Johnny Depp classic’s gone for a Burton

Inside No.9: Stage/Fright (Wyndham’s Theatre, London)

Verdict: A party for themselves

Fifty-something TV comedians Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton are celebrating their pearl anniversary – having worked together for an astonishing 30 years. 

Now they’re back on stage where they started out in The League Of Gentlemen (with Mark Gatiss), celebrating their success by throwing a ‘me party’ for themselves – not unlike Amy Adams and Miss Piggy in The Muppets.

Instead of dining out, they’re redeploying the format of their BBC so-called ‘anthology’ series, Inside No.9, to stage a collection of interlocking yarns, mixing horror, comedy and ghost stories. 

Set in and around the Wyndham’s Theatre itself, they start with a brilliant sketch featuring audience members running a gamut of cardinal sins from eating, chatting and answering phones, to Skyping on laptops. I’ve seen it all.

Thereafter, it morphs into the tale of smutty, washed-out Seventies comedians Len and Tommy (aka Cheese and Crackers) staging a dismal comeback. 

But the scene changes again as they kidnap a minor celebrity (Alexander Armstrong from Pointless on Wednesday this week), before it settles down after the interval as a

Hammer Horror spoof in which a young woman seeks minor surgery at a lunatic asylum.

The show has a distinct feeling of using up the comedians’ off-cuts, out-takes and left-overs for the amusement of themselves and their fervid fan-base. 

Fifty-something TV comedians Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton are celebrating their pearl anniversary – having worked together for an astonishing 30 years

The duo are redeploying the format of their BBC so-called ‘anthology’ series, Inside No.9, to stage a collection of interlocking yarns, mixing horror, comedy and ghost stories

And in keeping with their guiding principle for No.9, we must not only expect the unexpected, but also expect the very much expected… innuendo and black comedy. 

And naturally there are a great many disguises as both men slip in and out of costumes and prosthetics – including for one deliciously gruesome interlude in which Shearsmith amputates his own leg.

Both men have always struck me as being blessed with the aura of slightly sleazy uncles. 

This seasons their stage presence and our discomfiture significantly. But here, they also clearly aspire to classic double-act status, and there is more than a nod to Morecambe (Pemberton) and Wise (Shearsmith). 

And yet, their habit of not only pulling our legs, but also constantly pulling the rug from under our expectations does become slightly wearing.

Nonetheless, there is something commendably disruptive about their brand of theatrical anarchy and director Simon Evans does well to keep their runaway train on track – especially when it comes to the multiple levels of reality in the asylum scenes. 

Nor is it all Pemberton and Shearsmith self-tribute. There are also terrific turns from Anna Francolini as a ᴅᴇᴀᴅpan nurse at the asylum, and Miranda Hennessy as a pop star turned actress (a dig at Lily Allen).

Fans will be pleased with the roster of self-regarding in-jokes in what is a one-off memorial service before its time. 

In keeping with their guiding principle for No.9, we must not only expect the unexpected, but also expect the very much expected… innuendo and black comedy

And, although the rest of us may also be amused, we needn’t be too disappointed the show is more or less sold out.

Until April 5.

 

Johnny Depp classic’s gone for a Burton

Scissorhandz (Southwark Playhouse, London)

Verdict: Lacks cutting edge 

Scissorhandz is an American musical homage to Tim Burton he may well prefer to forget. 

It’s based on his 1990 film Edward Scissorhands starring Johnny Depp. Now, in a dazzlingly innocuous move, they have inserted a ‘z’ into the тιтle and turned Burton’s tale of the misshapen outcast with scissors for fingers into an ecstatically banal affirmation of variant Sєxual idenтιтy.

In line with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, our gender-neutral hero demands to know his purpose from his creator-mother. 

‘You are not from God, but from love,’ she explains, without resolving her creation’s bemusement at humans’ tribal behaviour. 

But although the show is earnest, it’s mostly a loud celebration of sectarian interest.

Music consists of recycled pop and rock, ranging from Chaka Khan’s I’m Every Woman to American Authors’ Best Day Of My Life, and climaxing in an almost haunting rendition of Radiohead’s Creep. 

The singing, however, is uneven, with Emma Williams yodelling most forcefully as Scissorhandz’s adoptive, Avon Lady mother, Peg.

Otherwise, a kitsch, happy-clappy mood glosses variable vocal standards. 

Scissorhandz is an American musical homage to Tim Burton he may well prefer to forget

Meanwhile, the venue’s narrow strip of a stage, hemmed in at close quarters, cramps Bradley Bredeweg’s rock-musical ambitions. 

With little space in front of a mountain of amplifiers, the choreography is forever on the brink of a human pile-up.

In a role reprised from the original production in Las Vegas, Jordan Kai Burnett’s Scissorhandz is dexterous enough, snipping at topiary before getting into ladies’ hair – upper and nether. 

Otherwise Burnett is left to drift purposelessly about the stage in pasty make-up and gothic leathers. 

Although the ending has been corrected to ensure something like social justice, the achievement is to turn the story into what it was all along – a Hollywood tale of outsider triumph.

Until March 29.

 

A jazzed-up Shakespeare set in smokin’ 1940s Harlem

Play On! (Bristol Old Vic, then Lyric Hammersmith) 

Verdict: The Bard sings the blues 

West Side Story revamped Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet courtesy of Bernstein and Sondheim; Cole Porter made the Bard’s cold, hateful The Taming Of The Shrew H๏τ to trot as Kiss Me, Kate. 

Alas, Play On! Sheldon Epps’s riff on Twelfth Night, to the tune of Duke Ellington, is not in quite the same groove.

The тιтle comes from the play’s first line. Ellington’s It Don’t Mean A Thing might be more apposite. 

For while the Duke’s fabulous blues chime with the theme of unrequited love, Cheryl L West’s book, and sketchy characters with few sparks flying between them, capture little of the bitter-sweetness of this cruel comedy of confusion.

Never mind. Played as a juke-box musical, Michael Buffong’s production provides potent proof of the unquoted part of that famous first line, ‘Music is the food of love.’

Relocated to Harlem in the Forties (suggested by set designer Ultz’s smoky bar and tatty costumes), the plot plays fast and loose with Shakespeare’s preoccupations with disguise and idenтιтy. 

West Side Story revamped Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet; Cole Porter made the Bard’s cold, hateful The Taming Of The Shrew H๏τ to trot as Kiss Me, Kate – but Play On! Sheldon Epps’s riff on Twelfth Night, to the tune of Duke Ellington, is not in quite the same groove

This Duke is no тιтled grandee but the greatest band leader in Harlem and, following a bust-up with Liv, the club’s luscious diva, he has lost his muse and his mojo. 

Enter aspirant composer, Viola, who discovers that writing songs is for men only. 

As a suited, booted Vyman, ‘he’ persuades lovelorn Duke, Earl Gregory (I Got It Bad And That Ain’t Good), ‘his’ winning songs will seduce Liv all over again.

From there, the music takes over. Koko Alexander’s shimmering Liv brings the house down with Mood Indigo. 

Cameron Bernard Jones’s upтιԍнт Malvolio figure, tricked into upgrading his wardrobe, puts a cut into his strut in a screaming yellow zoot suit. 

Best of all, Lifford Shillingford and Llewellyn Jamal blow the roof off with Rocks In My Bed before a brand new fairytale ending.

Ellington not Shakespeare, but irresistibly enjoyable.

Until February 22.

 

Toilet humour saved by a classic comic formula

The Gift (Park Theatre, London)

Verdict: Potty men

What would you do if you received a poop in the post? That is the dismal question posed by Dave Florez’s scatological sit-com about a middle-aged neurotic single man, Colin. 

The stool in question has arrived in a posh patisserie box at his North London home and is the object of his anxious inquiry, alongside his sister Lisa and her partner Brian.

I couldn’t quite believe that the offending article would be left for scrutiny on the kitchen counter – even under relative safety of cling film. 

That though is what we must accept as the trio attempt to apportion motive and blame. 

And although the set-up also serves as a pretext for schoolboyish gags and gratuitous F-ing and C-ing, it includes the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche by way of intellectual seasoning.

What’s to like, you may be wondering? Well, after a welter of cheap gags in a long first half, Florez engineers mildly anarchic comedy in Adam Meggido’s production on an IKEA show-kitchen set during a better plotted second period. 

What would you do if you received a poop in the post? That is the dismal question posed by Dave Florez’s scatological sit-com about a middle-aged neurotic single man, Colin

And, at core, it has the classic – let’s not call it clichéd – comic formula of idiot males vying for the approval of a fit young woman (even if she is sister to one).

Alex Price is a consistently (but not overly) vulgar EsSєx stereotype, whose bad manners helping himself to booze from the fridge without offering to anyone else are at least shared by the others. 

Laura Haddock rolls large eyes as the trophy-in-the-middle wife, providing re-ᴀssurance, scorn and despairing groans. 

And Nicholas Burns bottles the vacuity of many a modern male in Colin’s repertoire of neurotic delusions – including fancying himself as a handy gangsta.