The Tiger Lillies with Justin Bond
Sinderella
The Twisted Tale of a Christmas Crack Whore
Queen Elizabeth Hall – Southbank Centre
18 – 20 December, 2008
 ary Couzens
A review by Mary Couzens for EXTRA! EXTRA!
A vintage fireplace, Weimer music, pine trees, fake snow, instruments standing at the ready and, hold, on, what’s this – a stuffed cat, a grave stone? Sounds like a Tiger Lillies setting. Having mentioned Germany’s Weimer period, it also has to be said that some members of the audience looked kind of Weimer themselves, with their pale makeup, black lipstick and retro kitsch clothing combinations of black, white, pink and/or red. In the ensuing show, the cryptic humour and compulsively beguiling musicianship of Oliver Award winning Tiger Lillies (Shock-headed Peter- 1998) thankfully, handily managed to prevent New York icon Justin Bond and, this cabaret style production, Sinderella - The Twisted Tale of a Christmas Crack Whore from drowning in its own mire.
In this subversion of the fabled fairytale, Cinderella, the girl in ashes becomes a street whore working for her evil step mother. ‘Sinderella’, in this case, describes, sometimes in graphically re-enacted detail, not just her family legacy, ‘Mama was expensive,’ but also, her hapless duties, however sordid or grim. However, this show is not a panto, adult or otherwise, though Tiger Lillie’s composer and lead singer Martyn Jacques, who spent some of his formative years living atop a Soho brothel, views it as a type of ‘anti- panto,’ having seen some atrocious examples of that hallowed genre in his time. But this show is staged more as a cabaret performance, with theatrical over, or undertones, depending on how you look at it, than as a piece of theatre in its own right, though it certainly features plenty of rites...Among them, a fellow screaming out from the audience to evil Stepmother Jacques, ‘No he won’t’ when he says, through his greasepaint in his falsetto voice, ‘Some day my Prince will come.’
This unique U.K. / U.S. coupling promised to be a very intriguing affair, especially given the fact that the inimitable Tiger Lillies had composed twenty five new songs for the occasion and would be performing them. Composer, lead singer and accordion player Martyn Jacques sings his often explicit lyrics in an oddly alluring falsetto voice that for some reason, simply cannot be ignored and elevates the content of his songs to a level of fascination some of their subject matter might not warrant without his distinctive delivery.
Jacques hilariously grand entrance as a warped, darkly dowager Miss Haversham in S & M inspired clothing seemed to re-establish the fact that as a performer, he is definitely in a class by himself! Adrian Huge, on drums, percussion and toys also looked a right picture with tuffs of blonde hair spiking out of a bonnet as one of two ugly step-sisters, along with fellow musician/sister Adrian Stout who joined in 1995, on contra bass, intermittently warbling along through protruding teeth on backup vocals and adding sci-fi Theremin, completing this off-beat, comically melodramatically trio.
As Sinderella, Justin Bond climbs over the audience, (un) settles in selected viewers laps, pseudo slashes random throats with a huge rubber knife, trills Tiger Lillies songs and graphically banters about his character’s slavish life as a floor scrubbing whore, leaning on the onstage gravestone so hard in his opening number that it almost toppled. While Bond sings and re-enacts actions performed in his sordid life, Tiger Lillies’ drummer Adrian Huge huddles under an umbrella at his drum-kit, sheltering against the snow falling over him, and his fellow musicians. This artful combination of the conflicting aspects of life makes for a rancidly surreal picture, though it is a paring that is, by no means, alien to the Tiger Lillies canon, the songs of which tend to allow for both to coexist within their context, with often lovely melodies and non-illusionary lyrics. However Bond’s extremely over the top performance of his songs, which form the lion’s share of part one, seem more laboured than might have been intended as his delivery strikes increasingly stale notes with the repetitive phrases, ‘crack whore’ and others, making some of the songs seem too cliché, when, as proved by Jacques more knowing delivery of one of them later, they are not.
On the plus side, Bond’s interactions with Jacques, as Sinderella’s deadbeat stepmother are generally, quite funny, and some of the show’s dialogue however sordid or silly rings so true, it almost hurts to hear it, such as Sinder’s dream of that ‘great rapper, Prince Charmer, who’ll pick me up in a big car and then I’ll have nice clothes and class A drugs.’ And, in the second half of the show, the pace picks up, largely due to the fact that Jacques and the Tiger Lillies perform more of its songs themselves and part one’s by then, over-worked themes get a bit of much needed expansion lending a bit more dimension to Bond’s bedraggled character.
Among the songs of the show, one of its highlights for me was, ‘There Must Be a Reason,’ a melodic dirge performed by Martin Jacques with all the ironic aplomb appropriate to an evil stepmother, and ‘Am I Evil?’ a heavy metal influenced drone with carnival and music hall overtones, which was accompanied, not only by the musical meanderings of his fellow Tiger Lillies, but also, an especially garish smile, worthy of a Halloween pumpkin.
I’m all for exploring the dark sides of Christmas through performance, have been raised on a seasonal diet of Deck the Halls, pass the eggnog, and never mind the shouting drunk at one end of the table. However, in this instance, with Justin Bond ‘performing’ most of the songs, unfortunately, the tawdry often becomes more tat than tattered, as it really should be, as he spreads his irony on far too thick, making it seem more obvious, than odd. However, in an inadvertent gesture of mastery, when an encore was called for following the far superior second half of this program, and Bond fecklessly advised Jacques that ‘You write this shit, you take this one,’ the results were not pure, to be sure, given the song’s seamy lyrics, but they were nonetheless multi-layered and somehow, magical for it, proving that as Oscar Wilde had famously said: 'We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.'
0ver 18’s only
http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/music/productions/tiger-lillies-43348
Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road
London SE1 8XX
|