Tezza's Theatre Place

I’m terrible at flirting. It’s a fact of life and something I’ve had to accept over the course of many failed attempts to catch someone’s eye and get them to want me the way I want them. However, some people can flirt with words or even a glance. They can take the most innocent of sentences and load them full of innuendo and meaning. One such person was Hollywood icon Mae West and I recently had a chance to find out more about this particular screen goddess at a performance of  Better Than Sex  in the Toulouse Lautrec. Told as a first-person monologue, with piano accompaniment provided by Kieran Stallard, Mae (Bella Bevan) herself is on stage recounting her early life and completely blowing away everything I thought I knew about her. For a start, Mae was so much more than an actress from the 1930s. In fact, she was a singer, playwright, screenwriter, comedian whose entertainment career spanned seven decades and, even in her later years, remind a major sex symbol. Over the...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/195858/review-mad-as-hell-jermyn-street-theatre/ Vanessa Donovan and Stephen Hogan in Mad as Hell, credit of Eddie Otchere. There is always a frisson of real excitement when I find out the production I’m off to see is a world premiere. Knowing I will be one of the first people to view and comment on a show is both exciting and humbling at the same time. So, it is with some trepidation that I write about  Mad as Hell  receiving its world premiere at the Jermyn Street Theatre. In a Jamaican bar, a local girl is having a good time. Her name is Eletha Barrett (Vanessa Donovan) and works as a dance hostess with an enlarged moral sense. Yes, she will accept money to dance with men but that is as far as it goes. Sitting watching her is a middle-aged white guy (Stephen Hogan) in a rumpled suit. The two strike up a conversation and Eletha seems unimpressed with the man, even when he boasts that he is the renowned actor Peter Finch. Peter may be...