Saturday 18 May 2013

For now, something a little bit different for you…


More details coming soon about our next Secret Vintage Fairs on Sat June 27th, and also now Sat July 29th! Put those dates in your diaries! But first, here's a short musical interlude:

Parkway Dreams Review- Eastern Angles, @ Sir John Mills Theatre, Ipswich.

A musical documentary about ....Peterborough.

Peterborough- best known for the Queensgate shopping centre, roundabouts, the Passport Office, and the Train Station. Not a very vintage topic I hear you cry? Well read on and then make your own judgement on that one! And it just so happens to be the City where founder of the Secret Vintage Fair, Lucy, was born. It's not every day that The Eastern Angles produces a "musical documentary" about ones home town, so with much intrigue, Lucy went along to see it in Ipswich recently at the Sir John Mills Theatre. As a born and bred Peterborian, and a huge admirer of The Eastern Angles, She had high expectations...

"I did, and indeed I wasn't at all disappointed! This cracking production charts the expansion of Peterborough under the New Towns Act 1967, but actually spans a huge amount of history, right through from the 1940s, to present day Peterborough. It featured real life characters from The Peterborough Development Corporation and local/national politicians (including one Mr Charles Swift OBE who is still going strong as leader of the City Council in Peterborough today, after becoming a councillor there in 1954!!) and even Maggie Thatcher made an appearance or two with her trademark handbag! A pretty impressive number of characters featured actually, considering there were only 6 actors involved! 
There was also some very clever use of intertextuality from songs and TV quiz shows of the eras too, namely Crackerjack, Blankety Blank, and the Generation Game- (oh yes, who remembers these classic shows!) and the central story unfolded through use of a fictitious family who migrate to Peterborough from London in search of more modern facilities and a better family life; sold to them as some kind of new "Utopia". Bretton, my home for most of my childhood got a good mention, as one of the founding Townships built in Peterborough to house 20,000 people, which no development corporation had ever attempted before! I adored how dates and eras were further stamped out through use of mentions of Beatles songs, Football scores and other key dates in history such as the first concord flight in 1976! All very clever stuff. 
Plenty of awesome vintage costumes ahoy in this show, spanning 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s eras including some rather nice tweed for the boys! There were also some brilliantly comic songs, with characters declaring the post war expansion of News Towns was down to the fact that "Life is less Risky, we're feeling more frisky" and "The People are breeding, the Cities are teaming". Peterborough was also proud to have had the biggest Sainsbury's in the Country, but it was also soon able to boast the largest indoor shopping centre in the Country with 'champion store' John Lewis: Queensgate. It's funny to think that the place where I spent most of my youth growing up with school friends, actually opened in March 1982, when I was just a few months old, and was a HUGE factor in the development of Peterborough, having been 10 years in the making.

Simple but effective industrial/architectural style staging set the perfect ambience for this musical documentary, which certainly gave me an education. Just to add a note, those not from Peterborough will definitely enjoy this show too, with it's wit everyone every corner! It was a full house when I was there on Tuesday, grab a ticket for one of today's last performances if you are lucky enough!"

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