Come The Day

Saturday 29.3.14 : Same Sex Marriage Equality in the UK.



It's a lovely, bright slightly misty morning on the river and a moment to reflect on today's big gigs to celebrate Equal Marriage first at the Royal Festival Hall thence to a Channel 4 recording for broadcast Monday night. Too late for me? Possibly. Although I've as good as been-there-done-that with 12-year and 8-year relationships. If we'd had equal marriage in 1979 or 1992 when I met them, we'd have done it. Of course, by now one would be under the patio and I'd have driven the other into a mental institution … marriage is not for everyone. But if it's for you, be happy, be proud and be thankful for the generation who brought about the changes that made it happen today.

We gathered on the South Bank before 9am and rehearsed outside in the sunshine to the amusement of passers-by hanging off the balustrades.  We have a new choreographer this season, who was due to coach us in the more intricate movement, but he didn't make it.  It didn't matter because we were so collectively enthusiastic and eager to get it right.

Which we did.  This was not just one of the best-attended performances I've done in recent years, but also one where both singing and movement were accurate and, apart from one chap in the front row persistently wriggling and overselling it like a cheap stripper, together.

Post by Nathan Newland.

I had expected to be entertained by any event involving Sandi Toksvig, but I had not expected to be so moved.  The ceremony involved readings and an exchange of renewed vows between Sandi and her long-time partner Debbie, but was largely conducted by their children, from 8-year-old Mary to medical student Megan and with a massive degree of un-cocky self-confidence and charm.  When their son Theo spoke of his early experience of explaining his two mums to school friends, you could touch the warmth and pride in the auditorium.  

I thought fondly of my ferociously capable Manchester friend Helen Lawson who with her partner Sarah adopted two children who had not had such happy childhoods but who now have blossomed and grown into loving and trusting kids through the stability and support given by two intelligent and balanced parents. This weekend is also Mothers Day and the card they received from their son affirming they are the best mums in the 'intiya' world would make even the most rigorous spelling Nazi celebrate the triumph of enthusiasm over orthography. 

Lots of great and good in the audience, too.  Peter Tatchell, with whom I once skipped hand-in-hand down Oxford Street at Gay Pride in 1978 and doubt whether either of us anticipated this day would arrive, and Mary Portas who had to spend most of the ceremony outside because her small daughter couldn't stay still.  Christopher Biggins with whom I've shared - well, let's just say a 'friend'. 

And then parts of my life flashed before me.  We had not been told much of running order or guest participants in the event but I had some tenuous connection to each of them.  The event was introduced by Jude Kelly, director of the South Bank complex.  Thirty-seven years ago (sorry, Jude, you don't look old enough) when we both lived in Southampton and used to dance together in its one gay club, the Magnum, Jude was a struggling actress just setting up Solent People's Theatre, I was the youngest elected member of the City Council and my arts committee gave her her first ever grant.  

The first reading in the ceremony was delivered by Sheila Hancock, a long-time friend of the Toksvigs.  In 2008 Sheila and I were thrown together in the same weekend 'singles' holiday in Budapest. I'd bought it as a last-minute special offer (discounted by £100 because 'an actress' would be on board) and she was covering it for the Daily Mail.  Sharing a dislike of over-organised group tours we struck out on our own one afternoon for the celebrated Gellert spa baths complex.  It isn't very foreign-tourist-friendly but without a guide or much grasp of conversational Magyar we managed to buy our entrance tickets and through sign language indicated we'd like a massage.  When ushered in to a severe white tile room in the deepest recesses of the building and with what looked like a large mortuary slab it took an extra and urgent session of signing to explain we didn't actually want a 'couples massage' but sequential ones.  

Rick Wakeman played the Festival Hall organ for a couple of numbers including the wedding march in 'Get Me To The Church On Time'.  It reminded me that I was a hastily-recruited backing singer on his 2004 'comeback' album 'The Wizard and the Forest of All Dreams' when his usual group English Chamber Choir were momentarily short of tenors (as I then was).  We recorded it over one weekend in a studio in Wembley while Rick was upstairs writing it, and we got the pages warm from the printer and sight-read them straight onto the recording.

I have history with Sandi, too.  She compered the LGMC's Christmas concert in the Barbican in 2006 and in one of the most precarious last-minute things I've ever done, she and I and my friend Daron Oram co-wrote a comedy song in English and Danish during the afternoon rehearsal and sang it with her the same evening.

Our gig was brought to a fantastic climax by the glorious soul diva Sharon D Clarke who led us in 'River Deep, Mountain High'.  Apart from the fact I'm a huge fan of her musical theatre work from her more-raucous-than-Whoopi Oda Mae in 'Ghost' to 'The Amen Corner', she's my dear friend Helen Smith's sister-in-law.

Nuns On The Run

In a week in which seventeen assorted British piss artists on a stag weekend were arraigned in Greece for impersonating nuns - albeit not convincingly enough for the prosecution to produce a single complainant witness at their trial - it seems appropriate to reflect on the position of the Sisterhood in popular entertainment, and why nuns are perceived as funny and cute.



Anyone who's seen or read The Magdalene Sisters - or, indeed, rewound and replayed the segment where Geraldine McEwan thrashes the bejaysus out of Dorothy Duffy with a rubber hose and a glint that should really have disqualified her from ever again playing sweet old ladies like Miss Marple - would consider institutionalised sadism, lesbianism, mental cruelty and downright cant to be core values in convents, but stage musicals resist the repressive and celebrate nuns as cuddly.

Fair enough, but I wouldn't want to bring one home.

Clearly this bunch trained at the Eternal Sunshine Seminary of St. Connie of All The Fishers since they have 'Sound of Music' written through them like rock - there's the dour one, the sour one, the chubby one, the feisty novice and the septuagenarian rapper. Well maybe Rodgers and Hammerstein didn't envision the rapper but in this production it's veteran Julia Sutton (whose age it would be indecent to guess but I bet it starts with an 8 before the show's run is finished) who steals every scene in which she appears.

Sister Act has a slow start as it struggles with the necessary plotline in which lounge singer Deloris van Cartier, girlfriend of a small-time hoodlum, witnesses a gangland murder and is forced to hide out in a convent until the perps can be brought to trial. That this segment is played out to a crude pop musical score which belongs more to X-Factor than Broadway is a frailty in the show that needs to be fixed. Patina Miller, although playing a substandard lounge singer, doesn't make you warm to her as automatically as Whoopi (National Treasure) Goldberg, and only gets the audience onside later in the show.



Patina, incidentally, is not the 'Broadway star' the production hype might have you believe. I don't think she's headlined any show indoors in New York although she did appear in 'Hair' in Central Park - and Sister Act itself has never been to Broadway, coming to the Palladium from, er, Pasadena via eight weeks in Atlanta and a two-year rewrite gap. Don't get me wrong, she's good, but she's also slightly misrepresented. Possibly to avoid too much Googling, she's dropped her middle name - search 'Patina Renea Miller' for her early career.

Once Deloris is pitched into the convent, enter Mother Superior Sheila Hancock and her penguin chorale and suddenly we have a musical. In her first speeches, the standard of acting is raised a thousandfold, the comedy is subtler, and she and Ms Miller begin the sparring double act around which the show then revolves. I have to confess I know Sheila, slightly: we shared a monumentally weird holiday in Budapest a couple of years ago and the episode in which we were involuntarily herded in to a 'couples' massage in the Gellert Baths would make a musical comedy number in its own right as we tried to explain our way out, in clutched towels and pidgin Hungarian.

Hancock's only solo - a 'tale as old as time' Beauty-and-the-Beast-retread entitled 'Here Within These Walls' is beautifully if gently delivered: she shares a graceful musical quality with Sian Phillips, belying her 76 years, although the show has been 'adjusted' since Atlanta to reduce the singing load for Mother Superior. Where she excels is in a redefined characterisation which resists comparison with Maggie Smith in the movie, and which is more wryly and directly funny. Although why she didn't attempt an American accent escapes me.

The score is at its best when the nuns are given full throttle: two stand-out numbers (all originals and different from the movie because of copyright issues) are 'Raise Your Voice' in which Deloris instructs the choir in singing and which ascends in power through more key changes than the average Eurovision vehicle, and 'Take Me To Heaven' first sung (badly) by Deloris and her backing singers then turned into a holy roller by the nuns. I also enjoyed the hoodlums' spoof Barry White crooner 'When I Find My Baby' (I'm gonna kill her) and in the Sisters' patter song 'How I Got The Call' lyricist Glenn Slater gives free rein to internal rhyme which looks hugely jolly but is unfortunately macerated by either the diction or the sound desk, couldn't tell which.

Diminutive Julia Sutton threatens to upstage even Hancock as the gravel-voiced hard-drinking Mary Lazarus, and Claire Greenway outweighs Kathy Najimy as the sunny funny nunny Mary Patrick. The minor characters are all fair to good, although I can't quite see why Ian Lavender merits an over-the-title billing for his small contribution as Monsignor Howard.

It's the female ensemble that deserves the kudos, though, for its stamina in switching scene by scene from playing the nuns to the whole panoply of other characters who populate the story, from biker gangs to disco queens. It's a bit like the hardworking crew of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, but with better songs and - you won't believe this - more glittery costumes.

The set (by ex-Czech Klara Zieglerova) works very hard too: double revolve, lots of rising and falling elements, and it makes the scene transitions mercifully slick ... ingeniously so in the 'chase' when the hoodlums get in to the convent to find Deloris, there's a series of doors and arches moving on the revolve whilst the entire cast breaks in to a run through them which must have taken designer and choreographer ages to work out, but v. effective.

Jesus's nailed crossed feet appear from above periodically which is as camp as the giant in Into the Woods ... but even the luminous stained glass windows pale into insignificance against the nun's costumes which are so progressively flashy - by the finale they're so reflective you almost can't look - that designer Lez Brotherston must have finished them in a welder's mask.

The West End is well-supplied with big musicals, tickets are £60something, and with 20,000 a week to sell the Palladium's hard to fill. But for naturally uplifting musical comedy which is reliant on talent rather than the weight of costumes and effects in Priscilla - currently playing to every gay man and his mother in the Western World - I'd calculate Sister Act is a hit.

Get thee to a nunnery. To a nunnery, go.

Especially if you can get discounted tickets.