Spank The Monkey

The Death Of Klinghoffer

Casual operagoers of London! Here's a useful tip for you. If you ever find yourself purchasing a ticket for the English National Opera, be sure to give them your mobile number and ask them to pester you with marketing offers. Ironically, I did just that in 2010 for a production that I wasn't able to attend on the day - the Punchdrunk collaboration The Duchess Of Malfi, which by all accounts was a bit of a dud anyway.

But since then, whenever ENO has had a few spare seats going for a particular production, they've sent me a text on the day offering them at a massively reduced rate. Which is how I started one day last week with no plans for the evening, and ended it sitting in an Upper Circle seat at the Coliseum that cost me £20 instead of the usual £59, watching THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL OPERA IN THE WORLD.

MOSTLY FILM: The Book Of Mormon

What's been the most memorable thing that's happened in 2011? Some would say the wedding of Will and Kate, others the death of Osama bin Laden. But all these events pale into insignificance against the launch of Mostly Film, which has firmly established itself as Europe's Best Website in less than nine months of existence.

Currently, the writing team on Mostly Film are taking a look back at the year, just like everyone else, and asking contributors to write about one of 2011's cultural highlights. Several of these have been movies: films such as Margaret, Confessions, Beginners, Submarine and A Separation have all been discussed in depth so far, as well as a roundup of the activity in London's rep cinemas. 

But as the name implies, the site's brief is Mostly Film. So we've also had a piece on the year's best song: and today, it's my turn to focus on theatre, and specifically the Broadway production of The Book Of Mormon that impressed me so much on our trip to New York earlier this year. I look at how it fits into the careers of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, ponder on how Robert Lopez has tweaked their approach for the stage, and generally try to spoil as few of the jokes for you as possible. You can read it here.

Pressure Drop

The Wellcome Collection is one of London’s hidden gems. It's so well hidden, in fact, that I was barely aware of it until last year. Its permanent collection of Sir Henry Wellcome's medical curiosities is a wonder to behold: its temporary exhibitions take a series of interesting diversions into topics related to healthcare and wellness. And it's generally all free to visit. If you haven't been there before, you need to check it out smartish.

If you go there before May 13th, though, you'll have to pay some money, because its main exhibition space has been turned into a performance area for a play called Pressure Drop. As part of their ongoing Identity Project looking at what it means to be us, Mick Gordon's play looks specifically at what it means to be English. (Which is why half a dozen of us ended up seeing it on St George's Day. That's what we're like.) It's being advertised as part gig, part play, and part installation – that's a lot of parts, and they don’t really fit into a wholly satisfying whole. But this isn't the sort of site that believes overambition is in itself a bad thing, so let's concentrate initially on the parts that work.

Quadrophenia

Some days, the internet can surprise you. Today, for example, it surprised me when I discovered that apart from the one that’s going to occur at the end of this sentence, there’s only one other reference on the entire web to Rentacassette. Back in the seventies, before local libraries started lending out music as well as books, Rentacassette was one of the few ways you could listen to records that you couldn’t cadge off your mates. It was a rental service that worked on a similar principle to the way Lovefilm or Netflix operate today: you paid a regular fee, and selected a wishlist from their catalogue of albums. They’d then post you random selections from your list as they became available, on a medium we used to call “cassette” (think of it as a big plastic MP3, kids).

I learned about Rentacassette from an ad in the back of a music paper – shit, that’s another concept I’ll have to explain to the under-20s – and spent a couple of happy teenage years getting to hear records I probably would have missed otherwise. And one of those was The Who’s Quadrophenia, an album for which I quickly developed a huge amount of affection. Which would make me the perfect demographic for the stage musical adaptation that’s currently touring the UK. The problem is, the album isn’t the main thing people remember Quadrophenia for.

Lipsynch

Robert Lepage plays tend to come in two sizes. At one extreme, you have one-act one-man shows like The Far Side Of The Moon or The Andersen Project, which normally involve the writer/director playing multiple roles with the aid of the most cutting-edge theatre technology available. At the other extreme, you have epic pieces which can potentially sprawl over several days, using a large cast and even more imaginative staging techniques to produce something... well, I'd say 'cinematic', but that might actually be too small a word for what Lepage can achieve.

Lipsynch definitely falls into the second category: when the lights go down at 1pm on a Saturday afternoon, you know you won't be going home till ten that night. But the time goes by so fast, it feels more like one of his short pieces. How does he do that?

REPOST: The Black Rider

Originally posted on The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey 20/05/2004.

This production of The Black Rider toured San Francisco and Sydney as promised in the links section below, and then had a final run in Los Angeles in 2006. A separate production by November Theatre has been touring Canada for the last few years.

Tom Waits finally did a London show of his own in November 2004, and was bloody great.

REPOST: Closer To Heaven

Originally posted on The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey 04/06/2001.

Closer To Heaven's London run lasted five months, in the end. Thanks to the post-9/11 slump in tourism, a lot of West End shows closed before their time in the autumn of 2001, and this was one of them.

A soundtrack album was released, but judging from the prices on Amazon (see below) it's no longer in print. Here, have a video of Frances Barber singing Friendly Fire instead.

REPOST: The Tempest

Originally posted on The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey 24/02/2001.

Ian McDiarmid went on to make two more Star Wars films, and my predictions about the involvement of Palpatine (see the Links section) turned out to be utterly wrong. Meanwhile, this review subsequently ended up on a McDiarmid fansite translated into Russian.

As for the Almeida Theatre, they moved out to King's Cross, operated there for a bit, then moved back again. They're still going, now under the leadership of Michael Attenborough. And Le Mercury survived, too, despite the sentence that directly follows this one.

REPOST: Shakespeare In Shoreditch

Originally posted on The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey 01/07/2000. I was always quite fond of the original introduction to this piece:

Ralph Fiennes and Linus Roache both take the stage
And for their feats are garlanded with roses
At Gainsborough: a theatre for our age,
Yet soon rebuilt as flats for Hoxton posers.

REPOST: Mamma Mia!

Originally posted on The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey 01/04/1999.

After spending much of my first year on the site concentrating on the best arts and entertainment available, eventually I had to crack and do a full-throttle FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STAY AWAY FROM THIS PIECE OF SHIT post. Not that anyone listened, of course, given that the show's been a hit in numerous cities across the globe since then. And that whole 'firebomb the theatre' spiel looks a little bit tactless in the wake of what happened down the road from the Prince Edward Theatre just one month later. Oops.

In other news, Mamma Mia! The Movie opens worldwide later this month. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STAY AWAY FROM THIS PIECE OF SHIT.