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One hundred people’s ninth favourite thing: [title of show] @swkplay

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[title of show] takes you back to a time before the fast paced social media where word of mouth for a positive show came from chat boards, video diaries or (god forbid) blogs. A simple staging makes it an ideal (and economical piece to stage), but it’s sweet and earnest take on just putting on a show, and putting it out there and taking a chance gives this show its heart. With a strong and energetic cast and endless musical theatre references, it’s hard to resist and it’s currently playing at the Southwark Playhouse .  It opens with Hunter (Jacob Fowler) and Jeff (Thomas Oxley) as struggling young writers in New York City. An upcoming New York Musical Theatre festival, inspires them to write an original musical within three weeks to make the deadline. As they discuss ideas, writers block, distractions and endless other good and bad musicals, an idea for a show emerges. Which is about writing a show for a musical theatre festival.  Their friends Heidi (Abbie Budden) and Susan (Mary Moor

Film: A Scanner Darkly

I caught the movie A Scanner Darkly on Wednesday evening. Based on Phillip K Dick's novel and set seven years in the future in California where the war on terror and the war on drugs seem to have merged as the same threat. The film was a trippy sort of story full of paranoia and hallucinations. It was probably deliberate that it all didn't make sense until the last half hour or so.

It was also a film that was shot normally and then animated using a process called interpolated rotoscoping which added to the dreamlike feel to it… In the end I kind of liked it as it was like a graphic novel. The only problem I really had with it was that it was a bit hard to take a movie about drugs featuring Robert Downey Jr and Winnona Ryder… It felt like watching a sensitive documentary on the holocaust narrated by Mel Gibson or Tom Cruise doing a community awareness spot on depression: just all wrong and a distraction.

The author acknowledges at the end of the film all the people who have done drugs over the years that he has know that are either dead or with liver failure, mental illness, bowels that don't function or some other problem… A nice message to send the audience out of the theatre with…  

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Play ball: Damn Yankees @LandorTheatre

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