Tabla de contenidos para March 2022 en Ink Pellet

Anyone who has ever put on a school production of an established show will know that the first thing you have to do is to find out who manages the show’s rights and then negotiate with whoever it is. In a nutshell, the system means that if you stage a version of Little Shop of Horrors you buy a licence so that Alan Menken and the estate of Howard Ashman get a small payment in acknowledgement of your using their work. Enter Music Theatre International. It was founded in the USA in 1952 by Frank Loesser and Don Walker. Today the London office, which licences over 5000 productions a year, operates in a European market from Iceland to Israel. The companies range from schools and amateur societies to professionals and…

Jungle Rumble – Perform Productions Fortune Theatre The political message in this 45 minute show for under 7s is laid on thickly. Beware of crude indoctrination masquerading as educative entertainment. Yes of course we need to save endangered animals and to conserve the jungle but absurd, outdated stereotyping of the sort of people who once killed animals for taxidermy is hardly likely to get the message over to young children. Moreover, there are zoological and biological solecisms. Snow the White Lion is eventually rescued. If she really is the last of her species how did she come to be pregnant? I winced at the rhyming of Guatamala with koala too. Sorry, folks. But koalas live in Australia. All this is a pity because the songs are jolly and varied in…

“This is one of the best decisions I have ever made” says Rosie who is talking to me in a comfortable meeting room at Fourth Monkey’s new training centre, The Bamboo House in Bristol. She, and two other students I’m chatting to, are doing the one year course in acting and theatre making and planning to apply for drama school at the end of it. “This is the blanket I didn’t know I needed” says Abbie from Wales, who had to turn down a scholarship place at Mountview last year for family reasons. “I was deemed too young for drama school” adds Ellis, giving me a blue eyed grin and looking about 12 (he isn’t) over his face mask, “but the Fourth Monkey audition was the most challenging and the…

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the 20th century’s most important novels. Published in 1960, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it stated firmly that black lives matter very much – eight years before the death of Martin Luther King and 60 years before the death of George Floyd. Yes, the issues are still very much with us and it’s essential that we go on talking about them, especially in schools. That’s why I was upset to see that this book which has been repeatedly banned over the years, was recently removed from the 9th grade required reading list in the Washington State district of Mulkiteo, although teachers remain free to use TKAMB if they wish. This arose because three teachers from Kamiak High School object. One of them,…

How did you get into puppetry? I enjoyed Sesame Street as a child because the puppets exist within a human world and no one thinks anything of it. Then when I was eight years old and going through my dinosaur phase, I found, in the school library, an Usborne book: How to Make Puppets and it all grew from there. A lot of improvisations with toilet rolls, cereal boxes and the ironing board followed for the entertainment of my encouraging family. Eventually I went to Central School of Speech and Drama and took their puppetry course, which is no longer available. Although a degree in puppetry sounds pretty unlikely, my parents were very supportive. And then you got an exciting first job? Yes, in my third year at drama school…

Like many people of my generation, I have fond, warm happy memories of Floella Benjamin entertaining my children on programmes such as Play School – with that winning smile, blue beaded plaits and talent for singing, dancing and communicating. Today, aged 72, although she still looks unchangingly young and radiant, she is Dame Floella Benjamin of Beckenham with decades of charity work behind her and a busy life as a working Lib Dem peer. Because that’s how she’s introduced to me I greet her, by saying “Hello Dame Floella – or may I call you Floella?” She chuckles and replies: “Yes you may – now that you’ve actually said the word ‘Dame’”. I remind her of the day she was presented with the JM Barrie Award by Action for Children’s…

Evan Placey and I have history. I last interviewed him for Ink Pellet six years ago in a chain coffee shop in Catford. Just for old times’ sake we’ve met in the same venue today. And of course, a lot of water has flowed under both our bridges since 2016. Take Jekyll and Hyde a version of which was commissioned from Evan by National Youth Theatre for its Rep Company in 2017. I saw and reviewed the production then and remember it as a topical, intelligent, thoughtful reworking of Stevenson’s novella rather than a conventional adaptation. Harriet Jekyll is Dr Jekyll’s widow trying to carry on his work, which results in her developing an alter ego as a violent, forthright prostitute and there’s a subplot about a senior judge and…

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