REVIEW: The Sound of Music at the Chichester Festival Theatre

The 1959 hit musical Sound of Music has one of the best scores ever written with wonderful Richard Rodgers tunes that tug at the heartstrings, delightful moments of gentle humour from Oscar Hammerstein II and an authentic grim context that still resonates today with the daily news of invasions. It would be tough to fail in mounting a revival of this glorious musical but equally difficult to escape the memory of Julie Andrews's performance in the 1965 film. Chichester Festival’s wonderful revival directed by Adam Penford certainly manages to not only do the stage show full justice but also beautifully differentiate itself from the memorable film version and magically make the most of the theatre’s tricky thrust stage.

The design by Robert Jones focuses us on the monastic lifestyle that oppresses Maria's free spirit but also creates a sense of entrapment by the mountains around the Von Trapp home as the Nazi sympathisers and invaders start to circle with the huge grey-streaked cyclorama cliff face and walls framing all the action. The design cleverly and slickly allows more intimate settings to be created in the Abbesses office and grounds of the nunnery and the Von Trapp’s Hall, bedroom and veranda as well as evocatively creating the Salzburg Festival stage with the powerful presence of the occupying forces. It does mean we don’t see the wonderful mountain scenery so memorably showcased in the film for “The Sound of Music” or the final uplifting escape over the mountains to the reprise of “Climb every mountain” and the staging with Maria laying on the floor of a rising trap in the first and climbing through the auditorium for the latter are compromises that don’t quite have the same joyous sense of freedom as in the original.

REVIEW: Rock Follies at the Chichester Festival Theatre

Thames Television was at the height of its creative powers in the late Seventies and early Eighties and under the wonderful Verity Lambert (1935-2007) produced many iconic shows including The naked civil servant (1975), The Sweeney (1975-1978), Minder (1979-1994), Widows (1983-1985), Rumpole of the Bailey (1978-1992) and Edward and Mrs Simpson (1978), all classic TV dramas of the period. In 1976/1977 she produced a 12-episode (2 series) show called Rock Follies which made stars of Charlotte Cornwall, Rula Lenska and Julie Covington and its themes of an independently minded three-girl rock band called the Little Ladies in a world dominated by men was brilliantly executed and acted. The Chichester Theatre adaptation of this Landmark TV series by Chloe Moss for the Minerva after 45 years is brave and bold against the memories of the 3 BAFTA Awarding winning series and a number 1 soundtrack album. The adaption appears to lift the plot from the twelve episodes and stay true to its storyline, but the effect is a very bitty episodic rather long running time as they cram every song and plot point in from their formation, through their relationships, the tours and agents and artists they meet in the pursuit of fame. It does draw out clearly the tensions between the need and desire for fame and fortune and the motivation and intent to change the world with their messages. It is this theme that perhaps resonates the best today, but it is not strong enough to drive the narrative.

The production features before Act 1, a soundtrack from the pop music of the day and during the interval, Blurred Faces play covers of some other tracks from the period. For those of us old enough these instantly recognisable songs remind us of the energy and excitement of the music of that period. 2-4-6-8 Motorway (1977), Boys are back (1976), Children of the Revolution (1972), Blitzkrieg Bop (1976), Ballroom Blitz (1974) and White Riot (1977) were generation defining songs and 50 years on the Performers and the lyrics are still strong memories of the era. Sadly, not a single tune of Howard Schuman and Andy McKay’s songbook live up to these and are forgotten within minutes of hearing them. Indeed, even the Little Ladies defiant protest song Jubilee pales in comparison with the Sex Pistols Anarchy in the UK (1976) and God save the Queen (1977) of that period.

REVIEW: Assassins at the Chichester Festival Theatre

 

The Chichester Festival Theatre production of Stephen Sondheim’s 1990 musical is apparently the first professional staging of the show since the composer’s death and is mounted just as American candidates are announcing their intention to run for President in 2024. Director Polly Findlay and designer Lizzie Clachan draw on this, setting in their restaging at a 2023 National Convention rally and in the White House Oval Office. The Trump like arrival of the Proprietor (Peter Forbes) and the large screens of 24-hour news coverage from CNN and Fox makes a very obvious parallel to the historical stories. However, something is lost in the modern, large-scale, I would say, overblown, approach compared to the joyous intimacy of my previous two viewings of this title at the 200-seat Watermill in Newbury and a 50-seat studio amateur version. The intimacy of those settings and staging as intended as a 20th-century showman’s fairground attraction is completely lost on this grand scale and too often lonely 1 or 2 figures centre stage fail to have the same impact on us.

The fact that we know, either from history or the programme, each of the nine would-be presidential assassins and the outcome of their attempts and that they are all unsympathetic characters with apparently fairly bizarre motivations for their actions means there is little drama or engagement in the story, so we are left plenty of time to reflect on the staging and listen to Sondheim’s unique musical style. Judging by the half-empty Chichester Theatre many of the regulars have already prejudged the show and know that the style is something of an acquired taste. I doubt many visitors to this show will change their views of the music after a very long one hundred- and five-minute (without an interval) version. 

REVIEW: 4000 Miles at the Minerva Studio, Chichester Festival Theatre

In sharp contrast to Noel Coward’s classic The Vortex in the main house at Chichester, Amy Herzog’s 2011 play at the Minerva Studio opposite is a touching and engaging tale of love, grief and growing old which is beautifully played by the small cast on a glorious setting of ninety-one-year-old Vera’s Manhattan flat led by the delightful Eileen Atkins. 

When nineteen-year-old Leo (Sebastian Croft) arrives at his grandmother’s flat unexpectedly in the middle of the night after cycling across America from the west coast to the East, a curious revealing relationship develops. We learn that Vera’s husband died ten years prior and that they were both passionate communists and she has lived alone since staying in contact with her neighbour, Jenny by phone. He is a wayward son who during his epic cycle ride has witnessed the death of his friend Mica in a car accident and responded by continuing the journey alone without contact with his family. She is feeling her age with occasional memory loss, and often “can’t find the words” and a frail frame as she moves unsteadily and quietly around the flat. He is awkward and isolated from friends and family with no money and no clear future. Yet as he stays over the weeks, a strong bond develops between them as we see in episodic scenes their companionship develops and he grows up visibly under her influence.

REVIEW: The Vortex at the Chichester Festival Theatre

Noel Coward wrote, directed, and starred in his 1924 production of The Vortex which was seen at the time as scandalous with its depiction of sexual vanity, implied homosexuality and cocaine abuse but was a commercial success. Written in three acts it, like so many of Coward’s plays are full of acerbic witty lines and reflects the social elite and theatrical types that he mixed with at the time, It feels in the 21st century a classic timepiece of an era and a social group that although they probably exist today is far less familiar to the Theatre going public. The challenge for Director Daniel Raggett is how to bring it to life on the thrust stage of the Chichester Theatre in a way that engages a modern audience. His solution is to crush the action into a ninety-minute dash to the end spiralling down a metaphorical vortex as the luscious period furniture of the opening act is stripped away on a spinning revolve to leave us focused on the central mother and son.

The mother and son in question are played by real-life mother and son, the wonderful Lia Williams as Florence Lancaster, and Joshua James as Nicky. It is a masterstroke of marketing and gives the roles a sense of authenticity but as in other filial acting relationships also inhibits the performance. Williams is magnificent in the first act, dressed in her flying jodhpurs and bouncing with energy, she dominates the eclectic mix of visitors to her flat and flaunts her relationship with her latest young flirt Tom (Sean Delaney) despite the presence of her husband David (Hugh Ross). As she says, “David grew old, and I stayed young”. She is a social butterfly revelling in the attention and loving life without a hint of regret or even a suggestion of ageing desperation that might be driving the behaviour. When James returns home and announces his engagement to Bunty (Isabella Laughland) and that he is “gay, witty and handsome” before they realise that Tom was previously engaged to Bunty, he triggers the “vortex of beastliness” that follows.

REVIEW: Woman in Mind at the Chichester Festival Theatre

Sir Alan Ayckbourn has written and produced more than eighty full-length plays since his first in the late fifties and established himself as one of Britain’s most prolific and successful comedy writers. In the sixties and seventies, he had a string of hugely successful plays based largely around middle-class families in crisis but often with a brilliant theatrical trick that made them stand out from the rest. In 1985 he wrote Woman in Mind which has a very different darker feel but is still firmly rooted in the eighties culture. When do you remember your local Doctor last visiting you at home three times in a 48-hour period! Or did he?

It is written entirely as if seen through the eyes of Susan, a woman in a loveless marriage with an errant son who avoids contact with his parents. She has developed an alternative reality with an imagined family. Following an accident, with a rake in her garden, we see her increasingly confusing merger of these two realities. The characters she imagines as her mental state declines are like a collection of stereotypical stock characters from a seventies Ray Cooney farce, the bumbling vicar, the cheery old Doctor, the wayward young man, the incompetent housekeeper, the upper-class fool, and the attractive blonde bride. Yet here the tone is darker, the comic moments mildly amusing rather than laugh-out-loud funny and the interplay between the two alternative worlds too often misses the opportunity for her spoken out loud lines to be misheard by the other alternative world.

REVIEW: Doubt at the Chichester Festival Theatre

Doubt by John Patrick Shanley, is a story about that- what happens when we look behind the hard outer layer of something and you let yourself listen to doubt? This play inspires provocation in its questions and as an audience you leave asking them. Who do you believe? Who is in the right? What do I believe? The list goes on. 

Amongst the austere setting of the church and the (unfortunately) familiar story of a suspect male priest is subtle, comments on a women’s role within the Catholic church and how in the pursuit of fundamentally an honest intention they are painted as wrong or evil. 

The epitome of this is portrayed by Monica Dolan as Sister Aloysius Beauvier, who's quick whit is brilliantly executed through her enduring and berating pursuit of the truth. Its quite heart breaking to see someone do the right thing, while the whole time being questioned as to weather it is the right thing to be doing, and indeed while others around you are manipulated or persuaded in to having doubts towards your intentions. 

REVIEW: The Beauty Queen of Leenane at the Chichester Festival Theatre

This was Martin McDonagh's first play written in 1996 and although brought up in England by his Irish parents, he located his first few plays in County Galway where he holidayed as a child. His brilliant writing and structuring of plays were already visible in the tightly drawn “The Beauty Queen of Leenane”. He went on to write the wonderful “The Cripple of Inishmaan” which Daniel Radcliffe so brilliantly played in the West End and “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” which Aiden Turner scored a hit with. We are now waiting for his first non-Irish play “The Pillowman” to come to London after the pandemic delayed its opening. Of course, he found even greater fame as the writer and director of the film “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” which won four golden globes. It was therefore a pleasure to see this revival at the Minera theatre in Chichester.

All his early plays depict what may be thought of as stereotypical Irish characters in fairly poor bleak settings, but his writing makes them feel real from the start and the plot development is believable despite the often dark and shocking twists and turns. He captures the lyrical phraseology of the rural Irish voices and peppers his script with meaningful pauses which add to the tension and threatening behaviours and also allow the audience just enough time to speculate on the motivations and potential outcomes. Even simple phrases such as “Lumpy Complan” (the nutritious drink) or “Do you want a Kimberley” (a local Irish Biscuit) seem to acquire threat!

REVIEW: South Pacific at the Chichester Festival Theatre

The one thing I have missed most during Lockdown is full-scale Musical Theatre with a large cast, strong band and wonderful tunes and the Chichester Festival Theatre opens its new season with the 1949 Rogers and Hammerstein South Pacific which was delayed from last year. The delay has given this classic musical a very modern and telling context not just with the Black Lives Matter campaign but also just days before the racist abuse of three England footballers.

Lyrist Hammerstein campaigned throughout his life for racial tolerance and equality and puts his political position at the heart of this Second World War story set on an island in the South Pacific. Every storyline has this theme from the overarching US Navy versus the Japanese, through the role of women in the story, the Western attitudes compared to the local islanders and the love stories that develop. Nurse Nellie Forbush (played until 25th August by Gina Beck before she is replaced by Alex Young) falls for Emile de Becque (Julian Ovenden) but rejects his marriage proposal when she discovers, not that he has killed a bully back in France but has two children by his dead Polynesian wife. Young Lieutenant Cable (Rob Houchen) falls for a local girl Liat (Sera Maehara) but he rejects marriage too, for fear of how his folks back home would react.

REVIEW: Celebrating Sondheim at the Chichester Festival Theatre (Online)

Chichester Festival staged this celebration of the music of Stephen Sondheim last November in front of a socially distanced audience, just before another lockdown was announced and streamed it live to those who booked in advance. If you missed it, this encore is a chance to enjoy a selection of songs from shows that the cast have been in or wished they had been in. It is essential viewing for any Sondheim fan.

Our first encounter with his music was in the fabulous Side by Side by Sondheim in May 1976 at the Wyndham Theatre with Julia McKenzie, Millicent Martin, David Keenan and Ned Sherrin in a revue-style show and of course, many shows have been added to his catalogue since then. Daniel Evans has assembled a modern-day equivalent of this talent for his concert and half a dozen of the songs from Side by Side survive the passing 45 years although disappointingly there is nothing from Gypsy, West Side Story or A funny thing happened on the way to the forum. 

REVIEW: Facing the Music: Imelda Staunton at the Chichester Festival Theatre (Online)

Chichester Festival Theatre this week launched a series of four online events under the banner "Facing the music" before rerunning a recording of last year's event "Celebrating Sondheim" to at least connect with their audience and to celebrate musical theatre. First up is the irrepressible wonderful Imelda Sondheim, now surely a National Treasure, in conversation (when he lets her speak) with Edward Seckerson, a specialist musical theatre journalist. It's a fascinating insight into her approach to her work and reminds us of how she has become one of the leading Stephen Sondheim actresses amongst a host of other excellent work. 

The ninety-minute interview focuses on her portrayals of Sondheim's extraordinary leading lady creations and draws out her approach to each and the similarities in them. It briefly touches on her role as Vera Drake in the Mike Leigh film made in 2003 which involved six months of improvised rehearsal and three and half months filming and of which Staunton said she had "never done anything else easier" and the rehearsal put the character into her "muscle memory". So successful was the process that she won a BAFTA and Oscar nomination. It also touched on her time at RADA and in repertory in Exeter and Nottingham that gave her a solid base of experience.

Pocket Size Theatre: Top 10 Best shows of 2018!

Theatre in 2018 has been incredible! We're ending the year in a strange place, lots of long running shows closing but also lots of exciting shows coming up! Click here to see a list of shows we're looking forward too. We reflect, with our incredible team, on some of the best shows of the year. Take a look!

Six at the Arts Theatre

"Hamilton may be in trouble, theres new girls on the block and they've come to steal your fans. The music will be stuck in your head for days and this has to be one of the hottest shows of 2018. Get your tickets now, however I suspect we’ll see the return of this show to London very soon."

Six returns to the Arts Theatre from the 16th January after completing a sold out run at the Arts Theatre and a successful UK tour.

Read our ★★★★★ review here!

Julius Caesar at The Bridge Theatre

"An absolute must-see for those who perhaps don't know Shakespeare as well as they should as it brings his historical text stampeding into the modern day and for those who know it like the back of their hand: it's new, vibrant and will be unlike any other retelling you've seen before. Shakespearean perfection."

Julius Caesar played the Bridge Theatre form January through to April with a National Theatre Live broadcast in March.

Read our ★★★★★ review here!

REVIEW: Flowers for Mrs Harris at the Chichester Festival Theatre

Any review of Flowers for Mrs Harris has to start at the end of the show as the magical uplifting final sequence back in her Battersea home makes the whole production worthwhile; when Clare Burt as Mrs Ida Harris stands in her sixties kitchen and baskets of flowers are loaded on to the revolve one by one from her friends and the people whose lives are touched, one can't help shed a tear of joy for her and the production.

The second half of the production explodes into life when Andre Fauvel, played with comical delight by Louis Maskell, is kissed on the cheek by Natasha, Laura Pitt-Pulford. His rubbery legs and comic walk on the stairs of the Christian Dior showroom kicks off the show and from that moment the whole production lifts, the characters expand and the music seems more melodic. 

The challenge is that over the preceding seventy minutes the show is slow and laborious establishing Mrs Harris's humdrum life with her British cleaning clients thinly sketched. She is a lonely widow who sets a single goal to acquire a Dior gown. The music has echoes of Sondheim but is not varied enough and lacks the comedic elements which make the second half sparkle. It needs a judicious cut, a new tune and to play up the comic interplay with her local acquaintances. 

REVIEW: Copenhagen at the Chichester Festival Theatre

Having just returned from a cruise that took us to Elsinore in Denmark and the Neuemgamme Nazi forced labour camp memorial site near Hamburg where many dissident German and Danes were killed by excessive work and starvation between 1938 and 1945, there was a real poignancy and context to this first theatre visit on return to see Copenhagen at Chichester.

It is 1941 and the German Physicist Werner Heisenberg has returned to see his mentor and father like figure the Danish Jew Niels Bohr . Both are working on nuclear fission and both know that this could create a nuclear bomb for their masters. There are conflicting recollections on this real life meeting which Michael Frayn first explored in this play in 1998 and although more evidence has come to light since then there is no major revision to the text for this revival . They recall their first work together from 1924 and 1927 and their long walk to Elsinore castle but the world has changed since then with Nazi's in control of much of Europe and Heisenberg now Professor at Leipzig. Both know they are being spied on and live in fear of the Labour camps.