Do not be confused by the name of the film – Mel Brooks is 100 today! He’s a comedy genius – and if you’ve missed how much I love the musicalversion of his movie The Producers, I don’t think you’ve been here much! I really wish I could find a clip that really shows you how genius the show is but I don’t think any of their showcase performances really demonstrates that, possibly because out of context some of the numbers.. well. How can you unleash Springtime for Hitler on people without the context that they’re trying to create the worst show ever seen so it closes straight away? Anyway, I think the closest is this one from the Big Night of Musicals.
I will be attempting to mark the occasion by watching that documentary I referenced at the top, and if I can’t manage that with the streaming services at my disposal, I will be watching one of his movies. And in case you were wondering, yes I am going to try and make it back to the West End version one more time before it closes in September.
Have a great Sunday – try not to melt in the heat!
I said last Sunday that I had two outings to chose from – and after telling you about The Tempest last week (which finished last night at Stratford) this week it’s Rufus Does Judy at the Albert Hall, which was basically the culmination of a near 20 year dream for me. But before we get to the review, the TV version of Scamanda is now on BBC iPlayer (having previously been on Disney+ in the UK). I saw someone watching this on their phone on the way home the other day – and noticed the BBC logo on the top corner and thought it was worth mentioning!
Back in 2006, Rufus Wainwright re-created Judy Garland’s legendary Carnegie Hall concert from 1961. After that first (double) performance at Carnegie Hall, he performed it in London twice in early 2007 and also Paris The Carnegie Hall original was recorded and released as a double CD in 2007. He also performed the concert at the Hollywood Bowl and then a couple of years later at the Royal Opera House. I have owned the CD since not that long after it was released – and tried and failed to get tickets to the Royal Opera House in 2011. So when I was served an advert on Instagram for a 20th anniversary version of the concert at The Royal Albert Hall for “the last time” I booked immediately, without needing to think about it at all.
All of which is to say that my expectations for this were frighteningly high. I listened to the album more times than I care to recall and Wainwright is one of my favourite artists generally – I think I’ve seen him in concert more than I’ve seen any other artist as you may remember from when I went to see him twice in the same night at the Proms. But the good news is that it was brilliant. The orchestra (conducted by Stephen Oremus) sounded fabulous and Rufus was on great form. The special guests on the night were Rufus’s sister Martha – who as you know I also love – and was part of the original concert album too and Nicole Scherzinger, who was not there 20 years ago, but made for an interesting addition and was wearing an amazing black sequinned dress which looked like a glittery oil slick (that’s a compliment). Also, I really loved Martha’s long shirt dress – I would totally wear that although maybe not in that bright red-orange. I thought the sound mix needed a little more Rufus and a little less of the of the band – but it was actually pretty good from where I was sat five rows back in the Rausing circle. If you want to know where I was, in picture 11 of the insta post below I was just to the right of the follow spot underneath the arches at the top.
Do I regret not spending more on my ticket to be closer? Well, yes a little – but it got very expensive to be closer and lower down front on – I think everything below me was over £100 and although I loved my seats in the choir for Want One and Want Two I knew that Rufus was going to be playing some piano himself in those so I would get a little bit of his face from where I was and as I said at the time it was a bit heavy on the brass there. So, on balance I think I did the right thing – I was front on, the sound was good and it was still one of the most expensive tickets I’ve had this year – on a par with the Branagh last weekend which was in a much smaller space. The bit I do regret is the large glass of wine I bought – which cost me more than I wish to admit and definitely more than I’ve ever spent on a drink at a venue before. I will remember that when it comes to my next trip to the RAH – which as it stands will be for a Prom in August.
I had two outings this week to chose from today and I’ve gone with the Tempest for today (and the other can wait) because there is still a remote chance you might be able to go and see this one whereas the other was a total one off and if you weren’t there you’ve missed it forever.
This is the RSC’s latest production of The Tempest starring Kenneth Branagh as Prospero, in his first production with the RSC in about 30 years and directed by Richard Eyre. This is at least my third time seeing The Tempest* which makes it my second most seen Shakespeare (behind Twelfth Night, but ahead of Richard II) and as ever what I love about Shakespeare is the seemingly infinite number of ways that they can be interpreted and staged.
In this one, Prospero is a conductor – instead of a staff, he has a baton he waves to control the weather and the music that accompanies the show as well as orchestrating the movements of everyone else on the island using Ariel. And what an Ariel Amara Okereke is – suspended in the air, flying over the stage and singing – sometimes upside down. I always a sucker for the light relief in a Shakespeare play – and Trinculo (Keir Charles) and Stefano (Guy Henry) were brilliant as they plotted their drunken rebellion.
In the directors note in the programme, Eyre says that he has come to see the show through a post-colonial lens – “an island whose resources have been obtained through science and magic with a white master and two enslaved people. This element is unignorable. It is also a story in which a magician’s assistant is an invisible spirit, who manages a team of ‘spirits’, controls the weather, manipulates the enemies of Prospero like puppets and even teaches him that virtue is preferable to vengeance.” I can’t pretend to be an expert but I thought the concept and production really worked well. To me there was nothing that felt incongruous with the words I was hearing with the staging – and I’ve seen a few Shakespeare productions where that is not the case!
There is a week left in the run, which is why I’m posting this today – but every performance is showing as sold out on the RSC website at the moment. From the moment it was announced this was a hot ticket – I’m not even sure how much was left by the time it got out of member pre-sale. That said our tickets were returns that my friend snagged because she was checking the website in the hopes that something would appear, however that was back at the end of February (I was actually at the Courtauld for the Seurat when she rang me) way before the run started or the reviews came out.
There is also a chance I guess that this may come into London – like Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night did – although there may be a wait on that for a theatre and a gap in Branagh’s schedule. The next production at Stratford is a new version of Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard by Laura Wade (who wrote Home, I’m Darling and is also a writer on The Rivals) which also stars Kenneth Branagh as well as Helen Hunt and Bill Pullman and which is completely sold out for the whole run as well. It may be that whichever gets the better reviews gets the transfer – The Tempest got mostly four stars from all the big reviewers. I will be watching to see.
Have a great Sunday everyone.
*I’m a bit hazy because I have a friend who adores The Tempest and she remembers going to at least one production with me when we were at school that I can barely remember so there may be more!
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!
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 