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A night at the opera: That Bastard Puccini! (Park Theatre)

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It’s hard to imagine that it’s only been 130 years since Puccini first premiered La Boheme. Nowadays, it’s a revered classic, and guaranteed to be on any opera company's annual programme if it needs to stay afloat. It’s a crowd pleaser with its melodrama of poor, impoverished artists loving, starving and dying in Paris. But Puccini’s La Boheme had a less auspicious beginning, with one of his contemporaries accusing him of stealing his idea and being poorly received on its first outing. And that’s at the heart of That Bastard Puccini! Currently playing at Park Theatre , writer James Inverne uses the friendship and rivalry between the two composers, Puccini and Ruggero Leoncavallo, to weave a comic tale of creative frustration with an awful lot of facts and tidbits about the opera scene at the time. It’s part comedy, part music appreciation.  It opens with Leoncavallo (Alasdair Buchan) at home with his wife Berthe (Lisa-Anne Wood), cursing about Puccini’s latest work, which is drawn ...

The brown word: Death on the Throne @gatehouselondon

Production poster

We’re warned at the start of the show with an upbeat number that this is not the usual sort of musical. And it turns out to be just that. But with boundless enthusiasm and energy from its two leads, who deploy a range of voices and breathtaking energy to create a series of voices for puppet characters, a bedtime story becomes a silly oddball tale about four souls stuck in purgatory. With puppets. And various toilet humour references. It’s currently playing at Upstairs At The Gatehouse.

The piece starts as a bedtime story. Daddy (Mark Underwood) is about to read a bedtime story for Louise (Sarah Louise Hughes). But her stomach felt funny, and soon, she went to the bathroom. Then, for reasons that seem to only make sense in the confines of the show, they start telling the story of four people who died in unfortunate circumstances in the bathroom. Depicted as puppets, they’re stuck in purgatory as St Peter doesn’t have enough space for each of them in the afterlife.

And so begins a puppet battle for the afterlife, adjudicated by an expert in dying on the throne, Elvis. Along the way, there is a visit from the Queen, Margaret Thatcher and the former East German leader Erich Honecker. And a lifesize version of Gandhi who says things that are borderline bizarre or offensive. It’s often a combination of random ideas mixed with random world leaders. Depending on your thoughts on German / English politics and toilet humour, you may enjoy it way more than you should. 

Accompanying the action are a series of songs written by German pop-composer Tobias Künzel and Mark Underwood. Künzel has previously written children’s musicals; and this one seems like a smuttier, poppier version full of non-sequiturs and toilet humour. Whether this show is the sort of show that will have long runs in the fringe is debatable, but it’s bonkers enough to develop a following of sorts. Just don’t think about it too much. 

Directed by Blair Anderson, Death on the Throne is Upstairs at the Gatehouse until 13 April. 

⭐️⭐️⭐️

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