Results tagged “Michael Crawford” from Shenton's View

No, I’ve not gone straight. (The Daily Mail’s attempts to out me last week by chronicling the sightings of me and an “equally barrel-chested new companion” I’ve been escorting to West End first nights lately can hardly be said to have any effect, since I’ve never exactly been “in”, but I’m flattered that they care). But as regular readers will know, too, I’m a huge fan of cabaret, and though it is distressingly under-represented in London, I’ve seen two acts this weekend that I was mad about - and not in a crazy way, but in an entirely loving one!

Back in December I wrote here about what a fan I already was of Maria Friedman, and how, in the space of a single week, I’d seen her four times over in different guises.

The Edinburgh Fringe, of course, is just around the corner; but it started for some of us on Friday evening when the Almeida offered the UK premiere of its Traverse-bound production of Adam Rapp’s Nocturne — and, though beautifully acted by Peter McDonald, reminded me of one Festival rule: avoid one-man plays. No one else is going to arrive to change the pace.

But it kicked off a weekend of many changes of pace and place, though the highlight had to be seeing the show-tune loving, lonely earth robot Wall-e, propelled into a journey into outer-space, whose favourite thing is watching endless re-runs of songs from the film version of Hello, Dolly! — “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” and “It Only Takes a Moment”, both of which, incidentally, featured Michael Crawford. And it only took a moment, of course, to fall in love with Wall-e, too. (How many of us seek refuge when we’re feeling similarly lonely in showtunes? I could certainly identify!)

With Hairspray beginning performances in London tomorrow at the Shaftesbury, there are now ten shows playing in identical productions on each side of the Atlantic, with Jersey Boys set to join the line-up when it arrives in the West End from Broadway early next year and two more titles (Grease and Rent) also playing simultaneously but in different physical stagings. There’s an unequal distribution in the direction of the traffic – of the ten shows playing in both London and New York, four of them were born in West End, the other six on Broadway.

But yesterday’s announcement that Monty Python’s Spamalot is to do a leading ladies swap in January – we’re sending them our Lady in the Lake Hannah Waddingham, they’re sending us Marin Mazzie – makes me wonder why we don’t do this more often. [Click below to continue reading]

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.”

Has Elton John’s midas touch with musicals deserted him? After the runaway worldwide success of the film-to-stage version of The Lion King (for which he provided the songs for the original film that were then retained for the stage, augmented with new material from African musician Lebo M), a more modest Broadway success with subsequent Disney project in Aida (still unseen in London) and now the London smash Billy Elliot, he was lining up for another Broadway original working for the first time in the theatre with his long-time pop collaborator Bernie Taupin, Lestat, that has booked Broadway’s Palace Theatre for an April opening.

But whether it will get there now has been called into serious question by the reception the show has received at its San Francisco premiere on January 8. The San Francisco Chronicle theatre critic Roger Hurwitt wrote, “Didactic, disjointed, oddly miscast, confusingly designed and floundering in an almost unrelentingly saccharine score by Elton John, Lestat opened Sunday as the latest ill-conceived Broadway hopeful” to play in the city, after Mambo Kings (that never got to New York) and Lennon (that did, briefly, after San Francisco). He went on to comment that the songs “range from mildly interesting to, for the most part, banal and virtually undistinguishable. Taupin’s lyrics are often woodenly prosaic and rarely advance the story or our understanding of the characters…. John seems to spend most of the evening trying to become Andrew Lloyd Webber at his most vapid and pretentious.”

Another local review, the Mercury News said “the vampire musical showed few signs of life” and “lacks teeth”, before concluding, “Unless its creators can find a way to infuse more intensity, Lestat may be dead on arrival on Broadway in the spring.” The Contra CostaTimes, meanwhile, declared, “When dealing with vampires, it’s usually best to keep your neck covered and your garlic handy. Lestat proves the exception to the rule. The greatest danger…. is death by boredom.”

Of course, out-of-town try-outs are precisely the sort of place to hear such comments, and re-tool the show, if necessary, for Broadway. Elton John’s own Aida was completely overhauled after a critical mauling in Atlanta, with its then-creative team – including Lestat’s current director Robert Jess Roth, entirely replaced for Broadway.

But Broadway may be particularly nervous of vampire-themed shows after the fast failures there of Dance of the Vampires (that took Michael Crawford back to Broadway for the first time since The Phantom of the Opera but quickly expired; as Broadway columnist Michael Riedel called it yesterday in his New York Post column, it was “a campy fiasco that cost its investors $12 million and Michael Crawford his Broadway career”) and Dracula (“a $10 million bore that drove the final nail in composer Frank Wildhorn’s Broadway coffin”, according to Riedel).

And whether Elton John is (a) available for the kind of re-writes that might be necessary, and (b) would want to run the risk of a Broadway failure at this stage of his new theatre career that has made him one of the most successful of all contemporary writers of musicals is another question. Watch this space.