alinewaites

ROUNDELAY

Schnitzler’s La Ronde a sexually explicit play in seven scenes has been adapted many times and in many ways but never before has it concentrated on passion in the 3^rd age – illustrating the mature kind of love which can be even more powerful than that of younger people.

Clare Perkins, dressed as a circus ringmaster in fishnet tights is the puppet master of this circus of life and love. Her voice has the smooth sweetness of an angel but it can turn harsh and aggressive when she cracks her whip and very funny when she lets fall an exclamation in broad cockney.

She gives a Stunning performance that dominates the proceedings. She announces the scenes, bringing on the whole company dressed in fanciful circus gear who dance in a circle like children playing ring a ring a roses and then break off to dance with each other, changing partners regularly. These scenes happen throughout the performance between the short plays with some of them performing acrobatic stunts on two long white cloths hanging from the ceiling.

There are seven short plays each with two characters showing an aspect of their love life – and one protagonist from each play goes on to appear in another episode of their amorous life. The stories come in different forms from a Private Lives type scenario to an event in a gay club.

For me, there are two outstanding scenes. One is heart breaking –  about a caring and patient man looking after a wife with Alzheimer’s, sensitively played by Holly de Jong and Roger Alborough. The other one is of a bedridden widow who still yearns for a lover’s touch. ‘I love fucking’ cries Ann Firbank to her youthful friend Elan James. This is sensationally done and is probably the sexiest scene I have ever witnessed on stage.

We end up with one of the partners from the first play. We have come full circle and the company do their final dance. The circus theme brought alive by their colourful eccentric costumes designed by Moi Trans.

The clever, witty and moving script is by Sonja Linden and it is vivaciously brought to life by director Anna Lewich and choreographer Diane Alison-Mitchell.

Aline

CAUTIONARY TALES for daughters

Songs your mother never taught you.

BY Tanya Holt – Writer and performer

With Jenny Gould at the piano.

This solo performer is mostly talking about herself in a supposedly self-critical way.  Tanya sets off with a disadvantage from the beginning, giving herself the persona of a pushy mother – a bit off putting for someone who has met a lot of these in her lifetime. In this monologue, she is presumably giving advice to her daughter Dotty to make sure the child doesn’t make the same mistakes.

When she was a child she wanted to be a cowgirl but felt under constraint to be a fluffy little princess. A Daddy’s girl! She then imagines herself into the persona of a Daddy seeing his teenager daughter out with a boy for the first time. He is anxious, knowing the kind of mind of a young boy has and what they are thinking.  After all he was one himself (MY feeling is that he still is).

The first act finale is a graphic description of her birthing experience. I found myself longing for the interval and my chocolate ice-cream.

However, there are some jolly things. The set is without a set – just odd bits and pieces dotted about, a piano and a screen. The visuals are amusing, most especially the ones with medieval characters that keep us entertains while she sings a song accompanying herself on the zither. The song is similar to Hardy’s story of the Ruined Maid, without the happy ending. Tanya has a powerful voice which she often uses at full volume. Later she also plays the musical saw.

After the interval she carries on with some more little lessons about the mistakes she has made, presumably to teach Dollie not to repeat them.

There is a girl on a yo yo diet, the girl who submits to her boyfriend taking pornographic pictures of her which he then puts on facebook. The dangers of overspending of designer handbags. The boss who molests his female staff and they are not able to complain. She talks about a man who will hit you. Be careful not to accept his love and apology afterwards – or he’ll do it again. Just walk out straight away.

There are some very lovely bits. ‘A little Grey’ is about finding the first sign of ageing. She sings this a capella, very sweetly.

She is at her best when she is chatting to the audience and getting them to sing or hold her fans to cause a breeze during one of her numbers in which she resembles Kate Bush.

She praises alcohol and how lucky she is to always knows when she’s had enough always blaming her regular bouts of vomiting on the potato chips or peanuts.

I think she is at her best when she is communicating with the audience, getting them to sing, or to hold her fans to cause a breeze when she does a Kate Bush kind of number.

Jenny Gould is a huge asset, she changes costume for each number, plays up a storm on the piano and harmonises with Tanya in her high soprano.

The show is very womanish – not quite my cup of tea. I could imagine her being a blast at hen nights.

PROMISES PROMISES

AT SOUTHWARK PLAYHOUSE

Promises promises takes us back to the pre Beatles fifties.

It is a musical version of The Apartment – a film which is embedded in one’s very soul if you are old enough to remember those bad old days.  Neil Simon wrote the original script along with Billy Wilder and the frightening thing about it is that it was based on real life Hollywood events.. It is a nasty story and it was a cause celebre at the time.

It is strange to see Daisy Maynard as the victimised waitress Fran as an almost carbon copy of Shirley MacLaine. – I found this sort of worrying. I would rather she had been a bit different.  Gabriel Vick is I think is too attractive in the Jack Lemon Role. But it is an impossible task to follow that great actor. Nevertheless, Vick has a great talent especially in his soliloquies to the audience.

It is basically a story of two victims. Chuck is in the corporate section of an insurance company and is longing to become an executive. He is willing to let out his apartment to his senior colleagues in exchange for their promises to get him a seat in the Directors’ Dining Room .

Fran is the little waitress he fancies but who is in love with Mr Sheldrake the big boss who has promised to divorce his wife for her. A promise he has made to practically every other girl in the company.  He is a born philanderer, high up in the corporate ladder and he is played by Paul Robinson who is stunningly good looking and with a great singing voice.

I think one of the most impressive things about this production is the set by director Bronagh Lagan. who has done wonders with the small space at the Playhouse. The scene changes are good but sadly there is just too much moving about of furniture – a new set for each scene all done to music and by the dancers who play the stereotypical stenographers who self-consciously wiggle their behinds and behave like idiots in order to share Chuck’s apartment with the somewhat unattractive middle aged directors of the company.

These guys are played , sung and danced with enormous ebullience and a great deal of leering at the sexy girls. Question – Would they have had beards in the fifties/sixties?

Luckily Act two begins with a starring performance from Alex Young as Marge. She is a wonderfully inventive comic turn and her two short scenes with Chuck are the highlight of the show. Another highlight is the performance by John Guerrasio who plays a comical doctor – an actor who makes the most of Neil Simon’s Jewish wit.

I was not particularly au fait with the music (I’d only heard one of them) ‘I’ll never fall in love again’ which the two main protagonists perform sweetly with Vick on acoustic guitar.

This musical will be successful – yet another notch on the Southwark Playhouse musical belt.

This book by Aline Waites is going into print tomorrow and should soon be available on Amazon to order. Aline Waites is an English actress, director, producer, reviewer and writer. She is widely kn…

Source: She That Plays the Queen

This book by Aline Waites is going into print tomorrow and should soon be available on Amazon to order.

She That Plays the Queen is a quote from Hamlet – well nearly. The quote is He that Plays the King and it was used by Kenneth Tynan as a title of his book on the great British actors of the forties, fifties and sixties.  It is about the uneasy relationship of Two glamorous leading ladies living in the Spotlight – Stars of Stage and Screen.  Maxine Fletcher and the one who calls herself Jessie Maffews. Their lives collide over and over again and their hatred is unreconcilable = even though they trie hard for the sake of people surrounding them.They first collided during World War Two in Blitz ridden Hull.

The reason for using Hull as the background to Act one is the fact that the bombing of Hull never received any publicity because the news had to be hidden from the Germans. So the press gave Hull a miss and concentrated on Coventry. The people in Hull were very angry and thought nobody cared that they were being blown jup night after night. I lived in Hull as a child and when I left it was just one enormous bomb site. This year it is Cultural City so they must have fixed it up by now.

The settings are real and so are some of the events, but all the characters are figments of my imagination which has been nourished by a lifetime in the business known as Show.

I hope people will like it. .

Here is a short excerpt from Act three.

You must get over this antagonism to Jessica. Nobody else has a problem with her. She is one of the most popular ladies in the business.’

‘Huh, nobody has known her as long as I have.’

‘That is as maybe. But you are hardly as high in the popularity stakes.’

Maxine shrugged. ‘I’m not in the business to be popular.’

‘Then that is a problem. You really should be a little more careful. Actors have ways of destroying those who are dismissive of them They can ruin your performance in ways you will never understand’

‘It’s very kind of you Stanley to take such trouble over me but I have never kow towed to anyone in my life and I’m not about to start now.’

‘Then you may just find you are out of a job. Amy is learning your part –

right now as we speak

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An evening with Rodgers and Hart called ‘Any Old Place With You’

The cabaret room at Ye Old Rose and Crown in Walthamstow is a great venue for trying out any  new solo performance, but this particular one is already perfected enough to go straight into a larger venue.

Julie Ross is an excellent interpreter of these wonderful songs written by, in my opinion,  the most accomplished and extraordinary  songwriters of the twentieth century.

Richard Rodgers, of course, went on to work with Oscar Hammerstein in productions like Oklahoma, Carousel and South Pacific, but to my mind, these numbers cannot compare with the extreme wit, sophistication and sensitivity of Lorenz Hart.

The show included songs from all their top shows including  The Girlfriend, Pal Joey, Connecticut Yankee and Babes in Arms-  which was presented at the Rose and Crown earlier in the year. This show contains a plethora of standards, ‘My Funny Valentine’, ‘The Lady is a Tramp’, ‘Where or When’, ‘I wish I were in Love Again’ all of which have  Hart’s quirky lyrics. What a genius.

And Julie is just the girl to show him off.. She is a terrific performer. Cool, relaxed, never belting just acting out Hart’s poetry and making the most of it. She is a brilliant actress and works in the way all the best actresses do making the words seem like they are being rendered for the very first time.  But she is performing thirty nine songs and each one has to have it own individual interpretation.  I must have seen ‘Ten Cents a Dance’ done dozens of times but never with the emotional impact she gives to the story.

It was with great joy I witnessed her performance of the Jessie Matthews song from Evergreen ‘Dancing on the Ceiling’  I remember it so well from a very happy time in my life. It was a tour of Cornwall and the company were living in a St Ives Cottage. There was a gramophone but we only had one record. Sinatra  doing ‘Dancing on the Ceiling’ and on the other side, my ultra favourite song ‘It never Entered My Mind’ a number that has a mixture of heartbreak and gentle wistful humour that gets me in tears every time. Of course Julie’s version was no exception.

So what else is there to say about this lovely woman with the curly red  hair and canny resemblance to Bernadette Peters? She gave us lots of information about the two guys as well as singing 39 of their songs. She has the intelligence, the sense of humour and the humanity to make the very best of the very best.

This may have been a tryout – but believe me, it won’t be the last we hear of it.

A wonderful heart lifting experience.  Thanks Julie.

Aline Waites is an English actress, director, producer, reviewer and writer. She is widely known for a long spell playing Gwen, the daughter of Mrs Dale, the BBC’s famous fictional diarist in Mrs Dale’s Diary.^[1]

Life and career[edit]

She studied for the theatre at Webber Douglas Academy. On graduation she won the Silver Medal and a BBC contract, and at the BBC was lucky to work with famous actors of the day, including Sir John Gielgud ^[2] to whose Ernest Worthing she played Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest. She played Gwen, daughter of Mrs Dale twice daily on radio in Mrs Dale’s Diary, which was later renamed The Dales.^[3] Her mother was first Ellis Powell and later Jessie Matthews.^[4] Latterly, single-again Gwen took increased prominence as the parental characters aged, with her choice of new husband a major cliff-hanger just before the serial ended.

As a stage actress Aline Waites did many tours and seasons, including Rep at Torquay, Bournemouth, Southampton and Bangor in Northern Ireland.^[5] Favourite roles were Marilyn Monroe in The White Whore, Jane Eyre and Melanie in Gone with the Wind 2.

On television she debuted as Lottie in The Puppet Master, a live transmission in 1956. She played Nurse Joan Edwards in Emergency Ward 10,^[6] and was in A Life of Bliss ^[7] and other drama productions.

She started Aba Daba Music Hall, the first fully professional pub theatre company, at the Mother Redcap, Camden Town, and from 1970 at the Pindar of Wakefield Theatre in Gray’s Inn Road. This venue (now the Water Rats) was purpose built for the company. In 1980 she produced a political twice nightly revue for Kennedy’s in the Kings Road called Downstairs at Kennedy’s. A new project at Underneath The Arches in Southwark, begun in 1991, continued until 1996. The music hall performances were at first traditional, but soon became well known for their radical nature.

Her life partner for many years was Robin Hunter. With him she created political pantomimes each year for the Pindar, The Arches and the Canal Cafe Theatre. Together they wrote twenty five shows. With Robin Hunter and John Gould she wrote Hit the Fan or Not the News Revue, performed at the Canal Cafe.

She wrote Stairway to Paradise, a musical biography of Marilyn Monroe, with music arranged by David Wykes, which was performed at The Arches and the Canal Cafe.^[8] She has organised big charity performances at venues including The Old Vic, the Shaftesbury Theatre, the Mayfair Theatre and Charing Cross Music Hall – also shows in Scandinavia, France, Germany, Canada, and the USA.

Her company did three summer seasons in Copenhagen, and toured major cities in Denmark many times throughout the seventies.

Presentations included Gone with the Wind 2 (nineteen productions in various venues) and Road to Casablanca, which were written with Robin Hunter and David Kelsey. Fanny’s Revenge with music by Jeff Clarke and Death on the Isle – music by Antony Feldman – were Waites/Hunter musical comedies.

Non-music theatre was represented by her production of Pinter’s The Birthday Party for a tour of Denmark Waites and Hunter also did Corporate events and wrote special material for sales promotions. A popular one was a Whodunnit game called The Star is Dead.

She has also written comedy sketches for the younger generation, including the Brighton Revue Company.

She co-wrote, with Robin Hunter and David Wykes, The Illustrated Victorian Songbook, Michael Joseph 1985.^[9] Her novel A Thing Called Joe was published in 2016. Her next book She That Plays the Queen will follow shortly. Other writing projects, both books and plays, are in preparation.

As a director of plays, her productions include Waiting in the Wings, Noël Coward’s play set in an actress’s retirement home – with a cast of eighteen on a small stage^[10] – as well as Coward’s Still Life and Red Peppers.^[11] Aline Waites has been a reviewer and interviewer for Plays and Players national theatre magazine, and other journals. She has reviewed for the Ham and High (the Hampstead and Highgate Express), for  Time Out, Whats On, Remotegoat, and elsewhere. She took a BA hons lit degree from the Open University in 2005.

She was for several years on the North West Branch Committee of Equity. She is also a member of Writers and Artists, Actors’ Benevolent Fund, Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and Musical Theatre Network.

“Yes, everyone should be talking about climate change, but you should also be talking about the fact that Native communities deserve to survive, because our lives are worth defending in their own right — not simply because ‘this affects us all.’”

via How To Talk About #NoDAPL: A Native Perspective — Discover

She studied for the theatre at Webber Douglas Academy.

On graduation she won the Silver Medal and a BBC contract, and at the BBC was lucky to work with famous actors of the day, including Sir John Gielgud ^[2] to whose Jack Worthing she played Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest. She played Gwen, daughter of Mrs Dale twice daily on radio in Mrs Dale’s Diary, which was later renamed The Dales.^[3] Her mother was first Ellis Powell and later Jessie Matthews.^[4] Latterly, single-again Gwen took increased prominence as the parental characters aged, with her choice of new husband a major cliff-hanger just before the serial ended.

As a stage actress Aline Waites did many tours and seasons, including Rep at Torquay, Bournemouth, Southampton and Bangor in Northern Ireland.^[5] Favourite roles were Marilyn Monroe in The White Whore, Jane Eyre and Melanie in Gone with the Wind 2.

On television she debuted as Lottie in The Puppet Master, a live transmission in 1956. She played Nurse Joan Edwards in Emergency Ward 10,^[6] and was in A Life of Bliss ^[7] and other drama productions.

She started Aba Daba Music Hall, the first fully professional pub theatre company, at the Mother Redcap, Camden Town, and from 1970 at the Pindar of Wakefield Theatre in Gray’s Inn Road. This venue (now the Water Rats) was purpose built for the company. In 1980 she produced a political twice nightly revue for Kennedy’s in the Kings Road called Downstairs at Kennedy’s. A new project at Underneath The Arches in Southwark, begun in 1991, continued until 1996. The music hall performances were at first traditional, but soon became well known for their radical nature.

Her life partner for many years was Robin Hunter. With him she created political pantomimes each year for the Pindar, The Arches and the Canal Cafe Theatre. Together they wrote twenty five shows. With Robin Hunter and John Gould she wrote Hit the Fan or Not the News Revue, performed at the Canal Cafe.

She wrote Stairway to Paradise, a musical biography of Marilyn Monroe, with music arranged by David Wykes, which was performed at The Arches and the Canal Cafe.^[8] She has organised big charity performances at venues including The Old Vic, the Shaftesbury Theatre, the Mayfair Theatre and Charing Cross Music Hall – also shows in Scandinavia, France, Germany, Canada, and the USA.

Her company did three summer seasons in Copenhagen, and toured major cities in Denmark many times throughout the seventies.

Presentations included Gone with the Wind 2 (nineteen productions in various venues) and Road to Casablanca, which were written with Robin Hunter and David Kelsey. Fanny’s Revenge with music by Jeff Clarke and Death on the Isle – music by Antony Feldman – were Waites/Hunter musical comedies.

Non-music theatre was represented by her production of Pinter’s The Birthday Party for a tour of Denmark.

She has also written comedy sketches for the younger generation, including the Brighton Revue Company.

She co-wrote, with Robin Hunter and David Wykes, The Illustrated Victorian Songbook, Michael Joseph 1985.^[9] Her novel A Thing Called Joe was published in 2016. Her next book She That Plays the Queen followed shortly. Other writing projects, both books and plays, are in preparation.

As a director of plays, her productions include Waiting in the Wings, Noël Coward’s play set in an actress’s retirement home – with a cast of eighteen on a small stage^[10] – as well as Coward’s Still Life and Red Peppers.^[11] Aline Waites has been a reviewer and interviewer for Plays and Players national theatre magazine, and other journals. She took a BA hons lit degree from the Open University in 2005.

She was for several years on the North West Branch Committee of Equity. She is also a member of Writers and Artists, Actors’ Benevolent Fund, Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and Musical Theatre Network.