Posts

Showing posts with the label Steven Cheslik-Demeter

Featured Post

High anxiety: Collapse - Riverside Studios

Image
It’s a brave or maybe slightly provocative production to use Hammersmith Bridge on their artwork for a show called Collapse, which is about how everything collapses—poorly maintained bridges, relationships, and jobs. Nothing works. That’s probably too close to home for Hammersmith residents stuck with a magnificently listed and useless bridge on their front door. It gets even weirder when you realise the piece is staged in what looks like a meeting room with a bar. However, keeping things together in the most unlikely of circumstances is at the heart of Allison Moore's witty and engaging four-hander, which is currently having a limited engagement at Riverside Studios . The piece opens with Hannah (Emma Haines) about to get an injection from her husband (Keenan Heinzelmann). They’re struggling for a baby, and he’s struggling to get out of bed. But he managed to give her a shot of hormones before she started worrying about the rest of the day. She’s unsure she will keep her job with ...

Axes to grind: Lizzie @Swkplay

Image
Arriving at the Southwark Playhouse Elephant , there are plenty of pigeons (real and otherwise) inside and outside the theatre.  Having not been there since it opened at the start of the year, I figured it was an art installation.  Little did I know that it was a crucial part of Lizzie, the hard rock, full-throated true crime rock musical.  Pigeons are solace from a stifling, oppressive life for an unmarried woman in 1890s Massachusetts.  And that is probably all the subtlety you'll get in this high-energy production.  It originated at the Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester and now makes a lot of noise in the Southwark Playhouse's basement venue.  Based on the trial of the century in 1890s Massachusetts, Lizzie Borden was acquitted of murdering her stepmother and father with an axe.  Over time, everyone believed she had done it.  There's even a nursery rhyme about her.  This piece is less interested in the whodunnit and more in the whyshedunnit....