#Little theatre reviews professional

The Coppergate Woman is York Theatre Royal creating a new community production with an almost clean slate – the only ‘remainers’ are Juliet Forster and John R Wilkinson (co-directors on this), with Sara Perks brought in as Set Designer, in a theatrical landscape that is profoundly different to the one that existed in pre-pandemic days. It is wrong to lay claim to another battalion’s victories, and to make connections with what has gone before is misleading.

#Little theatre reviews professional

The Chief Executive has changed, in place of an Artistic Director there is now a Creative Director – a disparate entity, and the make-up of the tried and tested, and very accomplished, team of professional creatives that carried through each of those productions has completely gone. Some of those productions have been done in promenade, some have revolved around inspiring landmarks of the city, some have seen a number of those community casts go on to fulfilling professional careers, and some have had incredible ongoing projects emerge from them, but it is fair to say that all were created during the tenure of a very different theatre profile than the one that is in place today. York Theatre Royal has a proven track record of producing huge, glamorous, and truly brilliant, high profile shows that involve both professional actors and community participants in complete synergy with each other. The publicity surrounding The Coppergate Woman has touted York Theatre Royal’s long association with community theatre. Sunday, Sept.By Elizabeth Stanforth-Sharpe, August 2022 There is a slightly different and quite satisfying ending to the play.ħ:25 p.m. In real life, Rothko broke his agreement and never delivered the paintings.

Throughout the play, the two look at and talk about paintings the audience can’t see, but finally they hang up a blank canvas and the two of them together prime it with bright red paint in choreographed movement as a Mozart sonata plays on Rothko’s turntable. There is brilliant dialogue that will ring true to anyone who knows the history of modern art, such as the scene wherein Ken berates Rothko for his disdain to the new, young artists, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, saying that just as Rothko’s generation had been the dogs that respected and admired Matisse and Picasso but had to kill them off, Stella and his contemporaries were the new dogs that were killing off Rothko and the Abstract Expressionists. Rothko did commit suicide a decade later in 1970.

As per example, at one point in the play, Rothko talks about Jackson Pollock’s suicide as a heroic act and he inadvertently slips in a word about his own pending suicide, which he quickly backtracks, insisting he didn’t say it and Ken must have misheard. They believed in and perpetuated the myth of the artist as a troubled genius. To the Abstract Expressionists, art was a baring of one’s soul. As he paces the studio making sometimes outlandish pronouncements about art and life, the audience gets a peek into the inner workings of this complex and troubled artist’s mind. Valcho portrays the artist as pompous, grandiloquent, autocratic, proud and abusive. Tuttle displays subtle acting skills as he portrays the young man’s gradual transformation from a fearful idol worshiper to a man with a mind of his own - and strong opinions about art that clash with Rothko’s ideas. The audience sees him cowering, afraid to speak, but gradually he becomes stronger, surer of himself and he confronts the volatile artist. As Tuttle-Gates portrays him, Ken is at first enamored of Rothko, a hero of the Abstract Expressionist movement. It is a tour de force for actors Christopher Valcho as the painter Mark Rothko and John Tuttle-Gates as his studio assistant, Ken, and for director Jim Patrick.Īt an hour and a half with no intermission, this verbal sparring match between Rothko and Ken takes place entirely in Rothko’s painting studio over a period of two years as the painter works on the largest commission of his career, 600 square feet of paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York. John Logan’s dramatic two-man show Red at Olympia Little Theatre is engaging, intelligent and highly intense.