Theater News

Oh, Mama!

Kelly Osbourne, Diana Rigg, Stockard Channing, and Oona Chaplin are lighting up the London stage.

Kelly Osbourne as Mama Morton in Chicago
(© Simon Turtle)
Kelly Osbourne as Mama Morton
in Chicago
(© Simon Turtle)

At the moment, London theater is preoccupied with families — both in dramas for which it’s the primary subject and in the casting of members of famous clans in key roles.

The most publicized marquee dangler is Kelly Osbourne, who’s in the midst of a seven-week run as Mama Morton in the long-running production of Chicago at the Cambridge. Wearing a Louise Brooks coif, Osbourne does as she’s been told; but she sings her Fred Ebb-John Kander ditties, “When You’re Good to Mama” and “Class,” with a mechanical authority that shows she’s yet to feel fully comfortable on stage. But the 22-year-old daughter of Ozzie and Sharon can’t dim the razzle-dazzle Bob Fosse built into the satire of 1920’s crime and cynical redemption. Not only is everything else about this production, currently toplined by Josefina Gabrielle as Roxie Hart and Annette McLaughlin as Velma Kelly, in tip-top shape, but it proves that the time has come to revise the view that English dancers are inferior to their American counterparts. This group is as nimble as gymnasts and lively as acrobats.

At the Old Vic is All About My Mother, which Samuel Adamson has adapted with plenty of smarts from Pedro Almodovar’s blockbuster film. Adamson and director Tom Cairns understand that the wisest way to turn live-action into live action is to stress theatrical value. As a result, this incarnation — with morphing Hildegard Bechtler sets — is theatrically cinematic. What Adamson doesn’t fiddle with is Almodovar’s idiosyncratic storytelling, which always turns on his fascination with movies and plays. Here, the Spanish master puts a spin on Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve.

Esteban (Colin Morgan) narrates events following his accidental death as his grieving mother Manuela (Lesley Manville) seeks a backstage position with lesbian actress Huma Rojo (Diana Rigg), who is currently portraying Blanche Du Bois. Almodovar’s obsession is the female psyche and how he can filter his take on it through predecessors’ interpretations. The women he creates are as complex as a circuit board, whereas the men are usually one-dimensional, with the exception here of Agrado (the hilarious Tom Gatiss), who’s actually a transvestite. At the play’s denouement, the wonderfully over-the-top Rigg makes Almodovar’s balefully hopeful point by stunningly reciting some lacerating lines from Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding.

The dubious promise of better times is echoed in Michael Attenborough’s pithy production of Clifford Odets’ 1935 classic drama, Awake and Sing! at the Almeida. To play the matriarch of the coming-apart-at-the-frayed-seams Berger family, Stockard Channing has made a rewarding transAtlantic trip. Her Bessie has an unforgiving nature and a tough Bronx accent. Everything she spews and every action she takes is right for a woman not noticing the harridan she’s become while fighting for the survival of her weak-willed husband Myron (Paul Jesson), mean-spirited daughter Hennie (Jodie Whitaker) and dissatisfied son Ralph (Ben Turner). Equaling Channing’s authority with the excruciating, though often amusing, Depression-era-dysfunction dialogue is the gemutlich ensemble circulating on Tim Shorall’s accurate depiction of a cramped Bronx flat. By the time the hardships have piled up, in the way of Hennie’s unhappy marriage and the fate that befalls Bessie’s live-in Socialist father, the tears that flow are deservedly earned.

Oona Chaplin, Gemma Arterton, Andrew Vincent, and Michelle Terry in Love's Labour's Lost
(© John Haynes)
Oona Chaplin, Gemma Arterton, Andrew Vincent,
and Michelle Terry in Love’s Labour’s Lost
(© John Haynes)

At the Globe, Oona Chaplin — Geraldine Chaplin’s daughter and Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter –is distinguishing herself in a sprightly and funny treatment of William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. Under new artistic director Dominic Dromgoole’s endlessly inventive helming, the play is a laugh riot and indisputable crowd-pleaser. As Shakespeare gleefully intended, it’s also a sex romp, in which the King of Navarre (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) and three cronies (Trystan Gravelle, William Mannering, David Oakes) foreswear distaff company just before the French princess (Michelle Terry) and three gal-pals (Gemma Arterton, Cush Jumbo, and Chaplin) arrive with other plots in mind. The Bard often forces actors to do their best, but such a perfect realization of his invigorating poetry isn’t an everyday occurrence.

Those greedy for even more brilliance can find it at Complicite’s newest multimedia piece, A Disappearing Number, which is packing them in at the Barbican and then instigating keyed-up dinner-table discussions among the town’s serious theatergoers. Conceived, written and directed by company founder Simon McBurney, the intermissionless, two-hour piece — built on mathematics and the string theory of everything — sounds a bit daunting in description. Nonetheless, the confection McBurney makes of his concept is convincing in its contention that numbers are as real as wooden tabletops. On Michael Levine’s now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t set, guilty expatriate Srnivasa Ramanujan (Sheane Shambhu), a real-life early 20th-century Indian mathematics savant, spews one inspired idea after another to the astonished English academic G.H. Hardy (David Annan), while contemporary couple Ruth (Saskia Reeves) and Al (Firdous Bamji) try to balance her devotion to the cerebral science against his need for more connubial attention. Although McBurney’s grappling with math — or “maths” as the British have it — is somewhat less probing than it seems on the surface, he renders mesmerizing his misgivings about everything being connected when human disconnections are so often the order of everyday life.

Nothing is ordinary in JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which helps explain the popularity of The Lord of the Rings, the so-called musical adaptation of his trilogy at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. But don’t be fooled: The multi-million-dollar whirligig — supposedly jimmied since its introductory Toronto run — is really a play with music. The songs are too often tangential to a plot in which Frodo Baggins (James Loye) willingly leaves his happy fellow hobbits to travel across less friendly territories in order to destroy a powerful ring in the fiery natural cauldron where it was forged.

Suffice it to say that heroic Frodo does almost no singing. Nor does his best friend, Sam (Peter Howe), or venerated guide, Gandalf (Malcolm Storry). The women of the plot — Glorfindel (Alma Ferovic) and Arwen Evenstar (Rosalie Craig) — contribute more silvery chanting, as does heroic Strider (Jerome Pradon); and Michael Theirrault offers a standout performance as Gollum. Still, at the end of the expensive item, audiences definitely go out humming Rob Howell’s elevating turntable sets and elaborate costumes, Paul Pyant’s predominantly inky black lighting, and Simon Baker’s unembarrassed sound design.

Finally, in the soon-to-close Fragments at the Young Vic, Peter Brook has guided a hilarious three-person cast through five of Samuel Beckett’s short pieces — “Rough for Theater I,” “Rockaby,” “Act Without Words II,” “Neither,” “Come and go” — with remarkable simplicity. Also at the Vic, Portia scores as stalwart family retainer Berenice in Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding. While Flora Spencer-Longhurst is remarkably convincing as a 12-year old, her Frankie is so hyperactive that Ritalin is called for.