The Mod Musical
Information
- Date
- 16th February 2018
- Society
- Brightlingsea Musical Theatre Group
- Venue
- Brightlingsea Community Centre
- Type of Production
- Musical
- Director
- Lucy Weaver
- Musical Director
- Emily Hill
- Choreographer
- Lynda Western
This production was a fund raiser in aid of the Brightlingsea Community Centre Roofing Project and featured this little known musical, celebrating the swinging sixties and created by Phillip George and David Lowenstein for direction Off-Broadway.
Shout is a musical magazine running through the music, fashion and liberating days of the 1960s and with it's own agony aunt Gwendolyn Holmes, played by Gina Smith.
The action centres around five girls, Orange Girl (Lucy Weaver),Blue Girl (Lynda Western),Yellow Girl (Joanne Morris), Green Girl (Lynne Farlie) and Red Girl (Becky Foster) who all sing, dance and act throughout the production.
There are amazing new arrangements to many well loved songs from the 60s with the girls on stage virtually the whole time, sometimes as the soloist, sometimes as part of the backing group. All superbly performed by the girls with so much energy and enthusiasm and, without exception, all 5 had incredibly good voices.
Highlights for me were 'Son of a Preacher Man' sung by Yellow, with strong backing from the other 4 girls and 'Coldfinger' a James Bond parody by Green and the girls .But ,in truth there were so many well loved and established favourites that the audience knew the words and music and readily joined in when invited. There was humour in the script too, especially with the questions to the Agony Aunt and her responses!
Choreography was by Blue Girl, Lynda Western and was colourful, catchy and true to the time and well executed by the girls.
Emily Hill was making her amateur dramatic musical director debut with this production and there were some stunning new interpretations of songs everyone knew. Band members were Francis Garland and Taffy Archer (both keyboards) and Dan Edwards on percussion. Emily and the band all worked together well and appeared to be enjoying the music !
I must mention The Voice (Rory Western) hidden for most of the time but taking the role of narrator. Well done for helping the production move crisply from one section to the next.
The set comprised just 5 colour panels as the backdrop reflecting the colours of the girls. A few props were used to accent scene changes and stage manager, Hector Moyes, directed the backstage crew in changes.
Very cleverly, the colour panels were repeated across the programme design and the tickets, a novel idea by Orange Girl, Lucy Weaver who designed the programme.
Costumes were all sourced by 'The Powderpuff Girls' ie the girls themselves and completely in tune with the fashions of the time.
A very enjoyable evening with great talent displayed on stage and much credit to Lucy Weaver and Emily Hill.
Well done to everyone involved in this production.
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