Coffee-Table Notes

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars By rights, the late Cilla Black should have gained national treasure status as one of the greatest of 1960s Brit-girl singers rather than the light entertainment queen she became. This new musical by Jeff Pope goes some way to redress the balance, just as the TV mini series his stage play is based upon did before it. Pope focuses on Black's hectic early years that saw big-voiced Scouse teeny-bopper Cilla White move from floor-spots at legendary Liverpool nitespot the Cavern to recording at Abbey Road and playing the London Palladium. Out of this comes a classic showbiz success story that highlights Black's power and credibility as a singer. This is made clear to stunning effect at the end of the first act, when an astonishing Kara Lily Hayworth captures the full overwrought glory of Anyone Who Had A Heart, Black's first number one, and arguably the best recorded version of the Bacharach and David ballad by a country mile. Much of

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three stars If you can remember the 1960s, so cliched legend has it, then you weren't really there. Such superior-minded myth-making comes to mind watching Alan Ayckbourn's early hit, a suburban pot-pourri of sex and the tired thrill of everyday betrayal. This comes through the confused fall-out of three dead marriages as the so-called permissive society trickles down the class scale. Alan Strachan's touring revival of his West End production opens amidst the domestic chaos of upper crust Frank and Fiona Foster and the aspirationally with-it Bob and Teresa Phillips. Fiona and Bob have just had a late-night liaison, and must cover their tracks lest permanently befuddled Frank and new mum Teresa find out. As their alibi they co-opt unsuspecting William and Mary Featherstone, who end up having dinner with each couple on consecutive nights. Ayckbourn's ingenious conceit is to have the action in both houses played simultaneously, so the Featherst

Boff Whalley was still playing with Chumbawamba when the idea of forming a community choir first started to take root. By this time, the Leeds-based anarcho-punk iconoclasts formed in 1982 out of a northern English squatting scene had subverted the pop charts with their anthemic breakout hit Tubthumping. More recently, they had scaled back operations to perform as a largely acoustic ensemble. This highlighted the band's folk origins which had always been lurking behind the punk thrash through the vocal interplay between Whalley, Lou Watts and Jude Abbot. “ Even when we were still playing as an electric band, we'd do vocal harmonies backstage before we went on,” says Whalley, “just as a reminder that you've got to listen to everybody, and that there's no hierarchy.” Once Chumbawamba ended in 2012, Whalley went on to work as a writer with veteran leftist theatre company Red Ladder. He also ended up working with a scratch choir. This opened Whalley's ears to the

The weather can turn in a minute on Mull. This is something Sandy Thomson is discovering as she rehearses Damned Rebel Bitches, her new play presented by her own North East of Scotland based Poorboy company in co- production with Mull Theatre, where it opens this weekend before embarking on a short tour of seven venues in Scotland. It seems appropriate, then, that meteorological extremes were one of the driving forces behind the play. The fact that Hurricane Sandy, the second costliest storm in American history that blew through Manhattan in 2012 shares a name with Thomson may be coincidental, but, like the elemental unrest that goes before her, Thomson is a force of nature. This was the case in Monstrous Bodies, Poorboy's most recent show, which melded the lives of a teenage Mary Shelley, who would go on to write Frankenstein, and a twenty-first century schoolgirl facing up to her own demons. This time out, Damned Rebel Bitches sees Thomson jump to the opposite end of the a

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars When a lightbulb bursts during the opening massed rendition of Mack the Knife in this spirited production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's 1928 anti capitalist musical, it follows a similar incident last weekend on the opening night of The Steamie. If this initially feels like lightning striking twice, Susan Worsfold's production for the Festival and King's Theatre initiated Attic Collective is far smarter than that. As it runs with what morphs into Poor Theatre to the max, emergency lights and hand-held spotlights are utilised for all to see. The latter is crucial in a show that leaves nothing hidden in its re-energising of Brecht's disruptive roots. On an otherwise bare stage, a band plays while members of the show's eighteen-strong ensemble pedal away at exercise bikes, presumably powering the show, but getting nowhere fast. While captions and slides are projected, dashing anti-establishment rake Macheath runs r

Last week, the man who in October 2016 closed down one of Scotland's most internationally renowned visual art institutions without notice or any apparent public consultation, claimed that initial reports that it was no longer going to have any artistic function had been a rumour. Simon Milne, Regius Keeper of the publicly owned Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh where Inverleith House gallery is situated, appeared to be attempting to rewrite history. Milne's contention that it was "never the case" that Inverleith House would cease to show art appears to contradict RBGE's own statement published last October which, while making clear that artistic activity would continue in the Garden itself, states: '... Inverleith House will no longer be dedicated to the display of contemporary art, and RBGE is looking at options for the alternative use of the building.' Since the closure, a public outcry provoked a 10,000-plus petition and an open letter from major artistic

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars All the pink ladies, single or otherwise, are in the house for the touring revival of Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey's lovingly irreverent homage to the seemingly more innocent 1950s that went on to be the world's biggest musical and a smash movie too. With a fistful of hit songs and a pastel coloured cartoon style staging, David Gilmore's revisitation of his 1993 London production is a dazzling depiction of teenage dreams, where even the bad girls and boys are good. Despite this, it zones in on the heartbreak as much as the highs of the term time romance between tough guy Danny, nice girl Sandy and the gang. With The Wanted's Tom Parker donning Danny's leather jacket with a knowing swagger, Over the Rainbow winner Danielle Hope's Sandy isn't quite so sickly sweet as sometimes played, and ex East Ender Louisa Lytton's Rizzo is a beatnik in waiting. Set pieces are writ large, from the souped-up thrust of Greased