Production stills from the fantastically entertaining — and moving — production of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard at the Jack Studio Theatre.
The production runs to 2 August and you can get tickets here.
Category Archives: Theatre
Singing songs about the Southland
There’s not much I can say about shooting the poster and advertising imagery for Dessa Rose, coming soon to Trafalgar Studios.
Stars Cynthia Erivo and Cassidy Janson worked every angle and every emotion like they’d been born for the camera.
Costume designer Pippa Batt delivered in spades on virtually no notice.
Associate director Jen Bakst not only kept us to the schedule like a Japanese train but managed to double as a rather good photographic assistant AND stop me falling over.
And executive producer Andrew Harmer got us from the studio to Richmond Park and back again as if chasing the sun via every traffic jam in London were his raison d’être.
All I had to do was turn up and click.
(PS I’ve included a behind the scenes shot courtesy of Mr Harmer that demonstrates perfectly why my career’s doomed the moment I need a hip replacement.)
Transfusion
Some interesting challenges posed by advertising Passing By, Martin Sherman’s play about two men who fall in love which makes a virtue out of treating them as normal human beings rather than theatrical excuses for oh-my-god-they’re-gay-this-is-an-ISSUE angst.
First off, advertising for gay plays tends to be anything but charming. Traditionally, you stick as many topless buff young things as you can into the frame and make them strut. This may have no relevance to the plot but, well, it works.
But if you sold Passing By that way, you’d be cheapening the very thing that makes it different. That it’s not about guys shagging and being gay. It’s a love story between two fully-rounded individuals who live actual, you know, lives and happen to be gay.
Second, we wanted the imagery to conjure up a retro 70s feeling to match the 70s setting. But we absolutely didn’t want it to look like we’d just snapped a few shots on an iPhone and pumped it through a filter on instagram.
So the solution we came up with was to shoot outside and give as much of the retro feeling from the shooting technique itself as from jiggling it about in a computer, coupled with some spot-on costuming from Pippa Batt.
Then we came across a third problem. On the transfer from the Finborough Theatre to the Tristan Bates Theatre, the original cast of Alex Felton and Steven Webb were no longer free. Actors James Cartwright and Rik Makarem stepped in not, so much, to fill their shoes as to spin the play in an entirely different direction.
So we wanted the transfer advertising to reflect the vibe of the original, while making clear that it stood on its own two feet. The stills also needed to meet the requirements of shooting for bigger print formats and online advertising.
And how do you do that?
In the first shoot, oranges and reds were the dominant tones and the abiding rule was to trick the lens into behaving like a piece of plastic. For the transfer, everything was about the greens and shooting sharp as a razor. Different, but just enough of the same.
Assistant for lighting concept tests: Sara La Cuesta Calvo.
From the archives: They never did THAT on the telly…
Sometimes people do things so contradictory to what’s come before that you have to stop yourself a second to experience that little bit of weirdness wiggling inside.
Hannah Montana goes from cutesie teenie pop to licking chains in her birthday suit. Britney Spears goes from chaste pig-tailed schoolgirl to lingerie billboard to scourge of those who just won’t put in the hours. Madonna discovers clothing.
A long time ago (2011, to be precise), I stopped myself in the Ashcroft Theatre in Croydon to experience that little bit of weirdness wiggling inside that comes from seeing the hilarious Clare Buckfield and John Pickard, whom I grew up knowing as brother and sister on the hit sitcom 2point4 Children, playing occasional lovers in the brilliant Same Time, Next Year.
That their screen mother was playing a predatory lesbian television executive up in town was the icing on a very wriggly cake.
Retirement Planning
Who knew? Shakespeare’s King Lear works rather better when Lear’s a queen than a king.
Production shots from Lear at the Union Theatre, with Ursula Mohan in the title role.
The show runs to 28 June and you can book tickets here.
Spend Spend Spend
Bringing the London School of Musical Theatre’s 2014 stay at the Bridewell Theatre in the City to a close, Spend Spend Spend tells the story of Viv Nicholson.
Nicholson, notoriously, won big on the pools with her husband in the 60s and announced that she was going to “spend, spend, spend”.
Given that she has a whole (highly entertaining) musical dedicated to her travels from rags to riches and back again, it’ll come as no surprise to learn she was true to her word. And then some.
Lucifer Saved
Production shots from the unsettling Lucifer Saved, now playing at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre in Kentish Town, which asks provocative questions about the fallibility of memory and the fragility of innocent minds.
God is not a plastic surgeon
I seem to have been shooting a lot of musicals lately.
This is good for me because shooting a musical is a bit like going to the gym. This is less good for my shoes because shooting a musical is a bit like going to the gym in inappropriate footwear.
Shots from the London School of Musical Theatre’s first show of its two-show 2014 season at the Bridewell Theatre, Violet. If you want to see it (and you should; it’s very good), the run ends tomorrow night.
Violet tells the tale of a disfigured girl who takes a bus ride to meet a faith healer whom she hopes will heal her scars, and who learns that other things are rather more important on the way.
You can shoot me straight to the top
With the London School of Musical Theatre but weeks away from their return to the Bridewell Theatre, I thought I’d revisit the second of their shows there last year, Applause.
Applause, based on the film All About Eve, is basically an instruction manual for aspiring stars who happen to be psychopaths. Think of it as Fatal Attraction meets Fame and you’re there.
To the pub
Publicity shots of actor and all-round good egg Stevie Webb, shot at the Landor pub to advertise the Landor Theatre’s “An Audience With” series.
