Gosforth Civic Theatre is an open secret, a hidden, community gem that formed the perfect setting to last night’s cabaret performance.
Enter Frognal & Fox, a pair of time-served actresses, acting up to middle age and leaning into their joint experience of bit parts, local theatre, soap opera walk-ons and ‘’dancing in their scanties’’ to pay their way between jobs. Combining their talents, they are here, on an ad hoc run, creating their own work for now.
North East based Jane Holman and Zoe Lambert created a joyous warmth, as the ripostes ricocheted amongst the reverie as we journeyed in time through friendship, past romances, professional rivalries and tales of mishap, mayhem and mischief.
Songs
Classics from the Great American Songbook and film scores evoked the backdrop to this retrospective, with Holman and Lambert accompanied by professional musician Declan Flannery. Songs included Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” from the show Gypsy, Stephen Sondheim’s wonderful ‘’Send In The Clowns’’ which had my companion and I gasping, and my favourite of the evening, Jane Holman singing that old childhood classic ‘’The Gnu’’.
Resilience & Rejection
More than humour and nostalgia, Frognal & Fox could have been renamed Resilience & Rejection; this was about how hard it is to make it in the arts, the dearth of regional arts funding and all too familiarly, the lack of availability of regional stories and low opportunity of roles for older women.
Written by Fiona Ellis and directed by Cinzia Hardy, Frognal & Fox is feel good theatre. Holman and Lambert sparkled like their sequinned dresses, imitating the life advice provided in the lyrics of the final song ‘’Sew on a Sequin’’: When faced with hard times, focus on the positives, for it’s the little things that ‘’bring you happiness’’.
Frognal & Fox – A Life In Song will be playing to venues across the North East and Cumbria as part of the Highlights Rural Touring Scheme. For more information and dates of future shows Here
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