September 2006 Archives

I previously blogged here about a Liza Minnelli impersonator, Rick Skye, who reminded me of the Liza of old, and spoke of how it was like finding Liza at the height of her powers again. But yesterday, I saw the real Liza – both on film and in real life – and found that the spirit of survival that she has always embodied has bounced resiliently back. She was in town to promote the new DVD re-issue of her 1972 landmark “concert for television”, Liza with a Z, and I saw her in person twice: first, as a member of the studio audience for yesterday’s lunchtime recording of the Sharon Osbourne Show on which she was a guest (to be broadcast next Wednedsay), and then again at a late night screening of Liza with a Z, to benefit AIDS fund-raising charity Crusaid, at the Vue Cinema in Leicester Square, which she also attended.

While Osbourne – an embarrassingly poor interviewer – failed to draw out anything of interest out of Liza, leaving her in an alternately halting, gushing mode where no story ever seemed to reach a punchline or point, the evening was an altogether more relaxed affair. Maybe Liza, famously a late night bird, was simply more comfortable with the time of day; but also, having watched her younger self being applauded and loved by the cinema audience, she was far more confident. I’ve noticed this before, when she last appeared live at the Royal Albert Hall a couple of years ago; initially faltering, she visibly grew in power and stature as the audience fed her the oxygen of their affection. But also there was a sense last night of being not only amongst fans but also disciples; the late night audience was full of people from the business, many of them aspiring dancers, and she was literally passing on the flame. She spoke to the crowd on equal terms.

It was an inspiring performance, in every sense. And watching Liza, giving such a dazzling performance onscreen all of 34 years ago in the presence of the woman herself, made this one of the year’s most moving theatrical events.

The last time I questioned the behaviour of fellow audience members I unleashed a torrent of debate – at times openly hostile and at other times reasonable — that resonated on the national airwaves when I was called to defend those views on Radio 4. I have no desire to reawaken that debate, though I felt chastened and educated in the process; when it comes to involuntary disability that is the cause of disruptions, there’s a complex issue at stake, and I ignored it at my peril.

But the last two opening nights have been disturbed by what should be more controllable outbursts – of inappropriate laughter in the case of the Kevin Spacey/Eve Best A Moon for the Misbegotten at particularly sensitive moments; and last night at Wicked by a general air of collective euphoria, even before a note was sung as Idina Menzel made her entrance, and was sustained for the rest of the performance amongst the audience. In such circumstances, where does the critic sit?

As Paul Taylor noted in his review in today’s Independent of Wicked, “It was hard to tell from last night’s first night how well it would go down here. The audience was so papered with connected people that everything was greeted with uniform ecstasy.”

That’s, of course, an occupational hazard with first nights, where its often the case that you can’t judge a show from the audience response. But actually this is a show that seems to create exactly that kind of response, whether prompted or unprompted. And it does also seem, if the US track record for it is anything to go by, that it will be critic proof. As Patrick Marmion noted in his review in the Daily Mail, the critics “will largely deplore it. But it won’t matter. Critics of course are hardly the target audience of a show clearly aimed at teenage girls hitting the age when they start refusing to budge from or tidy their bedrooms.”

No, I’m not referring to the reviews accorded to Daddy Cool last week in the headline here, which were far better than I (or the producers, for that matter) was surely expecting. As I penned my own (two-star) review, I wondered if I was being unduly kind; but then I read appreciative three-star notices from my colleagues in such diverse places as the Standard, Guardian, Times and Sunday Times, and a near-rave from Charlie Spencer in the Daily Telegraph. “Cheers not sneers for Boney B” went the headline to the latter, which of course Charlie doesn’t write, but still the sentiment was accurate, since he concluded, “The Shaftesbury, for so long a graveyard of dreadful musicals might just have a hit on its hands for once.” Lyn Gardner in The Guardian concurred: “On paper, Daddy Cool looked like the poor relation to the autumn’s big hitters, but it may outstay them all”.

Critics are not, of course, astrologers, and the future is impossible to predict – who’d have guessed from its reviews that We Will Rock You would still be alive and rocking five years on? – but I’d be wary of putting too much store from these predictions. Charlie and Lyn and the rest of us don’t actually spend our own money buying tickets. It’s the public who always decide.

The critical bashing, however, is one that five game (and maybe insane) film critics allowed themselves to be subjected to by an aggrieved low-budget film director, Uwe Boll, who challenged four of his critics to a public boxing match in Vancouver last weekend, according to a report in today’s Independent. Boll, who has been variously described as one of the “most inept film-makers ever”, had trained as a boxer, and invited the critics to a gloves-on fight – all of whom retired beaten in the publicity stunt. “He started beating the crap out of my head. This might be PR but I don’t want to keep getting punched in the head,” said one. Another said, “I feel like a very angry German man punched me in the head repeatedly.”

Footage of the fights will apparently feature in his next film. (Do these critics have no shame?) But as The Independent also asked in a leader feature today, “Wither from here? Politicians, football managers, transport chiefs, utilities bosses, Charlotte Church’s producer, entire call centres? Artistically – and one thinks of Ken Russell beating Alexander Walker over the head with a rolled up copy of his own newspaper – the spontaneous and the unstructured should surely be preferred. What, though, remains certain is that the brave critic, guarantor of our most basic freedoms, will never be stifled: this, for example, was Chris Alexander in Vancouver: ‘I think I got him once in the face for Alone in the Dark and I got maybe one or two in for BloodRayne.”

I hope the trend doesn’t catch on myself. I don’t fancy going a few rounds with Berkoff or Dromgoole; alas, I don’t drink, either, so I can’t contemplate a round of another sort, either, to appease them.

You can’t buy goodwill: you’ve either got it, or you haven’t. I’ve already blogged here about the anticipation for the Young Vic’s reopening season in their refurbished theatre, and today’s Guardian G2 doesn’t merely provide a feature on it: there’s an entire eight-page pull-out “Young Vic special”. Admittedly two of those are ads – one from the South Bank Development Agency, welcoming the theatre back, and another for the Young Vic itself – but inbetween, there are contributions from artistic director David Lan, plus such alumni of the theatre as Joseph Fiennes (who started out as an usher there, before going to drama school), Noma Dumezweni, Eve Best, Juliet Stevenson, David Harewood and of course Jude Law. The Guardian does Jude no favours by signposting his own modest contribution to the supplement on its cover, “Jude Law: Why I’m giving up film”, when he says no such thing: he merely talks about his desire to return to the theatre soon: “I’m always looking of the right play and the right time. I hope that time might be soon.”

But it’s the theatre’s ability to generate so many pages of free PR, rather than merely paid-for advertising, that proves that goodwill is its oxygen. Andrew Lloyd Webber has always proved to be an astute operator in this field, as the recent publicity that surrounded the casting of The Sound of Music has proved; it may not have always been favourable, but at least the show was being spoken about everywhere. And so have the producers of Chicago, Barry and Fran Weissler, with its constant round of stunt casting that from tonight sees Ashlee Simpson join the company at the Cambridge Theatre. Also in today’s G2, Laura Barton notices that Chicago is “the new panto” in an article headlined ‘Who hasn’t starred in Chicago?’.

After listing the round of names who have already been attracted to appearing in it, Barton notes, “Some celebrity stones remain unturned, but before ascertaining which, one must examine the attraction of Chicago itself - after all, one doesn’t see quite so many stars popping up in We Will Rock You. Chicago tells the story of Roxie Hart, a nightclub singer who dreams of fame but only achieves it when she murders her lover and enlists the help of a wily Chicago lawyer to whip up publicity around her case. Those wishing to be Chicago-ed are largely, like Roxie, in pursuit of fame, with their star poised somewhere between ascendance and the wane….” She then goes on to say: “Crucially, a role in Chicago also allows a female star to wear fishnet stockings, and a male to don a suit. Full nudity in a theatre, as displayed by Kathleen Turner and Jerry Hall in The Graduate, suggests a desire to be taken seriously as an actor. Fishnets in Chicago implies a simple need to recapture the public gaze, like the girl at primary school who does cartwheels to flash her knickers.”

And so another chapter in the ongoing saga of what looks like a commercially successful but professionally botched operation to throw the casting process of a major musical to the public unfolds: even though the producers of the forthcoming revival of The Sound of Music, Andrew Lloyd Webber and David Ian, never publicly announced their alternate Maria, it was widely known in the business even as the TV series was unfolding that they’d set up a “default” position to employ established West End actress Emma Williams as an alternate to whoever won the role.

Lloyd Webber, as I previously blogged here, even went so far as to state on his own website that “It was made clear from the outset that we would contract an ‘alternate’ Maria to play two shows a week in The Sound of Music at the London Palladium. Casting an alternate in a major singing role of this kind has been custom in many West End musicals. I instigated this in 1978 for Evita and also for The Phantom of the Opera.” I wondered aloud whether it was strictly necessary in this case, though, since the role is not an especially demanding one.

And now that young Connie Fisher, a professionally trained actress but who has hitherto been unlucky in auditions, has actually won the role, she rightly wants to claim her stated prize, which is to play the lead. She doesn’t actually want to share the role after all. And neither do the public: according to Baz Bamigboye, writing in today’s Daily Mail, the box office has registered a £1.2milion hike in the last week, but callers to the box office have been asking to see “that girl who won from the telly.”

So today the producers have been put in the odd position of issuing a statement that Emma Williams has now “withdrawn her services from the production”, even though she was never formally announced to be part of it at all. “Connie will now play all eight performances a week, unless indisposed in which case she would be covered in the usual manner by the understudy.”

That’s as it should be. Having turned her into an eagerly anticipated young star, it’s now time to capitalise on her value. Of course, should she prove not up to the role, as Martine McCutcheon, for instance, famously failed to do so in My Fair Lady (where her understudy played more performances than she did), then it may be time to reconsider. But for now, it’s time to give her the break that she’s earned by public vote.

Maybe this is pushing self-referential naval-gazing to the limit, but there’s an increasingly rich dialogue taking place away from the arts pages of the papers on the blogs, personal or media-led, instead. It’s a phemenon that Guardian blogger Maxie Szalwinska has usefully noted in her entry on the Guardian’s Culturevulture blog today.

She notes how theatre coverage in the US is undergoing what she calls “a mini-revolution”, as the blogosphere is “reaching corners the increasingly PR-driven and squeezed-for-space arts pages of the print media can’t (or won’t).” She goes on, “A bevvy of New York-based playwrights, critics, directors, academics and assorted drama fans are using blogs to have conversations about theatre culture, post reviews, challenge critical consensus, respond to breaking news and plug their productions. What binds them together, from the formidably prolific Superfluities to Playgoer, is genuine excitement about the medium.”

We may be lagging a little behind here in the UK, she says, but points out we’re catching on – and cites this blog as one that’s worth checking out (so it’s only fair to repay the compliment and say that The Guardian is leading the way amongst the national papers in getting their critics to participate, with Michael Billington posting regularly there).

Anything, of course, that contributes meaningfully to an arts debate is worth having; and the great thing about the blogosphere is the instantaneousness of both the postings and the possible responses. As a writer of a blog, I don’t have to wait for an editor to arrive at the office to check my copy; I simply self-publish, using an easy-to-use online programme that posts my comments as and when I think them and complete them. And the reader can likewise respond instantly. (The Guardian requires prior registration to post comments, but this is easily accomplished). There’s no need to wait for the letters pages anymore.

Of course, there’s also the daily tyranny of a blog: finding something fresh to write about every day can be a challenge. No wonder, you’ll say, I’m writing about blogs themselves today; but it’s definitely changing the cultural dialogue, and I’m delighted to be a part of it.

The success of MySpace is creating a revolution in the way music is distributed and consumed: the artists own the means of production and distribution. And anyone can put themselves out there, so it’s as democratically available to all talents and wannabees as it is possible to be. As Mark Ravenhill pointed out in a column in The Guardian yesterday, however, “There’s been a problem to date. You can develop a big following on MySpace: everyone can be sending your track to their mates. But you don’t make a penny. And it’s only when you cross over to the tastes of the older generation - the over-30s who still go out and buy CDs - that you can make a living.”

That, he goes on to say, may well be changing – MySpace is looking at enabling bands to charge people to download tracks. And this leads him to wonder: “Maybe the future has finally arrived. Maybe the record companies, record shops and radio stations that have been the gatekeepers of rock and pop for the past 50 years will vanish overnight and a whole new free-for-all can begin. Maybe.”

It’s an appealing prospect, of course. “It’s certainly an idea that has appealed to artists of all kinds for as long as - well, probably for as long as some other bastard got to choose what art went in front of the public. Ancient Greek dramatists complained if their tragedies weren’t selected for the annual competitive drama festivals. They complained if the actors didn’t do the play well enough. And they complained if they didn’t get the prize for best play. If you listen to a group of dramatists today (collective noun: a whinge), you’ll hear pretty much the same complaints.”

But Ravenhill cleverly notices that there’s a theatrical precedent for the MySpace future – namely the Edinburgh Fringe. “Every year, the festival throws up a handful of theatre companies and comedians who become the talk of the town. While there are critics who contribute to this, word of mouth plays a big part. Stick hundreds of thousands of festival-goers together in a small city, all of them looking for a cultural fix, and they’re going to listen to recommendations from the person they sit next to in the pub or the cab driver at the hotel. That may create an exciting bubble of gossip and rumour during the Fringe, but it doesn’t seem to be a great way to locate work that can thrive in another environment. Sadly, what we’re going to see between now and Christmas - as we see every year - is artists who have been the hottest new thing at this year’s festival turning up in London and finding that their shows will be met with either a lukewarm response or total crash-and-burn. It’s a sobering experience for the young artists involved. But away from an overcrowded festival, with an audience coming to your show after a day of work or down-time, the response is bewilderingly different. More sober, more considered and - let’s be honest - better judged than it was during festival fever. Most of this year’s Edinburgh hits are going to discover that a Fringe First award will bring no more lasting fame (and a great deal less money) than a million telephone votes brought to Michelle McManus, who won Pop Idol in 2003.”

So, he concludes, “A democracy of taste is a great thing to aim for in the arts. But the kind of mob hysteria of the Fringe, MySpace and Pop Idol is an altogether different - and less healthy - phenomenon. Publishers, managers, funders, critics, investors: we should keep questioning who they are, why they are there and whether they are hindering or helping a genuine cultural democracy. But used well, they provide a better structure for discovering talent than group hysteria. When it comes to art, the mob are rarely right.”

I’ve quoted Mark at length because he hits the nail on the head in observing how the post-Edinburgh blues frequently hit Edinburgh hits when they’re exposed to the greyer London reality. I experienced one of these myself just the other week: a lot of intensely favourable reactions had collected around a play called Finer Noble Gases at the Edinburgh Fringe (including a five-star rave from the Sunday Times in its fringe round-up), so much so that I regretted having missed it up there. So when the Bush imported its American company for four performances a couple of weekends ago, I hastened along to one of them; and away from the Festival fever, it was decidedly underwhelming. The trouble is that in Edinburgh you see so much dross that the quirky, off-the-wall show like this shines like a good deed in a naughty world. But in a world where we have plenty of good choices already, shows like this show their emptiness.

There’s a big gap, too, not just between different outlets for theatre but between free views or online downloads and persuading people to part with their money as a result. While MySpace may eventually try to encourage people to buy donwloads, it will be interesting to see how far they succeed. And there’s another theatrical parallel that is being increasingly tested: new musicals are expanding their online offerings not just with inevitable promotional sites but also streaming video diaries that go behind-the-scenes. Elton John’s last musical, Lestat, offered this; and now The Pirate Queen, the new musical from Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil (who wrote Les Mis and Miss Saigon) heading to Broadway next spring via a Chicago try-out next month, is offering what are called “castcoms” on the show’s website, following the show in rehearsal and development with its principal actors. According to the show’s producers, Moya Doherty and John McColgan, who have a background as TV and radio producers in Ireland and Britain and previously produced Riverdance, “One of the biggest things that drove Riverdance audiences was our documentary of the making of Riverdance”.

Some 10% of the show’s marketing budget is being dedicated to producing the video diaries, according to a feature in today’s Wall Street Journal. They have hired a director who has worked in reality TV to oversee the production, and see it as an important part of their marketing armoury. The show is about a little-known Irish heroine, so any way to get the show noticed above “the noise in the marketplace” is important, Doherty is quoted as saying.

But will it repay its investment? Or would the 10% marketing spend have been more productively spent elsewhere? Time will tell. You can provoke curiosity by giving away online trailers for free — but ultimately you want people to spend real money. It’s the same challenge that the artists on MySpace face.

Seven weeks and seven prime time Saturday television hours later – not to mention the lucrative casting of over 2million public phone votes at 25p a piece – the forthcoming London Palladium production of The Sound of Music has found its Maria: a 23-year-old call centre worker called Connie Fisher. Except she’s not really a call centre worker. She’s simply a drama school graduate who has been making ends meet, as recent drama school graduates often do. So in other words, she’s actually fully-trained buddy professional already, who’s been going to auditions for the last 18 months but hadn’t broken through yet – as she said, “I’m always the bridesmaid but never the bride.” That’s another familiar story for the legions of performers who have put themselves through drama school training and emerge to find that the world isn’t yet their oyster.

But now she’s finally scored the bulls-eye of a shotgun marriage stage-managed under the gaze of television cameras. Given her formal training at Mountview, however, she could well have been found via a conventional auditioning process instead. But who takes a chance on a complete unknown nowadays? This route has at least established her in the public eye. But you can’t help feeling that the process has been entirely manipulated and manipulative. The producers have evidently found someone who has the talent and the training to pull it off; and she’s also now got the media profile, too. It’s a win-win situation.

But if professionals have to submit themselves to this kind of process to get themselves noticed, it makes a nonsense of their training where they have to present themselves not so much as aspiring professionals but amateurs looking to be discovered.

The West End may be alive with the sound of musicals this autumn, but only one – Daddy Cool (yet another compilation show, based on the back catalogue of Frank Farian, created for Boney M and others, refashioned around a new story) – is actually original to these shores. Even Monty Python’s Spamalot – inspired, as the title suggests, from the British comedy troupe’s work to put Monty Python and the Holy Grail onstage – has been filtered to us via Broadway. Ditto the now-previewing Wicked, and the National’s forthcoming Caroline, or Change, and also Avenue Q that arrived in the summer. Dirty Dancing comes by way of Australia. Then there are the revivals of a triple threat (and hopefully treat) of Broadway classics, Cabaret, Porgy and Bess and The Sound of Music.

It’s rare, outside of Lloyd Webber and the occasional fiasco like Behind the Iron Mask, to actually find a non-compilation show anywhere nowadays that is homegrown in London. The situation is even more acute in the regions, where – if a theatre can actually face up ot the big budget requirements of a musical – prefer invariably to steer a safer course with an established property where the returns might be more guaranteed.

So the boldness of Salisbury Playhouse in programming a new musical by Howard Goodall, Two Cities, is to be applauded. Goodall is, at least in my view, one of the great unsung heroes of the British musical, in every sense: early on, he wrote one of my favourite British musicals of the last quarter of a century, The Hired Man (premiered in 1984, and completed when he was just 26), but its one of only two musicals of his that has ever played the West End (the other, Girlfriends, flopped in 1987 with a cast led by Hazel O’Connor). But though his music is widely known from the TV themes he has written for shows like Blackadder and The Vicar of Dibley, amongst countless others, and he has forged a separate productive TV presenting career popularising music itself, he has tenaciously continued to write new musicals in the years since for companies like the National Youth Music Theatre. One of these, The Dreaming, was produced by the NYMT at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio during the Christmas season of 2001, and I loved it so much I saw it three times in its two week run, and again on the Edinburgh Fringe the next summer.

But even while acknowledging my own enthusiasm, I can see that that show probably doesn’t have a life beyond student or youth companies; it’s vivacity comes from its youthful cast interacting with its complex score. When I interviewed Howard earlier this week for a profile for The Stage, he told me that no longer writes on spec but only to commission, so he goes where the work is. If someone commits to putting something on, he goes to work. Which is an understandable policy: why commit the time and effort to something that may never see the light of day otherwise?

So now, following a successful collaboration with Salisbury Playhouse’s artistic director Joanna Read on a revival of The Hired Man there three years ago, they’ve duly reunited (with Reid providing book as well) for a new musical, Two Cities. And I duly went to Salisbury yesterday to sample the results of their endeavours.

I don’t want to pre-empt my own review of the show, but there’s clearly a great deal of structural work still to be done on the piece if it is to have a longer life. At least, though, someone is actually helping Goodall to do the developmental work required and get him composing for the theatre again. Musicals are a rigorous and intense process of collaboration and seldom work first time out of the starting gates.

And though he’s an unsung hero for me, I’m clearly not the only one who thinks it: the man I was sat next to at the matinee had travelled down from Nuneaton, and had seen the show the night before – and was seeing it again before going home. He follows Goodall’s work everywhere he can. There were professional groupies there, too – a West End general manager and an agent, amongst them – and we were all keen to catch up with this latest installment in his career.

It’s always good to see a theatre bouncing back to artistic and financial health, and after a rocky few years where a triumvirate of artistic directors — Martin Duncan, Steven Pimlott and Ruth MacKenzie — pursued an artistically adventurous but box office defying policy at Chichester Festival Theatre (and its studio, the Minerva) that seemed to simultaneously alienated the existing audience whilst failing to attract new audiences, the arrival of Jonathan Church from Birmingham this year has already reinvigorated the place. There’s a buzz around the place, and I don’t just mean the deafening sound of the interval bells in the main house foyers. A colleague ruefully commented to me that it’s so loud because so many of Chichester’s audience are deaf; which, I replied, is no excuse to make me deaf, too. But then that’s one of the most popular prejudices about Chichester: that its got an old, greying audience, going deafer by the year. Though this theatre may be defiantly of the middle-aged and class, it’s clearly also ready to be challenged and woken up.

Yesterday’s press openings of Strindberg’s The Father (in the Minerva) and Brenton and Hare’s Pravda (in the main house), in its first major revival since the original National Theatre staging in 1985, proved that it’s possible to make bold theatrical choices but also make them accessible. Church seems to have struck exactly the right balance between the popular and the challenging. There’s been Coward — but rare Coward, in a double-bill of his Tonight at 8.30 sketches; there’s been a new play, Entertaining Angels, but one starring Penelope Keith, a Chichester stalwart (and now out on a national tour); there’s been a musical, but instead of one of the easier Rodgers and Hammerstein warhorses, it was Carousel; there’s been the popular literary classic adaptation, but it was the two-parter David Edgar adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, originally done for the RSC, in its first major regional revival since that now legendary production.

Now Church has brought his first season to a close with a double-bill that pushes the artistic boat out still further. Having won the audience’s trust with his earlier choices, the Strindberg is a grim but gripping marital drama, chillingly played out in Angus Jackson’s production with the extraordinary Jasper Britton heading to the straitjacket as his suspicions about his daughter’s legitimacy multiply; and though Hare and Brenton’s broad satirical swipe at the changing face of the newspaper industry is now showing its age in the topicality stakes (with the changes it anticipates of press freedom and independence being compromised by the intervention of monstrous media moguls now more or less entirely wrought), it’s still fascinating to see Pravda again. (Of course, the tricks of theatrical memory — that last week saw another 1985 show, Me and My Girl, come back suffering in the fond glow of what we saw before — make demanding interventions here, too: since Anthony Hopkins gave a performance of such mesmerising danger and indelible intensity as Lambert Le Roux at the National, Roger Allam has his work cut out this time).

And just as the opening of Chichester Festival Theatre’s season in May annually marks the beginnings of the theatrical summer, so the last two productions to open have now neatly sealed it: a beautiful warm sunny Chichester day yesterday has given way to rain today. We’re now ready for winter again….

The National Theatre do something every year that I signally fail to do for myself: it’s only September and already they have filed and published their annual report and financial statement for the last financial year that only just ended in April. (I, on the other hand, make a mad dash to scramble all my records together in just enough time every year to make the January 31 deadline of next year). The handsomely produced document is not just a dryly-presented set of facts and figures, though, but also a celebration of a building in flourishing artistic and management health. (The report is also published on the theatre’s website for all to see, though the new one isn’t there yet).

And today, as he has done every year since he took office, Nick Hytner invited journalists to an informal sandwich lunch where, joined by his executive director Nick Starr and the chairman of his board, Sir Hayden Phillips, the report was presented, comments made and questions taken. It’s one of two occasions every year that Hytner does this – he also makes holds an annual press conference to announce the forthcoming season every March – and it’s indicative of a far more inclusive and open form of governance he has both pioneered and perfected at the National. Whereas he predecessor Trevor Nunn would typically adopt a defensive, if not antagonistic, relationship with the press, Hytner cleverly brings us onside – and he does this with a disarming mixture of charm and honesty.

Questioned, for instance, about the relationship with David Hare – whom he declared today was writing a play again for the theatre, after Hare publicly rebuked the National for not allowing his last play there Stuff Happens to have an extended life – Hytner replied frankly, “He was pissed off and we were sorry.”

With that kind of transparency, there’s not much spin a journalist can put on it. But Hytner is so bubbling with ideas and plans that his own surge of excitement communicates itself inspirationally to the assembled press. He told us of plans for the future, including those for opening the theatre on Sundays; he told us of West End transfer possibilities for The History Boys; he even told us of the extension of his contract for another five years.

It was undoubtedly exciting stuff. And being brought into the inner circle on these developments made us feel part of the process of the National Theatre, which is a message that Hytner also communicates to the theatre’s audience: this is a theatre that belongs to us all.

One of the biggest early hits of the ten-year Sam Mendes regime at the Donmar Warehouse was when the theatre was turned into an intimate nightclub setting for a revival of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret in 1993. But comparatively few people actually saw it, since the Donmar seats just 250 and the show ran less than three months. That production, however, inspired a Broadway revival, with Mendes joined by Rob Marshall as co-director, five years later that took New York by storm and ran for nearly six years in all, finally closing in January 2004 after 2377 performances.

Somehow, however, that version never made its way back to London, as might have been expected; and so now we imminently have a brand-new take on it, courtesy of director Rufus Norris – embarking on his first-ever musical – and producer Bill Kenwright. At an open rehearsal press event today, ahead of the start of previews at the end of next week, we got a taster of just how potentially different. During the act one finale staging of ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’, three of the dancers were seen to be stripping – in rehearsal, they stopped at their underwear, but choreographer Javier De Frutos revealed afterwards, “There’s quite a few moments when there is full nudity onstage.” In the scene we’d just seen, he says, “the shedding of clothes is like the shedding of skin.” And it’s very much in period: “Germany at that time had a complete obsession with naturist camps.”

Intriguingly, American actor Michael Hayden, who took over the role of Clifford Bradshaw in the Mendes/Marshall version at Studio 54, is reprising that role over here, so was in a perfect position to compare and contrast, as I asked him to do: “It’s vastly different. This is much broader in its scope – Sam’s version was very contained, so there’s really no similarity.”

But while Hayden is not new to the show, everyone else is; and the delightful Anna Maxwell Martin, playing Sally Bowles, is new to musicals entirely. Has she always wanted to do a musical? “No, I haven’t – I wanted to do this part for a long, long time, but I was never at great pains to do a musical otherwise – only this part!”

Inviting the press to get a rehearsal taster of a show is the way shows are routinely publicised in New York, but it’s seldom done here. There’s something intriguing and tantalising about seeing a group of actors in raw rehearsal gear (and almost in the raw entirely here), working in a church hall, without sets, lighting and orchestra; and as a result, the taster certainly worked its magic on me. The only danger now is that the show has to live up to its literally naked ambition.

English National Opera have boldy, if not entirely successfully, radically stretched their own boundaries with the premiere last night of Gaddafi: A Living Myth, which – like John Adams’ Nixon in China, also seen here last season – applies a contemporary musical palette to tell of an earnest (and in this case still unfolding) chapter of political history. But while the piece was originally expected to be something of a rap opera, it has turned out to be a strange hybrid that couldn’t, in the words of Stage critic George Hall, be described as opera “in any meaningful sense”. He continues: “Apart from a few tiny choral sections, Shan Khan’s rap-like verse text is spoken over a flimsy incidental score, incorporating north African musicians as well as Asian Dub Foundation’s heavy beat, conducted by James Morgan.”

According to Tom Service in his one-star review in The Guardian today, it’s “an evening of unclassifiable music theatre” that he calls “part contemporary opera, part pop musical, and part cross-cultural dance track.” Though he acknowledges that “it’s a brave attempt to create a vision for new opera in 2006”, he goes on to comment, “But sadly the evening is never more than a hodgepodge of musical and cultural influences.” In the Evening Standard, Fiona Maddocks even more ruthlessly identifies what they are, in her opinion: “The music, largely a soundtrack against the actors’ shouted text, is by Asian Dub’s Steve Savale. A few brief songs emerged like brilliant shooting stars out of the aural putty, but the rest seemed to echo Bombay Dreams pickled with Holst’s The Planets and a dash of crunk rap.” (Crunk rap? What’s that? I’ve just checked, and according to www.rapdict.org, it’s “a style of music most commonly made by rap artists from the southern states, aka the Dirth South. Some crunk artists or groups are Lil’ Jon, Pitbull, Lil’ Scrappy, Trillville and David Banner”. So now I’ve learnt something).

There are also echoes of Lloyd Webber – cries of “Gaddafi Superstar” are a clear steal on Jesus Christ Superstar – not to mention Evita, another musical about dictatorship. But Lloyd Webber is at least far more tuneful. Still, it’s amazing to see ENO flexing its creative muscle and stretching the cultural parameters of the kind of work it is doing. The show’s reach may not be up to its ambition, and perhaps it feels more than a little exposed in an ornate house like the Coliseum, but as an experimental theatrical exercise, it has definitely been worth making.

When the Young Vic held a press conference back in July, I blogged here about the collective disappointment of the press that we weren’t shown beyond the shell of the new Maria studio that it was being held in. But today the Young Vic’s artistic director David Lan made amends, holding a convivial lunch for national critics at the splendid Baltic restaurant on Blackfriars Road nearby (scene of some Young Vic first night parties, apparently), then taking us on a personally escorted tour of the new building.

I was, as it happens, taking calls from my solicitor – once only during lunch, but then a couple of times on the guided tour – about an exchange on a new flat I am buying, which went through as I walked back to my office afterwards; so just as David is taking possession of his new home – the builders should be out by September 23 – I was busy buying a new one for me, too.

I remember going to the farewell party for the old building, just before the demolition people came in, and there was something bittersweet about sending it off; but now, after 2 years away, the company are coming home. And what a home!

David, of course, was like a proud parent, as well he might be: the building, which is coming in on time and on budget (some £12.5million), is a stupendous new theatre factory, with three distinct and distinctive auditoria, handsome new foyer spaces with café and bars on two levels and an outdoor terrace, wardrobe and technical workshops (the latter of whom are currently engaged in constructing desks for the offices – they can come around to my new flat next), dressing rooms and administrative offices all on the same site.

But fans of what was originally constructed purely as a temporary home for a youthful offshoot of the National Theatre for just £60,000 in 1970 and then became permanent London fixture even though the original structure had long ago ceased being fit for the purpose, will be delighted to know that the integrity of that original, wonderful circular space has been entirely maintained, as have parts of the original walls. Walking into the main house auditorium is like coming home in every sense: its recognisably the same space, right down to the new bench seating that are being installed that very much resemble the old ones.

But look up, and extra layers have been added – there’s now a much higher technical gantry that could allow for scenery flying, and a vast docking door on the other side to the entrance that will allow scenery to be brought straight in from the workshop behind it, or even, should a director want to do so, use the door as a proscenium opening by the simple removal of the balcony seating that cuts through it and build a new stage out from there or behind it into the workshop itself. The key is a new versatility, and the Young Vic – where David stresses he never wants things to be done in the same way they’ve done been before – is endlessly renewable in terms of its configuration and layout. The biggest interventions, however, are the additions of the flexible two new studio spaces, seating up to 180 and 80 respectively, and these are both stunning, versatile new venues.

Of course, the ultimate excitement of a theatre comes from what happens on its stages – and that’s the next test for the Young Vic. But even as the finished touches are being applied to it, this is an extraordinarily exciting new chapter in its life. If I wasn’t buying a new flat myself, I’d just love to move in myself….

You sometimes get the impression, in every sense, that there are more Judy and Liza impersonators in every piano bar and even lowlier dive in New York than any other personalities, dead or alive. Something in the heroic talents of both – and the even more disturbing abilities to send their lives into self-destructive patterns that mother and daughter have shared, too – makes their lives into parables of struggle, survival and larger-than-life interest. One of the most talked-about shows at this year’s Edinburgh fringe was The End of the Rainbow, a play chronicling Garland’s struggle to get through a performance at the Talk of London, with Caroline O’Connor giving a powerhouse turn as Garland, at the Assembly Hall.

Tucked away at C Venues, meanwhile, was Liza – in the shape of New York drag performer Rick Skye with his show A Slice O’Minnelli. I missed it in Edinburgh, but I am delighted that I finally caught it at the Theatre Museum last night in the season he is performing there to Sunday. The downstairs picture gallery has been turned into a delightful, intimate cabaret boite, complete with tables at the front.

I have always loved Liza, even as I’ve watched the dispiriting decline of her talents as she’s wrestled with the demons of prescription drugs, bad marriages and ageing. Only yesterday she was in the papers again, as the charges and counter-charges from her last marriage to David Gest were being pored over. (Skye’s show is so bang up-to-date that he brings The Guardian story into the show). But this astounding show – part tribute, part parody, but altogether as loving as it is truthful – summonses not just the material or mannerisms for which she is best known, but provides its own delicious commentary on them.

Liza duly returns with a zing. This is like the Liza of old again – the insecurities are on open display, but so is the blazing talent. It’s like being taken back to another era in my ongoing love affair with the most exhilarating of all live performers I’ve ever been lucky enough to see for real, but finding her at the height of her powers once more. What a difference from her last Broadway appearance in her tribute to her father at the Palace Theatre in 1999 in Minnelli on Minnelli, and for all the affectionate first-person connection she brought to the material, I found myself shedding a tear not for the stories she was telling but for the fact that she wasn’t able to cut it anymore. Then there was the tour, after her marriage to Gest, which came to the Royal Albert Hall (and then New York’s Beacon Theatre), where she was also a tentative shadow of her former self, though it was intriguing on both occasions I saw her on either side of the Atlantic she visibly grew in confidence as the audience fed her their affection.

But the best way of seeing Liza live now is clearly to see Skye. And it only costs £15, too!

No, today’s entry isn’t a weather report, though the sun indeed seems to have his hat on with a final flurry of summer. Instead, of course, I’m referring to Me and My Girl, the 30s Cockney-meets-country gentry musical that became an improbably successful 80s international smash hit when it was presented in an entirely new adaptation by Stephen Fry.

That production – directed by Mike Ockrent and launched at Leicester Haymarket in 1985 before it went on to the West End, Broadway and around the globe – was a delightful throwback to a different era of book-led musical comedy, just as The Boy Friend in the 50s was a delicious reminder of 20s shows, and an early riposte to the earnestness of the Andrew Lloyd Webber era of through-sung musicals (that would become a lot more earnest in the next decade). It was also the one of the first of a new genre of “revisals” – shows from the past that were given a new lease of life (and lick of emotional, musical and scenic paint) with revised books, from Gershwin’s Girl Crazy (revised as Crazy for You and turned into another hit by Ockrent) to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song.

But now that musical comedy has established itself as a dominant genre on Broadway once again in the last few years, from The Producers to Monty Python’s Spamalot (about to open here, too), is there room for another helping of the retro social class and musical theatre politics of Me and My Girl? I travelled down to Plymouth last night for the premiere of a new touring version that has launched there, and it was a pleasure to be reacquainted with such sprightly English musical standards as ‘The Lambeth Walk’, ‘Leaning on a Lamppost’ (an exact mirror for ‘On the Street Where You Live’ in My Fair Lady that Me and My Girl so often resembles in its Pygmalion-like structure of trying to remake its hero into a member of the aristocracy), and the yearningly lovely ‘Once You Lose Your Heart’.

But did I lose my heart to the show once again? Not quite, or at least not yet. I’m surprised that, after just two days of previews, the producers were so keen to unveil the results to critics — last night had a showing of four of us from the London-based nationals, with the Daily Telegraph’s Charlie Spencer, the Sunday Telegraph’s Tim Walker and the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts in attendance besides me. The show isn’t yet quite as tight and fluid as it should be: there are times when the comedy is strenuous instead of effortless. Nor is yet an essential spark of effortless charisma between Richard Frame’s Bill Snibson and Faye Tozer’s Sally Smith that one remembers so fondly from Robert Lindsay and Emma Thompson in those roles. Revivals traditionally suffer the curse of fond memory – it’s sometimes said that they have to be twice as good as the original to stand a chance.

And it didn’t help, either, that our arrival in Plymouth hadn’t been exactly welcoming. All four of us critics had been booked into a rather down-at-heel hotel, the Astor; and then trying to eat at the Theatre Royal’s upstairs café meant dealing with what Charlie called a “Kafka-esque” ordering system in which all orders were taken at a counter by someone manning a solitary till, which took the best part of 15 minutes. Critics shouldn’t expect a red carpet to be rolled out for them – we’re members of the public with free tickets and a notebook, basically – but coming here involves a 7-hour round-trip by train, so it might have benefited the theatre’s management to have noticed we were there at all before we picked up our tickets from the theatre’s charming in-house PR. By then, even though she was as hospitable as she could be (and even rustled up some interval sandwiches to perk us up), the irritations had started building up. Now it wasn’t just memory that the show had to compete with, but the monumental effort of getting here and getting fed were counting against it, too.

When The Last Five Years opened at the Menier Chocolate Factory back in July, it was the middle of a London heatwave and conditions were well near unbearable in the theatre, even though the Menier management tried to alleviate things by giving everyone a personal battery-operated fan (which most of us were then far too polite to actually use). It was, in any case, difficult to concentrate on Jason Robert Brown’s intricately layered autobiographical musical about the rise and fall of a marriage, though it was admirable to see the two actors Damian Humbley and Lara Pulver (for whom it must have been even hotter under the stage lights) managing to give such powerhouse performances despite the conditions.

But now that things have cooled down a bit, I went back to see it again at last night’s 6pm Sunday evening performance, and I’m glad I did. While the physical temperature has thankfully gone down and it is now possible to watch the show in a far most hospitable environment, the emotional temperature of the piece has shot right up, too. The two actors are now not merely more physically comfortable in the better weather conditions, but they now bring an intensity, intelligence and focus to this moving song cycle that makes it come to fully inhabited life. All tentativeness has gone.

Jason Robert Brown is back in town himself to see it tomorrow, and I’m sure he’ll be delighted with what he sees. And it was particularly pleasing that last night a substantial house were there to see it, too. The Menier is one of the London fringe’s most invigorating success stories – the fact that they can bring an audience to such a demanding and non-commercial piece for such a long run is amazing.

Though I’ve already spoken out against the casting process of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? in this blog, those in the business have largely kept their own counsel until now. Presumably, they’re afraid of incurring the disapproval of Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, who as theatreowner as well as producer is one of the most powerful men in the West End, though he was in fact knocked off the top perch in The Stage’s own survey this year by David Ian, his conspirator-in-crime in the show. One leading producer I recently spoke to insisted on going off-the-record to tell me, “I think there is a sort of wonderful mystique about doing a show that I don’t personally believe belongs on television with talent shows. If you pay to go and see something, whether a footballer or an actress, you’re paying because you’re going to see something great done by someone special, not your neighbour. I’m not a fan of all this crap.”

But now one of Lloyd Webber’s own regular collaborators, none other than Trevor Nunn who has directed his musicals Cats, Aspects of Love and The Woman in White, has broken rank to decry the process publicly, too. In an interview in The Times yesterday, he said, “I think that what these reality programmes more or less rely on is the viewing public being witness to distress, or being witness to coping with failure, or inability to cope with failure.” But, he went on, “That is absolutely not how casting proceeds in the theatre under normal circumstances. It is much more to do with the respect of people and the encouragement of people. It is to do with advising people to whom you say ‘no’ about what their next step may be. The reason there is an appetite for it is because it is the opposite of what actually goes on.” And while Lloyd Webber has said he hopes to use the process again, Nunn says, “I hope that casting doesn’t become a group of people behind a table saying ‘You’re out’, and watching them burst into tears.”

Hear, hear! A spokesman for Lloyd Webber, however, has tactfully replied, “Trevor Nunn is entitled to his opinion. Millions of people are tuning in every Saturday night.”

Meanwhile, the critics have weighed in with their verdicts on the final lap of (dis)honour for Brian McMaster’s final year at the helm of the Edinburgh International Festival, and the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer has been provoked, like the production of Three Sisters has apparently done in some sections of the audience, to open derision. His notice, headlined Three Sisters, one stinker”, is a model of inventive invective.

He begins: “Over the years I’ve had some cruel sport at Brian McMaster’s expense, trashing some of the more wayward productions he has brought to the Edinburgh Festival as its director. But I’ve also come to appreciate his doggedness under fire, and his refusal to bear a grudge. I can only think that with this lamentable production he is mischievously cocking a snook at his more vociferous critics, and that, demob happy as he prepares to depart after 15 years in the job, he has put it on as a private joke.”

Calling it “so bad that it beggars belief”, he reports that “When all the characters were muttering inaudibly at the start, one doughty woman yelled, extremely loudly: ‘We can’t hear you.’ Then when Masha, in one of her perennial fits of misery, declared ‘Isn’t it awful!’, a dear old chap sitting near me jovially roared back: ‘Oh yes! By the end — and, at three-and-three-quarter hours, the end is a long time coming — line after line was being greeted with mocking laughter. When Olga uttered the single word “disaster”, it almost brought the house down. Ken Dodd couldn’t have hoped for a more jovial response.”

Charlie’s review, far more entertaining to read than the production must have been to watch, also informs us, “The sisters themselves are played as glamorous desperate housewives, constantly coming out with such vulgarities as ‘Ohmigod’, ‘Go screw yourselves’ and ‘Oh shit’. In one exchange, we even get the c-word, and as the action progressed, or rather limped along with its leaden pace, ill-defined performances and wilful perversity, I’m afraid I might have uttered the c-word myself as I gazed up at the implausibly tall director, who was sitting in one of the boxes.”

He then returns to mock the Polish director Krystian Lupa some more: “The word sitting suggests passivity, however, and that would be misleading. Not only did Lupa constantly issue sea-lion honks of laughter at his own show, he also provided his own soundtrack, banging away, apparently at random, on a set of bongos. I couldn’t understand why the ushers weren’t throwing this white-haired old loony out before McMaster confirmed, during the interval, that it was indeed the show’s director.”

He spares the cast his invective. “In a production like this, where both director and translator have wreaked havoc on a masterpiece (Lupa is also responsible for the hideously ugly set design), it seems unfair to blame the cast. Profound sympathy seems more in order.”

And he concludes, victoriously, with an honour of sorts for McMaster: “Congratulations, Sir Brian — you’re going out with one of the all-time great theatrical stinkers.”