9:06am Friday 6th June 2008
By Charles Hutchinson
The prolific polymath Robert Readman, director, designer, devisor and sometime showman, has built his latest show around night's journey into day, taking Stephen Sondheim's Saturday Night as his starting point.
The resulting concert cherry-picks from an array of musicals familiar, not so familiar and, in the case of Legally Blonde, yet to transfer from Broadway to the West End.
Saturday Night Sunday Morning is a testament to Readman's knowledge and love of musicals, and it serves to introduce talent too, as such concert shows in the summer season are wont to do, giving notice of voices newly blossoming (George Stagnell, Jolley Gosnold, Olivia Hollingworth) alongside others in full bloom.
After puppets purporting to be Lloyd Webber and Sondheim open the show with verbal jousting, the male ensemble sets the bright scene in all manner of shirts and braces against the backdrop of cubes of red, orange and yellow.
John Hall in drag, and Luke Dunford, Oliver Tattersfield and Alex Deadman on roller skates, catch the early eye; Sandy Nicholson's Chief Cook & Bottlewasher, from The Rink, and Alistair Scott Barron's She's A Woman, from Kiss Of The Spiderwoman, stand out; so too Jenny Scoullar's Life Of The Party, from The Wild Party, and Alex Papachristou's Dressing Them Up, where both voice and movement are characterful.
Readman's wish for his show to be a "still a concert, but a but deeper than that", is shown by his juxtaposition of gay and lesbian pieces, Luke Adamson maximising the comedy in Gay Or European, followed by Jules Mock making her mark in An Old Fashioned Love Story.
Jessica Hardcastle's ensemble choreography shines out, notably when led by Deadman in Batboy's Show You A Thing Or Two or in the half-light of Sideshow's Come Look At The Freaks.
Come Sunday, and Marie-Louise Scott has a wonderful second half, first solo, and later with Linda Collier in Wicked's For Good and with Sandy Nicholson in the moving Blood Brothers segment.
Abbi Wright's Avenue Q puppets have their moment, and Lesley Hill's choreography brings out the full-fat camping of The Altar Boyz.
By the close, everyone is in black, but they deserve gold stars all round.
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