Platinum Jubilee Variety Show

I do always enjoy attending Vane Tempest Theatre Group’s concerts.  They have a strong loyal membership, are always incredibly welcoming and rather than in some groups where there are a handful of very talented members, Vane Tempest has a large volume of them.  Concerts give them all an opportunity to shine. Shine they most certainly did. 

Vane Tempest took the presentation of a lovely choral concert, turned it on its head and decided to present an incredible variety show with vocals, dancing, magic, sketches and all round entertainment.  I did miss Ben’s jokes though!

The theme was a commemoration of the life and reign of Queen Elizabeth II and we were narrated by Keith Armitage explaining the relevance of each of the performances we were entertained by.  It was lovely to see more colour, variety and no books in hand with the majority of the cast entirely off book.  It really does make a difference to the visual experience for your audiences.

Vane Tempest had a lovely large cast of mixed ages, and as always there were lovely musical arrangements from Ben in all numbers we heard, including “Sing” the number written for Queen Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2002 by Gary Barlow and Andrew Lloyd-Webber.  The sketches were presented clearly and were most entertaining.  Colour was used in subtlety giving more life to the numbers we saw.  It was lovely to see some dancing too with some well choreographed numbers.  I couldn’t take my eyes off Laura Collinson on stage, what a beautiful dancer she is.

The children who performed were adorable and were strong and clear, including Jessica Geary and Francesa Lundie who took on some lead vocals and the “Chips” sketch. Suzy Wake also entertained us with a piece played on clarinet “Moonlight Serenade” which was really lovely.

Unusually and brilliantly we were also entertained by a magic show from Tony Southwick which was so clever!  Like the rest of the audience I desperately was watching to see if I was able to identify the secrets but sadly not, Tony was far better than any of our eagle eyes.  I was even invited on stage with him during his act which I immensely enjoyed.

The patriotic selection saw us out including Britannia and the National Anthem.  A lovely night of commemoration for Her Majesty whom I’ve no doubt would have enjoyed her evening as much as I did.  Thank you all so much.  All of you should be extremely proud of yourselves, this really was a superb production and you have well and truly chosen to show everyone exactly what you're made of.

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