Follow our blog to coincide with Soho's first walkabout performance, Moonwalking in Chinatown, contributed by members of the company.
moonblog
19 September: Opening Night
After an intense period of rehearsals Moonwalking in Chinatown has finally opened! It’s been an incredible process. The huge cast and crew is a mixture of professionals and community volunteers. Some of the same people who told their stories to Justin, the writer, in the research phase are now actors or crew in the show. It’s been wonderful to see everyone working together to create the piece.
The play starts in Soho Theatre but soon takes you out onto the streets of Soho and Chinatown. The myths and stories surrounding the Autumn Moon Festival are interwoven with the accounts of several generations of the Chinese communities living in London. The audience listen in on scenes taking place on street corners, on the famous Chinatown pagoda, and in some rather smelly alleyways! The boundaries between what’s in the play and what’s in the ‘real world’ soon start to blur. Random passers by join in and watch the scenes. Real world events and reactions affect what happens in the show every night. Some of the audience also start to tune in to other conversations taking place on the street. The journey past the Chinese restaurants on Gerrard Street makes everyone hungry, and everything blends to make a really special event.
Opening night saw a real life hero chase two of the thugs in the play. While they were running away from a scene that their characters had been they were particularly nasty in, the guy hotfooted after them to try and prevent them getting away. In another scene, two guys from a nearby restaurant just avoided a collision with an actor. The tower of empty boxes they were carrying tumbled over. It took them the rest of the scene to clear the boxes up again, providing us with some novel set dressing…
The audience seemed to really enjoy it. There was lots of laughter, even some applause in special places, and lots of smiles at the end of it all.
Annette Mees – Assistant Director on the Yellow Lantern Route
20 September
Today was press night, so everybody was getting geared up for lots of people with notepads ready to make their verdict. The preview last night went brilliantly, so all are in good spirits and ready for tonight’s two performances. As blue lantern co-ordinator I am to begin by waiting with Linus and Phoebe, the children sharing the role of Moonface, in our first pre-set position beside a swanky hotel where we get lots of strange looks from the doormen and the people who can afford to stay there.
All is going well as we await the audience, both Moonfaces preparing for their first entrance, when we are suddenly faced with a Jaguar (the car, not the animal) and a Toyota, both of which have decided to reverse into the exact place we are standing… To avoid child fatality we move out of our position, only to be faced with the audience walking towards us along the street. All is saved as we manage to duck and swerve out the way and find ourselves another suitable hiding position… These unpredictable events are exactly what make this piece interesting. On our second night we had fire engines creating no pedestrian access and tramps wandering into scenes!
Following this near death experience the performances went swimmingly; the routes are becoming much more fluid and there is a greater sense of magic being created with each performance. The actors are really tuning into when there is a need for an impromptu monologue and as we walk through the streets to each scene we find ourselves reunited with characters from scenes previously and it suddenly becomes much more believable that we really are being shown a ‘slice into life’. The Pagoda scene is gradually becoming less of a crime scene – on several occasions we had the police called with the public believing that a real violent attack was taking place! Instead, the 4 guys who seem to congregate there every night around 7pm simply carry on playing their game of cards behind the attack, paying little attention to the character of Joe falling to the floor in pain and secretly loving the fact that the scene creates such a crowd of public attention, with people wondering what the hell is going on, whilst they are fully in the know. One night I genuinely think that they should make a cameo performance… maybe we will try and fit them in tomorrow.
Charlotte Bennett – Assistant Director on the Blue Lantern Route
21 September
Hardcore day! On Saturdays we do 3 performances, one at 3.15pm and then two others at 6.15pm and 8.15pm. This is tasking on everybody as the piece is physically very demanding and so the actors are required to keep focused on delivering a constant stream of impressive performances.
Again, I begin by waiting with the character of Moonface; this time an adorable 5-year-old called Klareze, we wait by the posh hotel for our first cue. By the time these 15 minutes of waiting are up I am already exhausted after playing endless games of hop scotch and “hopping races”, some of which I might add I lost, even though at points I was genuinely trying - I feel my athlete days are over…
After going back to my childhood days and having a few conversations with the likes of Peter Pan and Mr Incredible after pretending to Klareze that you can talk to anybody in the world over my radio mic, the show finally begins. The Saturday afternoon performance was always going to be an interesting one as Soho and Chinatown are not the quietest of places, especially on a weekend. Nevertheless, the show was a real success, the afternoon setting gave a very different vibe to evening performances, especially the scene in Dansey place; a small back alley where we see a waiter being thrown out of a restaurant having lost his job following a disagreement about Andrew Lloyd Webber. It seems that this alley is the hub of deliveries on a Saturday afternoon and so the scene had a wonderful backdrop of Chinese deliverymen dropping off unfamiliar fruit to the local restaurants, now you wouldn’t get a set like that in the theatre!
The 6.15 and 8.15 showings also ran smoothly, the actors must have been running off pure adrenaline, as they must have had little energy left! There were some fabulous moments from the character of Mr Po as he played up to the Indian dance parade that ran through Gerrard Street during his monologue, and then later the 16 year old boys who thought it hilarious to stand behind him making rude gestures (I think even Klareze shows more maturity). Again, these obstacles make the piece fresh and exciting, the actors have no more idea what to expect than the audience, and their levels of professionalism constantly amaze me as they adapt themselves to each situation, no matter how bizarre!
After three shows in one day everybody is ready for a well deserved rest… 3 days off and then it all starts again, but what is great about this show is that it just keeps getting better and better, bring on next week!
Charlotte Bennett – Assistant Director on the Blue Lantern Route
22 September
Dear Blog
There is no backstage, no understudy, no interval, no prompt, no easy acoustics. No, this is not a formal complaint to Equity, this is the harsh - yet actually rather exciting - reality of a promanade performance on the moonlit streets of Soho and I say 'Bring it on!'
A week of the show has past and a fabulous week is yet to come. Have I enjoyed it so far? Yes. Have I learnt from this new, eyeopening, experience as an actor? Yes. Have I gained blisters from my character shoes? Definitely, yes.
After the first week, yes I am tired but at the same time, there is still a buzzing energy flying around the inside of my body yelling 'Get me back out there!!', to get back onto the streets with the other actors and mostly the amazing audiences that have strapped themselves in for over an hour of their life. The show is not one in which you can sit back with a bag of sweets. It's continuously moving both the story and the action, and to see more you have to go further. This is where the ever-growing audience has been fantastic. They have been with it all the way!
Simon Edwards - Actor, playing Joe.
Moonwalking in Chinatown, final day and night
Saturday 29 September saw the last three performances of the show. It was both a sad and celebratory day! The show has been completely sold out and we have had an overwhelmingly positive response to the show from our audiences. Luckily this Saturday we didn’t have the council cleaning trucks to deal with, but we still had the Hare Krishna followers singing loudly through Gerrard Street adding yet another layer onto our street performances. Our final show was just as wild and raucous as one would expect on a Saturday night, but also very moving and poignant as we did the final scene for the last time at St James’.
The play has come a long way from the initial research workshops and interviews that were done way back in March at the Chinese Community Centre and the Soho Family Centre. It has been great that so many people, local organisations and residents have been supportive of this community project. The project’s success has relied on the goodwill and dedication of our many volunteers, all of whom have given their time and energies for free I so I would like would like to add a special thanks to the following: everyone who told us their stories openly, and to our translators who helped us hear them, to our actors who came to rehearsals so positively and performed the production in all weathers, to our assistant designers who made the design a reality and braved heights so that the magic of theatre could happen in Meard Street, to the assistant directors who trawled through the streets time and time again to ensure that the play would work like clockwork, and finally to the ushers who made sure that the audience really saw the show. A great big thanks to you all from me and all at Soho Theatre!
Suzanne Gorman - Director, Moonwalking in Chinatown
