Guilty Pleasures

What do you do in your spare time when you are doing eight performances a week in Les Misérables? Well, if you are the multi-talented Josh Robson you form your own production company  - Blue Saint Productions – and you create a marvellous little one woman show with original songs, an excellent band (led by the composer himself) and a classy performance from Angelique Cassimatis.

Guilty Pleasures is short (45 minutes) and consists of five vignettes – stories about women who have killed the men in their lives. The writer (Robson) has been inspired by the humourously black “Cell Block Tango” and “Orange is the New Black”; but it’s also fair to say that the piece owes more than a little to Joanna Murray Smith’s Bombshells – though it is darker and funnier. Robson’s writing is deft and packs a punch, and his direction is simple but effective, aided by a terrific lighting design by Peter Amesbury.

The five vignettes are different enough to each provide interest and variety. There’s the midwestern housewife whose husband took her for granted until, in frustration, she shoots him through the back of the head….for which lyricist Chiarella provides the classic black humour line “His brains looked bigger on the wall.” There’s the wife of a man who becomes a monster when he starts working for “The Mob”. She tells us her story while chopping a head of lettuce – before chopping him. Add the good Jewish girl from New York who poisons her lover and his family; the obsessive stalker Nancy who chokes her artist lover on tins of paint, and – in a suprisingly moving and uncomfortable tale – the young migrant girl forced into prostitution who unwittingly kills with an axe the only man who cares for her while defending him from her pimp. All of these characters are beautifully performed by Angelique Cassimatis, dressed in all manner of clothes from the 1950s (where did they find the sensational girdle). She is quite spectacular and moves lithely like a panther through Amy Campbell’s excellent choreography. Even a move to put on a piece of clothing, or retrieve a prop, is choreographed to perfection. Then there is the music  - excellent songs by Tripolino and Chiarella. It is surely only a matter of time before these great composers reach the giddy heights of Broadway. With every outing their songs grow more sophisticated, both musically through Tripolino, and with the clever and witty lyrics of Chiarella…one can’t help but be reminded of a young Sondheim in these offerings….there’s an edge of Sweeney Todd in the blackness of it all.

Tripolino is Musical Director for an excellent 4-piece band. Remarkably, their first full rehearsal together was on the afternoon of the opening night.

Though it’s only at Chapel off Chapel for 4 nights, this is one of those shows which punches above its weight and surely deserves a return season. Perhaps some additions to dialogue and character exploration to increase the length to 60 minutes would be a move in the right direction, but don’t be put off by the shortness. This is a quality home-grown production and it really does deserve to be seen. It’s enormously entertaining in all respects.

Coral Drouyn

Images: James Terry