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My Mixed Day at MTFest: The Assassination of Katie Hopkins & Soapdish

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It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are (finally) looking at two works in progress I saw at MTFest a week or so ago and hoping that creatives make the necessary fixes as needed.

Let me first state for the record that MTFestUK is a phenomenal project, a weeks-long showcase of new musical theatre works and works in progress. In a city where new musical theatre talent and ideas can easily take a backseat to big shiny commercial ventures at the expense of artistry, this platform gives a much-needed boost, hopefully towards a full-fledged production, to creativity and originality. London needs to nurture more original and innovative musical theatre and more undersung talent, so this festival rocks.

I had time to see two shows during this festival, The Assassination of Katie Hopkins (AKH) and Soapdish. I had low expectations for the former, as it’s a new-to-me creative team and it sounded either silly or too much and I just didn’t know about it. I had high expectations for the latter since it came from Stiles & Drewe and had a cast of super recognizable names. As they say about expectations or assumptions or what have you, the results were the exact opposite: AKH (I wish it abbreviated sensibly to ASS because that’s what she is) was incredibly impressive and has stuck with me, where Soapdish was almost offensive to me as a human person and is the latest entry in my How to Fix Your Show series. Let’s start with the good.

The Assassination of Katie Hopkins

Extremely relevant politically and socially, ASS AKH shows the aftermath of the imagined murder of Katie Hopkins, notorious far-right political commentator, English Trumpian, racist, bigot, stupidhead, and all around c-word. On the first consideration of this fictional event you’re like ‘eh all in a day’ but you know, it’s still a murder, and that’s bad. The show follows several threads of narrative post-event, with interweaving lyrics and melodies to show the connectedness of ‘different sides’ and all of our lives. There’s young intern Kayleigh (Bethzienna Williams), tasked with researching Hopkins for a human rights charity and finding herself somehow propelled to the spotlight as she sort of takes up Hopkins’ mantle. The path of this young lost person getting swept up in right-wing fanaticism in order to find her foothold in our society seemed so authentic, and it was cool (I mean not cool but you know cool) to see the radicalization of a girl for a change.

Other storytelling threads involve the increase in harassment for people of color who had nothing to do with the murder, as is the sad but super predictable result, like post 9/11 bullshit. One such target is Shayma (Maimuna Memon (who we LOVED in Ghost Quartet, put her in everything)), a paralegal at a big law firm who expects better from people but feels like she’s the only one recognizing so much of the tragedy happening constantly. Shayma has a history of being ‘problematic’ at her firm, because she was sexually harassed by a bigwig and got him fired, so she’s on thin ice because that’s how that works. (The firing is the only hard to believe part of this show, since big law firms love to just pay the victims hush money so they don’t have to discipline ‘important men’. Happens super frequently it’s astounding. FUN WORLD.) She serves as the voice of most conscience-having people, wondering if we are taking crazy pills as the rest of the world seems to move on from enormous tragic events after a single breath. The whole show gives a good voice to the idea of empathy exhaustion, an aspect I found quite moving.

I hope that in the full show, Kayleigh’s journey to the right-wing spotlight is shown as more of a progression rather than a jump, since that journey is really believable and important to discuss. I hope Shayma is given more to do (I mean just let her sing the whole time) to show the interplay of her story with the rest, because as it stands, her song about slaying dragons after a tube incident could be cut, as it didn’t flow with the rest of the show as I saw, but if it’s woven more fully into the narrative it would be great because that song was forking fire. A lot of the music (by Matt Winkworth and Chris Bush) is wonderful, actually, and a lot of it is haunting. There was one point when Shayma was singing the list of names from one horrific tragedy and she said ‘Victor’ at the same time someone was singing the word ‘victim’ and I almost gasped, it was gorgeous. I cannot wait to see this show as a full-fledged production; I think it has the potential to be incredible.

Soapdish

Boy oh boy, you big man, you boy. Based on the 1991 Sally Field movie, Soapdish is about soap opera darling Celeste Talbert who is America’s sweetheart onscreen and a real b word offscreen. Her younger costar schemes to knock her off her perch and become the star. And there’s a secret love child involved. So this all sounds super fun and should be ripe for the romcom musical treatment, but so far, this show felt way too amateur. I wouldn’t be so blunt about these sorts of progress report showcases but given the talent involved, I expected much more refined work. They need to chuck the score out the window and start over (but keep the two instances of good rhymes – future with suture and Brecht with expect; those were good). It was like rough draft of Mean Girls songs (and that’s saying something since the final version of Mean Girls has like one good song). No song passed the smell test.

Also, the lead character of Celeste (Louise Dearman) needs to be reconsidered. The whole thing is that she’s an awful monster in real life – at least that’s what the preshow introduction said – but she didn’t seem like a bitch at all; she just seemed sad and pathetic knowing that her days were numbered as she gets older. So after the score, my second big problem is that there is no consistency to the lead character. Why should we be interested in her younger costar’s attempt at a coup except to say that like, it’s kind of sad?

And that brings me to the biggest problem. This younger costar Montana (Laura Pitt-Pulford) uses the promise of sex to get the producer, David (Richard Dempsey), to go along with her shenanigans. I get that this was the movie plot, in 1991, but that is no excuse for having such a grossly sexist storyline. (See, e.g. Pretty Woman the Musical and how copying the movie is not an excuse to be shit.) Everything about this felt super icky and suuuper obvious that it was an all-male creative team. Look people, there’s a way to do old-fashioned storylines, and even sexist storylines, without actually having your show feel sexist. It was infuriating, this whole thing, even though LPP says the name ‘David’ hilariously – but like most good jokes they repeat it ad infinitum and thus run it into the ground, destroying the fun of it. Actually the ruining of a great bit of comedy might be the most upsetting part. And of course the fact that London audiences will eat this shit up, and did.

The only person who comes out on top is young Alice Croft, who has a voice like baby Laura Osnes and honestly I cannot wait to hear her sing full (improved) scores. 

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