Drawing: Michael Keaton

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Michael Keaton

‘Mr Keaton will not be signing autographs,” we were told last night at the UK Premiere of SPOTLIGHT at London’s Curzon Cinema in Mayfair. Michael and fellow cast members Mark Ruffalo and Stanley Tucci were due to arrive at six, but were held up. (It’s always a curiosity why Premieres are scheduled during rush hours – yes plural – when the traffic in Central London is gridlocked). In essence they were right. It is a physical impossibility to sign autographs when you are not physically there. SPOTLIGHT is the true story of the Boston Globes expose on the massive scandal of child molestation and cover-up within the local Catholic Archdioceses and a leading contender for the BAFTA and Oscar Best Picture prizes.

The air temperature nudged zero and below by the time they arrived at 7.20, ten minutes before the start of the screening. The paps quickly grabbed pics as the trio raced into the cinema with only Stanley managing to sign on the run. We all hoped that, in a gesture of goodwill, since many had waited in the icy conditions for three plus hours that they might be persuaded to do some graphing on exit.

The film intro lasted five minutes and they emerged in a hurry to get to more media commitments… but stopped to accommodate the gathering, including Mr Keaton who approached the pen near the cinema entrance and attempted to sign, but the barriers began to buckle as the throng surged towards him. Security quickly ushered him towards his waiting vehicle, which, just so happened to be in front of me. The Curzon premieres are unique events when they decide not to close the street. The cast are always dodging drive-throughs in order to satisfy the fans camped on the other side. Anyway he saw this drawing I did of him in the title roles from BIRDMAN and BEETLEJUICE and said, “Oh that’s really nice,” signing and dedicating it for me. After a sporadic handful of graphs he departed.

Trivia note: I found out that his birth name was Michael Douglas, can’t think why he changed it.

Drawing: Four Austentatious Women

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Austentatious

“One of the most enjoyable 60 minutes on the fringe” is how The Guardian summarises AUSTENTATIOUS – AN IMPROVISED JANE AUSTEN NOVEL, an improvised comedy play, based on nothing more than a title from the audience. It’s ‘eloquent, irreverent and a 100% improvised take on the works of Britain’s best-loved novelists.’ Some titles from previous shows include ‘Mansfield Shark’, ‘Jurassic Mansfield Park’, Sixth Sense and Sensibility’, Darcy & Hutch’ and ‘I know What You Did Last Season.’

For one night only, January 9 to be precise, the seven dashing dames and buxom boys of AUSTENTATIOUS swapped bonnets and breeches and took to the boards of the Leicester Square Theatre in London to perform CROSSTENTATIOUS to raise money for the Pancreatic Cancer Fund.

The four damsels, Amy Cooke-Hodgson, Cariad Lloyd, Charlotte Gittens and Rachel Parris signed this sketch of them in their regular Regency attire. I had no room on the A4 sheet to fit Graham Dickson, Joseph Morpurgo and Andrew Hunter Murray who complete the troupe, but they will all be back in their London ‘home’ at the end of the month and the next month and the following month… in fact they are many happy returners, so I can collect the gentleman’s graphs and catch another show.

Drawing: Samantha Spiro and Simon Paisley Day in The Taming of the Shrew

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Samantha Spiro Simon Paisley Day The Taming of the Shrew

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW is Shakespeare’s most outrageous comedy. One of theatre’s great screwball double-acts with a couple hell-bent on confusing and out-witting each other. First performed in London in the 1590’s, it was farcical and probably hilarious to Elizabethans, but it’s message of ‘taming’ a woman with a fiery personality and making her subservient to her husband does not always sit well with modern audiences.

Toby Frow’s production for The Globe in the summer of 2012 featured double-Olivier Award-winning actress Samantha Spiro as Katherina and Simon Paisley Day as Petruchio. It Included the ‘induction’ by the character, Christopher Sly who takes to the stage as Petruchio, so the ‘play-within-a-play’ is more a fantasy, wishful thinking rather than reality, tempering the misogynistic theme. The Guardian’s Michael Billington wrote as “both actors go at it hammer and tongs” throughout the entire play that this is a “…knockout Shrew that doesn’t go in for much psychological depth and presents Katherina’s final speech of submission without irony.”

Jane Shilling in The Telegraph describes Samantha’s Kath as “a compact, muscular spitfire whose gentlewoman’s education has evidently included self-defence classes”, as she drops her suitor to the ground on their first encounter.

I ‘drew the Shrew’ with this in mind, but never got it signed… until… as per chance, both actors were on the London stage over this Christmas period past But alas, not on the same stage. Samantha was in A CHRISTMAS CAROL at the Noel Coward and Simon in THE LORAX across the Thames at the Old Vic. Still that’s why there’s seven days and nights in a week and it took two of them to complete the mission.

Drawing: Anna Karina

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Anna Karina

As part of the three-month ‘Jean-Luc Godard’ season at the British Film Institute on London’s Southbank, his muse and first wife, actress, model, singer, writer and director, Anna Karina was a special guest on Saturday. Regarded as the most influential and radical of the French ‘La Nouvelle Vague’ (New Wave) Godard challenged the conventions of traditional Hollywood and French cinema in the 1960’s and 70’s. He was awarded an Honorary Academy Award in 2010, but did not appear in person to collect it.

At the age of 17 Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer hitch-hiked from her native Copenhagen, arriving in Paris, poor and unable to speak the local language. While sitting at the trendy ‘Les Deux Magots’, an advertising agent approached her to do some photos. The cafe was considered the ‘hotbed of the artistic and intellectual elite of the day’, whose regulars included Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway. She went on to model for Pierre Cardin and Coco Chanel, who helped devise her professional name Anna Karina. Godard first noticed her in the Palmolive soap ads, which depicted her in a bathtub covered in bubbles. She featured in seven of the French auteur’s films, including UNE FEMME EST UNE FEMME in 1960, for which she was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival. Anna worked with other directors, including George Cukor, Tony Richardson, Franco Brusati and Andre Delvaux. She is also an accomplished singer, with major hits.’Sous Le Soleil Exactement’ and ‘Roller Girl’, stage actress and writer with four novels published.

Anna participated in Q+A sessions for BANDE A PART (1964) and VIVRE SA VIE (1962) as well as introducing LE MEPRIS (1963) on Saturday. She also introduced SINGING IN THE RAIN’ (1952) on Sunday as part of the BFI’s Screen Epiphany series. It was a busy schedule for the 75 year old, but when she arrived she graciously took the time to sign a string of vintage memorabilia for a handful of admirers and my sketch.

Drawing: Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant

Posted on January 16, 2016 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Leo Dicaprio

After five acting Academy Award nominations, Leonardo DiCaprio is this year’s clear front-runner to collect the elusive golden gong for his portrayal of legendary frontiersman Hugh Glass in THE REVENANT. With 12 nominations, including Best Picture and already collecting three top Golden Globe Awards, the film is set to continue that success at next month’s Oscars.

Leonardo has previously signed a drawing for me, but I was giving the 4B a bit of a workout early this week and the latest Empire mag happened to be lying at my desk, open at an article I had finished reading about Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s epic western adventure. Since the UK Premiere was scheduled for the Empire Cinema in Leicester Square on Thursday with Leo attending, I thought, “why not?” and scribbled this montage.

Thursday was cold… very cold… and got colder as the talent arrivals drew near. Standing for three hours was cause to question my motivation… as I often do these days. The crowded pens did offer some consolation, a hint of body heat, but not much. By the look of the film and from what I read about Leonardo’s physical endurance during the making of it, the air temperature was probably a tad on the tropical side for him. The man himself duly arrived and as usual ‘did the line’, including my sketch with his distinctive and precise (Leo holds the sharpie very close to the tip… probably the closest of all the A-listers) graph.

Drawing: Matthew Perry in ‘The End of Longing’

Posted on January 15, 2016 by Mark Winter / Chicane

matthew-perry

Matthew Perry’s debut play as a writer, THE END OF LONGING starts its run at London’s Playhouse Theatre early next month. It marks Matthew’s first return to the West End since 2003 when he appeared in the acclaimed SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO, directed by Lindsay Posner, who returns to helm this production.

While that’s very good news for London theatre-goers, it’s not so good for fans of FRIENDS, ending speculation of getting all six cast members of the hit series together in person for next month’s reunion in the planned NBC tribute to veteran director James Burrows.

Matthew is joined on stage by Lloyd Owen, Christina Cole and Jennifer Mudge in this ‘hilarious dark comedy’ about four people searching for meaning as they enter their forties during one crazy night in an LA bar.

I managed to catch up with Matthew as he popped out for a ciggy break from rehearsals this week ahead of the 2 February opening and my siggy break to get this sketch signed.

Drawing: Dominic West, Janet McTeer and Elaine Cassidy in Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Posted on January 14, 2016 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Les Liasions Dangereuses

Two hundred years after Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ sizzling and scandalous epistolary novel LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES slipped into pre-Revolutionary France, Christopher Hamption’s lauded and awarded adaption for both stage and screen appeared, collecting an Oscar, BAFTA and an Olivier Award in the process. It’s the tale of sex, intrigue and betrayal between two jealously-fuelled aristocrats (and ex-lovers), the Marquisede Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont use of seduction to degrade and humiliate others, in this case the virtuous and beautiful Madame de Tourvel. Critic, Dominic Cavendish summed -up the plot in The Telegraph “The destruction of purity and innocence, the cynical pursuit of pleasure at the expense of others’ pain, vice unbounded, yet kept within the impressive mask of civilised decorum.”

A ‘heady and intoxicating’ 30th Anniversary revival, directed by Josie Rourke is currently playing at London’s Donmar Warehouse featuring Janet McTeer, Dominic West and Elaine Cassidy in their respective leads roles.

The Independent’s veteran critic Paul Taylor wrote Dominic’s Valmont is a “seductive sociopath and erotomane who uses strategy as foreplay with a hotline between increasingly active brain and insatiable genitals” He describes Janet as “drop-dead striking …(who) insinuates and machinates in a breathy, mocking manner, her eyes a-glare with sinisterly circumspection and latent with injury”, and Elaine “superbly communicates a state of growing feverish chastity.”

Drawing: Hangmen

Posted on January 13, 2016 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Hangmen 2

After a 12-year hiatus writing for the stage, London-born Irish playwright Martin
McDonagh returns to theatre, which he described in The Observer as the ‘worst of all artforms’. If that’s the case, he’s doing his best to mock that statement with his latest dark comical offering, HANGMEN, a savage satire on the justice and punishment system – ‘the grimmer side of the swinging sixties’.

Described by one reviewer as a cross between Harold Pinter’s ‘linguistic gamesmanship’ and Joe Orton’s ‘gallows humour’, it’s the Olivier, Oscar and BAFTA winner’s first play set in England, in a small pub in Oldham in 1965 to be precise. Receiving rave reviews and a cluster of five-stars after it’s sell-out run at the Royal Court earlier last year, the production transferred to the West End’s Wyndham’s Theatre and is scheduled to finish in March this year.

What’s Harry Wade, the second-best hangman in England to do on the day they’ve abolished hanging? A reporter and the regular tavern sycophants want to know his reaction, as a peculiar stranger lurks amongst them with a very different motive. Led by David Morrissey as Wade, the outstanding cast includes Andy Nyman, Johnny Flynn, Sally Rogers, Bronwyn James, Ryan Pope, Simon Rouse, Craig Parkinson, Tony Hirst, John Hodgkinson,James Dryden and Josef Davis.
With such a large ensemble, it took more than one sketch to fit them all in and more than one attempt to get it graphed. At this point I thought of resisting the term ‘hanging around stage doors’. But I didn’t. If it’s good enough for distinguished critics like Dominic Cavendish to write “doesn’t loosen it’s grip from start to finish,” and Paul Taylor to say “drop-dead hilarious… perfectly executed,” then I’m in good company. And speaking of good company, the HANGMEN cast were excellent on and off the stage.

Hangmen

RIP David Bowie

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Ziggy1 My one and only time I saw the ‘Starman’ in concert was in Wellington, New Zealand in 2004 as part of his A REALITY TOUR. This was my review.

Bowie

Drawing: Anne Edmonds in You Know What I’m Like at the Soho Theatre

Posted on January 11, 2016 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Anne Edmonds

Described as ‘one of Australia’s most exciting new stand-up character and banjo playing comedians, Anne Edmonds is currently making her UK debut with a fortnight at the Soho Theatre in London with a gig entitled YOU KNOW WHAT I’M LIKE.

It won Anne the Piece of Wood Award last year. The Piece of Wood Award you ask? Yes, it’s literally a piece of wood presented to the winner of the Best Show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, where she resides. Apparently it’s traditional to bite it. ‘Eddo’ – as she calls herself on Twitter – says she’s a ‘sadness sniffer dog’ that can spot melancholy behind smiles. Her stand-up routine is described by critics as “uncomfortably funny” combined with dark, but funny songs and skilful banjo playing.

Her banjo is called Steve… well it was in 2012, if she’s still with Steve. I didn’t ask when I meet her last Friday night after her show to sign this sketch. But you have until 16 January to pop along to the intimate upstairs loft at the Soho and ask her yourself.