Stage-to-screen review: Flowers for Mrs Harris

My latest virtual visit to a regional theatre is to one I've been to before in person, although not for a couple of years: Chichester Festival Theatre, and Daniel Evans' production of Flowers for Mrs Harris, which he transferred there in 2018 after a run at his previous job in Sheffield. Rachel Wagstaff (book) and Richard Taylor's (music & lyrics) musical is based on a novella by American author Paul Gallico better known as Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, which is perhaps a helpful indicator of the kind of salt-of-the-earth working-class image of a London charlady Ada Harris (Clare Burt) is. Widowed in the Second World War and childless, she has little in her life except making ends meet through the various ungrateful clients whose houses she cleans. She ploughs through stoically until one day she covers a friend's shift cleaning for a deluded minor aristocrat (Joanna Riding,) where she spots a Christian Dior dress and becomes determined to own one some day.

Theatre review: Falsettos

Another week, another show gets embroiled in controversy - in the case of Falsettos it's over whether the long-delayed (27 years) UK premiere of William Finn (music and lyrics) and James Lapine's (book) musical engaged meaningfully with the Jewish community during the rehearsal process. Tara Overfield-Wilkinson's production has no Jewish cast or creatives, and when a show opens with a number called "Four Jews in a Room Bitching" (as well as later featuring a major plotline about a bar mitzvah, and a whole song about the cliché that Jews are bad at sports) it does seem mind-blowing to me that nobody considered at the very least having someone in the room in a consultancy role for some scenes, just to make sure the show's brash, cartoonish style didn't tip over into something insensitive.

Theatre review: Little Miss Sunshine

Michael Arndt, Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton's 2006 film Little Miss Sunshine was something of a sleeper hit despite being a downbeat comedy whose story takes some wild lurches in tone. Add the fact that it's essentially a road trip movie and it's fair to call it, at the very least, an eccentric choice for musical adaptation. James Lapine (book) and William Finn (music and lyrics) are the writers attempting it in a show that premiered in 2011, and finally comes to the UK in a production by Mehmet Ergen that starts a tour at the Arcola. Hoping to be crowned the titular junior beauty queen is 8-year-old Olive (Sophie Hartley-Booth, Lily Mae Denman or Evie Gibson,) who finds out that the girl who beat her in a local heat has been disqualified (for taking slimming pills) and she's now in the finals - with only a couple of days to make it from New Mexico to the pageant in California.

Theatre review: The Grönholm Method

Frank (Jonathan Cake) arrives at the final interview stage for a senior sales job at a Fortune 500 company only to find no interviewers present. Instead Rick (John Gordon Sinclair,) Melanie (Laura Pitt-Pulford, somehow feeling brave enough to return to the Menier Chocolate Factory so soon after an excruciating experience) and Carl (Greg McHugh) join him in the conference room, the other candidates competing for the job. They’re not here for a traditional interview but to be tested for their suitability for a stressful job, according to the rules of The Grönholm Method. Observed, they assume, through hidden cameras or two-way mirrors, a concealed drawer occasionally slides out of the wall containing instructions for the games they have to play – anyone who finds it too much is welcome to leave the room, but they forfeit their chance at the job if they do.

Theatre review: Barnum

One thing you can usually expect from the Menier Chocolate Factory is a pretty safe palate and a commercial sensibility, so it’s a surprise to see them spaff a big budget and their Christmas show on a gamble, and one that doesn’t pay off at that. Maybe it’s a reflection of Cy Coleman (music,) Michael Stewart (lyrics) and Mark Bramble’s (book) hero and his tendency to lay the big decisions in his life on the toss of a coin that’s led Gordon Greenberg’s production to cast Marcus Brigstocke in a part he has no obvious qualification for, the titular role in Barnum. The 19th century impresario P.T. Barnum was given the name (most likely by himself) The Greatest Showman, and the musical follows his earlier forays into show business (his co-founding of Barnum & Bailey’s Circus is pretty much the show’s epilogue) and his relationship with his wife Charity (Laura Pitt-Pulford,) who provides the nous behind his flair for spectacle.

Theatre review: Platinum

Martha (Siân Thomas) was a legendary protest singer in the 1970s, but she retired both from music and from public view. Simon (George Blagden) is a music academic doing his PhD on protest music and Martha in particular, but he's hit a brick wall and only speaking to the elusive singer herself will give him the details he needs. In a last-ditch attempt, he contacts her estranged daughter Anna (Laura Pitt-Pulford,) a commercial pop singer who's had some success with her first album, and is now struggling to put together a follow-up. Confronted with Simon's questions about her mother at a time when she's feeling vulnerable about her own work, Anna lets slip Martha's big secret: Her biggest, most influential hit was so different from her other songs because she didn't actually write it. She now lets Simon know where he can find her mother so she can give her side of the story, as writer Hannah Patterson returns to Hampstead Downstairs with her short play Platinum.

Theatre review: Side Show

A 1997 musical with the dubious reputation of having been produced on Broadway twice and tanked both times, writer Bill Russell and composer Henry Krieger's Side Show finally arrives in the UK in the version from the 2014 revival, with additional book by Bill Condon. Based on the story of the real-life Hilton sisters who appeared in Tod Browning's Freaks, it opens with conjoined twins Daisy (Louise Dearman) and Violet (Laura Pitt-Pulford) as the star attraction in a freak show during the Depression. The show's owner Sir (Chris Howell) is also their legal guardian for life and essentially treats them as his property as well. When vaudeville impresario Terry (Haydn Oakley) visits the show he spots the twins' potential as performers, as well as the abusive situation they're in, and helps them mount a successful court case to be liberated from Sir. He does succeed in making them stars, for a while, and they also seem to find a chance at love, but their disability gets in the way of both in the end.

Theatre review: The Return of the Soldier

Charles Miller and Tim Sanders' new chamber musical The Return of the Soldier is based on the 1918 novel by Rebecca West, an early literary response to the First World War and the physical and mental toll it took not only on the combatants but on the people left behind. Captain Christopher Baldry (Stewart Clarke) is sent home from the front with shell-shock, and he immediately sets about reconnecting with the woman he loves. Unfortunately this isn't his wife, but his holiday romance from a decade earlier. He's completely forgotten Kitty (Zoe Rainey,) his wife of seven years, and plans instead on proposing to Margaret (Laura Pitt-Pulford.) But she too has since got married, to the kind-hearted but sickly William (Michael Matus.) In an attempt to help cure his amnesia, Chris is allowed to meet with Margaret, but it turns out neither of them is ready to give the other up now they've found each other again.

Theatre review: Marry Me A Little

There's no shortage of Stephen Sondheim works but there always seems to be an appetite for more; hence the 1980 show Marry Me A Little, in which Craig Lucas and Norman René compiled a number of Sondheim's songs into an hour-long revue. Some, like the title song which comes from Company, are familiar but the majority were cut from earlier drafts of his shows. They're largely either love songs or heartbreak/breakup songs so lend themselves to a vague framework of a story about a couple. There's no dialogue, and looking up the show online it seems that it's down to the individual production to decide exactly what story it's telling. So Hannah Chissick's production at the St James Theatre's downstairs Studio space makes it the story of a couple who are just in the process of breaking up.

Theatre review: The Light Princess

A lot of long-awaited projects have been finally making their way to the stage at the National this year; after the Lester/Kinnear/Hytner Othello and before the SRB/Mendes Lear, comes Tori Amos' debut as a composer of musical theatre. With Samuel Adamson she's adapted The Light Princess from a fairytale by George MacDonald. Two warring kingdoms separated by a dangerous forest, Lagobel is rich in gold but plagued by drought, a problem that, as its name suggests, Sealand doesn't have. When Princess Althea of Lagobel (Rosalie Craig) loses her mother, she deals with it by becoming unable to find anything serious again, her lightness of spirit manifesting itself literally as she starts to float. When the same thing happens to Prince Digby of Sealand (Nick Hendrix) he goes the other way and becomes a humourless warrior. When the nations' animosity finally breaks out into war, the two are pitted against each other but, of course, opposites attract.

Theatre review: Mack and Mabel

The onstage preoccupation with the early years of Hollywood that's been an occasional theme this year returns with a revival of Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman's 1974 musical Mack and Mabel at Southwark Playhouse. Once again, the unforgiving space of the Vault has been given over to a musical but, perhaps thanks to the fact that he's worked there before with last year's Parade, director Thom Southerland has managed to get over the dodgy acoustics that plague the venue. Designer Jason Denvir has reconfigured the seating into a wide, shallow thrust, with a bank of seating and a curtain blocking the Vault's visually impressive double tunnels, along with their tendency to absorb every word anyone sings in there. The show charts the rise and fall of Keystone Studios through the turbulent relationship of director Mack Sennett (Norman Bowman) and Mabel Normand (Laura Pitt-Pulford,) the starlet he first discovered working at a deli.