Theatre 2022: Mirvish - Shark is Broken, Mean Girls, Fisherman's Friends

The 2021/2022 Mirvish subscription season ended with a bang with the stellar musical Singing in the Rain.  My husband Rich and I looked forward to the start of the new 2022/2023 season since the lineup sounded fantastic.  We have finally upgraded our subscription seats to the second price tier in the Dress Circle and will be sitting next to our friends for the entire season.  No more looking jealously at their seats two rows ahead of us!

Unfortunately, the first show of the new Mirvish season started with a whimper.  The Shark Is Broken is a play about the troubles that arose during the making of the 1975 hit movie Jaws that starred Robert Shaw as Quint, a professional shark fisherman, Richard Dreyfuss as Hooper, an oceanographer and Rob Schneider as Brody, the police chief. Shaw’s son Ian co-wrote and is also cast as his father in the play.  The lengthy show with no intermission depicts the three actors bickering for 90 minutes while sitting in a bobbing boat, waiting for the mechanical shark (which is never shown) to be repaired.  I read that the best part of the show was the set design, which included a real boat that appears to be sitting on actual water, thanks to some brilliant video effects.

Sadly, the rest of the show did not fare as well, as we had heard negative reviews from various sources.  My brother-in-law returned from the performance and promptly messaged me with “Well that was 90 minutes that I will never get back again”. The headline of the review from Now Toronto was “The Shark is Broken, and so is this play”.  The Globe and Mail called it a “performance piece by the son of Quint” rather than a fleshed-out play.  Nevertheless, I wanted to watch this play and come to my own conclusions about it.  I also wanted to sit in and experience the view from our new seats!  Alas, the theatre gods were not with me since I caught COVID just before we were supposed to go to the show.  The only bright side of this is that if I had to miss a show from our subscription series, this is the one that I would least regret. Our friends who we gave our tickets  told me that we didn’t miss much.  The closest I got to the eponymous shark was when I posed in front of the giant plastic one positioned in front of the Royal Alexandra Theatre.  But given that no shark was ever seen in the play, I guess this is the closest that anyone else got as well.

I would have been much more disappointed if I had to miss Mean Girls the Musical, since I love musicals in general and have fond memories of watching the 2004 movie starring Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried and Tina Fey that this show is based upon. Luckily, I recovered in time to watch this Mean Girls the Musical and was delighted by the wonderful job that was done in adapting the movie into the musical.

Like the movie, the musical deals with the coming-of-age story of Cady, an intelligent but naïve teenager who goes to an American public school for the first time after growing up and being homeschooled in Africa.  Cady initially makes friends with outcasts Janis and Damian, who teach her about navigating high school politics, cliques and social hierarchy. Janis encourages Cady to infiltrate and try to bring down “the Plastics”, a trio of popular “mean girls” considered to be school royalty, led by Queen Bee Regina George along with her minions, Gretchen, who is desperate to be liked, and Karen, who is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Cady is on board with the plan, especially after Regina cruelly and deliberately thwarts Cady’s attempts to connect with her love interest, Aaron, who is Regina’s ex-boyfriend.  But soon Cady loses her way and is seduced by the power and popularity of being one of the Plastics.

The initial song “A Cautionary Tale” sung by Janis and Damian, foreshadows the plot with the telling lines “How far would you go to be popular and hot”, and “Mean is easier than nice”. Regina is introduced with my favourite song on the musical, “Apex Predator” which compares her to a wild beast like the ones Cady would be familiar with in Africa.  Janis starts the song by conveying warnings such as “She’s the queen of beasts, she can smell your fear” while Cady realizes the advantages of being associated with Regina by singing “I’m in her pride, I have hitched a ride, with the apex predator”.

While the plot of the musical follows the movie quite closely, there have been some not-too-subtle changes which modernize a few scenarios and address current sensibilities and political-correctness touchpoints.  The most obvious change between the 2004 movie and the 2018 Broadway musical is the advancement of the Internet, social media and the use of cell phones where phone calls have evolved into texting. In the movie, to bully a rival, Regina (played by a young Rachel McAdams) uses her cell phone to call and speak to the girl’s mother.  This scene obviously did not make it into the musical.

Yet, one anachronistic element of the movie that is retained in the musical is the “burn book”, a pink-covered scrapbook of nasty slurs, rumours and disses that the Plastics use to disparage their enemies or those they consider beneath them. Having an actual physical book seems out of place in our online world.  But the book is so integral to the plot and so prominently visible to a live audience that I guess it was important to keep it.

The musical further pushes the movie’s themes of female empowerment and anti-bullying rather heavy-handedly by invoking references to #MeToo. At one point in the musical number “Stop”, Karen sings about being convinced by a boy she liked to send him nude photos which he then posted on the Internet.  Stopping the song (pun intended), she awkwardly throws in the comment that “Someone should teach boys to not do that in the first place”. This elicits the obligatory cheer from the audience but totally takes you out of the flow of the song.  The initial set design at the start of the show mimics pages from the Burn Book (or they could be interpreted as Instagram posts) with mean comments like “Saggy Boobs”, “Carol & Lucas Still Virgins”, “Masturbated with a Frozen Hot Dog”.  By the curtain call, after lessons were learned by all, the pages take on affirming messages like “Teen Female Power”, “Respect”, “Dignity”.

Mean Girls is a fun musical with great, upbeat songs that propel the plotline and good choreography. I found the sound to be too loud which muffled the lyrics being a sung and the words being spoken.  Good thing I listened to the soundtrack before watching the show, so I had an idea of what to listen for.

Our final Mirvish show to wrap up 2022 is another musical based on a movie, which in turn is based on a true story. Fisherman’s Friends is a folk music group hailing from Port Isaac, Cornwall, England, who sing traditional songs of the sea. The group is comprised mostly of fishermen, coast guards and lifeboat-men whose voices blend in beautiful harmony. Starting in 1995, ten friends sang together as an a cappella group, regularly performing on the Port Isaac Platt (harbour) with the waves of the Atlantic Ocean crashing behind them.  In 2010, they were discovered while singing on the Platt and were signed to a million-pound contract with Universal Music Group, a major record label.  Their first album debuted at #9 on the UK charts, going gold by selling over 500,0000 units. They have since released four more albums, sang for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012 and toured both at home and abroad.  In the intervening years, band members have come and gone, and the number of members in the group has fluctuated. With the addition of new members who play guitar and accordion, the group has added instrumentation to their performances.

The earlier albums consisted mostly of famous old sea shanties. A sea shanty follows a pattern of call and response, where the shanty man or lead singer belts out the main lyrics of the song, to which the remaining members sing a repeated chorus in unison. The group seems to rotate the role of shanty man from song to song.  Some of the more popular shanties and the ones I like the best include Drunken Sailor, Nelson’s Blood, Wellerman, John Kanaka and Keep Hauling.  Most of these shanties are lively, foot-stomping jigs, sometimes with humorous lines such as all the suggestions about “What will we do with a drunken sailor?”.  The Cornish accent is also prominently heard in the songs, such as when they sing the word “early” and it is pronounced as “er-lie”.

Fisherman’s Friends also sing slower, soulful songs that describe hard times in Cornish history and the dangers of the sea. The folk song Cousin Jack, written by English folk-rock performer Steve Knightley, is based on an 1860 poem describing the 19th century Cornish miners who were known as “Cousin Jacks” who emigrated abroad looking for work.  Proportionately, Cornwall lost more of its population to this emigration than Scotland or Ireland. Wistful lyrics describing this loss include “Where there’s a mine or a hole in the ground, that’s where I’m headed, that’s where I’m bound ... I’ll leave my country behind, I’m not coming back”.

A beautiful, haunting song called Widow Woman was written by Fisherman’s Friend members Bill Hawkins, Jon Cleave. It describes the local legend of a tragedy that occurred in Port Quinn, a neighbouring cove near Port Isaac.  As the story goes, all the men of Port Quinn were out at sea herring fishing when a huge storm blew in, drowning the entire fleet and making widows of every woman in the village.  In some tellings there were 24 widows while in others, there were 32. The song Widow Woman starts with the lyrics “Why do you sit widow woman? Why do you stare out at me?” as if the sea itself is posing the question.

In 2019, a U.K. movie also called Fisherman’s Friends was released, loosely based on the group’s rise to fame.  To add drama and romance to the plot, the movie adds a slick, cynical London music executive named Danny who discovers the group and becomes their manager.  It then throws in a love interest for him in Alwyn, a feisty fisherman’s daughter and mother to her own a cute young daughter. The movie follows the traditional romantic comedy clichés of the “meet cute”, and the “boy meets girl, boy loses girl and boy gets girl back” trope. Amidst the romance were a few other fictional plotlines including the local bar being deep in debt, Danny’s struggles to get a record company to give the group a chance, and the death of one of the elder members of the band.

Throughout the movie, songs are sung by the Fisherman’s Friends, with the real members augmenting the singing of the actors. It depicts the group singing on their lobster trawlers, on the Platt, in the Port Isaac church while recording a demo and in various locations in London while trying to secure their big break.  The film was well received, and a sequel subtitled “One And All” has just been released in November, 2022.  The saying “One And All” (perhaps a riff on “All For One and One for All” from the Three Musketeers?) is a tenet that the group stands by and is the title of their second commercial album.

In 2021,a live musical of Fisherman’s Friends debuted in Truro, Cornwall before heading to Toronto to play at the Mirvish Theatre in 2022.  It is of note that the show has come to Toronto without first debuting on London’s West End. The musical closely follows the general plot and characters in the movie with a few differences. The role of Alwyn’s daughter has been dropped, since it did not make sense to have a child actor in the cast for eight shows a week when her character did not really contribute to the storyline.  The reason for Danny coming to Cornwall has been extremely simplified for the musical (arriving on vacation) compared to the movie (attending a stag party where he is pranked into trying to sign the Fisherman’s Friends to a record deal).  In both cases, Alwyn’s father Jim is initially against trying for a record deal, but the motivations are different.  In the movie, it is merely suspicion of outsiders and a desire for to maintain the status quo of their simple but content life, while the musical alludes to Alwyn’s wayward mother who deserted the family in search of fame and fortune as a singer in London.

The musical opens up with some creative staging using ropes and pulleys to simulate a fishing boat swaying through rough waters while the shanty "Keep Hauling" is sung.  It is interesting to note that along with The Shark is Broken, this is the second show of the 2022/23 Mirvish season that involves staging of a boat on water.  In Fisherman's Friend The Musical, the boats return for two more scenes including a thrilling sea search and rescue sequence that involved fog and search lights.

As with any adaptation from film to live musical, there are many more songs and sea shanties to fill out the show, and it is not just the Fisherman’s Friends members who are singing.  The main female characters including the bar owner’s pregnant wife, Alwyn’s grandmother, and especially Alwyn (who is now an accomplished guitar-strumming singer in her own right), get to perform a few numbers. Not quite the typical musical or even the typical jukebox musical, the lyrics of songs make no attempt to advance the plot, which usually is a must for me to enjoy a musical. But as a "bio-pic" musical, the shanties are integral to lives of the Fisherman's Friends and so joyful to listen to,  that it didn’t matter.

Given the feel-good origin story of the real group, it is not a surprise that both the movie and the musical are fun to watch and leave you with a warm, happy feeling while you exit the theatre humming or singing the words to catchy sea shanty tunes.

Theatre 2022: CanStage - Choir Boy, Little Dickens

Towards the end of 2022, we watched two shows at the theatres owned by the Canadian Stage Company. We always need to take care to check which theatre our shows are playing at, since the Bluma Appel Theatre (on Front St. between Yonge St. and Church St.) and the Berkeley Theatre (near Front Street and Parliament St.) are a good 13 to 15 minutes' walk apart.  Showing up at the wrong theatre would not be an easy mistake to recover from.

Choir Boy is a play first performed in 2012 in London, England and then on Broadway in 2018.  It is a coming-of-age story revolving around five members of a prominent gospel choir at a prestigious all-black school for boys. Pharus, the self-proclaimed best singer and leader of the choir is an effeminate, gay senior whose brash and sassy façade hides a hurt and vulnerable young man who has battled homophobic slurs ever since he was a child.  Bobby, the headmaster’s nephew, is Pharus’ rival for the choir lead, and never misses an opportunity to harass and denigrate his nemesis.  But Pharus finds refuge in the “healing power of music” and takes solace in his belief in his own talent amidst the pressures to conform to social norms.  He is not afraid to push buttons to promote his own ambitious agenda, even when it invokes jealousy and pushback from others like Bobby.

The other members of the choir include “Junior”, who is Bobby’s sidekick and acts as comic relief, David, who intends to become a priest but struggles with his own demons as well as with issues trying to please a strict father, and Anthony, Pharus’ athletic and self-confident roommate, who is generous and accepting of Pharus’ queerness, in strict contrast to Bobby’s reactions.  In the current cast of this show, each of the five choir boys is a well-defined character with very distinctive personality traits and even physical appearance.  It is interesting to note that in an original 2013 staging of the show for Manhattan Theatre Club, there were more boys in the cast. Based on what I saw in Youtube clips, the extra boys were more backup singers and dancers for the musical numbers as opposed to additional characters who contributed to the plot.  I like that the current version of the show focuses on just the five main characters, as I would have found the extra ones to be distracting.

Integrated between dramatic discussions and arguments about identity, ambition, privilege, racism, slavery, and homophobia are beautiful performances of spiritual hymns, sung a capella by the choir in perfect harmony. The only song that sounded familiar to me was “Motherless Child”, and only because John Legend released a jazzy, pop version of it. In Choir Boy, this haunting slave song that laments being taken “a long, long way from home” is sung by the boys while they are in the showers of their dormitory.  In a feat of superb staging, the boys are shown seemingly nude, each behind a frosted shower door, with actual water coming out of the faucets and a horizontal strip of tiles strategically obscuring their private regions. Both symbolically and physically stripped naked of their defenses, this powerful song conveys an extra sense of vulnerability, sorrow and suffering.  This setting plays an important role in a climactic scene towards the end of the show.  This is a deep and thought-provoking play, made even more special by the glorious, soulful choral singing.

We have wanted to watch a marionette show by the renowned Canadian puppeteer Ronnie Burkett for quite some time now.  We finally got our wish with Little Dickens, a raunchy re-telling of The Christmas Carol which comes with the warning that children under age 16 will not be admitted! 

For over 40 years, Burkett has been designing and building his intricate marionettes, as well as writing and performing his own shows that are designated for “adults only”.  Burkett provides all the speaking and singing voices and controls the marionettes while in plain sight, hovering above the “puppet stage” on “the bridge”.  We had the perfect seats to watch Little Dickens, in the centre of the third row from the stage.  We could clearly see Burkett's spread-out fingers manipulating the strings of up to two marionettes at a time. More puppets could be on stage but the ones he was not actively moving were hung loosely from stands protruding from the bridge. It was amazing to watch his dexterity as he could make the head, limbs and occasionally even props move separately or simultaneously, all while providing dialogue for the puppets that propelled the storyline.  It was incredible to witness the energy and stamina that he exerted in singlehandedly carrying on the show for almost two hours without intermission.

Recipient of many awards and honours including the Order of Canada, Ronnie Burkett became fascinated with puppets at an early age.  He was inspired by the puppet show in classic 1965 movie musical The Sound of Music and idolized Bill Baird, the puppeteer behind that iconic scene.  Ronnie confessed in an interview for the Theatre Museum Canada that as a child, he had written to Baird several times offering to move in with him in order to learn from him.  Baird never responded. Burkett laughed ruefully and said that if some random kid wrote to him today offering to come live with him, he would not respond either!  Ronnie eventually did get to perform in New York with Baird’s puppet theatre company.

Earlier in his career, Burkett would write shows with fixed scripts and plots while creating the puppets that would animate each story.  In 2013, he came up with a new concept called “The Daisy Theatre” which involved a set up over 50 marionettes who would perform a show that included vaudeville, burlesque and cabaret acts, but was largely improvised and included audience participation.  Each performance would be different and partially dictated by the reactions of the crowd.

Little Dickens combined his two concepts, using the basic outline of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but casting his Daisy Theatre puppets to play the main characters of the classic tale, as well as some periphery roles that went beyond the well-known story. To set the tone, the first scene of the show featured a mainstay marionette act of the Daisy Theatre. The sultry striptease artist Dolly Wiggler performed a burlesque act while singing the highly sexually suggestive song “Santa Got Stuck in my Chimney”.  As she strutted back and forth across the stage, she would peel off another layer of clothing until she was down to her underwear and pasties. Getting on with the Christmas Carol storyline, another stock puppet character, Esme Massengill, the selfish, self-aggrandizing has-been actress, took on the role of Scrooge.  Other members of the Daisy Theatre entourage played roles such as the alms collectors, Bob Cratchit and the ghosts of Christmas past and present.  Other than Esme, the star of Little Dickens is also the star of the Daisy Theatre.  It is Schnitzel, the tiny elfin fairy-child, playing the role of Tiny Tim complete with a limp and a crutch.  Burkett’s skill was on full display as he manipulated the marionette across the stage, working the arms, legs and crutch with perfect timing.

Supplementing the characters from the main story were various vaudeville acts including a ventriloquist, a Frank Sinatra impersonator, a song by grandmotherly, small-town Alberta redneck Edna Rural dressed up as a Christmas Tree, and even a comedy schtick by no other than Jesus!  There are no boundaries that Burkett does not dare cross! Interlaced between the dialogue are curse words and lewd jokes such as listing all the Christmas carols with the words “come” in the lyrics (All Come all Ye Faithful, Here Comes Santa Claus, Baby Please Come Home for Christmas …).  “I could go on all night”, Burkett quips.

As is common in the Daisy Theatre, there was scenes requiring audience participation. One woman sitting on the front row was asked to come on stage to wind the box that would make a series of “orchestra puppets” pop up and play the background music to Jingle Bells while the rest of the crowd was encouraged to loudly sing along.  In that same skit, a socialite puppet waxed poetically about her shirtless pool-boy Ray. A man on the aisle was persuaded to come on stage to play the part of Ray while wearing a Santa hat and jingling sleigh bells.  Burkett teasingly instructed him to take his sweater off to properly play the role and incredibly, he did (probably to the horror of his wife!).  Being a great sport, this man pranced around shirtless, ringing his bells while we continued to lustily sing the last verses of Jingle Bells.  Afterwards, I leaned over to my husband Rich and whispered, “This is why you never sit in accessible seats and never make eye contact to avoid being picked”.  In another scene, a witch puppet tried to take on the part of one of the Christmas Carol ghosts and was told that the audience would not go for this and would swear at her.  Then en masse, the audience was instructed to yell “F***-you Debbie” at the puppet.  This was probably a common routine of the Daisy Theatre improv shows but it was not clear if our crowd would participate.  When the time came, our entire group yelled out the curse and then roared with laughter as the puppet slunk back off stage.  Another man came on stage to flip lyric cards that prompted us to sing along to the carol "Deck the Halls".  Burkett feigned disappointment when this new volunteer declined to take off his shirt.  After his stint, Ronnie asked the man's wife to come up to play the non-speaking role of the Ghost of Christmas Future, giving her a black robe and a skeletal arm as props. Her job was to point "over here" and "over there" based on verbal cues from Esme, but being sure not to block the puppet with her arm.

Attending and participating in this show in English pantomime style was so much fun and such a unique experience.  After the initial fascination in watching Burkett manipulate the puppets, you eventually get immersed in the show and just watch the marionettes as they act out the story. For most of the show, the action was fast-paced and joyful and hilarious. It was a good thing that we picked a show that was at least partially based on a well-known story like A Christmas Carol, since it gave us some familiarity and structure to follow as we took in the rest of the craziness that accompanied it.

The only part that didn’t work that well for me was the finale where the Christmas Carol part of the story was wrapped up too quickly and unsatisfactorily and then the show slowed right down to try to deliver an “emotional” ending. Schnitzel delivered a speech thanking the audience and then was joined by Esme and Edna to sing a final inspirational song. The ending zapped the energy out of the show and felt like a bit of a letdown to me after everything that came before.  Still, overall I loved the puppetry and would like to see another Ronnie Burkett production.

Theatre 2022: Crow's Theatre - Red Velvet

 Crow’s Theatre is located in the east end of Toronto, at Carlaw St.and Dundas St. East, far away from the downtown theatre district that is dominated by Mirvish-owned theatres.  Crow’s Theatre seems to specialize in avant-garde productions, often with very innovative staging set up in its two performance spaces. In 2019, when we watched The Flick about ushers in a movie cinema, we walked into Crow’s main space to find stadium seating where the stage would normally be, mirroring the stadium seating that represented our seats for the show.  In 2020 when we watched Julius Caesar (just before everything shut down for the pandemic), we were in that same theatre but sat in stadium seating in the round while the action took place at floor level.  We watched Red Velvet, as the final production of 2022 and found a traditional stage setup. We plan to watch two other shows next year and are interested to find out how they will be presented.

The play Red Velvet is based on real-life events that led a black man to take on the titular role in Shakespeare’s Othello at London’s prestigious Theatre Royal, Covent Gardens in 1833. The part of the Moorish military commander was originally played, in blackface, by British actor Edmund Kean (1787-1833), considered the most famous stage actor of the time.  Kean was starring in the play alongside his son Charles, who was cast as his duplicitous advisor and nemesis Iago.  When Edmund suddenly fell collapsed on stage during a performance and died shortly after, Theatre Royal’s manager Pierre Laporte controversially hired African American thespian and noted Shakespearean actor Ira Aldrige (1807-1867) as Kean’s replacement.

Aldridge started acting at age 15 in New York City but since black actors were not well-received in the United States, he moved to England.  He played Othello in a small London Theatre when he was 17, becoming the first black actor to take on the role. He was also an abolitionist who often spoke out against slavery. Aldrige continued to star in abolitionist dramas as well as Shakespearean plays across Europe.  By the time of his death in 1867 in Lodz, Poland, Ira had become an acclaimed and award-winning stage actor who acted alongside white actresses, despite facing racism throughout his career. Both Edmund and Charles had met Aldridge and supported his career, prior to Aldrige filling in as Othello following Edmund’s passing.  Unfortunately, the British press were not as generous and Ira only lasted for two performances before the show was canceled, receiving undeservedly scathing and racist reviews. 

Not many details have been documented about this brief period when Aldrige stepped in as Othello at Covent Gardens. Playwright Lolita Chakrabarti’s work Red Velvet takes the basic facts and re-imagines what might have happened during this time. In her play, Aldridge joins an all-white cast who regard him with varying degrees of unease, fear, and even racist hate. Using dramatic license to add conflict to the situation, Edmund Kean is merely ill, not dead, Charles Kean now plays Cassius instead of Iago, and his fiancé Ellen Tree has the role of Desdemona. Charles assumed that he would take over the role of Othello and is appalled and aghast that it was assigned to a black man instead!  In real life, Charles and Ellen Tree did act together and eventually married but there is no indication that she was in the play with Ira.

Ira Aldridge comes across as a confident, talented actor who espouses realism in his style of acting. In a scene where Othello confronts Desdemona about her supposed affair with Cassius, Aldrige roughly manhandles Ellen (with her permission).  Having a black man touch a white woman in this way, even if it is just acting, is not well received. The reviews by the British Press are damning and lead to Aldridge’s termination after a bitter argument with Laporte, who had championed Ira’s hiring in the first place. It is strongly implied that Pierre Laporte is a closeted homosexual and there is a distinct homoerotic feel to the interactions between the two men.  I’m not sure if this was also added in for dramatic purposes, as nothing that I have read supports this.  In their argument leading to Aldridge’s firing, Laporte hints at his own burdens in overcoming the stigma of his sexuality in order to succeed in his field.

One interesting character is the black servant Connie, whose job it is to serve tea to the actors. Although she is prominently positioned at the back but smack-dab in the centre of the stage, she does not speak through most of the show.  Connie silently fulfills her duty as tea-lady, but visibly reacts to discussions about slavery and abolition, and the overt bigotry shown to Ira by some of the other cast members. Even the more liberal characters who claim to support the end of slavery basically treat her as a slave who is at their beck and call.  Her reactions are magnified as she listens to the horribly racist theatre reviews that are read aloud by the cast, and she doggedly tries to protect Ira and hide the newspapers from him when he demands to see them.

The events of 1833 in Covent Gardens are told in flashback and are bookmarked by scenes of an aged Aldrige in Poland, 1867, just prior to his death. He is getting ready to play King Lear and it is ironic that he is shown putting on white makeup and white gloves to hide his dark skin, doing the opposite of what Kean did to play Othello.  The show starts off with two characters speaking German(?) for several minutes before Aldrige appears and we learn that the woman is a female reporter who has barged her way into his dressing room in hopes of an interview.  The misogyny that she deals with in trying to gain respect from her male colleagues is set up as a parallel to the racism that Aldridge has endured.  In answering her questions, Ira reminisces about the events of Covent Garden, setting the crux of the play into motion.

This was an interesting and enjoyable play that taught us about an important time in theatrical history, while addressing racism, homophobia and misogyny.  That is quite the accomplishment for one evening of entertainment.