Tabla de contenidos para September 2021 en Ink Pellet

It’s a familiar show, but there’s nothing clichéd about this production. As a fine fifteen-piece band, high above the stage out of sight, conducted by MD Cat Beveridge, launches into Richard Rodgers’s evocatively scored overture, we watch an otherworldly solo ballet sequence by Sera Maehara alone on the big round thrust stage. Then she is surrounded by American GIs, marching. It’s a neat way of signalling the serious and dark cultural clash which lies at the heart of this ever-topical piece. Full as it is of hummable melodies, South Pacific is a profoundly political piece and this production brings that out: Racism and the need to overcome it is, if anything, more urgent now even than it was in 1949. Of course, you can’t dismiss a man (or wash him…

Amini-musical for pre-schoolers, based on Julia Donaldson’s book of the same name, (see our interview with Julia in the last issue), this show has been around for a few years but it has settled. The present four actors have a palpable onstage rapport with both the audience and each other and Nikita Johal is delightful as the reassuring, very smiley Lily who also sings splendidly. The show assumes that audience children are already very familiar with Julia Donaldson’s rhyming adventure story about a ladybird who thwarts a burglary on an idyllic farm. But the show also offers its young audience things they’re not expecting: songs by Jon Fiber and Andy Shaw with additional lyrics by Howard Jacques, for instance. The words are witty, simple and clear – in the hands…

Jimand Allotey, 26, is warmly, infectiously effervescent. She and I are chatting in a coffee shop at London Bridge because I had seen her sparky work in Spontaneous Production’s open air Around the World in Eighty Days a couple of weeks earlier and wanted to know more about her and her career. I organise her chai latte and get out my notebook. “I was born in Epsom and I still have family in Surrey, but I grew up in Ghana because my parents went back for work. So I have a foot firmly in both camps” she chuckles. “And I suppose it all began at home with all those Disney Movies such as The Lion King along with The Sound of Music and The King and I. I just loved…

Yes, of course, we’d all like every child to have access to instrumental lessons and to be taught class music by an imaginative specialist. But, indefatigably as many people and organisations try to make this happen, there is an in-room elephantine question of resources: personnel, facilities and obviously, money. And regrettably, it isn’t at the top of every priority list either. Every reader of Ink Pellet will, I know, carry on striving but there are, sadly, many obstacles. Perhaps one day the tide will turn. Meanwhile, let’s, at least, expose children of all ages to music as much as we can. This costs almost nothing and requires no specialist expertise – just enthusiasm and teachers have that in spades. I think children and young people should hear music – all…

Carousel is a gritty piece. It’s about domestic violence and could hardly, given how cases have risen during lockdowns, be more topical. Based on a short story by Ferenc Molnar and originally set on the coast of New England, Timothy Sheader’s thoughtful production reworks it by setting it in the north of England with a range of accents which stresses the piece’s universality. We get Musical Director Tom Deering’s fresh new orchestral arrangements too. I love the way, for instance, he throws in the variations and repeatedly psychs up the texture in June is Busting Out All Over. And we get an on-stage brass band at the start to kick off that famous Carousel Waltz and tell the audience that we’re in brass band country. In a strong cast, Declan…

How did you get into theatre PR work? Via journalism. I grew up in Carlisle and when I was 16 I did two days’ work experience at the News and Star which was the local evening paper. Then when I was back at school (where I’d published the school newspaper) doing my A levels they called to say there was a job – did I want it? When I went to talk to my head teacher, she told me that if I took the job I’d never work for the BBC. I often remember that because I often work with the BBC these days. So you were a cub reporter? Yes it was classic, traditional cub reporter, learning-on-the-job stuff: local events, court reporting, industrial tribunals and the like. I loved…

So how does a woman who is German by birth but grew up in Kenya and now lives in West London get steeped in Russian history? It’s a long story. Ellen Alpsten, 50, and I meet on the ground floor at Tate Modern where her youngest son, Gustav is enjoying a flamboyant playground area set up for the summer holidays in the Turbine Hall. She keeps an eye on him as we chat over hot drinks at the pop-up coffee bar and after a while he joins us. Aged 11, he tells me that onomatopoeia is over used, that he enjoys his ballet class, is looking forward to secondary school next term and wonders how I manage to talk, listen and write notes simultaneously. It’s all very congenial. Ellen’s new…

What do I know about Tokyo? Very little, despite, at the time of writing, it hosting the Olympic games this year. Understanding just how far in advance galleries and museums must plan ahead to secure the loan of artworks from collections across the globe, it was surely a clever and well-researched idea to synchronise the current show at Oxford Ashmolean museum, Tokyo: Art and Photography (running until the start of January next year) with one of world’s most important and high-profile sporting events. That said both had been postponed because of the Covid-19 pandemic. I watched some of the sports coverage, and I’m sure many especially young people will have, if for no other reason than to see to see 13-year-old Sky Brown take bronze in women’s skateboarding. Impressively flying…

The Tsarina’s Daughter (see interview with Ellen Alpsten on page 8) plunged me into eighteenth century Imperialist Russia and it felt a bit deep end because most of my usual landmarks were missing. Having grown up on Jean Plaidy and Anya Seyton – much of the history I know first came to my attention through fiction. But most of it was, and still is, British via Philippa Gregory, CJ Sansom, Hilary Mantel et al. So I learned an enormous amount – assisted by Google which I kept consulting to check that the historical facts are right. And of course, they are. Elizabeth is the daughter of Peter the Great in a dynasty which has succession by appointment rather than automatic birthright. Her fortunes go up and down after the death…

There´s much to enjoy in Pam Gems´s musical theatre biography of Edith Piaf. The singer’s life story is pretty well known and Gem leans quite heavily on the motherless childhood and youth in her grandmother´s brothel, her work as a street singer, an international career and many men. Of course, she was vulnerable and pitiful and her short life – 47 when she died in 1963 – was tragically bedevilled by alcohol, drugs and personality flaws. Adam Penfold directs an ensemble of nine, which includes several accomplished actor musicians so that the music, with MD Gareth Valentine on stage at the side on piano, becomes a seamless part of the action. And there are, naturally, a lot of songs. A show with a lot going for it then but there…