Lost and Found Orchestra

Produced by: Yes/No Productions

Hold on to your seats as STOMP go symphonic!

LOST AND FOUND ORCHESTRA - the latest production from the creators of STOMP - is a huge and exciting spectacle involving 32 multi-talented performers and musicians plus a choir live on stage.

For over 16 years STOMP has transformed household objects into unforgettable percussion instruments - and the concept reaches an exhilarating new level with the creation of this very unique orchestra featuring an incredible array of invented instruments.

This breathtaking show combining dance, music, comedy and aerial performance broke box office records at the Sydney Opera House in 2007 and was a great critical and commercial success at the Royal Festival Hall in London over Christmas 2008 and at Carre Theatre in Amsterdam in February 2009. The show hopes to tour the US in Autumn 2010 - watch this space!

 

 

 



THE TIMES REVIEW 24 December 2008
Geoff Brown

How was music first made? Hitting two stones together, perhaps, or blowing down a hollowed bone. We’ve come a long way since caveman days, but Lost and Found Orchestra, the new extravaganza from Steve McNicholas and Luke Cresswell, the Brighton mavericks who created the worldwide phenomenon Stomp, are here to tell us that we haven’t.

Most orchestras at the Festival Hall play violins, clarinets, trumpets — instruments carved and polished into perfection. This bunch play traffic cones, plumbing pipes, watercoolers, bedsprings, hammers, saws, hospital intravenous stands, filing cabinet drawers, even the lowly dustpan and brush. Anyone who has seen Stomp during its transformations and travels since its debut in 1991 will recognise the show’s junk aesthetic. But Stomp, which is on stage in London at the New Ambassadors Theatre, settled into a show for eight performers. By my count, this lovely monster summons 34 (plus an added choir of 33), blowing, warbling, tapping and bashing over every level of the wide, scaffolded stage.

There’s another spectacular difference. Stomp was essentially a percussion show, celebrating rhythm. Here we have melody as well, or as much melody as is plausible if you’re playing the “plumpet” (plumbers’ piping plus traffic cone), a wok fixed with steel guitar strings, or the dreaded “squonkaphone”, a combination of piping, balloon and gate latch that specialises in sounding rude.

You could, if you wanted, criticise the first half for its restricted musical formulas. A rhythmic pattern is established, hewn out of rock or world music. A melody of the minimalist persuasion is constructed above, and repeated with changing densities as different instrumental exotica are wheeled on and off. Easy on the ears, but limiting heard in bulk.

Yet not even that famous music critic Ebenezer Scrooge could fault the cast’s incredible feats of co-ordination and choreography. Throughout, the performing army flexes and jigs in a non-stop ballet of gesture and movement, seemingly synchronised on the point of a pin. Paul Emery’s lighting design adds additional pulses of colour, strong on triumphant reds, throbbing in step with the rhythm of the music. And don’t forget the swinging aerialists, the droll, light-fingered comedy, or Mike Roberts’s crucial and intricate sound design – never once deafening, despite the amplification.

In the second half the musical diet is widened. Cresswell lopes on as conductor. The music-theatre grows more complex in structure, but never ceases being audience-friendly: think of Philip Glass plus the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, plus Warners’ cartoons, plus the Marx Brothers, plus that bizarre Hollywood fantasy of Dr Seuss, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. And even that fusion of music and mayhem won’t catch the crazy magic of this uplifting show – the best Christmas treat in town.

Royal Festival Hall Southbank Centre Box office: 0871 6632500, to Jan 11