Category: not a book

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: End of the Rainbow

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Happy Sunday everyone and I’ve got another theatre trip for you this week. I was going to save this for next weekend when we’re into Pride month, but this is a limited run and the tickets are getting very limited so I thought I’d maximise your chances of getting to see it by posting it sooner.

End of the Rainbow is a play by Peter Quilter about Judy Garland at the time that she was doing a series of concerts at the Talk of the Town. If you know your Judy lore, this is less than a year from her death and at the time that she was engaged to Mickey Deans who would become her fifth and final husband. This is the struggling with her addictions latter day Judy, and her relationships with both Deans and her pianist and friend Anthony are somewhat strained. This is a play with music – with rehearsals with Anthony in the hotel suite as well as performances with a band at the club. It’s also the source material for the movie Judy, which won Renée Zellweger an Oscar back in 2020.

If you’re a drag race fan you’ll know that Jinkx Monsoon did a very good Judy in Snatch Game on her All Stars season and she’s had success on Broadway in the last couple of years in musicals in Chicago, then Pirates! The Penzance Musical and then in the play Oh, Mary! but this is her first non-comedic acting role. And it’s a big one to take on because this play exists essentially as a showcase for whoever is performing as Judy – they need to be able to sing in a good enough facsimile of Garland and act their hearts out across comedic and tragic moments. And Jinkx is really, really good – better in the comedy and the singing than the tragedy, but pretty good all around. The audience that I saw it with went absolutely wild for it – and I enjoyed it just not as much as them!

But that said this isn’t my first time seeing End of the Rainbow – I saw the 2011 tour with Tracie Bennett, ahead of the transfer to Broadway. And my opinion on the play itself hasn’t changed – it’s a great concept and a great showcase, but it’s a bit long and doesn’t quite stick the ending and really hammers home Anthony’s role as an avatar for Judy’s gay fans in the second half in a way that is totally unsubtle and overdone (for me anyway). However it has a great band and great performances and they make up for a lot. If I’m nitpicking, I would say that the lack of height difference between the characters means that part of Judy’s force of nature character is lost. Garland was under 5 feet tall – and Tracie Bennett is about 5’2″ – and the way that Garland’s voice and charisma dominated the room and the people about her despite her diminutive size was part of the wonder of the performance. But Jinkx is the height she is, and male actors are not a tall breed, and they do make great work of the steps on the set to try and set her at a disadvantage to Mickey at various points to help with that.

This production has been getting four star reviews from the professionals – and I would basically agree with that. It’s worth seeing if you’re a Jinkx fan – and the audience reaction (and sales!) have been strong enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if this goes over to Broadway next season and that this time next year Jinkx is factoring into the Tony award conversations.

End of the Rainbow is on at the Soho Theatre Walthamstow until the 21st of June – and it’s worth the trek up the Victoria Line to zone 3 to see it.

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Thespians

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It is an absolutely scorching bank holiday so far – even hotter than it was earlier this month when we were in Colchester. As I said yesterday Colchester was the capital of Roman Britain – and we were there to see a musical about the other great european classical civilisation: the Greeks, brought to you by Mischief Theatre aka the people behind the …Goes Wrong series.

The Plot: It’s 500 and something BC and Greece is being ravaged by drought. The Tyrant who rules the country decrees that every island must send a group to Athens to compete in a prayer competition to bring the rain. The penalty for not going is death. The penalty for not winning is death. And that’s how the five residents of Ikaria (that’s the whole population of the island) come to invent acting.

Now I should say that we saw this on the first preview, so this isn’t really a proper review because that wouldn’t be fair and I’m expecting a few things will have changed since we saw it. But that said it was in pretty good shape. The joke rate isn’t as high as in a Mischief play but you don’t really expect ever other line to be a joke in a musical – and it’s hard to do jokes in lyrics too – but it’s got lots of puns and dad jokes and a lot of pastiches of other musicals, theatre in jokes and stereotypes. I thought it could use a little tightening and that they hadn’t quite nailed the sound balance, but those are fairly typical issues for early preview shows.

The cast were amazing – every one is turning in a good performance – and some of them are great – but they really work well as a company. It feels a bit harsh to pick anyone out in particular because it is very much a group – but if you really, really twisted my arm I would say that it was Rhys Taylor as The Tyrant and Allie Dart and Matt Cavendish’s double act as Bard and Rhapsodes.

I generally like what Mischief are selling (so to speak) so it’s hard for me to judge whether this will work for people who aren’t Mischief fans. This isn’t relying on things going wrong/choregraphed chaos and farce the way that the Goes Wrong shows do and of course it’s a musical. In some ways it reminded me of a (very superior) pantomime – and I mean that as a compliment. It’s all got a nod and a wink to the fact that there’s an audience watching and that there are rules and conventions of theatre that the characters are “inventing” but we are all aware of. I’m not sure it’s a “first grown up show” the way that I think The Play that Goes Wrong is, but it wouldn’t be a bad shout for an early theatre trip for an upper primary school age child – as well as being a good time for the grown ups too who will understand the in jokes.

Now the eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that this had its last performance in Colchester last night – but it is a tour – it moves to Bath this week coming and then Swindon, Guildford, Cheltenham, Cardiff, back to Guildford and then finishes up in Manchester for two weeks in July. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it have short West End run, but it’s hard to see where it would go – it’s not a big-big show and all the theatres that are the sort of size that I would think they would want are taken at the moment. But never say never.

Have a great Sunday

book adjacent, streaming, tv

Not a Book: Capote vs The Swans

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It’s only taken two years, but I’ve finally managed to watch Feud season 2 – Capote and the Swans. After having checked Disney+ for it for ages with no joy, suddenly when I was on there the other weekend there it was. When that happend for the UK, who knows, but the fact remains it has and now I have watched it.

This is an eight episode series based on Laurence Leamer’s book Capote’s Women, which I read back in early 2024 when this originally dropped in the US in preparation for watching this series – expecting to arrive way sooner than it has! Capote is played by British actor Tom Hollander, following in the footsteps of Philip Seymour Hoffman who won an Oscar for playing him in 2005’s Capote and Toby Jones in 2006’s Infamous. And the rest of the cast is incredibly starry – the main Swans are Naomi Watts (Babe), Diane Lane is (Slim), Chloe Sevigny (C Z) and Calista Flockheart (Lee) with Demi Moore and Jessica Lange also in the cast.

For me it’s always interesting to see how a work of non-fiction is turned into a drama – particularly an episodic drama, where you need to have cliff hangers and peaks and troughs to keep the audience watching. I had a couple of issues with the book – the omission of a couple of the swans and the non linear nature of the book, which deals with the Swans mainly one at a time so it is fairly easy to lose track of where in time you are. And if anything this is even less linear than the book was – jumping backwards and forwards between before and after Capote publised the article that exploded his relationship with the women. And that’s the problem with it. You don’t really get to know – or understand – the women’s relationship with Truman or even why they found him so alluring before he blows it all up (so to speak).

The outfits are fabulous and it looks beautiful but somehow – despite some great performances – it struggles to hold your interest. I watched it across a couple of days but that was because I wasn’t feeling very well and wanted some mindless TV to watch rather than because I was obsessed with it and desperate to see what happened next if that makes sense. There is so much drama in the story that it’s telling – but I wanted more of the women and less of maudlin drunken Truman and his terrible abusive boyfriend – even if Russell Tovey is doing a great job of playing the boyfriend.

So if you’ve got your Disney+ subscription turned back on for the new series of Rivals, then this isn’t a bad option for wiling away the time before the next episode drops, but it’s not one to take a subscription out for. And perhaps that’s the real reason it took so long to turn up to watch in the UK!

Have a great Sunday.

not a book, streaming

Out Today: Rivals Series 2!

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Happy Friday everyone – a bit of a break in the normal order of things today because the first part of the second season of Rivals has arrived on Disney+ (or Hulu if you’re in the US) today. You will remember how much I loved the first series when that came out in 2024 (I think I’ve watched the whole thing nearly three times now) and I’ve been so excited for the new series. I fully intend to spend my weekend watching as much of this as Eurovision and other life commitments permits because I can’t wait to how they carry everything on. I mean I’ve read Rivals so I know how that turns out but there isn’t enough of the plot of that left to do another whole season let alone a season which is four episodes longer than the first. There’s a lot of polo-playing in the trailer and the next book in the series is Polo so they may be including some of that in this I guess – although there’s not a lot of Rupert and co in that – or I guess they could be doing their own thing and expanding the world out in their own direction. Either way, I can’t wait.

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: False Prophet

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After a podcast last week, I’m back with a Netflix documentary this week to make it two whole weeks in a row that I haven’t talked about theatre. Even though I did go to the theatre (twice) this week. I actually watched this the weekend that it came out last month – but this got caught behind the theatre posts in the queue because they were more time sensitive.

Trust Me: The False Prophet is a four episode mini-series following Christine Marie and her husband Tolga Katas who move to the Short Creek community in the hopes that they can help members of the FLDS community in the aftermath of the arrest and conviction of their leader, Warren Jeffs. Christine is a cult expert who has a fascinatingly varied prior life, Tolga is a videographer. Both are very much city people and get the sort of suspicious reception from the locals you might expect. But Christine is incredibly persistent and helps the women to start a shop to sell their products and make some money. But during the course of this they discover a new “prophet” is emerging from the chaos and vacuum that has been left by the absence of Warren Jeffs.

I’ve written previously about Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, which covers Rulon and Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Mormon Church (and was made by the same director and executive producer) but after Warren Jeffs was imprisoned the community was left isolated and leaderless. Then Samuel Bateman appears in town with a group of wives – some of whom look to be underage and the community starts talking. Christine and Tolga decide that they’re going to try and find out what is going on and bring him to justice – and they’re going to film it as they do it. It’s astonishing. And what makes it even more astonishing is that Bateman approached them to make a documentary about him to help him spread his word – as in he thinks this is a good idea.

The big difference from Keep Sweet is that this has all of Tolga’s footage of the documentary that they were filming and so has all of the people that they are talking about in the documentary in their own words on camera at the time that it was happening. Including Samuel. I said in the post about Keep Sweet that the first parts of that were grimmer than I expected (and I was expecting that to be pretty grim) but I think having seen that gave me a really good background coming into this – and although this is pretty horrifying, ultimately it has a satisfying ending (or as satisfying as things can be in these circumstances) to their quest to help the young women that Bateman was marrying*.

I watched all of these episodes back to back in one sitting. I thought it was really well made and realy clever. I admired Christine and Tolga for what they were trying to do – and the nerves of steel that they showed while they were doing it. I have a few questions about the local police response, but that’s not about the documentary! And if you do watch this, this Guardian article from last week and this Hollywood Reporter profile of Christine Maire are interesting reading too.

Have a good Sunday.

*Spoiler: Samuel Bateman was sentenced to 50 years in prison in late 2024

audio, not a book

Not a Book: Wild Things

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Happy Sunday everyone, and after my mega run of Sunday posts about theatre visits, I’ve got a change for you today – a podcast.

The full title of this is Wild Things: Siegfried and Roy and it’s an eight part series about the German magicians and illusionists Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn. They were famous for using big cats in their shows in Las Vegas. Their careers ended when Roy was attacked – and nearly killed – by one of their white tigers during a show at the Mirage. Now I’m not going to lie, I remember the attack happening – and the many National Enquirer headlines about the duo, so I was shocked to realise that it happened in 2003. Time is a flat circle etc.

Anyway, Wild Things isn’t a new podcast, it came out in 2022 – it’s just I only found it recently, probably because it’s being turned into an Apple TV series starring Jude Law and Andrew Garfield. Although the podcast does go into detail of what happened on the night of the attack, it is a profile of their entire lives and careers – starting in wartime Germany through their meeting on a cruise ship in the 1950s and their development of a double act together, initially on cruise ships but the moving to the nightclub circuit and then to hotels and Las Vegas. It also probes the duo’s much repeated claims about the safety of their act through the years and efforts to protect the brand after the attack.

I listened to most of the series back to back across about three nights and then had to take a bit of a break as it got to the grim details of the tiger attack. But that’s because I’m squeamish more than anything and it’s quite graphic and I didn’t want to have nightmares about angry tigers! It’s got good access to some of the people who were close to (as in proximity) the duo as well as people who were involved in the investigation into the tiger attack. As someone who primarily knew about Siegfried and Roy as a punchline (different sorts of punchlines before and after the attack) or from the aforementioned National Enquirer headlines I found this really interesting – they come out of this as three dimensional people – outrageous in their public personas, who inspired loyalty in the people that worked with them but also flawed and contradictory. If you’ve got a long journey coming up, this would make a great listen.

Happy Sunday!

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Rocky Horror Show

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Because there’s the revival of Rocky Horror opened on Broadway this week, I thought it was a good time to finally post about my trip to the UK Rocky Horror Show tour. Now I saw this back in January when it was in Sheffield, as an extra treat as part of my trip there to see the Figure Skating, but as Rocky is almost always touring the UK, I have been holding onto this since then.

Now if you’ve been living under a rock(y), the Rocky Horror Show is Richard O’Brien’s rock n roll musical tribute to science fiction and horror B-movies that he grew up watching. It turned 50 last year and was the subject of a (very good) documentary about the early days of the show, and the making of the legendary cult movie. The musical has been touring the UK (and other parts of the world) almost constantly ever since and fans will turn up in costume, shout out to the cast and it’s generally a very different experience from going to any other musical.

I first saw Rocky 20 years ago (almost exactly) in the previous touring version, with David Bedella as Frank N Furter, and although I saw it a bunch of times after that first one, I realised as I sat down in the stalls that I’d actually never seen another actor play Frank live. So this was a first on that front. And since the last time I saw Rocky, there’s also been a bit of an update on the sets and a few tweaks to costumes and staging, although it has to be said that Rocky is Rocky, and like The Producers, a lot of it s is sort of baked in, although in this case it’s also because the audience has expectations as well as it being in the script.

And I had a lot of fun. It was great to see the changes to the staging and costumes, but it still felt like the Rocky that I remember. That said, the rocky I remember has David Bedella in it, a man with more charisma in a little finger than many people have in their entire body. The things that man can do with a raised eyebrow. Anyway. I saw Stephen Webb as Frank (Jason Donovan is doing some dates of this tour) and he is good, but he’s no Bedella. That said, if you haven’t experienced the wonder of Bedella as Frank, he may hit a little differently for you. As ever, when you’re really familiar with a property or a performance it’s hard to work out how a first timer would see things.

Where I thought there as a big improvement on previous iterations was the narrator. I saw Nathan Caton, who is a stand up comedian as the Narrator, and he was really, really good at handling the audience participation side of things. I’ve seen a few narrators who get a bit flustered or didn’t quite know how to deal with the more aggressive/persistent audience members, but Caton had it nailed. I think the experience of being a stand up meant he knew what he was doing with hecklers and dealt with them as he would have with people at one of his comedy sets. There were a couple of troublesome people at my performance (and I knew they were going to be trouble as soon as I laid eyes on them) and he had them handled – until they got evicted during Sweet Transvestite (which is really quite early!) by the ushers (who were also really good at what must be a tough gig).

I had a couple of understudies performing on my night in Sheffield – which was actually pretty cool, as I’ve seen Haley Flaherty as Janet before, so that made another point of difference from previous visits. And bother the understudies – Lucy Aston as Janet, and Nathan Zach Johnson as Riff Raff (another role I’ve only ever seen played by one person in the tour) – were really good and you wouldn’t have known they weren’t performing their regular track if you hadn’t seen the notice in the foyer.

Like I said further up, I don’t know how this will hit if you’re not familiar with the source material and also that this has an atypical theatre audience, so it’s a strange one to recommend in a way. I wouldn’t take my mum to see it for example and it’s definitely not a show for people who only do Serious Theatre. But if you’re a fan of the film then it’s great – and I think if you like the back and forth you can get with live comedy then it might be a nice thing to try. it’s a short show – only two hours including an interval – so if it’s not for you it’s over fast. What I would say though is that if you are going for the first time and are a bit nervous or feel intimdated, I would pick a weeknight performance over the Friday and Saturday evening ones, because I think they’re less likely to be as full of people in costumes. I was there on a Tuesday night, on my own, not in costume and I was absolutely fine. Aside from the two (evicted) trouble makers, it was a lovely friendly audience.

And I mentioned at the top that it’s on Broadway at the moment – complete with Luke Evans as Frank. This a new staging – nothing like the UK tour – it’s got a gender flipped Riff Raff and all sorts of stars in the cast. Here’s a bonus video from their Instagram:

Have a great Sunday everyone!

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Avenue Q Revival

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Another Sunday, another show! This time it’s the return to the West End of one of my favourite shows, Avenue Q. Eighteen months ago I wrote about the 18th birthday concert staging featuring the original cast but now its back in the West End until the end of August coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of its West End debut.

Avenue Q is the story of Princeton, a new college graduate, and the people he meets in his rundown neighbourhood after he moves to New York after graduating. The cast is a mix of puppets and humans and the vibe is very much Sesame Street but for adults. Life has changed a lot since this show first hit the stage – smart phones, apps, streaming, *gestures around* the world. And the question for producers staging any revival of any show is how much do you put on the show as it was written and how much do you update to make it work for a modern theatre goer. There were always a few changes in the London version compared to the US one – Gary Coleman was originally a woman on Broadway but was a played by a man in London and lyrics changed to explain Gary’s backstory more clearly, Christmas Eve in London says she worked in a Chinese restauran rather than a Korean deli etc and this revival has mostly followed that pattern – a few light updates to jokes and references but not whole sale cuts or rewrites.

As I said in my prior post about the show, Q has a special place in my heart because when I first saw it I was at the same stage in my life as the characters were and that makes it hard for me to judge how it will come across to people who have never seen the show before and who don’t remember the early 2000s, hard as it is for me to believe that those people can be adults. Now of course that didn’t matter for the concert staging – it was just two performances on one day but for a five month run it sort of does and I’m fascinated to see how this performs in the West End. The night that I went the audience laughed at the first joke and I relaxed. But I was there early in the second week of previews (in fact I spotted original West End cast member now Associate Director Julie Atherton in the audience watching) so potentially a house more loaded with existing fans than it will be later in the run. But that just gives me an excuse to go back and see it again – not that I needed one! I enjoyed it – and enjoyed the twenty minutes I spent on the phone to Him Indoors analysing the changes on the way home too.

Have a great Sunday!

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: A few recent shows

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Happy Sunday everyone, and I’m continuing the run of theatre trips from the last few weekends with two other shows that I’ve seen recently and wanted to mention even though they’ve both finished their runs now.

I’ll start with Marie and Rosetta which had its last performance at Soho Place last night. This is a two-hander about Sister Rosetta Tharp and Marie Knight who were stars in the gospel world. This starts in 1946 when established star Rosetta has persuaded young newcomer Marie to join her on a tour in the segregated southern states of the US. Beverly Knight is Rosetta and Ntombizodwa Ndlovu is Marie and the two of them gave amazing performances that transended the material. For me the play itself was just fine – it was two hours including an interval and I thought it would have worked better as a 90 minute one acter, because the break killed any building tension that was going on. But the two performances – particularly when it came to the music and the singing were extraordinary and were worth going just to see them. It was also my first time in Soho Place – which is the newest West End theatre and I thought it was a great venue and I loved the in the round staging. I will be interested to go back and see something else there. And it should be noted that this was the final West End theatre that I hadn’t ever been in so it was nice to tick that off too – especially as I thought I’d completed the list when I saw Operation Mincemeat until I remembered that Soho Place had opened!

And the second show today is Jeffery Bernard is Unwell which had a run at the Coach and Horses on Sunday and Monday nights in March. Jeffery Bernard was a real life journalist and this play was written and originally staged in the 1980s when Bernard was still alive. Bernard wrote the “Low Life” column in The Spectator, and the title refers to the one line apology the paper would print on the column’s page when he was too drunk (or too hungover) to produce his copy and it was too late to find anything else to fill the gap! The play started as a star vehicle for Peter O’Toole with a supporting cast but was adapted into a one man show in 2019 to be performed at the Coach and Horses pub in Soho – which was Bernard’s regular drinking venue – by Robert Bathurst. This is the at least the third time that it has been brought back – to the same venue with the same star. It won a bunch of acclaim and awards and sold very, very well, so when I saw it pop back up I forked out full price (unusual for me!) for a seated ticket (as opposed to the cheaper standing option) to see it and found myself right opposite Bathurst’s main perforamce spot in the venue which was a delightful treat. It’s only an hour but it’s a hell of a performance feat – one man and a pub full of people and no where to hide if it goes wrong, which considering the climax includes a trick involving a glass of water, a matchbox and an egg is quite something. It was a late start (and so a late night on a work night) but it was totally worth it.

Have a great Sunday everyone!

book adjacent, not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Into the Woods

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It’s Easter Sunday and if you have a long weekend I hope that it is going well so far, and not too encumbered by the sort of weather that a Bank Holiday weekend in the UK always seems to cause. For the third weekend in a row I have a theatre related post for you and to be honest, I don’t think it’s the end of the run of show posts because I’ve seen a lot of shows in the last six weeks – including two this week alone. But this week I’m going with another Sondheim show to join my posts about Here We Are and the Frogs, Merrily We Roll Along and Old Friends.

Into The Woods is Stephen Sondheim’s take on some of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, intertwining them to tell the story of a childless baker and his wife who try to life a curse that has been placed on them by a witch but finding her a series of items in the woods. This brings them into contact with other story book characters. We’re taken through the story by a narrator. I can’t really tell you much more about the plot than that without giving too much away, but the story takes the familiar fairy tale tropes and plays with them. Sondheim’s music is often tricky to perform – there are difficult harmonies and tunes that don’t go where you expect. Into The Woods has got repeating motifs that evolve through the show – you’ll come out humming snatches rather than having an earworm of one tune stuck in your head. The lyrics are brilliant – clever and often witty and even the spoken lines have a rhythm to them.

In the Stephen Sondheim canon, Into the Woods comes after Sunday in the Park with George and is the second of his three collaborations with James Lapine and is at the tail end of his run of what was probably his best work. I had seen the movie of Into the Woods, but this is the first production that I’ve seen in person – the last time it was in London was 2010 when I wasn’t seeing as much theatre for various real world reasons. That production had Hannah Waddingham and Jenna Russell, this one has Jamie Parker and Kate Fleetwood. Now when I (first) went to see it Jamie Parker got injured midway through the first act* and was replaced by his understudy, and there were also understudies on for The Baker’s Wife and Little Red. But I enjoyed it so much that I went back this week to try and catch some of the people that I missed before they leave (more on that later) and to get a different view of the stage.

And as you can see – I was higher up and further back but straight on and that means I could see a lot more detail of the set and the action behind. If you’re going to see this then try and be as front on as you can – I think probably ideally a level down from this seat in Gallery 2 but those seats are pricey – so for the money this was excellent. And I did get to see all of Jamie Parker this time with the original Baker’s Wife Katie Brayben. There were still a few understudies on though – including Little Red again but also Jennifer Hepburn as the Witch. All the performances were excellent, but I can imagine that when it’s the full main cast it is really quite something because I definitely have preferences having seen it twice. I can really see why it earned 11 nominations at the Oliviers – as I said in my Producers review last week I’m expecting the winners to come from this and Paddington. That said I’m expected possibly more Paddington given that Paddington took the Whats On Stage awards – although they are voted for by the public and the Oliviers are voted by the industry so there maybe a difference there. I haven’t seen Paddington because tickets are like gold dust until the summer so I can’t judge, but this is truly brilliant.

In fact it’s been such a success that the run at the Bridge has extended until the end of May, having been originally due to end on April 20th. There is a cast change that comes with that though – the details of which were announced last week and is the reason why I hurried back this week to try and catch Parker and Brayben before they left. The replacements are pretty good too – Rachel Tucker, John Owen Jones and Melanie Le Barrie are all names in their own right, and Hughie O’Donnell is who I saw take over as the Baker mid-performance and he was very good too. Not going to lie, I am tempted to go back again..

Happy Easter if you’re celebrating, happy Sunday if you’re not!

Into the Woods is at the Bridge Theatre until May 30th

*if you know the show, he got injured somewhere in the sequence in the wood shed.