Groan Ups

[alobear]

I have been to a couple of Mischief Theatre shows before, with mixed results, so I wasn't sure about Groan Ups. The cast play a set of characters at three ages - 7, 13 and 31 - as the story progresses. The set is very clever as the furniture and props change sizes to reflect how big they are compared to the size of the characters at any given time. And the change between the first two time periods is well portrayed by a musical medley of songs that would have been popular during the intervening years. A lot of the writing is also very clever, making good use of the 'children' referencing things that they don't understand but that the audience will. Not all of the humour was to my taste, and I found aspects of the second half quite painful, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I'd feared and more of it landed with me than I expected.