4 8 Living The Big Life In E15
A dazzling brilliant and original
musical which is bound to be a
success in 2005
sixty-something Jamaican lady (and personal friend
of Delia Smith, as she later reveals) mingles with the
audience before the show, mostly by pushing her
way along rows of seats causing maximum
inconvenience to all in her path – they can’t get
enough of it by the way – and then settling down
into one of the reserved boxes from where she
repeatedly steals the show by offering her random
musings on life, the universe and the vagaries of her
beloved Royston, and the conditions upon which
she permits him to enter her euphemistically-named
‘Gar-den of E-den’.
All this provides the perfect cover for scene changes
and always leaves the audience torn between the
pleasure of the main show and the desire for Mrs A’s
seemingly-unscripted offerings to continue. Later
gems, which I feel compelled to record for posterity,
include a guide to the differences between individual
Caribbean islands (“In Trinidad them kyan speak fi
singin, and as for Dominicans, me kyan unnerstand
a single word them say.”) to thoughts on Sharon,
the local prostitute, (“You wanna see her web page.
Lawks!”) and a plug for her allegedly- forthcoming
album Mature Heat featuring the hit single Sunday
Dinner, Monday Breakfast (of which we were given
a sneak preview rendition). Now that The Big Life is
transferring to the West End, Mrs Aphrodite should
surely be given a show of her own as well (perhaps
called The Big Wife).
The only reason that Empson doesn’t quite steal
the show is the remarkable talent of the on-stage
cast. Neil Reidman’s mellifluous tones (as Bernie)
are comparable to those of Nat King Cole and Harry
Connick Jr, with Yaa’s performance as Sybil comfortably
matching Reidman’s. Their duet, We Should Be
Together, brings to mind the haunting lyrical beauty
of Gershwin’s Summertime from Porgy and Bess.
This show is not just about the music, though.
Almost every song is accompanied by a toetapping dance routine, choreographed by
Jason Pennycooke who also appears in
the show, in the character of Eros, and
turns in a remarkably deft performance
wearing a stage-filling pair of wings which
in anyone else’s hands might well have