News about Zizi Strallen

PATRICK MARMION Heraclitus warned us 2,500 years ago that you should not step in the same river twice. The tide has already risen. But that hasn't stopped anyone from trying - as they are in Chichester, with a spirited new musical honoring the Seventies television series Rock Follies starring Carly Bawden, Angela Marie Hurst, and Zizi Strallen. I'm old enough to have a foggy recall of the original program. The late Charlotte Cornwell, sonorous Julie Covington, and Rula Lenska were three women who defied the misogynistic establishment to form the Little Ladies, an all-female rock band (the name is ironic). Chloe Moss' script reimagines the old screenplays to suit a modern audience's sensibilities. It's been purged of racial stereotypes, is more inclusive, with an openly gay personality, smokeless cigarettes, and more swearing than it would have gotten past Mary Whitehouse. It lacks the original's confrontational edge from its soaring heights of modern illumination. The suggestion that women might work together to defy leery men from copping a feeling and controlling their company no longer comes as a surprise.