Catherine Bennett resumes the weekly look at the performing arts world, with the sad end of Jerusalem, the luck of a cabbie, and French revolt. Do you hear the people sing?
Adam Alcock reviews Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons and his own Four Elements at York Opera House.
Catherine Bennett highlights the trends in the performing arts world today.
Jonathan Cridford reviews 'Ghosts', one of the Freshers' plays for this year.
The theme of this week’s show was ‘archaeology’ (with just a dash of Indiana Jones) which led team captains Dan Wood and Tom Crowley around an imaginative, ancient world along with their respective teammates, Katherine Timms and Ian Angell. On their journey, tasks ranged from insulting each other using objects suggested by the audience (green toasters, fishhooks and Google were used with varying degrees of success) to re-enacting scenes from films in a foreign language during the in-flight movies; the team captains were pretty convincing as French actors, but a Chinese interpretation of Inception was, well, slightly dubious, to the hilarity of the audience.
Crucially, as with all improv-based games, audience participation was a key element here. Instigating a real-life version of ‘Guess Who’ the teams had to identify the member of the audience with a clue to the Booty’s whereabouts. This deviated slightly from the original game, with team members asking more insightful and subjective questions such as "Does the person have elaborate facial hair?" and "Does the person look like they would enjoy a good slice of Stilton?" (it was a “no” to both of these). During the show, not all of the quips may have hit the mark, as is expected of improvisation, but Joke of the Evening came during an 'Invent A Plague' round – essentially a pun free-for-all (Plaque Plague, Plaguarism, yep, it was all there) – which was deservedly won with Katherine Timms’ catchy suggestion of ‘Plague David’.
In truth, the technology didn’t always behave itself (at one point, the house lights didn’t come up, eliciting the host’s command "Just close your eyes and pretend!") and the music didn’t always arrive on cue, but in a way this lent itself to the barminess and spontaneity of the show. The evening was finished off with a round that already seemed to be a firm favourite with the audience – Ballad of Wikipedia - where both teams composed a song based off a designated Wikipedia article. Following some minutes of both teams’ enthusiastic singing and/or mumbling, accompanied by (improvised) electric bass, Dan Wood’s team were the overall winners with a heartfelt ditty about incandescent light bulbs. A great end to a slightly eccentric, if not thoroughly entertaining, evening.
What happens next to the Got Booty teams? Toddle along to ‘Got Booty and Beyond’ in Week 7 to find out!
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