"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)