Emma Wilby reviews the lastest
YANTS production.
JUDGING by the sizes of the audiences in the town hall North Tawton thoroughly enjoyed being overrun by gangs of hoods and gangsters from the latest YANTS production, 'Bugsy Malone'.
With a cast of 32 local children, colourful sets, dapper costumes and great songs, the Young Actors of North Tawton Society brought the rivalries and love affairs of 1920s America vividly to life.
Bugsy and the two gang leaders, Fat Sam and Dandy Dan, were played with suitably swaggering confidence by Joshua Cassells, Rowan Perrior and Jack Cornwall. The three leading ladies, Sophie Thompson, Katie Curnow and Sophie Bending all brought beautiful singing voices to their roles, while the Speakeasy Chorus Girls performed some wonderfully kitsch dance routines, with elegant solos from Rebecca and Victoria Reed.
Many of the children provided some great comic moments, including Libby Kinsey, Vicky Eames, Harry Edwards, Hamish Inglis, Joshua Lee, Elliot Hole and Edward Thompson.
These cast members were well supported by Victoria and Nicolas Orbell, Autumn Honeychurch, Stephanie Perrott, Tess Townsend Green, Jessica Molyneux, Caitlin Nightingale, Jennifer Grey, Ben Phillips, James Curnow, Rosie O'Connell, Jade Dunster, Jessica and Rebecca Kennedy, Shannon Hill, Abi Little, Jack Cornell and Haydon Perrior.
Of the many adults involved in the production, special mention must go to the directors, Wendy Hill and Tamsin Grayling, whose commitment and imagination brought this ambitious production together so successfully.
The show ended with a mass shoot-out in Fat Sam's club, which left the smoke-filled stage covered in heaps of bodies smothered in pink and green 'splurge'. Then all 32 of them rose from the dead, one by one, to sing the rousing, hand-clapping chorus 'We could have been anything that we wanted to be, and its not too late to change'. Great stuff.
Anyone involved in out-of-school provision for rural youth could find much inspiration here.