bizzaro "Labyrinth" bonus photos! (plus opening night's review) (Patreon)

($3+ patrons-only)

hello loves....

i've given every patreon the download of this song and wanted to give all of you in the $3 and $5+ and above tiers some extra somethin'....

here are some bonus pictures from the album artwork photoshoot, shot by Kahn & Selesnick. 

we spent an entire day at my house (yes that's literally a room in our house in woodstock) styling this shoot with full hair and make-up and weird special effects, it was great fun...i haven't done a weird photoshoot like this in AGES.

if you missed the song itself, it came out the other day, and it's HERE...the response has been wonderful so far and i'm so grateful as usual to have this patreon to be able to fund such oddness.

and the show itself, which opened on monday, got a FABULOUS FUCKING review in the times!! i am so proud of this team of theater weirdos and so excited to have done this project with them....

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/theatre-review-the-grinning-man-at-trafalgar-studios-sw1-q3ghznz68 

it's paywalled, so you're welcome, i cut and paste it for you!!!

Theatre review: The Grinning Man at Trafalgar Studios, SW1

"A stunning new musical with puppetry from the director of War Horse, this is a deliciously convoluted tale of the search for truth" 

A War Horse for weirdos? A Phantom for freaks? A Les Mis for misfits? No, however much I try to put this stunning new British musical into a box, it crawls out and demands to be seen as its own deliciously strange thing. Sure, there are echoes of all of the above and more besides: Shockheaded Peter, Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, any number of fairytales with fangs. Yet finally this fanciful musical adaptation of The Man Who Laughs, an 1869 novel by the Les Misérables author, Victor Hugo, mixes the comical, the grim and the shimmeringly romantic in its own way.

It’s a triumph for its director, Tom Morris, its writer, Carl Grose, and its composers, 

Tim Phillips and Marc Teitler, all of whom worked on the lyrics too. Morris co-directed War Horse before taking up the reins at the Bristol Old Vic, where this began life in 2016. And he has called on the War Horse veterans Finn Caldwell and Toby Olié to provide similarly fluid moments of puppetry here: a large pet wolf that pads around the stage, or puppets of young versions of our troubled heroes that at one point put on a puppet show themselves.

It’s that kind of worlds-within-worlds story, as we journey back to a late 18th-century England that never quite was, where the royal palace is at Catford, where a dissolute royal prince nips off to Trafalgar Fair to see the disfigured title character, Grinpayne (Louis Maskell), tell the story of how he came to have a huge gash across his face. 

As we swap perspectives, as we meet the royal clown Barkilphedro (Julian Bleach, even more commandingly macabre here than he is playing Davros in Doctor Who), the showman and adoptive dad Ursus (Sean Kingsley) and Dea (Sanne Den Besten), the blind girl who loves her adoptive brother, this becomes a search for truth for audience and hero alike.

The carnivalesque flourishes on Jon Bausor’s set always serve to plunge us deeper into a riot of the imagination that is all about the hazards and necessity of knowing what’s real. Deliberately, deliciously convoluted, it loses momentum only as they tie the strands together near the end. Yet the fourth-wall-busting finale made me bite back a sob, the songs are uncommonly strong, and the cast of 16 are outstanding, especially Maskell and Den Besten, who sometimes have to sing their hearts out while crouching down to work their puppets. Whatever you call this moving, amusing oddity, I simply loved it.

..............

BRAVA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

xxx
afp

and here's an iphone photo of me and my little man, who wandered around the shoot being very helpful and blowing out candles: