Chicago

JORDAN

West End performer and past pupil of Cowbridge Comprehensive School, Jordan Davies, takes time out of his busy schedule to give Cowbridge Comprehensive School’s Performing Arts pupils a guided back stage tour. 

After achieving excellent results in Drama and Music at Cowbridge Comprehensive School, Jordan graduated from the Guildford School of Acting in 2011.Since then he has been busy with acting jobs and performing in musicals around Europe. His television credits include appearing on The Voice UK where he was a part of Team Will! Last year he appeared as Peter Pan at The Grand Theatre Blackpool.

Now, former Cowbridge Comprehensive School pupil, Jordan Davies, is appearing in Les Miserables at The Queens Theatre, London. Seen by more than 70 million people in 43 countries and in 22 languages around the globe, it is still breaking box-office records everywhere in its 30th year. Jordan always wanted to perform and believes that a combination of hard work and perseverance have got him where he is today. Performing in Les Miserables is a dream come true for him.

Despite a very busy schedule Jordan found time to show a group of Performing Arts students from Cowbridge around the Queens Theatre. Pupils were privileged to see the workings of the theatre and were able to ask questions and receive valuable information about a career in the industry.

Mrs. A Campbell (Head of Drama) and Mr. Colborne (Head of Performing Arts) commented that they were always impressed with Jordan’s desire to give something back into the school that he felt he had got so much from while being a pupil. His teachers remember his successes at Cowbridge Comprehensive School both academic and playing the lead in many memorable school musicals such as Jekyll and Hyde, Into The Woods and Little Shop of Horrors. He always wanted to perform and now he is living his dream.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some reviews:

 

Othello

Sell-out houses at Oxford Playhouse this week are greeting Frantic Assembly’s superb revival, with Theatre Royal Plymouth, of Shakespeare’s Othello, in a production first seen to huge acclaim six years ago. Around me in the stalls at Tuesday’s opening was an audience of A-level students stunned into startled silence, a happy condition not easily achieved with those of their age group.

But this is a tragedy stripped down, sexed up and translated into the present day (adapters Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett) in a way that proves the themes it tackles — jealousy, revenge, envy, among them — are indeed truly timeless.

 

Pounding, relentless music drives along the action, transforming into the moody and menacing when the moment demands. There is eye-popping choreography for all members of the cast, who seem as much acrobats as actors. Laura Hopkins’s set takes on a life of its own, with a multi-hinged back wall that writhes snake-like to suggest, for instance, how things feel for poor Cassio (Ryan Fletcher) after he is made drunk by Iago (Steven Miller) as a prelude to his disgrace. The method by which this is done — as shot follows shot in a competitive drinking game — strikes exactly the right note for the milieu we’re drawn into.

 

 

This is a seedy bar — northern to judge by most of the accents — frequented by a chavvy gang dominated through violence by Othello (Mark Ebulue), a man rarely without a baseball bat in his hands.

A lot of the action, including the sexual, centres on the pool table where, during a tense game, Iago first stirs his boss’s seeds of doubt concerning the conduct of his wife, Desdemona (Kirsty Oswald). Her championing of the aforementioned Cassio in his disgrace comes to play an important part in the case he craftily builds against her.

So, most crucially, does her dropped handkerchief, an episode boldly handled here in a way that overcomes one of the principal problems over it. In most productions of Othello, you are left wondering why the good-sort Emilia (Leila Crerar here), who has handed the talismanic love token to husband Iago, doesn’t speak up when she starts to see the nefarious purpose to which he is putting it. On this occasion, director Scott Graham invents a confrontation in which he can be seen (but not heard) exerting pressure to gain her silence.

In 100-gripping minutes, without interval, the action proceeds ineluctably towards its bloody conclusion, in violent scenes which in their modern context bear every mark of authenticity.

As I said, stunning.

 

 

Theatre

Othello

 

•          
• You will never have seen an Othello quite like this. Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett of Frantic Assembly take a broken bottle to Shakespeare's text and give it an expert gutting. The heart of the play remains intact, and it pulsates bloodily. This is not Shakespeare for purists, but it has undoubted vision and verve. There is plenty wrong with it - music that often swamps the verse, actors who are sometimes more physically than vocally competent, a failure at the climactic moment to ratchet up an emotional gear into genuine tragedy - but a lot is right, too. This production is violently watchable.

 

1. What is most startling is how effectively and seamlessly the action has been transposed from Venice to the less salubrious setting of a pub in a decaying, northern England working-class town. It is a place with its own distinct rules and male-dominated social hierarchy, where Desdemona and Emilia exchange confidences and fags in the ladies' loo. Here, bouncer Othello's (Jimmy Akinbola) rise to become top dog, snaffling Desdemona from under her father's nose along the way, has created tensions - social, racial and romantic - that Iago exploits. Charles Aitken is superb as the lethal bully who disguises his own envy and vulnerability by exploiting the jealousies of others, particularly the runt-like Roderigo, whose eyes constantly follow Desdemona around the pub.

One of the best things about the production is that it gets the details so right; not just in Laura Hopkins's design, with its pool table and slot machine, or the distant thump of disco music and barking dogs in Gareth Fry's sound design, but in the way it excavates the tribal loyalties of young, white, working class men. They swagger around the pool table with a macho grace. There is a terrible animal beauty in their coiled violence and vulgarity, a diseased nobility like lions in a zoo suffering from mange and misdirected aggression.
Yes, the flat northern vowels scrape the verse, but it is robust enough to survive. As love and death are played out upon the pool table amid the broken bottles and piss, it feels as if Shakespeare hasn't been buried, but honoured and imaginatively reinvented for 21st-century audiences.

Othello

Frantic Assembly's Othello is superb

By Karen Busell •                    

          

© Manuel Harlan

Always a fan of physical theatre company Frantic Assembly, I was delighted to see its Othello was on its way back. And the Theatre Royal Plymouth in association with the Curve theatre revised production did not disappoint.
The deserved rapturous applause from a mainly student audience is testament to Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett's adaptation and choreography.
The Bard's iconic tragic tale of scheming, sex and murder is brought bang up-to-date with hoodies, chavs and bottled lager as pool cues substitute the sword, and gang warfare is rife.
Set in a seedy Northern bar with pool table, plastic leather banquette and flashing fruit machine, nine actors populate the stage as plots and paranoia abound.
A convincing and somewhat noble Mark Ebulue leads the macho posturing with muscles rippling as the eponymous Moor manipulated by his jealous and devious henchman Iago (a nicely poisonous Steven Miller).
Caught in the web of intrigue are Cassio (Ryan Fletcher, whose drunken antics are a delight) and lovelorn bruiser Roderigo (Richard James-Neale) while Kirsty Oswald is spot-on as Desdemona – doting, sensual and increasingly bewildered.
Designer Laura Hopkins' eye for detail is tremendous – Desdemona and Emilia (Leila Crerar) locked in the grotty Ladies discussing the boys; testosterone-pumped, trackie-clad louts lusting after the lissom lasses; and more – while Graham's direction is pacy, athletic and vital.
With the pool table doubling as the marital bed and murder scene, wobbly walls that add dimension to the action, slo-mo moments emphasising the rapid slide to unavoidable destruction, and Hybrid's pounding rave soundtrack, this is a visceral, unmissable, uninterrupted 120 minutes.

Rehearsals will take place :





Tuesday  ---------------------14th October   3.30 -5.30


No rehearsal Tuesday ------21st October


Please learn your lines

REHEARSAL SCHEDULE



Thursday  9th October A1M    3.30- 5.30


Thursday  16th October  A1M    3.30- 5.30



Tuesday  21st October  A1M    3.30- 5.30


Please wear sensible clothes and jazz shoes if possible.

Shakespeare Schools Festival

SHAKESPEARE SCHOOLS FESTIVAL

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR

 

Taliesin Arts Centre Swansea

The box office have let me know that as of today, that tickets are selling fast!

If you want to talk to the box office, please call: 01792 602060.

Chicago

Call Backs 1.30 Monday A1M

 Chicago

 

Verity-Belle Atkinson

Abbie-Lee Cornish

Amy Hooper

Maddie Croysdale

Olivia Chester

Charlotte Adams

Hannah Gaskin

Tegan Cecil

Katherine Rees

Hannah Clarke

Anna Hooper

Elinor Parsons

Claudia Howells

Shakesperae Schools Festival

 

Shakespeare Schools Festival

 

Taliesin Arts Centre in Swansea

 

 

Performance Night - 14th November: 

• Cast Workshop - 1st October
• Plays already being performed - Macbeth, Twelfth Night

 

We are performing :

 

   The Merry Wives of Windsor

PACS. First meeting!

 

 

Having fun in the amphitheatre!

PACS Shakespeare Festival

Hi Everyone!


What a great first meeting of PACS!! 


We have over 60 members and we are delighted that so many of our new Year 7 pupils came along.

The script for The Merry Wives of Windsor can be found in:

My Computer/RM Shared/Drama/Shakespeare Schools Festival.

Please download and print off the script for your use in rehearsals.

If you want to audition for one of the parts in this hilarious comedy have a read through of the script and decide what part you wish to audition for.

There are many other important jobs that need committed students. These include publicity, marketing, props, costume and makeup.


See you next Wednesday!



Mrs Campbell and Miss Owen

News Flash!!!

 

 

1. PERFORMING ARTS EDUCATIONAL VISIT  YEAR 8

Comedy of Errors at the Globe Theatre London

 

18th September 2014

 

Please look at the notice board for information.

 

 

2. Whole School Musical: Chicago  Years 10-13

 

First meeting Monday 8th September at 1.30pm   A1M

 

All welcome. Please come along and register your interest and have some fun!!!

 

 

3.PACS (Performing Arts Club)

 

PACS  will start again 10th September 2014

 

A1M

 

3.30-4.30pm

 

 Shakespeare Schools Festival: Twelfth Night

Shakespeare Schools Festival is the UK's largest youth drama festival, offering students from all backgrounds the opportunity to perform Shakespeare on a professional stage.

I am delighted to announce we are taking part in this festival and I am looking for 30 pupils to perform Twelfth Night. 

If you want to be involved, then look out for audition dates early in the new term.



You do not need to have had any experience. All you need is energy, enthusiasm and commitment.


Dates for the festival are:

Cast Workshop: October 1st, Taliesin Arts Centre, Swansea, 10.00pm

Rehearsal: November 14th, Taliesin Arts Centre, Swansea, 9.00am

Performance: November 14th, Taliesin Arts Centre, Swansea, 7.00pm

Summer School

 

 

 

 

SUMMER SCHOOL

 

 

 

Year 8

Educational Theatre Visit

10th July 2014

 

 

 

The smash-hit, multi-award winning musical has arrived in London to sensational reviews
Based on the much-loved Oscar-winning film, Once is an extraordinary, original and irresistibly joyous celebration of love, friendship and music.

When an Irish busker and a Czech girl meet through a shared love of music, their song writing sparks a deep connection and a tender, longing romance that neither of them could have expected. Winner of 8 Tony^® Awards in 2012, including Best New Musical, and a 2013 Grammy^® Award, this unique stage adaptation takes you right to the heart of the action in a rapturous production.

An exhilarating love story that refuses to play by the rules, performed by an extraordinary cast of actor-musicians, Once dazzles with invention, wit and unforgettable music.

Featuring all of the magical songs from the original film, including the Oscar-winning “Falling Slowly”, this achingly beautiful, thrillingly inspirational show strikes an unforgettable chord and truly dares to be different.

The UK's biggest classroom!

 

Year 10 Drama students took part in the UK’s biggest Shakespeare classroom as they sat down to watch the live broadcast of Henry IV part 1.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The broadcast included a live, interactive Q&A with actors and members of the creative team.

 

 

 

 300 schools took part and over 25,000 students watched from across the UK.

 

 

Musical!!

MUSICAL  2014/5


Look out for news on the next whole school musical!!  

 

It will be announced this week!

 

Auditions and rehearsal schedule will be posted soon.

                                                        Summer Concert!

 Come and enjoy an evening of music and drama!!

 

Tuesday July 15th at 7pm
 
Tickets £2.00
 
Box Office  01446 772311

 

P.A.C.S 5th Feb 2014

P.A.C.S 5th Fev 2014
What did we do today?

• Dance warm up to get our bodies warm for some intense drama rehearsal 

• Some AMAZING REHEARSALS where the pupils of P.A.C.S perfected their monologues for the Refina monologue showing (3rd April)

• SHOW BACK - We got a preview of the pieces before they came to the stage

Refina Monologues

P.A.C.S PRESENTS...

THE REFINA MONOLOGUES

Date: Thursday 3rd April 2014

Time 7.00pm

Cowbridge Comprehensive School

Tickets: £3.00

TICKETS AVAILABLE FROM COWBRIDGE COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL RECEPTION!

Get Practising...

Love V x (and Fran ;))