By Imogen
Link: https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/show/fiver-the-concert/#schedule £15
Available until: There are livestreams
on Saturday 28th November at 3.15pm and 7.45pm. It seems to be
available for a while after the show too so you don’t have to watch it
completely live and you can pause it.
Fiver is a great show because the star is a member
of the audience! At the start of the show, Alex James Ellison invites an
audience member onstage and grinds against them till they give him a £5 note. I
wonder how successful that is. I mean he is so hot, some people might hold out
on him all night and only admit right at the end that they don’t even have a
fiver. I mean not many people do. It’s all plastic nowadays. Cash isn’t even
legal right now in some places.
The story of the show is the story of the fiver. It gets passed from person to person. Sometimes they buy things with it, sometimes they give it in change, sometimes they give it to someone else who needs it more. When a new person gets the fiver you see like a snapshot of their lives at that moment, there’s a scene and a song and it’s always a big dramatic moment for them. Sometimes Alex does a song that takes you through lots of different people who have had the fiver but we get to watch the interesting ones.
There are a lot of people who get the
fiver and there are a lot of stories and I can’t remember them all so maybe it
would be better if there were less of them but there are some really good
stories and characters. The thing that happens to the fiver before the interval
is gross. And I bet in fifteen years time it wouldn’t be legal tender anymore,
it’ll probably be plastic for everything but apart from that it’s a good idea.
The writing is good, some of it is funny and some of it is quite sad.
Alex plays a busker with a guitar.
He’s a sort of narrator but he interacts with the other characters too. He is
very nice and he is the same person all the way through. He and Tom Lees (who
is also the musical director) wrote the book, music and lyrics and also
directed the show.
The music is really good and it has
lots of different styles like rap (not that rap is really music) and sometimes
it goes a bit country and sometimes it goes a bit G&S and pattery which
makes it sound like total rubbish but even the rap is quite good. At least Alex
raps about intelligent things and he can keep in time.
There are four performers apart from
Alex and they are all really good. Luke Bayer is gorgeous and he is always fun
to watch onstage. He was really good at being the dad of a 15 year old and I
suppose he only needs to be 31 for that to be legal and it’s not totally
ridiculous for a 31 year old man to look as young as Luke. Dan Buckley played
his son as well as lots of other roles and he is really lovely.
The woman are good too. Hiba Elchikhe
is really likeable no matter what role she plays. She just seems really nice
but not in an annoying way like my sister Louise. She does a really emotional
song telling someone to talk about his brother who died. Aoife Clesham is a lot
like me. She’s really glamorous and she has a powerful voice and she is very
versatile in the styles she can sing. She’s funny too.
This musical has so got to come back
to the West End! And when it does my parents had better give me a ticket. And a
£5 note of course. I’ll be the beautiful blonde in the front row. I have no
objection to grinding.
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