Theatre reviews: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow | The Storm | Dirty Dancing
The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, King’s Theatre, Edinburgh ***
The Storm, Oran Mor, Glasgow ****
Dirty Dancing, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh ****
It’s the programme that first catches the eye, when you take your seat for Tilted Wig Productions’ latest touring show The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, playing in Edinburgh this week. Got up in the style of a 1950s American horror comic, it features sensational front-page teasers – “Will Our Hero Escape The Cursed Horseman From Hell?” – as well as a double page spread on fictional monsters, from Big Foot to the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
It’s a fine introduction to Philip Meek’s stage version of Washington Irving’s 1819 story, which offers about as wild a piece of no-holds-barred supernatural hokum as has ever graced an Edinburgh stage. The legend tells of a young rationalist, Ichabod Crane, who finds himself stranded in the strange community of Sleepy Hollow, a pagan place amid the strong Christian culture of early America. At first, Ichabod believes he can overcome the villagers’ superstitious beliefs, and save the village leader’s lovely daughter Katrina in the process; in Meek’s version, there’s also a gay sub-plot, involving Katrina’s gorgeously muscled blacksmith boyfriend.
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Hide AdThe main point of the show, though, lies in its shocks and thrills, its ghoulies and ghosties, and its famous headless horseman, who eventually devours all strangers; and in the end, the whole event turns into something more like a Hallowe’en horror send-up than a serious chiller. What’s thoroughly enjoyable, though, is the sheer panache with which director Jake Smith’s six-strong company deliver all this lively tosh, with Wendi Peters excelling herself as village crone Marietta Papenfuss, and the rest of the ensemble working so hard and so wittily in support that the audience fairly cheer them to the echo, when they all return to the land of the living for their final bow.
Actor and writer Owen Whitelaw’s debut Play, Pie And Pint debut, The Storm, also deals in fears of the supernatural; but here, there’s a clearer allegorical purpose, in the story of an author of uncanny tales who turns up to be interviewed by a radio presenter fighting her own demons, and soon disrupts the whole format by declaring that she – like all those who told her the tales – is about to meet a horrible fate, destroyed by a force of pure evil. Enter The Detective, apparently a super-calm police officer; and in no time, director Jack Nurse’s top-flight cast – Louise Ludgate, Gemma McElhinney, and Natali McCleary – whip Whitelaw’s drama into a truly scary and compelling piece of theatre about “the suits” who wield power in our world, and how, with their blue light and bright screens, they mesmerise us all.
After so much imaginary horror, though, it’s both a relief and a joy to return to a relatively upbeat past with the much-loved current UK touring version of Dirty Dancing, a story about love, sex, class, 1960s radicalism and the subversive power of dance set in a liberal US mountain holiday resort in the summer of 1963, and made a legend in the 1987 film.
In this latest staging, Kira Malou is luminously brilliant as Frances “Baby” Houseman, the doctor’s daughter who thinks she can change the world for the better, and has life lessons to learn when she falls in love with her working-class dance instructor Johnny, touchingly played here by the astonishingly handsome Michael O’Reilly. I’ve rarely seen an Edinburgh audience so excited, so thrilled, so simply ecstatic, as the Dirty Dancing fans during that beautifully-executed final lift; in an enduring show that – like Strictly – offers pure dancing pleasure, but with an added strand of thoughtful and hard-hitting radical politics, carefully woven in by writer Eleanor Bergstein, from start to finish.
All shows run until 13 November
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