Here & Now: The STEPS Musical – a gloriously silly production, a riot of colour, familiar tunes, and a jukebox story that engages as well as entertains (Grand Opera House until 31 January)

The brash cyan and pink supermarket costumes in the opening scene of Here & Now: The STEPS Musical hint that the full STEPS sensibility is on show. The story follows a group of supermarket workers who veer between being unlucky in love and unsure in romance.

Caz’s marriage is wobbling right at the point adoption seems like a possibility. Vel’s relationship has been on the end-of-line shelf for so long it’s rotting. Robbie’s struggling to find more than a one-night stand. And Neeta’s too shy to tell Ben how she feels. An upcoming 50th birthday sets a deadline for everyone to sort themselves out for a perfect summer of love. Until an existential curveball is thrown and the staff at Better Best Bargains face a very uncertain future and multiple tragedies.

Part of the success of Here & Now is its full and knowing embrace of the jukebox format. Snippets of lyrics are liberally dropped into the dialogue. Shoehorning the techno-country number 5,6,7,8 into a STEPS musical feels like it should be a challenge, but Shaun Kitchener’s book and Rachel Kavanagh’s direction manage to totally integrate the honky-tonk banger into the cut-price supermarket story.

With more shock twists than a special episode of Coronation Street, at various points in the plot, there are almost handbrake turns as a character turns around, makes a surprising revelation and then launches into a song. In a lesser quality production, the show could lose its sure footing. But in Here & Now, there’s a solid confidence that pulls off the unexpected with a peculiar panache.

Lara Denning is bright and bubbly as the shop floor mother figure Caz with a particularly emotive rendition of Heartbeat and a gorgeous trio with the vocally capable Jacqui Debois (Vel) and Rosie Singha (Neeta) in Scared of the Dark. One of the standout voices is Blake Patrick Anderson (Robbie) who shares a heartfelt duet Story of a Heart with River Medway … playing a drag queen who later sings astride a fleet of washing machines with built in glitter balls, though the dancers’ ICE-emblazoned shirts take a new twist given events in the US. The store manager is probably the most cliched character, though Sally Ann Matthews’ dead pan delivery of the faux French phrases Patricia is très fond of never fails to get a laugh.

Some songs start in a low key that doesn’t suit the register of cast members’ voices, but after a few mandatory modulations, everything comes right again. Throw in a running gag about the pineapple of destiny, dynamically choreographed dance numbers, and a string of well-known and well-performed less familiar songs, and Here & Now is a great success.

While the on-stage performers are giving it their all, musical director Georgia Rawlins in the pit is also giving her all, conducting the cast in and out of their parts, and gamely donning a stetson for 5,6,7,8 before jettisoning it in a beat between songs. Manolo Polidario’s guitar finger picking often cuts through and deserves a mention along with Katy Trigger’s very solid bass line that drives the poppy beat.

Other than the megamix at the end, this is not a STEPS concert. But the storyline and the deliberately cheesy use of the band’s back catalogue creates something very pleasing. It’s a gloriously silly production, a riot of colour, with familiar tunes and a jukebox story that engages as well as entertains. Here & Now: The STEPS Musical continues at the Grand Opera House until Saturday 31 January.

Photo credit: Pamela Raith 

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Nouvelle Vague – a satisfying dive into the world of early French New Wave cinema (Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 30 January)

As the last of his coterie of pals to make the dive into directing, film critic Jean-Luc Godard believes that it’s long past time to bring his own vision of cinema to the silver screen. Over 106 minutes we watch Godard persuade and cajole producer Georges de Beauregard to take a chance on him and then witness the disorganised process of shooting his debut feature.

With only a short film under his belt, Godard (played by Guillaume Marbeck) seeks out advice from numerous established directors, allowing us to see a hint of the genesis of his style of using the first or second take, letting his actors find inspiration in the moment, not overly worrying about continuity, filming guerilla style with passers-by becoming unwitting extras, throwing in jump cuts and liberally crossing the line with camera angles that will never match up in the edit.

While Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) works as a standalone film, for the princely sum of £3.50 any number of streaming services will allow you to watch the 1960 classic À bout de souffle (Breathless) beforehand, or in my case very soon afterwards. It’s widely regarded as a treasure of the early French New Wave movement.

Godard’s vision – if it is even as developed as that – is sustained by the craft of his cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), a war photographer with a flare for documentary-style shooting. Yet watch out for the fine details, like reflections in an actor’s sunglasses that bring a quality to the storytelling (and match scenes from the original film). The recreated scenes are a fine match for the original.

Aubry Dullin portrays actor Jean-Paul Belmondo who played the petty criminal and accidental cop killer Michel Poiccard in the original. Zoey Deutch stars as Jean Seberg, the actress who played Patricia Franchini, a student journalist selling copies of the New York Herald Tribune on the streets of Paris, and the romantic interest of Poiccard who he wants to join him in running away to start a new life.

Shot in moody black and white in Academy ratio to match the original film, Nouvelle Vague’s jazz soundtrack adds to the spontaneity of director Godard as he stumbles through an increasingly anarchic shooting schedule (“That’s all for today, I’m out of ideas!”) to assemble the parts necessary to make a film that has a few pages of treatment but no complete script.

Just as Marbeck captures the infuriating nature of the unphased director, Deutch depicts the exasperation of an actress bobbing about in a sea of chaos and reputational risk. Rising like a pillar of calm and preparation, assistant director Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Clery) emerges as the man who creates some of the beautiful touches that make the original film shine.

One character asks the question that is on the tip of every audience member’s tongue: “Are you making up how to direct as you go along?”

It’s only when you watch the original film that it becomes apparent that the crucial choice of hand-held camera and lack of sound synchronisation freed Godard to rearrange scenes and dub the dialogue on afterwards to create a cogent narrative.

Modern day director Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague is a fond look back at a pivotal moment in French cinema that changed so much and made it possible to break so many rules in the name of creating better art. It is being screened in Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 30 January.

 

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No Other Choice – a redundant worker spirals down a chute of catastrophe in a bid to regain employment (Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 23 January)

When Man-su is fired from the Korean paper mill, the former award-winning “pulp man of the year” is sure he’ll be back in work within three months. Park Chan-wook’s latest feature No Other Choice documents Man-su spiralling down a chute of catastrophe.

Feeling humiliated (at being out of work, heading in to mortgage arrears, and his wife (Mi-ri played by Son Ye-jin) needing to go back to work), Man-su’s desperation leads to him taking ever darker and more violent action to eliminate potential competitors from a job he’s chasing.

This dark satire celebrates the weirdness of job interviews, the virtuosity of his neurodivergent cello-playing daughter, the ineptness of police detectives, and tripping people up on their own bad karma. Two dogs and an endless sequence of well-sculpted scenes will surely make this another classic example of Korean cinema.

The send-up of capitalism easily sustains its tenor over 139 minutes with the satisfying but unpredictable dispatch of colleagues in the paper industry. By the end, we’re aware that while Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) has been depleting the available workforce, mechanisation and robotics are less dramatically human head count required to do the work he once so ably managed.

No Other Choice will be screened in Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 23 January.

 

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The Voice of Hind Rajab – an urgent reminder about a real-life tragedy that should not be forgotten (Queen’s Film Theatre until Wednesday 28 January)

Omar, a call handler at the Red Crescent office in the West Bank, receives an emergency request from a car in northern Gaza. There are few survivors in a car full of family who were fleeing their home in an area that Israeli forces had ordered to be evacuating. Ultimately a five-year-old girl is kept on the line while another Red Crescent official tries to negotiate a safe rescue mission. Tempers flare. Risks mount.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is Kaouther Ben Hania’s dramatisation of the real-life incident that weaves original audio from the recorded calls (with mother’s consent) – and later in the film, video captured in the Red Crescent office during a rescue attempt – to heighten the authenticity.

Motaz Malhees picks up the with empathy that Omar is consumed by as he tries to comfort and help the child in peril. Hind first suggests that the others in her car – her aunt, uncle and cousins – are “asleep” before admitting that she knows that they are dead. As day turns to evening, the girl tells the Red Crescent operators that “It will be dark soon, I’m scared”. Those are the child’s real words.

Over time, we realise that a cumbersome protocol’s ‘guarantee’ of safe passage – organised through the International Red Cross in Geneva talking to an Israeli Ministry who in turn make arrangements with the troops on the ground – has too frequently turned into a dangerous game of ‘Chinese whispers’ which has resulted in the deliberate or accidental death of rescuers.

Omar’s distress and frustration with the “coward hiding behind his desk” who can’t order an ambulance to make the eight-minute trip to the car is matched by the agonisingly slow manner of coordinator Mahdi (Amer Hlehel) who carries the guilt of previous failed missions.

The film never shies away from the reality questions of why the military would attack a civilian vehicle leaving an area as instructed. Why would anyone fire more than three hundred bullets into a car? Who would have the firepower to annihilate an ambulance? The ethics of the Red Crescent having to get Israeli permission and protection to rescue someone who had been attached by the Israeli military are also explored.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is one of a number of cinematic tributes to a five-year-old girl who is emblematic of so many other undocumented children and adult deaths in Gaza. It is not an easy film to watch. But in a month that features cinematic treats like Hamnet, Marty Surprise, Saipan and Sentimental Value, this is an urgent reminder about a real-life tragedy that should not be forgotten.

(Eighteen hours before watching a preview of this film, I’d watched on social media as friends of Renee Good reacted to her being fatally shot by ICE agents in Minneapolis. Subsequent reporting suggests that bystanders were prevented from giving medical assistance to Renee. Senior political figures continue to deny and contradict what video evidence depicts. The Israel Defence Forces denied having troops within firing range of the car; satellite imagery, along with the actual attack on the car and ambulance, challenges that claim.)

The Voice of Hind Rajab honours and memorialises the last hours of a child in Gaza. It’s being screened at Queen’s Film Theatre until Wednesday 28 January.

 

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