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An evening with Opus 8 Forest Arts Centre New Milton June 2004 The group is something very special indeed - talented, slick, polished, highly original, very, very funny and never afraid to send itself up, and this new show just has to be their best yet. On a cleverly designed set and using a multitude of ever-more outrageous and glorious costumes, these superb performers – Glinys Luff, Helen Barrington (who also wrote and devised the show), Bryan Newman, Paul Barrington and musical director John Aveyard – ensured that they, and we, had an evening of pure joy. The scenario is the previous lives that fictional vocal group, The Monotones, might have lived. But until you have experienced Jim the myopic Mountie, Mr D’Arcy and his problematical apostrophe, Cleopatra and her pet asp, the Roman General Phalicus Symbolus or the none-too-sweet Hansel and Gretel – well, you haven’t lived at all really. And however well you may have thought you knew the music and lyrics of the likes of Kander & Ebb, Sondheim, Gilbert & Sullivan, Lehar and Boublil & Schoenberg you’d have had more than a few surprises during this truly wonderful evening. Linda Kirkman Courtesy of the Bournemouth Daily Echo |
