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Showing posts with the label Upstairs At The Gatehouse

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Somewhere that's green: Potty the Plant at Wiltons Music Hall

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"I'm Potty the Plant," sings a potted plant in this odd little fringe concept of a show. It's hard not to get the tune out of your head, even if the show is brief. It's an earworm for a show that features a worm-like plant as a puppet. And given the show's brevity, running at only an hour, it's hard to get too annoyed by a lack of a coherent story, even if it still seems like the show could use a bit more development (which is underway). It has made its London debut at Wilton's Music Hall. The premise is that Potty, the plant, lives in the hospital office of Dr Acula (geddit?) and dreams of a life with the cleaning lady Miss Lacey (Lucy Appleton). But Dr Acula might be responsible for why all these children are disappearing while trying to romance Miss Lacey for her family's money that she doesn't have. Three nurses are on the case, trying to solve the mystery.  If the show settled on a convincing plot, location and set of characters, it could ...
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The brown word: Death on the Throne @gatehouselondon

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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 puppe...
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Making it grate: Strike Up The Band @GatehouseLondon

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For many people, Gershwin songs conjure up sultry jazz singers in smokey basements singing in hushed deep tones about “the man I love”. So it might come as a surprise it’s sung by a soprano in a musical about a cheese war between the United States and Switzerland. But that’s not the only thing that jars in Strike Up The Band, currently playing at Upstairs At The Gatehouse . The show is full of classic Gershwin songs such as The Man I Love and I’ve Got A Crush On You. Set to a bizarre book that’s intended to satirise the military industrial complex of the United States. But a plot featuring tariff wars, trade wars and real wars seem uncomfortably relevant today. After all we're in the era of slowbalisation , where nationalistic rhetoric and economic self-harm is the order of the day. To emphasise this point, there are some nice touches throughout the show, such as the “Make America Grate” caps enlisted to buy American cheese. So, on one hand, this revival is a stroke of genius. ...
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