The winter frost has really bitten last week on Broadway – at the box office, that is, not the weather (where things have been unseasonably warm for the time of year; having been here since last Thursday, I am yet to wear a jumper below my leather jacket). I’ve been intermittently commenting on the Broadway grosses published every week here, unlike in the West End where such data is literally a trade secret, and it’s intriguing to see that every single show playing on Broadway, with the sole exception of The Phantom of the Opera that registered a modest 1.5% gain over the previous week, has taken a fall this week, some of them precipitously so. At the top end, even Wicked has dipped below its typical 100% (or over) mark to 99.4%, and Spamalot from 101.4% to 98.7%, but I’m sure they can both live with that. Of more concern is the drop for the Broadway transfer of The Woman in White, which has fallen 12.9% in the last week to register just 60.3% attendance: the lowest attendance figure for any musical now playing with the exception of the autobiographical revue Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life (53.9%) that is surely not long for this world now (the show, that is, not Chita; the musical vultures currently circling Broadway for a home to land in that include a spoof musical called The Drowsy Chaperone that played to great acclaim in LA last year are getting hungry).
Meanwhile, talking of The Woman in White, I returned to see it at the Marquis last night, to find out how this most ambitious of Lloyd Webber’s recent shows plays over here, and also to applaud Maria Friedman’s Broadway debut – the sweet victory of which has been tarnished by her ongoing health problems that will see her leave the show for a few weeks while she undergoes further treatment. But to see her here again – the fourth time I have done so – is to find an extra layer of resilience and poignancy; she is fighting for her life both onstage and off. And the spirited resistance she is putting up on both scores means that she brings a new emotional vulnerability to the tough and soaring practicality that she also exhibits.
Around Friedman are gathered the strongest support cast yet: while American performers Angela Christian and Jill Paice reprise their excellent London turns as Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie respectively, Ron Bohmer’s dastardly Sir Percival Glyde and Adam Brazier’s earnest Walter Hartright bring more shadow and shade to those characters than was seen in London. Ditto, in the role of Count Fosco, Daniel Marcus (standing in for an indisposed Michael Ball last night), was the best I’ve seen there, too: not just a comically corpulent figure of fun, Marcus – who seemed to need no padding – actually brought a human, and therefore more sinister, dimension to him.
I also love Lloyd Webber’s score the more I hear it; it is easily his most interesting since Evita, and its utterly fascinating to see him still stretching his creative envelope. Trevor Nunn’s production probably still goes too far in its own attempts to do so, particularly on the much-heralded design front; though its cyclorama projections have been slowed down since their dizzying London debut, they still don’t work for a Victorian setting which cries out for more traditional sets.
Back home, the news yesterday of the appointment of Dominic Cooke to take over the artistic directorship of the Royal Court puts the venue into safe but interesting hands. Like Rickson – who was a protégée of Max Stafford-Clark and Stafford-Clark who was a devotee of Bill Gaskill – Cooke has a history here, where he was previously an Associate Director, and a particular record for new writing, too, that he has continued into his present job at the RSC.
