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FILM REVIEW: Kanarie (Canary)

The ‘canaries’ are the white male members of the South African Defence Corps Church Choir and Concert Group- a bunch of 18 and 19-year-olds who have a bewildering equal love for God and the Army.

IT’S an unusual subject for a gay-themed musical film set in the turbulent period of 1984/5 apartheid and at a time of the prolonged border war.

It’s also the era of Depeche Mode, Boy George, Culture Club, Ziggy and many Moreno– icons.

So our hero Johanes, played in a beautifully wistful far-away style by Schalk Bezuidenhout, finds himself at Valhalla Air Force Base with 22 other young men, subjected to a brutal corporal and his harsh punishment regime. It’s a kind of cross between The History Boys and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, and the amazing thing is that it works on all sorts of levels. Johanes salvation is his obsession with Boy George, and his disappointment that his hero hasn’t ‘come out’.

Mostly naturalistic, it has occasional excursions into a kind of pop music video style, which for me didn’t come often enough. Johanes is a shy boy on the periphery of the group, overshadowed by the plump Ludolf played for all the laughs he can get by Germandt Geldenhuys.

When Ludolf is repeatedly bullied by both staff and other choristers, Johanes is his staunch defender. But the real plot development is the growing affection between Johanes and his room-mate, the brilliant pianist Wolfgang, played in a sensitive coming of age way by Hannes Otto.

It is of course a forbidden kind of love and predictably Johanes is torn between his Christianity and desire to be ‘accepted’ and a growing realisation of his gay nature.

As he starts the film cruising down his hometown Main Street in wedding dress and veil, we the audience have no doubt of his sexuality.

But there’s a touching kind of sensitivity in his physical fumbling with Wolfgang.

When the choristers are confronted with criticism from a left-wing anti-apartheid supporter at a concert, they have no real answer – it’s as if they had not thought about the real brutality of 1980’s South Africa.

Only when they go to sing for the troops on the front line of the border war does some sense of reality dawn and then not for long.

Full of original songs by co-writer Charl-Johan Lingenfelder, the film poses many weighty questions about right and wrong, truth and falsehoods, honesty and being closeted.

Director and co-writer Christiaan Olwagen gets top-class performance from his largely young cast and they are nowhere better than when singing in close harmony.

It’s an uplifting film that could well have a sequel as we find out about Johanes and Wolfgang’s future fate.

Kanarie (Canary) is distributed by Pecadillo Pictures.

Review by Brian Butler

REVIEW: Spring Awakening @The Spire

The Brighton-based Apollo Company has chosen for its inaugural production an award-winning musical that speaks strongly to today’s teenage audience.

IMAGINE Romeo and Juliet, with a rock musical score, and more than a nod to shows like Rent, Hair, Matilda and the pupils of Hogwarts school, but based on a 19th-century German play by Frank Wedekind.

Spring Awakening is bang up to date with its complex overlapping themes of teenage angst, mental illness, gay encounters, young male suicide, teen pregnancy and abortion. If all that sounds a heady mix for musical theatre, this show – book and lyrics by Steven Sater and music by Duncan Sheik – carries it off largely due to the huge talent and exuberance of its young cast.

Locked away in some kind of religious school, the boy pupils break all the rules and mix with the local girls in a story of emerging adolescent awareness that in this story leads to three personal tragedies.

Katy Markey directs, produces and choreographs her young players releasing their pent-up emotions and physical desires in sometimes frenzied, wild dance moves and angry revolutionary punk vocals.

Ollie Wray is outstanding as the brilliant, precocious but self-conscious radical atheist teenager Melchior Gabor who finds himself irresistibly intertwined with the hauntingly innocent Wendla, played with a touching innocence by Jody King.

The trio of leads is completed by a disturbingly real performance by Ollie Hawes as the deeply troubled Moritz, who ultimately can find no way out of his unhappiness except by blowing his brains out.

The music is by and large accessible and there are some fine numbers – Wendla’s solo Whispering is but one example, and Touch Me is an ensemble piece that graphically explores the youngsters’ growing awareness of what’s happening in their adolescent bodies.

When his two dead friends visit Melchior we are blown away by their rendition of the trio Those You’ve Known.

Apollo is an offshoot of Apollo Productions and the linked Apollo Academy, through which training ground many of the performers have come.

Performing in a very spacious venue like this former church presents its own problems and the lighting veers from beautifully effective to downright dreadful. There are times when the cast just aren’t lit and others when the back lighting is so much in the audience’s eyes that it kills what’s going on onstage.

That said, this is an inspiring start to a new company and they will be a group to watch in the future on the Brighton stage scene.

Spring Awakening runs at the Spire Centre, Kemptown until September 7

Review by Brian Butler

New Queen on the block

Tom Redgrave aka Pat Clutcher is one of a new generation of drag performers working the Brighton circuit. He talks to Brian Butler about his Sunderland roots, not being a hit with pop star David Essex’s fans, and his hopes for his future act.

TOM Redgrave began very early to perform in his native Sunderland, doing musicals like Annie, Bugsy Malone and West Side Story at the tender age of 9.

“When I was 10 I bought the Stage newspaper and dreamed of going to somewhere like the Sylvia Young theatre school, but for a little Sunderland boy it wasn’t going to happen,” he says.

His secondary education was also packed with musicals and youth theatre shows, including at the magnificent Sunderland Empire. “School work took a backseat and I wanted to do a B Tech in performing arts but my parents insisted  I wait till I was 18.”

So it was that Tom found himself at the Guildford School of Acting. “Their reputation was in training actor/singers who could move. I was never much of a dancer. I aspired to be the next Michael Ball rather than a Wayne Sleep. I always looked older than I actually was so I always played dads or granddads, and older principal roles – like in the show The Fix.”

His roles included the narrator in Under Milk Wood and parts in 110 in the Shade and West Side Story again.

He admits to a string of what he calls “tatty tours and tatty pantos” before landing a role in the David Essex vehicle musical All The Fun Of The Fair, where he sometimes went on as Essex’s understudy, much to the annoyance of the many Essex fans in the audience. “They refused to applaud at my curtain call.”

That and 2 years of touring led him to lose interest in his stage career and led him into pub and hotel management, including the well-known Marsden Inn in South Shields, where the establishment clings precariously to the cliff side above a beach.

His first experience of drag was as Meg Mortimer named after the Noelle Gordon character in the soap opera Crossroads, but after 3 gigs in a few months he decided not to pursue it.

Moving to Brighton he worked at the Old Ship hotel and then changed careers yet again deciding to train as a nurse. “I did it for 9 months but couldn’t get into it,” he admits. So he went back to the food and beverage business at the Staley Hall Hotel in Northumberland, which he describes as “the middle of nowhere”.

“The staff were very unhappy, but I believe everything happens for a reason and Alastair, the owner of the Camelford Arms in Brighton offered me the job of assistant manager.” He had previously worked behind the bar there and coincidentally had previously signed his major stage contract with his agent in the pub .

Being on the mic for quiz nights and raffles helped him develop his patter with customers and the ability to pick tunes for punters. At the nearby Marine Tavern’s open mic nights he met the young drag performer Stephanie Von Clitz (Steven Banks). “We became good friends and he suggested I give drag a shot. So I took it very seriously, bought a wig and a frock off the internet and walked onto the stage as Angel de la North.”

When the 15 heats of the competition Drag Idol were announced Stephanie suggested Tom should enter at the White Swan in London. “I was awful; it was a baptism of fire but I enjoyed it. I realised I needed to do better and so in May 2018 he entered the heat at Brighton’s Charles Street Tap. “I remember someone saying I was someone they ought to hire.”

In London he took part in Drag Idol’s semi-final, didn’t win but was given a wild card to perform again the following week, where he admits “my Drag Idol story ended”. But work at the Queen’s Arms followed and a friend suggested he adopt a new persona in the style of comedian Les Dawson’s drag character Ada. And so Pat Clutcher was born as a tribute to the character Pat Butcher in Eastenders.

“The character is me in a frock saying things I wouldn’t dare say in real life – a court jester who can get away with stuff. It’s very different when I’m Tom doing karaoke. If you send yourself up, the audience know not to take you too seriously. I’ve rediscovered my mojo and my confidence and I’m not afraid to do stuff any more.”

Asked to advise his 16 year-old self he says “I’d tell me it’s all going to be all right.”

Tom admits the biggest influence on his act is Miss Jason (Jason Sutton). “I’d love to be thought of as the next Miss Jason.” He admits his style of performing harks back to the older days of drag with its camp humour and forthrightness. “I’m attracted by the character of strong independent women – like Pat Butcher, Meg Mortimer and Ena Sharples. I use snippets of their characteristics in my act.”

With regular spots at the Affinity Bar, Queen’s Arms , Legends and Charles Street Tap, he’s particularly proud to have been nominated for best drag act in the 2019 Golden Handbags, after just a year in the business.

He’s certainly a talent to watch out for.

 

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