Imelda Staunton shines in Gypsy at Chichester Festival Theatre

Gypsy was another musical that I got dragged to because friends who live in Chichester wanted to see it and I was interested enough to give it a go.

I booked it some time in advance for a time that looked convenient (an empty Saturday afternoon) and then my diary filled up with a foreign holiday that finished on the Friday and a trip down to Weymouth on the Sunday. That made the trip to Chichester a flying one.

Reasonably prompt booking got me a good seat (Stalls C47) at a good price (£25) for a performance that was sold out, as much of the run had been.

I knew even less about Gypsy than I do about most of the shows that I go to. When booking I knew that it was by Sondheim and on the day I learnt that it was about Gypsy Rose Lee. And I thought that it might have been based on Carmen!

The arrangements at the Festival Theatre were significantly different from my previous visit and this time the orchestra was in a pit at the front of the stage. I do not know whether that is common practice there but I had mixed feelings about it; it helped the music but took the front of the stage out of play and made it more like a normal proscenium stage rather than a thrust stage.

The staging was bit of a problem throughout. I was just about OK in my seat, you can see the view I had below, but those more to the sides than me, and there were about ten seats to my left, would have missed some of the action. This production may have started at the Festival Theatre but it had clearly been designed for the London stage with a transfer in mind.

The story of Gypsy was a fairly simple one. A showbiz family with a reasonably popular vaudeville act, something like the Partridge Family, struggled to survive as fashions changed and the children grew up.

Driving the family and trying to keep the show on the road was their mother, Rose, played by Imelda Staunton.Somewhere along the way she picked up a man, Herbie played (unexpectedly) by Kevin Whately.

Gypsy Rose Lee only emerged from the act toward the end of the play and then by accident.  Gypsy was the story of how Gypsy Rose Lee was created and, as such, was a story about her mother, Rose. It was almost a one woman show.

And what a woman. Imelda Staunton was absolutely blistering as Rose as she rode the ups and downs of both a struggling showbiz life and a difficult family life. She could sing too. In one of her more optimistic moments she sang, Everything's Coming up Roses, the one song that I recognised.

I found Gypsy to be a fairly slight musical that was light on plot and on memorable music and it may even have been a disappointment if not for Imelda Staunton who made it something special with her mesmerising performance.

Guys and Dolls at Chichester Festival Theatre was a treat

This is probably the point that I ought to stop saying that I do not go to musicals generally as I seem to have been to rather a lot of them recently and even went as far as Chichester to see this one.

Guys and Dolls was similar to the last two musicals that I saw, Carousel and The Pyjama Game, in that I did not know it very much (if at all) beforehand but I was tempted by its reputation to give it a try.

This was only my second visit to the Chichester Festival Theatre, the previous one was in 1987 to see Wilde's An Ideal Husband with Joanna Lumley. Another visit was overdue.

Apparently the theatre had been refurbished since my previous visit but I had little recollection of what it had looked so comparisons were difficult.

The cafe was popular and I was lucky to get a seat. I would normally have stood but I needed to have something to eat and a vast slice of cake did the treat. The weather was good so a lot of people milled around outside which they must have been expected to do as the space inside was limited, and the seats even more so.

I had remembered that the stage and seating were arranged unusually and they still were. The stage had seating on three sides and the seating was arranged in oddly shaped sections around it.

The stage itself was more horse-shoe shaped than rectangular which helped to explain the unusual seating arrangement.

A late booking meant that the four of us were spread a little as I had had to book four separate seats, B40, B43, C47 and D50, all at £25 each. D50 turned out to be directly behind C47 and the couple sitting in B41/42 moved one seat along to allow us to take B40/41, so it all worked out rather well. This is the view I has looking towards the back of the stage waiting for the show to start.

I was there on the recommendation of one of the friends that I went with and knew nothing of the show beforehand other than having heard of it. I had not heard to the author, Frank Loesser, either. I was relying a lot on that recommendation.

Guys and Dolls was a neat little story of those perennial wars between goodies and baddies and, not surprisingly given the title, men and women.

The baddies were gamblers looking to take part in a large illegal Craps game and the goodies were the local chapter of the Salvation Army keen to recruit these lost souls to their cause.

The main players in the men v women battle were the man trying to organise the Craps game and his fiancee who were taking a rather long time to get to the altar, and the second pair were a top gambler and a young Salvation Army officer who came from different worlds but found themselves attracted to each other.

Adding to the tension were some seriously hard gamblers who would take very unkindly to the Craps game not taking place as planned and a local policeman keen to catch them all in the act. And then there was the senior Salvation Army officer looking to close that section down as it was not making any progress.

These tensions brought a lot of humour and the two main relationships added tenderness to the equation. So, despite the gangsters and ruffians, this was a light and happy story. The only song from the show that I knew, the uplifting "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat", was typical of the mood of the show.

That good mood was maintained by fine singing, good acting and a slick production that kept the story moving at a healthy pace with just a few props being used to define each location. It was all very professional in a good way.

The story duly reached its happy endings to the delight of the packed audience who had been thrilled with the spectacle. It was a jolly fine way to spend a Saturday afternoon.