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We hope to see you at Stage2 events through out the season!
Wednesday, 30 January 2013
Sunday, 20 January 2013
Reviews of Alice's Adventures in Www.land
Curtain Call
At the Cresent Theatre
Stage2 ‘Alice’s Adventures in Www.land’
Devised by Stage2 using the story of the original book, the director, Lucy Bailey-Wright, goes to great pains to explain that although the characters and story in this production, mimic that of Lewis Carroll’s original text of Alice in Wonderland, all the characters in their play are real children, simply using character names as online alias’s.
To most of those above a certain age, which includes your reviewer, who use their computer basically as a word processor, and the internet as a quick and easy way to send messages, a means of sourcing information or buying things cheaper than in the shops, the world of social media is totally foreign to them. Thanks to whoever produced the programme for including a list of‘ ‘Teenage/Internet Speak’ or I for one, would have been totally lost – LOL!
The audience entered to see 15 year old Alice, laying on her bed in her room reading; she was bored with reading books with no pictures and doing homework, and has created a wonderland of her own via her laptop. We followed Alice as she clicked from site to site encountering the White Rabbit, the Duchess, the King and Queen of Hearts and many other characters from Alice in Wonderland, as she set out on her epic adventure through online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.
As is normal for Stage2 a huge cast of 54 (including the chorus) was involved, with almost as many backstage and front of house this was another all encompassing production.
With Alice’s bedroom recessed at the back of the flat stage space in the Studio Theatre, five pieces of rostra decorated with various common media symbols, a large projection screen above the bedroom and two video screens either side was the setting. This worked very well with such a large cast, and the projection screen was certainly helpful when ‘tweets’ were being sent and during the musical number towards the end. This was most impressive with the whole cast involved in such a small area, it was choreographed and performed to perfection.
Some notable performances came from Georgia Homer as Alice, Tom Butler as Cheshire Cat, Leah Martindale as Caterpillar, Annabelle Quirin as March Hare, George Bandy as Mock Turtle and Joshua Gordon as Griffin, however, the whole cast are to be congratulated as they all played their part.
I don’t claim to ‘totes’ get all that was going on, but this was a competent piece of theatre which certainly made you think.
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Thursday, 17 January 2013
THE TEMPEST
Liz has had her first meeting with the Production Team for The Tempest and it went extremely well, we are set to have another term with a hugely dedicated Technical Crew!
There is still time for people to join us this term for what is set to be a fantastic show!
There is still time for people to join us this term for what is set to be a fantastic show!
Click here to Book Now!
Tuesday, 15 January 2013
Stage2 Radio
Well done to Chloe, Jacoba, Sarah and Laura for being fantastic ambassadors on the Carl Chin show on Sunday.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p012tbqx/Carl_Chinn_13_01_2013/
Our kids start about 30mins in!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p012tbqx/Carl_Chinn_13_01_2013/
Our kids start about 30mins in!
Alice's Adventures in Www.land REVIEW
http://www.behindthearras.com/
RANDOM LETTERS
VIDEO SCREEN
Alice through the touch screen
In the world, but not of the world
Alice’s Adventures in Www.land
Stage2
Crescent Studio Theatre
****
LEWIS Carroll’s Victorian children’s classic opened up a world of bizarre characters where language and words battle with reason and everyone is mad . . . as a hatter, otherwise, as the Cheshire Cat tells us, they wouldn’t be there.
And Stage2’s reworking of Alice treads the same weird and illogical paths as the original although I suspect that it introduces an extra element with a generational gap and it also brings in a sadness, which may or may not have been intentional.
Alice, played by the excellent Georgia Homer, is tired of school and boring text books and finds escape in her laptop and the world of her namesake in Wonderland except our modern Alice’s escape is to a world of tweets, of hash tags, likes, @, trending and hyperlinks – the Www.land of social media . . . and that is where demographics come in.
The older the audience, and the younger strangely, the less likely they are to use social media, only one per cent of users are over 65 while, remarkably, only five per cent are under 17. More than half fall between 25 and 44 and, interestingly, the majority of users are women. (Source: Pingdom 2012)
So for any performance there will be audience members who will find Www.land an alien world speaking in a foreign language and using unfamiliar conventions – which is perhaps where the sadness comes in with the realisation that a civilisation that could give us the language of Shakespeare and the James I Bible is now giving us the vacuous world of social media and txt spk, with its ugly, inelegant stripped down linguistics and an obsession with celebrity and trivia.
Some of Carroll’s clever games with language are still there though such as Alice’s discussion about who she is with The Caterpillar, played confidently by Leah Martindale, or a complex monologue from Peter Collier as a splendid Mad Hatter which even had smatterings of rap.
Both speeches create the problem for both learning and performing of being largely nonsense with a flow and rhythm that depends upon the actor rather than any logical structure and both youngsters delivered their difficult lines with aplomb, the Hatter aided by a suitable loopy March Hare played by Annabelle Quirin and the weirdly hooded Anonymouse played by Gabriel Hudson.
Fine performances too from the fish and frog footmen, Alex Thompson-Carse and Luca Hoffman, keepers of passwords and random letters to foil trawling bots such as automated spammers – told you it was another language. Then we had the King of Hearts, Tom Baker and his loony queen, Sarah Quinn, who goes in for screaming and beheading in a big way.
Less violent are the strange pairing of The Mock Turtle and The Griffin, or The Gryphon, played by George Bandy and Joshua Gordon, discussing the merits or otherwise of modern schools and teachers and discovering . . . girls, which is enough for the nerdy Turtle to remove his glasses and try for cool and hip.
There are many more notable efforts from the large number of characters. 23 in all, who must have worked hard and long to reach the level of precision needed for many scenes, and, as this is Stage2 who work on the Ben Hur principle of casting, there is also a huge chorus of 31.
Leading us through at the start is Meg Luesley as The White Rabbit while taking over as the guide is Tom Butler as a wonderful Cheshire Cat. His grinning, rather floppy manner reminded me much of a youthful Christopher Biggins as he beamed and bumbled around the stage.
With such a large cast it needs a lot of discipline to prevent it all descending into a mob but director Lucy Bailey-Wright keeps a firm grip on things – as do her charges who seem to know exactly what they are doing at all times.
A notable feature of Stage2 productions is that the cast are always acting. There is no standing around looking bored, staring into space, looking for mates in the audience, waiting to say a line or exit left, everyone on stage always seems to have a purpose, to be part of the scene, taking an interest, even if the purpose is merely to look as if you have a purpose.
Technically it is a challenging production based around a simple set of Alice’s bedroom in the background and a stage of blocks decorated with large with common social media ascii characters such as @ and #.
Above is a large projection screen with a video screen at either side which brought in another element as we first saw Alice’s search for Carroll’s Alice, allowing her to break out of her world into that of Www.land, and then whole conversations seen as tweets on the huge projection screen.
Synchronising with pre-recorded video or music is a skill that takes no prisoners and full marks to the cast here for not only coming in on cue with their on screen tweets but also getting virtually every word right.
This live/video mix became even more impressive in a final musical number when the entire cast of thousands – all right 54 – filled the stage with a none too easy dance which synchronised exactly with the same dance filmed with the same cast to the same music in the same costumes at Millennium Point in what was a classy piece of staging.
There are a couple of moments when pauses were a fraction too long and a couple of graphics that perhaps needed more polish but the combination of mediums largely worked well.
The graphics and video were apparently created by a group from the technical team and then lighting designer and production manager Chris Cuthbert pulled it all together.
This is not a play in the conventional sense and combines live acting with video, graphics and music ranging from Police and Roxanne to Puccini and Turandot in what is a multi-media performance as Alice explores a whole universe of different worlds out in the cyberspace of social media. In mundo, sed non de mundo - In the world, but not of the world as one graphic tells us.
Through her we discover that it is a world that is not always welcoming, and despite living only within computers, is not always logical or even fair. The result is a clever piece of theatre, well presented and acted, as you would expect from Stage2, but at the end you somehow felt it had been a somewhat superficial experience – but perhaps that is what social media is all about.To 12-01-13.
Roger Clarke
Sunday, 13 January 2013
January Update!
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