Up For Grabs: GB, London, etc

Up For Grabs, waar Ripley en ik tickets voor hebben, is gisteren in premiere gegaan!
Hier wat fotootjes en recensies.
Wij zijn er op 11 juli! .

The Times schrijft:

Don't be shocked or morbidly excited when I confirm what some of the pre-publicity for Up for Grabs has pruriently suggested. Yes, the art dealer played by Madonna does delight a billionaire by inserting a nylon dildo into his bottom and does have sex with a dot-com millionairess while her genitally challenged husband looks wistfully on. But, no, we dont see these events, and, far from being sensationalist, they add point and punch to David Williamsons enjoyable comedy. Despite the crowds and cameras outside the theatre last night, and the callow whoops that greeted the actress when the curtain rose, Up for Grabs isnt The Madonna Show. The Aussie dramatists play would still be a lively satire of a debased art market if someone else were in the lead. Indeed, it would probably be livelier, for Madonnas acting, though it strengthens as the evening progresses, is a bit like her neat little trench-coat: pale, wan, lacking in colour.

Shes Loren, a New Yorker so keen to make her name and fortune that she herself guarantees to pay $20 million for a Jackson Pollock worth $18 million in the hope that her auctioning skills will bring her an even greater profit. But different abilities turn out to be necessary. Michael Lerners brash, coarse Manny is a Roy Cohn-like homophobe with taste for buggery. And Megan Doddss Mindy is tiring of men and especially of marriage to Daniel Pinos Kel, whose member has been transformed by enlargement surgery into a blend of potato and bloated cucumber. Even Sian Thomass Dawn, a wintry Englishwoman unhappily acquiring art for some vast corporation, has her personal agenda, though a non-sexual and rather benign one.

Madonnas Loren works to push up the competing bids, but finds herself pushed down in ways she never expected. Her smug psychiatrist husband, Tom Irwins Gerry, is appalled to find their apartment at risk. The intensifying pressures take their toll on Lorens nerves, ethics and self-respect. Its strong stuff, but it would be still stronger if Madonna could express desperation or even fear. She looks terrific, moves sinuously, suggests a certain waywardness and, when her marriage is threatened, generates some emotional heat. But she never forthrightly imposes herself on the role and, especially during a low-key, low-voice opening, could use a mike.

Still, Williamsons blowtorch comedy does succeed in searing off any residual pretensions the art trade might have to taste and integrity.

Buying a Pollock is an investment, a tax write-off, a piece of swank, or (Dawns case) an excuse for revenge. I suppose the objection to this is that not all buyers are as philistine as Lerners Manny or as vulgar as Pinos Kel, a self-proclaimed future person who bops and bounces around his computers with glad cries of Yow! So, yes, some of Laurence Boswells cast exuberantly overstate the case. But since when was satire supposed to be understated, objective, cool?

The Telegraph schrijft:

As celebrity casting goes, this is the big one. Short of hiring the Windsors to star in a revival of Sue Townsend's The Queen and I - and who knows, Her Majesty may have some time on her hands after the Golden Jubilee celebrations - it is hard to imagine how any producer will be able to top the lure of Madonna.

She is probably the most famous woman in the world, and certainly the biggest showbiz icon since Marilyn Monroe, on whom dear old Madge has often seemed intent on modelling herself. What's scary about Madonna is the way she has finessed a real but hardly monumental talent to such an inflated level of stardom. There have always been better singers, better dancers, better lookers and, ahem, better actresses than Madonna, but no one has matched her when it came to steely determination and an eye for the main chance. How appropriate, then, that she should have chosen to make her West End debut as a savvily opportunistic material girl in David Williamson's broad comedy about the contemporary art market in New York.

At the start of the show, I feared it would be impossible to judge this as a play at all, but merely as some bizarre phenomenon of hype and fan-worship. When the curtain rose to reveal Madonna alone on stage, the fashionable first night audience behaved like teenagers at a Britney Spears concert, erupting into applause, cheers and even screams before the star had uttered a word. After that, every line which might have some bearing on the star's own life was greeted with knowing, sycophantic titters - whether it was funny or not. And I must admit it is quite a kick to hear Madonna declaring: "My feelings towards the wealthy are deeply ambivalent. On one hand I hate them with a passion. "They're a constant reminder that I haven't succeeded yet. On the other hand I love them because they are the only ones who can make me wealthy." We might be eavesdropping on the real Madonna's nakedly ambitious private thoughts at the start of her career.

For the first 10 minutes or so she seemed seriously nervous; her voice tight, strained and, I suspect, inaudible in the gods. But while she certainly isn't going to give Nicole Kidman or Gwyneth Paltrow any sleepless nights worrying about the competition, her performance is far from the disaster many were predicting and some were maliciously hoping for. As Loren, a pushy art dealer playing three clients off against each other as she attempts to sell a Jackson Pollock - and facing financial ruin herself if she fails to make the reserve of $20 million - Madonna is often funny, and sometimes vulnerable and touching. She looks terrific, comes over as a far more appealing personality than I expected, and is a dab hand at comically kinky sex scenes. For make no mistake, Williamson's play may be about art, but it is certainly not art itself. The jokes are often crude, more reminiscent of a saucy seaside postcard than anything you would find in the Met. To get her price up, Madonna, sorry Loren, finds herself having lesbian sex with a dotcom millionairess while her husband, who has had a bungled penis enlargement operation, looks on. Then she is required to service an obese businessman with a vast black dildo. Chekhov it ain't.

I should add that in Laurence Boswell's slick production, with clever, high-tech designs by Jeremy Herbert, you see only the foreplay, and Madonna remains fully and fashionably clothed throughout.

In the final analysis, Madonna strikes me as being about as good as the play - OK, but hardly sensational. Both the drama and the gags become repetitive and stale in the second half, and Williamson's point that great art is nowadays treated as a commodity is neither original nor profound. Among the supporting cast, there's particularly good work from Sian Thomas as a boozily self-loathing art academic and Michael Lerner as the grotesquely revolting, dildo-fancying businessman.

Needless to say, the whole run is already sold out, but those without tickets needn't repine. Up for Grabs will appeal far more strongly to stargazers than to lovers of first-rate theatre.

De kritieken branden haar dus niet eens tot de grond af.
Dan vind ik het ongetwijfeld magistraal! .

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Op vrijdag 24 mei 2002 15:01 schreef Smike het volgende:
stargazer

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Op vrijdag 24 mei 2002 15:33 schreef Ripley het volgende:
Mijn salaris was er nog steeds niet .

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So, we have a date? .

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Op vrijdag 24 mei 2002 15:42 schreef Ripley het volgende:
. You are a doll!!!

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Ik ben morgen toch in de stad voor mijn Evisu shirt dus bel maar gewoon, dan gaan we daarna boeken!

Whoo-hoo! .

Kijk. Voorprettopic. Leuk. Enzo.

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Op vrijdag 24 mei 2002 15:59 schreef Neejoh het volgende:
hoi

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Yay, here's my stalker!

Een hele nieuwe!!!!

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Op maandag 03 juni 2002 14:29 schreef paarse_paashaas het volgende:
te veel tekst!

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Op maandag 03 juni 2002 14:32 schreef paarse_paashaas het volgende:
waarheen?

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Moeilijk topic?