Louise Penn Archives - North West End UK

Tonight at the London Coliseum: Cassidy Janson

3Oct

By Paul DownhamNo Comments

London

Tonight at the London Coliseum: Cassidy Janson

The most recent acoustic concert in the Tonight at the London Coliseum series features the star of Beautiful: the Carole King Musical and & Juliet, Cassidy Janson. Having already watched her livestream from her house earlier in the year, and seen her live in the intimate setting of the Coliseum’s Balcony Bar back in February, I have become familiar with her choice of songs, and this concert very much focuses on the crowd-pleasers and big-hitters. It remains a sad feeling to see any show broadcast from an empty space where an audience should be, however large or small. The beautiful Coliseum auditorium is lit up in reds, golds, and blues but without an audience there is a lack of energy and atmosphere. Janson, however, is a likeable and perceptive performer, and brings warmth to the...

Defying GraviTT – Online@theSpace

One of the best things about fringe festivals is that you get to experience a range of shows that cannot quite be boxed into one category. One day it might be jugglers or the circus, the next a political rant or an intense two-hander about the restaurant provision for vegans. As shows have gone online during the current pandemic, they have attained an additional status from performers isolated from others by necessity, not always from choice. Boundaries have increasingly become blurred as creators experiment. In Defying GraviTT, The Fabulous TT aka Tish Tindall brings her wry observational skills and musical prowess to a one-person show which considers lockdown from the perspective of “a menopausal madwoman”. Part video diary, part song cycle, part cabaret, Tindall’s piece has to...

Double Bill: The Masks of Aphra Behn and Oranges and Ink

Claire Louise Amias’s pair of plays resurrect Aphra Behn from a place of relative obscurity into sharp relief as a chatty, warm, and witty raconteur. Directed by Pradeep Jey and Alex Pearson, they were originally presented at the Tristan Bates Theatre as part of the Women and War Festival and were streamed together as part of the Online Fringe Festival this spring. Behn is a complex and fascinating character from the Stuart era. Born in Kent, she worked as a spy in Antwerp, had a brief marriage to a Dutch merchant, and was the first female playwright to make a living from her work. Played by Amias, she is presented as a historical gossip, a pragmatic conversationalist, and a feminist ground-breaker. In The Masks of Aphra Behn, we hear a fraction of her life story, yet I wanted to ge...