"Hive City Legacy" / "Hela" / National Dance Company Wales

My latest batch of theatre reviews: “Hive City Legacy” at the Wales Millennium Centre – a touring performance piece giving us the rare opportunity to see several “femmes of colour” on stage at the same time in a music/dance extravaganza focussing on issues of identity (which played to a disappointingly small audience on the night I saw it); Mari Izzard’s bilingual psychological thriller “Hela”, the final piece in the dystopian Violence Series at The Other Room; and the latest collection of excellent short pieces presented by National Dance Company Wales under the heading “Roots” at the W.M.C.’s Dance House – as always, it’s good to see them going to the effort of making a sometimes abstruse art-form accessible without dumbing down.

Lowri Izzard and Gwydion Rhys in "Hela" (Photo: Kirsten McTernan)

"On Your Feet" / "Hedda Gabler" / "I Wish I Was A Mountain"

As always, my theatre reviewing “career” has thrown up some fascinating juxtapositions. The day after the touring version of “On Your Feet”, the highly accomplished jukebox musical based on the career of the Miami Sound Machine (who were founded, I hadn’t realised, on the songwriting prowess of lead singer Gloria Estefan), at the Wales MillenniumCentre, I saw the Sherman’s production of Ibsen’s epoch-making “Hedda Gabler”, featuring some slightly odd directorial touches, but also some brilliant performances, especially from the women.

 

Heledd Gwynn as Hedda Gabler (Photo: Mark Douet)

A week or so later came Toby Thompson’s “I Wish I Was A Mountain” at the Centre’s Weston Studio – a show for children with an unusually philosophical bent based, as it is, on a story by Herman Hesse; its several pleasing aspects included the jazz-inflected score.

Toby Thompson (Photo: Jack Offord)