heavy metal, rockabilly, punk rock, hard rock, ballad rock... the list goes on and on. For me hearing them and seeing their live footage at the age of 11 made a light go on in my head and I realised and discovered Rock music through them. Their music influenced so many and has garnered them multitudes of fans worldwide, in 2007 they were even declared the greatest British Rock Band of all time by listeners of BBC Radio 2, they have spent 27 years on the charts with their albums (longer than any other band) and their greatest hits album is the biggest selling album of all time in the British charts. When you take all this into account, no wonder they created a musical based on their music. With such a huge built in audience, they would have been stupid not to.

So Queen are a successful band with a back catalogue of huge hits, what could possibly go wrong? My answer is Taylor + May with Ben Elton did not work. Roger Taylor and Brian May have been touting themselves and performing as Queen since the retirement of John Deacon in 1997. Since Deacon left they have made a lot of decisions that have pimped the Queen name out and tarnished their legacy, at least in my mind, as a rock band. They even resurrected the band as a supergroup with that great Rock vocalist Paul Rodgers as lead vocals, with a voice that was nothing like Freddie's it just seemed like a bad cover band in sound but with great rock pedigree. The union between Elton and May/Taylor though would make me very excited when it was first announced and I was just hoping that I would get the chance to see it. Well luckily enough for me in 2003 my Dad bought us all tickets to see the show and I was really stoked. Its a real shame that reality didn't live up to the hype but why didn't it?

Ben Elton is someone I really respect because of the quality of his work on The Young Ones, his play Gasping and his many novels. However he wrote a real dud of a book for this musical. Of course me calling it a dud is not totally right, after all its a smash hit but artistically WWRY is a complete and utter blunder. The problem is that the script is dire, the story absurd and completely half baked. If you have seen the show and do not believe me then pick up Eltons novel from 2007 called ‘Blind Faith’ which is set in a similar type of world and the story is pulled off with much more finesse and logic. The problem is that the start of the show has some interesting but not rib ticklingly funny gags about the heroes of Rock who are slowly taken out and disposed of by the new governments who suppress the kids and their music with pop and electronica. This leads to in jokes about Taylor and May as well as other Rock legends. I giggled with trepidation when I saw this on the screens as I knew as an audience member it was my job to laugh but the material wasn’t funny. Things would go from bad to worse as the first number started with the ‘Ga Ga Kids’ singing… Radio Ga Ga. Sure it was a great musical chorus performance, after all this was a heavily financed production and I couldn’t fault the chorus but suddenly the music of Queen had lost its edge. Then I lost all willingness to be sitting in that theatre when the lead character named Gallileo, go figure, started singing ‘I want to Break Free’ whilst running up and down the width of the stage thrusting his hands at us and with a pleading look on his face. It was just awful and I felt embarrassed being there and I was so glad I wasn’t in the abomination I was watching. I wish I could say it didn’t get worse but it did, again and again and sadly yet again. When some run of the mill musical theatre actor with spiked up hair and a pure white grin is claimed to be the second coming of Freddie Mercury that makes Xtofer a mean boy. It made no sense, the fact that Ben Elton would in many ways rip off the Matrix is quite sad really and to then neuter the edginess of the story by putting in such asinine and unfunny pop culture references is appalling. The Matrix worked because it was not a defined time in the future, this shows cultural references are all set around 2001- present day and they are not funny. By the time the second act started I had made up my mind on the show, it would have to take a hell of a story to pull me back in. To say it didn’t would be an understatement, during this messy second act I was watching these two teenagers rampaging around going on and on about rock music before somehow going to Montreux, in Switzerland, where they found the statue of Freddie Mercury who was apparently pointing to Wembley Stadium the place of ‘The Living Rock’. Now there are two reasons I was mad at this, the first being the complete and utter idiocy of the two main characters travelling across Europe and just stumbling across some old hippy who tells them to go to Freddie’s statue and the second is that when Elton was writing this script the stadium was already closed with plans of demolition on hand. I know this is fiction but he basically made a redundant piece of architecture a main plot point. When the two leads reach Wembley they search for the secret stash of real instruments (do not ask it’s a headache) placed there by the three members of Queen, wow Deacon got respect from the other two, just before they were executed. They find an electric guitar for the big finale, play their rock music over the global net thing and defeat the bad guys. Rock and roll saves Earth sorry I mean ‘Planet Mall’ whoop de doo. Now this just filled me with apathy. The show ended to a huge round of applause as people cheered obviously entertained but then the pain didn’t end. We had smug actor after smug actor bounce out and just take what seemed like endless bow after bow. I am sorry but that’s not just a criticism of WWRY but of nearly all shows, the curtain calls run too long. Have 2 or maybe 3 at most otherwise why am I still clapping 3 or 4 minutes later? To satisfy some actors ego? Why? I paid my ticket so why should I feel I have to applaud for so long. Then they disappeared before the video screens flashed up ‘Do you want Bohemian Rhapsody?’ to which the people who enjoyed the show screamed yes. I was filled with terror and sadness, terror at the upcoming blandness that this rendition would surely be and sadness at how they could ruin a true musical masterpiece. It was an awful rendition and it was followed by yet more bowing. By the time I left the theatre I was furious. My sister however really enjoyed it, she has seen it twice more, my Mum who for some reason likes to know my opinion before making her own wasn’t really bothered and my Dad was just mad because he spent all that money and I didn’t really like it.

Now I know I have totally slated the show but can I just say that there are some things about the show I really liked. I think the best moment in the show is ‘No One But You’ is sung which is when the revolutionaries sing about the fallen rock stars and especially Freddie Mercury and it was sung so beautifully that I had a tear in my eye. The songs itself is a wonderful piece of writing and for any Queen fan it has a lot of significance so its probably not a surprise that it moved me. The set and lighting was brilliant and in many ways the best I had seen on the West End since Starlight Express back in 96. The Killer Queen was a brilliantly played panto villain, similar in vein to a Disney villain rather than a really evil and menacing foe. The theatre itself, the Dominion theatre is a beautiful building and it was a real pleasure to see a show in there.

So would I recommend a show that I hated? That the Guardian dubbed ‘really as sixth form as it sounds’ no I wouldn’t. Not unless you want to see an illogical piece of science fiction musical theatre with none of the tongue in cheek humour of the Rocky Horror Show. This one is strictly I would say for the 12-18 yr olds. It isn’t offensive, it’s a big spectacle and teens love it so it does its job, it doesn’t push our art forward but its not meant to. It’s a populist piece and when people look back on the noughties and musical theatre in London they will be more inclined to mention Wicked, Hairspray and Avenue Q as having more of an artistic impact, WWRY is just going to go down as smash hit and rightfully so.

Now if you won't take my word for how awful this show is then check out the official WWRY website right here.

I also want to say please check out this website for tickets.

Oh and of course please visit the Best Band Ever! At their official website:

Queen Online

If anyone wishes to comment or ask me a question or just contact me in general you can either post a comment below or email me.

Xtofer