Upcoming Shows Worthing

What’s on? Worthing Theatres.

Coming Soon!

Direct from the West End Dreamboats and Petticoats is a Rock N Roll musical featuring some of the best music from the 50s and 60s. With prices ranging from £15-£29.50 per ticket this West End show is brilliantly priced and being presented in the Pavillion there isn’t really a bad seat in the house. The run starts Monday 7th of June and runs until Saturday the 12th with plenty of concessions for parties, youth groups and schools.

Treemonisha by Scott Joplin is a piece of Opera set in the American South. A former slave tries to change her communities attitude towards race and superstitions. Presented by Pegasus Opera Company coming straight from their successful run at Sadler’s Wells this is bound to be a good presentation of mid sized opera for a budget price. Coming to the Pavillion on the 3rd of June at 7:30pm tickets range from £19.50-£23 a fraction of the price of seeing one of the big opera companies.

Inside Job by Brian Clemens is the latest Ian Dickens production to come to Worthing. Described as The Mousetrap meets Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels I am sure this will be another fun show from IDP, despite my trashing of Nightfright, and I would recommend anyone looking for a good reasonably priced night out to go to any Ian Dickens Production. Starring Matt Healy and Christopher Villiers it is also a chance to see some true television stars live onstage. It begins its run at the Connaught on Tuesday the 8th of June and finishes on the 12th of June. Tickets start at £13 and go up to £22.

Update on Sean Hayes Drama

Considering the news last week regarding Sean Hayes it seems Broadway has come out to support him. It has been revealed that he will be presenting this years Tony Awards, something which I am sure will go down very well. With his natural charisma and energy he is a great choice of host, he is also up for honors as 'Best Male Actor in A Musical' for which he has plenty of competition but I say good luck to him.

What’s on? Brighton Theatre Royal

Currently running:

The Rat Pack Live From Las Vegas

 

The constantly touring Rat Pack Experience comes back to the Brighton Dome again from the 24th to the 29th of May. Featuring your favourite songs from Frank, Sammy and Dean’s records and shows this is a perfectly fun night out. The show starts at 7:45pm as well as a matinee on Thursday at 2.30pm and Saturday has a 4pm show.

Coming very soon!

Beauty and the Beast

Brighton Theatre Group is one of the premier amateur theatre companies in the Sussex area and their latest production is Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Boasting a fantastic score by Alan Menken this is a magical production, having seen the West End tour several years ago if BTG can produce even 10% of the quality that tour did this show will be one to remember for years. A truly wonderful event that would be perfect to take the kids to during half term holidays. It runs from the 1st of June to Saturday the 5th of June with a signed performance on Thursday the 3rd of June.

 

Salome

The verse tragedy by Oscar Wilde is presented by one of the UK’s greatest theatre companies producing in recent years ‘Six Characters in Search of An Author’ on the West End and ‘ENRON’ which enjoyed a National Tour, currently runs in the West End and is about to end on Broadway. Starring Con O’Neill and Zawe Ashton this production is sure to continue the trend. It starts on Tues 15th of June and runs until Sat 19th of June with Matinees on Thurs and Sat at 2:30pm.

 

Monty Python’s Spamalot

 

Continuing its incredibly popular National Tour is the Tony Award Winning Spamalot which bills itself as ‘funnier than the black death’. With Jodie Prenger the Nancy from Oliver who won ‘I’d do Anything’ and Eric Idle as God (albeit recorded) this show will surely be one of the most fun shows to come to Brighton this year. Running between Mon 21st to Sat 26th June with a signed performance on Thurs 24th this is one not to miss.

Just a Small One: The Smallest Theatre in the World?

This is a puppet theatre so whilst I have put it in this list it is not really a ‘Theatre’ as such because it is a street performance piece in many ways. However due to the calibre of the pieces, a tiny puppet version of Hamlet is one of 4 shows you can see, and the fact that it tours around Western Europe is quite impressive. Plus it harks back to the days of the travelling Magic Lantern something that just stirs feelings of magic and fun within me. Please watch the clip below to see some beautiful puppetry from this wonderful little theatre.

Congratulations to Douglas Hodge

As someone who has championed Douglas Hodge for this years awards season it was with great joy that I read this morning about the results of the Drama Desk Awards that he has won 'Outstanding Actor In A Musical' for his work in La Cage Aux Folles. This bodes well for his chances to win the coveted Tony later this year. On winning the award Hodge was qouted as saying:

"What a wonderful welcome I have been given in this wonderful city,"

Other awards given out included:

Outstanding Play:

• Red: John Logan

Outstanding Musical:

• Memphis

Outstanding Revival of a Play:

• A View from the Bridge

• Fences

Outstanding Revival of a Musical:

• La Cage Aux Folles

Outstanding Actor in a Play:

• Liev Schreiber: A View from the Bridge

Outstanding Actress in a Play:

• Jan Maxwell: The Royal Family

Outstanding Actor in a Musical:

• Douglas Hodge: La Cage Aux Folles

Outstanding Actress in a Musical:

• Montego Glover: Memphis

• Catherine Zeta-Jones: A Little Night Music

Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play:

• Santino Fontana: Brighton Beach Memoirs

Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play:

• Viola Davis: Fences

Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical:

• Christopher Fitzgerald: Finian's Rainbow

Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical:

• Katie Finneran: Promises, Promises

Outstanding Director of a Play:

• Michael Grandage: Red

Outstanding Director of a Musical:

• Michael Mayer: American Idiot

Outstanding Choreography:

• Twyla Tharp: Come Fly Away

Outstanding Music:

• David Bryan: Memphis

Outstanding Lyrics:

• John Kander & Fred Ebb: The Scottsboro Boys

Outstanding Book of a Musical:

• Alex Timbers: Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

Outstanding Orchestrations:

• Daryl Waters & David Bryan: Memphis

Outstanding Musical Revue:

• Sondheim on Sondheim

Outstanding Music in a Play

• Branford Marsalis: Fences

Outstanding Set Design:

• Phelim McDermott, Julian Crouch & Basil Twist: The Addams Family

Outstanding Costume Design:

• Matthew Wright: La Cage Aux Folles

Outstanding Lighting Design:

• Neil Austin: Red

Outstanding Sound Design in a Musical:

• Acme Sound Partners: Ragtime

Outstanding Sound Design in a Play:

• Fitz Patton: When the Rain Stops Falling

Outstanding Solo Performance:

• Jim Brochu: Zero Hour

Unique Theatrical Experience:

• Love, Loss, and What I Wore

£19 million has been Cut from the Art Council's funding

As readers of my blog will know I have been following the proposed and now the reality of cuts to the Arts Council since the start of the year and now here is the latest news from the Arts Council. Here are two articles from the Stage newspaper.

£19 Million Cut from the Art Council's funding.

Now I say it HAS been cut mainly because the Government has asked them to do so which generally means there is no negotiation. However the Arts Council has made it clear that cutting 19 million is not really possible. Here the Stage continues its coverage with the second article.

£19 Million could harm frontline Arts.

And of course there is the BBC Arts Editors blog which covers the story here.

My opinion is that it doesn't matter how much they cut the Arts will survive, are we in for a dark time? Sure we are, its going to get tougher to get funding and the guidelines for funding will be followed with more scrutiny over the next few years but the good thing is that situations like this will make artists work harder to get their work seen and developed. £19 million as Will Gompertz is manageable but its still a hefty chunk and further cuts could curtail our cultural growth further... but it remains to be seen if more cuts will come, they probably will but we can hope they won't.

The Importance of Lighting: An FPTheatre handout

Lighting is a huge part of the Theatre nowadays, after all one cannot help but enjoy the spotlight, and  it figures heavily in the design and feel of a piece. Here are some examples of the lights that make us shine.

 

The most common lights you will find a company using are Parcan's. Your basic Parcan light is named as such because it resembles a tin can with a bulb in it. These lights produce very flat light but when linked with haze or smoke machines can create very interesting effects. However these lights are durable, easily set up, moveable and provide excellent stage washes and basic lighting.

The Cycl/Strip light is generally used in the professional theatre to light the Cyclorama curtain at the back of the stage. However you can also use it to flood the stage with light and colour, you will find a lot of DIY theatre enthusiasts using the Cyc for this very purpose. Easy to use, set up and maintain the lights like Parcans is the bread and butter of lighting.

Scoop Lights are smaller generally than the cyc yet are used mainly for the same reason, to flood the stage with light or to light up the backdrop.

The fresnel lamp is a fantastic tool, great for washes of light on stage and for side lighting. These are probably the most frequently used lamps in the professional theatre. These lights are fantastic and can be used for all sorts of effects when used in conjunction with gobo's and gels.

Of course there are also more specialist lights such as the spotlight and moving and tracking lights nowadays. However the tracking and moving lights are something that is gradually being phased in. If you hire venues with a pre existing lighting grid it is generally a lot simpler than owning your own because you may have staff there able to help you. The company we are involved in tours and we borrow a very small lighting rig from a local school for a donation towards the school. We find this to be a cost effective way of using lighting and also an opportunity to promote our show within the school and staff there.

Those who are lucky and own their own lighting equipment will know one of the most essential parts of the kit is a good lighting board, these can range from basic boards with sliders only to ones that can be programmed to brightness and to instantly do a lighting effect at a touch of a button. Obviously the high end of the market costs a lot but if you run regular big shows it is worth the investment.

This only the very basic information on lighting for the theatre. It is an artform even of itself and adds a lot to any theatrical experience. There are numerous books on the subject of lighting in the theatre but two of the best I have found, which I know several of my techie friends have used or refer to regularly, are:

Lighting and Sound by Neil Fraser, printed by Phaidon it is a very good technical book that looks more at lighting than sound but still gives some great information, which is true of most Phaidon theatre books.

Stage Lighting Design: The Art, The Craft, The Life. This is a textbook that contains numerous lighting plans, photos, tips and information needed to truly understand Theatrical lighting including an entire section focused solely on the history of Lighting. Written by the man who designed the New National Theatre's lighting system, Richard Pilbrow, this is truly a great resource.

Weird Newscasters: Another WLIIA Video

Please note that I did not upload this video to youtube, nor do I own the copywright to this video, that belongs to the ABC network of America.

Ian Dickens Nightfright by Roger S Moss is a massive Rip Off

‘Nightfright: The Nightmare of Your Life’


I do not know what happened yesterday but someone in Worthing Theatres felt that it was ok to take £34 off me for a subpar performance of a very shoddily written ‘thriller’ that would have even made the worst amateur company look like professional actors. Now, whether or not this was because it was a matinee, I do not know but it was a show that felt like nobody on stage really cared about the product they were presenting to the audience.

I should probably restart and explain that yesterday, the 22nd of May 2010, LibraryGirl and myself attended the matinee performance of ‘Night Fright: The Nightmare of Your Life’ presented by Ian Dickens Productions. We went along after looking at the poster and deciding we wanted to see a horror/thriller as we hadn’t seen one before and thought it could be interesting. After all when a poster claims it to be ‘The Nightmare of Your Life’ you assume it is going to be scary, unless of course it is written by Roger S Moss. This play isn’t scary, it isn’t a thriller and it definitely is not a comedy despite trying desperately hard. This play has a very big identity problem in that despite sounding like a horror/mystery/thriller it seems to be trying to dip its finger in about 4 different genres and failing miserably at all 4. It is to date Roger S Moss’s only play and sadly you would be able to tell why if you too had been subjected to this mess of a play.

Now, because the play itself is a huge mess it makes the direction of such a mess a minefield, after all how do you direct a play with an identity crisis? Of course bad source material is not an excuse for bad directing but a closer look at the programme notes that it is directed by Chris Moreno, the man responsible for Buddy on the West End, Ian Dickens and assistant director David North. So perhaps it is a case of too many cooks giving the actors too many conflicting messages? Well the problems with this production are so baffling that who truly knows? All I know is that the show seemed to be suffering from some pretty big glitches after promising oh so much. From the massive posters all over the Worthing Area that looked like this:

To the wonderful programme which featured not just one but two articles on thrillers and horrors both in Cinema and the Theatre. It all read brilliantly and as I said before the programme said that this Ian Dickens Production was directed by Ian Dickens himself which made me confident that this was going to be a quality piece of theatre…

Let’s get to the first scene:

So, the lights go up and the curtain rises to a very good-looking set which causes both me and LibraryGirl to smile at each other in anticipation of what is sure to be a good production. I have to say that the aesthetic of the set is quite brilliant-looking and the designers David North and Alan Miller Bunford have done a good job creating the idea of a spacious chapel made into a one bedroom home. The characters enter and the two potential tenants looking over the property seem quite normal but there is a serious feeling of over playing from Dianne Nicks who is playing Miss Peterson. Later in the play this makes sense but for the moment it is a bit weird and I wonder why she has been directed to act so over the top like a caricature.

Back to the performance, as the first big problem occurs when the male lead, Frank Gilman, ably played by Neil Roberts, heads up the staircase and the banister wobbles precariously as if its about to fall off. Now this instantly takes me out of the moment and makes me feel really odd, I understand that with a touring piece the set needs to come apart quickly and be reassembled and there may have been an issue and it could have broken etc but it still looks bad because it wobbles all over the place. This of course drew my focus to the stairs and you could see all the scuff marks that made the stairs look like set and that the paint was coming off. I will reiterate that this is because it’s a touring production and retouching the set every day is probably not high on the agenda as it might be a waste but marred by the already wobbly set I was starting to worry about what I had forked out my money for. Then there is the chaos and idiocy of the front door. You could make a complete episode of ‘You’ve Been Framed’ from the many different problems it causes. Firstly there is the original idea that the door gets stuck and will not open which seems to be remembered when it is written in the script and then forgotten as unimportant throughout the rest of the play. The trick apparently is that you’re supposed to give the bottom of the door a little kick and it would suddenly open, this was reinforced by both Dianne Nicks and David Callister whenever they were on stage but the two leads seemed to forget this. This lack of attention to detail was not just a simple case of being part of the play, after all, there is a large chunk of the script taken up by viewing the house and getting it ready for occupancy yet these glaring errors were never commented on by the actors. As I said Neil Roberts who plays the lead Frank Gilman is quite engaging and commands the stage powerfully, however his female lead Helen George is underwhelming and more than a little annoying. With a voice that stays on one level throughout barely concealing the boredom and attitude that screams ‘This isn’t important, I don’t want to be here’. As the first scene went on I felt like I was being fed the beginning of a cannibal storyline in the same vein as the short Hammer Horror stories from the ‘Tales from the Crypt’ films of the 70s. It felt good but cheesy but this was because the pace was so fast, not because of the script but the rushed acting, that I couldn’t catch every detail. Then the scene ended and the curtain came down for the change over and I thought ‘oh wow what are they doing to change the set?’ and then the curtain went back up and it was movement of a few cushions and that was it. That was all-it took over a minute to change the cushions and remove a couple of items of clothing! This completely cut into the timing of the show and stopped any possible tension build, something which the programme had told us was imperative to this genre of theatre.

Scene 2 took us from Horror/Thriller territory as the couple moved in, to sex comedy territory as the now married couple go through the stereotypical innuendos that had us both cringing. Not helped by the fact that there was no chemistry between the two leads it just came across badly, I got the distinct feeling that the material was below the actors onstage. This scene at the very beginning though did give the one scary moment of the whole show, yes that is right the only scary moment in this entire horror happens about 15 minutes in and that is your lot for fear. We also got introduced to the character of Mr Watson played by David Callister and then Joanne Heywood as Jacqui. Both came on and played very well, Callister in particular playing a great slimy estate agent. Heywood’s Jacqui was vampish and overtly sexual but suffered from the same problem that haunted Helen George that she seemed like she didn’t really want to be there.

Scene 3 introduced the last character to us, the gardener Mr Harvey played by Henry Cormas who was dressed in a terrible costume with an awful fake beard. His diction was appalling, I don’t know if the script asked for it but we couldn’t tell what he was going on about it just sounded like Cornish mumbling. It didn’t further the storyline because it was incoherent, it was interspersed with bad jokes and a moment that was supposed to be chilling and frightening but just came across as bad pantomime acting.

When the curtain went down on the first act I was slightly tempted to ask LibraryGirl to follow me to the box office so I could ask for a refund but a) I wanted to genuinely see if it would get better and b) I don’t think they would have given me my money back. All I could do is hope that after the interval things would get better.

They didn’t, in fact they got worse and as flimsy plot point after flimsy plot point attacked me I got more and more bored until I gave up and just watched without trying to grasp the shows inane plot. I won’t spoil the plot for anyone crazy enough to pay for tickets to this show but it does have a lot of holes and things get easily forgotten and come across as confusing. In fact I put a part of this blame on the Direction because some bright spark at Ian Dickens decided that this four person play should have six actors… excuse me? Six actors for four roles is madness. It is made obvious how in the final scene and it just put the cherry on top of this messy cake of a show. Then, despite there being 6 actors, only four are allowed to take a bow and the other two are left off stage as afterthoughts. This second half is more of a mess than the first half and contains none of the supposed suspense a thriller is meant to have. The final piece of the jigsaw puzzle that is the mystery in this show is explained away so quickly that I doubt the whole audience had time to process it before the final bit of action happened and the lights went down. The ending had actually been written quite well but the direction and acting turned it into a very bad Keystone Films sequence heightened by the fact that the majority of the audience was laughing at the absurdity of the action.

This show suffered from having a hole ridden plot, a married couple with zero charisma or chemistry, bad direction, flimsy sets, terrible jokes (at one point they mentioned Worthing in reference to a restaurant bill which was supposed to be funny but you could hear a pin drop in the auditorium), bad acting and so many other things it just made it one big mess.

In conclusion this show was a waste of money and time. I seriously have to ask whether Ian Dickens Productions put on this show just to make money from another tour or did they actually believe in the show they produced? If it’s the prior, fine but have a bit more pride in your work after all whilst not all plays are supposed to be artistic they should all at least entertain. If it’s the latter then they need to talk to the cast and tour directors because the show I saw I cannot believe was the actors giving even 10% of the talent or enthusiasm they have. It is a real shame my first even chance to see this production company’s work was so poor but it will not put me off watching their work again. I am going to give Ian Dickens another chance as he constantly brings shows to Worthing and the future ones look good. Plus at only £17 per ticket to a Matinee its not too bad a price for a professional show, except on this one occasion.