Skip to main content

Thank You Very Much


Ukrainian Cultural Centre, Manchester
Five stars

When a hip-swivelling, pelvis-thrusting, heart-breaking Elvis Presley entered the building, the recording studio and the conscience of every teenage rebel in the world to become the bone fide king of rock and roll, its seismic effect spanned several generations. As choreographer, director and performer Claire Cunningham shows in her astonishing new creation, it’s easy to be all shook up by Elvis’ youthful pre-Vegas image on TV, even when you might be trapped in your own sense of quietly rebellious self.

This becomes the starting point for the ninety poignantly transcendent minutes of Cunningham’s co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland and Manchester International Festival, where it premieres this week prior to autumn dates in Glasgow. Throughout, Cunningham and her three cohorts explore what it means to take a leap, strike a pose and learn to love the spotlight for who they are, even as the image they project might be that of someone very different.

Such everyday life lessons are gleaned from a bunch of Elvis tribute acts who help make for a kind of auto-biographical cabaret that brings together four disabled artists to strut their stuff in a way that leaves them both exposed and empowered. As Cunningham, Daniel Daw, Tanja Erhart and Vicky Malin take it in turns to step into the harsh glare of a social club function room, there are moments they could be any showbiz wannabes going through their paces. Set against sound designer Matthias Herrmann’s remarkable deconstructed funereal electronic reimaginings of Elvis originals, it becomes a transformative meditation on how standing out from the crowd isn’t always easy.

In a show that sees the cast embrace their imperfections just as their jump-suited mentors might add their own personal tics to their performance, let’s hear it too for the tribute acts themselves. The disembodied recorded voices of Leigh, Des, Darren, Janny and Colbert are heard giving encouragement to their new charges with the philosophical zeal of Olympic trainers. When Cunningham’s final number unites everyone to make the performance possible, she is totally herself in a life-affirming display of community spirit that would make Elvis quiver with pride.

The Herald, July 18th 2019

ends




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
Post a Comment
Read more

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug
2 comments
Read more