By Ray Bennett
LONDON – David Edgar has trimmed his nine-hour 1982 Tony-winning play based on Charles Dickens’ “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby” to two easily digested parts, but they should please audiences just as much.
Revived for the Chichester Theatre Festival, now at the Gielgud Theatre in the West End and headed to Toronto in February, the production has lost scenes and many of the musical numbers from the original but is no less entertaining.
A supremely talented cast of 27, several playing multiple roles, has as much fun as the audience in re-creating the tale of a young man trying to make his way in the world in the often cold and pitiless 19th century England.
As Tony winner Trevor Nunn did in the original, directors Jonathan Church and Philip Franks create a great whirling epic with swift-moving sequences sped along by characters narrating their episodes before entering a scene.
Simon Higlett’s atmospheric design is aided greatly by Mark Jonathan’s lighting and Matt McKenzie’s sound so that clarity is never lost even when characters speak across one another in overlapping dialogue.
The players’ enthusiasm matches their skill in creating an entertainment that establishes the cruelty of the period while retaining an optimism untarnished by oversentimentality.
The familiar Dickens yarn follows young Nicholas (Daniel Weyman, pictured left with David Dawson) as he steps up to take responsibility for his family after the death of his impoverished father. His sister, Kate (Hannah Yelland), and their mother turn to unscrupulous but wealthy uncle Ralph Nickleby (David Yelland) for help, but he sends the boy up north to work in a squalid school for foundlings while forcing the girl to take work with a seamstress.
Nicholas encounters a nasty operation in place at the school and more or less adopts a damaged young man named Smike (David Dawson). Rebelling against the cruelty of schoolmaster Mr. Squeers (Pip Donaghy), they run off and join a theatrical troupe.
There are many encounters with colorfully Dickensian characters in a tale that involves potential marriage partners for Nicholas and Kate, plus larceny, lechery and a great deal of inheritance money that the rich uncle plots to acquire.
All the performers do well, but Dawson makes a memorable Smike, David Yelland is a very polished villain, and Richard Bremmer provides an indelible portrait of knuckle-cracking clerk Newman Noggs.
Both three-hour parts are worth seeing, though the first show probably is the most fun, ending as it does with a funny spoof of “Romeo and Juliet” as performed by a theatrical troupe that wishes to please the crowd a little too much.
Shakespeare, like Dickens, can survive almost anything.
Venue: Gielgud Theatre, runs through Jan. 25; Cast: Daniel Weyman; David Dawson; Pip Donaghy; Veronica Roberts; Zoe Waites; Hannah Yelland; Abigail McKern; Jonathan Coy; David Yelland; Richard Bremmer; Playwright: David Edgar; Based on the novel by: Charles Dickens; Directors: Jonathan Church, Philip Franks; Set designer: Simon Higlett; Lighting designer: Mark Jonathan; Sound designer: Matt McKenzie; Movement: Shona Morris; Music-lyrics: Stephen Oliver; Duncan C. Weldon and Paul Elliott for Triumph Entertainment present the Chichester Festival Theatre production.
This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.
Joni Mitchell still has that ‘Shine’
Cigarette in hand, Joni Mitchell was in fine form on the BBC’s Sunday morning public affairs program “The Andrew Marr Show” today. Speaking from Los Angeles, Mitchell was unapologetic about releasing “Shine,” her first album in about 10 years, through Starbucks.
The Canadian artist denied that she was ever a folk singer and said she has been smoking since she was 9 but it had nothing to do with shaving the top octave from her singing voice: “I had three octaves but I blew out the top register doing rock ‘n’ roll.”
When Marr asked if fans were likely to see her in concert, Mitchell said she didn’t enjoy performing — “I always felt inadequate” — and nor did she think she could hold a room as a performer. Not many artists can, she said, “Maybe Prince, and Jagger runs back and forth. But rock ‘n’ roll is dance music. Why are we sitting there watching performers?”
Reviewers have been kind to the new release: “A strange, intoxicating and unsettling album,” from Alexis Petridis in The Guardian; “One hell of a comeback” from Jon Lusk at bbc.co.uk.
Here is an EPK for “Shine” on YouTube