Coffee-Table Notes

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Three stars The all-male chorus line that opens this touring revival of the musical that arguably took drag culture into the mainstream look like a troupe of high-kicking angels as they sashay in formation down the glitzy looking steps of the French night-club that gives composer Jerry Herman and writer Harvey Fierstein's creation its title. Drawn from a 1973 play by Jean Poiret and adapted for the screen five years later, Herman and Fierstein's musical take on Poiret's story hit the big time just as AIDS was making its deadly presence felt. Something of a sleeper hit because of that, Herman and Fierstein's tale about club-owning Georges and star diva Albin, a long-term gay couple who are forced to jump through social hoops to appear 'normal' to their son's prospective in-laws is both a high-camp farce and accidental show of strength. This loose-knit plot is also the best excuse to gift the world one of the great gay anthems

The spirit of nightclubs past, present and future hangs joyously over these two releases by different permutations of a Glasgow underground supergroup steeped in the city's DIY art/music interface. Both are limited edition 12” vinyl releases packaged in sleeves that resemble old-school DJ-friendly platters as flash as they are cheesy. Both too are as myth-makingly conceptual as you can get. The first finds electronicist and Turner Prize-nominated artist Luke Fowler, Franz Ferdinand drummer Paul Thomson and vocalist/composer Richard Youngs joining forces for six slices of insular techno. These pieces are seemingly inspired by allegedly long-lost Italian synthesiser factory worker turned composer/performer, Emmanuel Maggi. The second finds the trio augmenting the line-up with bassist Michael Francis Duch as they morph into AMOR to produce a more organic stew of post-punk avant-disco that could have been excavated from circa 1979 Ladbroke Grove. Key to both records is Richard Young

When Syd Shelton arrived back in London in 1976 after four years working as a photo-journalist in Australia, it was to a city and a country in the thick of change. Margaret Thatcher's regime as UK Prime Minister may have been three years away, but the seeds of her ascension were already being sewn. Mass unemployment was biting away at working class society, and a rising right wing populism had demonised ethnic communities ever since Tory MP Enoch Powell had made his notorious anti immigration 'rivers of blood' speech in 1968. A disaffected youth was already starting to stir with a rising punk culture which was casting aside the old guard of bloated rock stars with a year zero approach that craved something faster, louder and more abrasive. Battle lines were drawn when a drunken Eric Clapton ranted his support for Powell to an audience in multi-racial Birmingham during August 1976. Clapton's guitar playing had been inspired by the blues greats, and he had scored a cha

If Susan Wooldridge hadn't have grown up in an artistic household, she may not have gone on to become a distinguished star of stage and screen in era-defining TV drama The Jewel in the Crown, for which she was nominated for a BAFTA. This was an award Wooldridge went on to win as Best Supporting Actress in John Boorman's film, Hope and Glory. Wooldridge's parents were actress Margaretta Scott and composer John Wooldridge, who exposed her and her brother Hugh, now a theatre director, to a world of culture that saw many bohemian types around. All of which sounds like the perfect grounding for playing Judith Bliss in the Citizens Theatre's forthcoming production of Noel Coward's play, Hay Fever. Written in 1924 and first produced a year later, Coward's play is set over one lively weekend in the bohemian Bliss family's country house, where they hold increasingly crazed court to assorted guests from a less hysterically inclined world. Together, they become witne

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It begins with a celebration, Mariem Omari's verbatim unveiling of honour-based domestic violence among the Muslim community. As Indian snacks are handed out by the cast of Omari's play in the theatre foyer before the show while percussionist Gurjit Sidhu beats out a triumphal rhythm on a dhol, it stresses just how vital to Muslim culture a wedding ceremony is in terms of expressing a sense of unity. Reality beyond the big day, alas, doesn't always work out as well, as women's real-life litanies of brutality are cut-up between four actresses. Together they tell of arranged marriages and extravagant dowrys being foisted upon them while still children, of beatings, rape and the eternal fear of family shame. Voice is given too to the male perpetrators of violence, who, through actor Manjot Sumal, talk of pressure, stress and other outside forces claimed to justify their actions. Produced by Amina – Muslim Women's Resour

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Three stars Red, white and blue are all over the place in Drew Taylor's contribution to the Glasgow-wide Take Me Somewhere performance festival. It's there on the carpet made up of Union Jack and Stars and Stripes flags, if not on the line-up of show-room dummies who sport Hitler-style moustaches and little else at the back of the Citizens Theatre's Circle Studio. It's definitely there in the co-ordinated retro apparel worn by the show's performers, Isobel McArthur and David Rankine, as they welcome the audience into Taylor's loose-knit political cabaret. Don't be fooled by the title's self-help styled implications. As the winner of the Somewhere New strand of Take Me Somewhere, which solicited reinventions of classic works in ways which playwright David Hare probably wouldn't approve of, Taylor's piece looks to Brecht for inspiration. Under Taylor's direction, the pair attempt to tackle the state of various

Last Friday night, Neu! Reekie! hosted an event at Summerhall in Edinburgh called Neu! Reekie! say Where Are We Now? For those who maybe aren't aware, Neu! Reekie! is a night run by poet Michael Pedersen and founder of 1990s lit-zine Rebel Inc , Kevin Williamson. For the last five or six years, this dynamic cross-generational duo has presented a series of increasingly ambitious events which have mixed and matched bills of spoken-word, music and experimental, mainly animated short films. Neu! Reekie! initially put on shows to audiences of a couple of hundred or so, first at the Scottish Book Trust, then later dove-tailing between Summerhall and Pilrig Church. As success begat success, the events grew bigger and the performers included more high-profile names, including two makars. Somewhere along the way, Neu! Reekie received funding from Creative Scotland. By that time, Neu! Reekie! had become a thing. There were Burns Nights and a road show around Scotland that involved a l