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daibhidcSaw this new stage show (soon to be touring Scotland) at Eden Court yesterday. And it wasn't quite "chust sublime", but it was pretty good.
I hadn't realised it was a musical. Mum wasn't terribly impressed by the songs, but I thought they were okay. There were original songs, a few contemporary numbers from the 1910s, a rather pretty Gaelic song which, from context, I assume was about selkies, and for the finale "Para's Wedding" to the tune of "Mairi's Wedding".
(The funniest song: Hurricane Jack gets his own theme tune, which cuts in every time he has to give his name at the lawyer's office. At the end of the sequence, the lawyer himself asks his name, and after a silent beat, Jack looks behind him to check the band is still there.)
There was an odd opening sequence with all the actors playing council workers at a recycling centre. One of them gets taunted by the others for having his nose in a book, and turns out to be reading Tales of Para Handy, leading into the play proper. Not sure that added anything, although the way the cardboard crusher was transformed into the Vital Spark's wheelhouse was quite clever.
Another clever touch of set-design were the two projection screens on the backdrop. When the Vital Spark was at sea, they showed waves and clouds; when the crew were in the Ferry Inn they showed a stained glass pub sign, of the sort you used to get on the West Coast; most of the rest of the time they showed silent-movie style cards announcing where the current scene was; and quite often they showed genuine black-and-white footage of puffers and other scenes from Edwardian Scotland, which was pretty cool.
Jimmy Chisolm was brilliant as Para, although his accent wobbled a bit, and sometimes he seemed to be too conciously doing an impression of Roddy McMillan. The rest of the cast were also excellent, especially Peter Kelly as the ascerbic Macphail.
There was about half a dozen stories they did in full, and maybe a dozen more that they referred to. They also managed to make more of a narrative structure out of them, with the second half in particular being all the stories about Para courting the baker's widow, culminating in the wedding[1].
In the stories, Sunny Jim makes his first appearance in the second book, and before that the fourth member of the crew is The Tar. The play uses the crew familiar from the TV versions, but includes some stories from the first book, with Sunny Jim instead of The Tar. And in the sequence based on "The Valentine Card That Missed Fire", Dougie takes on The Tar's role, and Sunny Jim takes on Dougie's role, leading to a romance between Sunny Jim and the girl selling the cards. This was one of two complete inventions, the other being the Hurricane Jack sequence; his dialogue is from the books, but most of the events aren't.
A few other liberties were taken; most notably some language that might well have been used by puffer crews when there were no ladies present, but certainly wouldn't have been used by Neil Munro in the pages of the Glasgow Evening News, but basically it seemed to have the spirit of the books about right. I enjoyed it.
[1]It's a good idea to end a play with a wedding; it means you've got all the characters dressed up and, depending on the period, posing for a group photo, which can then lead directly into the curtain call.
I hadn't realised it was a musical. Mum wasn't terribly impressed by the songs, but I thought they were okay. There were original songs, a few contemporary numbers from the 1910s, a rather pretty Gaelic song which, from context, I assume was about selkies, and for the finale "Para's Wedding" to the tune of "Mairi's Wedding".
(The funniest song: Hurricane Jack gets his own theme tune, which cuts in every time he has to give his name at the lawyer's office. At the end of the sequence, the lawyer himself asks his name, and after a silent beat, Jack looks behind him to check the band is still there.)
There was an odd opening sequence with all the actors playing council workers at a recycling centre. One of them gets taunted by the others for having his nose in a book, and turns out to be reading Tales of Para Handy, leading into the play proper. Not sure that added anything, although the way the cardboard crusher was transformed into the Vital Spark's wheelhouse was quite clever.
Another clever touch of set-design were the two projection screens on the backdrop. When the Vital Spark was at sea, they showed waves and clouds; when the crew were in the Ferry Inn they showed a stained glass pub sign, of the sort you used to get on the West Coast; most of the rest of the time they showed silent-movie style cards announcing where the current scene was; and quite often they showed genuine black-and-white footage of puffers and other scenes from Edwardian Scotland, which was pretty cool.
Jimmy Chisolm was brilliant as Para, although his accent wobbled a bit, and sometimes he seemed to be too conciously doing an impression of Roddy McMillan. The rest of the cast were also excellent, especially Peter Kelly as the ascerbic Macphail.
There was about half a dozen stories they did in full, and maybe a dozen more that they referred to. They also managed to make more of a narrative structure out of them, with the second half in particular being all the stories about Para courting the baker's widow, culminating in the wedding[1].
In the stories, Sunny Jim makes his first appearance in the second book, and before that the fourth member of the crew is The Tar. The play uses the crew familiar from the TV versions, but includes some stories from the first book, with Sunny Jim instead of The Tar. And in the sequence based on "The Valentine Card That Missed Fire", Dougie takes on The Tar's role, and Sunny Jim takes on Dougie's role, leading to a romance between Sunny Jim and the girl selling the cards. This was one of two complete inventions, the other being the Hurricane Jack sequence; his dialogue is from the books, but most of the events aren't.
A few other liberties were taken; most notably some language that might well have been used by puffer crews when there were no ladies present, but certainly wouldn't have been used by Neil Munro in the pages of the Glasgow Evening News, but basically it seemed to have the spirit of the books about right. I enjoyed it.
[1]It's a good idea to end a play with a wedding; it means you've got all the characters dressed up and, depending on the period, posing for a group photo, which can then lead directly into the curtain call.
