CUTIE CROTCHETS (Coronavirus Theatre Club)****

By Imogen

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-s36InfIl0

Available until: Unknown

I hope I never have to sink this low. I seriously hope I never have to sink half as low. It’s bad enough that my school production has been cancelled three times and my professional engagement. I can’t believe I’m saying this but it’s lucky I’m still young enough to go to school. At least I don’t have to go out and get a boring job. Or stay at home and get a boring job. That would be just too humiliating. And if I have to do the job the main character does in this play I would die.

Cutie Crotchets is about a trained professional actress (or actor if you insist but I don’t call that very feminist, honestly you want recognition as women and then you want to be called the same as the men? I don’t know about you but I really don’t see the logic there) called Gemma Sienna Wood or Gem for short because she sparkles. I sparkle too but no one gives me a nickname like that but that’s ok because some of us don’t need to be reminded.

Gem has lowered herself to be a children’s entertainer with singing and puppetry for young children from babies and toddlers and their parents. Poor Gem has to put up with pervy dads, mums who think they’re Oti Mabuse and children who act like babies. It’s so demeaning. She does her best to smile and be happy but she knows she was born for something far greater.

This play is a monologue so you don’t have to see and hear the kids luckily but Gem talks to them and reacts what they do so you know what they’re up to. Louise Breckon-Richards wrote the monologue and she created the character of Gem so eloquently. You can tell Gem is a star and she’s better than this and the monologue shows how Gem starts off really happy and determind to make the best from this terrible opportunity and slowly loses the will to live as my granny would say. Louise makes all the characters Gem talks to seem real too. You can imagine them even though you might not want to. Louisa Sanfrey is the director and she’s allowed Mitzli to stand up and move around which is quite unusual for monologues. But it’s more realistic for the play and it also means Mitzli can show her feelings in her body language.

Gem is played by Mitzli Rose who is even more of a star than Gem. She has a really gorgeous singing voice even when she’s singing rubbish baby songs. She was in The Comedy of Errors and Julius Caesar for The Show Must Go Online and she is brilliant in both of them. She can do comedy and tragedy and she gets to do both in this play because she’s in a really tragic situation but the play is still funny because it’s performed as comedy. But I still I really feel for her because obviously I know just what it’s like. (Well not quite. You wouldn’t catch me singing for my baby sister. She hasn’t got any money. But I’m an artiste so I can imagine the trauma and the degradation Gem feels and I can obviously see it in Mitzli’s performance.)