This year an unprecedented four big musicals are already set to arrive in the West End from Broadway: Movin’ Out (Twyla Tharp’s narrative ballet set to the songs of Billy Joel, coming to the Apollo Victoria in March), Wicked (Stephen Schwartz’s smash hit about the ‘back’ story of the witches and wizards of Oz, taking over at the Apollo Victoria in September), Monty Python’s Spamalot (expected at the Palace in the autumn) and Avenue Q (probably at the Albery).
In return, we have recently sent The Woman in White to Broadway (that opened at the Marriott Marquis there in November) and later this year Mary Poppins will follow. Chris Jones, theatre critic for the Chicago Tribune, has just filed an interesting feature http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/arts/chi-0601070280jan08,1,7776773.story?coll=chi-leisurearts-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true that expresses some interesting doubts about the shows emanating from this side of the Atlantic that could give producers of them pause. (A British critic could, of course, reply with many of the same charges about the prospects for the above Broadway shows when they come here).
Of The Woman in White, he writes, “Few New Yorkers could give a hoot about any of the characters onstage” and asks, “You couldn’t help but wonder what they were thinking in London, where they’re still embracing this thing. Are tastes so different? Or did the show somehow fall apart on its journey across the Atlantic?”
He then goes on, “Either way, that’s a question Broadway never used to ask. Twenty or so years ago, Les Miserables barricaded the world, Lloyd Webber was as close as he will ever come to a creative peak, and major international musicals from London were as much of a sure thing as New York could ever hope to snag.”
He takes a long, hard look at The Woman in White, Billy Elliot and Mary Poppins, and says they “suggest that the trans-Atlantic pipeline just doesn’t flow so smoothly anymore.”
Yet he comes to praise Caesar, not bury him: “Billy Elliot packs more emotional punch than any show of its generation. For anyone who believes in the arts as means of effecting social change — or escaping from either political or personal chaos — the show pierces the skin with an ease that’s startling. And it packs an oomph that makes one easily forget that John’s poppy, populist pastiche of a score is less than distinguished from a formative point of view.”
But then comes the killer punch, though he’s not the first to ask it. “So an inevitable Broadway smash, right? Only maybe. How the heck do you take it to New York?”
Writing that it is “intensely specific in time and place” and relying “on some knowledge of the specifics of Thatcher’s 1980s battle to the death with her most significant collective nemesis, the once-powerful miners and their once-radical leaders,” he suggests that “it would require considerable translation for American audiences”.
He identifies other problems, too, of staging and casting: “In London, Billy Elliot has a certain visual scruffiness that is a prerequisite of its appeal. As a general rule, production values in London are below what one routinely sees in New York — there’s an ongoing British resistance to flashiness, perhaps. But in a U.S. context, sloppy choreography tends to look like sloppy choreography, not some kind of scrappy social comedy. Yet clean up Billy Elliot and you kill the show’s soul. That’s quite the conundrum. And in that same vein, an overconfident showbiz American kid in a title role that must be played by a boy with ‘street credibility’ also would result in disaster.”
So, he worryingly suggests, “There’s so much that could go wrong, it seems, you wonder how the thing will survive.” And he compares it to Blood Brothers – “the musical this show most closely resembles”, and writes, that it “had a life in the U.S., but not so much of one. And not at current prices.”
Mary Poppins, he goes on, has the “best chance of success in New York”, since it was “pitched mid-Atlantic right from Day One”; but in his view, it “lands in the middle of the Atlantic with a palpable plop” as a result; but he concludes, “She fully belongs to neither country. And perversely, that surely will be her ticket to success in both.”
I found this to be a really interesting blog - thanks. I've read the Chicago Tribune article and am not sure that London audiences are "still embracing this things". Did anyone embrace it? I remember the review being quite mediocre. I have seen it a couple of times and on both occassions the theatre has been fairly empty.
I do agree that "middle-of-the-road artists such as Friedman are household names in England". Well, perhaps not household, but well known. Most performers on Broadway are superior to their London counterparts and those that achieve the status of Betty Buckley, Bernadette Peters, etc are there because they are fantastic performers. This was most noticable last year in Guys & Dolls where Jane Krakowski was in a different league to anyone else on the stage in my opinion.
I'm certainly interested in how the musicals coming from Broadway to London will be recieved over here. Spamalot should gain an audience with no problem as Monty Python is still popular on UKTV Gold and has found a new audience among people who were too young for the original. Avenue Q and Wicked I think may have a hard time to actually find an audience.
The Wizard of Oz doesn't have the same cultural significance in the UK as it does in the USA either. Quite a few people I know have never watched the film (or have only seen bits of it). I think in America it's almost an institution like Bond on a Bank Holiday Monday is here. A clever marketing campaign will be needed to make this a hit in London the way it has been in the US I feel.
Avenue Q seemed to be a very New York production. I think it will need substantial alteration to work well in London where jokes about trouble parking in Greenwich Village will mean nothing.
I think Billy Elliot going the other way to New York is likely to encounter the same problems as Avenue Q coming to London. Billy Elliot is a brilliant piece of theatre, but most Americans I know who have seen it don't understand the politics and thought that it should concentrate more on Billy and his family rather than the "police and dirty people" (as one of my friends called them).
Perhaps it's a good thing that things have moved on from the days when Phantom, Les Miz, Miss Saigon and Cats were developed to be accepted everywhere. Each country has their own culture and tastes, so why shouldn't shows reach out to those. We know that the French style of musical theatre doesn't work in London (Romeo & Juliet, Notre Dame de Paris), but is very popular in France. Much as I would love to see an English version of the German hit Elisabeth, I don't think it would work in London either. I'm pretty certain that none of the Czech musicals I have seen on DVD would work in London. And why would they.
I'll certainly be going to see the Broadway imports this year, but I'll be very interested to find out how many others follow .