| |
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
Perry Como's Christmas Cracker
The first touring show by Stan's Cafe and the only piece to have started as a script. The idea was knocking around before the company's formation. As with Memoirs of an Amnesiac and Canute the King which were to follow, it was forced to make a virture of the slender means on which it was made.
Rehearsed in the spare room of our rented house in Balsall Heath the two dimensional set was built from wood Graeme's Dad had ripped out when redoing his kitchen. The piece briefly toured venues in the south of England, the set strapped to the roof of Mark's volvo.
The notion behind Perry Como was simple.
Two hopeless entrepreneurs seek to earn a fortune by colliding the forms of pantomime and a nativity, hopelessly mangling the Christmas story in the process.
The attempt is doomed to failure, not least when Mary, apparently plucked from the audience, starts to go off script to perform something she feels to be more correct.
Although there were many cheap gags in the piece, its main interest was a formal one, the meta narrative of performing the staging of a performance which in turn is a collision of two mutually exclusive theatrical forms.
The response to its initial tour was encouraging enough to provoke a short run in MAC's Hexagon theatre a year later.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
