Orange Tree Extras is an exciting new venture at the OT:
curated by Matthew Poxon, it’s a series of one-night-only events showcasing a
wide variety of performances - comedy, music, poetry, drag – and thus
opening the theatre up to artists who haven’t performed there before (and to new
audiences, too). I was happy to attend three of the evenings in the current
series, which takes place between the closure of Chris Urch’s great
The Rolling Stone and the opening next week of Alice
Hamilton’s production of Robert Holman’s German Skerries.
The first evening set the bar almost ludicrously high, with
the appearance of one of the best and most captivating of artists: Barb Jungr. Accompanied
by the celestial team of Simon Wallace on piano and Davide Mantovani on bass,
Jungr performed her set of Nina Simone-associated material, drawing in part on
her 2008 record Just Like A Woman. (Jungr’s fantastic, just-released new album, Shelter from the
Storm [review here], also includes
a new homage to Simone in the shape of the beautiful ballad “Hymn to
Nina.”)
I saw Jungr, Wallace and Mantovani perform this show at City of London Festival last year, and deliver an outstanding performance that
triumphed over a somewhat disagreeable venue (ClubTEN), where inconveniences
included a creaking stage and a weird seating set-up. The Orange Tree, though,
could not have been more congenial a venue, nor could the audience have been
more attentive or appreciative. “It’s
quite puzzling to be doing this in the round,” Jungr admitted after the dynamic
opening mash-up of “Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair” and “Break Down
and Let It All Out”. “I do like to prowl, and I could get dizzy...”
In fact, the round
proved particularly great for Jungr’s performance style: she is, after all, an
artist who’s breathtakingly adept at showing us songs from multiple
perspectives and in new dimensions. Here we saw her from all angles: turning, bopping, grooving or swaying to
Wallace and Mantovani’s superb playing, endlessly shape-shifting and
spontaneous, hilariously irreverent
between-songs, and then turning gleaming-eyed satire into overwhelming emotion. Sketching the images of the songs
through gestures (turning her hand into a hummingbird on “Everything Must
Change” or parodying a male fantasy of grasping femininity on her brilliantly
subversive rendition of “Just Like A Woman”), Jungr is so vibrant when in motion that even when she performed a song with her back to us, it was expressive, and somehow an essential part of the story
she was embodying.
The set included some songs that weren’t featured at the
ClubTEN performance, and ran the emotional gamut with exhilarating aplomb, from
the distilled, aching tenderness of Judy Collins’s “My Father” to the joyful
liberation of “Feeling Good.” Soul-replenishing womanly wisdom was dispensed on
a stunningly beautiful “Angel of the Morning”; tension was ratcheted on a
“Ballad of Hollis Brown” that closed with Jungr’s trance-like repetition of the
lyric “Seven new people born”; and a cathartic “To Love Somebody” inspired the
most enthusiastic audience singalong that I’ve heard it generate yet.(Go, Richmond!)
Overall the tone was fiercer than at ClubTEN,
though, highlighting the incendiary, political side of Simone’s artistry. This
was nowhere more apparent than on a visceral segue from “One Morning in May” to
“The Pusher”, Jungr charging the latter song with references to current events
(from the refugee crisis to the US election) in an ad libbed section that
reminded us that “pushers come in every size.” It was a total joy to see this
brave and brilliant artist in this special space.
The Orange Tree’s distinctive space was also much reflected
upon in the following night’s show, Tim
Crouch’s I, Malvolio. Already highly lauded, Crouch’s solo show
presents the story of Twelfth Night from the perspective of
the “mightily abused” steward, spinning from his narrative a dazzling, very
funny and sometimes moving reflection on audience ethics, actor/character
relations, and theatre itself.
Crouch’s Malvolio is already present as we enter the auditorium:
centre-stage in tatty long johns and yellow stockings, eyeing us and muttering
his displeasure. Malvolio’s parting shot “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of
you!” is one of the show’s refrains; another – closely related to the first – is
“Find that funny, do you?” Before the evening’s out, Crouch has at once
unfolded and embodied Malvolio’s sorry tale: that of a Puritan with a firm belief
in order and a hatred of waste and excess, sacrificed on the anarchic
improbabilities of Shakepeare’s plot for the audience;s delectation. Like Bob Barrett at the end of Propeller’s great Twelfth Night, whose "pack of you" line was directed straight at the audience, Crouch implicates spectators at every stage, challenging us to rethink our responses to the character's humiliation as he picks out a boy from the
audience to kick him (“You liked that didn’t you? There hasn’t
been a good kicking in Richmond since 1780”), and generating both dark comedy and dramatic tension via the
possibility of the character's suicide (for which two more audience members were roped in
to participate).
It's a tricky tone to get right but Crouch manages with panache, generating big laughs alongside moments of real poignancy. His ad-libs and riffing around the text meant that the performance
ran about 40 minutes longer than the advertised one hour show time.But it’s safe to say that no-one was complaining, so
involving and appealing did the actor make this show in which critique of the
theatre is intimately bound up in celebration of it.
Audience interaction turned out to be equally central to
Giles Terera, Simon Lipkin and Jon Robyns’s
show last night - as the woman who was pulled from the front row to take
part in a manic Mel Brooks medley probably won’t forget in a hurry. Reuniting
three of the stars of the original London production of Avenue Q, the evening, overseen by excellent pianist and MD Alex
Williams, had the joyous feel of a
reunion of three colleagues whose rapport and affection has clearly not
dimmed a jot in the intervening ten years.
Although there were a few lower-keyed
moments throughout the night, including Terera’s fine solo on “Mr. Bojangles”
and he and Robyns duetting on an acoustic guitar-led mash-up of John Legend’s “All
of Me” and Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me,” the emphasis was placed on glorious silliness,
banter and fun for the most part. The tone was set from the opening number, “Not in the Show”,
a hilarious reflection on jobs that the trio didn’t get set to the tune of “Into
the Woods”.
Standouts, in between silly sketches and Jewish jokes, included
Lipkin’s amazing mash-up of a sequence of pop songs based around similar
chords; Robyns taking to the piano for an impassioned rendition of “The Music
of My Soul” (from Memphis); Terera’s sublime and scarily
accurate parody of Judi Dench singing “Send in the Clowns”; and he and Lipkin
getting retro on a delightful “Me and My Shadow”. Best of all, though, was the Avenue
Q material and the appearances of Princeton, Nicky and Rod (plus
surprise FaceTime with Christmas Eve!), and it’s “For Now” that I find myself singing
the morning after this thoroughly enjoyable night.
This set of Orange Tree Extras concludes today with
appearances by Wendy Cope and Dickie Beau. Further information here.
