Boogie Christ: Joseph Arthur @ Heath Street Baptist Church

Christ would wear cowboy boots, Christ would have sex, Christ would eat pizza and cut blackjack decks...

Regularly readers will know that I find it hard to write objectively about something I love, but this - far too overdue - account of Joseph Arthur's reverential gig at Heath Street Baptist Church in Hampstead on 11 October may be even more laden with superlatives than usual.

I've been a HUGE fan of Joe's since my dad, in his infinite musical wisdom, advised me to go to his gig at Café de la Danse in Paris four years ago. Joe blew me away then, playing for two hours solid and then some more acoustic at the merch stand passed curfew. Since then, the prolific Arthur has released three more solo albums, as well as albums with supergroups Fistful of Mercy and RNDM. His latest solo effort, the semi-autobiographical The Ballad of Boogie Christ, "about redemption and what happens after you find it and lose it", is considered by many to be his best yet, and certainly one of my favourite albums of the last few years, so it was with great excitement that I headed off to a Hampstead church for a sermon of a very unusual kind.

As well as an incredible musician, singer/song-writer and poet, Joe is also an artist, so we found the church adorned with his Basquiatesque creations. I loved the juxtaposition of his somewhat deranged visions with the sombre religious iconography. If I had a few thousand pounds to spare, I would have very happily taken one home with me.

Fellow New-Yorker Rene Lopez opened the show in style with songs from his new Latin-tinged Let's Be Strangers Again EP, ending with an old classic Roosevelt Is Burning. It was a real struggle for me not to jump out of my pew and start dancing, but it didn't seem appropriate in a church, so I had to limit myself to grinning like a crazy person.

Then it was time for the main attraction, with Joe accompanied by Rene on bass and Bill Dobrow on drums/rebolo. The packed set showcased the impressive range of styles that feature on The Ballad of Boogie Christ - rock, folk, soul, sung poetry... - as well as his trademark live guitar solos, which make spectacular use of a whole floor of effects peddles and loops. Scattered among the new tracks were classics including In the Sun, Chicago (one of my favourites, partly because of my weakness for the harmonica), and the hauntingly beautiful Redemption's Son. Joe struggled to speak through the gig - a mixture of insomnia and being weirded out by being able to see everyone as the church left the lights on - but that only made him even more endearing.

As well as his exceptional talent, one of my favourite things about Joe is how well he treats his fan. No amount of fatigue would stop him satisfying our demands for autographs and photos. It's this mixture that makes fans so devoted to him - my pew neighbour had travelled from Spain just for the gig - and is why, as we waited to meet our hero, all you could hear was fellow fans asking each other incredulously how he isn't playing a bigger venue... while  being selfishly grateful for the privilege of such an intimate gig. With the next album promising to be even better than Boogie Christ, I'm sure we won't have him to ourselves for much longer!

Visit josepharthur.com for more information, tour dates and live recordings of gigs. For a great introduction to The Ballad of Boogie Christ, watch the interview and live performance at KEXP below.

And They All Lived Happily Ever After: A Fairy Tale Friday Night is Music Night

Once upon a time, the good people behind Radio 2's Friday Night is Music Night decided to give us a magical treat with a special programme dedicated to fairy tales. With music from Rimsky-Korsakov suites to Disney classics performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra, current Wicked star Louise Dearman and my favourite fairy tale prince Hadley Fraser, what more could a girl want? Luckily, my genie granted my wish and transported me to the very apt Mermaid Theatre for the recording.

Our charming narrator for the evening Samantha Bond took us through the history of fairy tales, from Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve penning Beauty and the Beast deep in the French woods in 1740 to the adventures of chicken farmer L. Frank Baum, via the undisputed champions of the genre, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. In keeping with Friday Night is Music Night's famed eclecticism, there was an incredible range of music from Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov ballets, to a jazz version of Some Day My Prince Will Come from Snow White. Hadley enjoyed reuniting Thumbelina and Tom Thumb in a small-but-mighty medley, before whisking us off to Hushabye Mountain, while Louise stopped the show with her version of The Wizard and I from Wicked. Having grown up with Disney, though, their versions of the fairy tales will always be my favourites, so I was grinning like the Cheshire chat through highlights from Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and my recent favourite Tangled. Of course the evening could only end with Night on Bald Mountain, made famous by Fantasia, and completely spellbinding when performed by the full orchestra. 

 Once Upon A Time will be broadcast on Radio 2 at 8pm today and will be available on BBC iPlayer after. More information and clips available at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039ft9v

Mr B's Reading Year: Part 2 - The Polish Boxer

A story is nothing but a lie. An illusion. And that illusion only works if we trust in it. 

Between extensive travelling and a summer in the Social Programme Office, my Mr B's Reading Year blog has lost its way (though I have received and read five books now with the same enthusiasm as ever), but now I'm back to normality it's time to catch up. I was instantly struck by my second book, The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon, on the strength of the cover, the blurb and Mr B's personal recommendation. I remembered reading about Halfon's visit to the bookshop several months ago and being intrigued by this Guatemalan literature professor, especially as my knowledge of literature from his country only extended as far as Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias.

Halfon's stories are as addictive as the smoke that permeates through all of them. I rushed through the whole book in one afternoon desperate to know where the semi-fictional Eduardo's search for answers would take him next in this series of interconnected stories. The Polish Boxer has everything I look for in a book: an engaging, flawed  but likeable first person narrator, an eclectic mix of characters (including a girlfriend who draws graphs of her orgasms and a Serbian half-gypsy classical pianist), and observations of the beauty, sadness and absurdity of every day life.

As an aspiring literature teacher myself, I was particularly struck by Halfon's very honest reflections on the futility and vacuousness of academic conferences at times, the point of teaching literature to a class full of students who don't care, the moral implications of simply studying literature when there are people really suffering in the places we study, and his having to put this out of his mind to get on with his job and still appreciate the power of stories. The Polish Boxer is therefore quite a melancholy read, but the fleeting moments of unexpected human contact that proliferate through the stories are fascinating and oddly beautiful.

Learn more about Mr B's Reading Year and how to get one for yourself here.

Aida @ Arena di Verona - New Production

While thousands of tourists flock to Juliet's balcony every day, there was one attraction in Verona I was far more interested in visiting, the Roman Arena. 2013 marks the centenary of both the summer opera festival at the Arena di Verona and the first performance of Verdi’s Aida there, an occasion celebrated with a lavish new production by La Fura dels Baus.

While the ancient stone benches high up in the Gods may be the cheap seats, they afford spectacular views over the Arena and Verona beyond, with the Lamberti Tower, beautifully lit up, dominating the night sky. The downside, however, is that sound doesn’t travel that well, so sometimes had to strain to hear the singers.

My only prior knowledge of Aida came from Elton John’s 1998 musical and boiled down to 'Pharaoh’s daughter Amneris loves warrior Radames but he is in love with Aida, who happens to secretly be the princess of Ethiopia, with whom Egypt are currently at war'. This wasn’t really enough to follow the show, especially when it was so hard to hear the lyrics, and the singers performing Radames and the Pharaoh looked so similar.

At the time, I wasn't particularly moved by the music either. There was only one truly memorable piece of music, the Triumphal March at the end of Act One, but that one piece is incredibly rousing and remained stuck in my head for days (the video below is a version by the Metropolitan Opera House).

Luckily the production was so ridiculously extravagant, it kept us entertained for the  four long hours of the opera. While replicas of the original 1913 cardboard pyramids and Sphinx were piled outside the Arena for anniversary performances later in the season, this version of Aida was completely wacky: fire, inflatable sculptures, an aluminium pyramid assembled by crane, acrobats, mechanical camels, men in orange boiler suits with scarab beetle heads riding bumper cars, flooding the stage to make a lake inhabited by dancers dressed as crocodiles... Under the night sky, it was a visual feast that impressed and baffled us in equal measure.

Aida continues to run as part of the 2013 summer season at the Arena di Verona until 8 September: full details here.

A Little Night Music In Concert

I was confused by A Little Night Music at first. Not by the plot - a delightfully simple tale of marraige, infidelity and finding a happy ending - but by how and why such a stellar cast were performing together for one night only in Guildford. It was only when I read the programme after that I realised the debt that we as an audience owe to the producer/musical director  Alex Parker (@alexparker91 on Twitter), who is lucky enough to live the theatre-goer's dream: gathering your favourite cast and putting on a classic, under-appreciated show. I know I would do the same given half the chance!

A recent BMus graduate, Alex has achieved a remarkable amount for someone so young, working on a wide range of productions, including, most recently, The Pajama Game. As a result, he has put together an enviable little black book, which he put to excellent use in A Little Night Music. I realise I'm prone to hyperbole when it comes to blogging about musicals, but when I say stellar in this case I really mean it: Janie Dee (Desirée Armfeldt) and Joanna Riding (Countess Charlotte Malcolm) are both double Olivier award winners, Anne O'Byrne (Anne Egerman) recently starred as Christine in the DVD of Love Never Dies, Fra Fee (Henrick Egerman) is fresh from the barricades of the Les Mis film, and the entire cast have a long and impressive list of stage and screen credits to their name. This concert version - no props, no costumes, and scripts still in hand - displayed just why this cast are so successful. Their vocal and acting performances were strong enough to completely envelope us in the production, to make us laugh out loud or marvel at their singing abilities, without any of the usual accompanimients to a musical of this scale.

Of course, the cast are helped by the material they're given to perform, and A Little Night Music certainly lends itself to a concert version. Essentially the story of a handful of characters in one location over one weekend, the show relies on Sondheim's music and lyrics, which at 40 years old, are as fresh and captivating as ever. With the Menier Chocolate Factory version of Merrily We Roll Along finally bringing Sondheim's classic the acclaim it deserves in the West End, and the Chichester production of Sweeney Todd cleaning up at this year's Oliviers, Sondheim's work is once again proving its enduring worth.

My last brush with Sondheim was the new, fully orchestrated version of Sunday in the Park with George staring Julian Ovenden at Theatre du Chatelet, which I had to listen to on the radio (thank you France Culture) as the ticket price and a trip to France was a bit steep even for an obsessive like me. While there are some great songs (like Move On, which you can watch here), they are interspersed with far too much dialogue. I realise Sondheim wanted to make a point about the nature of art, especially after the original production of Merrily had just flopped, but Sunday just left me cold. Thankfully, A Little Night Music couldn't be further from Sunday. It's HILARIOUS, stuffed full of laugh out loud moments. It's also filthy, opening with a song in which Frederick (David Birrell) considers ways to get his wife of 11-months to finally sleep with him, and continuing in a similar fashion. Yet somehow at the same time, there are incredibly moving moments, full of Sondheim's trademark wry observations on human failings in relationships.

As well as the cast, Parker's concert benefitted from a 31 piece on-stage orchestra who really made the most of the score, full of 3/4 time waltzs. Apart from the ubiquituous Send in the Clowns, the songs from A Little Night Music are not well known, but they should be. Every Day A Little Death, the lament of the cheated yet loyal wife, is one of Sondheim's most heartbreaking ballads, while perhaps the most rousing first act closer ever (though Les Mis fans may disagree with me), A Weekend in the Country, is so catchy that it's been stuck in my head on and off for the last three years now, since I first watched the incredible Stephen Sondheim 80th birthday prom in 2010. 

Alex Parker states that his aim is to produce the highest quality short runs and one-off productions that everyone will be talking about for a long time after. He certainly achieved that with A Little Night Music. I can't wait to see what he comes up with next!

Stupid F*@#ing Bird @ Woolly Mammoth, Washington DC

-          “Is that a seagull?”                                

-          “It’s just a bird. A stupid fucking bird”.

After the thoroughly traditional Newsies on Broadway, I was ready for something a bit more transgressive when I reached D.C. As the title would suggest, Stupid Fucking Bird, Aaron Posner's postmodern take on Chekhov’s The Seagull, certainly didn’t disappoint.

The enormous Latin American Studies Association Conference didn’t leave me with a huge amount of free time to explore D.C., so it was sheer luck that on my – rather long! – walk from the National Gallery of Art to the conference I happened to walk past the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and their rather eye-catching posters for their latest production.

You’d be forgiven for guessing from the poster that the play is about Twitter. It’s actually far more interesting and original than that, but social media does have a very important presence in the lobby (see #sfl). With ‘Pinspiration stations’ and tweets projected onto the walls, the audience are encouraged to interact with both the text of the original play and the very idea of art.

The play itself questions the form and purpose of theatre just as Chekhov had done with his original over a century before, while bringing Chekhov's famous subtext out into the open. It is self-reflexive, self-referential, and completely breaks the fourth wall, frequently addressing the audience for input. Further nods to Chekhov include a small pile of leaves hinting at the bucolic setting of his plays, and Banksy style mural of the great Russian playwright on the back wall.

Just like Chekhov's Konstantin, the main character Conrad (Brad Koed) expresses his belief that theatre – at least in Eastern Europe in the late 19^th century  - used to have the power to change society. ‘Why would you want to change the world?’ asks Dev (Darius Pierce), the most grounded character in the production.  The question, like the production as a whole, makes us consider what we, as an audience, want to get out of the theatre. While Stupid Fucking Bird won't change the world, it did give me everything I want from a play. Despite the distancing effect of all this experimentation with form, there are still moments when the audience completely lose ourselves in the play; there is shock, happiness, despair and a whole lot of laughs, interlaced with really thought-provoking moments. I was incredibly impressed that one production could have so many different effects on me. Since I saw the production, on the second night of previews, it has unsurprisingly garnered rave reviews.

I later learned that Woolly Mammoth is just one of a host of new experimental theatres that have popped up in D.C. in recent years. Apparently new zoning laws make it far more economically beneficial for developers to turn the first few floors of their new buildings into public arts spaces. If the quality of productions at Woolly Mammoth is anything to judge by, it would seem this law is paving the way for a new wave of exciting, experimental theatre in D.C. It makes me wish the city weren't quite so far away!  

Stupid Fucking Bird runs at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Co, Washington D.C. until June 23 2013. Full information and tickets are available here.

Newsies on Broadway

Now is the time to seize the day!  - Newsies.

The last (and first) time I visited New York, my one regret was not having seen a show on Broadway, so when I knew I would have an evening in the Big Apple before heading to Washington for the Latin American Studies Association Conference, I only had one objective, and this song from Smash on repeat in my head: Broadway Here I Come!

One of my main aims was seeing a show that I couldn't see in the West End, as there is a particularly high level of cross-over at the moment. There was certainly a range of shows on offer...

However, one thing I learned about Broadway is that the vast majority of shows are closed on a Monday. That ruled out the spangly new circus version of Pippin, last night's Tony champion Kinky Boots and even the 'so bad it's hilarious' spectacle of Spider Man: Turn off the Dark. Nonetheless, there was one homegrown hit I hadn't had a chance to see in London yet open on a Monday night, Newsies.

The second thing I learned about Broadway is it's WAY more expensive than the West End, and that's saying something given that a stalls seat here will often set you back at least £60. For Newsies, I was offered the choice between $140 for a seat or $30 to stand. Despite having woken up nearly 24 hours earlier and travelled half way across the world, you can guess which option I chose!

My prior knowledge of Newsies was pretty much limited to Kurt mentioning the twirly jumpy dance move that dominates the production in Glee and knowing that it was the show that launched the career of Smash star Jeremy Jordan (singing Santa Fe below). It turns out that the show is a remake of a 1992 Disney film about the newspaper boys whose strike brought down Joseph Pulitzer himself. The original, starring a young Christian Bale, was a box office disaster but became a cult classic.

Newsies prides itself on its Tony-winning choreography, and it certainly is impressive, if repetitive. Those boys are strong and skilled at doing multiple leapy twirly things without getting dizzy! The story is fun, and the historical achievement of the newspaper boys is actually quite inspiring, but the show is almost painfully sweet (it is a Disney production after all). Musically, you could tell straight away it was Alan Menken; although not his best work, it does boast a couple of incredibly catchy tunes (Seize the Day was still rolling around in my head over a week later). My main disappointment, however, was the cast, who were almost entirely Broadway newbies. They could certainly dance, but their voices were weak and often overpowered by the music. While star Corey Cott has the look and charm for newly appointed Union Leader Jack Kelly, having heard Jordan's version, I couldn't help feeling cheated.

Choreography photographed by the NY Times

Besides the show, I was interested in seeing the differences between Broadway and the West End. The stereotype seemed to be true: Broadway fans are more vocal in their appreciation, giving huge cheers after every song, while West End audiences have to work harder for far more tempered applause. I was also amused that Annoying Actor Friend's spoof bios are so accurate; everyone really did thank Telsey and quote Bible verses!

Overall, I'm very glad I saw Newsies! if mainly for the experience of a Broadway show, but it certainly didn't seem worth the extortionate amount they charged for full price tickets. I wouldn't rush to see it when it (according to Baz Bamigboye) transfers to the West End in 2014.