Forbidden Planet far from forbidding
Return to the Forbidden Planet.
Guest reviewer, Richard Dring
What an ambitious choice for a school show. A rockin' production came to Hull a few years back and I would have thought such a technically-demanding musical was way beyond the scope of a school show.
But the Yarborough School has 'Specialist Arts' status, including a recently-installed 30,000 sound and lighting system and I went along to the opening night thinking that might just give the cast a fighting chance.
‘Forbidden Planet’ is Bob Charlton's wacky cocktail of a 1956 cult sci-fi movie and Shakespeare's ‘The Tempest’, laced with stone-cold rock classics like 'She's Not There,' 'Gloria' and 'Gimme Some Lovin'.
Working the crowd was a key part of this production, ably directed by Karen Ayres, and the cast had the audience on its feet within seconds, gyrating to the extra-terrestrial equivalent of Hand Jive meets The Time Warp.
And it was funny - the script is peppered with mangled quotes from the bard. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ gets a good mauling as does ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘Julius Caesar’.
The director had snipped the script wisely, removing the more obscure references but keeping the crowd-pleasers such as 'to beep or not to beep.' and whereas the average age of the cast must have been about 14, the backing singers were 'old hands'; a cookery teacher, a science teacher, gals who looked as though they'd been on the never-ending tour since 1963. They killed me when they pulled on the leathers and shades for ‘Born to be Wild’.
But the stand-out comedian was Joel Jackson whose rubbery face and perfectly-nuanced delivery of exacting dialogue turned 'Cookie' - only a minor character in Shakespeare's original - into one of the production's major players
The bard might have needed an introduction to Gloria/The Science Officer, both played stunningly by Holli Farr, from her red shades to her red shoes and her interpretations of Van Morrison's 'Gloria' and the Moody Blues 'Go Now' were two of the most charged performances I've seen in a school show.
And there was plenty more to enthuse about. Ellie McCall' spangly roller-blading Ariel, Olivia Ridlington's transformation as Miranda and a highly-professional production team, to name but a few.
This was an adventurous choice of show for the school but it was a sound one and it demonstrated exactly why Caistor Yarborough School has 'Specialist Arts' status.
Pic MR Caistor CYS Play
Cookie (Joel Jackson) and the Year 11 dancers. (Lin)
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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