Reviews

This play is a unique experience for the audience as it is invited to absorb the emotions and storytelling completely by the spoken word. There is no managed stage movement at all.  The two characters, Melissa and Andrew, met in childhood and we follow their lives and dreams from notes, letters and cards that they wrote right through to their twilight years. We engage with their dreams and disappointments, their awkward adolescence, their mature misgivings and, of course, their many missed opportunities.

Cotton Wool Kid is a roller coaster of emotions, a tenderly crafted story that is happy to turn the audience upside down without warning. A story of love and loss, where things can change in a moment, where the unlikely is plausible, yet the story is completely believable. 

Photos of the cast interwoven with lovely shots of Italy play on a screen in the foyer of the theatre. Reproductions of Renaissance paintings adorn the walls. Others, stylishly framed in gold, surround the proscenium arch and reach around to encompass the stained-glass windows which are a feature of 1868 building that is the Genesian.

It’s so good to see a director and his creatives thinking beyond the stage and the script. Congratulations Mark! Your vision sets the scene as elegantly as E.M. Forster described it in 1908.

The title of this one-man musical gave the audience a high expectation of seeing a fair bit of the birthday suit of Blake Appelquist. The posters plastered all over Oxford Street,  in the lead up to Mardis Gras, were hardly subtle.

Indeed, the moment of greatest dramatic tension was when the genetically blessed star looked poised to expose all. Sitting in the very cosy middle floor of the Limelight theatre, in close proximity to the star, the Director/Writer Melvyn Morrow left a little to the imagination.