Chicago (Artscape)

Photo: R Coudyzer

Photo: R Coudyzer


None of the South African productions of foreign musicals that have run in Cape Town have come even close to trumping producer Hazel Feldman’s superlative 2005 staging of the sexed-up Broadway revival version of Chicago. Its return two years later for a short season is most welcome. The musical itself hasn’t dated at all. The wicked ways of this world never do.

Good news is that all the leads are even better this time around, starting with Amra Faye Wright who went on to perform the role of Velma Kelly in the West End and on Broadway. Her co-stars Samantha Peo (Roxie Hart) and Ilse Klink (Matron Mama Morton) are now far from being overshadowed. The only lead change – Craig Urbani replaces Drummond Marais as the shyster lawyer Billy Flynn – is an improvement too.
And under the baton of the dependable Bryan Schimmel the 14-piece onstage orchestra delivers as well as ever.

The only backsliding is in the dancing. There are fewer dancers this time and more than half of them are new – a problem that probably arose from a short rerun season. A number of the present company are in poor form and don’t cope with Bob Fosse’s inhuman choreography. Yet, this doesn’t ultimately spoil what is a great evening at the theatre.

April 4, 2008 | Tags: , , , | Comments Closed

Menopause the Musical (Theatre on the Bay)

LISA MELMAN, ILSE KLINK, JUDY DITCHFIELD, KATE NORMINGTON

‘Menopause’ is rather a big word, but append ‘musical’ and before you can say “oestrogen therapy” you might have a show with a title as catchy as a tabloid headline. Add four female baby boomers drawn from the popular imagination shaped by television sitcom clichés to sing covers with parodied lyrics, and it seems you have a hit production.

Menospause The Musical is sweeping the world, celebrating ‘the change’, loudly and proudly releasing generations of embarrassed and repressed women in global climacteric warming.

What happens when the monologuing vagina begins to get a dry throat, runs a fever and starts bleeding at the gums? Jeanie Linders’ lyrics spare no grisly details, from menorrhoea to incontinence, from libido loss to loss of memory. The Bee Gees’ Staying Alive becomes Stayin’ Awake, the lion turns into My Husband Sleeps Tonight, Mary Well’s My Guy transforms into My Thighs, while Good Vibrations stays just that, but is battery operated. Some time around wishing for an interval, you start to wonder how many songs can anyone do about hot flushes.

Thankfully, the cast are all strong performers. Kate Normington is the skinny soap star, envy of the Iowa housewife (Judy Ditchfield); Lisa Melman is a Californian, hippy earth mother and Ilse Klink, who we adored in Chicago and sorely missed in We Will Rock You, plays the empowered modern female executive on her mobile to her PA.

There is no story line to speak of; they meet at Bloomingdales department store, New York, fighting over a brassiere sale in a desperate, anxiety-ridden attempt to shore up their failing vanity with some designer trumpery.

There were very few men in an audience whose hysteria bordered on that of a Chippendales’ concert. Yet this show does not – as it claims – educate women at all, it simply commiserates with them in self-affirming group therapy. Perhaps it is a first step. A more meaningful liberation might consider why it is that our society can find nothing positive in a perfectly normal biological process and has distorted it into something abnormal, even shameful.

March 20, 2007 | Tags: , , , | Comments Closed