Theatre: Cherry and Blossom

Corpus Playroom

I was pleasantly surprised when I walked into the Corpus Playroom last night. A first-timer, my reaction was that the venue was charming and quirky, but the particular stage set-up for Cherry and Blossom made the place. The intimacy of that L-shaped room, with the two audiences hidden from each other, created a perfect atmosphere for the production. On the stage was a beautifully decadent Victorian chaise longue, two small coffee tables crowded with half-empty bottles of generic liquor, and a rusty gramophone. The lighting was colourful but subtle, and the stage smoked in shades of red and blue, playing off the furniture. Old-fashioned suitcases strewn with flowers, feathers and pearls littered the ground, and pinned on the wall above were five dresses, each one symbolising the shifting fashions between the decades of the 1920s to the 1960s.

Already an eclectic feast for the eyes, then, even before Cherry (Eve Rosato) and Blossom (Emily-Jane Swanson) appeared. I knew and loved most of the songs the girls selected to sing. To name a few: Let’s Misbehave, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree (a personal highlight), and I Got Rhythm. The songs had been cherry-picked to fit the theme of ‘moving through the decades’, with a selection of favourites from the 20s through to the 60s. Anything but ‘run-of-the-mill Broadway babies’, the duo were entertainers through and through; both seductive and luscious in their black and white lingerie (which, amusingly, seemed to last them consistently throughout five whole decades), they acted and worked extremely well together, though at times their brilliant efforts at the nasal New ‘Yoick’ drawl turned somewhat Irish.

One of the most enjoyable and unique performances I’ve seen this year, you should catch them while you can in this venue’s intimacy, which suits them to a T. Or to an L, at least.