Category: Comedy

Dina Martina: Forgotten but not gone

Soho Theatre (with C&B)

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Talent-stuffed and sanitarium-ready, the hysterically funny Dina Martina is barrelling back to Soho Theatre with a new show and new video.

Miss Martina, (a.k.a. “The Second Lady of Entertainment”) debuted at Seattle’s Center on Contemporary Art in 1989, instantly garnering reviews that dubbed her “magically warped”, “utter genius” and “unwittingly hilarious”. Since then, she’s packed venues from UnCabaret in Los Angeles to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and shared the bill with acts such as Margaret Cho, Alan Cumming, and Justin Vivian Bond.

Absolutely packed with ludicrous song, horrifying dance, overburdened costumes and side-splitting video, Dina Martina’s shows are impossible to describe – other than that they’ve become synonymous with jaw-dropping pathos and mind-blowing comedy.

Dina Martina’s hugely successful shows in New York and Provincetown have made ardent fans of the likes of John Waters, Whoopi Goldberg, Matt Stone and Jennifer Coolidge. Martina has received nominations for the Alpert Award in Theater and two GLAAD Media Awards for Outstanding Off-Off Broadway Theater. She’s a recipient of The Stranger’s Genius Award for Theater and two Seattle Times Footlight Awards.

Dina Martina has been hailed as “alarmingly funny”, “dazzling and mind-blowing” and “as graceful as a Coke machine moving about on a hand truck”. A Dina Martina show is, quite simply put, a smart and hilarious evening of entertainment that you will never forget.

The Martian (2015)

Peckhamplex

Out from the blackness comes something we thought we might never see again: a decent Ridley Scott movie.

The Martian, Scott’s adaptation of the best-selling book by Andy Weir, is a knockabout space adventure. A wide-eyed tribute to human ingenuity that packs enough snark to pull itself out of the black hole of earnestness, even if its fuel runs out partway through.

Matt Damon stars as astronaut Mark Watney, left for dead on Mars after his crew are forced to flee a dust storm. Stranded with only enough food and water to last a month, he’ll have to (in his words) “science the shit” out of the situation to survive. He gets to work: burning hydrogen to produce water, rationing his remaining food stocks and growing more by terra-forming Mars with his poo. Back on earth a sharp-eyed satellite controller (Mackenzie Davis) notices Watney’s to-ing and fro-ing and alerts her superiors – A-type NASA suits played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels and Kristen Wiig. They’ll wrangle with the moral conundrum of whether or not to tell the rest of Watney’s crew (led by Jessica Chastain’s mission commander) that he’s still alive and risk them turning back to help him.

Weir is a space nut who once designed software to plot a successful course to the red planet and The Martian is sci-fi leaning heavy on the science. His book – self-published before it became a hit on Kindle, then stormed the best-seller charts – is research-heavy. It doesn’t spare his readers any of the cosmic nuts and bolts. All of the specialist lexicon makes it into Drew Goddard’s script, but so too does Watney’s sardonic streak, delivered in some style by Damon. He’s a tough character to pilot, this sceptical geek know-it-all, but Damon has the charm and wit to land some tricky one-liners. You try making “Fuck you, Mars” sound cool.

A galaxy of stars orbit Damon with very little to do. Ares III, Watney’s crew’s ship, is home to a pilot (Michael Peña), a navigator (Kate Mara) and a chemist (Aksel Hennie), but they’re all, despite their talents, fairly unremarkable. Back on earth Wiig’s PR specialist is sort of spiky, Ejiofor’s mission controller is a bit nice and Daniels’ NASA boss is a bit nasty. Even Watney, supposedly a symbol of hope for all humanity in the final act, is – once the quips wear off – pretty dull. Still, Scott has a lightness of touch that was absent from The Martian’s closest recent companion: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. That theory-heavy behemoth, which also starred Chastain and Damon, makes Scott’s film feel light as air.

With Alien, Scott went to space and found horror. With Prometheus he came back having caught something horrible (although, interestingly, the space suits in that wonky misadventure and this new film are very similar). The Martian floats between them. It is not fantastic, in either sense, but it does show-off a sense of play. For a survival flick it’s actually pretty light on peril (you never really believe that the Jordanian desert, where the film was shot, is Mars), but it’s not short of thrills.

It’s also a giant boon for NASA. Space exploration here is nothing but noble, exciting and worthwhile. Mark Watney, urging his space rover along through the plains of the Acidala Planitia, is pursuing a new manifest destiny. A sucrose coda (added, unnecessarily, to book’s matter-of-fact finale) suggests that we’d be fools not to follow him.

David Hoyle & Richard Thomas: Merrie Hell

Soho Theatre

From Jerry Sadowitz in a Santa hat earlier this week, to David Hoyle’s Christmas tree draped with dolls’ heads and condoms, festive-phobes are spoiled for jaundiced entertainment this year. That said, veteran “anti-drag” act Hoyle’s collaboration with Richard (Jerry Springer: The Opera) Thomas is only tangentially concerned with Christmas. I doubt Hoyle ever stays on-message for long, and in this magpie-ish cabaret he is (notwithstanding his red tinsel frock) less engaged with seasonal matters than with homosexuality in the military, broken Britain and his own chequered life story. That makes for an amusing hour – not for the songs, which are so-so, but for the likable banter between Hoyle and pianist Thomas, and the air of collusive mischief he fosters with the crowd.

When Christmas is addressed, it’s with Scrooge-like loathing. Hoyle can’t stand consumerism and enforced jollity, and shrieks abuse at Thomas’s jaunty jingle-bells backing vocal. The conceit is that straight-man Thomas keeps corralling louche-cannon Hoyle into line: when the latter’s fury gets out of control, the former barks, “Camp it up, David!” in a doomed bid to keep proceedings upbeat. Fat chance, with our spindly Lancastrian host angry at the deradicalising of homosexuality, resentful at the life-denying oppressiveness of religion and keen to promote the virtues of assisted dying. Happy Christmas!

It is happy, though: Hoyle keeps giggling at his own quirky – and often off-the-cuff – outrageousness. That’s more entertaining than the pastiche hymns he sings, whose intermittently effective lyrics too often rely on “Santa drinking meths”-style shock tactics. The standout number, by a long way, is the tender, autobiographical Crying at Christmas, in which Hoyle recalls his wild youth and the friends who didn’t survive it. The self-assertion elsewhere is fun, but only this moment of self-exposure is transcendent.

The Guardian