Six (Teen Edition)

First of all welcome back to the NODA fold, Mark Rutherford School after an absence of 8 years!  Good to meet you all. We missed you and hope to be of great service to you going forward.

So, my first visit to Mark Rutherford and I’m impressed straight away with the setup. Obviously long established with lots of framed posters for past productions on the walls leading to the actual theatre. The theatre studio itself is laid out lengthwise, with tiered seating to one side and the band on three separate rostra to the rear of the lengthwise acting floorspace. Clever! This setup was ideal for Six. But most impressive of all was the audio quality of this theatre. It was absolutely crystal, even for my aging ears. You have no idea what a change that made, I go to many a village hall and purpose built theatres that aren’t as good as this. So well done indeed to Alex McKenzie and his crew for that alone!

For those unfamiliar with the plot, it takes the form of six actresses representing the six wives of Henry VIII in modern party dress with original modern pop songs. The six Queens introduce themselves performing at a pop concert, telling the audience that the position of lead singer will be the prize for whoever they determine had the worst experience at the hands of their common husband, Henry VIII. And so the rivalry begins.

The costumes are an important part of this show and obviously about as far away from the ones the real wives would have worn as you could get. A colour coordinated array of modern teenage party clothes, each one helping to define the character portrayed. A fabulous array of deep red, pink, green, blue, silver and black. Very well designed and put together by L Day and Z Wells. Nice job

The backing musicians, all I believe pupils at the school, were all absolutely excellent, conducted by Musical Director N Jones. We had Nelly Palmer and Ava Lussmann on Keys 1&2, Oliver Spicer, Daniel Orr and P Moreton on Guitar, with Morgan Tucker on Bass and Jude Warehand and James Nugent on Percussion. Very tight outfit. Well played guys!

Now the most impressive thing about this show is the incredible Choreography. From the first note of the first number we were treated to some absolutely mind blowing dance routines, Powerful, energetic, complete coordinated, incredibly complex, in time and superbly executed numbers which were mesmerising. The audience went wild for them and quite rightly too. For that design and incredible amount of hard work that must have gone into them take a bow Choreographers, L Talbot, K Taylor and Z Wells. How the actors learnt all those moves and never once got in the way of each other or missed a step was way beyond me and will live long in the memory.

Now the clever bit. A lot of school productions have duplicate casts and simply swap from performance to performance. But not Mark Rutherford! The script simply has 6 actors, but they had both casts on stage at once. Only one team took the lead and had the speaking parts, but the second team shadowed them in their colour coordinated outfits. It both filled the stage splendidly and of course greatly enhanced the choreography. What a simple idea and it certainly worked beautifully.  Not seen that done before!

I’m not going to single out any of them as they were all superb and extremely confident in their delivery and for ones of such a young age had a very advanced command of comic timing. Our actresses for the show we saw were Amelie Pay as Catherine of Aragon, shadowed by Poppy Bean, Gabriela Stryjewska as Anne Bolyn, shadowed by Megan Fraser, Sorcha Brown as Jane Seymour, shadowed by Alaia Walton-Kale, Lucy Bichener as Anne of Cleeves, shadowed by Jasmine Coutain, Millie Wells as Katherine Howard, Shadowed by Rebeca Mihaela Ilie and Elizabeth Maples as Katherine Parr, shadowed by Izabella Frith. Those were all class performances way beyond their years.

The one thing I didn’t particularly enjoy was the programme. The design and layout were fine but the font in places took a magnifying glass to read, unreadable and thus useless in the tiered seating of a dimly lit theatre. And, I don’t follow the initial only names protocol, it’s confusing and doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever, especially as it wasn’t consistent, sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t..?  And now you have re-joined NODA I respectfully suggest you download and put the NODA logo on the programme and the official introduction to NODA if you want to enter the programme and poster competition. Excellent photos by J Saunders though.

So well done to Directors G Farnsworth, Alex McKenzie and L Day. That was impressive to say the least. I have a mantra in life which is, ‘Never underestimate the young.’ This was a prime example of why you never should. I see a lot of the cast have ambitions in the theatrical world after leaving school. Obviously, it’s an overcrowded profession and requires a great deal of luck to succeed, but, if the hard work this young cast put into this show has any justice, I see no reason why some of these names would not appear on future theatre billboards! You are a credit to your school and to the artistic fabric of Bedfordshire. I look forward to seeing you again in December.

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