Sam Hird: Singing Sondheim with Pick Me Up Theatre
ROYAL College of Music student Sam Hird returns home to York to join his father Mark Hird in the Pick Me Up Theatre company for Sondheim We Remember at Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, from March 27 to 30.
Taking part too in this celebration of New York composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim will be director Helen ‘Bells’ Spencer, Susannah Baines, Emma Louise Dickinson, Alexandra Mather, Florence Poskitt, Andrew Roberts, Catherine Foster, Nick Sephton and Matthew Warry.
Planned originally for 2020 before Covid intervened – and Sondheim’s death on November 26 2021 at the age of 91 – Pick Me Up’s show features music from his Broadway shows, film scores and TV specials. Tickets for the 7.30pm evening shows and 2.30pm Saturday matinee are on sale at tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.
Pick Me Up Theatre’s company of singers for Sondheim We Remember
Pick Me Up will make a swift return to Theatre@41 with a second Sondheim show, his 1984 musical collaboration with playwright and director James Lapine, Sunday In The Park With George, from April 5 to 13.
Inspired by Georges Seurat’s pointillist painting Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte, the musical follows Seurat (played by Adam Price) in the months leading up to the completion of that famous work.
Seurat alienates the French bourgeoisie, spurns his fellow artists and neglects his lover Dot (Natalie Walker), not realising that his actions will reverberate over the next 100 years.
Performances will start at 7.30pm on April 5, 6 and 9 to 13, plus 2.30pm on April 6, 7 and 13. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.
Picture pose: Pick Me Up Theatre’s Emma-Louise Dickinson, as Celeste, adds to the scene in Georges Seurat’s painting Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte, the inspiration for Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical Sunday In The Park With George
Hospital drama: Dan Crawfurd-Porter’s bed-ridden Whizzer with Helen Spencer’s Dr Charlotte, left, Rachel Higgs’s Cordelia, Chris Mooney’s Marvin, James Robert Ball’s Mendel, Nicoloa Holliday’s Trina and Matthew Warry’s Jason (seated)
FALSETTOS, William Finn and James Lapine’s “very Jewish, very gay” 1992 Tony Award winner, had been made unavailable for the British stage after a London production met with opposition over a lack of authenticity and accuracy.
However, negotiations spanning two years have paid off for “art with a point” York company Black Sheep Theatre Productions, whose director, Matthew Clare, has acquired exclusive UK rights to present the off-Broadway hit.
It would be good to see such persistence rewarded at the box office, but York theatregoers’ resistance to try out unfamiliar works is long established. Nevertheless, the support from Wednesday’s audience was admirably vocal from start to finish.
Matthew Warry’s Jason makes a move on the chess set. Is he a pawn in a game between his father, Chris Mooney’s Marvin, and his mother, Nicola Holliday’s Trina?
Falsettos pairs 1981’s March Of The Falsettos, a humorous study of men’s immaturity, with 1990’s Falsettoland, a graver piece penned in reaction to the devastating impact of the Aids epidemic on New York’s gay community.
In 1979, New Yorker Marvin (Chris Mooney) leaves his wife Trina (Nicola Holliday) and son Jason (Matthew Warry, aged 13) to live with Whizzer (Dan Crawfurd-Porter), his younger lover. They have known each other for nine months, says Whizzer; ten, insists the older, more hooked Marvin. They are arguing already.
Naively, Marvin expects to retain a tight-knit family. A subject he has discussed with his psychiatrist, the neurotic, insomniac Mendel (James Robert Ball), who in turn becomes a listening ear for latest client Trina. So much so, they marry, setting up the family unit Marvin had envisaged.
Nicola Holliday’s Trina with James Robert Ball’s Mendel mid-exercise
All this is expressed in song in a sung-through musical full of Sondheim emotional truths and vexatious Woody Allen humour (especially in Ball’s Mendel). All have their say, not only Marvin and the fast-exiting, exasperated Whizzer, but Trina and Jason too. Mendel listens and listens, cross-legged and looking as awkward as the conversations.
On opening night, sound balance favoured band over voice in this first act, meaning not everything was clear to the ear, for all the heart-felt, often beautiful singing. Such a hindrance to comprehending fully what was going on was detrimental to the show’s impact at this juncture, and the standalone March Of The Falsettos number in luminous white only added to that sense of bafflement.
Ollie Kingston’s choreography was fun here, but that scene came and went like a ghost. Such are the limitations of a sung-through structure, where more narrative would be helpful.
Fresh impetus in Falsettoland: Rachel Higgs’s Cordelia. left, and Helen Spencer’s Dr Charlotte
Post-interval, frustration vanishes. The voices can be heard far better; the singing is more dramatic; the songs are superior, as two storylines play out two years later in 1981: Jason’s preparation for his bar mitzvah and Whizzer’s reunion with Marvin under the spreading cloud of Aids.
Into the story, and very welcome too, come Marvin and Whizzer’s lesbian neighbours, Dr Charlotte (Helen Spencer), struggling with the rising tide of Aids patients, and girlfriend Cordelia (Rachel Higgs), forever cooking up another nibble.
Just as Marvin and his family learn to grow up, so Falsettoland is a far more mature piece than March Of The Falsettos. It is better balanced too with the presence of Charlotte and Cordelia being all important. Spencer brings gravitas; Higgs, puppyish devotion, amid the “hospital bed humour”.
Performances all round settle down as the night progresses to match the high quality of the singing. Ball’s Mendel is the comic driving force; Jarry delights as Jason, being pulled hither and thither but remaining single-minded too; Holliday’s resolute Trina handles the big ballads with aplomb.
Black Sheep Theatre’s poster for Falsettos
In a heightened drama without conventional heroes and villains, the gay characters of Marvin and Whizzer are depicted with three-dimensional complexity, devoid of any stereotyping. They play chess, they play squash, they bicker, they learn, their love blossoms, and in turn the stage chemistry of Mooney and Crawfurd-Porter grows too.
Staging Falsettos has been a passion project for Matthew Clare, who leads his four-piece band with suitable conviction from the keyboards, while Kingston’s choreography is alive to both humour and dramatic effect and the building-block set design is practical and amusingly adaptable.
Art with a point? Yes, indeed. Black Sheep Theatre Productions and the JoRo are to be commended for bringing Falsettos to York’s attention. The more variety there is to the city’s theatre portfolio, the better, when playing safe would be the easier path.
Black Sheep Theatre Productions perform Falsettos at 7.30pm tonight and tomorrow; 2.30pm and 7.30pm, tomorrow. Box office: 01904 501935 or josephrowntreetheatre.co.uk.
