Gilded Balloon

Aug 21-31

18:30

Jane Goodall – with a monkey

Ever wondered what an intellectually-bubbling coffee-shop girl dreaming of Broadway would do on a quiet morning at Central Perk – well Rebecca Perry’s Confessions of a Redheaded Coffeeshop Girl would be pretty damn close. With a dash of cabaret & a hint of the vaudeville, Perry’s rampant Canadian imagination flashes its way through a series of willowing scenes, painting detailed, photo-poetic portraits of her customers along the way.  The angle is she’s an anthropologist studying the punters in her ‘jungle’, along the way conjuring up an ideal boyfriend & a meeting with Bournemouth’s anthropological heavyweight, Jane Goodall.

There’s some great observations along the way, as when the plight of the typical coffee-shop girl’s aversion to seeing her ex-boyfriend is tortured every morning when he pops in for a barista on the way to work.  Every now & then she breaks out into jazzy songs, a little bit like that scene in Grease when a wistful Frenchy conjures up a kaleidoscopic dreamworld far from her saloon.  Of these numbers, the jangling classic, ‘Zing went the stings of my heart,’ was sheer lyrical & melodious ambrosia.

A slick, theatrical & accessible performance – she is at one hand girlie-fied chick-lit, & on the other a consummate family entertainer. Her characters are well-drawn & while all fluffy up front, beneath the show we have the Walter-Mitty-like undercurrent of those utopian worlds we real people all secretly dream about. FOUR STARS

****

Reviewers : Emily Oakman & Damo Bullen