Posts

Showing posts with the label Bryan Hodgson

Featured Post

Prayers and thoughts: The Inseparables @Finboroughtheatre

Image
The Inseparables brings Simone de Beauvoir’s posthumously published novel to life. It traces a lifelong friendship between Sylve and Andrée, two unconventional girls who grew up in a stifling world where being a woman meant getting married or entering a convent. With a quick pace and engaging performances from the two leads, it is a journey back into the 20th century that captures two unconventional women trapped in a conventional world that will have you reflecting on how much or little things have moved on in the last century. It’s currently playing at the Finborough Theatre .  We’re introduced to Sylve praying for her country, France, to be saved from the war and indoctrinated into the world of faith and obedience. But too smart for all that, her life was full of detached guilt and boredom. But when she meets Andrée, a new arrival at her school, she is struck by how different she is from everyone else. She was burned in a fire and had a passion for life that nobody else she knew...

Keep it gay: Twang!! @TheUnionTheatre

Image
Any time of the year you can watch Oliver! on television. Lionel Bart’s musical take on the tale of Dickens made him a fortune and is memorable for its music and a slick movie musical. A few years later under the influence of alcohol and LSD he wrote Twang!! A notorious and expensive disaster than ran for only 43 performances, it would cost him his fortune. But rest assured the Union Theatre hasn’t resurrected a curiosity for the benefit of musical theatre aficionados. As amusing in its own way that would be. This Twang!! is new. Or at least with a story that makes some form of sense. With a new book by Julian Woolford and updated orchestrations by Richard John, it’s a chance to see a lost Lionel Bart musical. The premise is that after years of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor Robin Hood has lost his twang. It’s a bit like the Middle Ages equivalent of mojo. It’s now his merry men who do most of the heavy lifting. Meanwhile Much, the millers son, has run away from home. He...