PUNK OFF!

Dominion Theatre

★★★★

“the energy of Ged Graham’s production is infectious”

Punk. You had to be there, surely. The snap and the snarl, the shocking offence to culture as an alien youth brandished guitars as weapons and donned pins and chains as armour for their assault on stale values.

Amid the cultural explosion and outrage – all those yards of spit! – it’s easy to forget the sheer throbbing excitement of the sounds.

Half a century on, Punk Off! puts that right. The title has changed from its touring name of Pretty Vacant, an alternative might be Now That’s What I Call Mucus.

The show shouldn’t work, it really shouldn’t, but it just about does for most of its two-hours, and then brilliantly does in the last quarter.

The staging is key. This is essentially a juke box musical – a live band, rotating singers, and the sort of literal Pan’s People dance routines which punk was specifically designed to destroy.

But its heart is in the right place.

It has Kevin Kennedy (formerly Curly Watts of Coronation Street) adding a storming narrative – as well as the occasional song. (His Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick a crowd pleaser).

And most of all it has an audience.

It’s playing to the home crowd. It knows who is listening and why.

Legions of now sixty-somethings, stately grandparents in many instances, dusted down their Damned T-shirts, buffed up their back tattoos, tanked up on fish oil to get their limbs moving and decided to have a party.

They still have the spark of anarchy within them, yelling out No Future! not because of a 1970s post-industrial malaise but because, well, the days ahead are fewer in number now.

They gleefully hurl themselves back to the days when they did mind the Buzzcocks. The band (a rotating mix of Phil Sherlock, Ric Yarborough, Adam Evans, Reece Davies, Lazy Violet) oblige with banger after banger – God Save The Queen, Gordon Is A Moron, Oliver’s Army, Hanging on the Telephone, White Riot, Lust for Life, No More Heroes, Teenage Kicks…) It is a surprisingly rich and varied canon, and each one a foot stomper. The band does a bang-up job emulating the feel of each of the now iconic three-chord collectives. Even the dancers (Louisa Clark, Joshua Fowler) find their feet, presenting little illustrative tableaux, such as Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road shop Sex.

Kennedy takes the audience on a whistlestop tour of their youth when the fire of revolution burnt bright. Yes, there is some confusion over whether this is a tribute band gig or a stage presentation, but the energy of Ged Graham’s production is infectious and by the tumultuous climax – a romping trio of My Way, God Save The Queen, 2-4-6-8 Motorway, the walking sticks and inhibitions have been flung aside and everyone is on their feet, attempting a token pogo for the first time in half a century.

They’ll pay for that in the morning. But, in the meantime, cobwebs cleared.

What a blast.

PUNK OFF!

Dominion Theatre as part of UK Tour

Reviewed on 9th March 2025

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Stephen Niblett

Previously reviewed at this venue:

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA | ★★★★★ | November 2024

THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW | ★★★★ | September 2024

GREASE | ★★★★ | May 2022

PUNK OFF

A SQUASH AND A SQUEEZE

Little Angel Studios

★★★

“The set and puppets stay true to Axel Scheffler’s always beautiful illustrations”

A Squash and a Squeeze is the first book that the rhyming author Julia Donaldson and illustrator Axel Scheffler created together, and here at the Little Angel Studios is a staged musical adaptation of the classic tale.

I asked the little girl next to me if she knew A Squash and a Squeeze and she told me it was all about friends squeezing into a little house together. The story has now been adapted for the stage by Barb Jungr and Samantha Lane, with music and lyrics by Jungr.

The show has stretched out the compact rhyming picture book to an almost too long one hour show for young children.

“Wise old man, won’t you help me, please, My house is a squash and a squeeze”. The wise old man knows, fill it with a flappy, scratchy, noisy crowd of farmyard animals and when you push them all out, you’ll be amazed at how big your house feels!

At the end of each scene, the aforementioned little girl, did ask is that the end? I love young critics.

The set and puppets stay true to Axel Scheffler’s always beautiful illustrations.

A simple and delightful set by Kate Bunce with a Wendy house that opens out into the inside of the old lady’s house, showing how squashed and squeezed they all become as she takes in more and more of her farm animals.

The puppets by Maia Kirkman-Richards are genius for both young and old to enjoy – but almost underused. Taking Scheffler’s wonderful vision a step further on from the original illustrations and bringing them to life on the stage, the puppets are an innovative delight with the hilarious handheld cat created from a fur-ball of a multi-coloured ball of wool, the popping-eyed handheld chicken who does lose feathers, the goat made from a wheelbarrow and the pig built with an apple crate body that gets filled with all the food it guzzles! The pièce de résistance though must be the Friesian cow made from a yoke holding two wooden buckets, one of which has udders hanging from underneath. But why there were only three udders is still a mystery to us all – I did double check that Scheffler hadn’t drawn it thus – no.

Each farmyard animal has its own upbeat song as they are enticed into the little house. And it certainly was a squash and a squeeze with them all inside! Barb Jungr’s music and lyrics are fun young children’s musical theatre, and as a renowned jazz singer and cabaret artist it was great to see her diversity.

The lead puppeteer Mark Esaias does sterling work as the many characters but syncing his goat’s mouth to his singing might need a teeny bit of tightening up. Both the wise man Gilbert Taylor and Ruth Calkin as the old lady, take their turns with the puppets – there are five to handle at once with a full house of farmyard animals!

Calkin finds just the right balance to create a warm, affronted and a despairingly funny old woman, and in her costume, she looked just like the picture book had come to life.

This stage adaptation introduces the wise old man (Taylor) as a silly billy character who makes “easy-peasy solutions”. He is certainly not the expected Scheffler creation with a white beard, hat and long black coat – maybe it was decided that character looked too austerely Germanic.

However, the easy-peasy solution solver arrives squashing and squeezing through the young audience and then proceeds to sing a song using his Walkman cassette player with the cassette tape getting stuck and needing to be rewound with a pen borrowed from the audience. A strange creative decision, and completely unnecessary to the story. Who in the audience, bar me, understood what he was talking about and doing – little girl critic said to her mummy what is that? – And mummy didn’t know either.

I also did not warm to the wise man character hitting a wasp’s nest on the side of the house with a bat and getting badly stung……that’s silly, not wise and not in the book either – even though the children laughed.

I was rather shocked to see missing from the online programme notes, a biography credit for Axel Scheffler because visually (apart from the wise old man), this production is very much thanks to his illustrations. However clever the author Julia Donaldson is (and her biog is there), a picture book needs those wonderous and creative illustrations – and so does this adaptation.

The cast work very hard throughout – and with three shows a day singing and dancing and puppetry and an audience full of excited children they work up a good sweat.

PUNK OFF!

Dominion Theatre

★★★★

“the energy of Ged Graham’s production is infectious”

PUNK OFF!

Dominion Theatre as part of UK Tour

Reviewed on 9th March 2025

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Stephen Niblett

Previously reviewed at this venue:

PUNK OFF

PUNK OFF

PUNK OFF

A SQUASH AND A SQUEEZE

Little Angel Studios

★★★

“The set and puppets stay true to Axel Scheffler’s always beautiful illustrations”

A SQUASH AND A SQUEEZE

Little Angel Studios

Reviewed on 7th March 2025

by Debbie Rich

Photography by Suzi Corker

Previously reviewed by Debbie:

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