Hold Onto Your Butts
The Arcola theatre in the up-and-coming area of Dalston, East London is the home for Hold Onto Your Butts before it goes on a tour of England.
It cost an alleged $26 million dollars to produce the film Jurassic Park: World Domination (the sixth in the Jurassic franchise). Hold Onto Your Butts, a parody of the original film must have cost about £26.50 – but then again this is the Recent Cutbacks Theatre Company and their skill set is DIY Foley (a post-production technique that involves creating sounds for film to enhance the audio). Not only are the sound effects DIY, so too the sets and props! A piece of kitchen roll becomes a dinosaur egg. A pair of glasses a fellow actor, and a sheet of cardboard a jeep!
What the production lacks in a production budget, it makes up for in hilarity, absurdity and laughs…in spades. Certainly, we are aware that the audience around us is having a great night, as are we.
The whole 70 minutes is a crazy, mind blowing recreation of the movie with many a gag pointing to the ridiculous story line of the original, such as picking up on the limp that one of the characters develops with no apparent reference to it in the script! 90% of the parts are played by performers Jack Baldwin and Laurence Pears who give us everything from child actors to Tyrannosaurus Rex! The parody of Jeff Goldblum in particular is spot on! Both actors’ performances are enhanced and elaborated by Foley Artist, Charlie Ives. Actors and Foley keep each other on their toes as they extend certain parts to see how far they can push each other, all with great comic effect.
We are in a crazy world where all reality has to be suspended – not unlike the original movie. As we laugh at the craziness of the storyline and the situation we find ourselves in, to a person we are reminded that Spielberg got us to do it 30 years ago on a slightly higher budget. Only this production is twice as daft as the original!
Fan of the film or not – we’d recommend this to you, for a crazy night out at the theatre.
This show was reviewed on the 12th December 2024 at the Arcola Theatre, London where it runs until the 11th January 2025. Tickets available here: Hold onto Your Butts - Arcola Theatre London
Review written by Paul Wood & Ian Worsfold
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Photo credit: Mark Senior
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