Mikyla Hallford – Theatre Workshop Coulsdon

The Producers

The Producers was Mel Brooks’ first ever movie back in 1968. Starring Zero Mostel as Max and Gene Wilder as Leo, it became both a cult and a commercial success, and Brooks even picked up an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. An improbable hit as a movie, it was an even less likely one as a Broadway musical, which Brooks did in 2001. A byword for tongue-in-cheek bad taste, it became the most successful Broadway show of all time, winning a record breaking 12 Tony awards and running for more than 2,500 performances over six years. And then art imitated art, as a movie of the musical based on a movie came out in 2005, starring Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick and Uma Thurman.

Born into a German Jewish family who fled the Nazis in the 1930’s, Mel Brooks was uniquely qualified to poke merciless fun at the Third Reich. Frankly, it’s impossible to believe that anyone without his background could have got away with it. Then again, the whole premise of a couple of Jewish con-men staging a sure-fire Broadway flop based on a camp musical about Adolf Hitler is so absurd, it would be difficult for anyone to take genuine offence. Besides, Brooks has many targets for his satire in The Producers – not least the whole shallow pretentious ‘bubble’ of Broadway itself. (Which is rather ironic, as it turns out, given the huge success of the show.)

The Producers is an extraordinary musical. Set in New York in 1959, the one-time ‘King of Broadway’, Max Bialystock, sees his latest show ‘Funny Boy’ close after just one night. Down and out, dependent on playing the aging lothario to wealthy but very elderly spinsters and widows, Max is thrown a lifeline back to success and the high life in the unlikely form of timorous accountant, Leo Bloom. Bloom discovers that a flop show can make more money than a hit, and so the two set out to lie, cheat and schmooze their way to a million bucks by staging a sure-fire Broadway flop – the worst taste musical ever written: ‘Springtime For Hitler’. The rest is showbiz history. Bursting with laugh-out-loud jokes and outrageously funny musical numbers, The Producers is pure, unadulterated joy.

Now it’s fair to say that Theatre Workshop Coulsdon are not, first and foremost, a musical group. But we do like projects that are a bit unexpected. So we’ve rescued ‘The Producers’ from the cold dead clutches of of the light-operatic am-dram circuit, and given it the down-and-dirty TWC makeover it deserves. We aren’t dancers, we aren’t singers. We don’t have the required 37-piece orchestra. But we do have a bunch of talented musicians and chutzpah to spare, and what could be more in keeping with the spirit of Mel Brooks than that? We hope you enjoy the show!

Twelfth Night – The Panto

We’re sticking to a Shakespearean theme for Christmas, with another original TWC panto, this time based (very loosely) on “Twelfth Night”, but with added slapstick, men dressed as women (dressed as men), “oh no it isn’t”, and “oh yes it is”. It’s a riotously funny pantomime full of unexpected twists and turns. Forget Illyria – a freak storm blows a day-trip to Boulogne way off course. Six months later it’s shipwrecked on the coast of Australia. Auntie Podees and her niece, Sheila, have to find work disguised as men to earn their passage back to Coulsdon. Meanwhile, Lord Sydney Opera-House unsuccessfully pursues the love of his life, Lady Alice-Springs (most beautiful lady in the world – and incidentally, the wealthiest). Can Sheila help? Will the principal boys win the hearts of the principal girls? Will the barbie be a success? Are there any gags about Aussies we haven’t plundered and mercilessly exploited? And will the three witches be too evil to be allowed onstage and exiled forever to make tea and serve mince pies? To find the answers to these and many other mosquitoes (sorry, misquotes) don’t miss Coulsdon’s bonza pantomime, a show so big, it needs two dames…

Deaf on the Nile

Look out! He’s… Behind You! (Oh no he isn’t!)

Take a priceless diamond necklace, a luxury Christmas cruise down the Nile, a collection of very suspicious characters and add… a pantomime dame?

Theatre Workshop Coulsdon present a pantomime with a difference!

Comedy is guaranteed as the mystery unfolds. Can you unmask the villain before the familiar-looking Belgian detective, Hercules Toilet, does? Or will you be too busy laughing?

Is it Shelby and Lara Smythe-Rotter, the elegant Riviera thieves?

Lady Pokingham-Proditt, whose last five husbands have all met untimely ends?

Hesketh and Petunia, the runaway lovers with a dark secret?

The seedy Reverend Pinchme and his secretary Miss Chaste, on the run from blackmailers?

All will be revealed!

A festive show of songs, slapstick and skull-duggery! Not to mention a show-stopping turn from Mrs Eliza Wallop, our dame with a difference, as ‘she’ powers out a truly operatic rendition of ‘Nessun Dorma’!

Dracula

A bloody, poetic and sexually-charged interpretation of the world’s most infamous horror story!

Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ wasn’t the first Gothic Horror tale (that honour falls to Horace Walpole’s ‘The Castle of Otranto’ published over a century before) but it is, arguably, the most famous exponent of the genre, though it has stiff competition in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, R L Stevenson’s ‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde’ and Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. However, none have quite the strange sexual allure that the Transylvanian aristocrat has, even to this day. This creature, for human he most certainly isn’t, should be repulsive, but yet the opposite is true. The vampire has taken on an eerie glamour, coupled with a sense of tragedy. Hence the success of Anne Rice’s ‘Vampire Lestat’ books and the ‘Twilight’ series by Stephanie Meyer.

Of course, folkloric vampires predate Dracula by centuries, with demons showing what we would consider to be vampiric ways and practices noted by the Romans, Mesopotamians and the Ancient Greeks. But these creatures were ruddy, or purplish in colour, and bloated from the drinking of blood, a far cry from the slim, pale skinned figures we associate with the term now. And frankly a lot less sexy.

Liz Lochead is a Scottish playwright and poet who adapted ‘Dracula’ for the stage in 1985. She made a number of changes to the tale, but then reducing a novel of several hundred pages down to a workable two act play was always going to require that. Lucy Westernra and Mina Murray became sisters sharing the surname Westerman. Arthur Holmwood, also known as Lord Godalming, and American Quincey Morris, two of Lucy Westernra’s suitors, are excised from the script while Renfield’s part is expanded on. In come new characters, such as Nurses Grice and Nisbett, as well as Orderly Drinkwater, at Dr Seward’s asylum, and to add a working class voice to the narrative, Florrie Hathersage, the Westerman’s maid. Across the whole script, the language has been updated to provide a level of humour and innuendo, while focusing on female sexuality and madness.

Do the changes work? Certainly Renfield’s character, and the story, benefits from the extra time spent with him. He’s more articulate, even sympathetic. A victim who can see his own doom coming. Mina though is something less in this version. Pared back, she’s no longer the architect of Dracula’s downfall, nor is Lucy any the stronger for having been reshaped for the late 20th Century. Dracula remains however, untouched, his presence throughout underlined by over a century of cultural familiarity.