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Fringe 2008 Reviews (8)
Judy - The Musical
K6 Collective
Augustine's (Venue 152)
**
With the searches for Oliver, Nancy, Joseph and Maria now over, the
next star they want is for someone to play Judy Garland.
Judy - The Musical looks at a theatre company creating their
new production about the life of the legend. Each character in this
musical has some element of Judy's personality within them, be it addiction,
love interests, seeking stardom or loneliness.
This is a young cast who give it their all throughout the production.
Eloise Secker, Josh Lincoln, Michelle Jay and Luke Oakley all act well
and tell the story creating some nice moments on stage. Oakley has some
real raw talent and really stood out. Jay gave a stunning performance
as an actress trying to get her foot in the door but who suffers from
loneliness and alcohol.
The star of this production has to be the overly camp actor Eddie;
Gareth Roland really entertained the audience with his sarcastic wit
and comedy timing.
Secker gave a good performance of 'The Man that got away' but the direction
forced the attention away for the singer and onto the extras in the
background enabling the audience not to connect with Seckers character
at all.
Sadly the cast are let down by a rather tedious script, by Director
Anna Lawrence, that drops in every chance it can get, a piece of information
about Judy Garland's life. This felt more like a history lesson than
a musical.
This is not a production for the die-hard Judy Garland fans with not
very many of her songs sung within the production. In one part of the
play Lincoln states 'Judy - The Musical, the audience will love
it' with one replying 'Yeah but will the critics?' Sadly this one didn't;
well acted but script and music letting it down.
John Naples-Campbell
Married to the Sea
By Shona McCarthy
Dragonfly Theatre Collective
Assembly @ George Street
****
Shona McCarthy directs her own first full-length play for Dragonfly,
a Galway-based company formed two years ago by her and two of the actors
in this production.
The play is narrated by Jo, a young girl from the Claddagh, a small
fishing village near Galway, who tells us about her family: a father
who is always supposedly going off in his boat but may be on other clandestine
business, an alcoholic mother who has never recovered from the death
of her son years ago and the grandmother she shares a bed with who asks
after people who are long-dead and no longer has total control over
her bodily functions.
The play shows from a young child's point of view a part of Ireland
still firmly rooted in past attitudes and traditions just before it
is quite suddenly dragged into the twentieth century. It also shows
a family in disintegration for many reasons, and the way different parts
of the local community (in the old, real sense of the term) either help
with or take advantage of the family's troubles.
Young Jo is played very ably by Siobhán Donnellan, who puts
across all of the extensive narration very clearly. Fiachra Ó'Dubhghaill
is excellent as a panoply of characters, all superbly differentiated,
including Jo's father, Jo's young friend Mikey and his father, granny
and parasitic neighbour Teresa. Jo's mother is played, in a nicely-measured
performance, by Carla Bredin.
This play is often very funny and quite moving in parts and is performed
very well by this young Irish company.
David Chadderton
Alun Cochrane: Owner of a
shed and a son thinks the world is wonky
Assembly @ George Street
****
Northern comic Cochrane has such an easy, conversational relationship
with the audience that he can respond to a comment or a yawn from an
audience member in a natural way that doesn't make the recipient feel
in the least put down or got at, and he misses very little that happens
in the auditorium that he can create material from.
The title in part comes from the fact that he missed the Fringe last
year due to the birth of his son, which is also the reason he is not
performing on 6th August as he is flying back for his son's first birthday.
This gives him a whole new set of things about the world to analyse
in his slightly bemused but very relaxed way, without ranting on about
things as some comics do. However he doesn't cover the usual ground
of nappies and sleepless nights except in a more oblique way, but somehow
gets on to thinking about martial arts with dogs, buzzing electronic
gadgets given out in Marks and Spencer cafés and a man eating
a peach on a train. The sorts of things that occupy Cochrane's mind
don't occur to most of us, but when he talks about them you wonder why
they haven't.
The material and the delivery is superb, and he had his audience rocking
with laughter from start to finish during this performance. He is a
natural comedian with a wonderful relationship with the audience who
leaves you with the feeling of having a chat with a bloke in the pub,
but with a lot more laughs.
David Chadderton
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