Sketch: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Playhouse Theatre

Posted on March 26, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Women on the Verge

The brilliant Tamsin Greig and Haydn Gwynne have both been nominated for this year’s Olivier Awards for their respective roles in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

Previous Olivier winner (for Much Ado About Nothing) in 2007, Tamsin has been nominated for Best Actress in a Musical for her musical debut as Pepa, the lead role in the hilarious adaption of Pedro Almodovar’s Oscar nominated 1988 cult film which, following the Tony nominated production on Broadway, took to the Playhouse Theatre in London’s West End late last year. For her performance as the bitter ex-wife Lucia, Haydn received her second Olivier nomination after her previous nod for her role as Mrs Wilkinson in Billy Elliot. She reprised the role on Broadway, earning a Tony Award nomination.

The Guardian’s Michael Billington’s review included: “there is strong support from Anna Skellern, who seductively suggest hat Candela’s (her character) sexual abandon is more a product of untidiness than promiscuity and from Seline Hizli as a putative bride induced to orgasm by the valium laced gazpacho.”

I sent this sketch of the four to Haydn who not only signed it, but got the other three to do the same. Originally booked for a limited season, the production has now extended for three months until 22 August 2015.

Sketch: Ron Cook in The Ruling Class at Trafalgar Studios

Posted on March 20, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Ron Cook

The versatile English actor Ron Cook has been a stalwart of theatre, film and television since the 1970’s. He may not be a household name but will be instantly recognisable to global audiences in all three mediums. Ron has appeared in most of the popular British TV shows, including DOCTOR WHO, BERGERAC, MIDSOMMER MURDERS, THE SINGING DETECTIVE and can be currently seen as Mr Crabb the accountant in the ITV series MR SELFRIDGE. He has actually played Napoleon Bonaparte twice, in a guest appearance in SHARPE and in the feature film QUILLS – one of Ron’s 54 movies, which also includes THE COOK (appropriately), THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER, SECRETS & LIES and TOPSY-TURVY. A highlight of Ron’s extensive theatre work was an Olivier Award Best Supporting Actor nomination for his role in JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK at the Donmar Warehouse. He can now be seen on the London stage as Sir Charles Gurney in the first revival of Peter Barnes’s social satire THE RULING CLASS at the Trafalgar Studios, where he signed this sketch.

Sketch: John Light in Taken at Midnight at Theatre Royal Haymarket

Posted on March 18, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

John Light

British actor John Light has been nominated for a Supporting Actor Olivier Award for his role as a Gestapo officer. Jonathan Church’s world premiere production of Taken at Midnight, the new play by documentary film maker Mark Hayhurst, was first staged as part of the Chichester Festival Theatre’s Hidden Histories Season.

It’s the extraordinary story of a young Jewish lawyer Hans Litten who subpoenaed Hitler to appear as a witness in a criminal trial in 1931. he was taken into “protective custody” and sent to Sonnenburg Concentration Camp. The play focusses on the attempts of Litten’s mother (Penelope Wilton) to confront the Gestapo and rescue her son from his inevitable fate.

After it’s success in Chichester, the production transferred to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket in London’s West End for a limited run which ended last weekend.

The New York Times correspondent Matt Wolf said “Mr Light is suavely chilling in the part” of Dr Conrad, the Nazi official who plays down the severity of Litten’s fate even though he knows the atrocities that await. Hans Litten died in Dachau in 1938, at the age of 34.

Sketch: Glynis Barber in Beautiful, Aldwych Theatre

Posted on March 11, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Glynis Barber

British actress Glynis Barber, best known for her small screen roles in hit eighties come series Dempsey and Makepeace, Blake’s 7, Eastenders and Emerdale. She’s currently on the West End stage playing Genie Klein (Carole King’s Mum) in the London production of the Broadway hit Beautiful – The Carole King Musical at the Aldwych Theatre.

Carole’s album Tapestry has sold more than 25 million copies and the musical focuses on her route to success between the ages of 16 and 29, as part of the hit songwriting team with husband Gerry Goffin.

Glynis is a lifelong fan of Carole King. She doesn’t sing, but loves the fact that she will get to hear Carole King music all year. Initially booking till 13 June, the show has extended its run due to popular demand until February next year. It has also just been nominated for 8 Olivier Awards.

Sketch: Katie Brayben in Beautiful, Aldwych Theatre

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Katie Brayben

West End’s newest leading lady, Katie Brayben, has just been nominated for an Olivier Award for her role as the legendary singer songwriter Carole King in Beautiful – the Carole King Musical.

Katie’s nod for Best Actress in a Musical is one of eight for the show, “I am absolutely over the moon,” she told Digital Spy.

Katie doesn’t read reviews, so in case she’s reading this, I won’t spoil it for her, other than to say her Olivier nomination would have the unanimous support of all the critics.

One of the most successful songwriters in pop music history, Carole King’s life story has been transformed into a hit Broadway musical, with 7 Tony nominations, winning Best Leading Actress for Jessie Mueller.

Carole was one of Katie’s idols and actually appeared at the curtain call on the press night. When Katie was signing my sketch at the stage door after Saturday’s matinee, I asked her if she knew Carole would be there and she said, “no, if I had known, I wouldn’t have been able to do it!”

Sketch: Lydia Wilson, Oliver Chris, Richard Goulding and Tafline Steen in King Charles III

Posted on March 4, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

The smash hit play, King Charles III, Mike Barlett’s mock Shakespearean play about a constitutional crisis when Charles succeeds his mother after her death. Time called it a “future history play”.

Directed by Rupert Goold, the pitch perfect production premiered at London’s Almeida Theatre on 10 April 2014, before transferring to Wyndham’s in the West End for a short sell out run late last year.

“It won’t blow the palace sky high. But it’s theatrical dynamite, nonetheless,” said Caroline McGinn in Time Out.

Lydia Wilson’s manipulating Duchess of Cambridge with a touch of Lady Macbeth puts pressure on Oliver Chris’s uncanny William to intervene in his father’s refusal to uphold Parliament’s decisions. Richard Goulding’s likeable and restless Harry falls in love with the liberating but ultimately unstable Jess, a punky republican art student played by Tafline Steen.

Sketch: Nancy Carroll, Oliver Chris, Patrick Marber, Rachel Redford, Rufus Sewell in Closer

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Closer – Patrick Marber’s study about the brutality of modern relationships, gets its first major revival at London’s Donmar Warehouse and has already sold out.

When it premiered at the National Theatre in London in 1997 and the Music Box Theatre on Broadway in 1999, Closer won Olivier, Evening Standard and New York Drama Critics Circle Awards and was nominated for a Tony for Best Play.

Directed by David Leveaux, it stars Rufus Sewell, Nancy Carroll, Oliver Chris and Rachel Redford as the quartet caught up in “an agonised sexual and emotional square dance,” according to The Telegraph.

The Donmar website sums the play as: “Dan rescues Alice. Anna photographs Dan. Larry meets Anna online. Alice rescues Larry. This is London at the end of the twentieth century, where lives collide and fates change in an instant.”

According to the Evening Standard, Marber writes perceptively about our obsession with appearances, the perils of honesty and the damage we can do to others in the name of love. Holly Williams in the Independent summarises it as “hook ups, fuck ups and break ups”.

The cast all signed my sketch after Saturday’s matinée, Closer runs until 24 April 2015

Drawing: Dracula! (Mr Swallow – The Musical) at the Soho Theatre

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Dracula! (Mr Swallow – The Musical) the hit new musical at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival transferred to London’s Soho Theatre last month and due to phenomenal demand has added extra shows, now running until 7 March 2015.

Written by the comically acclaimed character performer Nick Mohammed, this musical spoof follows the chaotic final dress rehearsal for the fictitious show Dracula, as his excitable alter ego, Mr Swallow in the title role, enters on roller staktes making strange demands and increasingly bizarre interpretations, like a “tin pot tyrant”. He is joined by three brilliant musical theatre actors; David Elms plays Joseph, the director who also plays Van Helsing; Kieran Hodgson is Jonathan Harker and Johanna Grace is his fiancée, Wilhamina, accompanied by a five piece band playing original compositions by Ollie Birch.

Nick graduated with a first in geophysics and commenced doctoral studies in seismology at Cambridge, but was caught in the glare of the Footlights Troupe and took up comedy instead. He is developing Mr Swallow as a TV vehicle.

I caught up briefly with Nick and the cast after Saturday’s evening performance where he and Joanna signed my sketch.

Sketch: Guy Paul and Harriet Walter in Boa at Trafalgar Studios

Posted on February 25, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

One of Britain’s greatest actresses, Olivier Award-winner, Dame Harriet Walter and her husband, American Broadway actor Guy Paul perform together for the first time in Clare Brennan’s tender two-hander BOA in one of London’s most intimate spaces at the Trafalgar Studios. The one and a half hour play is an honest account of a husband and wife, whose relationship spans thirty years of love, laughter, addiction and warfare. A large snake appears on the publicity material, but thankfully only metaphorically on stage. ‘Boa’ is the nickname of Harriet’s character Belinda. It relates on a number of levels, including her resemblence to the nocturnal snake and her passionate volatility as a heavy drinker described as ‘severe and slippery’.

“Sometimes her arm around your shoulders felt like a feather boa, and sometimes it felt like a big old snake squeezing the life out of you. I liked it.”

BOA runs for a strictly limited 5 week season at the 98 seat Trafalgar Studio 2, finishing on 7 March.

Drawing: Brandon Victor Dixon in The Scottsboro Boys

Posted on February 21, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

The final collaboration between legendary composing duo John Kander and Fred Ebb (Cabaret, Chicago) The Scottsboro Boys, tells the story of a group of nine black teenagers brought together by fate in a case that sparked the American Civil Rights Movement and led to two pivotal Supreme Court rulings. The show premiered off Broadway in February 2010, moving to Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre in October. The musical then opened in London’s Young Vic Theatre in 2013 where it sold out, before moving to the Garrick Theatre in the West End in October 2014.

Grammy and Tony nominee Brandon Victor Dixon made his West End debut as Haywood Patterson in The Scottsboro Boys. A Columbia University graduate, Brandon was a scholarship winner at the British Academy of Dramatic Acting at Oxford. He recently created the role of Berry Gordy in Motown, The Musical with a Drama League Award nomination.

His Tony nomination was for his role as Harpo in Broadway’s The Colour Purple and won the Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, Out Critic’s Circle, Drama League and AUDLCO award for his outstanding portrayal of Haywood Patterson in the original off-Broadway production of The Socttsboro Boys.

His producing credits include Of Mice and Men (2014) and Hedwig and the Angry Inch which won the 2014 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical.

In recognition of this intelligent musical about a notorious episode of American racial injustice, The Scottsboro Boys was nominated for 12 Tonys and 6 Olivier Awards, but failed to win any. It did win the London Critics’ Circle and Evening Standard Awards for Best Musical.

The West End run finishes today.