Olivier-Award winner Tamsin Greig makes her musical theatre debut in the UK première of David Yazbek and Jeffrey Lane’s new musical comedy adaptation of Pedro Almodóvar’s Oscar-nominated film “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”. Directed by Tony Award-winner Bartlett Sher, and with an international cast that includes Ricardo Afonso, Marianne Benedict, Haydn Gwynne, Seline Hizli, Holly James, Michael Matus, Rebecca McKinnis, Sarah Moyle, Alastair Natkiel, Haydn Oakley, Jérôme Pradon, Nuno Queimado, Dale Rapley, Anna Skellern, and Willemijn Verkaik, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” will open at The Playhouse Theatre on 12 January 2015.
Author
Brit Es Magazine
Brit Es Magazine
Brit Es Magazine Editorial team at London, Edinburgh, Madrid and A Coruña.
Christmas, like childhood, is burdened by the melancholy that comes from knowing that it must eventually come to an end. But this melancholy is something that we only recognise as adults. No child feels it as they stand before the glow of the Christmas tree lights or listen to children’s carols. To feel it, you need to grow up, you need to lose someone and to realise that Santa doesn’t really exist. Although perhaps they can sense it somehow: my only unhappy memory of Christmas as a child is of thinking about the day we would have to take down the tree. A natural pessimist, I started the countdown on Christmas Day itself and the following day the three wise men met their tragic fate. Brit Es Magazine está creada por gente que vive fuera de su ciudad; algunos vuelven siempre a casa por estas fechas y algunos otros lo celebramos con las familias que nos hemos inventado en el camino.
Leonor Watling, the Spanish actress and singer (who has an English mother and a Spanish father) is without a doubt one of our most multitalented and driven actresses, creatively speaking. She jumps from one discipline to another as naturally as she does between her two mother tongues. Not only does she sing in the band Marlango, she has also brought us such characters as Elvira in “My Mother Likes Women” and that neighbour who S. Polley chooses to replace her after her death in Isabel Coixet’s moving “My Life Without Me”.
In a tourist-packed Puerta Del Sol, Madrid, a silver painted Jesus Christ (with his 8-year-old son, since it’s Dad’s custody time, of course), a green army man, SpongeBob Squarepants, an Invisible Man and Minnie Mouse, perform a heist on a pawn shop. The police arrive, capture the invisible man and Minnie Mouse, and gun down poor old SpongeBob. José (the silver Christ, played by Hugo Silva) and Tony (green army man, played by Mario Casas) hijack a taxi, driver and passenger included, and drive away, intending to escape to France. Before they can get there, though, they get stuck in a small border town called Zugarramurdi, home to a coven of evil witches led by Graciana (the always welcome Carmen Maura).
La Gran Familia Española (Family United) tries really hard to please everyone. With its pastel and gold palette, handsome cast in suspenders and Converse, a painful wedding entrance music montage to the sound of Calvin Harris’ Feel So Close and, of course, the backdrop of the almighty Spanish national team beating Holland at the South Africa 2010 World Cup Final, the film is really desperate to have in its poster one of those laurel encircled quotes saying something like “…feel-good movie of the year!”.
On a sunny London morning in February, we meet Jorge de Juan, Spanish actor, director and producer who came to live in London just a few months ago, following a long career in Spain. He tells us that in the short space of time since he arrived, he has been to see more than fifty plays in the capital. Amongst these, of course, are a handful of Spanish classics performed at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney.