Critical prozac….

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.