This was hyped, billed and pushed as the Hot Ticket of the festival but it was a damp squib. The accompanying publicly is superlative in it’s praise of the singers and writers but they put me to sleep, literally and it’s not the most comfy venue to nod off in.

This was a half hearted episode of East’brigthon-enders without the incest, murder, violence and fun.  None of the narrative stories gripped me, the scarce singing was a lot of ‘whoo whoo whoo’ in a major seventh key to sound mechanically melancholy and uplifting and a lot of the acting was as wooden as the set, and as flaky too.

I really wanted this to be good and it’s always such a disappointment when something that has such promise fails to deliver. There were a couple of problems actually hearing the dialogue and I don’t know who made the decision to amplify the band but leave the actors without headmics? This was the beginning of my disengagement with this piece. Didn’t the director sit around the venue checking sound/vision angles etc? 

Mostly the dialogue was, like the set, wishy washy.  Staccato arguments that – when I closed my eyes again - felt like bad radio plays. Oh and the fucking endless fucking swearing, just goes to fucking show what a fucking limited mind the fucking writers have when they want to express the in-ar-fucking-ticulate expressive fuckingness of a man in his mid-fucking thirties. No body fucking talks like that, never fucking did, never fucking will.  Yawn.

The premise, of a few couples (I was too bored to count in the end) who all share the same B&B situated on the eponymous Parade whose lives are peeled bare to show us the tensions, hopes and dreams. Unconvincing, uninteresting and dull, I kept wishing an arsonist would turn up and book a room. How terrible for this to have to follow the similarly plotted but stunning, genuinely innovative and vastly superior ‘Electric Hotel’ which premiered last week on the Level, look and learn poppets, look and learn.  I know where I’d rather stay.

Right, enough moaning, what was good?  One or two of the singers were lovely, and their good strong voices made the evening shine when they brought them out. The musicians were superb, breathtaking vibraphone, dreamy violin and a rather cheeky double bass and it was the musicians alone who kept me in my seat for the duration.

There was also one slice of dialogue (choice) between Lee Ross & Jeff Rawle which shone with a stunning brilliance that was almost worthy of Becket that flashed across the grey sky of this script like a lighting flash out to sea and I ached for the writer to pull this wonderful rabbit out of his scrip-hat again, alas it wasn’t to be. But if I am honest that exchange between two accomplished actors was the high tide of the evening for me, my interest ebbed after that. Stretch that vibrancy out over an hour and I’ll eat this review gents.

Like Marine Parade itself this was an overlong, tatty and strangely empty production that only really got going once or twice and I was glad what it ended even though it ended up going nowhere in particular. Unless you like a night out in the Marina.

On till 23rd with some matinee performances.