What can you remember of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ – Mickey Rooney with an unconvincing set of false teeth and a cringingly awful Chinese accent? Audrey Hepburn cool as a January cucumber in her swept-up chignon, tiara, pearls and yard-long cigarette holder? The gamine, twittery but ultimately loveable party girl around whom New York whirls like […]
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Shortly before 7 this morning, the first ever transatlantic flight from New York JFK to tidgyLondon City Airport is due to touch down. In fact, estimated for 6.48am it’s trespassing pretty close to the airport’s noise abatement limit of no flights before 0630. Will it be popular? Mainstream press have suggested that when the flights […]
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Spotted – and we use the word advisedly – at the Noel Coward Theatre this week was ex-Coronation Street barmaid Bet Lynch, sorry Miss Julie Goodyear OBE being feted by the management who are currently pondering a fresh cast for Calendar Girls when the EastEnders heavy mob moves out on 31 October. Since West End […]
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It’s 21 years since Stephen Sondheim took English Pantomime by the scruff of the neck and throttled it into a self-styled morality play called ‘Into the Woods’. If nothing else, the current production at the Landor theatre highlights the age of the material, and the somewhat lengthy exposition necessary to tell the stories of Cinderella, […]
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Back in the days when boys became bands without the unwelcome attentions of Louis Walsh, or girls sang aloud without a televised vote – young Victoria Wood penned a simple, funny and sweet piece for the Sheffield Crucible based on her own experiences backstage in a provincial talent show. Revisiting it thirty years later, she […]
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Purism is not the issue here. The evening started stately enough with Nigel Kennedy, still sporting his Gary-Rhodes-on-steroids butchered pineapple haircut, leading the Philharmonia orchestra through two melodious movements of Bach. So far, so dignified, so what. What the audience had come for – and got in spades – was a hefty dose of Nige’s […]
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At a time when bankers and brokers are pilloried in the media for turning the economy into a gibbering basket-case, the idea that a bunch of amateur thespians from the Stock Exchange should get together to perform the inmates-take-over-the-asylum piece ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ is so delicious that it’s a must-see. The multiple […]
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Alan Cumming told ‘Hello’ magazine his new show was ‘me with a band singing some songs I like, and telling stories about what’s happened to me in the ten years since I moved to America’. That this is truthfully the middle and both ends of it disguises the fact that it’s a beguiling evening in […]
The post Review: Alan Cumming – I Bought A Blue Car Today (Vaudeville Theatre) appeared first on JohnnyFox.
The persistent fondness of Rodgers and Hammerstein for corn-fed country settings is at odds with their gritty New York City upbringing. Nostalgic affection for the farmer and the cowgirl is confirmed by Oklahoma!, Carousel and even Ensign Nellie Forbush marooned on her South Pacific island, sings of being “as corny as Kansas in August” For […]
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Finally gave in and joined Flickr. Here’s my first photo … a ‘nuclear’ sunset over Canary Wharf taken at the local DLR station, Pontoon Dock.
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Tricky one, this. Imagine you’re a producer with a new show to launch on the brink of the worst recession for thirty years, amid plummeting audience figures, in an unpopular theatre, with a cast of mostly unknowns. About the Holocaust. And it’s a backstage musical. This in itself could be a comedy to put The […]
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There’s something about Craig Revel Horwood I just don’t like. It may be the introduction of confectionery into a surname that insults my diabetic sensibilities. Perhaps other theatre directors could consider the benefits of an injection of chocolate? Would Nicholas Malteser Hytner, or Trevor Minstrel Nunn be any more successful? It may be the botoxed […]
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With the Whingers to a Sunday matinee of ‘A Little Night Music’ in its Trevor Nunn reincarnation at the Menier Chocolate Factory theatre, auditorium neatly reoriented from the womblike velvet tunnel structure for Cage aux Folles to something resembling a miniaturised hexagon, pre-theatre lunch nicely presented, seats now numbered and reserved, toilets clean, doors to […]
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Michelle: I wear red because my husband is full of fire. Laura: I’ll get my coat …
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In a somewhat lager-fuelled discussion about writing, after last week’s session of The School of Life, some of my classmates challenged me to produce a ‘No 1 Ladies Detective Agency‘ story, in which Mma Ramotswe travels to England and visits a relation who owns (and it’s a genuine place) the ‘It’ll Grow Back’ hair salon […]
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There’s something in the air that you can sense Elusive yet unbearably intense The stars are standing there in bright suspense As they prepare to light immense events So starts “On Such A Night as This” by the remarkable American lyricist Marshall Barer – and it accurately encapsulates the tingling feeling I’m getting at the […]
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As newspaper reviewers have said, comparisons are odious but I’m going for it anyway. In 1974, The Norman Conquests trilogy was a landmark in theatre comedy, Ayckbourn’s coming of age and coming to town in the first of the interlinked/alternate ending series of plays. It was also cast with actors who WOULD BECOME household names […]
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I’m having a Ken Barlow moment. In the longest running soap opera, he has dusted down from the attic his youthful novel, compared it briefly to the writers he currently admires, and torched it. I have nothing to torch but my memories, as Oscar almost certainly wouldn’t have said, but as I sit on the […]
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Roll up! Roll up! Hear a Dame of the British Empire say “fuck” repeatedly (and it’s not Judi Dench for once)! Appreciate how Colin Farrell could find 74-year old Eileen Atkins shaggable!! Laugh at the spoof of Germaine Greer !!! Despite having portrayed the dourest and sourest spinsters in a stream of poke bonnet-dramas from Gosford […]
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On a whim, I’ve been for a weekend on the Suffolk coast at a property owned by Ruth Watson, the somewhat painted-and-decorated star of Channel 5’s “The Hotel Inspector”. For the uninitiated, this is a programme in which she dispenses caustic advice and a general browbeating to the faltering proprietors of lesser establishments with decor, […]
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