December 2005 Archives

An interesting night in the West End last night to end the entertainment year for me – I’m not venturing near town tonight – when I took my friend Barb Jungr to see Will Tuckett’s production of Pinocchio at the Linbury Studio, then we went to dinner at a nearby restaurant afterwards. Both were notable, for very different reasons.

Pinocchio, which I had begun the week by seeing in panto version at Stratford East, was vibrantly animated as a highly inventive visual, verbal and musical dance experience: it has arrived at the tiny Linbury with far less fanfare (and much less budget) that the Matthew Bourne Edward Scissorhands at Sadler’s Wells, but smaller is definitely better here.

But the dinner that followed was more remarkable yet. The last time Barb and I had dinner a few months ago, she led me to her favourite Chinese restaurant in Lisle Street. When we got there, it was shut, though there were staff inside. We summonsed one to the door to ask what was happening. He simply pointed to a sign on the window that we’d not noticed: it had been shut owing to food hygiene problems by the Environmental Health Department.

Last night, I led to her a place I frequent a bit – a cheap ‘n’ cheerful pizza and pasta restaurant, Ikys Bistro Italiano in Catherine Street, just to the right of the Duchess Theatre. We were merrily tucking into our starters when we spotted a little black mouse scuttling between the glasses on the drinks counter. As if this was surprise enough to us, it was even more surprising how unsurprised the staff were. It was icky indeed!

A few years ago the RSC was the favourite whipping post of the press following a series of decisions by then-artistic director Adrian Noble, who might have been adapting the company’s model to survive into the new century but almost saw it self-destructing before it got there. Perhaps elements of it were misrepresented by the press, or at least not well presented by the RSC, such as the idea that Stratford-upon-Avon would be converted into a Shakespearean village, a kind of theme park for the Bard. The Royal Shakespeare Theatre there was to be demolished; so was their London relationship with the Barbican, which was curtailed first to six months then to none at all, even though nothing was secured to give the company an alternative London residency.

But then Noble lost his nerve, and undermined it all by getting out of the kitchen when the heat became too hot when he announced his resignation, as soon as the reviews were in for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that he had directed in the West End. Michael Boyd’s new regime has swept a new broom through the RSC, and not only stabilised the company but also brought it into the black for the first time in years.

But the arts always needs a whipping post, and this year’s one has unquestionably been English National Opera. It has seen the year lurching from crisis to crisis – the noisy departure of respected music director Paul Daniel (made noisier by the public boos from a Coliseum executive on his last night), the subsequent departure of artistic director Sean Doran, his replacement (without proper process being followed) by John Berry as artistic director and Loretta Tomasi as chief executive, the (some might say overdue) departure of board chairman Martin Smith, and yesterday the news of the departure of incoming music director Oleg Caetani before he’d even picked up his baton. All that and a strike vote, too, yesterday from the the Coli’s Bectu members.

ENO may be in the wars at the moment, but if the lesson of the RSC is anything to go by, if it can survive the current crises it will emerge a stronger and more robust arts organisation. But it needs the opera equivalent of Boyd to take on its poisoned chalice and reinvent it in his (or her) own image. Exciting work is still being done there — new productions of Madame Butterfly and Billy Budd were big commercial hits this year, and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant may not have scored big at the box office, but was one of the best events of my theatrical year.

Theatres like the National’s Cottesloe, Donmar Warehouse and Almeida — not to mention virtually every fringe theatre I know of — where the production budgets don’t stretch to employing understudies are inevitably stymied if a cast member is taken ill. But should audiences be stymied, too?

On Tuesday afternoon, I happened to be walking past the Donmar at around 2.30pm and saw that a notice had to be pinned to the front door advising that the performance of The Wild Duck that evening was cancelled. I thought nothing more of it, until I spoke to a friend the next morning who told me that he had tickets to that performance – and didn’t find out until he got to the theatre that night at around 7.15pm.

Though the theatre claimed they had tried to call everyone but had found out too late, they obviously didn’t try hard enough: as I saw with my own eyes, they certainly knew by 2.30pm, a full five hours ahead of curtain time, and they also definitely had my friend’s phone number, as he specifically remembered giving it when booking, as is standard practice (and since he sees virtually every show at the Donmar, they have his number on their database many times over).

Not only was this lousy customer service, but also it was lousy for the West End: as my friend said by e-mail, “So we didn’t see anything – the TKTS booth closes at 7 – and I’d be damned if I was going to pay full price for Heroes!!!”

And it’s the sort of thing that can have long-term effects: one fringe theatre that hadn’t bothered to call me when it had to cancel its show owing to a cast illness has not been visited by me since. But though it’s a theatre I have fondly supported over the years, there are (roughly) 105 other theatres in London, and one off the list is no great hardship for me. I’m sure I will return in the future; but the reason has to be doubly compelling now.

Last week should have been what they call on Broadway a “boffo” box office week there. But with the subway and bus network hit by a strike shutdown for three days, there were many casualties – with particularly noticeable ones at the recently opened Broadway transfer for The Woman in White (down $276,197 or 19.8% attendance on the previous week, to come in at 53% capacity from 72.8% the previous week) and the soon-to-shutter Sweet Charity (down $173,274 or 19.9% attendance on the previous week, to come in at 56.2% capacity from 76.2% the previous week).

In fact, The Woman in White’s box office performance marks a particularly worrying fall to near the bottom of the musicals table – only Chita Rivera’s A Dancer’s Life and the soon-to-close Fiddler on the Roof, at 45% and 52.1%, scored lower. And it can’t all be blamed on the transport strike: a hit’s a hit under any conditions, and the long-running The Lion King and Wicked actually registered box office gains on the previous week.

The current week, however, is usually one of the strongest of the entire year, so it will be interesting to see where we stand next week, without the transport difficulties. I will keep you posted….

I saw my seventh (and last) panto of the season last night, and though it’s not a necessarily a representative sampling, there are some trends that even this limited exposure reveals. First, of course, as the media has widely picked up on elsewhere, there’s the Ian McKellen effect: the fact that, encouraged by his appearance at the Old Vic, panto is no longer the preserve of the C and D list “celebrities” – and Christopher Biggins, of course, always in a class of his own – but that the star of panto has risen and therefore so have (some of) the stars. But those sightings of actors you rarely see in a theatre outside of panto time has always been part of the enduring appeal of it. It’s not quite the same as seeing Simon Callow, say, who we see all the time in the theatre, but in a different guise.

And secondly, there was the birth this year of a new panto producing house, First Family Entertainment, born of collaboration between what was Clear Channel and Ambassador Theatre Group. Three of my seven pantos were First Family productions, not by design but because they were geographically the suburban pantos most easily within my reach, at Richmond, Wimbledon and Bromley.

Given that pantos are what a producer once referred to me as a “bank raid” – a cash cow that drives the rest of the year’s regional theatre programming – it’s no surprise that ATG/CCE have decided to take them ‘in house’ and retain not just creative control but entire financial reward (against a little risk), too. There may be a higher capital investment upfront required than booking a panto from one of the existing producers, but ATG and the company-formerly-known-as-Clear Channel both don’t merely run theatres but are also active producers of the product that goes into them already, whether in the West End or regionally, so it makes sense that they have expanded their interests here.

And though my sampling may not in any way be definitive, each have been very handsomely produced; I did, however, spy a certain homogeneity between the two separate Cinderellas I saw, which may have had different writers credited to each, but seemed to oddly share some of the identical jokes and topical references.

But while these family entertainments deliver the panto goods – in a way that the rather-too-adult Aladdin at the Old Vic signally does not – my two favourite pantos remain the ones at Hackney Empire and Stratford East, as much for the audiences and the venues as for the shows themselves. That’s because both attract a local audience of all colours and creeds to share the communal joy, not just of Christmas, but of theatre itself, and both theatres are simply enchanting: they provide the best kind of introduction to the theatre possible to anyone who has never been before.

…as Tiny Tim says in A Christmas Carol, and London critics have heard at least three times this year – at the London Palladium (where Scrooge, a Leslie Bricusse musical version of the story, has been revived), at the Albery (where Patrick Stewart has reprised his one-man version of the story) and at the Trafalgar Studios (where fringe company Horla have brought their version).

But here are season’s greetings to you, one and all! (if the readership of this column stretches beyond one, that is!) It’s been fun being here this year; and I look forward to being with you again in the year to come.

Sad news from New York: according to notices in the New York Times, London theatre owner and producer Ted Tulchin died on December 18. The American co-owner of the West End’s Playhouse Theatre (with his brother Norman) who recently also acquired a stake in the Savoy (again with Norman and Robert Bartner, who took it over jointly with Ambassador Theatre Group) was also a prominent theatrical investor in shows on both sides of the Atlantic. Among the shows he has interests in over here include The Old Masters, Whose Life Is It Anyway, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Guys and Dolls, Sweeney Todd and As You Desire Me (current tenant at the Playhouse).

A theatrical enthusiast who served on the Board of The American Academy of Dramatic Arts as well as New Dramatists, Ted was also a banker, lecturer and an authority on business credit. Maidstone Productions, the theatrical division that he set up with his brother, took over the Playhouse in January 2003, and subsequently acquired a joint interest in the Savoy in October 2004.

Christmas may be nearly upon us, but there’s been no let up for theatre critics: as if the annual onslaught of pantos isn’t enough, the RSC have kept us on our toes right up to the last minute, opening their Gunpowder plot season at the Trafalgar Studios with A New Way to Please You last night. But there was no alternative: it closes tomorrow week! And however generous it is of the RSC to actually bring this strand of their work to London, I must question their new model of “straight” runs that mean that if you blink you miss it.

Time was that the RSC operated as a repertoire company both in Stratford-upon-Avon and in the transfer of that work to London. But now the work comes to London, whether at the Novello (where the Shakespearean comedies season sees each running for just over 3 week runs) or the Trafalgar Studios (most for barely two), and the pressure builds up. Of course, fans just need to get organised: the window of opportunity is limited, so you better get your skates on! But it also makes reviewing their work even harder: though the RSC has always had the rare privilege of being reviewed twice by most of the nationals, first at Stratford and then again in London, the run of A New Way to Please You is so short that no Sunday paper will be able to review it while it is still on. None of our papers are publishing this Sunday (Christmas day), and by the time we next come out on January 1, it will have closed!

Jermyn Street Theatre has long blazed the trail for the fringe in the heart of the West End, but the more recent arrival of the Sound Theatre has revealed some of the difficulties of trying to establish a profile in the midst of so much competition, as Kit Productions have found to their cost (literally so) and has led to them to withdraw from the venue after the failure of their Christmas musical. But now the West End has gone fringe with the arrival of Trafalgar Studios 2 last month, a 98-seater venue carved out of the rear stalls of what used to be the Whitehall Theatre, above which is now the larger Trafalgar Studios 2 that rises from the old stage to meet the old dress circle.

It’s a laudable aim to give small fringe companies a West End showcase that could help them to make a bigger leap, but two things worry me. First, the thing that drives most fringe theatres to exist on a shoestring is the desire to produce their own work, so whatever the quality (or not) of that work, the venues achieve something of an artistic identity. But a receiving house in the West End that simply operates, like any other West End theatre, on being available to those able to pay the rent – and though the owner will, of course, take shows in on their perceived commercial and/or artistic value, it will struggle to establish a real identity.

Secondly, not unlike the annual Edinburgh scrum, having deep pockets rather than rich talent will take precedence in the ability to hire the venue. Beware the vanity that might propel companies to book this space, over their actual artistic worth. One suspects that the booking of Horla’s A Christmas Carol, that opened there last night, was partly seasonal opportunism on the part of the venue – a good title to carry over the festive season, though in fact subsequently pipped to the post by the return of Patrick Stewart’s one-man version of the same story to the West End’s Albery Theatre – but it also revealed a leap that the company weren’t, in my opinion, yet ready to make: the show’s heart may have been in the right place, but the work isn’t really good enough.

And although a lot of good work is being done on the fringe, I do worry if there is quite enough to sustain a transfer house in the West End, especially since it’s difficult to make the money that such a transfer costs back with such a small seating capacity. Which leads, in turn, to ticket prices being hiked there – and defeats the other main appeal of the fringe, which is its affordability

Broadway lives on a much tighter economic leash than we do in London: not only are costs (and potential rewards) far higher there than here, but also perceptions of what’s hot, and what’s not, change fast. When Spamalot first opened in New York last spring, it became the latest hottest ticket; but now there are signs apparently that interest is already deflating.

According to Broadway’s most influential theatrical insider, the New York Post’s Michael Reidel, Spamalot has seen its advance drop already from over $30m in the summer to $20m now. Of course, a sell out is still a sell out: unlike other manufacturing industries where you just roll out extra stock to meet the demand, with theatre there’s always a finite inventory to sell. And Spamalot, which played to 101.7% capacity last week, is still selling out on a day-to-day basis. But Wicked – now in its third year – is carrying an advance of almost $35m, Reidel reports today, and according to the weekly figures released by the League of American Theatres and Producers, is also playing to 100% capacity. Since the Gershwin (home of WIcked) is larger than the Shubert where Spamalot is playing, its income is far bigger on those stats, too: a capacity week at Wicked has earned over $1,350,000, whereas Spamalot registers nearly £1,088,000.

There’s a fine balancing line between supply and demand on Broadway, and one way to fuel demand is to limit supply by only releasing tickets for short booking periods at a time. “The harder it is to score a seat, the louder the public clamour to get in,” suggests Reidel. But Reidel posits that maybe the Spamalot producers under-supplied and it back-fired: he quotes a veteran Broadway producer saying, “sometimes what happens is people get tired of hearing good seats aren’t available, and they move on to other shows.”

And Reidel concludes that Spamalot should take a leaf out of Cameron Mackintosh’s book, who spent vast sums of money advertising his shows “even when they were sold out”. Reidel goes on, “He believed it was important to ‘brand’ a show while it was hot so that it became part of the landscape. The Phantom mask, Cats eyes and Les Miz waif became ubiquitous. To get its advance back up to blockbuster territory, Spamalot may have to start plastering that Holy Grail all over a lot more billboards around town.”

After the multiple Oscar wins of the 2002 movie version of the stage hit Chicago, there were hopes that this might mark a return of all but extinct form, the screen musical. Two more have duly just turned up in the US, and will soon be released here: The Producers – a musical itself based on a film comedy has gone full circle to become a film again, opening here on Boxing Day; while the film version of Jonathan Larson’s Rent finally reaches cinema screens over a decade after it first burst onto the New York stage.

I saw a press screening of The Producers yesterday, and although one of Broadway’s greatest love letters to itself has been faithfully reproduced in another medium, it may in fact be far too faithful. Susan Stroman (who also directed and choreographed the stage version) seems to have done little more than point a camera at her stage production; it has been scarcely opened out. Not only do all the sets look very ‘stagey’, but Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick – reprising their stage turns on screen – still seem at times like they’re playing to the back of the mezzanine (as they call the dress circle in New York). The performances are broad, and broadly funny; with material this good, it couldn’t fail to still be funny. But no extra dimension except historical preservation of a stage production seems to have been achieved – and may ultimately defeat the stage version, too.

Whereas Chicago on stage exists in an entirely different dimension of stripped-back immediacy to the film version that followed, and therefore saw the benefit of people who had enjoyed the film then wanted to catch it onstage, there isn’t much reason for them to do so now with The Producers. Why pay $100 on Broadway, or up to £49 in London, when you can go to the movies and see the identical product for $10.75 or £9?

“Keep it gay!” cries a song in The Producers. But one London producer is simultaneously following that advice for a show he’s producing but keeping it quiet that he’s doing so.

I was recently applauding here (on 9 December) that Raymond Gubbay – the Mr Christmas of popular classical music promotion – was stretching his reach: “though his typical repertoire is sing-a-long carol evenings and carols-by-candle night, he also spies commercial opportunities in the offbeat, too, like promoting the London Gay Men’s Chorus concerts at the Barbican on December 21 and 22 (Make the Yuletide Gay) as part of his schedule there.”

But disturbingly, I now realise that his inclusiveness of such events only goes so far. While he seems to single-handedly keep the Sunday Times culture section advertising afloat with a regular full-page ad for his Christmas shows in it, the ad yesterday didn’t include these gay concerts. Perhaps there is no need, I thought – maybe they’re sold out. But I’ve just gone online this morning and seats are still readily available.

It seems strange to produce an event and then keep it quiet, especially when you’re already paying for the space. Perhaps he’s concerned at ruffling the feathers of the families who usually book for his concerts. But you can’t have it both ways: happy to take (and make) money from gay concerts, but deliberately exclude them from your advertising.

UPDATED AT 2.30PM: Within a couple of hours of my posting the above this morning, I received a phone call from Raymond Gubbay personally to tell me that I was incorrect: though the concerts were not included in yesterday’s Culture ad, there was no policy to exclude them, but each concert was independently budgeted for PR purposes, and some of that budget was kept back to promote the concerts in the gay press. Since the full page ad in the Culture was already being paid for, I didn’t entirely follow this reasoning, but I am happy to accept that their motives are not sinister in excluding it.

Maybe it’s the curse of Macbeth. And the law of averages dictates that things must occasionally go wrong in the theatre, and that must occasionally occur in the full gaze of the national critics assembled to report on the occasion.

But pity the poor Old Vic. Two press nights in a row have now been beset by technical glitches: during the opening night of Richard II, the lighting scheme literally lost the ‘plot’ during the first act, and though they soldiered on to the interval in reduced lighting, an announcement was made then that an area-wide power surge had caused the difficulty, so we were not seeing the production in its best light, so to speak.

Then last night, a key set change failed to occur during the first act of Aladdin, and a black-tied stage manager had to walk into the middle of that scene to stop it; which led to a tongue-tied Frances Barber declaring, “But I don’t know any jokes!”, and looking lost and helpless like a rabbit caught in the headlights; she started in on a comment about “Richard Wilson is at Wimbledon…”, but we never got to hear her desperately searching for a punchline because the curtain was at last brought in. I can only imagine what her predecessor in the role, Maureen Lipman, would have made of such a moment, though: during last year’s press performance, she responded to a crackling microphone by declaring, “That’s me old bones crackling.”

But if the show is good enough, it survives such mishaps: one of the National Theatre’s biggest-ever hits, the now returned (and Broadway-bound) The History Boys was launched with a press night where the fire sprinklers went off, drenching the set, half an hour before curtain up; when it finally went up, an hour later, Nicholas Hytner took to the stage to tell us that his entire company had been onstage frantically trying to mop it up! The lighting, too, was affected throughout; but nothing could dim Alan Bennett’s wonderful play or the wonderful performances in it.

In today’s Evening Standard, young columnist Johann Hari proves himself to be avid theatregoer, but makes an impressive case for the fringe over the West End.

Wittily declaring that Peter Hall’s current “wheezing, clunking” West End production of You Never Can Tell left him contemplating ritually self-harming himself – “I began to wonder if it was possible to slash my throat with one of those little ice cream scoops” – he wrote that it “epitomizes everything I hate about the laziness of the West End: a dead play no sensible person would revive, hideously mannered acting, and – most painful of all – the forced laughter of an audience desperately trying to rile itself from its boredom to convince it was watching something frightfully civilised.”

He could have added, of course, that many were probably persuaded to actually be there by the critical plaudits it had received, since most of my colleagues seemed to actively collude with the pact that this was seriously funny. (Myself, I compared it to Ray Cooney’s now-departed Tom, Dick and Harry and said of the latter, “I certainly laughed more freely than at the smug society comedy of George Bernard Shaw’s antique You Never Can Tell. Peter Hall’s production of this late 19th-century play - also coincidentally revolving around three siblings who in this case are reunited with their long-estranged father - features only one believable performance from Nancy Carroll as the oldest sister.”)

But before anyone fears that Hari is about to write off the theatre, he declares, “Don’t worry, this is not one of those portentous, pretentious ‘Theatre is Dead’ articles. There are dozens of nimble, zestful fringe theatres dancing around the arthritic stages of the West End, showing that theatre is not only alive but on amphetamines.”

And as he sees each of them, he tries to diagnose why it’s so much better. Seeing Sunday in the Park with George at the Menier, he realises that Strength Oe of the fringe is that “it can afford to take risks. No West End producer could gamble on this high-brow, high-art musical, especially since it bombed there last time” (Actually, Johann, it didn’t even play there; it was premiered in the subsidised safety of the National).

Then, seeing the Gate’s production of The Emperor Jones, he finds Strength Two: “sheer physical proximity”. And he adds, “The huge picture-box theatres of the West End were built for a pre-TV age, when the audience didn’t expect to see and hear everything. But as I watched the sweat trickle down Paterson Joseph’s forehead in the Gate, I realised how much you miss in the cavernous theatres of the West End.”

Finally, he sees On Ego at Soho Theatre, and notes, “Watching its weeping cast, Strength Three came to me: fringe shows have shorter runs, so they don’t slacken and sag by the time you finally get tickets. West End critics invariably go to first nights, when the actors are on top form and the theatre is packed with laughing, appreciative friends of the cast. If they went six months later, like many of us punters, they would too often see a show that resembles an animated exhibit at the Natural History Museum.”

These are fascinating insights. But it avoids one key economic reality: none of the above makes any money for their participants. They are all done for love. And love doesn’t pay the bills. It’s all very well being privileged enough to see such marginal work so expertly done, but it’s mainstream opportunities that afford actors the chance to actually live.

The BITE season may have revitalized what goes on inside the theatres, but the appalling Barbican Centre remains a miasma of confusion and unlovely public spaces, a situation exacerbated rather than lessened right now as it finds itself in the midst of a (rather frighteningly prolonged) foyer refurbishment that was originally budgeted at £12.25m, virtually enough to build the entire (and entirely wonderful) Unicorn Theatre from scratch. Maybe it has to get worse before it gets better. Let’s hope so; but so far, the signs are not encouraging, literally so, with a huge sign stating what can only be described as the bleedin’ obvious with massive lettering spelling out ‘Hall’ near the Barbican Hall, for instance.

But beyond these cosmetics, even more tangible (and inexcusable) are the bad manners of the house management that beggar belief, too. The matinee of Tintin that I attended yesterday clashed with a graduation ceremony for London Metropolitan University taking place simultaneously in the aforementioned ‘Hall’; and so a vast swathe of the main foyer area – the bits not already covered in by building work, that is – was apparently not available to theatre patrons, as I discovered when I attempted to purchase a tea and flapjack from the refreshment counter, and was told that it was only available to people attending the graduation (even though there was but one person ahead of me in the queue at the time). I was re-directed instead to the Waterside Café, two flights up, where I didn’t choose to go, so the Barbican lost out on that piece of revenue, to boot.

And while nothing can solve the difficulties of actually getting to the centre – and the current main entrance, in the midst of its refurbishment, is more uninviting than ever — it would help if patrons arriving by car, as I did yesterday, were actually able to pay for their parking at working payment stations. At least two of the machines I encountered were out-of-order.

There’s an air of neglect about this place, even as they are trying to apparently improve it. The fatal combination of a house management that seems indifferent, if not outright hostile, to its paying customers and the slow progress of the “improvements” seems to be running the place even further downhill. No wonder, I think now, that the RSC were so determined to leave it.

Meanwhile, fresh from the unlovely — and probably terminally unlovable — Barbican, I went last night to the Royal Albert Hall, the nation’s village hall as it is sometimes described, and one of the most stunning public buildings in the world, to see Bryn Terfel’s Christmas concert. This, too, isn’t the easiest place to get to from public transport – it’s a good ten minutes walk from the tube – but in this case, the walk actually serves to magnify the sense of expectation rather than the dread you get on to the Barbican’s wind-swept approaches. And even if the entrance areas are functional rather than exactly welcoming, and refreshments here in overall short supply, all is forgiven for the spectacular, wrap-around auditorium, that seems to pull the audience into a warm embrace and never lets go.

Watching the amazing New York duo of Kiki and Herb in their Christmas show at none other than a packed Queen Elizabeth Hall last night got me thinking about how many gay performance artists, or gay-friendly ones, have been taking on the citadels of popular culture to provide the Christmas entertainments in the last few years. At the Barbican’s Pit in 2003 and 2004, C’est Barbican (which went on to take the Olivier Award for Best Entertainment) was literally a transfer of a “tableside” burlesque that had originated at a South London gay pub, the Vauxhall Tavern. This year, the Pit continue the trend by hosting drag artist Tina C, aka Chris Green, an alumni of C’est Barbican. And cult act Pam Ann – born on the gay circuit – promises to be a sell-out at the Bloomsbury once again this year.

Meanwhile, pantos too are being readily taken up by a series of provocative gay writers: as well as the announcement that next year’s Barbican panto will be scripted by Mark Ravenhill, this year already sees the likes of Jonathan Harvey writing the panto at Woking and Tim Fountain (whose onstage, online cruising show Sex Addict played at the Royal Court at the beginning of the year) script Cinderella at Bromley.

But while out-and-proud gay men are staking their claims to family entertainment, an article in Sunday’s New York Times pointed out how few women directors are reaching the mainstream of Broadway. Of 39 plays and musicals that have opened there in 2004, only three were directed by women (while a short-lived fourth show was directed by a husband-and-wife team); and of the 34 new shows in 2004, only two were directed by women. Yet three of Broadway’s biggest, long-running musical earners are, in fact, also directed by women: The Lion King (Julie Taymor), The Producers (Susan Stroman) and Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd).

Those three shows, of course, are also playing in London; but by contrast, looking through the listings, there are a total of eight current West End attractions directed by women, including a second hit production by Phyllida Lloyd (Mary Stuart), two shows at the National (Marianne Elliot’s staging of Pillars of the Community and Melly Still’s production of Coram Boy) and the fast-rising Thea Sharrock (who, in addition to running the Gate, also has Heroes at Wyndham’s), so we’ve instantly eclipsed Broadway in giving opportunities to female directors. But though women are slowly catching up, they are still outnumbered by gay male directors: against the 8 shows directed by women, 11 current shows are staged by directors known to be gay.

But lest it be thought that there’s some kind of “gay mafia” amongst London’s directorial brigade, directing remains a predominantly male heterosexual activity. But Broadway producer David Stone discounts the role of gender in director choices, and the same thing could be said for sexuality: it’s simply a question of relationships. “Directors are not chosen for their gender; they’re not even necessarily chosen for their credits. More often, the writer and producer select a director because of their previous personal or professional history together and the knowledge that they are copasetic in the rehearsal room and share a similar aesthetic. It is fair to say that it would be great for Broadway if more women were directing there, but it can’t necessarily be said that there is some sort of conspiracy at work.”

Kathleen Marshall, a Broadway director and choreographer, adds, “Yeah sure, I wish there were more women directing on Broadway. Then again, I wish there were more women senators and C.E.O.’s.” And another Broadway producer and theatre owner Rocco Landesman, points out, “On Broadway, progress is slow. It was only a couple of years ago, about 80 years late, that with the renovation of our five houses, we created a sufficient number of women’s bathroom stalls… But change is coming, however slowly. We’ll get used to their styles (watching Susan Stroman direct The Producers was a revelation; talk about velvet glove, iron fist!) and certainly, their successes. Nothing changes perceptions like a hit. The women directors I know have proved that they can get everything they want while still being decent to people. The famously bullying Jerome Robbins is just not the role model for them and the Broadway theatre is better for it.”

Making a case for the arts – and in particular for arts funding, against the competing claims of more readily quantifiable benefits, like health and education – is always a tricky one. When arts administrators and artistic directors state their claims, it is often in the language of the generically self-evident rather than specifically proven: the arts matter, “because they are universal; because they are non-material; because they deal with daily experience in a transforming way; because they question the way we look at the world; because they offer different explanations of that world,” suggested John Tusa of the Barbican Centre, when he first published a volume of essays six years ago about his time in the arts world.

In today’s Guardian, he brings that definition up-to-date and tries to make it more specific: “The arts matter because they are local and relevant to the needs and wishes of local people. They help citizens to express their needs and to clothe them in memorable forms. They offer a way of expressing ideas and wishes that ordinary politics do not allow. The arts regenerate the run-down and rehabilitate the neglected. Arts buildings lift the spirits, create symbols that people can identify with, and give identity to places that may not have one. Where the arts start, jobs follow.”

But he discovers, the arts still resist a definitive economic valuation, but that’s no reason not to fund them: “The final value of the arts cannot be predicted or quantified”, he writes, but “to curtain them on these grounds is to deny the possibility of an unpredictable benefit. The risk of funding the arts offers benefits far greater than the immediate gains of not funding them…. The investment in the arts is so small, the actual return so large, that it represents value as research into ideas.”

The debate over the causes of homosexuality – and whether it’s a matter of nature or nurture – has long raged, but sometime playwright, theatre critic and writer Toby Young has just thrown his hat (or maybe that should be jockstrap) into the ring that suddenly discovering a love of musicals may be turning him.

In his Spectator review of the Menier’s production of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, he declares that watching it, he “felt like the luckiest man alive” and that he “loved every second of it.” He concludes, “I’ve spent the past week hunting down the original Broadway cast recording.” (If only he’d asked me: a quick trip to Dress Circle might have saved him a lot of time). “Who knows,” he concludes, “by this time next year I may even have turned into a fully fledged homosexual”.

If only it were that easy, I’d be rushing to recommend visits to the Menier to Robbie Williams and David Beckham, too. It’s a pity that he’s undermined an otherwise appropriately laudatory review with such an inappropriate assumption that a love of musicals is inherently evidence of gay tendencies.

It’s what you always hope for but so rarely get: pure, unmediated theatrical ecstasy. One of the ironies of live performance – which is, of necessity, in the moment – is that it’s all too often a recycling of past moments; the spontaneity is drained by repetition and rehearsal. But last night, at the New Players Theatre, a cabaret performance came into its own when Jason Robert Brown – the New York composer and performer – sprung a brilliant surprise on his 24-strong onstage backing choir from the Royal Academy of Music, and asked if any of them performed his songs themselves (apart from now!). Many did – it’s amazing that, though he’s never had a West End show, his work is very well known here in musical theatre circles.

After taking the titles of what they sang, he then invited a young Canadian called Peter Navickas to perform ‘It’s Hard to Speak My Heart’ from his Tony Award winning score to Parade; and the amazing, unprepared performance that resulted came straight from the heart. It was spellbinding to watch, and utterly unrepeatable, too: a moment that couldn’t be caught again, because of the surprise of it for all of the participants.

But then Jason Robert Brown is the kind of performer that frequently takes himself offguard, too. As he rambles inbetween songs, he finds himself on unexpected verbal journeys. But it’s the songs – each a complete story in itself – that travel furthest. It’s shocking that London has so far only seen his song compilation, Songs for a New World, briefly at the Bridewell; it’s high time we saw and heard more.

It would also be great to see more made of the New Players. Artistic director Mark Clements told me last night that he now parted management ways with Brian Daniels and Off-West End Theatres Ltd (who also control the New End Theatre in Hampstead and Shaw Theatre near Euston Station) and is going it alone in charge of the theatre. It’s a perfect spot for cabaret – a much neglected form in London – that forges a superb intimacy between performer and audience. But its artistic programme – made up of productions that have hitherto simply hired the theatre – has failed to give it an identity up to now. Mark is determined to establish one.

There isn’t a producer quite Raymond Gubbay. Since he has built his business empire out of the popular end of classical music promotion – exemplified by the Classical Spectaculars, complete with indoor fireworks and lasers, that routinely sell out at the Royal Albert Hall for each of the multiple times they play there every year, and he is now shipping around Europe, too – this is his busiest time of the year. Indeed, you could call this good Jewish boy – who next year will celebrate his 40th year in the business – Mr Christmas; this year alone he is presenting 150 festive classical concerts around Britain, including 18 at the Albert Hall and 15 at the Barbican.

But though his typical repertoire is sing-a-long carol evenings and carols-by-candle night, he also spies commercial opportunities in the offbeat, too, like promoting the London Gay Men’s Chorus concerts at the Barbican on December 21 and 22 (Make the Yuletide Gay) as part of his schedule there.

And though he made a rare business mistake in promoting an unsubsidised “People’s Opera” company at the Savoy for a short-lived season a couple of years ago, he has also found a strong niche for ballet and opera audiences by staging spectacular arena productions of both genres at the Royal Albert Hall over the last decade that together with his concert runs, means that his company is now the hall’s biggest annual tenant after the Proms. In February, his in-the-round production of Puccini’s La Boheme, directed by Francesca Zambello, will have a return run.

Yesterday he announced plans for a bold new production that seek to bridge the gap between opera and musical theatre, as ENO did last summer with its staging of Bernstein’s On the Town, by now producing a massive in-the-round staging of Kern and Hammerstein’s 1927 Broadway classic Show Boat, with Zambello again at the helm, next June, for an 18-performance run at the Albert Hall. Peter J Davison’s set, with the audience wrapped entirely around it, looked spectacular in the set model shown to the press: a giant hanging model of a showboat can be raised and lowered from the rafters of the Albert Hall, and there’s water surrounding the playing area.

Harold Pinter may have formally given up his playwrighting pen, but he has not abandoned his political passion. In his video-taped acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, reprinted in today’s Guardian, he begins with a brief discussion on his craft and how his plays and characters come to be, but then launches in a far more incendiary attack on politicians, and how they conspire to keep people in total ignorance of the truth in order to maintain their power.

He says: “As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with al-Qaida and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11 2001. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true. The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.”

What follows is an excoriating and chastening account of American foreign policy interventions since the second world war that, he says, have made it clear that the US “had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.” He comments, “It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent…. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.”

He cites the invasion of Iraq again, as a “bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort, all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation.”

Since America has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice, but Britain has, he suggests that Blair be arraigned before it as a war criminal.

Pinter’s plays speak volumes between the lines – but bluntly stating his position as he does here, he speaks even more loudly with them. His speech is not just a major contribution to revealing the lies we’re living under, but also an important new part towards understanding the man.

Though the British theatre has virtually adopted Stephen Sondheim – a self-confessed Anglophile anyway – as a native son, to the extent that nowadays coals are taken to Newcastle with a Newbury production of Sweeney Todd now wowing them on Broadway – we have mostly missed out, so far, on the current generation of leading lights of the New York stage.

The late Bridewell tried to champion the cause, particularly of Michael John LaChiusa, Jason Robert Brown and Adam Guettel (where their shows Hello Again, Songs for a New World and Floyd Collins respectively received their UK premieres), and a Sunday evening concert series, Notes from New York, tried to do showcase revues of some of their work and some of the others, including Ricky Ian Gordon, William Finn and Andrew Lippa, but there’s still no co-ordinated way of seeing (and hearing) their work, apart from visiting Dress Circle and buying the CDs instead.

But at least there’s now a chance to engage directly and in person with Jason Robert Brown, an accomplished performer in his own right and an ideal exponent of his own work, who brings his cabaret to the New Players from tonight to Saturday only, in a return run of a series he did there last September. On that occasion, I wrote in The Stage: “For an American composer who has only had one musical produced professionally in London so far – his Songs for a New World song cycle that was seen at the Bridewell three years ago – Jason Robert Brown already has a formidable following over here from people in the know, who packed out the opening night of a four performance late-night run at the New Players.”

What’s disheartening, however, is that for producer David Dolman it continues to be an uphill struggle for him to get any press interest in it at all.

As he said to me in an e-mail, “After writing over 150 letters, the only press or sponsorship I received was the article in The Stage and a cheque from Cameron. We are accomplishing so many valuable educational exercises this time, it’s a real shame that no one takes notice. I feel that his work should be shared with more than the people in the know, but it seems impossible to achieve. For someone who makes such an impact on so many, sells out shows with no publicity, you’d think someone would take an interest in such a cult following….” Ruefully, he added, “Perhaps I should get someone from The X Factor to do Stars and the Moon? Just kidding!!”

Joke though we may, that is probably exactly the way to get Brown’s work out there. The trouble with the narrow coterie of the cabaret world is that it merely preaches to the already converted. Perhaps the only way to reach out further is to take it there.

It’s what Margaret Thatcher, of course, always dreamt of (apart, that is, from her daughter winning I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here): an arts economy that stands on its own two legs. And following the US model in which state subsidies are negligible but business and private sponsorship is instead used to philanthropically prop up arts organisations (in return for the great kudos attached to doing so, not to mention branding opportunities that show the extent of their largesse, that has seen Broadway theatres variously renamed the American Airlines Theatre, the Hilton Hotel and the Cadillac Winter Garden), we are now rapidly catching up.

According to a story in today’s Guardian, private support of the arts has leapt from £393m to £452m in the last two years; though the vast majority in fact went to heritage projects, theatre benefited to the tune of a little under £31m in 2004/5 – an increase of 40% on previous investments in this sector.

The example and popularity of the Travelex scheme – first implemented at the National and now also at the Opera House – has led the way. The Travelex £10 season, as it is called, enables ticket prices to be heavily reduced at both places, and have been a big public success.

Nick Hytner is delighted with the philosophy behind it as well as the results: “I’m completely comfortable with the idea that we live in a mixed theatrical economy,” he is quoted saying in The Guardian. “That is always what has happened. For us it’s worked brilliantly.” And confronted with fears that business might want to exert an editorial influence over what is produced, he replied, “It’s easier to imagine being asked to do tiresome things to sustain a state subsidy.”

The Pulitzer Prize for Drama, presented annually since 1918 by New York’s Columbia University, are one of the most sought-after dramatic prizes there; but curiously, though a win usually means a transatlantic transfer, it’s intriguing to note how few of them actually then succeed in London. Over the last twenty-five years, Pulitzer winning plays have been regularly produced here at the Lyric Hammersmith (Talley’s Folly, a 1980 winner), Bush (Crimes of the Heart, 1981), Hampstead (‘Night Mother, 1983; Dinner with Friends, 2000; Anna in the Tropics, 2003), Tricycle (The Piano Lesson, 1990), Donmar (How I Learned to Drive, 1998; Proof, 2001), Greenwich (The Heidi Chronicles, 1988) and Royal Court (Topdog/Underdog, 2002), but none have gone on to a commercial run. When the Pulitzer wins have come straight to the West End, they have regularly failed: from Fences (1987) and Rent (1996) to Driving Miss Daisy (1988), Wit (1999) and I Am My Own Wife (2004), the latter of which closes this weekend at the Duke of York’s after a run of barely a month.

The only exceptions to this over the last quarter of a century have been Albee’s Three Tall Women (1994) and Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers (a 1991 win that transferred first to the National and then on the West End), as well as three more National Theatre hits, Angels in America (in fact produced on the South Bank first before it went to New York), Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (currently being revived at the Menier Chocolate Factory).

So the Pulitzers could be said to work in reverse here: a win in New York points to the fact that London prospects could be doubtful.

Reality television has long been taking over the television schedules, but now it’s invading the theatrical landscape as never before. Darius Danesh, a Pop Idol finalist, has just taken over in Chicago, a production that itself became a reality TV show when Channel 4’s Musicality trained a bunch of performers to go into it, initially for one night only. But schoolteacher-turned-Billy Flynn recently returned to the show for five nights earlier this year in his now-professional debut; while fellow Musicality ‘stars’ Rebecca Dent and Caroline Graham are now both on the road together in the tour of Saturday Night Fever (which Dent has also headlined in the West End).

Meanwhile, producer Sonia Friedman is working with Channel 4 to find and produce a brand-new play by a previously undiscovered writer under the gaze of the television cameras; and now it has been reported that Andrew Lloyd Webber will climb ev’ry television mountain to find a new star to play Maria in his forthcoming revival of The Sound of Music. Co-producer David Ian has commented, “We think this could be an interesting way of casting someone who is not known yet but who has enormous talent and we hope it will break new ground.”

Though it could indeed make compelling television, and will no doubt guarantee the production lots of valuable publicity, too, existing West End talent might well feel “insulted”, as a leading West End actress told me yesterday. The fact is that appearing in the West End is a privilege, not a right, and it usually takes years of dedicated training to get there: not a cattle call staged for the benefit of television cameras. Even if it allows the public a glimpse of the kind of process that goes into putting on a show, as Musicality did, the West End isn’t a democracy, and access isn’t available to perform there for anyone and everyone…. though if you’re really keen and ready to pay around £250, you could sign up for the Master Classes that are regularly held for several major West End musicals, and over a three day period, a group is taught a 15-minute compilation from the show that they then get to perform on the actual set of it.

As the National Theatre’s now annual Travelex £10 season has proved, the most effective way of getting people back into the theatregoing habit is to make it more financially accessible. With tickets available at the equivalent of a West End movie price, people are more willing to take a chance; when you’re spending £50 or the new £55 that musicals are now charging, by contrast, you want the risk removed, and a guarantee that your money will be well spent.

New York – which has long overpriced its product, but had lead to a bargain-basement mentality instead being paradoxically developed, with all but the biggest hits piling their unsold tickets up high and selling them cheap in a mind-boggling array of offers that are put out – is now catching on.

Signature Theatre Company – whose signature is that they devote entire seasons to the work of a single playwright – will next year offer a three-play repertoire of plays of the late August Wilson, to mark the company’s own 15th anniversary. Thanks to a sponsorship deal it has struck with Time Warner, Inc, it is going to offer every seat at every show for just $15. Now there’s a cause for celebration!

Each of the plays being done was previously seen on Broadway, but had disconcertingly short runs: Two Trains Running (160 performances in 1992), Seven Guitars (188 performances in 1996) and King Hedley II (72 performances in 2001). Price resistance certainly played a large part in those short runs; but now the plays are being brought back at prices that anyone can afford.