In praise of "The Glums"

Les Miserables is the longest running Musical in London’s West End. It opened in 1985 at the Barbican (based on a simpler 1982 Paris Production) and was severely panned by the critics. However, the audiences loved it and after trimming the show a bit so that it wasn’t overly long, it transferred to the Palace on Shaftesbury Avenue. A few years ago, it moved down the road to the slightly smaller Queens theatre and it is still there, having celebrated over 9000 performances!

I first saw it in 1988 when I worked in technical marketing. I was asked at very short notice to entertain a couple of Danes from a Telco, picking up the bar bill beforehand and the Restaurant meal afterwards. I knew them slightly so it wasn’t an ordeal and the tickets were biked down to us in Maidenhead from one of those last minute ticket agencies that charge such silly prices that only the Corporates can afford them.

We were sat centre stalls in row C, an excellent place to see the show. Not too close that you are having to look up, close enough that the stage fills your field of vision and you can see the detail of facial expressions.

Les Mis the Musical is based on the Victor Hugo novel of the same name and charts the post-prison life of a convict (prisoner 24601) who was arrested for stealing a loaf of bread, serving nineteen years overall as he tried to escape. In it there are barricades, gunfights, deaths and sorrow, counterbalanced with love and a couple of comic characters. It is wrongly assumed to be about the French Revolution although it does include a student insurrection.

The show is entirely “sung through”, i.e. there is no spoken dialogue at all, every line is set to a melody. The main set consists of a large revolving stage surrounded by French looking 18th Century tenements and two large piles of what look like junk either side. These junk heaps move onstage, mesh together and transform into the barricade at a key point in the show. The revolve is frequently on the move as it is acted upon and the cast make it look easy to step onto and off (it isn’t.)

The show is lit by David Hersey and has many of his trademark lighting styles, especially light curtains (narrow vertical or rear angled tight beams in a continuous row). Of particular note is the follow-spotting- it uses low voltage narrow beam projectors for very tight subtle following with a very soft edge to the beam, such that it is hardly obvious that the actors are being followed at all. It is a visual device that when an actor dies, they are briefly bathed in a brilliant white light, readily achievable by the follow-spots that are otherwise running at about one third intensity the rest of the time.

I got to see Les Mis again circa 1990, buying a Gallery tout ticket for a mid-week Matinee when I happened to be passing. (£25, face value £6.50).You feel very remote up there (particularly in the Palace which is vertigo inducing) but I was able to appreciate the gobo effects projected onto the revolve, particularly the sewer and river scenes.

Since then, we have seen it in London again, New York (when we went there via Concorde) and in Manchester (another Palace). In Manchester, the stage is so wide there that the Barricade looked less substantial. A joke was made of it on the UK Soap Coronation Street when two of the actors supposedly went to see it and they kept pronouncing it in all seriousness as “Lez Mizzer-a-Baalls”

A couple of years back, my Mum and I visited the touring set onstage at the Bradford Alhambra. She remembers it better than me and recalls being surprised when a little concealed door opened on the barricade and the driver got out! She also recalls us being let loose onto the revolve, it being set at full speed and then being encouraged to sing whilst we stepped off and back on again. It is hard to do it with full concentration so they must hold training courses for the actors. (They really are the “turns” in that show).

We have the various CDs, DVDs and making of stuff. (Stage by Stage is particularly good, only on VHS though).

Anyway, seeing it in the MAOS show has whetted our appetites and we have booked to see it again in London. The Orchestra is smaller in the Queens show, partially because the Pit is smaller, partially to save money. (The Musicians Union were not happy at the time). I imagine there is another omission- the radio controlled rectangular truck used as the Cafe in the Palace staging that occasionally had a mind of its own- some bricks at the downstage edge were actually girders preventing the truck ending up in the Pit. It was omitted in other stagings as it was troublesome and I imagine it was restaged when it moved.

It isn’t the most hi-tech musical and doesn’t have the best songs but it remains my favourite for its theatricality, staging, flow and level of emotional involvement. I still get a tear in my eye when little Cosette sweeps the floor and yearns for a Castle in a Cloud.

Put another nickel in…

The singing talent of Morley Operatic managed to excel recently when they staged their Musical Extravaganza 2 which was even better than the Musical Extravaganza back in 2005. We had pre-arranged to get tickets for Saturday night in the first allocation, mainly by recognising the man who played Wishee Washee back at the Mayor’s Ball. On turning up on the night, we were surprised to find ourselves in the front row, from seats where we could have readily conducted being sat directly behind the Musical Director. At first I had concerns that the musicians may have drowned out the singers but there were enough radio mics in use that we could hear from the nearby PA speaker without a problem.

The show was staged in Morley Town Hall using their standard fit-up stage (the Proscenium of which stays there semi-permanently these days, the bracing of which gave me something to hang the Dean Friedman stage lighting on back in July). They had flats and borders with a fairly neutral green leaf pattern, otherwise known as “another part of the forest” and a large screen at the rear for projected words and images.

Just before the show started, the Tabs were closed (the stage front curtains) in order for the beginners to take their positions. At this point, my Mum said “Oh Dear” as the drapes do look rather sad when closed, being a little threadbare and with insufficient fullness. (Fullness is the amount of additional material pleated into the width to give them a visual richness when hung. 50% is minimum you can get away with for decorative Tabs and 100% is better).

The show was fast paced and very song intensive, apparently 79 songs in total. The first half included songs from Phantom of the Opera and finished before the interval with a set piece from Les Miserables, with one of David’s school Staff playing the foul mouthed Innkeeper’s Wife, Mme Thenardier. (She said three rude words and was chastised for it by david on Monday at School!). They finished with One Day More which also leads up to the Interval in the West End show (although their arrangement seemed slightly adrift with men singing women’s parts and vica versa).

After ASDA Choc Ices, it was back to the second half. The best set in this half to my mind was the Hans Christian Andersen one, excellently sung by the lead and with lively dance by youngsters, including one of David’s friends who played a cute ugly duckling (who turned into a very fine Swan indeed). Special mention must also go to the Singing in the Rain number with excellent Tap dancing . It was odd, though, that the song was repeated with full supporting cast a couple of songs later without any obvious (to me) causal link.

The strangest song had to be the one from Wicked featuring a green faced Wizard of Oz style witch and a woman in a baby doll outfit singing how she was going to make the witch beautiful.

The grand Finale’ was the Joseph megamix, but to my mind it didn’t quite come off and felt slightly stilted at times. Too many glitter wigs & random togs so it looked a bit too much like a (mature) Student party rather than a riot of colour. Sometimes the music soars above what can be squeezed out of a drummer and two keyboard players and it can start to sound a little bit John Shuttleworth-like. Similarly, the lights can sometimes be too revealing/flattening and what really would have worked well was strong cross-lighting from the wings. (Not that there was anywhere to put them in the horribly cramped confines of the platform. The other thing is that most of the principals are very good singers and a few are genuinely excellent ones so it can be easy to forget it isn’t a pro show and then be reminded of it when someone or something is only 90%. Having said that, the Joseph Coat was superb, as was the coloured cape. It must have taken an age to make, I wonder if they can be hired from others via the National Operatic and Drama Association (NODA), the Amateur Theatre UK body? (It is possible to hire other Props and Costumes on a pro or amateur basis, such as Audrey II, the metamorphosising monster from Little Shop of Horrors).

David’s friend has been trying to persuade him to take part but David doesn’t like performing to an audience, getting huge stage fright. (Ironically, though, if he is not the centre of attention, he can quite happily make himself one, such as when he joined me onstage for speeches at Karen’s 40th a couple of years back. Karen seems to think that I harbour a secret desire to get involved, although I tend to constrain myself to a semi-pro basis, preferring to do things professionally and generally get paid for it, where possible).

The Morley Operatic is 80 years old this year, and the programme has a number of long serving members and patrons with NODA long service awards. However, it would take so little to scupper the society, such as poor sales for a run, a key individual losing interest or the price of insurance becoming prohibitive. (Just involving youngsters means chaperones and criminal records checks, neither of which come cheap). Being a Charity, their finances are in the public domain and they seem to be sending accounts again (after some missing years) so it is interesting to see that they pay their musicians (but not very much). I can recall Karen and I going to see an amateur “The Sound of Music” at Batley Town Hall (BD- Before David) and being amused to see the handing out of brown envelopes to the musicians in the interval. However, on reflection, it makes sense to pay professional musicians as there is nothing as uncomfortable (or worthy of sniggering) as the Portsmouth Symphony Orchestra.

An amateur practices until (s)he gets it right. A Professional practices until (s)he cannot get it wrong.

High School Musicals

I mentioned recently that I was surprised to be played an interval advert for a forthcoming show. We decided to go and see it- an Amateur Production of We Will Rock You.

Written by comedian and author Ben Elton (Blackadder, The Young Ones) in collaboration with Queen members Brain May and Roger Taylor, We Will Rock You is a fantastic stage experience.

Set in a tongue-in cheek dystopia where the Earth is ruled by commercial forces and everyone uses the same computers. Rock music is forbidden and evil mega corporation Globalsoft are tapping into people’s thoughts.

However, resistance is growing and the rebel “Bohemians” strive to restore freedom of thought, fashion and music! Join them as they bravely begin the search for lost instruments of rock ‘n’ roll as they encounter the dreamer Galileo, misfit Scaramouche and ageing hippy librarian Pop. The Bohemians are here to bring back rock n’roll!

The show was very well done but the plot can best be described as contrived, being a device for linking most of the Queen back catalogue. It will come as no surprise, therefore, to know that characters include Killer Queen, Scaramouche and Galileo, traveling to the seven seas of Rye. Being written by Ben Elton it has lots of tongue in cheek song references.

This show was “produced with the kind permission of Schools Will Rock You” and it seems that the Production is being made available to Schools cheaply and easily (£120 license for 7 shows in 18 months). I suspect that this was actually a technical tryout of the package as it seemed true to the West End Production (from what I can see here- with a bit of scaling down to fit theatre and budget) and had a full backing track. (The Musical Director appeared to start the songs and then conduct). It didn’t use the schools logo above but something similar to the West End one.

Expect it in a High School near you in 2008…

More theatre…

Our Wakefield Theatres guide showed up today.

More shows from the excellent Wakefield Musical Youth Theatre coming up- A Chorus Line in April and High School Musical in September. David is really looking forward to the latter, he has the Disney DVD.

We also received the We Love Theatre newsletter. In it is the quote of the season:

“we are going to be spending the next 7 or so hours together”

Ken Dodd.

I’ve yet to see him but apparently it is a comedy marathon. It could have sold out twice when he came and he isn’t getting any younger so maybe we will keep an ear out for when he is next in the area.

Springtime for Hitler…

We’ve been watching The Producers over several evenings with timeslip on the Sky+ box post-BBT (boy bed time). We’d thought about going to see it on tour but hadn’t quite got our finger out. Anyway, I checked availability at Manchester Palace online and was pleased to see there were still dates available with Peter Kay playing the part of the inept Director.

Anyway, I suggested a date, and Karen checked the calendar. “No good, we are going to see Five Gays named Moe that day”.

A bit of a Freudian slip, although the 2005 Producers is much more Gay than the 1968 version…

Five Guys is touring again, by the way. Karen got into Jive via Joe Jackson and it is a cracking, if somewhat contrived show. (Although I find the original Louis Jordan songs a bit blander on the old recordings). Is you is or is you aint my baby sang slowly in tight close harmony is a showstopper song and gives me goosebumps!