REVIEW: Glenda & Rita: LIVE @ Brighton Fringe
They really are black and white -costume, hair, make-up ; they’re monochrome humans. It’s a brilliant, bizarre & comic
Glenda Swing and Rita Herringbone are relics of a bygone Hollywood era.
You might be thinking they were silent screen stars overtaken by the talkies. Not a bit of it.
The platinum blonde Rita and her very grumpy partner are monochrome stars who didn’t make it into Technicolor.
And the surreal reason is that they really are black and white -costume, hair, make-up ; they’re monochrome humans. It’s a brilliant, bizarre comic invention by Alexander Joseph as Glenda and Ro Robertson as Rita. The script is by Joseph and the music by Robertson.
They give us an hour filled with joy, bitterness, and pathos with tales of the movie studios, their loves and their hit films; all tinged with a palpable pain that hurts.
When you do the sums, they would be 120 years old and counting, but this is Hollywood where anything can happen.
Rita is tall, pretty and not the archetypical dumb blonde, though she seems to have had a string of boyfriends all named Billy, and her father’s inappropriate and persistent fondness for her gives a tragic victim touch.
Glenda, by contrast, is bordering on the grotesque, with her gravelly voice not unlike a male gangster’s. Her dark mood is bolstered by her heavy reliance on a hip flask to get her through the show.
There are clever pastiche songs to pepper the plot, with Rita on the ukulele. And Glenda keeps telegraphing she’s about to do her big number, from her big movie called The Big Number.
When it comes, it’s a drunken disaster and she crumples to the floor, helped up by Rita. Their musical finale – “ I Guess That’s The Last Of Me,” seems to sum up their lives.
It’s brilliantly funny, poignant and mesmerising. Catch it again at The Rotunda Squeak in Regency Square on 26 May as part of Brighton Fringe – tickets brightonfringe.org
