November 2006 Archives

At Monday’s Evening Standard Theatre Awards, the paper’s editor Veronica Wadley gave a newly instituted ‘editor’s award’ to Frost/Nixon after the award judges fail to recognise it in any of the categories for which it was nominated, pointing out that there was “an excessive amount of musicals in the West End” and noting, “Never before has the West End faced such a challenge.” In a news feature in the paper last week, arts reporter Tom Teodorczuk wrote a feature, The Big West End Showdown, that analysed the crisis in which, as he put it, “Blockbuster musicals are in danger of driving straight plays out of the West End”. He goes on to demonstrate the gulf between plays and musicals: its not just a question of numerical strength but also the financial dominance of the musical. While the top ten musicals, he says, are carrying advances of at least £64.1m and are playing on average to 90% capacity, the most successful of the plays – Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll – is playing to 80%, and tickets for the few plays that are on are freely available. He quotes one theatrical insider saying, “Plays are living from day-to-day and the success of musicals is not running off on them - if anything it is the opposite.”

Matthew Byam-Shaw, producer of Frost/Nixon, says, “There has been a pile-up of musicals that has led to a car crash for the straight play. You have got to be really brave to put on a play at the moment. It’s most likely got to have a Hollywood star in it or a British theatrical dame and I don’t know whether either of them can survive in this climate. I think Frost/Nixon will be an enormous success but if it closes early I’ll give up.”

According to producer Clare Lawrence, the Hollywood star syndrome isn’t enough. “Five years ago people were excited to see a Hollywood star on stage but now the bar has been raised. We’re all finding it hard to compete.” And Sonia Friedman, producer of Rock ‘n’ Roll and Donkeys’ Years, adds, “It’s being called a golden age for the West End but it’s actually a golden age for musicals. Audiences are spoilt for choice, which is absolutely fantastic, but it’s made us pause for thought. We have to find different ways to be noticed.”

All of which is intriguingly born out by the two plays I have just seen this week in the West End. Since I was in New York last week, I missed the return of Amy’s View, and caught up with it on Tuesday at the Garrick. David Hare’s searing drama fascinatingly plays devil’s advocate with the idea of the irrelevance of theatre to the modern age, with one of its characters suggesting that its time has passed – “for my generation, going to the theatre doesn’t seem relevant”, he says, and which – as you sit in the crumbling, tatty surrounds of the Garrick Theatre with its peeling plasterwork, ancient carpets, creaking seats and oddly musty smells – you can sadly start to identify with. But then the play itself proves its own magnificent validation of the power of the theatre itself in a blazingly emotional confrontation between the mother and daughter in the second act, played at full tilt by Felicity Kendal and Jenna Russell, that connects you to it as you would nowhere else. And when Kendal refers to the passing of an underground train underneath, as if on cue one did indeed rumble beneath: a moment of theatrical and real life blissfully colliding. There’s something quietly and devastatingly moving, too, about an actress like Kendal – who has devoted much of her life and career to the theatre – acknowledging earlier on, “Let’s play to the people who like it – and if there aren’t many, so be it.”

On Tuesday, there were quite a few of us who liked it – but maybe not enough to turn a profit anymore. The upper circle was shut, and the stalls maybe two-thirds full. But as long as plays and productions as good as this are on in the West End, all is not yet quite lost. But then last night saw the opening of the import of a feeble flop from Broadway, Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, and you begin to wonder again. Despite the enticing casting of veteran actress Claire Bloom and Hollywood hunk Billy Zane, this show sends the prospects for the straight play hurtling straight back to oblivion. What were the Haymarket – who’ve produced the play themselves via TRH Productions – thinking?

It all depends on whom you read: in London, no single critic has the final word. For Nicholas de Jongh, it’s “an astonishing piece of theatre”; but according to Charles Spencer, “frankly, shows don’t come much worse than this,” while Quentin Letts says it “is perhaps the most laughably bad thing I have seen since accepting the theatre beat”. They are all talking about Caryl Churchill’s short new play, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? that premiered at the Royal Court last week, and I caught last night since I was away when it opened. Forewarned, of course, is forearmed; and its fascinating to see a play after my colleagues have already so openly contradicted each other.

The cut and thrust of daily journalism – particularly overnight journalism, when most of these judgements were formed – means that critics have to rush to judgement (though given the short running time of the play of barely 45 minutes, all would at least have had time to read, and re-read, the play afterwards before they filed their reviews — something which led Michael Billington, for instance, to write, “It’s a short, 50-minute play that you almost need to hear twice, or read, to get the full force of Churchill’s accusations”).

But watching it last night with a “regular” Royal Court audience – particularly on a Monday night, when some of its most loyal patrons attend since all tickets are just £10 — was perhaps to get a more accurate and even more immediate response. Harold Pinter once characterised the coughing fits that sometimes seem to engulf an audience as an ‘act of aggression’, and if that’s true, then last night’s must have been one of the most openly aggressive audiences I have ever been a part of. The quiet, dying moments of the play – exquisitely staged by James Macdonald – were engulfed by pockets of loud hacking noises from different parts of the auditorium that all but destroyed the play. And the playing of it, too: though some critics have already taken Stephen Dillane’s audibility to task (“true to form for this brilliant if eccentric actor”, Matt Wolf wrote on theatre.com, he “isn’t always audible”), a very loud remonstration from the circle during the second or third scene to “Speak Up!” may have rattled him, but it certainly rattled me! (By the same token, a King Lear I once saw at the RSC with John Wood, in which he broke out of character to admonish the audience, “Will you please stop coughing!”, had a similarly alarming effect; I was on edge for the rest of the performance).

The audience in the theatre is also famously a player: we contribute to the liveness of it. And a play that fails to still the coughing may demonstrably be failing to engage that audience. A friend had sent me a text message after he saw the play last week, in which he relayed a conversation he was having with a friend on the phone after the play: “I said, ‘total bullsh*t’.” A passerby interjected, “That’s an insult to bullsh*t!” Another friend sent me an e-mail after seeing it: “Given the reviews I have to say that all of you critics are on crack. In fact I was sorry I didn’t have a blog to complain – how dare critics give raves to a play that they found more rewarding after they read it a couple of times … Plays are for performing and reading is a supplementary activity. Needless to say sometimes 45 minutes is longer than 3 hours.”

I wouldn’t go so far. It’s certainly a difficult, demanding piece. But there’s a density – and intensity – to it that kept me on the edge of my seat (and not just in case someone shouted out another comment). And a play that draws such provocative reactions is also doing something that’s challenging people for sure.

Since we give it, we can’t complain when we get it, I suppose: criticism, that is. The media section of today’s Independent does a double-page spread rounding up the critics – complete with capsule reviews of us, our educational credits, a sample review extract, and even a star rating applied to our work! Compton Miller, who put it together, rang me a couple of weeks ago to quiz me on the job, so I suppose I only have myself to blame for the impression he’s gained of me, but I really must dispute his characterisation of me a “workaholic bachelor” – he asked me questions about my personal life and I told him I did have one, so why the bachelor euphemism? (I’ve never hidden the fact that I’m gay. Or does he just mean to suggest that I can’t have any time for a life outside the theatre?) He notes that I confess “to seeing shows six days a week, regularly trawling the fringe and the provinces”, but then uses the information to dig at me: “You can almost see the nail marks as Shenton tries to escape the tiny review cage allotted him.” Yes, I have a limited amount of space in the Sunday Express, but at least it’s there; and I am able to amplify elsewhere, as he also notes: “Luckily, he also compiles a newsblog for The Stage, and is contributing editor to theatre.com. He worries that colleagues have recently ‘overdosed on Prozac’ because of their ‘ecstatic’ reviews of some musicals, but he often awards four or five stars.”

He duly awards me only two; but then, given the competition – and the fact that Nicholas de Jongh (“a gargolyle-faced iconoclast”) gets five – its as meaningless as those star ratings can sometimes be attached to our reviews. But it’s interesting that, despite his extensive research – the kind that has him twice quoting ‘colleagues’ (some who reportedly say it’s time that the “civilised, erudite dinosaur” Michael Billington exited stage right, or that the “waspish, Essex farmer’s son” Alastair Macaulay is “a bit grand”) – he digs up three reviews of the same show, Behind the Iron Mask, to illustrate opinions, and two of A Right Royal Farce; while wrongly labelling Alastair’s review of Pool, No Water a review of Therese Raquin. But if its weird to be mentioned, it must be even stranger – if not downright galling – to be excluded. Where’s Sheridan Morley from the round-up? Even though there’s Rosie Millard – self-appointed theatre critic of the New Statesman and Toby Young, both on relatively small-circulation magazines; and if those are included, where’s Jane Edwardes, theatre editor of Time Out (surely one of the most influential sources for fringe reviews), or Metro’s Claire Allfree, who has to be one of the most widely read of all London critics?

UDATE: December 13, 2006

My colleague Rosie Millard has written to clarify that she was not “self-appointed” to the post of drama critic of The New Statesman, as I put it above, on which she had previously been arts editor. She had, however, given up that post before being appointed theatre critic by the magazine’s editor. I would like to apologise to Rosie and set the record straight. Since writing the blog entry in question, I have also met Rosie in Stratford-upon-Avon, and found her to be a genuine enthusiast for the theatre, even if her home commitments make it difficult for her to cover more than one opening a week.

To marry or not to marry isn’t, of course, the only question. There is also the question of a constitutional right to the state of marriage that is being sought by American gays and lesbians, and is the subject of Paul Rudnick’s typically wise-cracking, but provocative and thoughtful new comedy, Regrets Only, receiving its world premiere in a dazzlingly cast production at Manhattan Theatre Club that includes Christine Baranski, George Grizzard and our own Sian Phillips.

I loved this play for both the wit of its delivery and the smartness of its off-centre view that has the world thrown into chaos when gays and lesbians suddenly withdraw their labour for a day, throwing the wedding ceremony of a Manhattan lawyer and his socialite wife into disarray, after the lawyer is consulted by the President on drafting a definition of marriage to keep gays out of its reach.

But is marriage a state worth aspiring to at all? In one of those neat theatrical juxtapositions you can sometimes achieve by going to the theatre back-to-back, as I have been doing over here, I saw Regrets Only on Tuesday night and then a new production of Sondheim’s 1970 musical Company on Wednesday afternoon, that revolves around a 35-year-old bachelor, Bobby, who refuses to commit – and with good reason, as he surveys the wrecked shells of the marriages of some of his best friends.

It’s a still-dazzling and pertinent show, even in the new circumstances of Brit director John Doyle’s new staging that follows his trademark method of having the actors play their own musical instruments. It’s not as intrusive as it was in his (Tony winning) production of Sweeney Todd, since George Furth’s book neatly separates the scenes and songs into stand-alone vignettes, so the actors don’t have to constantly swap between functions. There are occasional shafts of wit, too, as the trio of ‘You Could Drive a Person Crazy’, for instance, become a crazy sax combo. But this taxing technique of staging a show – shown to such ill-effect in Doyle’s London production of Mack and Mabel – is surely paying diminishing dramatic returns now that the novelty is wearing off.

For real novelty value, how’s this? A brand-new play, not seen in the West End or prior regional production, receiving its world premiere of Broadway – and by David Hare, moreover, whom you’d expect to be seeing at the National before anywhere else? Much has already been made of his dissatisfaction with the National’s handling of his last play there, Stuff Happens, that was withdrawn from the repertoire (of necessity, since it was part of the Travelex season and the Christmas show was already booked) when it still had a life in it. In an interview in The Observer a few weeks ago, he said, “The extraordinary mismanagement of that play didn’t leave me with the instinct to rush back there, obviously”, and added, “But the reason we’re starting this one here is simply because three-fifths of the characters are American, and there isn’t anything more sinister or strange about it.”

In the same interview, Hare also said something else interesting that had attracted him to doing his new play, The Vertical Hour, on Broadway first: “The straight play is a very endangered thing on Broadway. But what I have found, with Plenty and with Via Dolorosa, is that if you are the one serious play on Broadway you get a fantastic audience because there are so many clever people in New York. They mostly don’t go to the theatre - but they’ll go once a year. And once you get that audience, they’re the best audience in the world.”

And watching the play, still in preview at the Music Box Theatre last night, he’s right: it was the kind of attentive and smart audience that an attentive and smart play like this deserves.

Since filing my last blog entry two days ago, I have been running to catch up with myself while I’m here in New York. I am invariably a busy person, but there’s something about being here that speeds me up even more: the city’s energy is infectious, even if (as I have been) you are suffering the kind of jetlag that puts you in mind of sleep just as you’re sitting down to watch a show, and wakes you up again when you’ve only managed to sleep a few hours after you’ve finally gotten to bed.

BARBARA COOK
Still, if I’m feeling rough, I can only imagine the resilience and artistry that sustained Barbara Cook through her return to Carnegie Hall on Saturday night. It was her sixth solo appearance at this most hallowed and beautiful of concert halls – her first was in 1961, the year before I was born! – and she told us that she very nearly cancelled. Just four days earlier, she’d been suffering from an infected windpipe. She added, “And I’ve been singing better than ever lately—but not tonight!” But she, and we in turn, need not have feared, because she has the kind of formidable technique that could sustain her even in (slightly) reduced vocal circumstances. And it’s true; she has been singing better than ever lately. She’s the greatest singer, bar none, of popular song alive today, in my opinion; and she did that remarkable thing of seeming to make this vast hall shrink to the intimacy of a cabaret boite.

THE LITTLE DOG LAUGHED
Douglas Carter Beane wrote one of the smartest, sassiest society comedies in years in As Bees In Honey Drown which I saw a few years ago in New York (but is still unseen in London); and though The Little Dog Laughed – newly transferred from off-Broadway (where I saw it first at Second Stage in January) to Broadway – isn’t quite in its league, its wonderful to see such an abrasive (a)moral comedy about sexual hypocrisy in Hollywood onstage, as an up-and-coming movie star falls in love with the male prostitute he hires –and then marries the prostitute’s girlfriend so he can keep the secret of his sexuality safe.

I remember taking a friend to see it at Second Stage, and expressing astonishment that such a wonderfully alert production had been directed by Scott Ellis, a New York director whose work isn’t usually as inspired. My friend memorably replied, “Even a blind squirrel finds the occasional nut”, and so it has proved. But now that its been ramped up to fill a Broadway house – and a three-tier one at that – Julie White’s performance as the monster agent-from-hell to the actor has become a little shrill. Beane’s script is still as full of beans as Ellis’s production has found the nuts (and bolts) that make it work, and I only hope it can find and sustain an audience there.

EVIL DEAD – THE MUSICAL
And still they keep coming. After a play revolving around the film industry, it’s the movie business that’s keeping the stage musical alive, too. Broadway currently has The Wedding Singer and Hairspray on the boards, for instance, with High Fidelity that started previews last night and Legally Blonde on the way. Now off-Broadway is following suit, with Evil Dead – the Musical following in the campy footsteps of the likes of Little Shop of Horrors. It’s exactly what it says on the label; you know what you’re going to get. It may not have much in the way of wit or style, but there’s plenty of blood and some guts, too, so fans of the movie will be happy.

A CHORUS LINE
And finally, this is very much more my sort of thing. I’ve previously blogged about how important A Chorus Line has been to me, dating both my arrival in London to seeing the last matinee of its run at Drury Lane in 1979, and then seeing it also on my first-ever trip to New York in 1983. Now its back in triumph on Broadway, and seeing it again last night transported me back to both of those occasions. And now that we’re in the era where musicals, as I’ve just said, are obsessed with putting films onstage, it was refreshing to return to an age when the theatre was actually in love with the theatre and the process of putting on shows that A Chorus Line epitomizes. I fell in love with it all over again, and I’m not ashamed to say so.

We’re also in the midst of the annual Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS fundraising campaign, where the actors make curtain speeches about the charity and then collect funds in the foyer afterwards from the audience; and as Michael Berresse made his, there was a special poignancy to the fact that the show’s original creator, Michael Bennett, himself died of AIDS in 1987. But it was even more chastening to hear that when Bennett died he was just 44; the age I am now. His contribution to musicals is incalculable. And just as A Chorus Line, possibly his greatest achievement, is back, so Dreamgirls – his other most definitive work – has finally been made into a movie. It opens here at Christmas, and the billboards are already all over Times Square. Dreamgirls has, shamefully, never been seen in London, so I suppose this is the closest we’ll get to it….

What is it with ducks and the theatre? After last year’s London disaster of Duckstastic – the Right Size’s follow-up to their megahit The Play What I Wrote – there’s a new off-Broadway musical in New York called Mimi LeDuck, and as the subhead to the Village Voice review asks, “Why can’t show folk tell duck from turkey?” As critic Michael Feingold goes on to write in his review, “Mimi LeDuck is one of the great mysteries of the theatrical universe. People of high professional standing are involved. The show boasts at least eight producers, six of whom are known quantities with reasonable credentials; those members of its better-known design team are even more impressive, while its eight-person cast’s combined credits add up to nearly three centuries’ worth of solid onstage experience. And yet all of these skilled theater hands, at least some of whom had presumably read the script and heard the score, signed on to participate in something called Mimi LeDuck, about a Mormon housewife who paints ducks for a living until she abandons Ketchum, Idaho, and her accountant husband to discover her destiny in Paris. The show is up and running, and their names are on the program, so they all must have signed their contracts and somebody must have signed some checks. Why did they do it?”

In other words, couldn’t they have seen it coming? But making hits is an inexact science, and no one can ever tell in advance what might work and might not. And if they couldn’t see it coming, can I be blamed for going (at least to the first half)? Yes, I wasted a precious evening in New York; but I was curious to see Eartha Kitt in a new musical – and at least I went for free, and haven’t lost all the money it must have cost to put on.

The same morbid fascination with theatrical turkeys also took me to see Twyla Tharp’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, which sought to do for the Dylan catalogue what her Movin’ Out did for Billy Joel: to thread a new dance piece around an existing song repertoire. But this tepid show – set, according to the playbill, “sometime between awake and asleep” – actually put me somewhere between those two states, too. It closes today after a run of less than a month.

By a curious coincidence, not one but both of the roles that Julie Andrews immortalized in film musicals have been brought to the stage on consecutive nights on each side of the Atlantic – and I was at both. At the London Palladium on Wednesday, of course, it was Connie Fisher who inherited the role of Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music and made it completely her own; and then, taking an early morning flight yesterday, I was able to be at the Broadway premiere last night of the Mackintosh/Disney transfer of their London stage version of Mary Poppins, too, with Broadway ingénue Ashley Brown taking the title role originally taken in London by Laura Michelle Kelly.

Playing with the iconic memories that everyone has of the beloved Julie in these absolutely adored films, of course, ups the stakes even more for young actresses like these; but if – as Sondheim so eloquently put it in Sunday in the Park with George — the creative process is to “give us more to see”, then both of these productions and the performances in them succeed in doing so. Unlike the stage version of Dirty Dancing that recently opened at London’s Aldwych Theatre and whose sole creative impulse seems to be to merely replicate the film, both Jeremy Sams (in returning to the original stage version, with interpolations from the film score for The Sound of Music) and Richard Eyre and Matthew Bourne (co-directing Mary Poppins) have taken their familiar – perhaps over-familiar – properties, and freshened them up considerably.

Their lead actresses are a big part of that process. For Connie Fisher, her triumph is sweetly accentuated, of course, by the process that brought her here, namely the live nationwide television ‘audition’ that has already made her a household face. But she now earns her stripes by actually delivering a performance that also hits the bulls-eye, combining a natural vivacity with the tenacity that got her to the winning post.

Ashley Brown, the Broadway Poppins, has – like Laura Michelle Kelly did – served her dues in the more conventional way, steadily climbing through the ranks of other shows (her Broadway debut was as a take-over Belle in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast) before reaching this point. But while it is Poppins is, of course, a more knowing character than Maria, it is also notable that Brown has a stronger air of confident authority as a performer, too, that she has built up through her earlier work.

I doubt that Fisher and Brown could swap roles. Yet Julie Andrews immortalized both. (To have created one iconic role is an achievement; to have created two, legendary). So her status is still secure, even as we see those roles through fresh eyes.

How prepared should a critic be when s/he arrives to review a production? Should we be familiar with its history, origins, past productions, earlier versions, and so on – or should we come it to fresh, as many of our readers might? On the one hand, it’s good to be able to reflect the immediacy of the joy of discovery that coming to something completely fresh allows; but are we not supposed to know a little more, so that we can make a better-informed judgement on what is being shown to us today, and how it measures against the past (or not)?

As Charles Spencer notes today in his review of the National’s new stage version of Zola’s Therese Raquin, “It’s a perennial problem. When reviewing stage adaptations of novels, should you read (or re-read) the original before seeing the play? After 30 years on the job, I still can’t decide. You don’t want to seem an ignorant oik when discussing a stage production based on a book many of your readers may already be familiar with. But if you do read the original, it ruins the dramatic surprise.”

So Charlie decided to “skim a few chapters” of Zola’s novel to get the flavour of it – but then found himself drawn in. “As anyone will know who has picked up this astonishing work, it is almost impossible to put down. The French author’s frank and erotic description of an illicit affair, followed by the murder of the adulterous heroine’s husband and the guilt and remorse that follow, is fiction at its most addictive, the novelistic equivalent of crack cocaine. You simply can’t stop until you’ve finished, or at least I couldn’t.”

As a result of this “binge reading”, however, he found that Marrianne Elliot’s production, “though often impressive, intelligent and well acted, seemed like a dim shadow of the thrilling, lurid images already floating around inside my head.”

In other words, the stage couldn’t, in this case, compete with the page; but you could argue that it’s not meant to. Surely a stage adaptation has the right to be judged on its own merits – and should be able to stand alone of prior knowledge of the source — not by comparison with another medium. But we all bring baggage, whether we’ve sought it out or not, to things we see. Theatre doesn’t exist in isolation of other cultural activities, especially when it so often co-opts them for the stage.

This keeps happening with new musicals, so often nowadays based on old films, that comparisons are inevitable. What one hopes for then is a different kind of spark to what makes the film tick – not a slavish recreation (which is the essence of the failure of Dirty Dancing, to find a new theatrical language to transpose its filmic one to).

Of course, some of us are too busy simply going to the theatre all the time to see the films in the first place, let alone read the books, too. But with a genuinely new musical, it’s sometimes difficult to come to a full appreciation of its score on a single hearing. So, again, do you seek out the score in advance if there’s been an original cast album already available, or do you hear it for the first time in the theatre? I love encountering a new score live in the theatre the first time I hear it. But I like to revisit them on CD to make a fuller acquaintance of it, and then try to go back a second time (or more) to see the show again. But doing that, no wonder I haven’t got the time for anything else….!

After yesterday’s blog entry about the early departures of both Bent and Summer and Smoke, news comes today that another show is closing before ever officially opening: not that Stones in His Pockets is exactly closing during previews, but that its first night – originally planned for last Monday – was postponed owing to the indisposition of actor Hugh Lee, and the alternate cast put into the roles from the next night onwards. Now, with a convoluted explanation of how Hugh Lee has now had to formally withdraw and it has not been possible to rehearse another actor into the role to join Simon Delaney, or to parachute another actor who has played it before into the show either, they’ve been going on with the alternate cast – except that the show cannot be presented without covers, either (though quite how they’re maintaining the show right now, in that case, is another question, since both of the present covers are now fully engaged).

It’s odd that a two-hander like this should present major difficulties, especially one in which numerous actors have previously played the parts around the world now. There’s an age-old showbiz adage that the show must go on; but clearly not this show right now. Though neither Lee nor Delaney could be considered ‘box office’ any more than covers John Cronin and Conrad Kemp, it seems the producers are reluctant to ‘promote’ them to the leads officially. But I’d be curious if the casting change has made any difference at all to the box office advance, or lack thereof. In a heavily crowded marketplace, there may simply have been no room for Stones, with our without Lee, and the producers have managed a graceful escape without having to admit that commercial interest has long since waned in a show that was, after all, seen in the West End as recently as three years ago.

Curious footnote to this saga: when the press night was cancelled, a friend wittily asked me if Sheridan Morley had, by any chance, managed to review it. (Some may remember that when Barbara Cook had her season at the Gielgud Theatre postponed owing to an illness in 2004, it didn’t stop Sheridan from reviewing her and awarding her a four star rave). In fact Sheridan’s regular stand-in on the Daily Express, Simon Edge, duly did review Stones last Friday; but as his review made clear, he actually saw the alternate cast, so was in the clear.

In the suddenly topsy-turvy world of the West End, where musicals currently outnumber plays at least two to one, the few plays to have opened this autumn have taken a further knock today with the simultaneous posting of early closing notices for two of them: Bent will bow out from the Trafalgar Studios on December 9 (after a 12-week run), some weeks short of the original closing date of January 13; and Summer and Smoke will close at the Apollo on November 25, far ahead of the original closing date of February 7, 2007.

Of course, shows may succeed for many reasons but fail, primarily, for one: audiences simply don’t come, at least in sufficient numbers, to cover the costs. In both cases, the producers have put a brave face on things: Bent, they say in their closing notice, “continues to receive great audience response and standing ovations”, while Kim Poster, producer of Summer and Smoke, draws attention to the “very positive reviews” it had.

But Bent draws attention to another, potentially even more disastrous factor in its closure: “in the competitive West End climate, which is offering a huge range of new musicals combined with the run up to Christmas”, they have made the decision to make way for a new production. Musicals, in other words, haven’t just edged plays out of getting into the theatres in the first place, but are edging the plays that actually have got there out there, too.

We’ve been seeing a seismic change in the landscape of the West End this year: as with global warming, where the signs have been there for years but have only lately been adopted as fact, perhaps we can finally accept that we’ve followed the Broadway path all too clearly. The driving force of the West End, as on Broadway, is now the musical; and as West End ticket prices for musicals have now not only matched those for Broadway but actually eclipsed them (with the £60 and £59.50 top price of Porgy and Bess and Dirty Dancing respectively), that all-too-tempting economic clock cannot be easily turned back.

As long as there’s the National, Royal Court, Almeida, Donmar and so on, of course, serious theatregoers are still being (well) catered for in London; but the best we can now hope for in the West End is event-theatre plays, like yesterday’s announcement of the Daniel Ratcliffe revival of Equus, or transfers from the subsidised sector, like Rock ‘n’ Roll, Frost/Nixon or the belated arrival, at last, of The History Boys.

I’m beginning to worry that my colleagues are overdosing on prozac at the moment. How else to explain the run of ecstatic reviews they’ve lately been giving? And for musicals, of all things, a form for which there has often been a default position of qualified reserve, at least, if not active resentment. And regardless of the merits, or otherwise, of what we’ve been presented with, I thought that by now the majority of the critics would have been collectively worn down by the onslaught of them this autumn; but no such thing. It started with Daddy Cool that I frankly thought might just get slaughtered, but wasn’t; and the tone was immediately set for Wicked, Spamalot, Cabaret, and even – especially — Dirty Dancing, to get the kind of reviews that not only quotes are made of, but could very well translate into ticket sales, if those reviews are anything to go by. I guess Daddy Cool did everyone a favour in the end: having set the benchmark very low, critics couldn’t very well fail to endorse its successors at least as favourably, until Dirty Dancing arrived and even that had to be applauded.

Perhaps critics just don’t want to be revealed to be out-of-touch with popular tastes, so have simply been hedging their bets and second-guessing their readers’ tastes; but the onslaught of raves means, too, that it’s becoming impossible to actually separate the merely adequate, let alone good, from the really outstanding.

But as Bill Kenwright told me earlier this week, one of the dangers of this quantity of shows following hard upon each other is that, “you get rave reviews, which we did for Cabaret, and you don’t have time to glory in them, because the next week it’s Spamalot, then it’s Dirty Dancing, then it’s Caroline or Change. Whereas normally people would be speaking about those Cabaret reviews for six or seven weeks, now it’s onto the next one. This week it’s Porgy and Bess, and then next week it’s The Sound of Music. They just keep coming. But I think that a vibrant West End can only help itself. You know me — I’m the optimistic. I never quite believe that the marketplace does get overcrowded – I think that hits beget hits.”

And rave reviews seem to beget rave reviews, too. You might have expected them, perhaps, for Caroline, or Change, since it’s a musical with a serious theatrical pedigree in playwright Tony Kushner and the National Theatre’s serious endorsement; or today for Trevor Nunn’s Porgy and Bess revision, since the Gershwin show is a long-admired operatic masterpiece. But with so many apparently outstanding shows around, how does the public make its choice? The reviews are no help, since they seem to suggest that everything’s just great. The reviews duly start cancelling each other.

Perhaps the bile is being stored up for The Sound of Music next week (which is critic proof, anyway, since the advance is so strong). As star Connie Fisher told me recently when I asked her about the critical pressure she might feel under, “Apparently The Sound of Music has never had a good review, so that’s a relief, because no one’s expecting one!” But I wouldn’t be surprised if this show scores a critical home run, too.

There’s a phenomenon that usually happens on the Edinburgh Fringe where you’re so busy rushing and doing and seeing things that there’s little time to digest what’s actually happening, let alone finding the time to do the journalistic work itself, which is to commit one’s thoughts to paper, print, web or even the ether (as radio work immediately evaporates into, unless your words are temporarily reprieved by the good offices of the BBC’s Play Again facility). And sometimes things get a bit overwhelming in London, too. Hence the occasional absence of an update from me in this space, though I do try to commit to a daily entry. But in the last couple of days I’ve been besieged with an onslaught of commitments including press briefings, press previews, interviews and plays (seen and missed) that I’ll try to catch up on now…..

Monday evening: Sometimes one gets the unexpected bonus of a night off. I was all set to attend the return of Stones in His Pockets on Monday evening, when an e-mail arrived from the press office: the performance was cancelled, owing to a viral illness being suffered by co-star Hugh Lee. Funnily enough, I’d wandered by the Duchess on Saturday afternoon, and had seen an understudy notice posted in the foyer – and the matinee board had curiously been altered to a later start time that afternoon, presumably in order to get it rehearsed – and I wondered whether this would affect the press night. It duly has, though performances will resume the next day, says the press release, with the alternate actors instead (the understudy cast), until Lee is fit to return.

But the trouble now is when to re-schedule a press night when he finally is: the press night diary for the next two weeks is entirely full, and is in fact frequently double (and sometimes triple) booked (as witness next Wednesday’s triple-hitter of a double bill of Dominic Cooke’s productions of Pericles and The Winter’s Tale in Stratford-upon-Avon, and The Sound of Music in London). The Almeida have, for instance, been forced once again to settle on a Friday opening for Charlotte Jones’ The Lightning Play – the least popular night of the week for an opening, because the nationals tend not to do overnights of Friday openings, the Sundays won’t appear till the following weekend, and the reviews can get lost. (Of course, Friday nights are sometimes chosen precisely for this reason, when a producer wants to ‘bury’ the reviews).

But though I was looking forward to seeing Stones again, it’s not such a severe loss: frankly, I’ve variously seen it four or five times already, between its runs at the Tricycle, New Ambassadors and Duke of York’s, and once even in Toronto, when the production first travelled there en route to Broadway and I interviewed original stars Conleth Hill and Sean Campion backstage afterwards for an American publication.

Tuesday: The day starts with this year’s Empty Space Peter Brook Awards ceremony at the Theatre Museum – the 17th year of these unique private awards, set up and administered by the indefatigable Blanche Marvin to honour the UK’s smaller studio theatres, and judged by Blanche with a panel of professional critics that comprises the Guardian’s Lyn Gardner, the Daily Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish, the Standard’s Fiona Mountford and myself. Though Lyn and Dominic get to the regional studios far more than Fiona or I do, and I sometimes only scratch at the surface of what’s going on in the London fringe spaces, I enjoy this job and responsibility for the real opportunity it presents to honour an important theatrical sector that is little marked elsewhere in this way. And sometimes, too, we can make a real difference: today’s prize to the Scoop – the free outdoor space next to City Hall – for the up-and-coming theatre category comes with a £1,500 cheque, and since the Scoop’s mission is to present theatre for free, every little bit counts towards keeping it that way. The money, by the way, is Blanche’s personal gift, as is the £2,000 for the winner of the Established Studio (this year, the Orange Tree), plus £350 cheques to each of the other nominees (two in each category). It’s an incredible expression of Blanche’s real commitment to this world.

But though she insists that the awards are there to honour the theatres, today the person most honoured is Blanche herself. Now 81, she’s literally unstoppable, bouncing back after a bout of cancer laid her low over the summer. And it was genuinely affecting to see the warmth and genuine affection she is held in, with heartfelt tributes from Thelma Holt (who no doubt recognises a kindred spirit in Blanche, since Thelma is no less indefatigable herself) and Peter Brook (by way of his assistant Nina Soufy, who makes the trip over from Paris every year specially to represent him), as well as the Independent’s Paul Taylor, who read extracts about Blanche he’d penned in his diary over the years. (The subject of Paul’s diary, which we didn’t know he keeps, was a cause for some alarm amongst the gathered critical throng afterwards; what’s he written about us?)

But if Blanche today was the centre of the gathering, and has always been the reason that it happens at all, it was also the end of an era, since the award’s formal home, the Theatre Museum, will be closing to the public in January (and Blanche, in typical style, is holding a send-off open-house the day before it shuts). The awards, like Blanche, will however go on elsewhere, and hopefully forever.

And tonight, appropriately, she’s already back at it – I walk into the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs, and there she is, for the first night of Meredith Oakes’ Scenes from the Back of Beyond. (So, too, are Fiona and Dominic; there’s often a déjà vu about going to the theatre on first nights, since we’re invariably surrounded by the same colleagues, but after today’s awards it feels even more so). Tonight’s performance is entirely stolen by the appearance of a gorgeous real-life baby at the end of the play. It’s an amazing, wide-eyed debut, full of expression of hope for the future. Alas, however, the author (who was sitting in front of us) tells Blanche – who of course has to ask her whose baby it is (she belongs the Royal Court’s Young Writers Programme administrator Nina Lyndon) — afterwards that usually it will be a prop baby, not the real thing!

There’s no interval, but Fiona and I spend the next half an hour catching up. We don’t even reach the bar – we stop on a landing on the long trail downstairs, and simply chat there. Fiona gets so comfortable she even takes her shoes off. She didn’t like the play at all – as we discover yesterday with her one-star notice in the Evening Standard – and she’s anxious after Ian Rickson stops for a friendly word (he’d been at the awards this morning, too, and says nice things about them. He usually avoids going to such ceremonies, but he turns up to this one for Blanche). Knowing what she feels about the play, there’s a feeling of duplicity, perhaps, in this kind of social friendliness; but that’s different to the job we’re there to do. And I think – I hope – that there’s an understanding on both sides that to do our jobs we have to call it like we see it, regardless of personal connections. It’s something I’m going to be sorely tested on tomorrow.

Wednesday: Two consecutive press events in the morning get me off to an early start. At 9am, we’re called to the Little Angel Theatre in Islington, for a “press breakfast” – coffee, croissants and pastries – to hear of this tiny puppet theatre’s plans for the next year. Though I’ve known about it for years, many of us only ever finally went to it for the first time a couple of years ago when Gregory Doran staged a puppet version of Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus and Adonis there a couple of years ago. Now he’s reviving it, first at the Swan Theatre, Stratford as part of the Complete Works season in March, and then returning it to the Little Angel; and he’s here today to talk about his connections to the theatre. In fact, he tells me, though he lives nearby, he, too, had never been inside till he finally did this show there, so that makes two of us.

He’s of course also in the midst of rehearsals for Merry Wives – the Musical, for which it was announced just two days ago announced that Desmond Barrit had sustained an injury (doing DIY, it turns out, that would take five weeks to heal) and that Simon Callow was replacing him as Falstaff. Greg revealed the secretive plans to conscript Callow – who was tracked down to a beach in Malta where he was filming last Wednesday – to join the RSC for the first time, since Greg didn’t want to destabilise the cast by telling them of Des’s indisposition before he had a replacement ready to announce. More personally, Greg also told me of the long-established professional rivalry between Callow and Greg’s partner Antony Sher, who could in fact be twins of a kind: they were literally born a day apart in the same year. Each has long kept a watchful eye on the other’s careers. Sher has undoubtedly had more classical success than Callow, but Callow more film success than Sher; both are acclaimed writers; and both, as it happens, have partners who are theatre directors (who have directed them in plays), who are both bearded! “We could go on and on!”, joked Greg. But with Callow now working for Greg, the two households are being joined…. So perhaps the compliment could be repaid by Sher working for Daniel Kramer next!

But we’re not here to swap RSC gossip, at least no more so than we’ve done already! The business of the day is a celebration of the Little Angel (where Greg intends to workshop a production of Gulliver’s Travels next, to see if it works). But though this theatre has been one of London’s best-kept theatrical secrets since it was founded all of 45 years ago, its now reaching far, far wider than before, with its production of The Mouse Queen, for instance, currently now at the Unicorn and then going to Hampstead Theatre for Christmas. Film director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice), son of the theatre’s late founder John Wright, was on hand to talk with huge affection about the role the theatre played in firing his own creative imagination. And new artistic director Peter Glanville spoke about other new lottery-funded initiatives that the theatre is about to embark upon.

Then it was straight onto an “open rehearsal” for Scrooge – the Musical, that a few press reporters and photographers were invited to sit in on as this touring production makes its final preparations before hitting the road in Wolverhampton next week. Producer Bill Kenwright ran a similar exercise for his production of Cabaret ahead of that opening in the West End, and it’s interesting to give the press a glimpse of the church hall environments in which shows like these are created. But whereas Cabaret had been set up as an interview opportunity with all of the creative and principal cast members available for interview, today was more of a photo-op only: the reason for the interest in the production at all – the return to the stage of Michael Barrymore for the first time since the debacle of his failed one-man comedy show at Wyndham’s in 2003, that closed immediately after its press night – was not available to talk to yet. Instead, we saw him going through his paces with some panache that saw some of the old sparkle and confidence back in place. I spoke to Bill afterwards, one of the old-school of producers – probably our most prolific, in fact, who keeps product churning through theatres up and down the land – and it’s always refreshing to encounter his unique brand of spirited enthusiasm and unquenchable belief in theatre.

Worrying, as I did, about the lack of plays in the West End – not helped by Bill’s own neglect of the form this winter as he has concentrated on bringing Cabaret to town – he replied, “I don’t think we have too much to worry about with the playhouses, I truly don’t” – and then revealed his card for the new year, that included Billie Piper starring in a new production of Christopher Hampton’s Treats, plus a revival of a Somerset Maugham play and a new play by Richard Harris. But the fact that Bill usually offers such a full slate of plays in production like this means that we feel its absence even more keenly when he doesn’t.

And talking of old-school producers: Paul Elliott is another of our longest-serving veterans, but unlike Bill, has slowed down a bit lately. I’ve always liked Paul, because he talks straight: when he revived Rattle of a Simple Man two years ago and it promptly failed, I asked him why it didn’t work, and he said, “It wasn’t good enough and you were right”, referring to my review. When I saw him at the TMA Awards a few weeks ago, he pulled me to one side to tell me about a new departure for him – writing his first-ever play, There’s No Place Like A Home, and wondered whether I could catch it when it got to Bromley this week. I said I would and was true to my word, seeing it last night; but now I have to tell it straight, too. Set in a retirement home for aged actors, the play offers a home for 9 aged actors plus four younger ones, but really they and the play should have been sent into retirement at the first rehearsal. One of the old actors says at the end, “I’m not past it – I can still paralyse an audience”, but so does the play.

So Andrew Lloyd Webber has parted ways with yet another leading player, just as performances have begun. And, to paraphrase Lady Bracknell, to lose one may be a misfortune; to lose another looks like carelessness. Or worse, incompetence.

The road to an Andrew Lloyd Webber produced musical first night has, it seems, long been littered with the discarded corpses of performers along the way: remember Roger Moore’s departure during rehearsals from Aspects of Love? Or Patti LuPone’s from Sunset Boulevard, somewhere between premiering it in London, the New York Times review of her performance, and the show opening in LA with Glenn Close instead – who then took it to New York? Or, when Close left for Broadway, the replacement lined up for LA – Faye Dunaway – was suddenly dismissed before she’d given a single performance, and the production summarily closed?

Now, following the Emma Williams debacle on The Sound of Music — who was employed but then discharged from the need to fulfil duties as an alternate Maria when it became apparent that Connie Fisher was up to doing all eight performances a week, and more to the point, the public actually wanted to see her do it – the leading man has been let go, too. In this case, Simon Shepherd actually gave two public performances last Friday and Saturday – for which he was variously categorised, by theatregoers that saw it, on a theatre bulletin board as “too bad for words, his singing is laughable and is even wooden when he is supposed to melt and fall in love with Maria in about 3 minutes flat” , and “hopelessly miscast” , while another wrote, “I don’t know how Simon S dare pick up his wages, he was out of tune, cannot act his way out of a paper bag and forgot his words”.

Of course, the entire spotlight has been on the casting of Maria for this production via the How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? programme. But the trouble with doing it in isolation of the rest of the company is that there was no way of determining, as a result, whether the person chosen would work with her leading man. As one message poster complained, “There was no heart to any of it and I didn’t believe that Maria could fall in love with this Captain which is what the whole 2 and a half hours is about. There was no chemistry between them.”

And that exposes a key difficulty with casting a show like this in this way. Never mind technical aptitude – which Shepherd may well have demonstrated in auditions, we hope – the more intangible qualities of personal chemistry between actors can’t be tested until they’re in the same room together.

It’s surprising that the discovery came so late in the day, though, and not until they were put in front of an audience for the first time. And it’s an expensive mistake to make: both Williams and Shepherd will have to bought out of their contracts, and replacements paid. Intriguingly, Alexander Hanson who has now gone into the role of Captain von Trapp appeared in a workshop of the show earlier this year. So he was obviously always in the frame, but didn’t quite have the telly credits that Shepherd has. Pity, of course, that another Alex – Jennings – is otherwise engaged at the National, since he too might make an ideal von Trapp…..

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When the Arts Theatre shut its doors last year, there was a little wailing and gnashing of teeth at the loss of an intimate West End venue with such a venerable history that included the English language premiere of Waiting for Godot. But most of us accepted the inevitable; such prime real estate obviously had a value far in excess of its theatrical one, and besides, when was the last time you had actually seen a good show there?

Now the theatre has made a virtually silent, sudden return, and despite claims of a “major refurbishment”, nothing more than a little glitter has been added to the walls as you descend to the stalls, and some strange 3D mirror portraits added to the auditorium walls, which at least gives you somewhere else to look at besides the stage (though that surely isn’t the point) if things get a bit boring there. This little black box of a theatre has always been a bit bleak and depressing, and there’s nothing to lift the spirits about it now. The springs in the seats have entirely sprung; and the creaks emanating from them as you move your uncomfortable body do your moaning for you.

And though I want to applaud producer Andy Jordan for his valiant attempt to use the theatre to give a showcase to an Edinburgh show he did, 2Graves, this short, static piece of solo narrative verse wasn’t big enough to fill the Arts the night I went. There were barely thirty of us there, which failed to generate the heat — in any sense — to warm the chilly place up. But my own internal temperatures weren’t helped, either, at Saturday night’s performance by the unhelpfulness of the staff, who didn’t have a record of the press seats to issue or, having persuaded them to give me a ticket, didn’t understand the etiquette of giving a programme as well.

If the Arts is going to survive in the crowded marketplace of the West End, it is going to have to smarten up its act.

We are in the happy, and just occasionally overwhelming, position in London of there being far more theatre openings to accommodate than there are nights in the week. So critics frequently have choices to make. You can easily go to the theatre five or six nights a week and still see only a fraction of what’s on. On the larger papers – The Guardian or Telegraph or Times or (sometimes) the Independent – there are deputies, who help the lead critics cover the terrain, though the second stringers are often also deputised around the country, with the Guardian’s Lyn Gardner, Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish and the Times’ Sam Marlowe, diligently clocking up train miles as they do so.

But being a one-man band, as I am (along with many of my Sunday paper colleagues), we can only cover what we can cover. So its frustrating when you get a ‘dead’ week like the one we’re in now – the sole opening of any significance was Pool (No Water) that opened at the Lyric Hammersmith on Wednesday – whereas the coming week has four openings on Tuesday, seven on Wednesday, two on Thursday, and three on Friday.

With so many productions fighting for so few critics – and so little space in the papers themselves – there are going to be some that are lost entirely. Of course, productions come to the boil – ready for public exposure – on their own timetables, not to a critical one. But the critical mass of productions vying for our attention in London at the moment is surely no good for anyone.

The night before last I saw the best film I’ve seen for ages – actually, it was the only film I’ve seen for ages, since I’m at the theatre most nights and hardly ever actually get to the cinema much. But having loved Frost/Nixon, and having lately interviewed both Michael Sheen (from that play) and Alex Jennings (currently in The Alchemist at the National) both of whom told me about their roles as respectively Tony Blair and Prince Charles in The Queen – not to mention an array of other theatrical talent, from Helen McCrory as Cherie Blair and Roger Allam as the Queen’s Private Secretary to Robin Soans as the Queen’s Equerry – I was dying to see it.

Both are scripted by Peter Morgan; and his behind-the-scenes dramatic speculations, whether of the circumstances behind the Frost-Nixon TV interviews or here of the Royal Family’s apparently muted reaction to the death of Diana that was counterbalanced with the very public grieving that took place all over the country, are both riveting spectacles that make you feel as if you’re a fly-on-the-wall; and though we can’t be quite sure what really took place behind those closed doors, Morgan takes us right into the hearts and minds of these living people. It feels utterly inhabited, and utterly real, even as you know its only being minutely imagined. But the fiction is gloriously sustained alongside the reality with the seamless juxtaposition of real documentary footage from the period.

As I watched The Queen, I could only speculate: what would the real-life Queen and her family would make of it? I would dearly love to know. But even if we can’t find that out yet – if ever – an interview in today’s Daily Telegraph with David Frost lifts the lid on what Frost makes of Frost/Nixon, and it’s remarkable both for the generosity of Frost’s response – “my overall reaction is that this is as exciting a night as you are likely to get in the theatre this year” – but also for the shafts of insight he also provides of what really happened. The fictional phone call between the two men that Morgan dramatises near the end of the play, in which the wilderness beckons for the loser, Frost characterises as a “masterstroke” – “It captures the Nixonian self-pity and his sense of being on the wrong side of the tracks.” But he adds that he doesn’t think the line where The Frost character says of Nixon, “He wants me to finish him” is “remotely true, but it’s a good line. I don’t think Nixon was that generous.”

Frost, who didn’t have artistic control over the play, uses the opportunity of the interview to put the record straight on a few other things. “I’m delighted it’s had such an enormous success. Obviously, I would have preferred that it be accurate as well.” Some of them are errors of record that Frost wants to put straight: for instance, the suggestion that his Australian series had been scrapped, as had his New York show. “It’s a detail, but I did specials whenever I went out to Australia, so there was no series to be cancelled. And The David Frost Show (in America) was 750 editions, but it ended some years before, in June of 72. All those things get compressed.” Nor did Nixon ever give a filibustering answer of 23 minutes: “That’s dopey. In television, three minutes is an eternity, and even someone who had never conducted an interview before would ever let anybody, including the President of the United States, go on for 23 minutes.”

Frost here, however, clearly goes on for a great deal longer than 23 minutes in his interview with the Telegraph’s Jasper Rees, and it’s worth savouring every minute. Especially when he replays the final “confession”, the one in which Frost elicited the admission, “I let down the American people, the whole system of government, the hopes and dreams of all those young people” – as Frost puts it, “one was incredibly aware of something very significant having happened”; and that’s also the triumph of Morgan’s play, as directed by Michael Grandage and ferociously played by Michael Sheen (as Frost) and Frank Langella (as Nixon): it leaves you in no doubt that this is a searingly significant play.