Drawing: Summer Strallen in Love Never Dies

Posted on October 23, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Summer Strallen is the second of the four hugely talented Strallen sisters. She has been nominated for four Olivier Awards. One was for her performance as Meg Giry in Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s Love Never Dies, the sequel to Phantom of the Opera at the Adelphi Theatre.

It was a role that won her the Broadwayworld.com UK Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical and she was also nominated for the Whatsonstage Theatregoers’ Choice Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical.

I did this black biro sketch during Summer’s season as Meg which ran through 2010 and early into 2011, which she signed at the stage door.

Drawing: Aimée-Ffion Edwards in Jerusalem

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

I first saw Welsh actress Aimée-Ffion Edwards in Jez Butterworth’s outstanding play Jerusalem at the Apollo Theatre on London’s Shaftesbury Ave. The play opened at the downstairs theatre of London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2009 to rave reviews. It starred Mark Rylance as Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, a modern day Pied Piper and Mackenzie Crook as Ginger, an aspiring DJ and unemployed plasterer.

The title is based on a short a short poem ‘And did those feet in ancient time’ by William Blake, best known as the anthem ‘Jerusalem’ with music written by Hubert Parry in 1916.

Jerusalem along with most of the original cast, including Aimée-Ffion, transferred to the Apollo Theatre in the West End in 2010 before its Broadway run in 2011 followed by a London revival later that year, again at the Apollo. It won multiple awards, including the Olivier and Tony.

Aimee-Ffion played Phaedra, the stepdaughter of local thug Troy Whitworth who goes missing in the play. She is seen at the beginning of both Act One and Two singing the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ dressed in fairy wings, which was the basis for this sketch which she signed for me at the Apollo Stage door.

Drawing: Gemma Arterton in Made in Dagenham at the Adelphi Theatre

Posted on October 21, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Bond girl and BAFTA nominated Brit actress Gemma Arterton is currently on stage playing Rita O’Grady, the lead in the new musical Made in Dagenham which started previews earlier this month and opens at London’s Adelphi Theatre on 5 November.

Based on the film of the same name, it tells the story of sexual discrimination at the Ford car plant in Dagenham, Essex and the 1968 sewing machinists’ strike in which 850 female workers took on the might of the motoring giant and the corruption of the union supposed to protect them.

Directed by Olivier Award winner Rupert Goold, it is written by Richard Bean with music by Bond composer David Arnold and lyrics by Richard Thomas.

Gemma has always been very generous with signing my theatre drawings, from The Little Dog Laughed at the Garrick, The Master Builder at the Almeida, and The Duchess of Malfi at the Globe. However, after the first Saturday evening performance of Dagenham, the large gathering of ‘graphers at the stage door were told, “programmes and tickets only”.

This was the first time I had sketched Gemma in lead – previously only in ink in various applications – so I was keen to have it signed. True to form, she did make an execption for the sketch and signed it for me. If the audience are anything to go by, the show will be a smash hit. It is booked to run until March next year.

Drawing: Anne-Marie Duff in Cause Célèbre at The Old Vic Theatre

Posted on October 18, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

In 2011 four time BAFTA nominee Anne-Marie Duff played Alma Rattenbury in Terrance Rattigan’s final play Cause Célèbre at London’s Old Vic directed Thea Sharrock.

It was part of the centenary celebrations for the acclaimed English playwright. Originally staged in London in 1977, just a few months before the dramatist’s death, the courtroom drama is based on the famous case of Alma Rattenbury who was charged in 1935, together with her teenage lover, with the murder of her husband who had been bludgeoned to death. It is structurally daring, mixing the traditional conventions of courtroom drama with flashbacks.

“Anne-Marie Duff is electrifying in this terrific revival” wrote Charles Spencer in his four star Telegraph review.

Drawing: Nigel Lindsay in Shrek

Posted on October 17, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

British actor Nigel Lindsay played the title role in the original production of Shrek The Musical which opened at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane on 14 June 2011. He finished in February 2012, earning nominations for both the Laurence Olivier and Whatsonstage Awards for Best Actor in a Musical.

The previous year he won the latter for Best Supporting Actor as Dr Harry Hyman in Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass at the Tricylcle Theatre in London.

To play the grumpy Socttish ogre Shrek, Nigel had to spend 90 minutes before each performance having a prosthetic make up applied. There was also a touch of the Time Lord in his voice – he asked his mate David Tennant to help him out with this delivery – a cross between Kenny Dalglish and the former Dr Who. David said if he did Kenny no one would understand him, Nigel responded that, “yeah, but you’re too fey” so David ‘butched’ it up for him.

Nigel’s currently playing Charlie Fox in David Mamet’s Speed the Plow at London’s The Playhouse where he signed my sketch last night.

Drawing: Anna Friel and Joseph Cross in Breakfast at Tiffany’s at Theatre Royal Haymarket

Posted on October 15, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

One of the most anticipated productions of 2009 was the stage version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket, featuring Anna Friel as Holly Golightly and Joseph Cross as her neighbour William Parsons. It was the role that established Audrey Hepburn as a glamour icon and arguably Capote’s most famous character.

He wanted Marilyn Monroe for the 1961 Hollywood film, and hated Hepburn in the part. In fact, he hated the whole film. He called it, “a mawkish Valentine to New York City… thin and pretty where as it should have been rich and ugly!” The stage version is considered a closer adaption of the book.

The Telegraph’s Charles Spencer gave the production four stars. “This is the sexiest performance I have seen on stage since Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room… Friel creates a thrilling frisson of eroticism.”

The production opened on the 29th of September, concluding on 9th January 2010. Both Anna and Joseph signed my quick black biro sketch in the final week.

Drawing: Paul McGann in Butley at Duchess Theatre

Posted on October 11, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Paul McGann starred alongside Dominic West in the revival of Simon Gray’s biting comedy Butley in the summer of 2011 at London’s Duchess Theatre after a gap of 40 years. Dominic took on the iconic title role of the boozing and abusing rapier-tongued uni lecturer Ben Butley, well-bent on self-destruction and Paul played Reg Nuttall, the eloquent, steely new to Yorkshire lover of Butley’s housemate Joey. The play premiered in 1971 in Harold Pinter’s award-winning production starring Alan Bates at the Criterion Theatre in London and was described as a ‘darkly comic assault on the soft underbelly of academia’.

Drawing: Anna Carteret in Shakespeare in Love

Posted on October 10, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

British stage and screen actress Anna Carteret has quite literally follow in footsteps of Dame Judi Dench playing Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love and on the same stage as the great Dame recently performed in Peter and Alice – The Noël Coward Theatre in London. She is probably best known on the small screen as Police Inspector Kate Longton in th BBC’s long-running 1980s series Juliet Bravo

Anna made her first stage appearance as a cloud and a jumping bean in the panto Jack and the Beanstalk at the Palace Theatre in Watford in December 1957.

She joined Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre Company at the Old Vic in 1967 and over many a decade her performances included Olivia in Twelfth Night, Queen Isabel in Richard II, Roxane in Cyrano, Chorus in Oedipus and Anya in The Cherry Orchard.

Anna has played a Queen Elizabeth before, in the National’s 1979 production of Richard III. She also played Queen Margaret in the same play, for the Royal Shakespeare Company 20 years later. Throughout the 1990s as a member of The Peter Hall Company she appeared on both West End and the Broadway boards.

Drawing: Charlotte Lucas, Jessica Raine and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith in The Changeling at The Young Vic Theatre

Posted on October 9, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Jessica Raine and Charlotte Lucas featured in the sell out hit The Changeling at London’s Young Vic, helmed by the Theatres’ Deputy Artistic Director Joe Hill-Gibbings in early 2012. Described as a ‘darkly comic tale of sex, love and panic’ this was a modern-dress revival of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s 1622 classic which was originally set in Renaissance Spain. One reviewer called it “The Changeling supercharged – urgent, sexy and messy.”

It’s focus is the doomed romance between Alsemero, a nobleman and Beatrice-Joanna’s impending marriage to another man, until she finds a solution… which has deadly consequences. Jessica described her character in three words “clever, lusty and murderous”.

Her maid, Diaphanta (Charlotte) performs the bedroom trick, and stands in for Beatrice (Jessica) in a highly lubricious and well-lubricated spectacle in which a blindfolded Kobna Holdbrook-Smith and Charlotte smear themselves with jelly!

Drawing: Ciaran Hinds and Sinead Cusack in Juno and Paycock at The National Theatre

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Sean O’Casey’s gutting tragicomedy Juno and The Paycock is one of the most highly regarded and often performed plays in Ireland. First staged in Dublin at the Abbey Theatre in 1924 and set in that city during the Irish Civil War in the early 1920s, it is the second of the ‘Dublin Trilogy’ between The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) and The Plough and the Stars (1926).

London’s National Theatre in association with the Abbey Theatre staged the revival on the Lyttelton Stage in late 2011 with Ciarán Hinds and Sinéad Cusack in the lead roles as Captain Jack Boyle and Juno Boyle respectively.

“Searing, sobering, devastating and beautiful,” said the Sunday Independent. Both Ciarán and Sinéad signed my sketch in February 2012 at the Theatre and for a brief moment my stage door name became Martin…