A friend once sagely remarked that you can’t fight a hit - and just as critics have been powerless to stop the waves of musical mediocrity represented by the likes of We Will Rock You, Dirty Dancing and Never Forget (the latter of which just yesterday announced an extension of its current booking period to November 15 at the Savoy, with plans to then transfer to another West End theatre), so it is utterly pointless to resist the onward onslaught of Disney’s High School Musical.

Yes, I know that I’m hardly the target audience for it, being roughly 30 to 35 years too old for its intended tweenage audience of 10-15, and it’s true, too, that I was feeling waves of nausea even before I sat down in the Apollo Hammersmith last night, having returned from Gran Canaria the day before with something of a fever, so perhaps I need to make allowances (yes, even critics are human sometimes!). But from the moment the curtain went up to literally deafening screams from the overwhelmingly youthful audience, I felt like a complete outsider.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been having withdrawal symptoms from my self-imposed “blogging leave” of the last week. And being entirely away from the theatre, too, for a full week has been a bit surreal (yes, life - and the theatre - does go on without me!). But I’ve also been discovering how very tiring it is to do so very little! During my week in Gran Canaria I wrote a bit every day, and of course checked the web daily for breaking news, at least of the theatrical variety - but otherwise I managed to turn a darker shade of pale as I spent a lot of time in a cooling pool-side Jacuzzi, treating myself to afternoon ice cream sundaes and late evening meals and not doing a whole lot else.

But if I’ve been away from London theatre and my blog, it’s been fascinating to catch up, vicariously, with the annual theatrical marathon of New York Times chief critic Ben Brantley, who is in London for a month and filing a daily blog of his own about what he sees (and sometimes, who he sees - Ralph Fiennes was just down the row from him at Major Barbara at the National - and even what he eats: he has “bad and restless dreams” after seeing Anthony Neilson’s Relocated, adding, “and I don’t think it was just from eating a comforting slab of Fortnum and Mason treacle fudge”).

This isn’t the first year that Brantley has been blogging from London - he did it last year, too.

You sometimes see review columns, particularly with the Sunday papers, by-lined by an unfamiliar name (except to eagle-eyed regular readers who actually keep track of who’s who in the critical world), being footnoted with the declaration that the usual critic “is away”. This keeps their name in currency and suggests that they will be back. The daily papers, of course, have teams of critics; so when - as he has been for the last couple of weeks - Benedict Nightingale of The Times doesn’t appear, they don’t draw attention to this fact but you simply notice that Sam Marlowe is covering more things than usual.

Things are more confusing on the Evening Standard where, in the absence of Nicholas de Jongh, another Nick - Curtis - pops up at some of the bigger openings, instead of the “official” deputy Fiona Mountford.

All of this is by way of explaining that I am away from today to this time next week, so I will not be appearing in this spot until tomorrow week, Tuesday July 8.

It’s a recurring theme here to note just how swamped with openings we occasionally become - just three Mondays ago I came back from New York to the prospect of three clashing first nights on that same night, while the next night had two, as I reported here. At least it meant that I was spared having to see Dickens Unplugged (which is officially unplugged tomorrow); but if only we could have been spared All Bob’s Women, too.

However, that has managed to arrive in a week when we have been having trouble filling our critical dance cards; and so it is that some of us have been lured to the Arts yet again, even though it is fast turning into a venue where a sense of doom envelops you the moment you walk in.

That’s because a sense memory has started to attach itself to a place which has recently only seen terrible shows.

Blog readers,

Below appears the first guest blog on Shenton’s View. It is written by Alistair Smith, The Stage news editor, and is a trailer for a new blog to be launched on The Stage website which will deal with news comment and analysis.

For the moment I am happy to welcome it as an occasional guest on my own blog to introduce it to regular readers. Please feel free to comment and let us know what you think.

Mark

Yesterday I saw a classic musical, originally premiered in a Broadway theatre in 1956 (where it ran for barely two months), in an opera house and another contemporary musical, originally premiered in the West End in 1999 and now long-established as a global stage hit, re-made for the multiplex cinema.

It was interesting to see each adapt — or not — to their new environments; and while Candide, the famously problematic Leonard Bernstein-scored musical adaptation of Voltaire’s moral fable of a man’s journey through serial adversities, has found a new lease of life in opera houses (where its dramatic problems can be over-ridden by, or at least traded for, musical brilliance), maintaining the joy, spontaneity and surprises of the stage version of Mamma Mia! proves more difficult onscreen.

It’s partly, of course, a question of the audience itself and what we bring to it.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I go to the theatre a lot. Partly, of course, it’s because I do happen to love it - but fortunately, too, it’s my job to do so. (I often think that my theatregoing habit would be unsupportable if I actually had to pay for it!) But the job, for me, doesn’t stop there; it doesn’t just fill the nights but also most of the daytimes, too.

That’s because what I do isn’t merely defined by what happens onstage but also off it, and - in common with many other critics and arts journalists - I also write (and sometimes lecture) about the business of the theatre from the wings, whether interviewing actors one-to-one for profile pieces, hosting live interviews in front of audiences, chasing news stories, or talking to producers about more general business issues than the shows they are doing right now.

It benefits me in the sense that I get a wider perspective of this intense little world than just what happens when the curtain goes up; and I hope that the extra knowledge I get from this informs what I see when it does.

Were it not for the 19-day strike of stagehands that shut down most of Broadway last November, the figures released for the Broadway season that ended on May 25 would have broken all-time records, as reported here. While the shows grossed approximately $937.5million (including an estimate for Young Frankenstein, which alone amongst Broadway’s shows isn’t disclosing its takings), compared to the previous season’s record of $938.5m, it is estimated that were the strike not to have intervened grosses would have reached $975m. So that means that the strike - which didn’t, coincidentally, affect Young Frankenstein — cost approximately $37.5m in direct earnings.

But while the box office takings go ever skyward - partly propelled by the ticket prices that do, too (but also by year-on-year increases in attendances, which in the season just reported clocked up a paid attendance of 12.27m, against the previous year’s 12.3m, and which are estimated would have been 12.9m if the strike had not occurred) - so do the costs of putting the shows on in the first place and keeping them running, which is why the producers were seeking the concessions they did from the stagehands.

It’s a similar story in the West End.

It is hard work being a composer - and even harder to get a show put on, as any composer will tell you. But there are ways to make your work get heard - and far more widely than West 45th Street or Shaftesbury Avenue and their environs. It’s called, of course, the internet; and the London debut of American songwriter Jeff Blumenkrantz last night has demonstrated perfectly how its reach can work.

Last night’s concert happened, in fact, thanks to Facebook, and a Danish postgrad student at Mountview called Thomas Bay Pedersen; and due, in turn, to Jeff’s personal website, which brought his music to the ears of one of Thomas’s tutors back home in his native Denmark in the first place, and who introduced Thomas to Jeff’s work via the podcasts he offers there of many of his songs. Thomas duly connected with Jeff on facebook - and as they were chatting, Thomas mentioned how great it would be if Jeff could appear in London. Jeff replied that he was coming over in June, and Thomas suggested he contacted Amy Maiden - another Facebook ‘friend’ who has previously produced one-off concerts for other American writers Jason Robert Brown, Andrew Lippa and Georgia Stitt in London.

And so it is that Jeff was appearing in St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge last night under Amy’s auspices.

Theatre PRs — or publicists, as they call them on Broadway - play an even bigger role in managing the media there they do over here. And they have wider responsibilities to do so - it’s their job, for instance, to keep the programmes (Playbills) updated, which - since they are printed weekly - is a constant task. So while London theatre PR offices are typically a handful of people, at the most, if not one-man (or woman) operations, New York’s biggies - in particular, the two mega-agencies, Boneau/Bryan-Brown and Barlow-Hartman - seemingly have armies of publicists and assistants; and do an amazing job at it, too.

But now this behind-the-scenes function, which is already accorded a place on the title page of the Playbill and poster, is not only moving into the spotlight but above the marquee itself, with the news yesterday that a Broadway house is being named after a Broadway publicist for the first time, with the brother and sister-in-law of the late Sam Friedman using funds from a foundation they established to donate a substantial sum of money to Manhattan Theatre Club to re-name their Broadway house, the Biltmore, in his honour.

There’s nothing new to rich people buying and selling honours - just ask Tony Blair - but on Broadway, the commercialisation of the naming game is taking on new levels.

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’s a recurring theme of this blog to point out how divided theatre critics can be on the same show. But of course it doesn’t just go for me and my colleagues, but also for ones in all disciplines: it’s been fascinating this week, for instance, to see the polarisation amongst dance critics in their reaction to English National Ballet’s Strictly Gershwin arena stage dance show.

On the one hand, there have been four star raves from Judith Mackrell in The Guardian and Debra Craine in The Times; on the other, there’s been a pan from Ismene Brown in the Daily Telegraph and a one-star review from Sarah Frater in the Evening Standard.

As always, it’s a question of taste and aesthetics.

On Sunday, a friend e-mailed to ask me if I’d seen Anthony Neilson’s Relocated at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs - “I was one minute late yesterday, due to roadworks and a very bad bus situation, and the show has no latecomers point, so I had to miss the show. Wondering if I can miss it, like I could have missed his last play at the Soho.” I don’t know the answer, as I’ve not seen it yet (but I will find out next Monday).

As it happens, though, I’d been at the Court myself the night before, but in the even more intimate confines of an upstairs rehearsal room, accessed via the 3rd floor administrative offices, to see the last performance of Mike Bartlett’s grippingly compelling Contractions, and latecomers would not have been welcome there, either. In these tight spaces, the theatre has to make a call to measure the disruption to the performance that could be caused by a late arrival against the timetabling difficulties that some of its customers may have; and in both of these cases, latecomers have to be treated as no-shows entirely.

It’s better to arrive a week too early than a minute too late, as I discovered for myself on Sunday evening when I turned up at St Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge for what I hoped would be an evening with American theatre songwriter Jeff Blumenkrantz.

What a difference 43 years makes! When the hit West End version of the French comedy Boeing-Boeing first crossed the Atlantic back in 1965, it was a fast flop, clocking up a Broadway run of just 23 performances - it opened on February 1 and shuttered on February 20, even though the original London production had run for over seven years and 2,035 performances after opening the year I was born, in 1962. But last night the transfer of last year’s London revival was named Best Revival of a Play in this year’s Tony Awards, and Mark Rylance took the top personal British honour of the night to win the award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play.

Boeing-Boeing’s success - over more serious-minded imports like Macbeth, and new local productions of Pinter’s The Homecoming and Les Liaisons Dangereuses — proves that comedy is a serious business, too; but then so is Broadway.