Review: Bingo!, the Crescent Club, Cullercoats

Jul 7 2009 By Tony Henderson, The Journal

PROBABLY not for the first or last time, the thumpingly inane beat of Agadoo-doo-doo filled the concert room of the Crescent Club in Cullercoats.

The 1984 horror by Black Lace was, incidentally, voted in a survey the fourth most annoying song of all time.

But on this occasion it was the perfect mood-setter for what must be a little piece of stage history.

The play Bingo! is set in the concert room of a social club, and here it was being performed
in the mirror-image concert room of a social club.

The play’s writer Kitty Fitzgerald, of North Tyneside’s Cloud Nine Theatre Productions, worked with the body’s 0ver-60s community wing on their experiences of club life. The over-60s group also provided the bulk of the cast, with Cloud Nine’s artistic director Peter Mortimer taking the role of the concert room “turn”, an outrageous drag artist.

The booking upsets the club’s old-style male committee men who are already bemoaning the fact that strippers are a thing of the
past.

The controversial cross-dresser quips: “When I played at Tynemouth Club they pelted me with tomatoes. The problem was that they were still in the tins.”

The committee’s reservations are spliced by the characters, intrigues and relationships to be found in any concert room.

But the modern age is infiltrating even the heartland of the CIU with a couple having their first date via the internet.

Bingo! is also enlivened by musical numbers, a dash of bawdiness and one-liners and includes a finale by the Wallsend Wichita line dancers. The fact that the Crescent Club laid on bingo before and after the performance meant that the well-filled concert room became part of the show.

And there was no escape for those in the bar who were visited after the show by Mr Mortimer in full drag regalia. Well, it makes a change from dominoes.

At the end of the night it was top marks to the older performers who had the bottle to get up on stage, their back-up crew and the Crescent club for staging the event.

At a time when there are question marks over the relevance of “high” culture to a sizeable slice of the North East’s population, here was a community group delivering their version to local club-goers. Agadoo to that.