There was a time, of course, when the first night was the first night: it still is, in fact, for opera and ballet performances, where critics are invited to the first paid, public performances. But nowadays it is standard practice in the theatre to cut the producers some slack, and allow them to determine their own “first” nights following a period of previews, entirely at their discretion, in which to get the show right before we see it. Since critics are (usually) guests of the production, we generally do as all good guests are supposed to, and that’s to await our formal invitation, rather than gatecrashing the party early (which, of course, there is nothing to prevent us from doing so, should we choose to buy a ticket).
But the terms of engagement are gradually changing. Producer Sonia Friedman has tried a couple of times to separate the first night from the press night, inviting critics in a night earlier than the official gala opening. But without any arrangement to embargo our reviews till after the opening, it did mean that the production then went into the first night already knowing their critical fate. So no one has tried it again until last night, when the transfer of Monty Python’s Spamalot from Broadway once again invited us in early, and tonight will duly glow in the comfort factor of their (mostly) favourable reviews. But though the producers of Spamalot might have been quietly confident of their likely reception over here, it could have gone the other way, and a first night under those conditions might have been rather less good fun for all concerned. (A fun aside: on the way there, I got a call from a colleague, eager to confirm exactly where the Palace Theatre was. How long have you been a theatre critic, I asked? Of course, Les Mis had run so long there that the critic concerned hadn’t been there for over 19 years, until The Woman in White moved in, but since then we’ve also been to Whistle Down the Wind there, so its location should have settled in the memory by now…)
On Broadway, they hold what are called “Critics previews” ahead of the opening night – for which critics are invited to choose when they will attend from a range of two or three final previews. But in New York there is an agreement to hold reviews until the day after the opening itself, which also means that the critics get a much longer time for reflection before they have to produce the words, so there’s no unseemly scramble for the exit that the overnight critics have to do on London first nights. Of course, this does mean that the New York critics aren’t reporting on the immediacy of the first night and offering an instant judgement on it, so their reviews lack ‘news’ value. No wonder they are always confined to the arts pages, whereas in London a big opening may make a news splash much earlier in the main body of the paper…
Last night’s press desk, meanwhile, had the combined forces of the efficient Premier PR office on duty – a role they’ll have to return to provide tonight, to marshal the teams of photographers and diary columnists who will no doubt be out in force for celebrity sightings that we were thankfully spared last night – but also New York’s most indefatigably conscientious theatrical PR, Adrian Bryan-Brown of Boneau-Bryan Brown, who look after the show in New York. I have known Adrian for years now, and the pleasure of running into him, either here or on his home turf where we invariably have breakfast, is his undiminished enthusiasm for this business we could show. It must be all too easy to become jaded by demanding clients and shows, but I know no one more intensely knowledgeable about the inside workings of the theatre industry, on either side of the Atlantic. He knows who all the English critics are, and cultivates his relationships with us in a way that’s entirely genuine and completely accommodating.
Talking of critics, I’ve blogged already about some of the critical responses to the new production of Bent , but now I’m pleased to see that the dialogue has been continued in The Times, no less, with a feature by Simon Callow yesterday that points out that some of the reviews, “in addition to the critical judgments of the play, to have brought forth something I had hoped gone for ever: homophobia”. In addition to the two reviews I singled out, he also cites the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer for “approvingly” quoting Peter Hall’s dismissive comment that the play is “a Manhattan fag’s fantasy”. Says Callow, “The phrase ‘Manhattan fag’ — the playwright Martin Sherman is American — whether in 1979 or in 2006, is offensive by any standards: replace it with ‘Manhattan kike’ or ‘Manhattan nigger’ and see how it sounds.” But Charlie at least addressed what he perceived to be play’s shortcomings as drama, not making judgements about the lives or history being portrayed.
As Simon eloquently puts it, “What is offensive is that these reviewers seem to twist the facts depicted in the play, and suggest that Sherman is perverting the truth of the Holocaust for purposes of gay propaganda. But everything in the play — whether or not you like the way it’s handled — is based on documentary evidence. Homosexuals were the lowest of the low; they were despised by their fellow inmates; they were given the most demeaning tasks. No one is saying that numerically the Jews did not suffer vastly more than any other group, but a substantial number of gay men were meted out particularly harsh punishments. Is that not worth saying? They did survive on humour, which in their case, naturally, was queer humour. And they did manage to create some sort of sexual contact. The famous sex scene in which the two men talk themselves off is dismissed as masturbatory: if it were between a man and a woman, I’m sure critics would be delightedly throwing their hats in the air at their clandestine orgasm as a triumph of the human spirit — precisely Sherman’s point. But apparently not for homosexuals. In fact, Sherman is making the very same point that Tom Stoppard so eloquently makes in Rock’n’Roll: the only real defiance of totalitarianism is by refusing the terms of the tyrant, by creating a reality beyond the reality of politics.”
