» Review: Here Comes The Bride
Beside The Seaside Productions have certainly gone all-out on realizing their theme. Welcomed to the beautiful St Andrew’s Church as guests to a wedding, the audience are given champagne and cake, shown to our pews by women in competitively silly headgear, and at one point asked by the vicar to join in a hymn. The hymn turns out to be ‘When I’m Sixty Four’, this being a musical comedy built out of well-known pop songs, with a gospel choir, live musicians and drunken hen night take on ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ thrown in for good measure. Conceptually it’s flawless, and the large cast of actor/singers give it their all. But Liz Tait’s script plays it far too safe: bitching mothers, emotionally divided best men, a Mrs Overall-esque church warden and a slip of a story about secrets and love winning out in the end. It’s the moments when Tait allows a more surreal sense of humour to flicker through that get the biggest laughs of the night. As with wedding’s themselves, clichés have their part to play, but it’s the individual touches your guests will remember.
St Andrew’s Church, May 8, 15 and 22
3/5
Bella Todd
May 10th, 2010 at 9:24 pm
The atmosphere from arrival was electric, the audience were part of the buzz which was added to by the mingling of cast with ‘guests’ drinking & eating. Some fantastic hats were to be seen floating feathers above the top of the crowd (thankfully removed before the performance) and there was even a guest in a full wedding dress, trailing through the pews. The show itself was comedy from the word go with some superb one-liners and great melodic mixes of likely and unlikely music. All extremely well delivered with the womens voices excelling in particular. Strong & vibrant, I highly recommend it.