Andrew is on sabbatical but Phil is soldiering on to help you decide between the Merlot and the Marlowe and generally putting London's West End theatre to rights
In which Phil acts as advisor to Mel Brooks.
Phil’s having a half-arsed catch up of shows he missed during his confinement. Or you could say a catch up on the seventies since this is his third in a row that steals from classic movies from that decade (Network, The Exorcist). Though this is less of a catch up than a revisiting. Of sorts. Read the rest of this entry »
Phil is constantly surprised by life.
After experiencing his first earthquake and returning to his hotel room, he ran a forensic check on his bathroom’s grouting. How, when the whole building was quivering around him, did it survive intact without even the hint of a hairline crack? It wasn’t even flexible grouting. How do they do that?
And he shouldn’t really be surprised by the musicalisation of grim real-life events anymore but he is. After all he suffered Jean Seberg (which, if he remembers correctly – when he saw it – opened with the actress’s body discovered in the boot of a car after her suicide and also contained the jaw-dropping moment of a chorus line of tap dancing psychiatrists) then there was the equally memorable Too Close to the Sun (the last 24 hours in the life of Earnest Hemingway before he blew his brain out). The surprise in The Scottsboro Boys, concerning nine black teenage boys, falsely accused of rape in the Alabama of 1931, isn’t so much that the event was turned into a musical, but that – unlike those others – it actually works. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re still a wee bit shell-shocked, to be honest. Contrary to early reports, this is NOT car-crash theatre and this is NOT train-wreck theatre. This is the theatre of two trains colliding on a level crossing on which is stuck a Robin Reliant of orphans on their only day out of the year. With their pets. Oh, and did we mention there was a big tanker coming in the other direction full of flammable chemicals?
Or to put it another way Paradise Found is Kismet meeting The Great Waltz via A Little Night Music, Carry On Emmannuelle and Up The Chastity Belt. Except, well, again, not so much “meets” as “crashes into”, with the wreckage strewn the length and breadth of Southwark Street.
And yet we couldn’t tear ourselves away from watching.
And we are still very much in a state of shock. Read the rest of this entry »
A West End Whinger 