Results tagged “Michael Ball” from Shenton's View

This week is being bookended by the transfer of two musicals to the West End. On the one hand, there’s Spring Awakening - the best new musical I’ve seen in years, it says on the ads (and outside the theatre), and I know it because I said it! - has moved from the Lyric Hammersmith to resume performances at the Novello, prior to an official opening on Thursday. And that’s where I will have to be, even though I am heading to New York the very next morning and even though I attended - and paid to see — the last night at the Lyric the weekend before last. I’m a fan who puts my money where my mouth and pen are…

And on the other, last night saw the London press night for Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, that has transferred from even further afield, namely Australia - where I first saw it in Sydney in 2007, and declared of it then, “it’s the best show of its kind since Mamma Mia!” (and, given that I’ve just rsvp’d an invitation to attend the Mamma Mia! 10th anniversary performance the week after next, that means it’s the best in a decade, which is a judgement I’m happy to stand by).

It’s an occupational hazard: I spend so many of my waking hours either seeing, writing about or arranging to go to the theatre that it now affects my sleep, too. This morning I actually awoke from a dream in which I had imagined that Priscilla, Queen of the Desert has already recouped its investment - before it has even opened! (If only, I can hear the producers muttering….)

But don’t put your money on it: my own track record in predicting what will be a hit and what will flop is notoriously unreliable. I would have told Cameron Mackintosh not to transfer Les Miserables from the Barbican to the Palace; and I actually told a friend not to invest in the London production of Hairspray, since I didn’t rate its chances.

No wonder that, when this same friend asked me the other day for further investment advice on a possible Broadway transfer for a recent London hit and I said “I wouldn’t put money on it — especially now. Heck, I wouldn’t put money on ANYTHING!” - he instantly replied: “I have just invested my entire life savings on this venture. When Mark Shenton says ‘flop,’ bet the farm!”

But seriously, I’m not a tipster - if I were, I’d be a rich producer, not a humble hack.

Thank God for Radio 2. While musical theatre is, without doubt, one of the most popular forms of theatre there is and an entire export industry has been based around Britain’s expertise in creating it, it is strangely little sung about on our radio airwaves. Commercial radio all but ignores it, and though BBC Radio 4 used to have an excellent weekly programme, Stage and Screen, hosted by Edward Seckerson, it was strangely decommissioned a couple of years ago (though Ed has maintained the show’s presence electronically by migrating it to an online platform).

It has instead been left to Radio 2 to fly the flag for musical theatre, where Michel Ball and Elaine Paige fill the Sunday mornings and early afternoon slots; but the station - which has the greatest reach of any BBC Radio station, attracting some 13m listeners a week, according to the most recent Rajar figures - is also strong on generating fresh, unique content, particularly through the institution that is Friday Night is Music Night — the world’s longest-running “live music” radio programme that has been running since 1952.

Last night it held a live recording at the London Palladium for Lyrics by Don Black, a slightly belated 70th birthday tribute concert (nearly two months after Don’s actual birthday on June 21) to one of our most prolific, yet paradoxically personally unsung, musical theatre heroes of the last half century.

Blogs are, of course, nowadays ubiquitous, as the democratisation of opinion they allow means that there’s a public forum for everyone to express theirs, if they so choose. But is anyone reading them all? I’m always gratified by the responses I get to this one, both privately amongst people who talk to me about what I’ve written, and by posting public responses.

Though posting here every day has become an increasingly significant part of what I do — and certainly the first job that I complete each day — it is still far from my only job; so I was intrigued to read Charlotte Higgins, who has been The Guardian’s arts correspondent for the last four years, state in a feature in The Guardian on Wednesday that after being “a reporter who tried to fit blogging in around the edges of my life, I’m about to move online. From this week, blogging will take its place at the heart of what I do.”

Charlotte has duly launched a rolling blog, where she can potentially post updates throughout the day.

We all need to step out of ourselves from time to time. And so it is that I came yesterday to be understudying no less than Elaine Paige in her occasional ‘Spotlight on….’ series of West End and Broadway celebrity interviews at the Shaw Theatre. With Elaine unwell, I was asked to step in to hold the spotlight on Michael Ball; I’m not much of a follow-spot operator (though I did do it once in my student days at the Cambridge ADC, when the operator didn’t show up on a show I was producing!), but the good thing about Michael is that - like all star performers - he knows how to find the glow of the spotlight and bask in it.

So although the audience may have been expecting both the leading man and woman of the West End musical stage to be in the same place at the same time, they got the leading man and me instead; but since that leading man was the ever bouncing Ball, I reckon they still got pretty good value.

It is one of the greatest regrets of my theatregoing career that I managed to miss the one-night run of Oscar Wilde – the Musical when it came and went from the Shaw Theatre in the space of one October night in 2004. I was in New York at the time, so it passed me by; but in what sounds like a uniquely jinxed opening (and closing) night, the sound itself was partly to blame – according to The Guardian review at the time, “You begin to wonder whether the sound system is being affected by the hefty rumbling of Oscar Wilde turning in his grave.”

Call me morbid, but I love to ambulance-chase dying musicals on their way to the graveyard (I even went to the final matinee of Desperately Seeking Susan to see it once again before it shut shop, just so I could lock it into my memory forever). I am always delighted to be able to say that I saw Carrie both at Stratford-upon-Avon and in its short-lived Broadway incarnation, for which it has become a by-word in musical flops – musical theatre historian Ken Mandelbaum even named his tome about flop musicals “Not Since Carrie”.

But now, having missed Oscar Wilde in London, I may at least get a chance to see it in New York.

As Barbara Cook sang an unamplified (and gloriously unadorned) version of Bernstein’s “Some Other Time” with the kind of haunting clarity and emotional intelligence that is her hallmark at the conclusion of the 80th birthday tribute in her honour at the London Coliseum last night, both my good friend Dan and I were in tears. “Let’s be glad for what we’ve had/and what’s to come”, she sang, and we can only hope that that there’s much more to come. At 80, she’s in astonishing shape: not just looking physically stronger and comfortable than she has for years, but vocally, too, she’s in prime condition. There is, in my opinion, simply no greater singer alive today. “I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love with a wonderful guy”, she sang earlier; and I could only think, “I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love with this wonderful gal!”

This time last year hardly a week went by without a big new musical opening in the West End – no wonder that, as I reported Bill Kenwright telling me at the time, “you get rave reviews, which we did for Cabaret, and you don’t have time to glory in them, because the next week it’s Spamalot, then it’s Dirty Dancing, then it’s Caroline or Change. Whereas normally people would be speaking about those Cabaret reviews for six or seven weeks, now it’s onto the next one. This week it’s Porgy and Bess, and then next week it’s The Sound of Music. They just keep coming.”

This year is altogether more measured – though Porgy and Bess came and went, and Caroline, or Change was only in on a limited season anyway, the others are still with us, so there’s hardly room for any new shows to come in. Ditto on Broadway, where the only two new musicals that will open this side of Christmas are Young Frankenstein (opening next week, assuming star Roger Bart is able to return to the title role from his current back injury) and Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

No wonder, then, that the arrival of Hairspray at the Shaftesbury last night was an opportunity to let our hair down – or rather, put it up (or what’s left of it, in some of our cases). And jostling with Cilla and the inevitable Biggins to get into the theatre, down the single tiny barricaded passageway that was created alongside the theatre’s notoriously narrow entrance, this was the a typically annoying first night experience. [CLICK BELOW TO CONTINUE READING]

“Go, go, go Joseph you know what they say/hang on now Joseph you’ll make it some day”, goes the Tim Rice lyric to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s insistent melody in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat; but he’s not the only person aspiring to make it some day. As the set of reality TV series that saw Maria in The Sound of Music, the title role of Joseph and Danny and Sandy in Grease fade in the memory now, the finalists that featured in each series are spreading throughout the industry. [Continue by clicking below]

It’s not usual at the Proms, of course, to hear lyrics like this: “Smile a rented smile/Fill someone’s glass/Kiss someone’s wife/Kiss someone’s ass/We do whatever pays the wages.” But then it’s not just those lyrics, from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s title song to Sunset Boulevard, that will have had Radio 3 audiences choking on their sherry (or tea or lager – let’s not categorise them too narrowly), but the fact that they were being sung by Michael Ball as part of Prom 58, the first-ever to be devoted entirely to a musical theatre performer to strut his stuff.

Of course, this is far from the only time that the musical theatre repertoire has been represented; a few years ago, an entire prom was devoted to a concert performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Wonderful Town, with a cast that included Broadway’s incandescent Audra McDonald, a performer who was subsequently a soloist for the last night of the Proms, too, so the classical credentials of good musical theatre talent have long been established.

But the Proms are usually about the art rather than the artists: we’ve not had solo showcases (yet) for Bryn Terfel or Renee Fleming, for instance, though both have of course appeared in Proms. But there the music came first, then their casting. Last night’s Prom seems to have begun the other way around, with Ball then left to choose his own repertoire as he saw fit.

And yes, he did break down barriers in the process, proving that he could more than hold his own, for instance, in the classical repertoire when he sang a Bizet duet with Alfie Boe (whom he recently co-starred with in the ENO’s ill-fated Kismet). But this was also, I’m sure, the first time that Frank Wildhorn and John Miles have been heard in the Proms, too, with their indescribably cheesy ‘This is the Moment’ (from Jekyll and Hyde) and ‘Music’ respectively, that threatened to turn the night into a Tom Jones Vegas concert.

Michael made several references to the criticisms that had been made of his appearance here, and in introducing a song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (which he performed in two years ago with New York City Opera), he referred to his character’s song as poking fun at the pretentiousness of people who think that high art is the only art.

That got a round of applause, and it’s certainly to be welcomed that the Proms are expanding their audience and repertoire, with music here also from Queen and Carly Simon. And if this may well have been the first time that many in the audience had attended a Prom, it was my first for this year, too – I had booked also to go to the Cleo Laine concert celebrating her 80th birthday, but it clashed with the opening night for Grease, so I didn’t get there in the end.

I couldn’t help thinking, though, that the Proms would have served Ball better if they’d suggested a musical framework for the evening to give it context beyond his own big personality (and bigger hair); and it finally came to me when he did a sing-off medley between a Lloyd Webber and Sondheim love song (‘All I Ask of You’ from Phantom and ‘Loving You’ from Passion, respectively), which he prefaced by saying that he didn’t think one could choose between them. While Lloyd Webber was elsewhere well represented, too, with songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, the previously mentioned Sunset Boulevard, and Aspects of Love (Ball did his signature song from that show, ‘Love Changes Everything’, as an encore), and Sondheim came back with his lyrics to West Side Story’s ‘Something’s Coming’ (wrongly attributed in the programme running order to Arthur Laurents), it might have been a more musically cohesive evening, and a better tribute to the genre itself, to have spent the entire evening showcasing the work of these two titans of contemporary musical theatre.

Michael would have been the man to do it; he is now, unquestionably, the West End’s leading leading man – or soon-to-be woman (when he stars in Hairspray; as these pictures show, he looks something like a cross between Kim Criswell and Bette Midler). As it is, he merely confirmed last night what we already know: that both he and musical theatre are worth taking seriously.

Tough though English National Opera’s Kismet was to watch – I blogged here at the time about how the head of one senior opera critic sitting across the aisle from me was operatically rolling so far forward in despair it was virtually buried in his briefcase – it must have been even harder to actually turn up and have to appear in every night. This is usually one of the private agonies of the theatre: actors tend to grin, literally, and bear it, since they don’t want to jeopardise future opportunities by speaking out about what they’ve had to experience. But that unwritten rule was irresistibly broken yesterday, when Michael Ball hilariously trashed Kismet in an interview in the Evening Standard, headlined with his own words, “It was shockingly, gloriously awful”. He went on, “It was like being in a cross between Springtime for Hitler and Carry on Camel”.

Was this one of those shows done with the best of intentions where the flour just doesn’t rise once it was in the theatre? No, he could see it coming: “The rehearsals were a shambles. People were standing around on stage saying, ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’ Can you believe it? I’ve never had a dance lesson in my life but I suggested a few things, just because you have to come up with something with all those people looking at you. It was as if a member of the Stedham Village Players had won the Lottery and said [puts on camp northern accent]: ‘I’m putting on Kismet and I’ll do it my way.’ It was like Aladdin at the Bradford Alhambra circa 1978.”

Ouch! He itemises the problems: “One of the biggest disasters was the design. To stick it all in a bloody great Day-Glo pink blancmange with no room to move and having the male dancers dressed in the same colour as the set so you couldn’t see them and the women, supposed to be luscious and sexy, wrapped up in M&S blue sheets …” And working practices at ENO get a hammering, too: “At ENO, because it’ s subsidised, there’s a civil-servant mentality. Even if you’re in the middle of a song, if the rehearsal reaches its scheduled end, you all down tools. I found that completely shocking. There was no collective sense of continuing to the end - just a matter of minutes - to make the whole enterprise better. One of two people might have done it but the others had already gone home.”

Ball, whose loyal fan club, of course, bought many of the tickets, was tempted to tell the audience what he thought: “I wanted to come to the front of the stage and say ‘We know. It’s as bad as you think. We’re not crazy’.” But maybe he is to say all this in the same breath as adding, “in spite of all that, I loved every second. The people were great and I’d be happy to work at the Coliseum again.” He’s trying to spoil his cake and eat it.

Nichola McAuliffe famously did so in 2004 when she was starring in Murderous Instincts at the Savoy, and before it even opened wrote, in a double-page spread in the Daily Mail, of a producer who was “as mad as a box of frogs”, and rehearsals as being “like a motorway pile-up”. Now she’s done even better with the experience and written a brilliant backstage fictional account of the putting on of a West End salsa musical, called A Fanny Full of Soap.

Actors are invariably glad of the work, whatever it is, but its good to know that their critical faculties are intact, and that even those in hits aren’t necessarily spared its blushes: I have spoken to a couple of members of the cast of Dirty Dancing, and even they have privately admitted it is rubbish. Yet they also know their responsibilities to an audience who have come along to have their memories of the film honoured, and that it is their job to make that happen.

You know the sinking feeling. You arrive at the theatre and the star is off: sometimes even more than one, especially if you’re seeing a musical. In America, you open the free Playbill you are given when you are shown to your seat and a shower of little slips of paper falls into your lap. It happens all the time. But the transfer of The Woman in White to Broadway has been more than uncommonly besieged by this since it opened there last November: American co-producer Bob Boyett commented on Friday, “Unfortunately, early in previews, the show experienced a number of medical problems among the cast. Maria Friedman performed admirably through a diagnosis of breast cancer and its treatment and Michael Ball battled a serious viral infection. As a result of these and other health issues among the company, audiences got to see the entire original cast perform just 31 of the 108 performances played to date since the show’s first preview”.

Andrew Lloyd Webber added, “There have been performances when two or more leads have been absent due to illness. I’m not sure even The Phantom of the Opera could have survived the illnesses which have beset this wonderful company”.

Though Maria Friedman battled on through her illness – returning to the show just a week after an operation to remove a lump from her breast – the producers had announced a leave of absence from February 12 so she could receive further treatment, but she has now announced that she will continue to the end of the run. Michael Ball, meanwhile, has also been curiously absent, with no reason stated, for a while now; he was not on when I saw it a couple of weeks ago there, but the understudy came up trumps: as I reported here, he was the best Fosco I have yet seen.

The streak of bad luck it has suffered – which also saw original star Michael Crawford depart the London production early, citing illness – has now been declared terminal as a result: it will close on Broadway on February 19, just three months since officially opening there, at a loss of most of its $8.5million budget. It also closes in the West End a week later, on February 25.

In this critic’s view, The Woman in White is easily the best (and most ambitious) Lloyd Webber musical for some years: not since Song & Dance has he flirted quite so bravely with exploring new forms – in that case, pairing an exquisite solo song cycle followed by a score for a blazing dance drama that long prefigured Susan Stroman and Twyla Tharp’s later Broadway entries in the form (with Contact and the West End bound Movin’ Out respectively). And The Woman in White also boasted an uncompromisingly difficult score that, notwithstanding Lloyd Webber’s trademark melodic uplifts, also went into far darker musical territory. Maybe, as with Aspects of Love that was a teasing chamber musical but was horribly overproduced, it simply needed a more understated staging to reveal its charm. The Woman in White may have gone into the red; but I suspect that its future life has not faded to black just yet.

In other news today, former Really Useful exec Bill Taylor is – according to the Sunday Times – tomorrow being announced as the new chief executive for Stage Entertainment UK, the British division of Joop van den Ende’s massive European theatre and television empire. I recently wrote in a profile of corporate players in the entertainment market in The Stage that van den Ende “is spreading the tentacles of his European-based company into a growing range of new markets, including Britain where Stage Entertainment are currently behind the transfer of the Blue Man Group from off-Broadway to the New London Theatre. They also co-produced Contact in the West End…. In Germany – the world’s third largest market for musicals, after the West End and Broadway – Stage Entertainments run 11 theatres, and have three each in Spain and the Netherlands, plus one in Russia. It can only be a matter of time before they expand into UK theatrical ownership, too.”

The appointment of Taylor, who spearheaded Lloyd Webber’s own incursions into becoming one of the West End’s most powerful theatrical landlords in 2000, can only increase this suspicion. At the time of RUG’s theatrical acquisitions, Taylor commented, “RUG’s commitment to live productions is well known. Our acquisition of Stoll Moss, which is a well-run and prestigious group with a fine track record, ensures a thriving and profitable future for the West End. The scale of the new Group will now make the overall operations more efficient and provide a very strong base for future acquisitions both in the UK and overseas.”