Fringe theatre reviews: Gwyneth Goes Skiing, I Wish You Well – The Gwyneth Paltrow Ski-Trial Musical, and more


THEATREGwyneth Goes Skiing ****Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 26 August
MUSICALS AND OPERAI Wish You Well – The Gwyneth Paltrow Ski-Trial Musical ***Underbelly, George Square (Venue 300) until 26 August
Advertisement
Hide AdAdvertisement
Hide Ad“A musical about a ski accident; who would think of that?” More people than you might imagine, it turns out. There’s two at this year’s Fringe, based upon the real-life court case that saw celebrated Hollywood actress and founder of wellness brand Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow, taken to court by retired optometrist Terry Sanderson after a collision on the slopes. In Gwyneth Goes Skiing, the fabulous Linus Karp is a preeningly perfect pastiche of Paltrow, Joseph Martin is everyone else (including Sanderson’s starstruck lawyer Kristin Vanorman), and a stony-faced stagehand is a standout, holding up the Deer of Deerness, divine overseer of the Utah ski park (and also available as a £300,000 necklace).
It's a news story so camp that a drag musical was perhaps always its logical conclusion, but Karp and Martin’s witty script also conjures up the weird world of pre-collision life in the ski village and gives it a good shake in its snow globe of puns. From the breakfast bar to the gift shop, the disconnect between celebrity and normality – mashed together into a multiverse not dissimilar to that of the Marvel films Paltrow also inhabits - is one of the things that makes this story so fascinating and frequently very funny. It's a classic slapstick set-up: everything Gwyneth wants, she gets, and everything Terry wants (including millions of dollars in compensation) gets him.
When we get to the court, the fast pace of the slopes is replaced by a more static environment and, in relying more upon the real-life transcripts, there’s less space for the company’s delicious earlier fabrication of events. We all know where things are going next, which is one of the best lines Paltrow, victorious, has ever delivered, as she leaves the courtroom: “I wish you well.”
Talking of which, there’s less messy British heart than well-worked American polish over at I Wish You Well – The Gwyneth Paltrow Ski-Trial Musical, with its glossy Broadway razzle dazzle. The cast’s blow-dried hair and sharp suits wouldn’t be out of place in Congress, which is a sharp contrast to puppet Kristin’s messy wig seen flying around previously. Here, Sanderson’s claim is quickly dispensed with to focus on lesser-known lawyer Vanorman’s attempts to befriend global megastar Paltrow. Only in this version, many of the real-life names have been changed, perhaps conscious of the same kind of American suing culture that has led to this story happening in the first place.
Advertisement
Hide AdAdvertisement
Hide AdThe cast give it their all, with catchy, well composed tunes mimicking musical genres and other West End hits in a way that draws parallels between the showbiz nature of courtrooms and theatre sets. If ever there’s a chance to strip off into a sparkly leotard and do a straight-to-audience power ballad, it’s not left untaken. The farce of seeking a moment in the spotlight when it’s undeserved is perhaps the ultimate crime in this arena, with a final fantasy sequence of Gwyneth and Kristin together, as “women just doing their jobs”, summing up the silly satisfaction that comes from endlessly reliving this tale of a non-famous man trying and failing to sue a very famous woman.
Sally Stott
THEATRE
Dis(honest) ***
theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall (Venue 53) until 10 August
Oddly elusive and curiously enchanting, an ensemble cast from St Catherine’s School enact an episode of “your favourite podcast,” a self-consciously generic parody of sensationalist podcasts that trade on manufacturing moral outrage. You know the type. Anything that markets itself as “true crime”, the kind of thing you overhear work colleagues gossiping about on a Monday morning.
They trace the story of a female con artist in a Catch Me If You Can like yarn of adopted identities and outrageous lies. Inspired by the real-life Amy Bock, a confidence trickster who frauded her way through early 20th century Australia, they fill in the picture puzzle piece by puzzle piece.
The twist is that we witness the narrative’s impact as it is broadcast, the cast switching in and out of perspectives as listeners titillated by the scandal and riled up by the over the top talking heads offering their warring opinions. This isn’t a self-important collar grab of a show. Instead it gently beckons you in before administering a dose of venom in the way it holds a mirror to the way a story’s atrociousness fuels its ability to propagate as well our all too human fascination with criminality.
Alexander Cohen
THEATRE
Forked ***
Summerhall (Venue 26) until 11 August
Advertisement
Hide AdAdvertisement
Hide AdTwo halves do not make a whole for Jo Tan’s Jeanette, a Singaporean drama school student in London whose identity fragments when she realises that she cannot be both English and Singaporean.
On the one hand she is drunk on a Platonic form of Englishness: Hugh Grant sipping cream tea in Downton Abbey, so much so that she wants to severe her Singaporean roots completely. She abandons the language and adopts an RP accent as an attempt to integrate. On the other hand Monsieur Laroche, a magnanimous drama school mandarin, wants her to adopt her true self for an audition. Half Asian? Half English? Can she put the two sides to her together?
No doubt Tan’s astute jabs at ritualistic drama school pretentiousness and Spitting Image like caricatures of industry figures will go down well at the world’s largest theatre festival. But Forked has a sting in its tail.
At its core it is a middle finger to a ruthless entertainment industry that bends over backwards to talk the talk about race, but when push comes to shove “authenticity” remains skin deep. With streamlining, that middle finger could turn into a knuckled fist and pack a punch, especially when it reflects on myopic Singaporean national identity fractured between an Eastern and Western gaze.
Alexander Cohen
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.