An American In Paris (stage2view.com)
Verdict: Swish, swanky and ‘s wonderful!
Falling Stars (stream.theatre)
Verdict: Put it in your pocket
Rating: 
Marry Me A Little (barntheatre.org.uk)
Verdict: Polished Sondheim
Rating:
With a little bit of luck, before too long we’ll all be vaccinated, freed from the shackles of Covid and feeling (I imagine) like the Americans partying in Paris after they liberated the French capital from the Nazis in 1944.
But pending that shot in the arm from Pfizer — or whichever vaccine we can lay our hands on — we can settle for this jubilant stage version of the 1951 Gershwin brothers’ movie starring Gene Kelly.
The show is one of many available on the new Stage2View website.
For £4.99, you can rent top-quality recordings of West End shows including Kinky Boots, 42nd Street and Red (the drama about the painter Mark Rothko, directed by Michael Grandage).
An American In Paris, starring Robert Fairchild and Leanne Cope, was what I needed this week
An American In Paris, though, was what I needed this week.
Its songs are impossible to mention without hearing the tunes — I Got Rhythm, The Man I Love, ‘S Wonderful — and they swing along to Gershwin’s parping brass, tinkling triangles and swooning strings. It looks good on the small screen, too.
N ifty camerawork makes the most of Bob Crowley’s spectacular sets, with boulevards, Notre Dame and the River Seine rendered in the style of Picasso, Matisse and Toulouse-Lautrec; and also Christopher Wheeldon’s choreography, with its frisky jazz numbers and gorgeous Busby-esque set piece featuring girls in feather boas and guys in top hats.
As our struggling artist hero, Jerry, Robert Fairchild (of New York City Ballet) wheels through his pirouettes without ruffling a jet black hair on his head. Leanne Cope (of our own Royal Ballet) is no less silky as his kittenish muse Lise, and Haydn Oakley is lovably stiff as her fiancé Henri.
Following a detailed clinical trial this week, I found it 100 per cent effective against those lockdown blues.
Another little helper in our house was Falling Stars — an impromptu online cabaret featuring songs from the 1920s, adoringly arranged and performed by Peter Polycarpou and Sally Ann Triplett. It was to have aired at Southwark’s Union Theatre this month but they ended up filming it instead.
The upshot is a pleasingly schmaltzy trip down memory lane, with a 60-minute set including Night Time In Italy, Tea For Two, Smile and a lovely lump-in-the-throat number, You Know You Belong To Somebody Else, Else (So Why Don’t You Leave Me Alone).
Polycarpou, avuncular in his chocolate-coloured velvet jacket and Triplett, elegant in her black cocktail dress, perform on a pleasingly dusty set furnished with knick-knacks, tumbling drapes and an old standard lamp. Guaranteed to raise a sigh.
Stephen Sondheim doesn’t get under my skin in quite the same way, but Cirencester’s Barn Theatre has staged an immaculate production of his hybrid musical Marry Me A Little.
It’s a show about two singletons, stuck home alone in New York on a Saturday night (as if we should sympathise!). And its songs are plundered from other Sondheim shows, including A Little Night Music, Company and, most of all, Follies.
Yes, there’s heartache and longing but much metropolitan ambivalence, too; and, as the title suggests, it’s all a bit non-committal.
Frankly, though, I’ll take it, mainly because of the polished performances from Celinde Schoenmaker and Rob Houchen, who expertly negotiate Sondheim’s lyrics, with their inter-looping rhymes echoing his tricksy music.
Schoenmaker is a smouldering Amazonian blonde with a bell-like soprano voice; Houchen a slighter but no less skilful tenor.
There’s a neat loft apartment set with TV screen offering views of the Manhattan skyline (and dating apps) in what is a slick video, with high-quality sound.
The Barn has barely been open for two years — and spent most of this one closed — but I can’t wait to get down there in real life, once all of this is over.
An American In Paris is available to view indefinitely; Falling Stars runs from this Sunday for one week; and Marry Me A Little is on until Sunday evening.
SOMETHING TO TREASURE
Hoard: Rediscovered (newvicthreatre.org.uk)
Verdict: Tales from nerd central
Rating: 
Detectorists may already have sensed this coming, but the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme has put online a short piece of documentary about the Staffordshire Hoard of 2009 — the largest discovery of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver artefacts ever found, dating from around AD650.
Using material from the Staffordshire Hoard Festival of 2015, it’s a piece of ‘verbatim theatre’ collated by New Vic boss Theresa Heskins in which actors bring to life the accounts of key players in the fantastic find.
Chief among them was detectorist Terry Herbert (played by David Nellist), who quickly realised he had bitten off more than he could chew after unearthing the first pieces in what turned out to be a cache of 3,500 items in a field near Lichfield.
Detectorists may already have sensed this coming, but the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme has put online a short piece of documentary about the Staffordshire Hoard of 2009. It stars David Nellist as detectorist Terry Herbert
The haul was valued at a staggering £3.3 million. Terry shared the cash with farmer Fred Johnson.
My inner nerd (which my girls tell me isn’t that ‘inner’) was fascinated by the story of these extraordinary — and quite beautiful — artefacts in a tale that has become detectorists’ legend.
It will doubtless attract everyone from trainspotters to mediaeval battle re-enactment enthusiasts; but now it’s online, at least there’s no need for a cagoule and a packed lunch.
Historian Michael Wood (played by an actor) muscles in late on to explain the mysteries of the haul.
Augmented by 11 short monologues, based on characters associated with the hoard, by writers including Lemn Sissay, Isy Suttie and Sara Pascoe, it’s a hymn to oft-overlooked Staffordshire folk.
One participant calls it ‘nerd central’. I couldn’t possibly comment. Just don’t call them treasure hunters! P. M.
GAMES REVIEWS… by PETER HOSKIN
Hyrule still rules the anime world
Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Calamity (Nintendo Switch, £49.99)
Verdict: Magical surprise
Rating:
Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, £59.99)
Verdict: Overkill
Rating:
I always assumed that when I returned to the fairy tale kingdom of Hyrule, the setting for 2017’s The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild (one of the finest games ever made), it would be in a full-blown sequel.
Here, instead, is a prequel story, told in the lesser Hyrule Warriors spin-off series.
What’s even stranger is that the two series are so different.
Where Breath Of The Wild is placid, a game of puzzles and exploration, Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Calamity, below, is, well, breathless, a game of button-mashing combat. With each sweep of your sword you send dozens of monsters flying.
Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Calamity, above, is, well, breathless, a game of button-mashing combat. With each sweep of your sword you send dozens of monsters flying
Yet it works remarkably well. This is due, in part, to the translated beauty of this anime world but also to Age Of Calamity’s own qualities.
Mastering those button combinations is seriously rewarding. Switching between characters is a fun innovation.
The story contains more delights for fans of Zelda than for the uninitiated. But the actual play is universal.
The story part of Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War begins in a bar. A small, sweaty, neon-infused bar in 1980s Amsterdam. Part of me wishes I could have stayed there.
And that’s not just because of lockdown yearnings. What follows, after you and your covert colleagues leave the bar to pursue a terrorist, is just too much.
The graphics are detailed to the point of deliriousness. The weapons are loud and produce exceedingly bloody results. The globe-spanning plot is overexcited about historical references, which include a photorealistic Ronald Reagan.
Even in its gameplay, Cold War never settles. There are abbreviated sections in which you fly helicopters, race remote-control cars and command aerial bombardments. Variety, normally a good thing, is an imposition here.
There are various options outside Cold War’s story — including the frenetic, multi-player horror of its zombies mode. You’ve got to give the developers marks for trying. But I’m still nursing sore trigger fingers from all that shooting.