Sister Act

Sister Act opens with aspiring singer Deloris (Jane Turnham) and her backing group (Olivia Fisher and Lauren Somerville, I think) auditioning for a spot in Curtis’s nightclub.  You know that Curtis is a sleaseball as soon as he turns them down.  I would have given them the job - they were fabulous!  Curtis, a crime boss, played with brooding menace by Lewis Philpott, murders a police informer.  Unfortunately for Deloris, she witnesses the act, then needs protection when she reports it.  It’s Eddie (Ben Smart) the heroic (and multi-layered) policeman who has the idea of hiding her in a convent.

The nuns were great fun; a lot of effort had gone into creating different characters.  There was some help from the script for Becky Philpott playing the long-suffering Mother Superior and Lizzie Diaper as the insecure novice, Sister Mary Robert, but others were created through movement and voice - notably in the case of Paige Ottaway as Sister Mary Lazarus whose vocal characterisation sounded as if it was created with a diet of cigarettes and whisky, a real growl that made one fear for her vocal chords.

The sound was good throughout - clear and with good balance between the on-stage performers and the impressive invisible band playing behind the set in the scenery dock.  The script calls for a lot of different locations - in theory, at least ten - so the sets had to be realised quickly with the visual clues coming from backdrops and a few pieces of furniture.  There was a simple but brilliant effect created by a mid-stage curtain: imagine a pair of curtains joined at top centre, but with the bottom pulled taut to either side.  This created an incredibly realistic cathedral arch.

And after that it’s a battle of wits between Eddie and the police on one side and Curtis and his incompetent henchmen on the other, and between them lots and lots of singing nuns, whose costumes got progressively more flamboyant as their gospel choir developed.  An evening full of frothy fun!

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