Cameron McAllister Archives - thespyinthestalls.com

★★★★

“A new and mostly fresh-faced cast give their all to this hugely enjoyable show”

At the highpoint of the Victorian era, WS Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan collaborated on 14 hugely successful comic operas, thanks to their being brought together by Richard D’Oyly Carte at the Savoy Theatre. Sullivan wrote the music and Gilbert the words. The duo’s gift for catchy tunes and clever and witty lyrics won them huge success.

HMS Pinafore, The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance have long been out of copyright and remain firm favourites for amateur companies around the world. So far, so familiar. But what happens when you freshen up these old warhorses and stage them with an all-male cast?

Since 2009 London-based director Sasha Regan has been doing just that, first at the Union Theatre, which she founded, and subsequently on tour around the country and to Australia. When asked why an all-male cast, she once said she loves their innocence. “Like a bunch of fresh-faced schoolboys, they have an energy that is infectious”. That fizzing energy rocked Wilton’s Music Hall last night.

A new and mostly fresh-faced cast give their all to this hugely enjoyable show, injecting much delightful scampering campery into the already irreverent old story. David McKechnie (the very model of a modern Major-General) is the only cast member to have appeared in Sasha Regan’s show before and his version of the most famous patter song (think the original rap) is a tour de force.

Thanks to the direction and some ingenious and ultra-precise and always enchanting choreography by Lizzi Gee, the cast occupy the entire theatre most enjoyably. From the opening scene where the troupe of white clad performers bowl energetically on to the stage through the auditorium, their movement is a delight.

Amongst the best known numbers in the show are ‘When a felon’s not engaged in his employment’ (a Policeman’s lot is not a happy one) – sung with great gusto by a knee-trembling chorus of Policemen, and ‘Hail poetry’ a beautiful rendition of this a cappella anthem.

These choruses are well-suited to an all-male cast. The greatest challenges are in the female roles, where Sullivan wrote some beautiful bel canto tunes. As Mabel, Luke Garner-Greene makes an impressive stage debut, gamely tackling the considerable falsetto challenge. Robert Wilkes as Ruth has some terrific comic moments. Tom Newland is the living embodiment of the swaggering pirate king and Cameron McAllister has a fine voice and touching innocence in his performance as Frederic.

Right down to its cheesy ending when all’s right in this shining take on the Victorian world, Sasha Regan’s The Pirates of Penzance is a delightful don’t miss.

Back to the Future

Adelphi Theatre

Reviewed – 6th October 2021

★★★★

“It is sleek, well-oiled and will surely be burning bright for quite some time”

Even with the help of a 1.21 gigawatts flux capacitor and an unhealthy dose of radioactive plutonium, 88 mph seems a pretty modest speed required to propel a rear-engine ‘DeLorean’ through time. But this piece of eighties iconography has no trouble landing on the stage of the Adelphi Theatre in the twenty-first century, swept along by the sheer force of a gravity-defying publicity machine and the collective, kick-starting power of a couple of thousand fans a night, adding to the lightning bolts of energy that burst throughout the auditorium. To say “Back to the Future: The Musical” is spectacular is an understatement. It showers us with special effects, jaw-dropping sets and transitions, blurs of neon, CGI magic and a hi-wattage, fifties/eighties mash up of a soundtrack. It is sleek, well-oiled and will surely be burning bright for quite some time.

But listen closely and you hear some troublesome knocking in the engine. Not enough to stall it and too quiet to worry the crowd, the flaws are invariably swamped by the energy of the performances. It’s a bizarre adaptation of the film; simultaneously faithful to the original but adding quirks and eccentricities that don’t always sit comfortably with the source material. Doc Brown attracts an ensemble of backing singers and dancers like flies. It’s a lot of fun, is wonderfully appealing to the ears and eyes and it breaks the fourth wall. But you wonder why. The music and lyrics of Alan Silvestri and Glan Ballard are crowd pleasing pastiches, with words and rhymes full of witty observation and humour; but sometimes side-stepping into banality. The almost relentless breaking into song takes away from the narrative and the characterisation; we barely have time to take a breath (so how do the cast cope?) and we miss those moments when we can absorb the concepts of space, time and history that the film allowed us to contemplate.

Yet despite being stripped of at least one dimension of their characters, the cast give impeccable performances. Olly Dobson, as Marty McFly, is a dead ringer for Michael J. Fox and is a fireball of energy. When he arrives back in 1955, the moments when his teenage mother (Rosanna Hyland) has ‘the hots’ for him are played for real laughs. (It is bizarre to note that when the film was originally pitched to Disney, the appalled executives rejected it outright, declaring it to be a movie about incest). More emphasis is placed on Marty’s relationship with his dad, George. Hugh Coles gives one of the stand-out performances; lanky and geeky with angular awkwardness, and often hilarious in the way only a highly skilled mover can re-enact ‘bad dancing’. Roger Bart’s Doc Brown is a contagious concoction of quirks, marred only by his over playing to the audience at times.

The special effects, sets and lighting are as much a lead role as the protagonists. Tim Lutkin’s lighting, Finn Ross’ video design, coupled with Chris Fisher’s illusion design, Gareth Owen’s sound and The Twins FX animatronics cannot fail to produce a breath-taking show. Add on the extra layers of Chris Bailey’s sleek, though sometimes excessive, choreography; and musical director Jim Henson’s thirteen-piece band and you have a display that defies the laws of physics. Like the well-worn bumblebee flight myth (it is a scientific and aerodynamic impossibility that bumblebees can fly – yet fly they do) the unconventional components that make up this vehicle should leave it grounded. It shouldn’t do – but it flies. It soars even. Although not timeless, it will stand the test of time and we’ll still be seeing this show in the West End way back to the future.

THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE at Wilton’s Music Hall

★★★★

“A new and mostly fresh-faced cast give their all to this hugely enjoyable show”

THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE at Wilton’s Music Hall

Reviewed on 31st October 2024

by David Woodward

Photography by Mark Senior

Previously reviewed at this venue:

THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE

THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE

Adelphi Theatre

Reviewed – 6th October 2021

★★★★

“It is sleek, well-oiled and will surely be burning bright for quite some time”

Reviewed by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Sean Ebsworth Barnes

Back to the Future

Adelphi Theatre until July 2022

Shows we reviewed in September 2021: