A Small Mind At The Theatre

It is safe to say that I love the Northampton Musical Theatre Company, while there are many other amateur groups in the town, they for me hold the mantle of being the most professional. Much of this is because of the absolute belief needed to make their shows work at all, these productions don't just require acting like most of the other groups, this little group has to throw singing and dancing as well into the mix for its performers. Perhaps because of this and the fact that performers of this ilk are not finite, it can't always work and areas have to be cut where you can't get a whole cast that can do the full gamut. However, this is where the amateurs own neat trick comes to the forefront, over professional actors sometimes, enthusiasm. The very real reason these people do these things is not through monetary gain, it's because they first and foremost want to, and that always shows on stage, as it does through this latest production, Summer Holiday . I had a bit o...

Dance shows have not exactly been at the top of my theatre going despite the fact that when I have gone, I have generally enjoyed them (we shall not mention that ballet). The first dance performance I actually saw was a few years ago when I was invited to Isham Dark at the University of Northampton by Mary O'Brien to see the then students there. It was a little out of my usual interest, however, the skill during the show was quite something. So a call out of whether I could fit this show into my schedule from Mary was difficult to ignore, and it was on my one free night that week, I took a little trip to Wonderland . Wonderland was created through the students of Spotlight Dance School and if plays are described as herding cats, this was very much of the herding kiddies flavour as 93 performers took to the stage from 3-21 and quite frankly with incredible success. Even when something sort of went wrong (a young diva refusing to go on stage for instance), it was all received with ...

A theatre shrouded in trees on the estate of a house with landscaped, picnic and woodland areas is a tremendous boost to anyone putting on a show and Kiss Me Kate from director Matthew White lives up to the wonder of its location. Kiss Me Kate based on a book by Sam and Bella Spewack with music and lyrics by Cole Porter is itself based upon Shakespeare's work The Taming of the Shrew . A theatre company with principal performers divorcees Lilli Vanessi (Caroline Sheen) and Fred Graham (Matthew McKenna) are putting on Shrew interspersed with their quarrelling behind and on stage. Added to the mix is a romantic side piece featuring Lois Lane (Monique Young) and Bill Calhoun (Justin Thomas) and some nefarious characters after some money. Caroline Sheen There is just so much to delight in from this production, right from the first viewing of the impressive and very grand set and an amazingly well choreographed initial number of Another Op'nin', Another Show , you just...

Being a Man is an exceptionally well performed one man show and possibly one of the very best I have seen at Flash. Performed in the cramped and uncomfortable surroundings of Hazelrigg House's basement it vividly tells the story of those victims of male rape. Still often shunned by many as something that does not exist, through a series of individual stories, Javier Melhado stunningly recreates the trauma of such happenings. It is perfect in all but one way that this production is in the basement, and lighting issues are the only reason for disappoint as the screen with some powerfully recorded video is slightly washed out. However this is about Javier's live performance though and it is one to savour as he lays everything on the line and either slightly hidden behind a gauze or right within touching distance of the audience, you are dragged totally into the pieces. Clarity of voice, cleanness of performance, and a quite incredible grasp of spatial awareness as he perform...

LiKE ToY SOLDiERS starring Kundai Kanyama tells the story of one young girl in Africa and her very different experiences to ours of growing up in that country. This relatively short solo show has great impact over that brief time, telling the everyday issues of a child and her forgetting to do a job for her mother and the wide-eyed panic on the face of that child because of this, then the progression of that same child wielding a gun and doing the bidding of an unseen commander. This play clearly depicts that in war, everyone suffers and in Africa perhaps, even more, the children as ruthless leaders blatantly target them to continue to fuel their armies. Kundai gives a confident and clearly defined performance as this child, and over the course of the thirty minutes, we clearly see the lively youngster move from the worry of upsetting her mummy onto the gunning down of people. There is a very distressing scene where Kundai physically acts out a rape perpetrated on her...

There are many reasons why I wanted The Time Travel Tour to be so much better than sadly it turned out. As a life-long fan of sci-fi myself, the premise and idea of this show from Just This Guy and its performer Jay Andrews, sounded absolutely perfect. To a certain extent, it still remains that, it's just that the premise currently (but perhaps hopefully not in the future) exceeds the production. Jay Andrews plays our time travel guide, who takes us back in his time machine, called TARDIS, but for fans, cleverly not standing for what you might expect, to moments of history. Sadly these moments are a little where the show slightly begins to disappoint. With so much in our history to choose from, the selection chosen is quite frankly rather dull, so much so that I have little recognition of them now. Perhaps this for me is like Jay admits in his programme (bonus point for this), that I also find history often dull. However, if this show is to work, you need to make it not dull, le...

G.M.H. stands for Genetically Modified Human in Stalagmite Theatre's involving, if a little slowly building the tale of a potential future. We are introduced from the opening to two scavengers who appear to be far from those in the title and are indeed survivors of the pure species. These two are played with a nicely realistic tone by Daniel Ambrose-Jones (Kamari) and Jamal Franklin (Iblis). They happily appear to have a love/hate relationship with each other, yet in this harsh environment also clearly need to respect and need one another to survive. Thrown into this pairing upon arrival at an underground base (featuring a huge, nicely decorated structure with artwork from former Flash performer Zoe Davey), is a G.M.H. of the title, Atara. She is played by Jessica Bridge with an icily chilling style, cold and obviously calculating but not letting on her true motives perhaps. The play itself is a curious one and as mentioned is a little slow to build considering its length, how...