Monster Academy

Barton Players Summer School has been established since 2005 and so is now in its 21st year. It has been run throughout and most of its material has been written by the very talented Keith Badham whose out of the box thinking and artistic creativity have introduced many a youngster to the thespian world. The school gathers on a Monday morning to cast the show and then spend the whole of the week rehearsing it for two performances, one on the Friday night and again on the Saturday afternoon. His latest offering was a musical comedy, Monster Academy involving twenty-six actors across the educational age spectrum from primary to college level.

Badham’s script was extremely witty but how to describe the plot might be a little tricky. Basically, it’s a school for monsters starting a new term with the Headmistress, Grimwood firmly in charge and starting off like any school with registration, a mixture of new and old students registering, one of which had been present at registration since 1741 and another for four hundred years! A chuckle scene where each answer to their name came with such comments as ‘Here. Sort of. Present in most of my parts.’ Or ‘Present. Bit loose in the hip, but present.’ After which the Headmistress announces ‘The Oversight Committee in London has grown suspicious. They’ve heard rumours of creepy antics and absurdist musical numbers. They are sending an inspector. And, to make sure we aren’t “radicalising the youth” …… an exchange student. A human exchange student.’ And as Zombie Zeke then says to the audience, ‘And that’s basically the plot. Try and keep up this year.!’  So, we were treated to a series of extremely silly but highly amusing scenes of the entire cast of monsters trying to become ‘Ordinary!’

Now it’s not every day that a NODA rep goes to see a show to find their own tombstone on stage, but the opening scene to a background of eerily lit stain glass windows full of monster heads and coloured shapes and a big sign above it saying ‘Monster Academy,’ which remained throughout the show, the forestage of which was initially full of tombstones with the names of the backstage crew with various comments, One of which read, ‘Here Lies Richard Fitt Lost On His Conquest To Find The Plot.’ (Only one problem, I’m still trying to find it! LOL!) Others included, ‘Keith Badham, ? - 7-08-26 Incredibly Old’, -‘Pre RIP, Keith Bowie, Rachael Bowie, Adam Bowie Not Actually Here, Need Them For Lights & Sound,’  - ‘Here Lies Chloe Badham & Becky-Lou Looking Forward To A Long Rest‘ and ‘Milly Badham, Liam Batty, Gone & Kind Of Forgotten.’ Seriously though you have to admire their artistic humour, Well done to the stage management of Rebecca Smith, Milly Badham and Liam Batty, plus the very imaginative artwork by the latter pair. That set will haunt me for some time to come!

The eerie lighting and ghostly sound was provided by Keith and Adam Bowie, queued with their usual spot-on efficiency and caught the atmosphere perfectly.

Costumes and make-up by Chloe Badham and Kera Rose were an eclectic mix of various zombie style costumes, a lot in black and white, some old fashioned dresses to denote the passing of the centuries including, a chef’s outfit, a full skeleton and lots of wigs with some very amusing  headgear to go with them, including a bucket, a pair of red Devil’s ear’s and hats of all shapes and sizes. The Make-up department had obviously had a ball painting faces and creating all these ghosts and ghouls. Scary stuff!!

The acting was great fun. Keith Badham sat at audience level to stage right with an appropriately distorted microphone and acted as the narrator whilst the actors played out a series of sixteen, mainly short but enthusiastically playout scenes, including amongst other wonderful titles: Registration Day, Dormitory Inspection, The Naked Truth, The Ghostly Gourmet, Into The Mist and The Clean-up to mention just a few.

With sequenced music throughout, and appropriate choreography by Rebecca Smith, some of the accompanying songs were with modified lyrics and included: Monster People to the tune of ‘Common People’ by Pulp, The Cure’s ‘Friday I’m In Love’ and ‘Murder On The Dance Floor’ by Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

This was by no means a perfect piece of theatre, with quite a few prompts and ad-libs, but this was a two hour show which had been cast, rehearsed and performed over a six day period, admittedly on a full time basis, the logistics alone of which I am in awe! This did lead to one of the funniest unprompted moments in the show where the script went missing and Keith Badham called out the name of the actor who he thought was the next to speak, only to be told in no uncertain terms by said actor, ‘No, Grimwood comes first!’  Several seconds of raucous laughter ensued before order was restored and even Keith corpsed at that!

Normally a society would pace that over a three-month period, so the hard work, dedication and enthusiasm that went into this was very much to be admired. Barton are unique in District Two in running an annual Summer School. But most of all the one thing you come away with is a sense that all the kids involved had had a great, very memorable time and no doubt made some friends for life during the week.

So well done to Writer and Director Keith Badham, his crew and cast of:
Poppy Widdowfield (Banshee Bella and Blurryface), Aurora Soley (Barnaby), Katie Timpson (Batty Lou), Anthony Wathall (Bentley), Violet Knight (Bram), Christopher Paxton (Brian The Head In A Jar), Evie George (Chef Slop), Roxy Allen (Constance), Caitlin Wustrau (Fang), Maddie Laurie (Grimwood), Edward Thompson Hoare (Igor), Finley Butler (Inspector Clue), Locksley Soley (Invisi-ian), Evie Baker McAbe (Marsh), Alice Southern (Matron Maggot), Layla Nash (Mrs Pringle), Lewis George (Mummy Mike), Charlie Williams (Norman), Gracie Andrews (Piper), Artie Thompson-Nash (Sergeant Stitch), Ruby Andrews (Skully), Hannah Reeve (Wanda), Tallulah Smith (Wolfgang), Charlie ‘Chazza’ Simmons (Zeke) and Finn Thompson-Hoare (Zora).

Whatever madness Barton Players Summer School and Keith Badham have in the pipeline for next year we very much look forward to it!

 

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