The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars America is hell in the late Jim Steinman’s rock and roll love story, reimagined in 2017 from his multi million selling albums for Meat Loaf as a long overdue jukebox musical. Steinman sets out his store in what used to be Manhattan but is now a dystopian dump, with youthful dissent beaten into the underground tunnels that line the city. Brought to life by director Jay Scheib, Steinman’s epic draws from Peter Pan, Romeo and Juliet and the sort of 1980s teen flicks where the good guys wear black leather jackets to make a suitably bombastic morality tale writ very large indeed. It opens with Love and Death and An American Guitar from Steinman’s own 1981 album, Bad for Good. As delivered by Katie Tonkinson’s goth rebel Raven, Steinman’s spoken word monologue about attempted patricide by guitar is possessed by a low-key menace worthy of a routine by New York’s original No Wave bad girl, Lydia Lunch. Raven is at war with her wealt...
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars If the history books are written by the victors, no-one told the Mary of Rona Johnston’s whistle-stop ride through the life and times of Scotland’s short lived but much dramatised monarch. Here, Mary, Queen of Scots is a folk punk diva reclaiming her story to tell it in her own defiant image over a fifty-minute riot of spoken word monologue and song. As Mary, Johnston is ably abetted by her guitar, drum and fiddle wielding girl gang sisterhood watching her back at every turn as they join in the action. It begins and ends with blood, as the six-strong ensemble wield their instruments like weapons in Katie Slater’s perfectly poised production for the young Knot Tied Theatre Company. As Johnston takes the microphone on designer Phoebe Wiseman’s regally carpeted stage, Mary’s short life of incident and colour is packed into a fistful of songs that move between rousing hoolies and tender ballads. These are delivered with vocal ...