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The greatest show and other bromances: Adam Riches and John Kearns ARE Ball and Boe @sohotheatre

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Alfie Boe and Michael Ball seem to be a bit of a joke act anyway. Their endless interpretations of popular songs (also known as covers) and their double-act bromance make them quintessential crossover artists where popular music meets opera and Broadway. And a perilous choice for the discerning listener. It’s not that they aren’t talented musicians and performers in their own right. Still, their musical choices are always safe, predictable and less than their potential. But every country deserves to have a pair of self-described national treasures that can tour the local arenas and give people a good time for the bargain price of £175 a seat.  And so the concept of Adam Riches and John Kearns - two world-famous from the Edinburgh Fringe comedians taking on this bromance seems like a curious choice for a Christmas musical fare. One can only hope that over the fourteen nights, it is playing at the Soho Theatre that the show evolves into something more substantial than a series of po...

Theatre: Dying For It


Liz White and Tom Brooke in Dying For It

In a week of playing theatre catch-up, Friday night I managed to catch Dying For It which is based upon Nikolai Erdman’s once-banned satirical comedy The Suicide. It is a sort of silly story about a man who is propelled into celebrity for announcing he was going to kill himself and pokes fun of all sorts of people in society - particularly post-revolutionary Russian society but I was wondering whether there are any analogies for Islington society as well... I thought there were a number of similarities - artists, the intelligentsia, officials, ideologues, pragmatists, sex workers, unemployed - you get 'em all there...

It is always fun to watch a silly play with a silly person. And that I did by seeing it with An. An loves farces and I think I have seen more farces with him than anybody else and so we were able to laugh out loud at double entendres about socialistic uprisings and sex and the like. Actually we do that anyway (the double entendres not the socialism) so going to a play full of it was as good an excuse as any.

All told the play was great with some very witty lines. The cast were all excellent and particularly Brooke (as Semyon) who played dead so wonderfully well. The set also was also the usual fabulous Almeida standard and added to the lunacy. And you can't have a farce without some door slamming and running up and down stairs so the set worked very well for that...

Oh and there was a great scene about learning to play a tuba. After much struggle (as they are not cheap and he is unemployed) Semyon finally gets a tuba, only to discover that he also needs a piano to help with learning musical scales. Chatting after the play to a flautist he also mentioned that he recently bought a piano to help with his scales. And there I was thinking that was funny. Those woodwind and brass players must have a hell of a time...

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