With some 59 students to showcase from their three year BA (Hons) Acting course and one year Graduate Diploma in Acting course, the newly renamed Birmingham School of Acting (formerly the Birmingham School of Speech and Drama) has a devised a punchy and pacy way offer them all an effective moment in the spotlight.
The students are divided into two companies, the Red and Blue Companies, and their showcases are presented twice each in both London and Birmingham. So audiences are not expected to absorb all 59 students in one breathless rush but also have more opportunities for closer consideration within each showcase themselves.
After a short ‘window box’ presentation in which the complete set of students from each particular company have the chance to offer a lightning, one-minute character sketch that may be a little brutal in terms of the kind of rush to judgements they invite, the showcases then divide off. Call it promenade showcasing if you like - while one group performs musical theatre in the upstairs studio, for instance, another group performs contemporary extracts in Soho Theatre’s main house.
Then, while classical theatre takes over upstairs, two contemporary shows continue in the main theatre.The format offers audiences an ideal opportunity to follow students through different environments and genres. Of course, it’s inevitable that the audience obtains a selective picture of the talent that’s on offer but then it also recognises an eternal truth about the theatre - talent-spotting is about luck as well as judgement.
While the result is simply too populated and dense to offer comment on each student individually, particular students start to stand out from the crowd as you see them in different guises and disguises. The BA (Hons) Acting course offers some students the chance to follow a musical theatre pathway and that’s the path I took too, going upstairs to the studio for the musical theatre showing for each company.
These short compilations of songs from musicals familiar and unfamiliar over here positively burst with talent and refreshing momentum - there’s nothing like a winning song to win you to the talent of a young actor, too. While a quartet of girls for the Red Company took on a number from Barry Manilow’s Copacabana musical and the boys were introduced via a song from The Producers, solo and duo turns by each also invited a fuller consideration of what they were capable of and particular stand-outs here were Guy Mott with a powerful Pumping Iron from Starlight Express, Steven Walker with a superb turn from the Broadway show Parade and Faye O’Leary offering a beautifully sung My Brother Lived in San Francisco from the score to Elegies.
Continuing downstairs in the contemporary scenes, it was possible to see each of those students again in extracts from Blue Remembered Hills, Rupert Street’s Lonely Hearts Club and Our Country’s Good respectively, all of which confirmed their range and versatility. On the basis of his work in the musical showing, I would have also been intrigued to see Sam Millard in another guise but he was appearing in a classical show I couldn’t see.
From the Blue Company, it was intriguing to be able to follow Leah Shand, for instance, from musical theatre, in which she sang Oklahoma’s I Cain’t Say No with a feisty vigour, to a classical opportunity playing Gwendolen in an extract from The Importance of Being Earnest and on to a contemporary extract in Mark Ravenhill’s Sleeping Around. At its best, the format allows you to make an informed judgement, based not on one moment but a collective impression.
Mark Shenton
EXPERT CHOICE
For the Red Company:
JONATHAN ARUN (agent)
Nailah Cumberbatch
Guy Mott
For the Blue Company:
KRISTIN TARRY (TCG Management)
Eliot McDonald
Shirley Darroch
Soho Theatre, London, May 13, 14, 18, 19
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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