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….
I don't think Barbara Cook's first solo appearance at Carnegie Hall was in 1961. I believe 1961 was her first appearance at Carnegie but as part of a large tribute to Bernstein by the New York Philharmonic where she sang Glitter and be Gay. I may be mistaken but I believe her solo appearances were the famous 1975 event (Barbara Cook at Carnegie Hall), another in 1979 or '80 (It's Better with a Band), 1998 or so, Mostly Sondheim and finally Mostly Sondheim Revisited.
Will Evil Dead The Musical have Bruce Campbell in it?
I havenàt seen The Little Dog but what I find interesting is that you pick on Scott Ellis, who while not having commerical success with musicals (Tom Sawyer and Steel Pier) has found general acclaim and success with plays - The Man Who Had All The Luck and Twelve Angry Men among them. While hardley a visionary he is adept at casting and bringing plays to a vibrant theatrical life.