Black Martini
It’s all going down at the Black Martini Casino, manager Pippin Timmins flash in his wardrobe of striped silk shirts but highly strung over the unsustainable losses at the card tables courtesy of regular Mister Jones, married to the daughter of the owner and suspected of cheating, while at his own table Senator Blakey downs another cocktail before heading up to his room where more private personal entertainment awaits – miaow!
Rookie private detective Monk hired by Timmins to investigate Jones, his first awkward interview is with Mrs Jones who turns the tables and stacks the deck, plying the naïve sleuth with the Black Martini’s signature cocktail – a regular martini served with a black olive – and seducing him into her own plan cooked up with society dame Lady Spalding to ensure the passage of an equal rights bill which the (publicly) rigidly conservative senator is intent on frustrating…
Performed by Shotgun Theatre and written by Max Kroon and directed by Lauren Ewer, the cast of Black Martini are Will Usherwood-Bliss, Matt Page, Seb Tapp, Poppy Hall and Anna Powell as Timmins, Blakey, Monk, Mrs Jones and Lady Spalding, with Charlie Hollingworth serving all and seeing all from behind the bar as Peggy, the disreputable Mister Jones himself wisely keeping a low profile and the ensemble accompanied by a live six-strong band comprising guitar, bass, keyboards, saxophone, trumpet and drums.
With original songs composed by Tom Atkinson, the occasional dance number and Timmins going through more wardrobe changes than a Cher concert as he sweats through each shirt in his state of constant panic, the setting of Las Vegas is the sinful, sleazy seventies is high stakes and deep corruption, Mrs Jones lamenting how life has been cruel to her even as she tortures the hypocrisy of the senator with the truth.
Mrs Jones may have lost much but she still has a voice which she intends to use for the benefit of her sisters but while all the performers can sing well they are performing without amplification and are too often drowned out by the power of the band, failing to properly project and enunciate even in less competitive scenes of dialogue, anyone beyond the front rows of the sold-out house struggling to follow the shenanigans of the plot beyond the obvious duplicity, dubious alliances, debauchery and drinking.
Black Martini runs at theSpace on the Mile until Saturday 26th August
