Coffee-Table Notes

When Motown Records supremo Berry Gordy met theatre director Charles Randolph-Wright with a view to putting Gordy’s life story onstage, the man who took American black music into the mainstream pointed out that his potential new charge had never done a big Broadway musical. Randolph-Wright responded by saying that neither had Gordy.  Thus the deal was sealed on what would become Motown The Musical, the Tony-nominated Broadway and West End hit drawn from Gordy’s 1994 autobiography, To Be Loved: The Music, the Magic, the Memories of Motown. Like his book, the Gordy-scripted show tells the story of how a young kid from Detroit founded a world-changing record label that turned Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and Smokey Robinson into stars alongside the likes of Stevie Wonder, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and The Jackson 5.  “That was one of the things that connected us,” says Randolph-Wright of the man he still calls Mr Gordy, as the UK tour of Motown The Musical arrives in Edinburgh for

The Georgian House, Edinburgh Four stars Things are getting strange inside number 7 Charlotte Square, the Edinburgh New Town des-res now under the care of the National Trust for Scotland as The Georgian House and marketed as a tourist attraction. The ghosts of philosophers past are gathering within such hallowed halls in Ben Harrison’s hour-long entertainment, which leads an audience of up to 30 from room to room. Harrison’s production serves up a taste of life when Edinburgh’s city fathers had something resembling vision and imagination which Edinburgh’s current misadventures in property developer friendly town planning are sorely lacking. Greeted on the ornate stairwell by Mark Kydd’s portrayal of the building’s architect Robert Adam, Adam takes poetic pride in the elevated creation he never lived to see. In the dining room, David Hume and Adam Smith are arguing the toss about the meat on their respective plates before they become aware of those watching them. The pair pop up ag

Catherine Makin never went to a youth theatre when she was growing up. As curator of Chrysalis, a three-day festival of work by young theatre companies that opens today at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, she is more than making up for that now. Makin has been projects co-ordinator of Youth Theatre Arts Scotland since 2017, and is overseeing the fourth edition of Chrysalis, which follows the differently styled summer’s National Festival of Youth Theatre. Where NFYT is a mass gathering of youth theatre clans, Chrysalis is a more public-facing platform of ambitious new work that plays with form and ideas in a professional theatre environment. “Chrysalis is a festival of new work that’s been made over the last two years by young companies between the ages of about 14 to 25,” Makin explains. “It’s a bit different in form and content than what people might expect youth theatre to be. It’s maybe a bit more ambitious, and has to be of a really high quality, and to have stuff coming in