Fringe 2023 It's A Woman's World theSpaceUK 14th August Review
It’s a Womans World at theSpaceUK Triplex is set in Hollywood in 1953 and deals with the very real issue of how the big studios treated their female stars, and in particular their often very young female stars as youth was everything on screen.
This often meant that young teenage stars stayed exactly that, teenage stars, even though they were at times now often adult women approaching their thirties. The time between being a glamour queen and a mother or a maid on stage was a very short one, and to keep this aura of eternal youth and energy alive often a mixture of pharmaceutical supplements and cosmetic surgery was the norm.
Here we focus on one particular studio MGM and one man in particular, legendary studio mogul Louis B Meyer, and the often very restrictive contracts that legally bound them to not only the studio, but exactly what the studio wanted to do with them. Here we follow three women caught up in a trap that was impossible for them to escape from without devastating consequences for their career.
In It’s a Woman’s World we follow an already established studio star, now getting too old at 29 for her youthful roles, a new very young 15 year old star (all too often a thinly disguised story of Judy Garland) and a dancer with big dreams.
At first look, this show has the potential to work well and deal with a problem that is not only historical, but sadly still contemporary. Unfortunately, however, too complex a story line, too many characters and too many stage settings mean that its execution on stage is often muddled and confusing to watch as characters and different timelines overlap constantly with one another.
If you are performing any work of theatre in a small space then the rule of keep it as simple as possible so often works best. This is proven over and over with small casts (often one or two people) and a single stage setting giving us some of the great theatrical works of their time.
Keeping things simple, having a strong story line that gives characters real depth so that you both engage and care about them is essential to theatre like this. Unfortunately, the time constraints upon a Fringe show make it extremely hard to do this with so many different characters in this story and no matter how hard the cast may try, they are ultimately working with a two dimensional stereotype as their part.
I would have loved to tell you more about the cast and creatives behind this production, but this information was only available by scanning a QR code as you went in to see the show, and I do not have a smart phone. Another rule then for Fringe shows, make sure as many people as possible can get information on your production by as many different means as possible.
In short, too many ideas pushed into too small a time frame and theatrical space to make them work to anywhere near their full potential.
Review by Tom King © 2023
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
This often meant that young teenage stars stayed exactly that, teenage stars, even though they were at times now often adult women approaching their thirties. The time between being a glamour queen and a mother or a maid on stage was a very short one, and to keep this aura of eternal youth and energy alive often a mixture of pharmaceutical supplements and cosmetic surgery was the norm.
Here we focus on one particular studio MGM and one man in particular, legendary studio mogul Louis B Meyer, and the often very restrictive contracts that legally bound them to not only the studio, but exactly what the studio wanted to do with them. Here we follow three women caught up in a trap that was impossible for them to escape from without devastating consequences for their career.
In It’s a Woman’s World we follow an already established studio star, now getting too old at 29 for her youthful roles, a new very young 15 year old star (all too often a thinly disguised story of Judy Garland) and a dancer with big dreams.
At first look, this show has the potential to work well and deal with a problem that is not only historical, but sadly still contemporary. Unfortunately, however, too complex a story line, too many characters and too many stage settings mean that its execution on stage is often muddled and confusing to watch as characters and different timelines overlap constantly with one another.
If you are performing any work of theatre in a small space then the rule of keep it as simple as possible so often works best. This is proven over and over with small casts (often one or two people) and a single stage setting giving us some of the great theatrical works of their time.
Keeping things simple, having a strong story line that gives characters real depth so that you both engage and care about them is essential to theatre like this. Unfortunately, the time constraints upon a Fringe show make it extremely hard to do this with so many different characters in this story and no matter how hard the cast may try, they are ultimately working with a two dimensional stereotype as their part.
I would have loved to tell you more about the cast and creatives behind this production, but this information was only available by scanning a QR code as you went in to see the show, and I do not have a smart phone. Another rule then for Fringe shows, make sure as many people as possible can get information on your production by as many different means as possible.
In short, too many ideas pushed into too small a time frame and theatrical space to make them work to anywhere near their full potential.
Review by Tom King © 2023
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com