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.
