First published in The Tab, 10 March 2010

The Footlights’ Smoker audience is the most obliging, generous and compliant audience of any comedy show I’ve ever seen. To the point of complicity. At least at the Howler, the acts know if they’ve been shit; at a Smoker, everyone is applauded with the same raucous enthusiasm you’d get from a room filled with your friends. Which is, of course, exactly how the Smoker audience is constituted.

It dawned on me yesterday, as I cast my eye over the bar in the ADC, how dreadfully close-knit the Cambridge comedy ecosystem is. You only had to listen to the “Darling, how are you?”, the “Sweetheart, lovely to see you!” and the “You were wonderful, babe!” to realise it. I’ve always hated ostentatious mutual admiration, but the luvviedom in that bar was something to behold. Lanky sycophants in skinny jeans, wanky cardigans and retro specs. How very predictable, and how very tiresome.

Every Smoker is identical to the last. The same acts, the same jokes, the same fucking ukulele. I can barely be bothered to comment on this one. Even the female acts have me outmanoeuvred: once they’ve come off stage, there’s no room to wheel out a trademark misogynistic quip, because they’ve done all the work for me with sets that hang off little more than how crap it is to be a woman. Yeah, I suppose it must be. Get over it.

It’s worth praising Jacob Sharpe, I suppose, who’s the highlight of any show he’s in. When I wasn’t salivating over his good looks, I was admiring the quality of his material and the fluency of his performance. But I’ve come to expect more from Abi Tedder. Pulling silly faces and shuffling around nervously on stage will get you a Ritalin prescription in no time, but it won’t get you a far as a stand-up any more. And tone down the Ricky Gervais nods, for fuck’s sake.

Other familiar faces – Phil Wang, Ahir Shah – turned in serviceable performances, though none had time in the three minutes available to execute a proper set. A few one-liners, then off. Shame. The whole format is problematic, really: endless little monologues that go nowhere, with imperfect punch-lines, abruptly terminated. I don’t like it.

But like I said, it’s the audience that’s the real problem. Laugh at good comedy, by all means. But that screeching from the man in E5, at little more than the expectation of humour, drove me barking bloody mad. (Then again, starting a show at 11pm – when most of us are already half cut – is a recipe for obnoxious hyenas.)

The fact that I have such little to say after an hour of comedy speaks for itself. But the Smoker always sells out, and has done for years. Why? It shouldn’t: the acts aren’t funny enough; it’s too expensive for such a short show; the bar at the ADC is pricier than, say, the Wolfson Howler’s, and the people there are unbearably pleased with themselves.

This is the point at which my editor will be expecting me to supply a “but.” But I can’t. If you’re not one of the Footlights posse, don’t bother trying to get tickets. The money’s better spent on booze. If you are… well, I don’t need to tell you book in advance, do I? You probably have a reminder set already. And you’ll probably be foaming at the mouth by now, too – so by all means leave your abuse in the comments below.

First published in The Tab, 10 March 2010

My God, the wine was awful. The wine in the interval, I mean. We’re not just talking David Hyde Pearce-style “Oh my God it’s just called ‘wine’,” or even out-of-a-box gyppo juice. (It wasn’t, anyway. I saw the bottles.) To give you some idea, I was accompanied to the theatre by a friend from Serbia, who said it was worse than Moldavian vinegar. I don’t know what he means. Maybe you do.

I’m sorry to go on, but I can’t help it. One over-enthusiastic gulp was all it took; now I may never sing again. I tried when I got home; bottom G stuck in my throat. I’ve been gargling with salt for two hours now, and if anything it’s getting worse. I left Wolfson a baritone and came back a counter-tenor. FitzTheatre wine. Just don’t.

So, anyway. I guess I should talk about the play. They made Julius Caesar into Margaret Thatcher and set the whole thing around the 1981 Tory conference. Ha fucking ha. Red braces, white collars and cream ties conflated Gordon Gekko with big-c Conservatism, and later in the show the mob were identified with punk. You can see where this is going. It didn’t work. The civil war, as Roman historians have it, makes no sense in relation to the disintegration of Thatcher’s leadership. You can’t map Caesar on to this period in British history; there aren’t enough points of confluence. It feels like a gimmick, because that’s what it is. So it got old. Quickly.

Where did they get this idea from? Was it the product of a drunken night in the JCR? Something that was left unchecked by good sense and allowed to blossom into an entire production? It doesn’t really matter. When Lucius cuts Brutus a line of coke in place of lighting him a taper, we know this is paradise. (I hope Guy Francis was using vitamin C powder on stage. Something tells me this simulation of class-A drug use is going to come back to bite FitzTheatre in the arse.)

The second half was better. Interesting, because it’s by far the weaker half of Shakespeare’s play. One explanation is Jenny Harris’s absence, but Richard Benwell’s suddenly magnificent delivery can’t be ignored. Actually, Jenny was rather good, though she gave Thatcher a haughty air that the role commands but Maggie never really had. Besides, 1981 was the year of the bomb attack on the Grand Hotel; Thatcher knew better than to be magisterial. Harris made a good job of the Northern star line, echoing Thatcher’s reassurances to Parliament that the poll tax would be popular. Similar end results in both cases. Nicely done.

I’d forgotten how unsophisticated Julius Caesar is. But any Shakespeare play is a hubristic project for a single College’s theatre company. They almost got away with it. Benwell delivered the “honourables” as well as anyone I’ve seen at the Globe. Steady, though, Richard: you need to man up a bit to give us a convincing Mark Anthony. After the assassination, you exploded onto the stage in what can only be described as… a tizz. Not very statesmanlike.

I was momentarily drawn to John Swarbrooke’s Metellus Simber, but this was Ben Woodford’s play really. His Cassius was part David Geffen, part William Hague. Appropriately oleaginous. A bit psychotic. More robust than the average Cassius – more of a Bosola, I think – but we forgave him that. And he was the only one who felt like a proper Tory: Portia scolded like Harriet Harman, while her voice was indistinguishable from Jacqui Smith’s; Brutus’s Blairite speech at Julius’s funeral had me heaving; Decius’s quick-wittedness was straight out of Alistair Campbell’s diaries. Octavius was just fucking weird.

Pity about the props. The daggers looked like plastic canteen cutlery, the chairs and tables looked like crap, and, let’s be honest, trying to pass off a red Rymans boxfile as the Chancellor’s briefcase was pretty dumb. But these are minor things.

The big gripe was the central conceit. Julius Caesar could never be a woman, and Tory-bashing isn’t big or clever. But even forgiving that, the directors didn’t need to mess with the script, changing all the hes and hims. It ruined, for example, Mark Anthony’s, “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him” (which was rendered “not to praise her” instead; the trailing, open-ended vowel on “her” robbing the line of its intensity).

The wine was called La Maison de Charlotte. You can get it in Tesco for £3.33. But don’t.

First published in The Tab, 6 March 2010.

Watching a tap dancer try to be sexy is a deeply uncomfortable experience. Particularly when, as happened last night, they’re set against blisteringly hot contemporary booty-shakers. It’s Cliff Richard versus Britney; Celine Dion versus Mariah Carey; West Side Story versus Grease.

You see, tap dance isn’t cool. That hot girl in the nail bar you’ve wanted to get on since sixth form? She does street dance. Your local librarian, the one with the squint and the perfectly centered ponytail? Yup, you guessed it. Tap.

And it isn’t just me: I could hear groans of agony rippling around the auditorium every time the lights went down and we heard the tell-tale tippity-tap of Mandy from the Reference section. I’m sure it’s fun to practise – not that you’d know it from the rigor mortis grins last night. Perhaps it’s even fun to perform. The problem is, tap is simply unbearable to watch.

It was judicious of the choreographer to employ safety by numbers to hide the shit dancers, and wise also to give two of the street dancers – both called Ruth, apparently – room to show off. I was mesmerized by their Fix Up, Look Sharp routine.

I enjoyed the girl band audition from a clutch of the sluttier dancers, who shimmied to Girls Aloud while the front row alternately vommed and came. Though that piece illustrated a general problem: when you have such talented leads, it really shows when the backing dancers are lacklustre, or a bit tired. “She’s only in CUTAZZ because her mother makes the costumes,” I almost heard from the row behind me. She needn’t have bothered: while the street dancers gyrated in little more than leggings and boob tubes, the librarians made us wince with awful skirts and bits of crap tied around their necks in a hellishly anodyne parody of studied Parisian nonchalance.

Two parallel shows wrestle for your attention within Shine. The first one is boring, and slightly sad. You watch it with pity and you applaud reluctantly. But there’s a second, stupendously good one, too: the street dancers, whose routines are a gay man’s wet dream. But unlike those overweight, sweaty poofs in provincial nightclubs, these girls can really dance. When they want you to get hot under the collar… you get hot.

When the street dancers turned lyrical, bathed in red light for a beautiful, slower set-piece, you could see they had soul as well as attitude. But it was mostly attitude: think body-popping, swooshes and sharp jumps. What Tyra Banks would call “fierce.”

I could have done without the interludes, to be honest. Yeah, I know the real dancers need time to get changed, but a bit of OK-ish prancing around to Shirley Bassey remixes didn’t really do it for me. (Get This Party Started? I wish they had.)

Shine is a celebration of pop culture; a warning against one too many choccie biccies at the issue desk; a chance for some of the University’s best dancers to show off and, overall, a bloody entertaining night out.

First published in The Tab, 4 March 2010.

What Ever Happened To Baby June? That was the thought going through my mind during the interval of Gypsy, as I meditated on the ponderousness of the first act’s latter half, which I felt suffered in the absence of Katie Taffler’s June. Little did I realise that Millie Benson’s magnificent Mama Rose would get even better, or that Tommy Crowley would blossom into such a brilliant stripper.

Yup, you heard that right. After a family-friendly first half, sustained by the combined talents of Taffler and Benson, Gypsy basically disintegrates into striptease meta-theatre. Boys need read no further: go book your tickets now. Girls, carry on if you want to know more about a play that chronicles the decline of a vaudeville troupe with more line-up changes than the Sugababes and as many hits as One True Voice.

Uncommonly, the supporting actors deserve high praise too. Laurie Marks was hilarious in each of the three parts he took (even his perpetual corpsing was adorable). Ed Wagstaff was particularly funny, while the faintly camp Jake Arnott provided eye candy while singing, somewhat unconvincingly, of his need for a girl. Top marks to the stage manager, too, for resisting the temptation to illuminate an LED bra more frequently than the music commanded.

Gypsy is not overwhelmed by an excess of plot, and it’s crammed full of songs that couldn’t sound more like porn movies if they tried (my personal favourite: “Dainty June and Her Farmboys”). But it isn’t just saucy fun: Benson’s final song, “Rose’s Turn,” raised her portrayal of a psychotic stage mum into something genuinely affecting. When it comes to university musicals, the safest strategy for the critic is generally to say, “Well, it’s not bad for a student performance.” But despite being rough around the edges, Gypsy is an awful lot better than “not bad.”

Naturally, there are a few improvements to be made in the coming days. It was a shame, for example, that the brass section seemed to have arbitrarily chosen a different key to play in from the rest of the band. And I was shocked at the horribly wooden acting and listless, often incomprehensible delivery from Henry Male. If this was deliberate “acting”, I humbly suggest that he drops it for the remainder of the run.

I’d also suggest advertising the show more widely across the university. It is a badly-kept secret that 40% of Magdalene’s female population hark from Essex, and I confess I did occasionally find it difficult to see the stage over the mounds of slap and fake Chanel bags. But the performers can hardly be blamed for that.

As anyone who has wandered through Magdalene in the last few weeks will have noticed, the promotional material for Gypsy falls gloriously short of its aspirations. Fortunately, however, the production does not. Highly recommended.

Before I sign off, a final word to the staff at Magdalene’s Cripps Auditorium: the surest way to kill the mood of an audience immediately prior to performance is to issue interminable, stern admonitions about eating, drinking and mobile phones. WE GET IT. Having never been to the Auditorium before, I don’t know if this is standard practice, but if they intend to continue this policy, I pray they elect someone a little less bossy and patronising. It just spoils the mood, alright?

First published in The Tab, 3 March 2010.

When I tell you I was grateful to be out of Pembroke’s New Cellars by 9pm, do not misunderstand me. Yes, Quality Street is infuriatingly vapid. The plot is pointless and predictable, the characters two-dimensional and the language whimsical even by J. M. Barrie’s standards. But the Pembroke Players, led by a marvellously neurotic Caitlin Doherty, did the best they could with a second-rate script and put on a very entertaining show. And let’s be honest: we might level the same dramaturgical criticisms at Oscar Wilde. His popularity is no worse off for them being valid.

That said, it would be madness to compare Barrie to the author of Lady Windemere’s Fan, and no amount of clever innuendo makes up for his lack of dramatic subtlety. “One thing we discovered during rehearsals,” confided a member of the cast to me, somewhat churlishly, before his stage debut this evening, “was that J. M. Barrie couldn’t write plays.”

To be fair, if I’d only had tonight’s performance to go on, I might not have reached the same conclusion about Barrie – which is a testament to the cast’s ability to pull off a very good performance of a very weak play. It’s true that the second half, as written, can be dreadfully languorous, and that the first suffers from some unfortunate and unnecessary compressions. But it is witty and quite clever, and so were most of the actors, who overcame the limitations of the script with intelligence, enthusiasm and what Simon Cowell might refer to as “the likeability factor.” Best of all, they actually made me laugh.

The litmus test of comedy is whether it moves you to genuine, unpretentious laughter. Sounds obvious, I know, but having sat through innumerable “avante garde” (that is, too clever for their own good) comedy performances by delusional student troupes, I was grateful to sit back and enjoy some earthy titillation and silliness for once.

So what of the performance? Well, at times, Miss Phoebe (played by Doherty) lost her wide-eyed, nervous energy. The whole play suffered when she did. But, for the most part, she was a superbly hysterical, gurning, glassy-eyed trainwreck who single-handedly drove the action forward with a mixture of bipolar mood swings and slutty coquettishness. She was complemented effortlessly by Anna Goodhart’s Miss Susan.

I must applaud Rosie Corner, who modestly reveals her responsibility for this production’s magnificent costumes in the programme notes. She also gave a very serviceable performance as a copybook lusty wench (though the real point of discussion for me was whether her fiery locks are her own or a horror-store wig).

The male roles were subject to more curious casting decisions, with a wiry lead who affected an accent twenty years too old for his character. I’d like to have seen more from Christopher O’Donnell’s Lt. Spicer, who came alive in the second half. George Johnston as Ensign Blades was unarguably good-looking, but perhaps a little bland until he briefly stole the show by leading a hilarious and unexpected swordfight down the aisle.

First published in The Tab, 26 February 2010.

It must be dreadful to be a ballet mum. Imagine it: watching from behind a rictus grin as your portly offspring flounders about on stage like an autistic hippo, sighing, “You looked so beautiful, darling,” through painfully gritted teeth while praying that little Lizzie will lose interest before the next big show.

Because, let’s be frank, amateur ballet is horrendous. It’s not like playing the piano, which can be executed perfectly well, albeit at a more modest level, by novices. No: if you’re a ballerina, you’re a ballerina, and you’re judged accordingly. And ballet critics, even more than classical music critics, can be savage.

Which is why it was so awful to see the valiant efforts of the Cambridge University Ballet Club sabotaged by appallingly shoddy production values, the like of which I haven’t seen since Sunset Beach. The most important component of any ballet performance, beside the dancers, is the music. Tchaikovsky was so hilariously and haphazardly vomited from the speakers that it twice prompted loud chortles from the row behind me. There were abrupt endings, weird volume changes and I swear we heard the CD skip during the penultimate piece of the first half.

But we can’t place all the blame with the production team for the audible sigh of relief after the final curtain. The director too seems to have sleepwalked through rehearsals: neither the more accomplished ballerinas nor the novices came off well after ill-judged and brutal juxtapositions of fluent performances with mass waddling and teetering from the less confident dancers. Which brings me to my other complaint: why were so many of these women so large?

At one point, I don’t think there was a ballerina on stage below size 18. Now don’t get me wrong, I know we’re growing as a nation, and sure, big can be beautiful, but honestly, I never expected to see a ballerina with bingo wings. (I should point out that it’s not just the ladies of the Ballet Club who ought to lay off the pies: one of the male ballerinas looked like he’d been preparing for months for The Sleeping Beauty… by eating deep-fried Mars bars.)

In the interests of fairness, I must tell you the improbably tall lilac fairy went down a storm with the audience, and there was a delightful little set-piece in the first half that involved pink umbrellas and a cute girl I recognise from the English faculty. The staging was pretty good, too: simple, but effective, even if transitions were generally over-long.

In fact I wish that we’d seen a bit more from the umbrella girl, and perhaps that camp couple dressed in black, who were very good. And, as I’ve said already, I wish the Ballet Club would put a bit more thought into how their less talented, but no less enthusiastic, dancers are presented.

More than anything, though, I do so wish Sleeping Beauty had shaved her armpits.