April 2006 Archives

Unlike on Broadway, where the weekly grosses are not merely public but actually published every week, London’s theatreland has always been notoriously secretive about the ways of the box office; but as corporate traders (if not corporate raiders) increasingly take on the West End, perhaps some of that secrecy is going to evaporate.

According to a trading update issued to the stock exchange by IP Live plc, producers of Movin’ Out at the Apollo Victoria whose first London production this is, “The first three weeks of Movin’ Out … have shown occupancy levels below management’s expectations. The directors are keeping the position under review on a daily basis and taking action to try and improve the situation. The show, which combines live rock music and non-stop dance, has been well received by audiences and critics alike and the cast continues to receive standing ovations each night, but a greater number of tickets need to be sold if the show is to continue to the end of its London run in mid-July on a commercially viable basis.”

Of course market forces apply to the theatre, as to anything: if not enough people buy something, it’s taken off the shelves. But I’ve not seen this economic reality applied to the theatre quite as frankly as this before. Perhaps a greater transparency is a good thing, but I wonder how the cast now feel about the precariousness of their position?

Just as the geographically compact nature of Broadway creates a greater sense of common purpose amongst audiences attending its theatres, so it also engenders a greater sense of community amongst its practitioners, too, than in the more diffuse environment of London: Broadway is almost literally like a small village, and performers and crew hang out in the same diners and dives in the district. But there’s also a far wider range of extra-curricular activities, from one-off benefit performances to workshops, to keep performers on the toes in every sense, than in the West End. There’s a charity do of some description on virtually every Sunday or Monday night (the traditional ‘dark’ nights on Broadway, though that model is changing into a seven-day operation that ensures there is always something to see, whatever the night).

But this week I was lucky to be in town for the culmination of the biggest fund-raiser event of the year: the annual Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS fundraising drive, with nightly collections at Broadway theatres and also Broadway road productions, that culminates in the Easter Bonnet Competition, held at the New Amsterdam Theatre, in which companies from most Broadway shows put together a brief, usually original, number to showcase their own competition entry. This initiative began modestly in 1986 in a backstage competition of the La Cage Aux Folles company, then playing in its original production at Broadway’s Palace Theatre, at which $1,200 was raised for the National AIDS Fund, and by the following year, it had evolved into an ‘Easter Bonnet Competition’ to which other Broadway companies were invited to join, and some $18,740 were raised. Within a short time, it became established as Broadway’s premier AIDS fundraising event that, up to last year, had collected some $25,523,451 for charity.

This year, that total was added to by a sum of some $3,187,496 being raised by the 60 participating Broadway, off-Broadway and national touring companies. But quite apart from the astonishing sums of money involved, the best bit about the Easter Bonnet competition is that it’s fun; an opportunity for the performing community to poke fun at itself and each other.

It has also culminated, for the last 9 years, in an appearance by the oldest-surviving original Ziegfeld Follies dancer – Doris Eaton Travis, now 102, took to the stage to dance once again. Its that kind of indomitable Broadway spirit that the event epitomises.

There’s no business like show business, of course, and there’s nothing like the business of shows about themselves. Broadway has long been brilliant at perpetuating its own myth, from 42nd Street (the place as well as the show) and The Producers (the people that call themselves that as well as the musical of that name) to A Chorus Line (the ‘gypsy’ dancers that are the backbone of the Broadway musical, as well as the now legendary 1975 musical that celebrates them).

I’ve just come been to a press event to introduce, for the first time, the cast that have been put together for the imminent Broadway revival of the show, and it reminded me that I date my own time in London to this very show, too: it was the very first West End musical that I saw after arriving in London, aged 16, from South Africa (where I was born and brought up). And I remember it was the very last Saturday matinee of its London run at Drury Lane in March 1979.

I subsequently saw it, too, on my very first trip to New York, four years later in 1983, where it was still running at the Shubert Theatre (and continued to do so to 1990, where it established the record for the longest run in Broadway history to then, since eclipsed by Cats and now The Phantom of the Opera). And there’s something buried in the vamp of Martin Hamlisch’s song, “One” – to which the chorus line took their places this morning – that reduces me to tears, instantly.

Apart from the anticipation of seeing this show again when it returns to New York iN September, after an out-of-town try-out in San Francisco in July, was the excitement of seeing inside a Broadway theatre I’d never been to before today: the press event was held in the Hudson Theatre, an old theatre buried in a modern hotel but now only used for conference events. But just as A Chorus Line now lives again, it’s also exciting that the theatre still lives on, too, albeit in different circumstances.

They will both live forever; much as vampire victims famously do, but the Broadway musicals about vampires never do. Elton John’s latest musical, Lestat, opened on Broadway last night, and to read this morning’s reviews, it seems that it will complete a trilogy of Broadway vampire flops that have seen Dance of the Vampires and Dracula both bomb, too.

Elton John’s winning streak that has seen him become the most successful contemporary musical composer today – with The Lion King currently playing on both sides of the Atlantic and Billy Elliot in London – has now officially deserted him. It also marks a first attempt by Warner Brothers to enter into a market that Disney have successfully cracked of turning film properties into stage hits; but the wittiest line I’ve heard about the show is that the producer in charge of it has been described as “the aptly-named” Greg Maday.

Monty Python’s Spamalot is all about chasing the holy grail of producing a hit Broadway musical, and has itself made one out of a phenomenon with a cult following. But I am guessing that it could be a little lonely to watch if you are not part of the initiated already, and wondering at why those around you are hysterical with laughter before the joke even happens.

I felt something akin to that experience while watching a new and hugely acclaimed new off-Broadway musical called Grey Gardens, based on a 1975 documentary about a reclusive mother and daughter who were related to Jacqueline Kennedy, living in the squalor of an East Hampton mansion overrun with cats and racoons.

The documentary already has a following, but the musical (running to this weekend only at Playwrights’ Horizons) that it has inspired has already gained one thanks in large part to Christine Ebsersole, who plays the mother (in the first act) and daughter (in the second). In a review in which Ben Brantley anointed her performance as “one of the most gorgeous ever to grace a musical” (with a presumptiousness that suggests he’s seen every other performance ever to grace one to compare it with), he wrote, “Anyone who has seen the 1975 Maysles brothers documentary that inspired this show will know that Ms. Ebersole looks, sounds, moves and (most important, for much of this show’s audience) dresses with eerie exactitude like the real Edie Beale.”

But there on Sunday night, the problems began for me: not because I was unfamiliar with how accurate she was being, but with a small section of the audience who did, and thought it was the funniest thing they had ever seen. From the moment Ebsersole made her second act appearance, before she had even uttered a word, they were hooting and hollering, and it didn’t let up for the rest of the show. There were a couple of fans who literally applauded every single funny line she uttered. And with them underlining each joke, it became not only profoundly irritating but also increasingly unfunny as a result.

There’s a fine line between adding to the show – as the Rocky Horror cultists do, with their shout-out interventions to the script that have virtually become a part of it now – and nearly destroying it, with over-the-top self-involvement of this kind. Yes, they’re having a good time – but I just wish they had allowed me to share their pleasure by calming down on theirs.

Thanks to Max Bialystock (by way of Mel Brooks), the Broadway first night is a legend: judgement is famously as harsh as it is instant. And the first night party, that instantly dissolves as news of unfavourable reviews start arriving, is part of that legend. Happily, however, there was no such swift emptying of the room at last night’s opening night party for the Broadway transfer of the National’s The History Boys.

Critics don’t usually go to first night parties, either in the West End or on Broadway: in London, because we’re usually writing anyway fresh from curtain down when the party is actually happening (whereas on Broadway, the review will already long be written before the opening night, since critics there are invited to see the show ahead of time in what are called ‘critics previews’), but also because it’s not part of a critic’s job description to mingle socially with those he (or she) is in judgement over. There’s no joy, moreover, in being spectre at the feast should the review you’re going to write, or have written, be unfavourable, and it’s a double hypocrisy to be biting the hand that literally feeds you at the party.

But just occasionally I am delighted to celebrate a show I already know to be a success. Having championed the National’s production of Jerry Springer – the Opera, I joined the celebrations when it transferred to the West End. Ditto, for the Menier’s production of Fully Committed when that show moved to the Arts. And last night, I joined the first night Broadway celebrations for The History Boys.

Partly, it was sheer curiosity: Tavern on the Green, in Central Park at West 67th Street, is one of the most popular of all venues for Broadway parties, and I wanted to see inside! But also I knew that I would know lots of people there – and the British contingent was in force. Besides director Nick Hytner and the rest of the company, Broadway Brits including Cameron Mackintosh, Stephen Daldry and Jonathan Pryce (currently starring here in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) joined them to party.

And whereas time was that someone would rush out to buy the first editions of the next day’s papers as they hit the streets, I also wanted to see for myself the Blackberry effect, where the reviews arrive electronically. Happily last night, they were overwhelmingly favourable; and the partygoers were clearly going to party on long after I departed.

It never ceases to surprise me how the way theatre operates in London and New York is so different. We may well have the edge in terms of variety, accessibility and quality of the product, since the West End has not (yet) been entirely lost to the behemoth of the all-pervasive musical; but Broadway still has the edge in terms of making the theatre into an event and convenience.

There is still a massive sense of occasion about Broadway theatre that we, who take our theatre somewhat for granted, have long lost. That sense of occasion is heightened, of course, by the geography and energy of the city itself: since the major Broadway theatres are largely compacted within a roughly twelve block radius, from West 42nd to West 54th Street and mostly on the single block between Broadway and 8th Avenue (with a few houses on the other side between 7th and 6th), it’s much more tightly focused than in the disparate West End that stretches from Victoria to Holborn. Then again, of course, there’s the standardized start times for Broadway shows – 8pm for evening performances, 2pm for Wednesday or Saturday matinees, 3pm for Sunday matinees – that means that there’s a common purpose on the streets around 7.30pm (or 1.30pm): everyone seems to be heading to a show. It’s fantastic to watch the neighbourhood restaurants, too, galvanizing to clear their customers by 8pm to get them to the curtain up time.

But there’s also an indefinable sense of expectation in the air, that you can’t fake or manufacture, from the lines that form outside the theatres to get in (even though seating is reserved, people start queuing in an orderly fashion from about fifteen minutes before the doors actually open), to the buzz in the tiny theatre foyers as people pass through to get in.

Most of all, however, there’s the smart glamour of most of the Broadway houses themselves. Unlike the run-down shabby state of all but the refurbished Mackintosh theatres in London, Broadway theatres are almost all in fantastic nick; there’s an air of luxury, albeit in seating so cramped that it makes economy class seem spacious, to the actual auditoria.

If we’re going to start taking pride in what we see onstage in the West End again, we need theatre owners to start taking pride in where we watch the stage from. And when we take this lesson from Broadway, isn’t it time, too, to finally take another one from there as well, and that’s to give everyone a free programme (Playbill in the US) on the way in? Very often a programme, not just a mere cast list, is an essential part of the enjoyment of a show, since it helps to set the place and scene (for instance, at The History Boys that I saw on Broadway on Friday night, the Playbill’s brief background note on Oxbridge examinations would have been invaluable to audience members unfamiliar with the system), order of songs for musicals, and the past credits of the performers.

In an age when Portillos and parliamentary correspondents are let(ts) loose in the stalls, one shouldn’t be surprised that instead of dispatching their theatre critic Michael Billington to cover Wednesday’s Broadway opening of Julia Roberts in Three Days of Rain, The Guardian have simply asked their New York news stringer, Oliver Burkeman, to file a review of it yesterday. The Times didn’t splash out, either, on an air fare for their critic Benedict Nightingale, but at least they got a proper theatre writer to cover it for them, the prolific London freelancer Matt Wolf. But time was when the arts pages of The Times actually retained the services of a regular theatre stringer from Broadway.

Mind you, even the real critics weren’t sure quite how to judge this occasion: in a bizarre notice for the New York Times, the usually astute Ben Brantley went into an extended riff on the star, even admitting, “I feel a strong need to confess something: My name is Ben, and I am a Juliaholic.” Clearly her appearance on Broadway has brought the fans out, but also outed Ben as a fan amongst the critics. He even goes as far to admit,“Like a down-home Garbo, she is an Everywoman who looks like nobody else. And while I blush to admit it, she is one of the few celebrities who occasionally show up (to my great annoyance) in cameo roles in my dreams.”

Perhaps this is, as Americans are fond of saying, Too Much Information – best left for his therapist’s ears, not his readers. But it does make for a curiously self-referential, and self-involved, critical response, and it’s only after all these confessions are out of the way that, more than half way through, he grudgingly writes, “I suppose I had better give you some plot here. (Fellow Juliaholics can skip this part if they like.)”

There’s not much they have to skip, since he soon returns to his idol and dream companion: “I found myself fascinated by the way her facial structure (ah, those cheekbones!)seem to change according to how the light hits her. In repose, her face seems impossibly, hauntingly eloquent…. On the few occasions when she smiles, it’s with a sunniness that could dispel even 40 days and 40 nights of rain.”

Enough already! But if even ‘real’ critics lose their hearts, minds and pens in thrall to a star, what hope is there for anyone else to find out about the play? Perhaps we need a news reporter to do that. And the aforementioned Oliver Burkeman hits the nail on the head when he describes the difficulty: “The right way to watch a movie star on stage, presumably, is to try to ignore the pulsating glow of Hollywood celebrity and focus instead on the acting. But that isn’t easy when the star is Julia Roberts. For a start, there are the fans who have been jamming the streets outside the theatre during previews; then there are the police on horseback, struggling to keep calm. The Broadway debut of the most bankable woman in cinema history is proving to be not so much a play as a major public order challenge.”

Judi Dench cost me £124 and I’m still not going to the first night of Hay Fever. No, I’m not referring to the high ticket prices (at £50 top price, it sets a new top for a play) or suggesting that, in my desperation to be there, I’ve been fleeced by black market forgeries, but rather, by a scheduling conflict that was first of all my own stupidity and then a change by the producer.

Let me explain. A couple of months ago I booked a flight to go to New York yesterday. And the very next day, I noticed that the opening night for Hay Fever had been set for last night, Wednesday April 19. I didn’t want to miss it; so I rang Expedia, whom I had booked the flight with, but it was too late. The ticket was non-changeable. All I could do was cancel the ticket, and though I would forfeit the fare, I would at least get the tax back. I took the hit, lost £124, and re-booked to fly to New York today.

But then a few weeks ago Hay Fever noticed that it had booked a clash on press nights last night with the RSC’s Antony and Cleopatra, opening at Stratford-upon-Avon to kick off the Complete Works season in the Swan. And since the producers Thelma Holt and Bill Kenwright, as well as Dench – who will be appearing in the Complete Works herself later this year, when she stars in a musical version of Merry Wives – all have close links with the RSC, they decided to do the decent thing and move their opening to tonight!

Having postponed my trip to New York once at a cost of £124, I wasn’t going to do so again. Hay Fever would have to open without me. But the producers agreed to put me into what had now become the final preview instead. And curiously, I was not alone amongst first night critics who were doing the same thing: The Guardian’s Michael Billington, the Mail’s Quentin Letts and the Independent on Sunday’s Kate Bassett, plus the New Statesman’s Michael Portillo, were all in attendance last night, too. So the RSC has opened without us anyway.

Of course, it is one of the by-products of a very busy theatre schedule that we’re all pulled in various directions simultaneously. I reported here last week about the ridiculous situation where there were five clashing first nights the Monday before last, including for two West End musicals that had necessitated some of us going on the Saturday night before in order to see both. But sometimes even the best-laid plans go awry….

There’s distressing news in the Daily Mail today that one of the actors due to appear next week in the Baxter Theatre’s South African production Hamlet, coming to Stratford-upon-Avon as part of the RSC’s Complete Works festival, has been found shot dead, “with an execution-style bullet wound to the back of his head”, following a carjacking – a crime that is legion in South Africa. Brett Goldin was playing Guildenstern in Janet Suzman’s production that’s features an Indian Hamlet, a white Gertrude and a black Claudius (veteran South African actor John Kani). The company are continuing with the production as a tribute to him, according to a feature in The Daily Telegraph.

While that brings a real tragedy close to home for this production, it will also resonate – according to the Telegraph feature – with a political situation on the production’s doorstep. Quoting both the director and Kani as being struck by parallels between Claudius, the play’s usurping tyrant, and Africa’s surviving tyrant rulers, Suzman says, “Tyranny is also at home in Africa. There’s a tyrant just north of us in Zimbabwe.” And Kani adds, “There on our northern border is a man, once a good man, who wants to hold on to power even when it destroys both himself and his country.”

On Sunday, the Observer did another of their “stitch up” jobs: a couple of years ago we had Lynn Barber, a brilliant interviewer but an avowed theatre despiser, despatched to confirm her prejudice, and now, finally noticing how jukebox musicals are all the rage, the Review section editor has regular contributor Barbara Ellen on a mission to collect a few.

One’s heckles are immediately raised about her credentials and accuracy, however, when she tell, in her fourth paragraph, “what no one could deny is that these hybrids of pop nostalgia and theatrical are here to stay” and states in support, “Tonight’s the Night, a Ben Elton show based on the hits of Rod Stewart, is playing in the West End….” and also goes on to adduce in further evidence that “this summer, London’s Dominion Theatre will host a version of the album Thriller by Michael Jackson, an artist in dire need of public rehabilitation”. Tonight’s the Night in fact closed in October 2004; as for Thriller, it is being staged for one day only!

She goes to Mamma Mia! and is surprised that the audience isn’t dressed for the part. “It was a disappointment to arrive at Mamma Mia! and discover the audience weren’t all dressed as their favourite Abba members. Inexperienced in these matters, I had been picturing some kind of Swedish Rocky Horror Show, where everyone camped it up and sang along to the songs”. Sorry, Barbara, the show wasn’t written to your expectations. And when she then goes on to complain, “Far from the expected explosion of camp, Seventies silliness, Mamma Mia! turns out, rather disappointingly, to be a drab musical sit-com set in Greece…” She only finally gets what she thought she’d come from in the encores of Waterloo and Dancing Queen, “but by then, I’d rather lost the will to camp”, and states, “surely one could be forgiven for expecting a modicum of Abba-ness in an Abba musical?”

Once again she gets it heroically wrong. Mamma Mia! – which is now the Rolls Royce of jukebox musicals, not The Rocky Horror Show of them – can be blamed for many things, not least spawning such lame, pale imitators as We Will Rock You and Tonight’s the Night, but the point about these shows is to create something new out of an old, familiar pop repertoire, not merely replicate it. She’s getting herself confused with tribute shows.

She concludes, via stops in Birmingham for the UB40 musical Promises and Lies – which prompts what she calls a “mini-breakdown” that reduced her to a “pitiful wreck: huddled dead-eyed in my seat…. with my coat thrown over me, hugging my bag and all but sucking my thumb for comfort” and at We Will Rock You and Movin’ Out, that after seeing “all four shows, I still feel none the wiser about the validity, or otherwise, of the genre, though there’s no betting I’ll be rushing back for more any time soon.” So the exercise has been more or less entirely pointless and a waste of her time (and ours, to read it) as well as paper. She has a final sneer: “I would rather be hung from a gibbet in Stockholm than sit through Mamma Mia! again”.

As it happens, I went to see Mamma Mia! again myself last night, for at least the 12th time that I can remember! (It was my sixth time in London, and I’ve also seen it three times in New York and once each in San Francisco, Las Vegas and Stockholm!) Most times I return to see specific performers – last I was keen to see the new Donna, Helen Hobson – a one-time ingénue who was a dazzling Eliza Doolittle in Simon Callow’s otherwise disastrous touring My Fair Lady – now graduating to playing a 40-something mother.

But each time I see it, I marvel anew at how fresh and spontaneous this show makes its material seem. And more importantly, how actively it involves its audience: not in tired singalongs or dance-a-thons (I’ve come to hear the performers sing, not my fellow audience members, than you very much), but rather, like the best musicals, in engaging them in a story that actually care about. And the songs that they already know and love are a key to unlocking a sense of ownership and identification that the audience then bestow on the story, too. It’s thrilling to see an audience literally transported, and Mamma Mia! does that, effortlessly.

While shows like Dancing in the Streets seem to require the audience to pay for the privilege of entertaining themselves by singing and dancing along to imitation acts – Barbara Ellen might have had a fine time there, in that case! – Mamma Mia! is an original and a terrific musical in its own right. Abba’s the bonus track here, in every sense.

Though there are peaks and troughs to the London theatre year, we have no identifiable “season” as such, but rather a natural rhythm seems to occur around clusters of spring and autumn openings that mean that March and April and then September and October are often prime times to open in the West End. By contrast, Broadway marks its year out by the Tony timetable and eligibility for inclusion in a particular year’s consideration, which usually cuts off around a date in early May for that June’s awards. As a result, there’s a galvanising run of openings as producers rush to get in under the wire. So the next three and a half weeks are the busiest of the year: while the season to date has produced 25 Broadway openings, the roster for the weeks before the cut-off date of May 10 has over half as many again, a total of thirteen openings between tonight and then.

This week has four – Zoe Wanamaker in a rare revival of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing tonight, Julia Roberts making her Broadway debut in Three Days of Rain on Wednesday, Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper in The Threepenny Opera on Thursday and the original National Theatre cast in a transfer of The History Boys on Sunday.

Next week has three musicals – the latest from Elton John, Lestat, on April 25; the latest film-to-stage transition, The Wedding Singer, on April 27; and another jukebox ‘dansical’, Hot Feet (to songs by Earth, Wind and Fire), on April 30. The week after brings a new musical The Drowsy Chaperone on May 1, Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore transferring from off-Broadway’s Atlantic Theatre on May 3, Ralph Fiennes and Ian McDiarmid in a transfer from Dublin’s Gate Theatre of Friel’s The Faith Healer, where they will be newly joined by Cherry Jones, on May 4; and a revival of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, on May 7. Then the season concludes with a new production for Conor McPherson’s Royal Court hit Shining City, opening on May 9, before Disney’s latest, Tarzan, flies in to end the season with a May 10 opening.

There’s so much to see, in fact, that even though I head to New York on Thursday for six nights, I have had to be highly selective about what I’m going to see in the nine ‘slots’ I have available. I’ve therefore had to turn down the plays I’ve seen before, like Inishmore, Faith Healer, Shining City and Caine Mutiny, and concentrate on the new musicals – plus the star vehicle of Three Days of Rain. And I can’t resist seeing The History Boys again, either, so have scheduled that, too.

But if I’m having to make choices, so are potential audiences, too. And just as all the productions opening are chasing Tony Award nominations – alongside those already opened, of course – they are also chasing audiences. And the law of the jungle applies: this will truly be a case of survival of the fittest. The simple truth is that there isn’t enough food source – i.e audiences – to go around. So Broadway, far more than London, is polarised into hits and misses: weekly running costs are so high that to keep a show open when even these aren’t being met is to throw good money after bad. Though to do so in the hope of a Tony nomination or two is sheer folly, most producers will do so thanks to a combination of hope springing eternal and personal vanity (or insanity). Thus, after the flurry of April openings, there’s invariably a prompt clearing out by mid-May (after the first trench of shows don’t get the nominations they were hoping for) and then another in early June (after the awards inevitably fail to recognise some shows).

Two contrasting stories on the art of answering your critics have appeared this week, and neatly illustrate the difference between new and old media approaches to handling these matters. In the wake of the Old Vic’s news would be no in-house production scheduled between tonight’s early closure of Resurrection Blues and September, Michael Billington checked in last Monday with a typically thoughtful editorial feature in The Guardian, in which he said he was not surprised that it was closing early, or that one of its stars Jane Adams had already jumped ship: instead, he went on, “The only astonishment is that a production as shambolic as Robert Altman’s ever reached the stage in the first place. Even those of us well disposed towards the Old Vic’s artistic director, Kevin Spacey, are beginning to wonder if he has the taste and judgement for the job.”

Billington neatly identified its core weakness, traceable directly to the artistic director: “Resurrection Blues was a classic case of a badly planned package”, starting with the director appointed to stage it, Robert Altman, whom Billington quoted as telling him, “I don’t really know this script”. And then the wrong actors were hired for the job: what Billington calls “a wildly disparate group of actors, including Maximilian Schell, James Fox and Neve Campbell, who not only didn’t appear to be in the same play but barely looked as if they had been introduced.”

And he goes on to suggest, “But the buck stops with Spacey. The job of producers is to produce. And since it must have been obvious early on that Altman couldn’t cut the mustard, Spacey should have hired a decent, jobbing director to rescue the show.”

The piece must have rung serious alarm bells in the Cut, since a few hours after it hit the streets, Billington got a call at home, just after lunch, as he reported on Thursday. Would he like to talk to Spacey? “By 5pm I am seated in Spacey’s comfortable, but not extravagant, office opposite the Old Vic. He is courteous, civil and chain-smoking. He also has a message to put across which he does with ever-increasing emphasis: that the public loves the Old Vic even if the press doesn’t. But I also notice that Spacey has a politician’s ability to put a positive spin on bad news. I can see why he’s a chum of Bill Clinton and got on famously with Tony Blair on Parky’s chatshow.”

The Guardian duly cleared three pages to report this conversation, but even if Spacey seeks to align himself with the spin-doctoring of New Labour (perhaps taking lessons from his friend Peter Mandelson) and go on the offensive, it actually came out more defensively. As the Standard immediately took to reporting later on Thursday (without crediting the source, a standard Standard practice to rewrite other people’s news as their own), this included blaming the actors: “When it came to early previews, the performances were not where they could have been. We worked hard to get the play to a point where it could be appreciated. Now, unfortunately, opening night came and those actors got hit by a set of nerves the like of which I’ve never seen. And the show received reviews I can’t argue with.” Spacey adds that the actors continued to rehearse and work on the show after the first night, and “finally got to a place where the play was being delivered and delivered well.”

Quite apart from the moral and morale issues of criticising your actors in this way that no artistic director should ever do, Spacey also fatally lost control of the story. He effectively handed Billington another stick to beat his regime with: his own words. As Billington goes on to say, “Spacey’s answer is frank without addressing the main point. Hiring an 81-year-old director to stage a play by an 86-year-old writer was always a big risk. If the cast was afflicted by first-night nerves - and, at one point, Schell couldn’t even put a telephone back on a receiver - it must have been because the show was fatally under-cooked. And the recent abrupt departure of Jane Adams, after an incident in which, during a matinee performance, she allegedly pushed fellow-actor Modine so violently in the chest he nearly fell off the stage, hardly suggests that everything was hunky-dory after the first night. “

But this is the old media regime of ink and paper, tit for tat. By contrast, New York gossip columnist Michael Riedel wrote a column yesterday pointing out that John Lloyd Young, the star of the current Broadway hit Jersey Boys in which he plays Frankie Valli, doesn’t do all his own singing, but is ‘assisted’ on the top notes by two booth singers. Young has stayed in charge of the story by replying, not to Riedel, but on his own personal blog. Here, we find out that its no secret that this is being done: “The signature sound of the Four Seasons was created by having Valli record his vocal part twice and then running them back together. If you listen to the original recording of “Sherry” you will hear TWO Frankie Vallis! This technique was called “doubling,” and the Four Seasons were one of its earliest pioneers, using it on some of their most famous songs.”

He goes on to point out, “When we recorded the Jersey Boys cast album, we were able to do exactly the same thing in the studio. If you listen to the Jersey Boys CD carefully you’ll hear TWO John Lloyd Youngs on some of the signature up-tempo Seasons songs (for instance, track #5, “Sherry”). Other vocal parts are doubled, as well, just as in any choral arrangement.”

To recreate that sound onstage, he tells us that Jersey Boys therefore uses “live, offstage or onstage singers just like in the chorus of any other musical, (except a doubler sings in unison with the lead vocal line, not in harmony). Doubling is a way to layer support under a sound, not a replacement for it, which is why you hear it if I make a vocal mistake: there’s no place to hide.”

And Lloyd Young hasn’t hid, either, in coming clean about what’s happening; and more importantly, he does so by staying in charge of the story, rather than handing it back to the journalist to do his spin on it. Perhaps Spacey should simply start a blog…..

Putting political ogres onstage is a tricky business, especially when they’re still in office; but two very different plays show how it can be done in vivid journeys of theatrical imagination, based on known facts. In Stuff Happens, which opened last night in a new production at New York’s Public Theatre after premiering at the National last year as part of the Travelex £10 season, David Hare offers what New York Times critic Ben Brantley today calls “a fluid public speculation — a collective work of imagination that attempts to grasp how and why an unnecessary and unwinnable war was allowed to happen.”

It sounds, too, like there has been an interesting shift of emphasis from London that has moved the play away from Bush and Blair and towards focusing on Colin Powell. This is partly a question of performance. According to Brantley, “Bush, who as embodied by Alex Jennings was unquestionably the psychological linchpin of the National production, is less complex here. Mr. Jennings’s Bush initially registered as a boyish pretender playing cowboy-president. But as the drama progressed, you sensed an unwavering conviction that seemed to spring from a belief in a president’s divine right to rule. The audience’s growing realization that this character was not the joke he first appeared to be might be said to parallel changing perceptions about the real Mr. Bush. quare of jaw and mountainous of build, Mr. Sanders’s Bush is, from the beginning, a monolithic presence, less an evolving character than a fixed historical force.”

He then adds, “The same could be said of Byron Jennings’s Tony Blair, a part Mr. Hare has tweaked to put more emphasis on the prime minister’s idealism and less on his political survival strategies. (In London, Nicholas Farrell seemed to glisten with the oil of self-preservation.)”

As a result, Brantley suggests, “This automatically shifts the play’s centre. If Stuff Happens were indeed the Shakespearean history play it aspires to be, its London production might have been called George II; the New York version is unmistakably The Tragedy of Colin Powell.” Thanks to Peter Francis James’ performance, Brantley says, “Powell becomes the character everyone is most likely to identify with. Here is a smart careerist who winds up believing that his boss’s agenda is neither ethical nor desirable. Most of us, at least those of us who like to imagine we still have some integrity, have found ourselves in comparable situations in the workplace. Now imagine that situation with the stakes raised to world-changing, life-annihilating heights.”

The same personally compromised position is the one that a white psychiatrist finds himself in Fraser Grace’s Breakfast with Mugabe, currently being presented as part of the RSC’s New Writing season at Soho Theatre, as he is called on to attend to the mental health of the Zimbabwean President. Based on a newspaper report in 2001 that Mugabe did actually consult with one, Grace makes a brilliant speculative journey into what might have happened. Like Hare, he is not privy to the conversations that actually took place, so they’re imagined; but as Grace says in a programme note, it’s one in which “everything that happens offstage is piteously, relentlessly, unproductively true”.

The same is the case with Stuff Happens. Both plays are thrilling history plays, helping us to make sense of the seemingly senseless decisions taken behind closed doors that we are not otherwise privy to.

But even more startling is the news from Zimbabwe itself, where a group of local actors are daring to stage a new play called Pregnant with Emotion, about a child who refuses to be born there until there is a change of leadership. Mugabe isn’t personally named, but director Daves Guzha says, “It’s very critical of the regime and for the first time comes up with a solution”, according to a report in last week’s Sunday Times. “I think you reach a stage where you say to yourself, ‘Either I must stand up or forever be quiet.’

It has already had an enthusiastic two-week run in Harare, attended by the state’s secret police. “We knew who they were,” says Guzha, “and directed all the anger towards them.” This is theatre that stands up to be counted, in every sense.

Six cheers for Time Out, who – having introduced a new six star rating scheme a few months ago – have finally attached this ultimate of accolades to one of their theatre reviews. It’s for Dominic Cooke’s RSC revival of The Crucible, now at the Gielgud.

Star ratings are, like the reviews they accompany, inevitably somewhat subjective: I’m still slightly startled by the fact that Nicholas de Jongh, having said of Embers, “I rate it as one of the major experiences of my theatre-going life”, only saw fit to give it four stars, not five. (What would prompt a five star review, I wonder?)

But while star ratings are a symptom of our attention-deficit age in which we seem to crave quick visual references to save us the bother of having to read the full review, they also introduce an unhealthy sense of classroom competitiveness: productions are crudely reduced to marks, that are then even more crudely transformed into marks out of ten in a weekly round-up panel in The Guardian every Monday that ascribe points to each review from a cross-section of them from different papers and aggregate them.

On this reckoning, theatre critics are no more than the judges on Celebrity Come Dancing, holding up a board with our scores on them.

The national critics have been divided over Movin’ Out, the Twyla Tharp choreographed “dansical” (to music by Billy Joel) that opened at the Apollo Victoria on Monday: divided, that is, into dance and theatre camps, with four dance critics reviewing it relatively unfavourably (Guardian, Times, Independent, Standard), and four theatre critics checking in, three of them considerably more favourably (the Daily Telegraph, Daily Express and me). The fourth of our theatre tribe to see it so far was Alastair Macaulay of the FT, who told me afterwards that he detested it “with a passion bordering on the sublime”.

Theatre and dance critics might understandably come at this show from rather different perspectives – theatre critics may not be qualified to talk authoritatively about the nuances of the dance vocabulary, though we can assess its effectiveness as a theatrical language; nor can we necessarily can put it in the context of the rest of Tharp’s work, though we can look at it next to other recent “jukebox” musicals that embrace a back pop catalogue. So on the one hand we have the Guardian’s dance critic Judith Mackrell lamenting the fact that, “for those who care about Tharp, it’s impossible to ignore that it doesn’t take her choreography to any place we haven’t seen.” On the other hand, the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer, referencing “Twyla Tharp’s often thrilling choreography”, adds that “this is a show that really packs a punch.” He concludes by even anticipating the dance criticisms: “Sensitive ballet fans will doubtless find Movin’ Out appallingly loud and vulgar, but anyone with a passion for popular culture at its electrifying best will have an absolute blast.”

But Alastair Macaulay, of course, is alone qualified to do both, since he used to be a dance critic – for the New Yorker, amongst other publications – and is now a theatre critic. So I take his criticisms and the serious context he can put it in seriously. But it does raise the question: are we the eyes and ears of the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus, or are we expert witnesses, drawing off an extensive back catalogue of our own theatrical (and sometimes personal) experiences to do so? The best reviewers are a bit of both; critics who know what they like, but whose taste and judgement is known and can give their readership a guide to align themselves with.

That’s what makes Charlie Spencer’s such a respected voice, and also the Guardian’s Michael Billington: both of them put their own tastes and prejudices out there, but they support them with a passion and integrity that becomes a marker against which the reader can make up their own mind.

No critic can be an expert in everything: seeing Movin’ Out, it helps to have a passing acquaintance with the repertoire of Billy Joel, though it’s good, at least, to admit ignorance if that isn’t the case. In a website review, Michael Coveney confessed of the songs, “not one of which I recognised apart from the mildly irresistible Uptown Girl”. Charles Spencer – probably the biggest pop fan amongst the national critics, whose tastes tend to lean towards the more classical – admitted that he had “seriously undervalued” Joel: “I was amazed to discover that I knew most of the 20-plus songs included here without ever quite realising that I did, as if I had somehow absorbed them by osmosis.”

Vaudeville long ago breathed its last; but its replacement in the more embracing term ‘variety’ has also lately been facing a crisis. The Guardian yesterday, picking up on reports in The Stage, ran a full-page feature about the crisis facing it: “The historic North Pier, home to a variety theatre for 129 years, has been mothballed, and in The Stage newspaper the headlines make equally grim reading – ‘Cannon and Ball Show axed at Blackpool Grand’.”

It went on to say, “Last rites for the variety industry have been read before but some feel they might now be justified. Certainly entertainers such as Keith Harris have had enough. He and Orville, and the comedian Billy Pearce, are upping sticks and moving to Portugal for the summer because of the state of the industry and, in particular, Blackpool.”

That town may be the West End or Broadway of seaside variety, and a crisis there is suggestive of a crisis at large. It’s certainly possible that a generational change is occurring: the younger constituency of holidaymakers there – “Visitors are most likely to be part of a hen or stag night, or any old night that involves touring bars”, according to The Guardian – may be seeking less sophisticated pleasures than variety shows. Or perhaps, more sophisticated ones: in an age of interactive multi-media, live entertainment needs to offer a different model to attract audiences now. Charlotte Smith of Leisure Parcs (who are responsible for Blackpool’s South, Central and North piers, the Tower and the Winter Gardens) is quoted in The Guardian as saying there does seem to be a trend away from the long-runners: “Yes, things are changing because people want different things.”

Certainly the telly recognition factor of those old variety names is fast disappearing, as they no longer command prime time appearances on the box. But on Sunday night, as chance would have it, I actually went down to Wimbledon Theatre to catch a rare London area appearance by the inimitable and irreplaceable Ken Dodd, and even though he isn’t on the telly, either, these days, he was still able to command a packed and appreciative house. There is still nothing quite like the sound of 1,500 people laughing; and to hear your own laugh above them. Ken Dodd is living proof that variety isn’t dead yet.

The Society of London Theatre maintains a press night diary, where producers log their openings so that major clashes can theoretically be avoided. How, then, to account for the fact that tonight there isn’t one opening, not two, not three, not even four, but an astonishing five, simultaneously occurring?

The most egregious is the head-to-head rivalry of two major musicals: the transfer of the Newbury production of Mack and Mabel to the Criterion, and the arrival of Movin’ Out from Broadway. When Movin’ Out was first announced, it had set a press opening for next week, April 18, but then brought it forward unexpectedly – perhaps motivated by the RSC Complete Works opening that night in Stratford-upon-Avon of Romeo and Juliet. (The clash that was also announced for the next night – that would have seen the RSC’s opening of Antony and Cleopatra, with Patrick Stewart and Harriet Walter clash with Judi Dench’s Hay Fever in the West End – has now been avoided, with Hay Fever moving its opening to the next night, April 20).

But the behemoth of a big Broadway show Movin’ Out trampling over the more modestly-proportioned Mack and Mabel shows a more disturbing lack of basic courtesy. Critics have duly been put in the interesting position: some will no doubt choose between them, but the more conscientious of us have given part of our weekends up to make sure we can do both: when I went to Mack and Mabel on Saturday night, the Guardian’s Michael Billington, the Observer’s Susannah Clapp, the FT’s Alastair Macaulay and the Sunday Telegraph’s Susan Irvine were all in attendance. It wasn’t something any of us had discussed in advance; just a practical necessity that we’d all reached the same conclusion over trying to fit in.

But if that’s not enough, three plays have also scheduled openings tonight: Hilda at Hampstead Theatre, Rainbow Kiss at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs, and Huge at the King’s Head. Each are venues that are often covered by first string critics, and though the broadsheets (in spirit, if not size anymore) employ second strings that will be able to get to them instead, some of us are solo operators. I’m therefore chasing their tale by going to Hampstead tomorrow (in a slot opened up by the postponement of the Donmar’s Phaedra that was to have opened tomorrow), and to the Court on Saturday afternoon.

Of course, in a theatrical landscape where there are more shows opening than there are nights in the week, some of this may be unavoidable. But there should be enough nights to avoid the West End having to clash with itself.

The trajectory of “star” directors is very interesting. A few rare ones seem to burst fully-formed upon the scene, like Sam Mendes who served only a brief Chichester Festival Theatre apprenticeship before moving straight into the West End, and thence on to the Donmar Warehouse, National Theatre, Broadway and Hollywood, in turn. Then there are those who serve a slower but no less dazzling apprenticeship, like Stephen Daldry who ignited his career at the tiny Gate Theatre in Notting Hill, was picked up by the National for An Inspector Calls and shot straight to the Royal Court (even though he’d not actually worked there), before becoming an international player of films and now a megamusical of one of those films, Billy Elliot.

But a new star has lately been emerging from the shadows of the Royal Court and latterly the RSC, Dominic Cooke, who has gone about his way far more quietly but ultimately persuasively enough to find himself now about to take over the Royal Court’s artistic reigns. And though his commercial West End credits have hitherto been confined to bringing Holly Hunter to the stage in By the Bog of Cats, he is fast turning into the hottest director around, equally adept at the classics as he is at new plays.

While his ravishing Stratford-upon-Avon revival of As You Like It transferred to the Novello, he was simultaneously staging a new production for the RSC of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Now that production has transferred to the West End’s Gielgud, at exactly the same time as the RSC’s New Writing season that he curated has moved to Soho Theatre. His own directorial contribution is Postcards from America, a pair of bracing new plays from the US. But if he is feeling newly ubiquitous, he’s own profile has hitherto been rather low. The new spotlight that is being thrust upon him now, however, will stand him in good stead when he’s under the glare of expectation that will await his arrival at the Royal Court.

Yesterday saw two of the year’s more interesting, quirky prize-givings – and though it was a little weird that they took place just an hour apart on either side of the river, I got to both. The beleaguered Theatre Museum served one of its more useful functions as a theatrical social gathering place for the presentation of the Society for Theatre Research’s annual Theatre Book Prize. In the words of administrator Howard Loxton, “The Theatre Book Prize was founded to encourage more and better theatre publishing”, and he added, “it is not the big publishers who necessarily make the biggest contribution.”

He’s right: the two most prolific theatre publishers in the UK nowadays are small independents: Nick Hern Books and Oberon, the latter of whose The Coming of Godot made it onto the shortlist for the prize this year. But the actual award was taken by James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare (published by Faber and Faber). Judge Ruth Leone wittily (and honestly) commented: “There are lots of books, including some with my name on their spines, which are a waste of tree. Then, every now and then, along comes a book for which it is worth chopping down an entire forest.” Shapiro’s fell into this category. She concluded, “I have been carrying this book around with me since I first bought it last year. It is probably the best book about Shakespeare, his life, his times and his adopted city that I have ever read.”

Then it was on to the National, where the Critics’ Circle gave a lunch to honour Alan Bennett and present him with their award for Distinguished Service to the Arts. In a typically self-deprecating acceptance speech – interrupted three times, in a moment that could have come from a Bennett play, by the announcements of the matinee performance about to begin in the Lyttelton downstairs – Bennett thanked the assembled throng for “being very well treated over the years – I’ve got off very lightly most of the time, and got away with it, really.” There was one critic, however, that he said he’s never had good relations with – “the one on my shoulder, the voice in my ear”. It was that critical voice, he admitted, that made certain passages of The Madness of George III unwatchable for him – he would have to dart out of the director’s box at back of the Lyttelton when they came around, in and out of the theatre like a French farce.

There are, he said, only five or fix things he’s written that he wouldn’t alter now: “Three or four of the Talking Heads, An Englishman Abroad, and latterly and wonderfully, The History Boys”. He paid tribute to how good the National has been to him, and particularly his relationship with Nicholas Hytner with whom Richard Eyre paired him for The Wind in Willows in 1990, since when he has worked with no one else. “To work here, you get time and consideration and space and everyone at every level is bending all their efforts to the production”.

He concluded by craving our indulgence for the future: “It’s a dangerous time as one gets older for a playwright: you’re boxed in by what you’ve done, people expect you to write a certain sort of play.”

Moviegoers have put up with it for years – seeing trailers for other movies before the one they have actually paid to see. Advertising in theatres, however, has traditionally been confined to what appears in the theatre programme (that you also pay for, but don’t have to buy). Lately, too, there’s been signs (literally so) of corporate sponsorship around, from the National’s branded Travelex £10 season to the American Airlines bars that have started popping up in theatres around town. But now theatregoers at venues around the world will have the joys of London theatre promoted to them, according to a report in today’s Independent, in specially created “ads” that are acted out in front of them before the main event.

According to James Bidwell, chief executive of Visit London, “London’s theatrical heritage and reputation are revered worldwide. It is a highly creative way of leveraging this unique platform to connect with potential visitors to London and we are proud to spearhead this world-first. We wanted to do something which exemplified the creativity which is inherent in a modern city that does things first.”

In New York, there have already been walking theatrical video billboards, but this is the first time that live actors will be sent into live theatres from Dublin to Philadelphia to sell London’s wares. It’s certainly a novel approach – but quite how cost effective it can be in terms of the number of people it actually reaches is another question, though the scheme promises that it will be backed by a print and online promotional campaign.

The Rocky Horror Show probably started it off – but mainly because of the subsequent film version: the cultists who turn the show into a cause and return again and again. In fact, they have become so much a part of the show – with their own unscripted interventions to it – that when it was last staged on Broadway a few years ago the producers actually invited some to every performance to help create the ‘atmosphere’.

Chasing that holy grail of producing shows so popular that audiences will pay good money to return to them again and again, and more importantly help to spread the marketing word, too, is difficult, because theatrical cults are largely born, not made. But once they are there, creative producing can exploit and nurture it.

In New York, Rent has its Rentheads, as its passionate fans have dubbed themselves, and Jekyll and Hyde had Jekkies. Avenue Q and Wicked – both due in London this year – also have their devoted followers. But it’s not just confined to Broadway: according to a feature in today’s New York Times, there are now Altarholics – fans of the spoof off-Broadway Boy Band musical Altar Boyz.

The producers are even offering Altarholics Appreciation Days now to reward their enthusiasm. And it very cleverly provides access for the fans in a way that they would not get if they were, say, fans of a real boy band: as one Altarholic, who had seen the show 71 times, succinctly put it, “If I went to an ‘n Sync concert, Joey Fatone’s not going to talk to me. Here it’s, ‘Oh my God, Mark’s gong to come talk to me!’

But the fans talk, too, not just to their newly-crowned idols, but also to the world. Producer Ken Davenport is quoted in the New York Times pointing out how a young, computer-savvy fan base can promote their enthusiasm widely through sites like LiveJournal and MySpace – “this helps us tremendously.”

In the same way that selling a logo tee-shirt to a theatregoer is a good way of getting them to pay to become a walking billboard for you, the fans are becoming marketers for the show. And as everyone in the theatre always says, it’s word-of-mouth that’s the most important thing to sell a show. This word-of-web has opened a whole new avenue for translating that live enthusiasm even further.

From Samuel Beckett at the Barbican’s Pit and Pinter at the Gate, to The Musical of Musicals – the Musical! at the Sound and Lucky Nurse at the Finborough, brevity is the soul of the party (if not always of wit). There’s no danger, at least, of these shows outstaying their welcome (though The Musical of Musicals comes close).

Beckett provides powerful poetic images – a woman rocking herself (to death?) in a chair – and Pinter a bracing pair of sparely-written mysteries (what is it like to awake from a 29 year sleep? Who is the odd match-seller that has set up at the end of the garden?). Lucky Nurse is a captivating collection of four musical miniatures by Michael John LaChiusa, one of America’s most prolific theatrical composers but whose work is hardly known over here. Only The Musical of Musicals – that exploits a simple idea, to re-tell a basic plot in the style of five different composers five times over — runs thin.

But while the 40-minute running time of the Beckett evening hardly makes for a full night out, there’s something appealing about knowing that you’re not stuck with the same crowd for too long. “90 minutes, no interval” is one of the happiest signs a theatre critic can see. Mind you, Beckett’s Breath – that runs for a couple of minutes – is probably a little too short. A colleague once told me that she was rummaging around in her handbag when it started, and missed it entirely as a result.