September 2005 Archives

A production of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, starring Alan Davies and Bill Bailey, was the fastest seller on the Edinburgh Fringe this year (so much for experimentation and daring there); now another new production that hits Broadway this month (reuniting Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick from their pairing in the original production of The Producers four years ago) is about to begin previews and is already in the enviable position of having sold out its entire first booking period.

“I don’t think we can take out any ads,” producer Emanuel Azenberg has told the New York Post, “because it would be misleading. We don’t have any tickets.” It has $21.5 million in the bank already – thus making it truly critic-proof, too. “I’ve produced 71 Broadway shows, and this is the first time I’ve never had to worry about what the New York Times is going to say,” he adds mischievously.

Already it is being speculated that they stars will re-sign to stay beyond the current booking period of next April; could London beckon next? Certainly the West End – who were denied the chance to see them both in The Producers, and only got Nathan Lane by default as a last-minute emergency replacement for Richard Dreyfuss – would welcome them with open arms.

It is reported today in the Evening Standard that the Royal Court’s artistic director Ian Rickson is to stand down next year, after overseeing the Court’s 50th anniversary season. Rickson, who succeed Stephen Daldry into the role after directing one of the Court’s biggest commercial successes of the 90s, Conor McPherson’s The Weir, has been in the post since 1998; by the time he leaves, he will have therefore have been there for some 8 years.

Though that doesn’t rival the decade-long regime of Richard Eyre at the National or 13 years of Peter Hall who preceded Eyre, the Court is younger and more cutting-edge than the National, since its mission is almost exclusively new writing and the promotion and development of new writers. As a theatre is always first and foremost about the taste of the artistic director – and the collaborations he or she inspires – a turn-over in this key position could see a radical shift in the direction that the theatre takes.

Rickson’s own meticulous work as a director has tended towards the small domestic canvas, rather than the large public or political stage; and while My Name is Rachel Corrie – returning to the main house this month after premiering at the Theatre Upstairs earlier this year – is a potently political work (directed and co-adapted by Alan Rickman), as was this summer’s offering of former Court Artistic Director Max Stafford-Clark’s Out of Joint’s touring production of Talking to Terrorists, this sort of programming seems to have been the exception rather than the rule lately in Sloane Square.

But even though having to carry such a huge responsibility for setting the agenda of new writing inevitably attracts sniping, the Royal Court has consistently found worthwhile plays under him, and nurtured important careers like that of Richard Bean whose current play Harvest (running to this weekend in the main house) is the play of the year, so far, at least in my opinion. Yes, there have been some major missteps, too – such as giving house room to Tim Fountain’s feebly self-indulgent (in every sense) Sex Addict – but nevertheless Rickson will be a tough act to follow.

Thanks to Chris Moran for his warm review in The Guardian’s arts blog, Culture Vulture:

It has to be said that The Stage’s blog has got pretty much everything right. The design is attractive without being busy and Mark Shenton’s pieces, indexed intelligently, provoke thought within tight and manageable articles. The range here, too, is impressive. A brief glance through the tags throws up topics from the obvious (Spacey, Edinburgh, Spacey, Hare, Spacey again) to the intriguingly tangential (Amnesty International, Christian Voice, J Sheekey).

So what’s not to like? Well, to my own shame and embarrassment, the only thing that lets down what has the potential to be a vibrant actors’ forum is … the actors. Or rather, the lack of them.

If you’ve arrived here as a result of Chris’ blog posting, then welcome — and by all means feel free to add your voice to the comments. From next week, we’ll be feeding some of the newsblog content back into the print edition of The Stage (available in newsagents every Thursday), so you could see your pithy quote in print, too.

Plus, don’t forget that we have a lively message forum - StageTalk - as well as national listings and reviews covering the best in theatre, dance, opera and light entertainment.

If you have any comments or questions about any aspect of The Stage Online, just email them to webmaster@thestage.co.uk — or you can, of course, post comments on the blog!

One of the ongoing problems — or challenges, depending on whether you see the glass half-empty or half-full — of London as against New York theatre is the nearly complete absence of a commercial middle-ground in London between the high-cost (to audience as well as producers) West End and the low-rent (in every sense) fringe.

While New York theatre can healthily embrace a happy spectrum with a plethora of houses of 499 seats or less (to qualify them as off-Broadway) where producers can actually make money without the crippling risks of Broadway, London has little to offer inbetween the two extremes, though various initiatives — like the Trafalgar Studios and, when it finally gets built, the Sondheim Theatre above the Queen’s — are intended to plug that gap.

Off-Broadway, but very near Broadway geographically, is meanwhile continuing to thrive, as witness the extraordinary conversion of a multiplex cinema on 50th Street, behind the imposing skycraper of Worldwide Plaza on 8th Avenue, into a multiplex theatrical complex. Called Dodger Stages, it has five theatres ranging in size from 199 to 499 seats, and the conversion — all bare floors and walls and artfully arranged furniture in the public corridors — is so hip that it hurts. It’s like walking into a futuristic Manhattan hotel; the personification of ‘cool’ in every sense. And it makes for a very hip and happening place to see theatre in. Each of the theatres is beautifully appointed. This is a theatre for the future — and London should come and learn a lesson from it. Perhaps the Vue (formerly Warner) West End in Leicester Square could have a new life as a theatrical multiplex?

I’m in New York right now, and am struck more than ever by something that’s perfectly obvious, yet never really analysed: how this town is galvanised by musical theatre, and particularly new musical theatre, in a way that London simply cannot compete on. A comparison of Broadway against the West End only provides part of the picture, but it’s a striking one nonetheless: the West End listings currently include 19 musicals playing there, 14 of which were new when they first opened, plus 3 Broadway imports and 2 revivals; while Broadway has 25 musicals either playing or about to open, 17 of which are either new now or were when they first opened, plus 4 imports from the West End, and 4 revivals (1 of which, Sweeney Todd, also originated in London, or rather Newbury).

But its beyond Broadway that the comparison is even more extraordinary: while musicals are rarely sighted outside of the West End, beyond the Menier, Landor or King’s Head, there’s a huge infrastructure, formal and informal, producing musicals off-Broadway either in their own right or with an eye to the main stem (as Broadway is referred to). The “institutional” or “not-for-profit” theatres as they’re called here (ie producing houses), like Lincoln Center Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, Second Stage, Playwrights’ Horizons, the Vineyard and more, regularly include musicals in their programmes, and have active musical developmental programmes who are regularly working on new shows. Then there’s a lot of ‘commercial’ product that’s happening off-Broadway as well: listings here currently include some 15 shows receiving open-ended runs there.

And one of the signs of the robustness of musical theatre in this town is the constant round of development, showcases and readings that are happening behind the scenes. Yesterday and today the National Alliance for Musical Theatre — a countrywide organisation dedicated exclusively to promoting musical theatre amongst its 130 members that include not-for-profit theatres, commercial producers and universities — is holding its 17th annual Festival of New Musicals in town, in which extracts from eight new musicals are being showcased in front of members to try to entice them to take them further.

But not all of the developmental work on new musicals is closed to public view, either: running simultaneously now, to October 2, is the second New York Musical Theatre Festival that is showcasing some 34 new musicals. This week, one of last year’s successes, The Great American Trailer Park Musical, opens for a proper off-Broadway run, while Slut — a success from another festival, the New York International Fringe Festival — is also currently in preview for an off-Broadway run.

Both are testament to the fact that there’s an active process for work to find a life through here, completely lacking in London where outside of Lloyd Webber, few composers have a chance of ever having their work heard, let alone seen.

Though the Olivier Awards have previously once attempted to recognise take-over performances in major musicals, the category never ‘stuck’ — it’s difficult to get a cohesive judging process together to re-visit long-running shows and attempt to recognise the performances in them. New York’s major theatrical awards, the Tony’s (presented every June, at the end of the ‘season’ there that is basically defined by the Tony eligibility year, announcing a close-off date for shows eligible to be considered for that year’s awards in early May, so that the new season for the following year’s eligibility begins immediately after that) have just announced that they are inroducing a new prize for an actor or actress in a recreated role.

The rules they’ve devised for performers to be eligible are that a performer who steps into a leading role in a long-runner (ie any show that opened in a previous season and were eligible for Best Play, Best Musical or Best Revival in the year in which they opened) must be contracted for at least six months of public performances (thereby neatly disqualifying the ‘stunt’ casting performers who are parachuted in to bolster box office from time to time, but show no real commitment to Broadway). It will certainly be interesting to see how this plays out….

• Charles Spencer, reviewing Nathan the Wise that opened at Hampstead Theatre on Monday, in the Daily Telegraph on September 25: ”Noel Coward’s advice to actors was to remember their lines and not bump into the scenery, but in a wretched performance on the first night, Anna Carteret failed both these rudimentary tests.”
• In a feature on the last night that James Lomas appeared in the title role of Billy Elliott on Sat September 17, published in the Daily Telegraph on Mon September 19, his mother is quoted as saying: “We used to think nobody wants you if you come from Sheffield. Frankly, I’d like James to be a joiner and live round the corner, but this is his dream.” And James, now fifteen years old, says of Elton John: “He’s proper down-to-earth – he’s like someone you meet every day, except he looks really posh.”
• In a feature entitled Right to Reply in The Guardian on Wednesday September 21, Richard Bean writes about the reviews for his new play Harvest, currently playing at the Royal Court. “During previews I don’t sleep well. I lie in bed making up alternating fantasy and nightmare reviews. ‘The first great play of the 21st century’. ‘Execrable nonsense’. ‘Surely a knighthood is only a matter of time.’ ‘Why, oh why, oh why?’…” He then quotes extracts from reviews that have ranged across exactly that spectrum. “On balance the critics have warmed to the play’s mad ambition, deliberate dramatic excess and unfashionable political message. The word ‘extraordinary’; keeps popping up. At least three of the critics have described it as ‘one of the best new plays of the year’. Fantasy fulfilled. Three critics have hated it. Nightmare fulfilled.”

The global success of Mamma Mia! has spawned many imitators, not least over here We Will Rock You which did for Queen’s back catalogue what Mamma Mia! did for Abba and is now in its 4th year at the Dominion Theatre. Interestingly, however, it hasn’t braved the harsher critical climates of Broadway, and has by-passed it entirely to do a sit-down in Las Vegas instead.

But other attractions, like Our House (which, despite its Olivier Award win, still didn’t take the town) and Tonight’s the Night that respectively drew on the catalogues of Madness and Rod Stewart, suggested there were limits to their audience appeal. Meanwhile, on Broadway, Good Vibrations (the Beach Boys) reached an early end earlier this year, and now this weekend sees two more expire: Lennon (the title is self-explanatory) closes on Saturday; and All Shook Up (based on the Elvis Presley catalogue) follows it on Sunday.

But the genre is not quite dead yet: next month brings another entry to the Broadway boards when Jersey Boys – a musical constructed out of the songs of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons – opens at the Virginia Theatre.

So Jerry Springer - the Opera is back on the road. But was it really ever off? True, seven (out of 28) venues that originally expressed an interest in taking it withdrew, apparently bowing to pressure from Christian Voice, the organisation who orchestrated a campaign against the show in the West End (but only after it had been broadcast on television, not before). And no, ACE didn’t agree to fund it to make up the shortfall – but then why should they? Cut free of the subsidised organisations that generously originally helped to develop it – first BAC, then the National Theatre – it long ago became a purely commercial venture, promoted by a rich independent production company, Avalon.

But the fact that the remaining 21 venues have banded together – and a consortium of them have agreed to aggregate marketing costs between them – to put the show back on the road suggests that they think there’s still a commercial life for it. Theatres do not act altruistically purely for the sake of art; they know they also want a slice of the box office. And with four Olivier Awards behind it, and an ever- shrinking pool of good touring product, of course they wanted a slice of this. The controversy, indeed, doesn’t hurt either – it helps tell the world that the show is happening.

Also using the media to get the town talking is a projected production of Hedda Gabler that may star Nicole Kidman in the title role. Pardon me for asking, but didn’t we just have a Hedda Gabler in the West End a few months ago, with Eve Best? In any case, the Standard have already reported yesterday – and the Independent have followed it up with a picture caption story today – that Kidman is “in talks” to do so. No producer has been named in either story – though the Evening Standard suggests Daniel Kramer – whose production of Hair opens at the Gate Theatre this week – being attached as director of the project.

It’s rare enough for a new play by a debut playwright to reach the West End, but comedian and actor Nigel Planer’s first play On the Ceiling, which only opened last Monday at the Garrick, has just announced that it is already pulling the plug and has given notice that it will quit the Garrick on October 1. No doubt an unsupportive critical press will be blamed – reviews were of the one and two star order – but really, having given it a trial run in Birmingham in May, the producers only have themselves to blame: they knew what they had, and if they thought this was good enough to serve on a West End public, then they deserve what they got.

It does no one – not actors, writers or audiences – any favours to promote substandard fare, however warmly we wish to welcome the playwright; when I interviewed him last month, however, he told me that he was already at work on his next play. “I’ve just finished the second draft of a second play. It was important to get the new one written before On the Ceiling opens, because if it’s a disaster I might not have had the courage to do it again, and if it’s a success, I might have felt inhibited, too,” he told me. Sadly for him, he was right on the first score.

Simon Callow’s notes on the changing nature of stars in the theatrical firmament (a delicate ecology already much altered by the global warming towards Hollywood) and Canadian critic Richard Ouzounian’s brilliant recipe for a West End commercial cocktail (“add a dash of reasonably high-profile celebrity in a smallish cast play for a limited run”) have both been explored previously in this blog. This week, Peter Hall rushed into the fray, claiming that the search for West Coast glamour is stifling innovation and good writing. “I would be asked by a producer what I wanted to do,” Sir Peter was quoted as saying in The Independent. “Now I’m asked, ‘Who can you get? Somebody from Los Angeles?’ This is the wrong way round. You must start with the play, you really must.”

Others immediately pointed out that Sir Peter doth protest too much. “”I love Peter Hall, but he does make me laugh. Peter loves stars as much as I do,” said Bill Kenwright, who has produced Sir Peter’s shows in the West End. “Peter and I did about 13 or 14 productions together over the last eight years and I can’t think of many instances where a star has been found and then you find a play. It was always the play that came first with Peter and I.”

In today’s Observer, the paper’s theatre critic Susannah Clapp asks: “Hang on a minute. Last week, Peter Hall argued that a concentration on big names is smothering adventurousness in the theatre. Is this the Peter Hall who nine months ago directed Kim Cattrall in Whose Life is it Anyway? - or his swapped-at-birth changeling brother?” She goes on, “Hall has of course got a point, a big one, as his own direction of Cattrall proved: she wasn’t strong enough to make a deficient play look interesting. Playing a prone body in a bed in a particularly recumbent way, she was flanked by two actors - Ann Mitchell and Janet Suzman - whose subtlety was a rebuke. Still, this is hardly news - and only Hall, whose genius for publicity has served the theatre well, and himself better, could make it seem so.”

Citing some of the endless parade of Hollywood names that have come to the West End in the last few years, she comments, “It doesn’t seem to me ridiculous for people to want to see in the flesh what they’ve seen only on celluloid (in the flesh is, after all, part of the point of the theatre) but let’s not call all of these things plays. They are star vehicles.”

But her real gripe is not with the actors per se – “some movie actors, after all, can act”, she grudgingly admits – but rather, “What really needs attacking is not the stars themselves but the phoney, pious-seeming argument that they will bring ‘new’ audiences into the theatre. For a minute, maybe: but not audiences that are likely to return. The work of enticing different people into the stalls is being done more efficiently by other means. By lowering seat prices, as Nicholas Hytner has done at the National, or by expanding the range of what’s on offer.”

David Farr, new artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith, answering Guardian critic Michael Billington’s criticism of doing his production of Julius Caesar in modern dress (published on September 14):

“In approaching a Shakespeare play I immerse myself in its language, and move towards an imaginative world that might best express my interpretation of that story. I have set Shakespeare in 1950s America, Samurai Japan, a crumbling English country house and now in an ex-Soviet republic. The aim, in each case, is to illuminate the play, to render it clear, urgent and exciting. Billington finds a director’s obsession with using the modern world tiresome. For me, by contrast, the really clichéd safety zone of Shakespearean production is that which sets the play somewhere in the early 20th century, preferably in England with vaguely ‘period’ costumes. This type of productions lacks specificity, encourages woolly acting and smacks of what I can only call a ‘theatrey-ness’. It instils in me a quiet longing for death. Theatre needs historical intelligence but it also needs a modern consciousness. Shakespeare’s won productions were modern-dress – he was talking about his world.”

James Nesbitt, on learning how to tile for his next play Shoot the Crow, opening at the Trafalgar Studios at the end of this month (interviewed in the Daily Telegraph, September 14):

”Even if I’m rubbish in the play, I’m going to be able to tile my bathroom”.

Trevor Nunn on leaving behind the artistic directorship of the National Theatre (interviewed in the Evening Standard, September 13):

”Because you lose the immediate daily contact with so many close colleagues, it does feel like a bereavement. You can’t creep back and be a spectre at the feast and you can’t have secret meetings with people out of school, either. But there is also a release in not having those deadlines, those financial pressures. And you do hear the word ‘no’ on such a regular basis… I had a delightful time at the National and I’m having a delightful time not being at the National.”

About Rob Lowe, reviewed in A Few Good Men at the Haymarket by Kate Bassett in The Independent on Sunday (September 11, 2005):

“Lowe acquits himself admirably but he looks curiously like a crusading ventriloquist’s dummy with his square-jaw small-physique combo.”

In Shakespeare’s day, the South Bank was the West End - the place, outside the city’s borders and therefore jurisdiction, where such licentious behaviour as the putting on plays (and the selling of sex in brothels, many of which were run by the same people running the theatres) could go on unregulated. The Festival of Britain in the 1950s famously brought the arts, if not sex, back to the South Bank with the building of the Royal Festival Hall, and then the addition of the NFT and then National Theatre in the 70s meant that a new cultural quarter was being established between Waterloo and Westminster Bridges, and extending further down Waterloo Road to the venerable Old Vic and nearby Young Vic.

Both of those theatres are now being reinvigorated, with Kevin Spacey (see blog entry for Thursday last week) as artistic director at the Old Vic, with the Young Vic in the middle of a major rebuilding programme (but continuing its operations elsewhere meanwhile, launching its Young Genius season in collaboration with the Barbican with Robert Lepage’s The Dragon’s Trilogy opening there tomorrow).

But there’s also been an astonishing artistic regeneration of the entire area that is now stretching down the river as far as Tower Bridge. Going east from the Old Vic, you come to the Union Theatre (a small fringe space beneath railway arches near Southwark tube station), then Jerwood Space (a smart rehearsal room centre used by many West End shows and aspiring younger companies who’s rentals are subsidised), then the Southwark Playhouse (though they’re looking for a new home now), then the Menier Chocolate Factory, who in just over a year have established themselves as a major theatrical player in the area.

No wonder that companies are migrating here with alacrity. The Unicorn Theatre for children are building their own purpose-built new venue near Tower Bridge; and today comes the announcement, too, that Ballet Rambert are to have their own £16.5m new home behind the National Theatre on Upper Ground. The company’s artistic director Mark Baldwin comments, “If this is the cultural heartland of creative Britain, it’s a powerful place for us to be. We’re not just a little conservatoire in Chiswick. We’re in the middle of the city where people can visit us.”

At an informal press briefing today to release the National Theatre’s Annual Report and Financial Statement for 2004-05 to the press, Nicholas Hytner was predictably pleased since they showed an operating surplus of some £674,000 on the year; but also urged caution: “We’ve had a year we won’t have again”.

That’s because the financial success was achieved largely on the back of two shows, in particular, that had a long life: The History Boys, that became “a box office phenomenon” (and the National jealously safe-guarded to itself, keeping it in the repertoire for over a year, and even next week hosting its return in an entirely re-cast production that will then go out on an 8-week national tour); and the return of His Dark Materials, that sold out for the second year running but the production costs of which were essentially already paid for.

Achieving a surplus isn’t, in any case, what the National is actually there to do: his job, his insists, is to spend the money they make or receive on the repertoire and operation (with half a million now earmarked to upgrade the front of house in the Lyttleton). But it could be useful in the event of a run of box office flops: all it would take to wipe it out, he reckons, would be a flop in the Olivier and a couple in the Lyttelton.

Hytner, who has just finished a 6-week shoot of a film version of The History Boys for the BBC (on a phenomenally low budget of just £2million) that retained the identical original stage cast, spoke of how helpful The History Boys has been to the repertoire, enabling them to run up to three plays in rep in the Lyttelton. The third Travelex £10 season – currently running to 93% capacity, with the final play of the programme, David Edgar’s new Playing with Fire, now in previews prior to opening next week – has “really worked” to fill the Olivier.

They’ve also already got a box office hit with Mike Leigh’s Two Thousand Years that opens in the Cottesloe tomorrow, and sold out all 16,000 tickets of its initial run before it had even been titled. Hytner, who says he has kept in touch with its development throughout its 18-week rehearsal process, finally only saw a run-through himself two weeks ago: “His plays only come together right at the end”. Why, in that case, were so few previews scheduled? (The first two last week were cancelled when it obviously hadn’t yet). “He’s a major film and theatre artist by any standards, and that’s what he asked for. I’d have liked more previews, but he thinks that once a play is there, it’s there.” Don’t despair if you haven’t got a ticket yet: there are plans to extend it in the repertoire, and it will definitely tour.

Time was that the West End play and Broadway musical was a fertile soil for film-makers looking for material to commit to celluloid. Now it’s largely the other way around. “You’ve seen the movie – now see it live!” seems to the motto. Even a 1989 Broadway play, A Few Good Men, that became a 1992 movie with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, now looks like it’s a stage version of a movie now that its belatedly made it’s West End debut at the Haymarket this week, thanks to a staging that is full of cinematic background effects and a movie star in the lead in the shape of Rob Lowe.

In a piece in the New York Times last Sunday, writer Jesse McKinley noted that “nearly half of Broadway’s 20 musicals were drawn from films, including two of last season’s hits, Monty Python’s Spamalot and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and such long-running successes as The Producers, Hairspray, The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast. (Now, if they’d just let you buy some popcorn. …)”

This trend – some people wittily call them “movicals” — is starting to look unstoppable. As Jed Bernstein, president of the League of American Theaters and Producers, comments, “The two-way traffic between New York and Hollywood has been a fact of life since Hollywood was invented. But the traffic has really intensified in the last five years.”

On tap for the new Broadway season are stage versions of The Color Purple, beginning previews next month, The Wedding Singer, and Tarzan (to be directed and designed by Britain’s Bob Crowley, for Disney),

Intriguingly, the shows can make more money than even the movies: “Between them, The Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King have grossed $3.3 billion worldwide,” reports the New York Times, against a combined estimated box office of the films of $1.6 billion (“And that’s before T-shirts, CD’s and souvenir books”, it adds).

Disney is also, of course, behind the current London hit Mary Poppins in collaboration with Cameron Mackintosh that is also surely Broadway-bound soon, and is also developing a stage version of The Little Mermaid; and it is Disney that is driving the current passion for studios to seek musical opportunities for their film properties.

Warner Brothers now has a theatrical production division that will launch next year with Lestat, based on Anne Rice’s vampire books and featuring the character in the 1994 film Interview with a Vampire. DreamWorks are partnering with Sam Mendes’ theatre production company, Neal Street Productions, to bring Shrek to the musical stage. Working Title Films are co-producer of the stage version of their 2000 film Billy Elliot in London.

And the trend doesn’t look like it’s going to stop anytime soon. Amongst other film titles being lined up to make the transfer to stage are two of the Pink Panther movies; Get Shorty; Weekend at Bernie’s; Network; Dr Zhivago; Batman; Legally Blonde; Cry-Baby; Ever After; Catch Me If You Can; and even Blade Runner. Frank Wildhorn, the composer of the Broadway musicals Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula, who has been chasing the rights to Blade Runner, believes it will be perfect for a musical: “There’s a lot of messed-up humans and androids in that movie. So there’s no shortage of opportunities to write songs.”

Judi Dench, interviewed in The Guardian today by Michael Billington, on the nature of acting:

I think you use your own emotions and push them to the outer limit. At the same time, acting is about the exploration of character rather than simply a projection of self. I was in New York with Maggie Smith recently, promoting a film, and we were asked about the Sanford Meisner Method school of acting which is based on ruthless self-exploration. Maggie, in her unique way, said, ‘Oh, we have that in England, too. We call it wanking.’

A year late, but better late than never, Jermyn Street Theatre — a “little theatre with the big heart” (as co-founder Howard Jameson described it) — last night celebrated its 10th anniversary with a royal gala performance , attended by theatre patron HRH Princess Michael of Kent, at its nearest theatrical neighbour, the Criterion, with which it in fact has something in common.

The Criterion is an entirely subterranean space – you even have to go downstairs to reach the upper circle – and so it is with Jermyn Street, located in the basement of a restaurant, with the dressing rooms one floor below the theatre.

It first opened its doors in August 1994, so a year and a month after its official tenth birthday many of the names who have played there in the last decade, plus a few that haven’t, were on hand to mark the occasion. These ranged from international choreographer Gillian Lynne – who told us she’d been connected to workshops of five shows there – and host Nikolas Grace, to Kit and Widow and Dillie Keane, who earlier this year did a try-out of a new production of the Tom Lehrer revue Tomfoolery here (that coincidentally originally played at the Criterion in its original West End run!). Veteran actress Moira Lister, Joanna Lumley and Gyles Brandreth introduced other acts that included Clive Carter, Morag McLaren, Bonnie Langford, Rosemary Ashe, Clive Rowe, Anne Rogers, Noel Harrison, Angela Richards and Lorna Dallas.

Jermyn Street is, under Penny Horner’s inimitable stewardship, a studio theatre in the heart of central London that provides an extremely friendly and (for the fringe) surprisingly comfortable showcase home. Long may it thrive.

A new play by Mike Leigh, as it was long billed, has now not only finally been named 2000 Years, but after the cancellation of its first two previews on Thursday and Friday, has also had its first performance last night at the National’s Cottesloe – and already it’s first review this morning in the Sunday Telegraph.

Quite how the journalist concerned Chris Hastings got his ticket to the sell-out run he doesn’t reveal, though since he reports that “theatregoers camped outside the National from 5am yesterday morning, hoping to get their hands on returned tickets”, suggests that he might have been one of them. And throughout the day he was obviously on the trail of information about the show, presumably again hoping to know when he might be ready to file copy – “Callers to the theatre could not find out even when the play would finish. As late as 4pm box office staff were still simply saying, ‘It is a very fluid piece of work.’

He added, “Very fluid, certainly – but also very fine.” And this is where his news report strays into territory that should be the prerogative of the paper’s theatre critic Rebecca Tyrell who will be formally reviewing it next week. Earlier in his report, he also writes, “This story of Jewish parents struggling with their son’s zealous dedication to the faith which they had never truly practiced in told with warmth, irreverent humour and rich insights into family life in general and Jewish family life in particular.”

He further comments, “The production is studded with outstanding performances.”

This trend to pre-empt theatre critics by reporting the previews as news has been growing apace over the last few years, but usually when there’s a star name attached, such as Kathleen Turner’s appearance in The Graduate, Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room or Madonna in Up for Grabs. But now Mike Leigh is such a big star in his own right that his work, too, is clearly up for critical grabs, too, before the first night.

What was that suggestion of the stripper Mazeppa in Gypsy?

“You can pull all the stops out
Till they call the cops out
Grind your behind till you’re bend.
But you gotta get a gimmick
If you wanna get a hand.”

Taking these words of wisdom to heart, English National Opera are plugging their new stage version of Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant that opens at the Coli for seven performances only from September 16 with a poster and leaflet that offers the words “Sexual desire, Dominance, submission” in far larger typeface than that of the name of the piece itself.

The depressing thing is that the gimmick appears to have worked. The Sunday Times last week even rose to the bait with a headline of its own that could have come from The Sun: “Singing lesbians to rescue opera house”, it trumpeted.

Arts editor Richard Brooks reported below it, “The troubled English National Opera plans to sing for its survival with the world premiere of a new opera about lesbian lovers that features nudity and sex.”

Sex clearly sells; but John Allison, editor of Opera magazine, was reported at being dismayed at ENO’s use of it to do so. “This sort of marketing shows how desperate ENO has become. Obviously they know how hard contemporary operas are to sell, but it does smack of a stunt.”

Meanwhile, not to be outdone the Royal Opera House are also up to a stunt PR. Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West is being sold as if it were a Clint Eastwood film – it is being marketed under its English name, The Girl of the Golden West, with the slogan “opera’s very own spaghetti western.”

At today’s press briefing to announce the Old Vic’s second season that kicks off next week with Trevor Nunn directing artistic director Kevin Spacey in the title role of Richard II, Spacey walked into the dress circle bar where the event was held and before taking his seat worked the entire room first, shaking the hands of every journalist present.

It was an immediately inclusive act that, as The Stage’s news editor Jeremy Austin remarked to me, is a very New Labour kind of way to go about things: unlike the notably adversarial relationship that Nunn, for instance, has always had with the press, the new generation of artistic director like Nicholas Hytner at the National, Michael Grandage at the Donmar Warehouse or Spacey clearly view the press as part of the process.

Indeed, Spacey went on to say during the proceedings that hadn’t been affected by criticisms of his first season, and indeed said, “I went into this job fully expecting criticism” but going on, “I’m in this for the long haul, and I’m more concerned with our primary task to turn audiences that come into loyal patrons, so we attract a broader, younger, more diverse audience.”

Expressing no regrets at all about any of his choices in his first season (which executive producer David Liddiment was on hand to say had recouped its investment and attracted audiences averaging 70%), he went on to announce the productions beyond the Christmas return of last year’s hit production of Aladdin, with Ian McKellen and Roger Allam returning in a new company that will also include Frances Barber replacing Maureen Lipman as Dim Sum.

A joint British and Iraqi company will collaborate on a brief run on The Soldier’s Tale in January that will subsequently go to New York, to be followed by the British premiere of one of Arthur Miller’s last plays, Resurrection Blues, previously only produced at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 2002, where The Guardian’s Michael Billingon reviewed it and called it “a funny, pertinent and sharp-toothed satire aimed at the materialist maladies of modern America.” The veteran American film director Robert Altman, whom Spacey – who has never had the privilege of working with on film – called “one of the most legendary film directors of all time”, will direct it.

While the fourth play for the 2005-6 season is yet to fall into place from a choice of three that they are considering, Spacey also announced his own return to the Old Vic stage a year from now to star in the opening production of the 2006-7 season, reuniting him with director Howard Davies with whom he worked on O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (at the Almeida and subsequently bringing him to the Old Vic for the first time when it transferred there), to work on another O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten.

But first there’s Richard II, for which technical rehearsals began straight after today’s press conference: while he told us that at Julliard they were schooled in what was called a ‘mid Atlantic’ accent, here he promises to be employing RP – and hopes that if he mispronounces any words, we’ll be too involved in the action to notice.

The Times, addicted to lists as it is such as with their most famous annual publication of the country’s richest, today publishes a supplement, The Arts Power 100. Quite apart from raising questions about who exactly compiles the list, it’s also questionable exactly what criteria they use to position people by: with money, it’s easy – though difficult to know how exactly they know what each person is truly worth – to put people in order of how much they supposedly have, but measuring influence and power in the arts is a far more subjective call.

But however it was reached, it’s interesting to note that amongst the top ten only two are from the world of theatre: at number 7, NT artistic director Nicholas Hytner (“the current leader of British theatre”, The Times states categorically, though the current season is hardly the NT’s strongest) and chasing his heels at number 8, Jude Kelly (who chased after the NT directorship after she left Leeds, and is now on the list for becoming “the cultural brains behind the London Olympic bid” and her appointment as artistic director of the South Bank Centre – “two enormously high-profile portfolios that have put her at the forefront of our arts scene”. But there’s no recognition of the fact that there have been no achievements yet in either post to back it up).

Commercial theatre gets its first entry at Number 11, with West End and regional theatre owner and impresario Howard Panter named, even though Andrew Lloyd Webber (bizarrely, relegated to 47th on the list) owns more theatres in London and is still an artistic force in his own composing right, not to mention Cameron Mackintosh (at 29th) who is fast chasing RUT in theatrical owning terms and is still a massive influence on the producing scene.

Sally Greene, chief exec of the Old Vic and the production company that bears its name, enters the list at 38, with her Old Vic artistic director Kevin Spacey, named at 82nd position. The only other theatre producer/owner named is Nica Burns, who is listed 40th, and cited for her directorship of the annual Perrier Award, now in its 25th year, that “has shaped the international comedy landscape”, and suggests, too, that “in October, Burns will also become arguably the most powerful woman in the West End when her company Nimax takes over four theatres from Andrew Lloyd Webber.” Don’t tell Sally Greene, or for that matter Judy Craymer (not on the list at all, but producer of Mamma Mia!, currently the most successful global musical), Rosemary Squire (also not on the list, but Panter’s wife and now chair of SOLT or the ubiquitous Sonia Friedman (again absent the list).

The theatre directors who make the list are pretty conventional: Michael Boyd (12th), artistic director of the RSC; Trevor Nunn (31st, former artistic director of the RSC and National); Peter Hall (44th, ditto, but now preparing to run the Rose of Kingston, if and when it is completed); Sam Mendes (55th, who hasn’t worked in the theatre here since he left the Donmar two years ago), Richard Eyre (62nd); Michael Grandage (69th, who took over from Mendes at the Donmar but has also directed the Donmar’s West End version of Guys and Dolls and next year will stage a revival of Evita); Complicite’s Simon McBurney (83rd) and Stephen Daldry (84th).

Ditto the playwrights: there’s David Hare (42nd); Tom Stoppard (67th); and Martin McDonagh (87th); but no mention for Britain’s most prolific playwright Alan Ayckbourn or Alan Bennett, author of the most acclaimed play of last year, The History Boys (being revived for a regional tour this autumn and returning to the National before it heads to Broadway).

Only a couple of stage actors evidently make the grade: the inevitable Jud iDench (22nd) and Ian McKellen (52nd). There are more arts patrons than actors, including Dame Vivien Duffield (9th, whose foundation recently ave £5million towards the refurbishment of the Royal Festival Hall), Donald Gordon (retired property developer who donated £20m to be shared between Covent Garden and the Wales Millennium Centre, at 17th), Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover (a chief benefactor of the Royal Opera House, at 48th), Lloyd Dorfman (chief exec of Travelex, who funded the National and Covent Garden’s Travelex £10 seasons, at 73rd), Lord Browne (chief exec of BP, who sponsor the National amongst others, at 75th), and Martin Smitha (chairman of the ENO board, who raised £8million for the restoration of their home the London Coliseum, including £1million from Smith himself).

Also on the list are ACE chairman Christopher Frayling (27th), classical producer Raymond Gubbay (35th), choreographer Matthew Bourne (37th), comedy producer Jon Thoday (59th), Royal Ballet director Monica Mason (65th), Dance Umbrella founder Val Bourne (88th), but as with any such compilation, it’s probably best not to take these things too seriously.

Only yesterday I was reporting Simon Callow’s story about the changing nature of stars in the theatrical firmament, and noting how the annual Hollywood invasion has upset the ecology further.

It’s not just me who’s noticing it. Toronto Star critic Richard Ouzounian has just paid a visit here, and noting how, “over the past five years, London, especially during the tourist-rich summer months, has become the home to a new kind of production which could very easily be perceived as a hipper, higher-priced form of dinner theatre”, he has wittily described the winning West End formula** for a “commercial cocktail” thus:

• Add a dash of reasonably high-profile celebrity in a smallish cast play for a limited run.
• Shake well to generate maximum publicity.
• Pray the critics don’t chill it too thoroughly.
• Serve to an eager public.

He dates “this onslaught of largely American talent onto the British boards” to Kathleen Turner’s appearance in The Graduate here in 2000, when her “15 seconds of stage nudity” turned the show into the “hottest ticket in the city”.

He goes on, “Not only did that single appearance revitalize Turner’s career, but it made pots of money for all concerned and eventually led to a record-breaking run in Toronto and a commercially lucrative stint on Broadway. Canny British producers and curious American actors soon started casting sly looks across the Atlantic, wondering what they could do for each other. It soon turned out that it didn’t even matter if the performers concerned had any stage experience — a box office name was enough to bring the public in.”

He then remembers the 2002 production of Kenneth Lonergan’s This is Our Youth, in which a succession of young American actors passed through, including Hayden Christensen, Jake Gyllenhaal and Matt Damon, plus assorted siblings and kids of more famous actors like Casey Affleck (Ben’s brother), Summer Phoenix (River’s sister), Keiran Culkin (Macaulay’s brother) and Colin Hanks (Tom’s son).

“That year, if you were a young Hollywood star, you didn’t go to summer camp, you went to London,” writes Ouzounian.

But why this sudden fondness for London? “Surely it can’t be a fondness for warm beer or the BBC?”, he asks. No, the reasons are far more practical, he replies.

He cites the far lower cost of production, which means that “producers are more willing to take a chance when someone approaches them with a quirky property.”

Then there’s British audiences. Whereas “Broadway is still the land of the herd and the home of the hit”, he quotes Kenneth Tynan: “the British will often deliberately go to a piece of second-rate theatre”. Not all theatre here has to be great. We are happy to see middling successes. Or go out of curiosity.

And then there are the critics. “There are 10 papers in London and the odds are that at least one or two of them are going to like your show, no matter how bad it is.” And again unlike New York, we don’t have a herd instinct here, either. “In New York, when the critics hate you, they all go along for the ride. It’s like a Mafia hit, and they don’t even leave the cannoli.”

So, thanks to this triple threat – “money, manners and the media” – London has become an attractive place for American stars to visit. “It’s a symbiotic relationship that both sides seem to be enjoying,” he concludes, “and there’s no reason to think it should cease in the near future”.

** The Toronto Star’s website requires free registration, or bugmenot.com

In a fascinating piece in today’s Times, actor-director-writer Simon Callow analyses one of the seismic shifts in the theatre of the last fifty years: the notion of theatrical stars, and the democratisation of the relationship of star actors and their audience.

“We lived in a world which has demoted personality in favour of celebrity”, he writes. And whereas “the great stage stars – Olivier, Redgrave, Guinness, Dame Edith Evans – invited their audiences to attend their performances like monarchs passing among their subjects” – nowadays, the stars “are different: they come into contact with their fans in a democratic spirit. Actors and audiences mirror each other.”

There have been gains: “Today’s actors are lighter, quicker, are more in touch with life as it is lived. For the old gang, the mysteries of personality and power, sex and stage sorcery, the potency of impersonation, made them different from others, and they fenced themselves off from the world.”

Callow quotes a story about Gielgud, from the new biography of Laurence Olivier by Terry Coleman, turning down a role in an all-star revival of The School for Scandal for the Festival of Britain in 1951, on the grounds “that instead of putting all the stars in one show they should each be in one of their own”. As Callow writes, “The idea of actors today, however stellar, carving up the West End like a personal fiefdom is hilarious”.

Instead, however, it has lately become the personal fiefdom of assorted American film and television actors, keen to earn their acting stripes in the West End, and producers hoping to make a fast buck. “Today, a large number of productions are star-driven,” says Callow: “The appetite of the audience for a glimpse of their favourite film or television stars remains immense.”

But whereas they would once get a sighting and a performance, too often nowadays they only get the sighting. Maybe the age of the theatrical star has burnt out; but what has replaced it? Now we have actors like Luke Perry – who, prior to appearing in Sexual Perversity in Chicago in the West End, had last appeared on stage in high school; or the arrival this week of Rob Lowe in A Few Good Men.

After Sam Mendes and his Donmar executive producer Caro Newling departed from the Covent Garden theatre, they stayed in the physical area — hiring offices in nearby Neal Street and re-inventing themselves as Scamp Film and Theatre Ltd, with Newling heading up the theatre division and Pippa Harris the film department.

While their early theatrical slate didn’t bode well — with Fuddy Meers (not directed by Mendes) in particular proving to be a fast flop at the Arts Theatre last summer — there was further confusion afoot when it turned out that there was another theatre production company already with the same name, Louise Callow and Jenny Sutherland’s Scamp Theatre, who are Edinburgh Fringe regulars, and whose production last year of Jonathan Harvey’s one-woman show Taking Charlie was even, in one negative national review, blamed on the Mendes/Newling company! (This autumn, Scamp are touring Bristol Old Vic’s production of Private Peaceful, seen at the Edinburgh Fringe last year).

So with immediate effect, the Mendes/Newling/Harris company has been re-branded Neal Street Productions. On the movie front, they have Sam Mendes’ third feature movie Jarhead in post-production for a US release on November 4 and UK release slated for January 13, and another new film about to go into production, Starter for Ten, being helmed by debut director Tom Vaughan with a cast that includes Peter Hall’s actress daughter Rebecca.

On the theatrical scene, they in partnership with other producers to bring Shrek — the Musical to the Broadway stage, directed by Jason Moore (who staged last year’s Tony Award winning best musical Avenue Q, heading to Stratford East next February), with a new score by Jeanine Tesori (who provided additional songs for Thoroughly Modern Millie) and lyrics by Britain’s Jeremy Sams (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang).

First it was a radio show; then an award-winning TV series. Now it’s to be the subject of a South Bank Show appraisal – and also a touring live show.

Little Britain is already a phenomenon. Now ITV are giving the BBC show a boost by devoting Melvyn Bragg’s regular arts show to it as part of its new series. Bragg compared Little Britain’s creators David Walliams and Matt Lucas to the creators of The Goon Show, because “they are hitting new heights of comedy,” and added that it was “preposterous that anyone would even think that we are dumbing down. From the very beginning The South Bank Show has done features on high-quality artists from across the spectrum. People like John Cleese and Billy Connolly have featured and I think that Little Britain is squarely in that area.”

Meanwhile, too, the two also kick off a live 112-date tour at Portsmouth’s Guildhall on October 24 that will take Little Britain across Great Britain.

“We started out doing live shows together but we haven’t toured the UK since 1997, so we’re really looking forward to getting back onstage”, says Matt Lucas, who more recently was seen onstage in the Boy George musical Taboo, in which he played Leigh Bowery. “We like to be quite naughty and spontaneous, getting the audience involved. In fact, we used to confiscate people’s shoes so beware!”, he added.

But who is going to get the writing credit? In another story recently reported in The Independent, Jeff Posner – producer of the 3rd series – is claiming a credit. “It’s not that Jeff Posner is belittling their work, but he wants an ‘additional writing’ credit on the end of the series,” it reports someone close to the production as saying. “Likewise, it’s not as though David and Matt don’t recognise the contribution that Jeff makes as producer, but they aren’t happy that he should also be credited for writing the material.”

Thank you to everyone who entered our recent competition to win a copy of the Actors’ Yearbook. The lucky winners were:

• Sarah Beauvoisin, Enfield
• Sarah Fennell, York
• Giles Gould, Salisbury
• Darren Jones, Swansea
• Vicky Virgo, London

Commiserations to all those who entered, but didn’t win this time. Don’t forget that you can read an exclusive extract on The Stage Online, along with extracts from a number of other A & C Black publications — all available at a special 10% discount price for Stage readers.

The epicentre of London theatrical dining – the Ivy, opposite the New Ambassadors and St Martin’s Theatres on West Street (it’s easy to spot; it’s the one with paparazzi stationed outside all day) – has been knocked into second place for the first time in nine years in an annual survey of London’s favourite eateries.

But the Ivy did come out near the top of another two lists: it was named second in the most disappoint restaurant stakes, and fifth in the most overpriced ratings, of the annually published Harden’s London Restaurant Guide, that collates the opinions of some 8,000 correspondents.

So is the Ivy losing its lustre? Or is this yet another classic example of the British tendency to build things up only to relish knocking them down again?

But I can’t see the winner of the favourite restaurants list, Chez Bruce in Wandsworth, attracting the first night set just yet. It’s not nearly as convenient for post-show dining, unless you’re on your way back from Wimbledon Theatre, perhaps.

Other popular restaurants with the theatrical set, such as The Wolseley on Piccadilly, moved up five places from 8th to 3rd, while J Sheekey’s and Le Caprice dropped one place each to 4th and 5th position respectively.