Coffee-Table Notes

It’s pretty obvious that Stephen Schwartz would never have created Wicked without The Wizard of Oz. The influence of British playwright Tom Stoppard may not be quite so apparent on the veteran American composer’s smash hit musical prequel to L. Frank Baum’s classic tale of life beyond the yellow brick road made immortal by the 1939 film, but it’s there alright.   “Ever since I saw a production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, I’ve just loved that idea of taking a familiar story with well-known characters and looking at it from a different point of view,” says Schwartz on the eve of Wicked’s arrival in Edinburgh for a month-long run as part of the show’s latest UK tour. “It’s a way of addressing philosophies and ideas in an interesting way, and seeing if it survives the transition. I’ve always been enamoured by that technique.”   The idea for Wicked the Musical was born after Schwartz picked up a copy of Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the W

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Home is a dust-laden fortress for the ageless couple at the heart of Martin McCormick’s new play, a tragi-comic leap down the rabbit hole of what passes for domestic bliss in a place where time seems to have stopped in a pre-mobile phone age. With their windows curtained off to the outside world and the piled-up debris of a life alone together piled up around them like the contents of a bombed-out junkyard, Ma and Pa’s world is enlivened only by a mess of egg custards and a fridge full of tinnies. That and an unspecified and possibly unreliable set of memories that hint at a past gone mad only brought out into the open by the appearance from the bathroom of seemingly normal female stranger, Neil. What follows is a riot of survival strategies dressed up as old school social club cabaret. McCormick’s most ambitious play to date is rich in chewy non-sequiters that make for a set of wild and ear-poppingly baffling one-liners that almost sing in

In 1990, The Proclaimers released a four-track EP, the lead track of which was a cover of King of the Road, Roger Miller’s countrified blue-collar paean to life as a permanent road trip, cheap, easy and positively revelling in its commitment-free existence. Released by Miller in 1964, the song’s crossover smash hit status chimed with the new freedoms that the decade was starting to open up. As such freedoms trickled down the class scale, the song’s breezy optimism was the perfect soundtrack to male middle-aged spread turned to a collective mid-life crisis which suggested that, for ‘a man of means by no means’, as Miller would have it, nothing was impossible. In its own home-boy way, the sentiments of Miller’s song chimed with the burgeoning would-be revolution that had been building, and which would bear various fruit over the next few years. This saw 1967’s so-called Summer of Love explode into the seismic events of the following year, when pop, protest and proletarianism saw wor