REVIEW: Cats at New Wimbledon Theatre

FOUR STARS

ONE of the West End's longest running shows is wowing audiences in the regions thanks to a nationwide tour.

Cats, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s extraordinary, record-breaking, smash-hit musical is currently at the New Wimbledon Theatre for a two week run.

For those who haven't seen it, it is based on TS Eliot's seminal work, Old Possum's Book Of Practical Cats which was written for the poet's godchildren in the 1930s.

Lloyd Webber decided to compose a score around the words and Cats was born, opening at the New London Theatre in May 1981.

Now 27 years later and despite no longer in the West End it still has a loyal and growing fan base - which was evident at the New Wimbledon Theatre last week.

And the appeal of the show is not surprising. With an amazing musical score that includes the timeless song Memory, made famous by Elaine Paige, spectacular set designs, stunning costumes and breathtaking choreography, Cats is utterly captivating.

Although there is not much of a story, it doesn't matter. It's the costumes, the dancing and the set which provide the wow factor and this current production doesn't disappoint.

There are some highlights though - the Jellicle Cats scampering in amongst the audience and Mistofelees, played by Joseph Poulton, who performs the most amazing dance in the second act in a costume studded with glittery sequins - is fabulous. It's breathtaking.

Cats is on at the New Wimbledon Theatre until Saturday, May 17

REVIEW: Fame: Not The Musical

FIVE STARS

FAME. What is it and is it really all it's cracked up to be?

Someone well placed to spill the beans is comedian and writer David Baddiel. Thanks to a career which has spanned 20 plus years, he's seen the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to being famous.

And now, coming back to stand up after a hiaitus of about 15 years he's ready to tell all thanks to his show Fame: Not The Musical.

In fact it's not really so much a stand up show than a chat with the audience, punctuated with screen shots of his family or his own public embarrasment and blunders of one sort or another.

Throughout, he explains what fame is and means to him, how it's impacted on his work and his family, how he still gets mistaken for Ian Broudie of pop band the Lightning Seeds, Ben Elton and Alan Yentob even after all this time and what it's taught him over the years.

A fair amount of the show is taken up by exploring the relationship David has with people - those who he knows, and those he doesn't.

And unsurprisingly Twitter gets more than a passing mention with David talking about how it has allowed people from all over the world to contact him at any time of the day and night about anything and how he deals with the trolls of which there are many.

Before the interval he asks for the audience to tweet him and promises to read out a few in the second half - my tweet generated a big laugh.

But the whole show is absolutely hilarious - with some of the biggest laughs being gained by his own public humilation on TV shows, meeting Madonna, being mistaken for other people and his enounters with some of his own idols - Peter Gabriel to name but one.

It also showed that despite the passage of time, he's lost none of the fantastic, intelligent and well observed wit that made him famous in the first place.

Fame: Not The Musical is on at the Menier Chocolate Factory until May 23. Tickets from £21. Visit www.menierchocolatefactory.com or call the box office on 020 7378 1713.

INTERVIEW: Hetain Patel

THERE has been much debate over the years about how TV shows and films can influence a person but for one South London artist they have provided the inspiration for his latest project.

American Boy is a warm and funny self-portrait by Hetain Patel constructed entirely from quotes and scenes from 90s Hollywood movies and TV programmes.

Drawing on the vocal and physical impersonations of Hetain’s playground days, it looks at the multiple personas which we all inhabit in our day-to-day lives.

The solo show which he is bringing to Sadler's Wells on May 20 and 21 marks something of a departure for the 33-year-old who trained and has subsequently built up a reputation as a visual artist.

Indeed Hetain, who lives in New Cross, mostly works in photography and video exhibiting in galleries around the world to critical acclaim.

Recent successes include his performance piece Be Like Water, which has been viewed as a TED Talk more than two million times, and Fiesta Transformer, a large-scale robotic sculpture created with his father from a replica of the Ford Fiesta he was given as a 18th birthday present.

"A lot of my work is for galleries as I'm more of a visual artist," he says.

"But recently I've started doing bits and pieces of physical theatre.

"This is only the third time I've done something for the stage. In the first one I was talking about myself and in the second I did the opposite and spoke in every other way but my own so I learned a lot of languages.

"American Boy is somewhere in the middle taking aspects of both those shows a bit further as well as exploring identity and belonging, race and culture, themes which run through all my work," he says.

"I'm really excited about it and especially because it's fantastic to be at Sadler's Wells."

And he says it was an interesting project to see which films he shortlisted and which were then whittled down to be in the piece.

"There was a big list of clips to choose from!" he laughs. "But all the quotes are personal to me, are about me and describe me.

"It's a self portrait of characters, quotes and scenes from all of those films I used to watch when I was growing up, spliced together to make up the narrative," he adds.

"It's been incredibly interesting to see which films and TV programmes have had an influence in my life and how they have done so.

"I've not used any really obscure films but when I had finished putting it together it was quite revealing," he adds. "A lot of them are guys in suits - Matrix, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Usual Suspects, that kind of thing.

"We know violence and guns are wrong but as a kid gun swinging warriors are cool so I suppose that's why those ended up in the mix.

"There was also a lot of Eddie Murphy including films like Beverley Hills Cop - he was the first person to deal with race in his movies but he does it in a humorous way.

"There were two main things that came up - the first that it was very male with the whole men in suits thing and the second was the questions of race.

"What's great though is that there is a vein of humour running through it.

"I'm being as honest as I can and giving an accurate reflection of being human."

To help illustrate the show there will be costume changes, different accents and even a super hero costume, though Hetain says people will have to go to the show to find out which one.

"When you are a kid wanting to be a superhero is almost de rigeur," he says. "There is one which I could relate to really well so he does make an appearance!"

American Boy is at Sadler's Wells on May 20 and 21. Tickets £17. Visit www.sadlerswells.com or call the box office on 0844 412 4300.

REVIEW: Yellow Face, The Shed theatre

FOUR STARS

THE exploration of how ethnic minorities are depicted and represented on stage is the subject of a brilliantly well observed play by David Henry Hwang.

Yellow Face was written in 2007 and in questioning what race really means, it draws on real life events and experiences of the Chinese American playwright.

These are interwoven with some less real to produce the piece which is now on at the National’s Shed theatre.

The main character is Hwang himself who penned the Tony-award winning hit musical M Butterfly and then became, somewhat unwittingly, the spokesman for the Asian American community.

It begins with David getting caught up in the true controversial casting of UK actor Jonathan Pryce taking the lead in a Broadway production of Miss Saigon in 1990.

David responds by writing a farce, Face Value, but instead of casting an Asian American actor of the calibre required for the lead role, he chooses Marcus G Dahlman, a man who has next to no Asian heritage at all.

To get around this he tries to pass Marcus off as having Siberian connections which Marcus embraces all too readily with unforseen consequences.

While all this is going on America is facing a rise in anti Chinese sentiment and government witch hunts and investigations of anyone with the vaguest of Asian connections.

They even investigate David’s elderly, fiercely pro-American but immigrant father.

The climax comes when David is interviewed by a journalist from the New York Times who tries her best to stitch him up only to be told she will feature as a character in his next play.

Funny and poignant, it is superbly acted by the seven strong cast and beautifully staged in the round on a raised platform under which Chinese lanterns are hung.

Yellow Face continues at the NT Shed until May 24. Tickets from £12. Call the box office on 020 7452 3000.

Interview with Meow Meow

EXUBERANT, fun and unpredictable. Just three of the words to describe international singing sensation that is Meow Meow.

I speak to the Australian songstress, grande dame and tour de force of the cabaret world ahead of her forthcoming residency at the London Wonderground and she is getting “really excited”.

"I’m here and I’m giggling already," she laughs. "I'm doing a photoshoot at the Vaudeville theatre and have been doing jetes around the stage – well it would be rude not to!"

And far from wanting a rest and a bit of "me time" before she takes to the stage next week, she is positively bursting with energy and joire de vivre.

"I got off the plane on Saturday, dumped my bags in the hotel, put on a fabulous frock and went to a concert of the young Von Trap singers and sang a song with them which was lovely," she says.

It turns out she met the group who are descended from the Austrian Von Traps made famous by the film Sound Of Music, in Portland when they did an album with American group Pink Martini and now they are “old friends”.

"At their gig, I came out of the audience wearing a fabulous frock which I just happened to have on and I sang Hushaby Mountain with them. It was divine.

"I’m on pure adrenaline," she adds chuckling.

"It's exhuasting being a showgirl of gargantuan talent but you just have to keep going. That’s the trick!"

And that she does, rarely letting up as she chats away about her love of cabaret, crowd surfing, sparkles and songs.

In fact it’s hard not to be swept away by her joire de vivre – much like it is going to one of her concerts in which she will draw in the audience before blowing their minds with her hypnotic voice and amazing, theatrical performance.

She has been dazzling audiences around the world for more years than she says she cares to remember and has worked with anyone who's anyone.

Indeed her glittering roll call of collaborators includes Australian national treasure, Barry Humphries which she says was "incredibly special", Ricky Gervais, David Bowie and Pina Bausch which she describes as "life changing".

But for her latest show Feline Intimate which she is bringing for a three-week stint at the London Wonderground’s spiegeltent, she will be on her own save for her accompanying musicians.

It's a venue she says is her “natural habitat” and she can't wait to stun the crowd once more with her incredible brand of cabaret.

"I love all those spiegeltents,” she says. “It’s my natural habitat, lots of mirrors everywhere, dark, mysterious and magical. Feline Intimate demands a more intimate space so the spiegeltent is the perfect environment."

The show, her first at the Wonderground, will feature a wide range of her cabaret favourites as well as "sequins, schtick, sexiness and possibly the splits".

"I love the flexibility of cabaret and being able to take risks," she says. "Cabaret songs last through the decades but I especially love the early stuff from the inter war years. It's quite astoundingly erotic and avant garde.

"Society at that time was in such a state of extreme and trauma and experimentation and discovery. There were record players and the radio for the first time. It was such an amazing period with everything hurtling towards the abyss - we are still hurtling. There is a frenetic energy in those songs.

"I am also mad about 1950s and 60s music as those decades featured fabulous singer songwriters.

"But cabaret songs and music can be endlessly reinvented," she adds. "You can touch people's hearts and minds at the same time. There's also an excitement that anything could happen.

"This show will feature gorgeous torch songs, a lot of mayhem and divine musicians as well as some gorgeous frocks of course," she says warmly.

"I don't have favourites when it comes to songs because it depends where I am at a particular time, how I'm feeling and how the audience is but there will be Brecht/Weill's Suraabaya Johnny and Brel's Ne Me Quitte Pas which I've sung all my life.

"There will also be some Schubert, which I think of as the beginning of cabaret, Radiohead, Patty Griffith and some original songs. One of them will be something I've written with Pink Martini's Thomas Lauderdale called Hotel Amour which is a beautiful torch song.

“I might also take requests if forced.....” she muses. "But there will be a plenty of old favourites just because they are incredible and so beautiful."

And she says this concert is much more about the music rather than being tied to a particular story or issue, as has been the case with previous shows.

"There is always a bit of a narrative but this is much more a cabaret show with glorious songs ancient and modern," she says.

"It will be a good rollicking 70 minutes of high and low class entertainment full of all kinds of human emotions," she adds cheerfully.

"Expect passion, laughter, heartbreak, rebellion, loneliness, joy, love, loss, grief, excitement and danger - the tensions between words and music and what happens when they collide means anything could happen! It's terribly exciting.

"I might even do a bit of crowd surfing," she muses.

"I am a person of the theatre after all!"

Meow Meow in Feline Intimate is at London Wonderground from May 20 until June 8. Tickets cost £15.50. Visit www.londonwonderground.co.uk or call 0844 545 8282