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On the
prowl for life
Cougar – The Musical
Coventry Belgrade B2
****
WHY pillory lust when one can exult in it? This compactly directed,
amusing piece of nonsense is pure entertainment, and as such can be
enjoyed for its mild raunchiness, suggestiveness, cheekiness. It’s a
let-your-hair-down entertainment with some good albeit tame songs, all
well delivered with plenty of pzazz and panache. Serious? Certainly not.
Witty and amusing? All the way through. Overall, it’s one big giggle. Some of
the movement is really slick, at other times neat but a mite short on
invention (choreographer Racky Plews); but the fours characters and
musicians Neil MacDonald (Kurzweil keyboard) and Joe Pickering (drums)
maintain the pace, and the last two manage well, especially given their
gift for holding back and cutting down, which enables them to produce
far subtler musical effects, even with these minimal forces, than if
they had merely bashed away. These
three, Lily, Mary-Marie and Clarity, are essentially on the prowl (the
first song, of that title, was one of the best in the show.) The trio of
sex-starved norns (Pippa Winslow, Suanne Braun, Dawn Hope) not only
excel in their set pieces (Winslow poignant and engaging, Braun a
rhythmic pleasure, Hope a rich lower voice that worked wonders). They
interact well. They keep you lively. They make you laugh. Out of
nowhere they conjure a ‘younger’ man (Barnaby Hughes
Some of
the numbers – ‘Yes’, ‘Let’s talk about you’ hit the jackpot, and some
crazy gymnastics from Hope’s Clarity were brilliantly unny. So was her
pissed scene, pouring gin and bourbon down the hatch together. The other
two performances were skilled and enjoyable; she, with her range and
variety, was rather more of a revelation. ‘I’ve met
someone, he’s sexy, he’s hot…he’s my daughter’s age’ draws attention to
one drawback. It is virtually impossible to separate the hunky Hughes in
age from the rest of them. They are in their forties; he looks in his
30s. Given that Clarity (or whichever of them) is happy to go down as
far as, if not 18, then 19, all the perplexedness and keeping at arms’
length and – perhaps – yielding by the younger loses its cradle
snatching specialness. Buck holds
his own, interspersing a presentable falsetto here and there. ‘Love is
ageless’, sung with Lily, was another attractively sung song (her ‘Maybe
on this planet it’s a good thing exposing yourself to your son’ one of
the more interesting if near the bone observations); and when Mary-Marie
launches into a kind of central American bossa nova, we got another hit;
she can do Big Mamma, can do Hispanic: a performer of some range. So – not a
particularly serious or even meaningful show. Directed by Patricia
Benecke and written by Donna Moore, it was too punchy to be poignant. We
needed to be moved more, to get to grips with the loneliness that being
without a man brings. By being endlessly witty, it wraps us in laughs
but never, or rarely, hits that emptiness. So – nearly, but not quite.
To 06-06-15 Roderic Dunnett
19-05-15
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),
playing a series of young bucks or beaux, and proceed in their different
ways to gloat over his presentable six-pack and affable personality. The
jokes are rather mild for a sex-mad show: ‘If I can swagger then I can
shag her’ is one of the few blatant sex quips. ‘Oedipussy complex’
another. But Lily’s idea of setting up a ‘Faceliftbook’ website deserved
its laugh.