June 2006 Archives

In the wake of the Toronto opening of a stage version of The Lord of the Rings back in March that I attended, I blogged here about the difficulties it was going to face after the mostly hostile local press reception it received… and commented that it was also playing in a city “where the local population isn’t huge, the tourists aren’t as plentiful as they used to be, and the theatre seats 2,000”.

Yesterday the closing notice was posted for the show to end its Toronto run on September 3, by which time it will have played 230 performances in 31 weeks. WIth the huge local investment that was made in the show — including from the local government — there are going to be a lot of people licking their financial wounds on this one. The political spin, however, is that the production needs be to measured in more than just base line costs: according to the closing notice release, the show “generated an unprecedented amount of coverage from international media, highlighting Toronto’s creative communities. By September 3rd, more than 420,000 people will have attended the show, some coming from as far away as Asia, South America and throughout Europe. It is estimated that by its closing date, The Lord of the Rings will have generated an economic impact of more than $640 million to Toronto and the province of Ontario.”

But what’s interesting is that, less than a week before this closing notice arrived, last Friday saw the announcement of the show’s London opening for next June at Drury Lane: of course, we have a far bigger audience catchment area than Toronto here, but the stakes — and the mistake of Toronto, as it must now seem — are being driven even higher (not to mention ticket prices, which are expected to top out at £60). It can’t afford to fail, in any sense, once again. But if mistakes have been made, at least they got the order of their announcements right: it could have been fatal to announce the opening of a London Rings after it was already known that the Toronto one was closing. As it is, the producers are going to have to fight the perception that they are importing a flop.

Meanwhile, further to my blog of yesterday, Cameron Mackintosh might have been quietly confident that he was importing a known hit, even though I feared how my colleagues might respond. And true to our collective perversity, those fears have, alas, been borne out. There’s definitely something grudging in the London critical tribe being faced with a show that has already been deemed a hit elsewhere: according to the Daily Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish, “either something has been lost in translation or this dinkily alternative but incredibly light-weight affair, staged now with a mainly British cast, was never as much cop as its New York admirers have been claiming…. Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx’s tame beast of a show lumbers up a cul-de-sac of one-note satire before hitting a brick wall of anodyne schmaltz. By the second half I found myself mentally rechristening it Avenue ZZZ.” Myself, I was a fan in New York and found it just as much cop here as there. And despite having arrived in town from New York only yesterday, it kept me fully awake….

I just got back from New York this very morning, and am about to return there tonight — courtesy, of course, of Avenue Q, the Broadway musical finally making its West End debut at the newly-rechristened Noel Coward Theatre. This has been previewing for most of the month, and though I have been away for much of it — in the last ten days alone, I feel I have been virtually across the globe, travelling from Adelaide and Sydney to London and New York — it’s been interesting to hear, from afar, how the buzz has been gently building around the show. Its one of the reasons why the producers decided to have an unusually extended preview period for it, at significantly reduced prices — the show needed to trade in that old-fashioned commodity, genuine word-of-mouth, to sell itself, and it seems to have worked. The word has been spreading.

But having loved the show in New York, I’m still going to tonight’s press performance with a little bit of trepidation: does it translate and has it survived the crossing? Actually, if The History Boys can do the journey the other way and be entirely comprehensible to American theatregoers, there’s no reason at all why not. And that’s one of the joys of the theatre: though I have been literally travelling a lot over the last month, the theatre enables you to travel without leaving your theatre seat. And in a fluid theatrical economy between London and New York, we freely exchange the best shows we each produce with each other anyway. It’s great to be able to welcome Avenue Q to London. I hope my colleagues concur…..

Just as it was the original London cast album for Side by Side by Sondheim that, when I was still a teenager, first turned me onto the riches of Stephen Sondheim — and shortly afterwards, was followed by seeing the original (and shockingly short-lived) London production of Sweeney Todd that turned me into a lifelong fan — it was encountering another revue, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, at an even younger age that first alerted me to the genius of the Belgian troubadour. That was while growing up in Johannesburg, South Africa, where a production in the mid-70s of this revue — that had originated off-Broadway in 1968 — had become the longest-running musical production in the history to date of that city. So I have always had a soft spot for this hard-edged collection of vibrantly textured songs of the anger of love and loss.

But though the songs have deepened in meaning as I’ve grown older, it’s also difficult to stay fresh with material that has long become standard cabaret fodder. But in 1999, a dazzling dramatic danced version of the songs, performed by a Belgian troupe called Anonymous Society, came to Lyric Hammersmith from Edinburgh and reinvigorated this extraordinary repertoire as performance art. And last night, I caught a new off-Broadway version of the original Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris that is like a blend of Anonymous Society’s context setting of the songs and a straight revue that brings it a freshly contemporary edge that, in electrifying new orchestrations, sounds hip and new, too.

It’s playing at the Zipper Theatre, one of the city’s newest and hippest off-Broadway spaces that is a ‘found’ industrial space that was once a zipper factory, just as London’s Arcola was formerly a garment sewing shop. Many of the seats are ‘found’, too, from the insides of cars. The place feels as real and inhabited and full of ghosts as the songs do, too. It’s the perfect fusion of theatre and show that makes each as hip as the other.

After twenty years away from the Broadway stage, actress Jill Clayburgh has come back to the theatre with a vengeance: between last October and last night, when she opened in a new play at off-Broadway’s Playwrights’ Horizons, she has now done three stage productions in a row. First there was Richard Greenberg’s A Naked GIrl on the Appian Way, for Roundabout Theatre Company at their Broadway base, the American Airlines Theatre; next, a commercial entry in the revival of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park; but if both of those titles suggested a fetishist concern with variously unclothed body parts, the new play — The Busy World is Hushed — is buttoned up in every sense.

It’s fantastic, however, to find actresses of a certain maturity finding their theatrical legs again. When I interviewed Kathleen Turner a few months ago ahead of coming to London in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, she described her own theatrical homecoming as a natural progression to me: “That’s where the good parts are”. And it’s also where actors can both hone their craft and remain in charge of their work. If Clayburgh sticks with the theatre, as she seems intent on doing now, she could have a late flowering as a major stage star again, and would bring her career full circle. In the same way, Meryl Streep also returns this summer to the New York Shakespeare Festival’s free season in Central Park: few years ago she was a sensation there as Madame Arkadina in The Seagull; now she’s set to play Mother Courage.

I am in New York once again, and yesterday caught the current Broadway production of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, starring a stellar trio of exemplary actors, Ralph Fiennes in the title role, local stage goddess Cherry Jones as his wife, and Tony-winning Ian McDiarmid as his agent. Say what you will about Broadway and its admitted reliance on such star billing, but it does at least mean that a seriously challenging play — in form (it comprises four extended monologues) and content — is actually playing there. And this is actually the second time it has been on Broadway: an earlier production in 1979, with a cast led by James Mason in the title role, only ran for 20 performances, but a new set of producers — led by Britain’s Sonia Friedman and Michael Colgan of Dublin’s Gate Theatre (where this staging originated, but without Jones in the cast) — have shown fresh faith in bringing it back to Braodway.

Yet the play has never, by contrast, played in the West End at all — London has only seen it at the Royal Court (in 1992, with Donal McCann) and the Almeida (in 2001, with Ken Stott). So in some ways, Broadway is more adventurous than the West End. And it was extraordinary to feel the concentration, and appreciation, of a Broadway audience for a play of this serious kind, playing alongside more conventional Broadway fare like Spamalot and The Lion King next door. On the next block, The History Boys is New York’s biggest and most profitable dramatic hit, proving there is an appetite for plays in New York as well as musicals.

Of course, both of these — plus Conor McPherson’s Shining City and Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore — are plays from England or Ireland, not indigenous plays, of which there is only one (Doubt) currently playing on Broadway.

And it’s fascinating, too, to notice the British takeover of American musicals, too — as well as Spamalot, based on a quintessentially English source (Mony Python), I saw Jonathan Pryce bamboozling a Broadway audience into submission on Friday night in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Now that Sonia Friedman and Channel 4’s The Play’s The Thing has reached its theatrical climax with the opening night of On the Third Day, the winning entry that resulted at the New Ambassadsors, it’s time not just for the reviews (you can read my own elsewhere on this site), but also to review what, if anything, it has taught us. Certainly it has been interesting to be a fly-on-the-wall of the process of choosing a play for production, and finding that needle in a haystack of over 2,000 entries; but it also seems strange to have done so on the basis of just a scene and a synopsis that were then pushed into development under the scrutiny of the cameras. Just as musicals are about more than their songs, so plays are about more than single scenes or an ability to craft dialogue, but are about the complete picture of what they are trying to tell us.

And even if there’s a paucity of new plays in the West End, as I identified here a few days ago that this is an attempt to redress, lots of new plays open all the time, of course, at the Royal Court, Hampstead, the Bush, Soho, Tricycle, Old Red Lion and numerous other theatres up and down the country. They may also get good, bad or indifferent reviews along the way. But this one has been brutally exposed, in every sense. While The Times’ typically generous and benign Benedict Nightingale opened his review by commenting, “One would have to be a blend of Scrooge, Rumpelstiltskin and Cruella de Vil not to wish this piece well”, he went on to say, “But as any publisher will tell you, slush piles seldom conceal masterpieces”.

But are the false, manufactured conditions of this competition the type of environment in which to produce a good play, anyway? True, the West End makes up its own rules as it goes along — being unsubsidised, it can do whatever it wishes to do, providing it can raise the funds to be able to do so. But as The Independent’s Paul Taylor puts it, while he completely understands the frustrations of Friedman at the difficulty of initiating new work in the unsubsidised sector, “What I don’t comprehend is what she thought she would prove by collaborating with reality TV. In the world of the latter, the stakes have always got to be melodramatically high, people must be seen to lose and the competitive framework (luxuriously bolstered by high-profile experts, purely because the cameras are rolling) cannot be adjusted to provide a workable model for future development.” He then adds his own suggestion for doing so: “From the point of view of finding new talent, it would have been better to spend the money on a mini-festival at the Bush or the Gate. But that would not have been invidious enough for TV, which will never be theatre’s route to rescue.”

In fact, television companies have a long history of sponsoring new writing venues, and an even richer history, of course, of plundering its writers for tv work. But this exposure of the difficulties of producing new plays could yet have its own disastrous postscript: can the play possibly survive for its scheduled 12 week run? And if it can’t, what does that say for the prospects of new talent reaching the West End again?

I’ve previously blogged about noticing that by this summer all but one of Delfont Mackintosh’s West End theatres are housing musicals, but the virus of musicals seems to be spreading ever wider: as of today, 23 venues listed in the West End (out of 39 in all) are currently hosting musicals or soon will be.

In fact, if you then take the subsidised houses of the National, Barbican, Royal Court and Donmar, plus the summer season theatres of Shakespeare’s Globe and Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park (which itself will next month add their annual summer musical The Boy Friend to the repertoire) out of the equation, that leaves just 11 commercial theatres currently hosting shows that aren’t musicals, and two of those – the Vaudeville and New London – don’t exactly have plays on, either, since they’re respectively hosting Stomp and the Blue Man Group. The St Martin’s, of course, has The Mousetrap now and forever, and ditto for the Fortune and The Woman in Black, so take that one out, too, and there are currently precisely seven commercial theatres in town hosting new(ish) productions of plays in the old fashioned sense: the Apollo, Comedy, Haymarket, Duchess, Duke of York’s, Garrick and New Ambassadors. All but two of those seven are revivals – of Shepard (Food for Love), Frayn (Donkey’s Years), Coward (Hay Fever), Philip King (See How they Run) and Keith Waterhouse (Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell).

That leaves the only ‘new’ plays in town at the Duke of York’s, where Embers is soon to be replaced by Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the New Ambassadors, home to the play ‘discovered’ by reality TV series The Play’s The Thing.

We have not only caught up with Broadway in ticket prices, we are now in the inexorable slide to sidelining plays completely in the West End as they do on Broadway. Actually, they have as many plays on Broadway right now as we do: they, too, have seven houses currently hosting plays today (though a couple – Awake and Sing and Doubt — are about to close).

Running out of West End addresses to put musicals on, even the Royal Albert Hall – for the first time in its history – is up to hosting one at the moment. Of course, Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat is an acknowledged classic of the genre, and at least Raymond Gubbay’s arena-stage production tries to do something new with it, by creating an environmental type design that wraps the audience in nearly a complete circle around the action. But though it’s a bold experiment and the swarming crowd scenes provide the best reason for staging it on this kind of scale, it fatally dissipates the focus of the drama and its characterisations. There’s lots of sweep but no detail. As for the music, it’s great to have a full orchestra – in full view on a podium above the stage – in residence for a change, but the amplification is so strenuous that the liveness of it barely registers: you can see them, sure, but you can’t exactly hear them first hand. The result is strangely dislocated, even from prime seats in the centre of the auditorium, never mind in the further reaches of the galleries.

Still, I was amused, at least, to finally be able to place one of the show’s Chicago locations for myself: over 100 years ago when the show is set, Gaylord Ravenal and his wife Magnolia stay, when they can afford it, at Chicago’s Palmer House. That grand hotel is still there, as I discovered when I was in Chicago last month; but on that occasion, it was overrun by gay leathermen attending the annual International Leather convention. It’s good to know that nothing’s changed: as in Show Boat, people are still only make-believing there!

I will shortly be high flying in order to return home from Australia in time to see an adored musical: actually, two. I’m filing this from Sydney, where I am en route back from the Adelaide Cabaret Festival; and although the festival continues for another week and I could have happily stayed on, I have to be home in order to get to the opening of Evita at the Adelphi on Wednesday.

I hope I’m not setting myself up for a fall here, but I’m dying to see what Michael Grandage does with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s most dramatically powerful and musically fertile musical. The question arises, of course, because the show has, until now, been entirely inseparable from the original Hal Prince staging, and it will be interesting to see it find a new life and a different perspective under new directorial hands. Classic musicals, like any great plays, need to be revisited, freshened up and seen through new eyes from time to time; one of the problems of the long-running behemoths like Les Mis and The Phantom of the Opera is that we’re never given an opportunity to re-appraise them, because the original productions refuse to die. Other musicals, like West Side Story, are hidebound by a slavish devotion to the original choreography, so that it has become inseparable from Jerome Robbins’ artistic contribution; but nowadays the show looks very dated. It’s time to give it a complete makover.

I am also getting back home in time to see exactly that kind of complete makeover of a classic show, Show Boat, plunged into the round for the first time at the Royal Albert Hall, before it ends its short run this weekend. I can’t wait to see it, either.

While I am still at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival in Australia, it seems that I’ve managed to miss the year’s greatest cabaret event of the year, and quite possibly millennium so far, at New York’s Carnegie Hall, where Rufus Wainwright has this week done an astonishing thing: he has recreated Judy Garland’s legendary 1961 concert there in its entirety. According to Stephen Holden in his New York Times review, “It didn’t matter that Mr. Wainwright sounds nothing like Garland or that his voice, an astringent drone with a quavering edge, uncertain intonation and slightly garbled diction, isn’t half as good an instrument as Garland’s. The spirit was there. At the very least, his loving song-by-song recreation of “Judy at Carnegie Hall,” Garland’s brilliant 1961 concert that became the most beloved of all pre-rock concert albums, was a fabulous stunt. Not even Madonna, pop music’s ultimate pop provocateur, has attempted anything so ambitious. What unfolded onstage was a tour de force of politically empowering performance art in which a proudly gay male performer paid homage to the original and longest-running gay icon in the crowded pantheon of pop divas.”

What a hip and amazing idea! And it is one that, as Holden suggests, was something that “the heavily gay, male, over-30 audience” could intimately identify with: “His courage to stand as a surrogate for every audience member who ever gazed into the mirror and fantasized slipping into Dorothy’s ruby slippers spoke for itself.”

At last year’s Edinburgh Fringe (and subsequently off-Broadway), there was a similar act of powerful appropriation, when New York performance artist Bradford Louryk recreated an interview with Christine Jorgensen, a celebrated male-to-female sex change, that brought Jorgensen back to intimate life. But that was mimed to Jorgensen’s own voice; Wainwright’s show, by contrast, is a far more personalised tribute. Perhaps he can be joined by one of his sisters to recreate the legendary Judy and Liza concert at the London Palladium one day…

What’s in a name? In the case of the Perrier Awards, 25 years of sponsorship by the sparkling bottled water manufacturers of Edinburgh comedy’s highest honour has made the brand synonymous with the genre. Now, however, Perrier have finally withdrawn, citing that “25 years is a record sponsorship and we felt that it is time for us to explore new opportunities for the brand”. The comedy awards are to be renamed the if.comeddies, in a puzzling nod to new sponsors Intelligent Finance, an Edinburgh-based division of Halifax plc. But can the awards maintain their status and brand-recognition, in every sense, with the name change? The re-financing may be intelligent to sustain the awards, but there’s a danger in playing with a winning formula like this. Perrier may yet have the last laugh, literally.

But then corporate theatre theatre sponsorship always comes with its own price and costs attached. On Broadway, this has led to theatres changing names as fast as shows: the Ford Center has become the Hilton Theatre, the Selwyn re-opened as the American Airlines, and the Winter Garden was redubbed the Cadillac Winter Garden. At least we’ve not quite sucumbed to this tendency in the West End just yet, though we’ve already got the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs and Upstairs at the Royal Court….

When Barbra Streisand returned to live performance after a gap of over 20 years in 1994, she came to London’s Wembley Arena and my lifelong love affair with her died when I saw the ticket prices: they were pegged at an astonishing top of £360. What could possibly justify such outrageous fleecing? Greed and nothing but. Especially when she said at the time in interview that given her long absence from live performance, it wasn’t that much if you aggregated it over the years she’d been away…. and that she was unlikely to be doing it again, so count yourself lucky! (I paraphrase, but that was the gist). The point, however, was that she charged these prices because she could, and because it made a statement: not just ‘I’m worth it’ but also, ‘I’m the biggest star in the world, and this validates it’. But touring is a responsibility and a payback to the fans who have supported you — not an opportunity to rip them off. I didn’t go; and I stopped playing her CDs. Her personal greed had so undermined her in my eyes that I couldn’t let my ears hear the truth of her singing anymore.

And of course, it hasn’t proved to be a one-off at all. She has made two returns to live performance since. And now is about to make another, launching in the US in October. This time, however, she is stating that the concerts are primarily charity fund-raisers: “The increasingly urgent need for private citizen support to combat dangerous climate change, along with education and health issues was the prime reason I decided to tour again… .This will allow me to direct funds and awareness to causes that I care deeply about.”

So at least the ticket prices — this time $100 to $750 — can be justified on more than greed terms. Intriguingly, Streisand’s concern about climate change is one that was also addressed by Mandy Patinkin in his concert at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival on Saturday. He told us that he missed his flight out to Australia because his wife took an old passport to the airport, but it was ‘bashert’ — a Yiddish phrase meaning it was meant to be, because when they got back home that evening, he and his wife went to see a new film, An Inconvenient Truth, that follows Al Gore on his awareness campaign for global warming. Patinkin called it “the most important film I’ve ever seen in my life”, and told us that this is something that affects our entire planet, and is something we need to address immediately.

I had not heard of the film myself, but now I will be rushing to see it. Artists, as well as their art, can make a difference. And maybe buying a ticket to Streisand’s concert will further the cause, too.

The Play’s the Thing — the Channel 4 commissioned project that is following the progress of a new play by an unknown writer being selected for production and leading to its opening in the West End — broadcast its first episode last night, and the play itself begins previews at the New Ambassadors Theatre tomorrow night (14 June). However, the title of the winning play and the identity of its author are still under wraps — and curiously, will remain so officially until next Monday, when the next episode of the TV series broadcasts it and there is an accompanying official release. Yet anyone who buys a ticket for a performance this week will, of necessity, find out who the winner is, since that is the play that are actually witnessing. And the internet chatboards will no doubt resound to the information, since there’s nothing that the theatre websites and the people who visit them like better than to be the first with the news, whether its officially released or not.

The PRs for the show realise they are powerless to stop this, but merely say they hope that the press respect the spirit of the competition. Yet to whose benefit, precisely? Obviously very many more people may be following the TV series than will actually be likely to see the play in the theatre, and it would be good to retain the suspense for them. But once a play begins previews, it is surely impossible to keep a lid on this kind of information. Nowadays there are no limits to the amount of opinion and gossip traded online — and perhaps it would be been wiser to recognise this, and have scheduled the previews to begin to actually coincide with the TV broadcast of the relevant episode, so that there was a real and not manufactured suspense to the outcome.

As it is, the theatre producers are also, of course, giving themselves a marketing nightmare: with no title or subject matter to promote — or even, until a few weeks ago and a rehearsal picture appeared in the Observer, a cast to announce — they are asking tickets to be bought entirely ‘blind’. Some may want the thrill of being in at the beginning of something unknown — but you can be sure they won’t keep the secret for long.

The timetable for the public release of the information, meanwhile, is being entirely driven by the imperatives of the TV company, not the reality of theatrical consumption. Nor can any of us resist the temptation to speculate on the outcome: having seen the first episode, I’d put my money on the Manchester supermarket shelf-stacker turned playwright, Steve Gardner, and his play Father’s Day — about which the panel variously enthused that it “smacks of the work of a real playwright…. you can’t teach it. Real playwrights are born not made” (Mel Kenyon) and that it was “so truthful” (Sonia Friedman).

Six of the most important wins at this year’s Tony Awards, presented last night at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, were British: the Best Play nod to Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, the two awards for direction of play and musical respectively (Nick Hytner for The History Boys as well as John Doyle for Sweeney Todd), and three of the four awards for acting in plays: The History Boys earning nods for Best Actor for Richard Griffiths and for Best Featured Actress in a Play for Frances de la Tour, plus Ian McDiarmid winning for Best Featured Actor in a Play for Faith Healer. Other British winners included History Boys set and lighting designers Bob Crowley and Mark Henderson and Sweeney Todd orchestrator Sarah Travis. That’s a total tally of nine awards (out of 24) that went to British shows and personnel, whose influence on Broadway is pervasive as well as persuavive, even in categories now like orchestrations that we don’t often make a mark in, and (in a coals-to-Newcastle move) directing a revival of an American-originated musical like Sweeney Todd.

No wonder that American Actors’ Equity is still so strenuously opposed to British incursions: not only does the British presence potentially deny their own members jobs, we also too often steal their glory. The History Boys, imported lock, stock and barrel, may have afforded some American backstage jobs and understudy postings, but otherwise has been entirely a bank raid, in every sense, on Broadway — stealing serious thunder (and potential audiences) from homegrown product like Well. The indigenous play on Broadway has long been an endangered species, and this year just one (Rabbit Hole) of the four plays nominated for Best Play originated there — the other three were all first seen in London (in addition to The History Boys, they were Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore and Conor McPherson’s Shining City).

Still, the Broadway musical held sway at least as an authentically Broadway product this year, with Jersey Boys going head-to-head with The Drowsy Chaperone and sharing the spoils between them — Jersey Boys taking Best Musical, and Drowsy taking the Tony’s for Best Score and Book.

After the false start, in every sense, to the Adelaide Cabaret Festival on Friday with Engelbert Humperdinck’s concert performance, two performers have restored cabaret – and this festival – back to its essence. From the US, Mandy Patinkin made his Australian debut in a solo cabaret last night – accompanied only by Paul Ford’s impeccably, unobtrusively supportive piano – on the large Festival stage that shrunk both stage and the massive house to an intimate cabaret boite for a mostly Broadway retrospective of familiar songs from Stephen Sondheim and Richard Rodgers to Les Mis that came up dazzlingly fresh and new. And from the UK, a completely different kind of performer, Barb Jungr, also distilled a remarkable repertoire – Bob Dylan’s – to fearlessly reinvent it for herself.

But the point of both artists is that they use the material, not merely as showcases for their own astonishing vocal gifts, but even more importantly as expressions of their true selves. They make it speak directly and personally, from the heart of themselves and as a result, they get to the art of the songs. This is cabaret as a communication tool, yearning, open and vulnerable at times, but also full of trust: of the songs, of the audience, of themselves.

Trust, in fact, is a key factor of the festival: it’s an extraordinary fact that, while Patinkin may be known to aficionados over here for his Broadway career, Jungr is little known in Oz, yet her first three gigs this weekend have all sold out: audiences are buying tickets for someone they’ve probably never heard of, yet they trust the festival sufficiently to deliver them something memorable. The same thing happened to Belgian singer Micheline van Hautem two years ago here (returning for the third year running next week), who arrived an unknown but went home a star. Festival director Julia Holt’s trawl of the world of cabaret goes beyond the obvious candidates who are already established globally in the field – a tiny constituency – to expand not just the horizons of the audience but also those of the performers.

But another point about those invited to appear here from abroad is that it’s not just a personal showcase for exposing them to a new audience, but they’re also there to engage with local talent. Both Patinkin and Jungr have, this weekend, gone beyond their stage appearances to do exactly that, leading singing masterclasses with young Aussie performers.

In Patinkin’s case, it was as much a confessional as a masterclass: he freely admitted the charge frequently levied against him that as a performer he’s sometimes too busy. He reminded himself as much as the singers he was coaching that less is often more. The night before, I noticed how he’s always best when he’s still and centred, simply serving the song, rather than hiding it beneath his unquestioned abilities as an actor that sometimes leads him to an over-intensity and over-embellishment of what he’s doing.

Tonight, Patinkin was in the audience for Jungr’s show, who exemplifies the art of doing what she had told her own masterclass yesterday: to let the song do the work. But both also bring something beyond the material to their audiences as they do so: they bring themselves with it, too. They’re both great storytellers in prose as well as music. And though great songs speak for themselves, both performers are so sincere in their conversations with the audience that it adds another layer to them.

No, I’m not coming over all nostalgic for Marie Lloyd. In fact, I’m on the other side of the world in Australia right now, where it’s now Saturday 8am; but I’ve just spoken to my partner back home who had just come home from taking his sister, visiting from South Africa, to what was supposed to be a theatre treat for her: seeing Judi Dench in Hay Fever at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. But unlike when he attended the press night with me, sitting in centre stalls, he went as a regular theatregoer — and rang up the theatre to book tickets himself. Only balcony were available, so he bought two — at £22 each including booking fee. They had a perfectly miserable experience: the view was appalling, the seats uncomfortable. Of course, you could say that you get what you pay for; but £22 is not exactly cheap. He says they would have been better off going to a movie. And in future, he would do exactly that. Another paying customer has been lost to the theatre. How often does this happen? Someone goes to the theatre, has a bad experience, and is put off for life. The Haymarket, with under 900 seats in all to sell, probably has to capitalise on every seat it has; but in this day and age, remote galleries should be a thing of the past, and consigned to theatrical oblivion or at any rate the bargain basement: tickets up there shouldn’t cost more than a fiver.

Strangely enough, I too was in the upper circle — but in the main theatre of the massive, relatively modern Adelaide Festival Centre in Australia, attending the opening night performance of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival that I have attended for the last three years. I was seeing Engelbert Humperdinck — he of the preposterous stage name, and even more preposterous stage presence. And distance was definitely an advantage in this case. You wouldn’t want to be too close to this spectacle. Though performers like Tom Jones have lately been acquiring a retro chic, Humperdinck remains as silly as his name. There’s something repellent about watching an ageing lothario — now nearly 70 — with his black-dyed hair and paunchy belly — still trying to put the sexual moves over an entire audience. Tragically, however, he can no longer rely on the audience to throw their knickers at him, but has to have a stage roadie bring a pair on for him that have been allegedly left at the stage door with a note. It was not an auspicious start to the festival here, but things can only get better….

“In Paris, New York and Berlin, everyone does it on a Sunday. Shoppers and sport-lovers the world over commonly do it on the Sabbath. Only in London is one sector of society prevented from indulging its private passion on its day off: people who go to the theatre.” So says Michael Billington in a feature in today’s Guardian, in which he interviews National Theatre artistic director Nicholas Hytner who speaks of his determination to open the doors of his theatre on a Sunday at last: “At the moment, you walk along the South Bank on a Sunday and we’re the only dark building. It’s ridiculous and it’s got to change.”

Of course, just down the river at Shakespeare’s Globe, the place is open for business on Sundays, but that’s only in their summer season. The big stumbling block, as reported by Alistair Smith in The Stage, is Bectu. Though agreement has been reached with the Actors’ Equity and the Musicians Union, Bectu is holding out. The National propose to allow existing staff to work Sundays on a voluntary basis, but want compulsory Sunday work to be introduced into contracts for new staff taken on. According to union official Willy Donaghy, “We don’t want a two-tier workforce”. Also, their workers are in a different position to those from other unions, because Sunday opening will affect their membership on a full-time basis, whereas for performers or musicians it would only change working practices for the length of their contract with the NT.

As we move into increasingly into a 24-hour, 7 days a week culture, however, the reality is that people want their entertainment at times that suit them. And the theatre industry has to adapt or die. The National has already led the way in so many things — like the fact that its doors are open and welcoming throughout the day, not just at performance times — and it’s great to see it taking the lead on this, too.

Meanwhile, on Broadway — where Sunday performances are, of course, long embedded into the routine — Hytner’s National Theatre production of The History Boys has recouped its transfer costs quicker than any in memory: the $1,850,000 capitalization has been earned back in just six and a half weeks and 51 performances. That’s in addition, of course, to the weekly running cost: Since the weekly gross it is achieving is currently over $650,000, I’m guessing that the weekly costs are around $350,000 to produce the reserve of $300,000 that has led to this fast return.

Not all new plays spring fully formed from the consciousness of a playwright. Sometimes they need a little help along the way. In the US, there’s a kind of developmental hell, however, for writers in the theatre just as there is famously for them in the cinema and television, which sees plays being subjected to endless rounds of readings and workshops, but rarely tested in production. Max Stafford-Clark spoke to the Critics’ Circle a couple of weeks ago, and told us about JT Rogers, the author of The Overwhelming that Max has just directed at the Cottesloe. Apparently he makes his living as an academic, and has hitherto mostly seen his plays awaiting productions rather than actually receiving them. Until Tim Levy, who works in Nick Hytner’s office, read The Overwhelming, that is, gave it to Hytner to read, and suddenly he had a production.

Not all authors, though, have those kind of lucky breaks. This week saw two strikingly different approaches to the trying to address the problems of finding new plays for particular London theatres, away from the usual round of new writing theatres that specialise in them. At the National, where new plays are mostly confined to the studio Cottesloe unless they have Stoppard or Hare’s names attached to them, Hytner has long sought to break a younger generation of writers away from the studios that, of economic necessity as well as taste, they seem to be predisposed to working in, and get them to reach the broader public stage of the Olivier. But what’s interesting about David Eldridge’s Market Boy – that has 31 actors playing an even greater number of characters – is that it may be a break from the studio theatres he usually works in, but it was a different kind of studio that actually helped create it – the National’s own Studio. It was commissioned there five years ago, and has been in gestation for three years there in a series of workshops – in the programme, the playwright and his director Rufus Norris thank the “many, many actors” who participated in them between 2002 and 2005. Of course, the National has the resources – financial as well as artistic – and is funded to make this kind of investment of time, talent and money.

On the other hand, the challenges of bringing new work to the West End is about to be dramatically revealed in The Play’s the Thing, both onstage at the New Ambassadors (where performances begin on Monday) and on TV in the four-part TV series that follows the competition it was found through which begins airing on Sunday. Unlike the National’s slow developmental process, this is more of a fast track gimmick, it’s true; but there’s a serious purpose to it, too. According to an interview in today’s Guardian, producer Sonia Friedman hopes that if it achieves nothing else, “If only 25 critics watch this programme and understand the difficulty of producing in the West End, then I will have achieved something.”

As theatrical consumers – whether critics or members of the public – we are always more concerned with the ultimate product than the process; but it helps to appreciate the product better if you understand the process of manufacture. As Friedman also says, “Critics seem to think there’s something going on with West End managements; we’re exploiting subsidised theatres or being cynical. They can’t believe that maybe we just want to produce new work, too.”

A grand new glass entrance walkway that also contains box office, café and bars has been bolted onto the old Roundhouse in Camden, but otherwise its business as usual for the venerable alternative space as it reopened last night. That déjà vu is enhanced, of course, by the opening show Fuerzabruta being created by Diqui James, co-founder and co-creator of De La Guarda, and featuring music by Gaby Kerpel, composer for De La Guarda, the spectacular physical theatre extravaganza that previously played at the Roundhouse in 1999 and became the longest running show ever there.

This vast circular, industrial “found space” is exactly the kind of infinitely flexible environmental setting that shows like Fuerzabruta need to come alive in – audience, playing space and performers become one, moving to the show’s weird but distinctive rhythms that redefines movement as harnessed performers fly through the air and then unharnessed ones throw themselves about in a watery pool lowered directly above your head. It did, however, mean that the restorative work on the Roundhouse itself was hidden from view. But though the venue itself should have been the star itself last night, there will be other opportunities to see it close up and more personally.

For now, it’s enough that the Roundhouse is back. The challenge for Chief Executive Marcus Davey and his programming director Verity McArthur, however, will now be to fill it will events that match its scale (and potential seating capacity). Not all shows can be Fuerzabruta; but serious theatre artists also look like they’re being drawn to the space already. Legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham is bringing his biggest piece, Ocean, into the round here in September – putting 14 dancers into the middle of the Roundhouse, surrounded by the audience who are themselves surrounded byi 150 musicians from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Being part of the first night of a new play definitely makes you indelibly part of the event of it, and critics have long played a variously honourable (and sometimes dishonourable) part in the recorded history that results. But a comparatively undocumented fact is the history of the first preview – the first time a play is ever put up for public consumption – that’s a sometimes fraught part of the process, but traditionally witnessed only by those either closely connected to the production or particularly avid theatregoers who like to be in at the beginning of something (or mistaken ones who don’t realise they are in so early). Sometimes in the case of new (and particularly potentially disastrous) musicals, early previews attract the ghouls who want to get a headstart on the rest of the world.

On Saturday evening, I paid for a ticket to see the first preview of Tom Stoppard’s new play, Rock ‘n’ Roll, that receives its world premiere at the Royal Court this month. In this case, there was a purely pragmatic reason for going in so early: obviously it wasn’t possible to see it for reviewing purposes yet, but I go to Australia on Wednesday and so am away when it opens next Wednesday, and wanted to have a sense of what I will be missing so that I don’t read the reviews from a distance and have to discover the play through them. But I will then see it again to review it myself after I get back.

But what was interesting about Saturday evening was that in the final rush to bring it to a public audience that night, they apparently ran out of time to actually run the show straight through before we saw it. I asked a member of the creative team before the show what the running time was likely to be, and he said he couldn’t honestly say, as it hadn’t been fully run yet.

Comprising numerous scenes that are intercut with musical extracts – the rock ‘n’ roll of the title – these took rather a long time on Saturday, and by the interval, I wondered aloud whether these were deliberate (to give the music its due weight) or were simply taking longer than usual in order to cover set changes. It turns out that it is important that the music is heard, though not for as long as we were doing so; but I also discovered the next day, in an interview feature in yesterday’s Observer, that Stoppard’s script calls for “smash cuts – changes of lighting and scene which have to be instantaneous rather than faded”.

I have seen this one dazzlingly achieved on Broadway in another Stoppard play, The Real Thing, that Mike Nichols directed there in 1984, and I wonder if that is what Stoppard was hoping for here. But as it happens, the play felt, in the early condition of Saturday’s preview, quite staccato. So there’s obviously some work to do.

But then that’s precisely what previews are for. I therefore don’t intend to use this blog to offer any critical judgement on the event, but merely to report those facts, including the one that the answer to my earlier question about running time turned out to be close to three-and-a-half hours.

In fact, I could have guessed as much as director Trevor Nunn frequently works to a larger canvas in previews, and then cuts down to size as he goes. I previously blogged about how Disney’s production of Tarzan on Broadway specifically used their extensive preview process to learn, watch and grow their show through, taking days off between public performances to implement changes that the performances had shown them were necessary.

But in a week and a half preview process that Stoppard’s play is having, there’s going to be a far greater intensity to getting the production finished in time, in every sense.

After Richard Griffiths’ well-documented run-ins with UK theatregoers during the runs of both The History Boys at the National Theatre and Heroes in the West End when their mobile phones rang, it has now happened on Broadway, too.

As reported on the US theatre gossip bulletin board Talkin’ Broadway posted on Wednesday evening, Richard Griffiths stopped that day’s matinee’s performance of The History Boys there. According to BeenThereBrad, within the first hour or so, “THREE different cellphones went off ringing loudly, each about 5-7 times and then ANSWERED. Not to mention the woman behind me whose cell phone vibrate in her bag went off twice and literally shook my seat.”

He went on, “When the third phone rang its 4th ring, Richard Griffiths in the middle of a crucial confrontational scene with the headmaster, turns to the audience and I paraphrase: ‘Ok, I am not going to compete with these electronic devices. You were told to turn them off by the stage manager, you were told it was against the law and you heard two phones go off already before this. You should be ashamed of yourself. Now I’m going to exit and we’re going to start this scene again, so tech stand by… and I assure you if we hear one more phone go off we’ll be in our right mind to quit this afternoon’s performance… you have been warned.”

Griffiths, he went on, exited to rousing applause, and re-entered – for the scene where the headmaster quizzes his character, Hector, about why he teaches with his door locked. “I hate to be interrupted”, Griffiths/Hector replied – and another round of applause duly stopped the show. The headmaster came back with, “You do realize I’m very angry”, which got yet more applause.

Of course, the American habit of applauding individual line readings (not to mention the obligatory star entrance applause, a fashion that has more or less died out in the West End, thank goodness) is itself an irritation, as I previously blogged here about when I saw a new musical Grey Gardens. But Griffiths’ crusade against the mobile seems to have become a mission.

It’s certainly discombobulating, however, when actors step beyond the 4th wall to address audiences directly. I remember once seeing John Wood as King Lear for the RSC, and stop in the middle of an early scene and say to the audience, “Would you please stop coughing!” And then he added, rather sheepishly, “I’m terribly sorry,” before continuing. Of course, for the rest of the play I was on tenterhooks every time anyone so much as cleared their throat.

But on another more memorably mischievous occasion, I noticed that Michael Gambon was repeating audience’s coughs back to them, as they did so, in the middle of his speeches during the final performance of Volpone at the National a few years ago. And at one point he riffed away from his scripted speech into a flight of fancy of his own that had co-star Simon Russell Beale so convulsed with laughter that he had to leave the stage. Of such occasions are theatrical memories made; but at the same time, was he serving the play?

The death of Broadway – the “fabulous invalid” as it was once famously dubbed – has been predicted often, but it just keeps on defying the logic and the odds and most of all, the crippling prices on both sides of the footlights. It costs more, sure, to put on a show — or worse, to see a show — than ever, but just as the stakes have gone higher, so has the potential. And in figures released yesterday for the 05-06 season up to May 28, grosses were up 12% from the previous year up to a record $861.6million.

Of course, with ticket prices hurtling ever upwards – now $110 for a musical at regular prices, but with “premium” seats now hitting $250 – the money is bound to go up, but more impressive is that attendances, too, have done so, not just the money it translates into: paid attendance broke the 12million barrier for the first time.

So price is clearly no deterrent. The secret of Broadway’s success has always been in the product and giving audiences what they want, and as Variety notes, the strong season has been “fuelled by holdover hits and a terrific selection of new shows”. Of course, the law of the jungle applies more than ever in such a situation – it truly is survival of the fittest – with underperforming shows like Lestat, the West End import Festen and the transfer from off-Broadway of Well bid a quick goodbye in recent weeks.

On the other hand, all four of the Tony nominated musicals of the previous, 04-05 season are all still running – Monty Python’s Spamalot, The Light in the Piazza, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels – despite the competition from newer arrivals.

The top earners of the year actually only included one of those – Spamalot, taking $53.6m – but were mostly holdovers from even earlier: Wicked topping the list at $68.1m, The Lion King at $59.3m, Mamma Mia! at $48.9m, and The Producers at $40.2m.

So the current template of success on Broadway seems to be living on past hits. The season just ended, on the other hand, has so far produced just one smash hit that’s likely to stick around, Jersey Boys, though there are hopeful signs for The Color Purple and The Drowsy Chaperone. Tarzan will (despite its hostile press and lack of Tony nominations) likely stick around thanks to the marketing might of producer Disney. (Revivals of the plays The Odd Couple and Three Days of Rain are also hits, but both are dependent on their star casting whose runs will end when the stars leave).

But one nice problem for Broadway is that in the midst of the holdover success, it has created a logjam on real estate: there aren’t enough theatres to go around. There’s apparently a feeding frenzy now on the Palace Theatre, just vacated by Lestat; and some of the plays this season just ended have had to sign up to some of the least popular houses like the Longacre, Cort, Lyceum and Belasco in order to get to Broadway.