December 2006 Archives

Here’s a New Year’s Eve thought to conjure with: according to a story in yesterday’s Guardian, Newcastle upon Tyne has topped a survey of 14 UK cities in a study to name the arts capital of the country.

According to the study, for TV channel Artsworld, the citizens of Newcastle are, per capita, more likely to visit art galleries, museums and concerts; have better libraries and bookshops, and have more arts students and the second highest number of theatres, than anywhere else in Britain.

Apart from the fact that London is near the bottom of the list (at Number 9), there’s an even more worrying entry at Number 10: Liverpool – which is, of course, the 2008 European Capital of Culture. It may have aspirations for that continental title, but clearly it can’t hold a candle to Newcastle, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast, Bristol, Manchester, Plymouth and London that precede it in the British stakes.

But I also have a confession to make: I have never been to Newcastle. I have been to every other city on this list – after Liverpool, it is completed by Glasgow, Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham – but, except for passing through it on the train en route to Edinburgh every year, I have never actually stepped foot in Newcastle. Obviously there’s a major part of my cultural education lacking. And perhaps that should be my first New Year’s resolution for 2007: to go there. (Where, though, is Brighton in the list? Surely it must have one of the savviest arts audiences in the UK?)

And here’s to a successful 2007 for all of us! Thank you for reading in 2006, and I look forward to catching up with you on the other side…..

I’ve already blogged here about the “list mania” that erupts around this time of year, which the Daily Telegraph’s arts editor Sarah Crompton stole a march on everyone this year by publishing her 15 top (and 5 bottom) arts events of the year for before the middle of December. Since I wrote about that on December 13, I’ve duly been dredging my West End theatrical memories of the year for various outlets, from the pages of The Stage to an audio discussion you can hear on theatrevoice where critics David Benedict, Charlie Spencer, Jane Edwardes and myself spoke about our hits (and misses) of the year, as well as critical round-ups that will appear in the Sunday Express this weekend, plus ones that have already appeared elsewhere online, on both the BBC London website, where I also listed my Top Six hits and howlers, and on theatre.com, where Matt Wolf and I separately chose our favourite five top shows of the year, and only coincided on the choice of one! (This proves, if nothing else, the inevitable subjectivity of any such list).

I actually found myself disputing with myself each time I drew up a new list (the terms of engagement are subtly different each time, so you find yourself making different lists, even if the same highlights keep coming to the fore). Today, I’ve had to compile my last and possibly definitive one, when I finally cast my secret ballot for this year’s Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards (to be presented on January 30 at the Prince of Wales Theatre). So I’m not going to spill any secrets today, and in any case, since this is a vote of the entire membership, I could potentially fail to come up with a single winner!

But I’m delighted to note on the voting form that, joining the categories for Best Shakespearean Performance and Most Promising Newcomer other than a Playwright (which are respectively already named in honour of John and Wendy Trewin and Jack Tinker), the Best Musical award has been newly designated with the name of Peter Hepple, the late, great editor of The Stage who continued to work for the paper until the day before his death this year, though he had long retired from the editor’s chair. It’s a very fitting tribute to one of the theatre’s most diligent and enthusiastic reporters; but you can’t help but wonder what Peter would make of your own choice as a result.

This is the 400th entry on this blog — so it’s appropriate that I’m today reporting on another list with a hundred entries of its own. As you can read online today, and in tomorrow’s issue of The Stage, Andrew Lloyd Webber and David Ian have jointly topped the annual Stage 100 list of the year’s most influential theatrical personalities, on and offstage. This follows a bit of a head-to-head stand-off last year when Lloyd Webber was toppled from pole position by the ascendancy of Ian, only of course to come together professionally this year to co-produce the runaway hit of The Sound of Music – with a little bit of help from television friends and the casting-by-public-vote of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?

Now that they’re in harmony at the top of this year’s Stage 100, they’ll part ways again to go head-to-head in another bout of reality TV casting next year when they respectively use this new casting tool to cast revivals of revivals of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (Lloyd Webber, via the BBC) and Grease (Ian, via ITV1) that they’ve both previously done.

As our editor Brian Attwood comments, “It will be interesting to see how they both fare next year when they are competitors with two separate TV shows, rather than collaborators.” But while there’s an inevitable subjectivity and intrigue to the way lists like these are drawn up – and the public, by the way, is being encouraged (in the spirit of the times) to cast its own vote for whom they deem to be the most influential in a survey here – this is a fun survey of who’s in and who’s out and the changing fortunes of the people who make the British theatre one of the most compelling places on earth.

This year, for instance, Jude Kelly hurtles back into the top twenty list – after a five year absence from it – in her new role as artistic director at the South Bank Centre. That’ll sharpen the differences that are, if a report in The Observer a couple of weekends is anything to go by, are already erupting over there. According to the Observer, “The maverick vision of the artistic director, Jude Kelly, has prompted a series of ‘stand-up rows’ between her and the chief executive, Michael Lynch, over what will be staged at the venue”. It further reports one executive (who wishes to remain anonymous) complaining, “We just don’t know what kind of business we are in yet”, and another former employee saying, “There is still no clear programme. People are feeling a bit leaderless.” But if Kelly is yet to show her hand – and another executive quoted says, ‘It is as if everybody is still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Nobody wants this place to fail, but this is a time for working out the nitty-gritty, and nobody seems to be doing that” – she will hopefully feel empowered and emboldened by her placement so high in the artistic firmament again to finally make some of those ideas public.

But if the South Bank Centre is floundering a little, it’s also refreshing to find Vicky Featherstone and John Tiffany of the National Theatre of Scotland amongst the new entries to the Top Twenty. Here’s a thrilling new initiative – a national theatre without the boundaries of a building-based programme to fulfil – that has, since its first performance less than a year ago in February 2006, already put itself at the forefront of British theatre. It has been involved in creating some 28 productions in 62 different locations – from theatres to ferries and forests – and the amazing Edinburgh hit Black Watch is now due to hit the road in the New Year.

Also new to the Top Twenty list is Jonathan Church, who has astutely put Chichester Festival Theatre back on the map in his first year at the helm of a theatre that was seriously floundering under its triumvirate of artistic directors before, while another newcomer to the list, director Rufus Norris may have suffered a rare directorial misstep when his hit West End production of Festen floundered badly when it went to Broadway, but he’s still top of the freelance directorial tree for shows like Market Boy at the National and the current West End production of Cabaret. Dominic Cooke, the other directorial new entry, made a stonking West End hit of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible when his RSC production transferred to the Gielgud, and of course now takes over in the New Year from Ian Rickson at the helm of the Royal Court, where his unique parallel talents for new and classic plays will be acutely tested.

Britain – and this blog – may have ground to a halt for the last few days, but although I may have given my keyboard a rest, I’ve not entirely stopped myself. I’ve had several thrilling cultural experiences – the kind that make the endless pursuit I make of such things worth the while.

First off, and very much a case of better late than never, I caught the final performance of the short run of one of Noel Coward’s earliest plays, The Rat Trap, at the Finborough. Written in 1918 when he was just 18 years old, but not seen since its original 1926 production – long after later plays like Fallen Angels, The Vortex and Hay Fever had been successfully produced – had played for just 12 performances at Hampstead’s Everyman Theatre (now, of course, an art-house cinema), its 80-year neglect is very curious, but this is no mere curiosity piece. Though you would have thought that there might be more than 19 hardy souls – including the director and myself –with enough curiosity to take it in at the 45-seater Finborough, even on the eve before Christmas Eve, we were the lucky ones; for this was not only an astonishingly mature play about an imploding relationship between a couple both of whom have artistic aspirations, but Tim Luscombe’s exquisitely-judged in-the-round production also did it proud. (And we were able to do something that Coward never did himself – he never saw it onstage).

Luscombe, who has resourcefully previously given successful life to neglected Coward plays like Easy Virtue and Point Valaine, has weathered a curiously chequered career of his own – after early West End successes with Easy Virtue and Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase (that both transferred from the King’s Head, with the latter also going to New York), as well as his own play EuroVision, first seen at the Drill Hall and subsequently transferring to the Vaudeville, he hasn’t been in the West End mainstream that seemed to be his destiny for a while now; that position seems to have been taken by his younger brother Christopher instead (who curiously also made his West End directorial debut with a rare Coward, when he directed Star Quality at the Apollo in 2001). But Tim’s production of The Rat Trap confirms his rare abilities to not only uncover a rare gem but also to give it an utterly convincing inner and outer life.

Meanwhile, a sense of separate but colliding lives is amazingly animated in Duckie’s dinner-theatre-with-a-difference, The Class Club, at the Barbican Pit. I’ve already written about experiencing this show in the upper class, but returning for the middle-class evening on Friday evening was to feel that there was a party happening there that night – but we were entirely excluded from it in a lonely pool of dull, smug isolation. Of course, I knew now just what the party was like in Upper Class – a fine, silver-service gourmet meal – but with the working class party just on the other side of the curtain in full raucous swing, the one we were being served – self-regarding and embarrassed, by turns – was sometimes excruciating in the spot-on (im)pertinence of its social satire. Of course this was the class that we were most likely to feel the pain of our social exclusion from the other classes in, since this was where the majority of the audience (and, if truth be told, the performers too) actually belonged. But when, at the end the toffs were toasting “God Save the Queen” and the lower orders were joining hands for “Auld Lang Syne”, the fact that we had merely had a group shake-out of our energies and then had a few embarrassed hugs from the performers, was to feel completely left out. I am greatly relieved that, though I may have to live this every day, I won’t have to do it again there; instead, when I go again next week, I’m letting my hair down (or at least covering what’s left of it with a paper party hat) in the working-class.

Then last night I did something very rare for me: I went to the cinema! As someone who loves the theatre, I obviously love storytelling; and the great joy of going to the cinema for me is that I’m being told stories but I’m not working! But also the cinema can do its storytelling with a different kind of economy; close-ups and imagery can take the place of words. I went to see the extraordinary Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and it was sensational, in every sense. The story of an apprentice perfumer, so obsessed with smells that he makes it his mission to capture the essence of women he captures and murders, this is a man who could have turned the fragrant Mary Archer into a fragrance…

But the thrill, too, for me is that the lead role of Grenouille is taken by Ben Whishaw, the young actor who came from nowhere (or more specifically, direct from graduating from RADA) just two and a half years ago to take the title role of Hamlet for Trevor Nunn at the Old Vic. And true to the promise that this amazing, unusual young actor revealed then, he’s extraordinary. In an interview in the Daily Telegraph last week, he said that when he read the screenplay, he found it “a bit alarming. Usually the lines are the first thing you gravitate towards for information about your character. But with Grenouille there was nothing to get hold of.” That’s because his role is virtually silent. “I began to feel that he was a character who, left to his own devices, wouldn’t really speak at all. I thought about him as being autistic in some way. He simply doesn’t understand human beings. Social situations terrify him.”

And I suspect, having interviewed Ben in front of a National Theatre development department audience when he was in The Seagull there earlier this year, the actor isn’t too keen on them, either. He tugged on his jumper and avoided eye contact much of the time – but if he is physically awkward offstage and screen, that becomes a key asset when he’s onstage or screen: he has a unique, troubled vulnerability that is articulate even when he’s not speaking.

And I was obviously not the only one to find this offstage awkwardness: the Telegraph interviewer Benjamin Secher writes, “Ben Whishaw is fed up with theatre. ‘I’ve got a little bit, I dunno…’, mumbles the 26-year-old actor, head down, eyes fixed on the contents of his teacup. ‘I guess I’m more pedantic about the theatre these days. I find it harder to lose myself in the experience.’ He looks up and his prominent brow, until now a perfect horizontal, becomes a rumpled ‘w’. ‘Perhaps’, he says, ‘some of the magic has gone.’”

Let’s hope not. He’s fantastic on screen – but we also need him back onstage.

The shock announcement yesterday that Samuel West, who is only in his second term of office as artistic director of Sheffield Theatres, will depart at the end of the current season gives one pause, and cause for speculation, about what the reasons might be. Handed a theatre with a thriving artistic agenda by his predecessor Michael Grandage – who was doing double duty as he juggled that job with also running the Donmar, which has just had the best year of any theatre in London – West was an intriguing choice for the post, since he had never run a theatre before, and had directed comparatively little as well. (His prior directorial credits had included an ENO opera, Cosi Fan Tutte, staged while the company was away from its home base; and a production of Christopher Fry’sThe Lady’s Not For Burning at Chichester Festival Theatre).

But Sam, who like Mark Rylance at Shakespeare’s Globe, was a popular classical actor who knew how to galvanise the troops; and he made some bold artistic statements, such as his early decision to give Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain its first major revival since the original highly controversial National Theatre production in 1980. He also provided one of this year’s most powerful and poignant evenings when he was joined by his father Timothy in Caryl Churchill’s A Number – to play father and son(s) in this extraordinary play about the genetic cloning.

The official statement issued about his departure – which came from a PR company I was previously unaware of, since they do not routinely handle the theatre’s dealings with the national press on new productions – says it was a decision “reached by mutual consent of both West and Sheffield Theatres Trust Board on Wednesday”, and goes on to suggest that a big part of the decision was the fact that “The Crucible and Crucible Studio will be closed for refurbishment during what would have been the 2007/08 season, and it was agreed that this was a good point to allow West to leave and pursue other projects.”

This refurbishment programme (which will see the theatre closed from January 2008 to March 2009) should not, however, have been a surprise to West, or at least I hope not – he should have been an active and integral part of those plans. In any case, it doesn’t mean the work had to stop. During the Young Vic’s two-year refurbishment, for instance, David Lan became building manager as well as making sure that the company kept its profile high with its ‘Walkabout’ season elsewhere, doing some 22 shows at 41 different venues. The Arts Council’s Christopher Frayling, who had recommended a shut-down during the refurbishment, ate his words publicly on the opening night, saying that it had been a huge success to keep its work going over that period.

West and the board have found a face-saving formula for both of them that has seen him agree to be appointed an associate artist, with the stated aim of working again in Sheffield when the building re-opens. But it still leaves the Crucible without an overall artistic manager during its closure (when the Lyceum will, of course, still be available for productions and the artistic programme could have simply been moved there), but more immediately for next autumn, too, when it is still open but West’s tenure will have already ended. A main house show for the autumn is evidently to be announced in the New Year, but who will choose it?

At a time when Jonathan Church has put Chichester Festival Theatre back on the map after a rocky few years there, it seems a pity that Sheffield should so dramatically lurch off course now.

Now that Connie’s a star, and The Sound of Music’s co-producer David Ian is already presiding over exporting the idea of casting a theatre show by reality TV to the US with a new production of Grease there (that was, of course, his first big West End hit as an independent producer), it’s now been announced that the BBC will follow up the success of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? with Any Dream Will Do.

And perhaps it’s now the case that any star will do when it comes to populating the West End billboards, as a television search is now conducted for a planned new production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. This time the star search isn’t being confined only to the lead role: they’re also looking for a girl to play the narrator figure, the Pharoah/Elvis impersonator, and the best schools’ choir, too, to accompany them.

But while the unprecedented success of the TV search for Maria has undoubtedly fuelled a surge at the box office (and got the nation talking and thinking about musicals again), isn’t it too soon for Joseph to come around again? Bill Kenwright’s touring version, which both preceded the last Really Useful Company production at the London Palladium in 1991 and has been back on the road ever since, only closed last year at the New London after a two-year run there.

This year the cameras have watched as a new play was selected from a previously unknown playwright and projected into the West End spotlight, where it quickly and justifiably wilted, in The Play’s the Thing; and watched as Connie Fisher triumph – next week, we’ll get the backstage story when BBC1 air How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? – Connie’s Story on December 27. In an interview in today’s Daily Telegraph, Connie still seems as refreshingly normal and unspoilt as when I met her at a press call before the show opened, alongside her then co-star Simon Shepherd, who was suddenly subsequently dismissed after just the second preview. “When they called to tell me at midnight, I thought it was to say they had made a mistake about me,” she says of that event. As for the earlier departure of Emma Williams, who had been contracted to be her standby, she also says, “I’m glad not to have the competition; I want to make the role my own.” And as for a tabloid ‘scandal’ when she was caught allegedly romancing a sound technician on the show, she says simply, “My boyfriend Neal and I read it together at 6am; last week we ate fish and chips off that paper. It was flattering, really, to have been on the front page on the day of Tom Cruise’s wedding. “

“Whatever happened to class?”, wonders Mama Morton in Chicago, and goes on to lament, “Now no one even says oops/when they’re passing their gas”. She’s, of course, referring solely to matters of social etiquette, rather than the (not so) niceties of social division that are still perpetuated in Britain where your accent, dress, education and behavioural reflexes can all still be used in evidence against you.

And last night, the new show from the Olivier Award winning Duckie troupe put a delicious (in every sense) new spin on these notions, providing a dazzling and unique piece of “immersive” event theatre in which the audience chooses (according to price) which of three social groups to join, and are served food and entertainment appropriate to their choice of lower, middle or upper class.

The evening is called The Class Club, and you’re encouraged to move up, or down, a peg or two – “to strut it or slum it”, in the words of the publicity – and asked to dress for the occasion you’ve selected. Last was press night, and even the critics were asked to join in. Since I elected to go Upper Class, I dragged my dinner suit out of its mothballs (though I couldn’t go the whole way since I didn’t have a bow tie, but I had a freshly laundered white shirt, at least); somehow, I had two pairs of DJ trousers, and could still fit into one! When I arrived at the Barbican, the lovely in-house PR Angela Dias immediately exclaimed that she’d lost her bet: she was sure that the critics wouldn’t rise to the challenge of dressing the part. Some simply took the easy option and came as they were – i.e. middle class. For the Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish, the Guardian’s Lyn Gardner, and Time Out’s Rachel Halliburton, no change of clothes were therefore necessary.

But those in the upper and lower orders tried a bit harder. The Independent on Sunday’s Kate Bassett won the critics’ prize for the best get-up: she came tottering in on high heels (quickly installed in the ladies’ loo, and removed there afterwards before going home), tight top, and powder-pink baseball cap for a brilliant chav look. The Evening Standard’s Fiona Mountford, meanwhile, went the other way, dressing up in an elegant black dress that I both ungallantly and indelicately suggested could have gone either way: she was either upper class, or a working-class tart with aspirations. She was too classy to hit me, so she was obviously upper class! And Benedict Nightingale of The Times – who usually sports a crumpled and/or stained suit – dragged out his best winter suit, while The Observer’s Susannah Clapp was beautifully attired in what looked like a vintage dress.

The audience are duly ushered into one of three separate, privately curtained-off areas for a Christmas dinner – silver service waiters serving a salmon starter, then pheasant, sprouts and mash for the main course, topped off by Christmas pudding and cheese and biscuits for the upper class (£40); an organic menu for the middle-class (£25); and carvery for the lower-class (£14.99). The entertainment in each area is also bespoke – the waiters become operatic divas in upper class, while there’s a heavily shoulder-padded club singer, a drunken Father Christmas, and a boy rapper in working class. You get a sense of what’s happening in the other rooms from the soundscape that spills over between each area, giving you that irresistible sense of a great party literally happening somewhere else that’s tantalisingly just out of out-of-reach. A curtain is drawn back briefly between the elegant, chandeliered area of the long upper class dining area and the neon strip-lit working class area as the latter go to collect their food, and as they peer through the plastic glass between us, we’re suddenly in a goldfish bowl. And then gradually, as the curtains are drawn back, the three worlds collide – and the waiting staff (who also provide the entertainment in their own areas) spill into each other’s areas to see how they other half live.

I’m actually going to watch it from each of the other two points of view, too – I have booked (and paid!) to see it again in middle-class later this week, and lower-class in the New Year. Speaking to colleagues afterwards who had been in the other classes, I discovered that, far from being in their own comfort zone in the middle-class, this sounded like the most intimidating of all the areas. The working class seemed the most fun.

Duckie’s shows certainly repay revisiting. I loved their last Barbican show so much – C’est Barbican!, presented in 2003 and 2004 – that I went several times. It was a burlesque that wasn’t just unique every night, but unique to every table in the room: you ordered acts off a menu that were then performed at your table, as available. As well as a core group of performers, special guests were invited to add to the mix, and one night, an act that rejoices in the name of Boogaloo Stu was there. I got my table to agree to invite him to perform one of his acts “Boogaloo Stu Wanks for You” for us. It was exactly what it said on the label – he produced a giant dildo, covered the table in plastic sheeting, and proceeded to spray the table at the, er, climax of his act. When Duckie won the Olivier, I remember telling some incredulous industry-folk about this act, and I could tell no one quite believed me.

There’s nothing quite so shocking here. But this is a one-of-a-kind evening all the same: as Lady Mountford said to me, if only every night at the theatre could be like this. After all the pantos she has been enduring for the Standard, this must have come as a welcome adult alternative.

When the Young Vic re-opened its doors back in October, one of the great pleasures was, of course, the fact that – like Hackney Empire or the Royal Court after their refurbs – this was still recognisably the theatre we loved and remembered of old. I was shown it a few weeks before the opening, and blogged at the time 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.” The main changes, I wrote, were elsewhere: “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.”

On Friday night, I saw the second new show there – The Enchanted Pig, which like the opening show, Tobias and the Angel, is a contemporary opera by Jonathan Dove, and once again breaks the mould for Christmas shows in London as the Young Vic have long excelled at. It’s a thrilling idea to trust a young audience to respond to a new piece of operatic storytelling, but they do. It confirms the age-old adage: if you build it, they will come. You need to expose audiences to something so they can discover they have a taste for it. And the Young Vic, having built up a reputation for the most interesting Christmas shows in town, has (re)built itself and they have come.

But as I also wrote back in September, “the biggest interventions 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.” They built these, but I didn’t come – at least not to the opening of the first show in the larger Maria studio, Dennis Kelly’s Love and Money, as I was away when it opened. But I finally caught it on Saturday, its closing day, and though its too late now to therefore comment on a play you can’t see anyway, I thought it was particularly poignant that, for a theatre named after one of British theatre’s most innovative theatre designers – the late Maria Bjornson – the first play in the high, handsome space should be designed so thrillingly by a young (and female) designer, Anna Fleischle. A tall curved wall, beside another flat one, produces a constant flow of different locales and hidden surprises: it’s a wonderful set for a wonderful play. Like Maria Bjornson, Fleischle is obviously a problem-solver when it comes to design. Though the flexible studio space that bears Bjornson’s name isn’t so much a problem as an opportunity for clever theatre makers, it’s superb to see it being inhabited so innovatively.

Later on Saturday, I also returned to another production whose young, female designer Katrina Lindsay also plays a pivotal role in: Rufus Norris’ re-imagined (and highly imaginative) staging of Cabaret offers a brilliant series of skewed, geometric shapes, endlessly reconfigured, to offer unique perspectives of the skewed, edgy world that the show itself inhabits. More than that, however, I returned to see it again away from the pressure of having to review it on the first night so I could simply enjoy it; and it was a great relief to feel that I could still stand by my original judgement (especially worrying since part of that is emblazoned on a large quotes panel outside the theatre!). One question, though: where did the Lyric centre aisle vanish to in between opening night and now? I remember quite clearly sitting on the centre aisle – but on Saturday, there was none!

As reported in this week’s paper, ATG is following Delfont-Mackintosh’s West End lead in planning to levy a ‘restoration fee’ on top of the ticket price as a contribution towards the upkeep and restoration of some of its ailing theatres, with a £1 surcharge to be levied on tickets at Richmond, the New Wimbledon and Brighton’s Theatre Royal.

Of course, the public are already widely being charged extra for the “convenience” of booking their tickets by phone or online – and this now means that they’re also being charged an additional fee towards the fabric of the building itself. (Imagine if Sainsbury’s or Tesco’s tried to slap an extra fee at the check-out for the convenience of providing till staff, or for the privilege of occupying the premises, and you’ll see how unfair it feels). But all of these fees are a neat way for the theatre owners to raise additional revenue (on top of the rent and contra they charge, not to mention bar, catering and programme sales income) that producers – the people who actually generate the product that goes into those theatres – don’t see.

The lead in this has naturally come from New York, where this additional fee has become standard practice. But though Broadway houses are often horribly cramped, with the seats getting narrower as the average size of the theatregoers themselves gets wider, you can at least see where the money has been spent: the toilets are clean if sparse, the basement lounges comfortably appointed with sofas, the seats properly upholstered, and the carpets and front-of-house areas in good nick.

That’s the sort of experience, too, that Delfont-Mackintosh have also delivered with their West End refurbishments already, so the restoration fee there (currently 75p per ticket) feels like a bit of a retrospective attempt to raise revenue for money that has already been spent. But at least you can see it has. The worry is trying to charge people money for something that they cannot yet see the benefit of: I’ve already blogged this week about Sarah Crompton’s response to the ladies’ loos at Brighton’s Theatre Royal, and it adds insult to injury to be paying an additional fee when they’re in such a state. And last night, attending New Wimbledon’s panto, I was struck by how cold and dank the gents loos are there, too. It’s not that they’re dirty; but they’re brutally functional rather than comfortable.

And as I squirmed on my front dress circle seat – which could have been as much a function of the show, of course, as the seat itself – I found myself thinking of other uncomfortable seats I’m glad I at least don’t have to pay to sit in. But the public does.

The Stage is currently polling its readers on the best and worst theatre seats in the country – you can contribute by clicking through from the story. However, in the spirit of the Nick Hornby-inspired lists I also began compiling the other day, here’s my own, not necessarily exhaustive, list of my nominations for London’s best and worst seats.

WORST:

• Arts Theatre – I know of no more decrepit seating in London than that in this small West End venue. The springs, which have entirely sprung, provide a constant percussion to the play as audiences move around.

• King’s Head – I don’t want to beat up a theatre when its down, especially one held in such wide affection, but the seating arrangements here have always been notorious. Though somewhat improved now with the cushioned, but back-less, benches at the centre tables, the side tables and wooden chairs still offer the most uncomfortable fringe seating around.

• Hampstead Theatre – I can’t believe that a brand-new theatre should have installed such uncomfortable seating – and with such poor legroom.

• Trafalgar Studios 1 – the main studio at the former Whitehall is nearly ruined by the most weirdly cramped seating in London, with the cushioned seats rammed up against each other without arm rests, so you forced to become very friendly with your neighbour.

• The Venue – with tiny plastic tip-up seats straight out of an Edinburgh fringe venue installation, this Leicester Square theatre is a pain in the butt. But the two front rows are better, with traditional theatre seating there.

BEST:

• The Royal Court downstairs – the ‘business class’ of London theatre seating, these firm, comfortable leather seats are supportive and spacious, but cosy, too – you can get closer and more intimate with your neighbour if you choose with retractable arm rests! There’s even a thoughtful pouch in the seat in front of you to place your programme in!

• Barbican Theatre – the soft enveloping warmth of the individual seats carved out of cushioned benches in the main house is still the best feature of London’s least attractive arts centre.

• National Theatre (Olivier and Lyttelton) – seats that have stood the test of time; just enough width and support to the back (but beware the front stalls of both theatres, where there are no arm rests – though you get them cheaper, too). In the Cottesloe, there’s tip-up cushioned seating which, though without arm rests, is comfortable enough; but when extra seats are brought in for different configurations, they’re far too close to each other for comfort.

• Soho Theatre – unreserved cushioned benches mean it’s a bit of a scramble to get in when the doors open – and a bit of a squeeze to put the required number onto each row if its full – but they’re comfortable once you’re there.

• Jermyn Street Theatre – for a tiny fringe studio, there aren’t better seats anywhere – the only pity is that the programming isn’t as good as the comfort factor!

No sooner did I name-check the Broadway musical version of High Fidelity here yesterday than later in the day the producers announced they were pulling the plug on it already: it will close this Sunday, after an official run of just over a week. It will have played a run of just 18 previews (comparatively few for a major Broadway musical, but it did have an out-of-town try-out in Boston beforehand) and only 14 performances.

Fast flops of this order, which were once de rigeur in the cut and thrust of Broadway’s ruthless economics, have become a comparative rarity of late: nowadays, producers rarely throw in the towel this easily. They build in fighting funds and contingency plans to keep their shows running, whatever the critics say; and there’s always hope that a turnaround can be achieved, or at least not having the ignominy of being run out of town quite so quickly. But this autumn has seen two shows come and quickly go: Twyla Tharp’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ staggered on to 28 performances (after 35 previews) and now High Fidelity.

I managed to collect both – and while Tharp’s Dylan show, even without comparison to the ecstasies she achieved with Movin’ Out, was a clumsy, incompetent vehicle that one was surprised to see on Broadway at all, I’m a little more perplexed by the sudden failure of High Fidelity. No, it’s not a great show – but it’s the sort of thing that in a Broadway which wasn’t quite as ruthless as it is now might have trundled on for a season or so, and even found an audience. Original pop musicals like Brooklyn managed to run for 284 performances as recently as 2004, and another film-to-stage adaptation of The Wedding Singer will, by the time it closes on December 31, have (by a curious coincidence!) have played exactly the same number of performances as Brooklyn did.

But there’s no room for the middling hit anymore – or even a middling flop. Partly, there’s a pressure of real estate: theatrical vultures are circling over head, looking for prime theatres like the Imperial where High Fidelity was playing, to pounce on. There’s also a failure of will. Producers need to believe in their shows – or they wouldn’t do them at all. But the producers of High Fidelity clearly didn’t believe in it enough. Sometimes, you feel like a producer is beating a dead horse – as Joe Brooks did with his vanity (or insanity) project, In My Life, throwing good money after bad to keep it running at the Music Box for 61 performances from October to December 2005.

But High Fidelity didn’t strike me in that league. It wasn’t a musical for musical snobs, to be sure, but for a slacker generation who might be nostalgic for the days of vinyl that they grew up in, this might have been just the ticket. Except that they probably don’t go to the theatre anymore. Maybe that was the problem….

It was Nick Hornby with his book High Fidelity, of course, who started off the current mania for making endless grocery lists of life’s ups and downs – from top five films to top five break-ups (the book has now become a Broadway musical that opened just last Friday, and prompted New York Times critic Ben Brantley to declare, “High Fidelity definitely deserves a place in my own catalog of Top 5 lists. That would be on the roster of All-Time Most Forgettable Musicals. Now if only I could remember the names of the others.”)

But this is the time of year when critics are inevitably cast into a reflective mood, and it’s time to start drawing up our own lists of the year’s hits, misses and more. I’m busy thinking of at least three features along these lines (one for the paper attached to this website!), and getting ready for an audio version of the same that we’re recording this Friday for theatrevoice.com.

Someone has to go first, though, and it’s fun to see the Daily Telegraph’s arts editor Sarah Crompton (who is also the paper’s dance critic) already using her regular arts column today to enumerate her 15 favourite things in the arts this year, plus five she’s hated. Since Sarah covers the waterfront as arts editor, she includes a bit of everything – a book, a few films, some dance, tv, art and music – but it’s interesting that a full third of her list of favourites are theatrical. (She cites Harold Pinter’s performance in Krapp’s Last Tape, the RSC’s Complete Works season, Kevin Spacey’s tenure at the Old Vic and in particular his performance in A Moon for the Misbegotten, the National Theatre of Scotland’s Edinburgh hit Black Watch, and the Royal Court’s play readings to celebrate its 50th anniversary).

And two of the things that have made her cross are also theatrical. The threatened closure of the Theatre Museum is one (“surely it wasn’t beyond the wit of a man to come up with a solution. And decamping to Blackpool isn’t it”), while the other is state of the ladies’ loos at Brighton’s Theatre Royal (“They were a disgrace when I went at the start of the year and they still are. Theatre going shouldn’t be this arduous”).

I’ve been noticing the state of theatrical loos myself lately: from the desperate pongy state of the gents in the stalls bar of the Shaftesbury Avenue’s Apollo to the decrepit state of those in the stalls of the Palace Theatre (a theatre Andrew Lloyd Webber recently told me personally was now fully refurbished), the loos of some West End sometimes make you feel like you’re at a public urinal, not somewhere you’ve paid up to £60 to enter. The theatregoing experience is something to be taken in its entirety – and being able to go to the loo without having to hold your nose in disgust is one of the essential requirements, surely.

I’ll start posting my own lists here over the next few days of the year’s peaks and troughs, but let’s kick off literally at the trough – London theatre’s worst five gents loos (not a definitive list, but a good place to start):

• Apollo Theatre stalls

• Palace Theatre stalls

• King’s Head, Islington – this pub theatre may be most famous for its leaky roof – but the leaky basement loos are even more gut-wrenchingly wet.

• Old Vic – the now long-ago refurb (that integrated all the levels of the theatre onto one stairwell) positioned mens’ loos only at the very top and very bottom of it – in a very cramped arrangement. But if its bad for the men, spare a thought for the ladies you have to push past as they endlessly queue out of the door that leads into both.

• Sadlers’ Wells – for a new build, the loo facilities are surprisingly inadequate, buried in the basement though fine when you finally get there.

And, for good measure, here are the best:

• National Theatre Lyttelton loos – but beware, they’ve swapped them over! What used to be the men’s loo (on the auditorium left-side entrance) is now the ladies, and the ladies’ loo (on the other side) is now the men’s!

• Delfont Mackintosh Theatres – have upgraded the loos in the Prince Edward, Prince of Wales, Novello and Coward Theatres (I’m not sure about Wyndham’s), which are now all fit for a prince, or even a Coward!

• Barbican Centre – after a £12million refurb, the foyers are still unlovely – but the loos (and London’s longest urinal beneath the stalls level) are spick and span!

• Royal Court – the loos may be buried in the basement bar and a bit of an effort to get to when the theatre’s crowded, but the wood panelled environment is a pleasure! There’s also another gents hidden up the stairs, en route to the Theatre Upstairs.

• Lyric Hammersmith – there are loos are every level – the restaurant, and then each of the three levels of the auditorium

The days of the gallery first-nighters sometimes-vociferous jeers in the West End are long gone; as on Broadway, London audiences nowadays seem hot-wired into the instant standing ovation, at least on opening night here and every night there, to convince themselves as much as the actors that they’ve had a great night out and it’s been worth all the trouble (and expense) of being there.

But the tradition of catcalls from the upper galleries are still alive and well in the operatic world, it seems, where on Sunday evening, tenor Roberto Alagna stormed off mid-performance in Milan of the Scala’s new production of Aida, in which he was singing the role of Ramades, following boos that greeted him that night. “I heard a boo as soon as I went on stage – even before I began to sing,” he is reported in today’s Guardian as telling Italian newspaper La Repubblica. He has also now declared, “I shall not be coming back to La Scala again. It’s not a theatre. It’s an arena.”

In today’s Telegraph, he is also reported as saying, “The audience is intimidating. It reminds me of the fear of expressing oneself feely that existed in the Communist bloc.” And it does seem that it wasn’t so much his performance as an interview he gave that caused disapproval: Laura Foscanelli – one of the so-called loggionisti, the “hard-core opera anoraks who pack the upper galleries,” in the words of the Telegraph – quotes him as saying, “If the public whistles me, it does not deserve me,” to which she answers, “He needs a bit of humility.”

And the diva-like behaviour of his storming off doesn’t suggest there’s much of that in evidence. The artistic director of La Scala, Stephane Lissner, has accused him of a “blatant lack of respect for the audience and the theatre”, and an Italian news agency Ansa has reported that the theatre was considering whether to demand compensation from him.

The Telegraph’s opera critic Rupert Christiansen suggests that he’s “still a considerable singer in the right repertory, and that single booer – who was probably chauvinistically motivated by the view that an Italian should have been cast – is outnumbered by his many fans.” But, he goes on, Alagna now faces a supreme test of nerves, and advises; “Come on Roberto, take a deep breath and try again. Are you a true operatic trouper or just a tenor whose vanity got the better of him?”

It’s fascinating to find passions running this high, both offstage and on. When’s the last time this happened in the legitimate theatre?

The annual round of pantos (and Christmas-themed) shows has begun in earnest, so the rounds of theatre reviewing are even more frantic than usual since most of them are opening in the same fortnight of last and this week. And the let-up on other shows hasn’t happened either: inbetween the pantos last week, we also had the opening of John Kolvenbach’s Love Song, the Royal Court’s Catch (co-authored by five young women dramatists) and Patrick Marber’s version of Moliere, Don Juan in Soho; while this week, there’s two consecutive RSC openings with a trip up to Stratford tomorrow for Merry Wives – the Musical (a kind of RSC panto?) and the opening of the annual London season on Wednesday with Much Ado About Nothing. And wedged inbetween these and the pantos, there are also the folk-tales and adaptations of kids’ books, from the return of the National’s sublime Coram Boy (which I caught again at the Saturday matinee, and did an aftershow talk for with the director and composer for a group from the production’s sponsor, Accenture) to this week’s Young Vic show The Enchanted Pig and a Peter Pan at the King’s Head using the complete Leonard Bernstein score for the first time ever.

I’m trying to be as diligent as possible, but I can’t be everywhere. Still, I managed three pantos last week already, and have two more this week. So far, so good: but then I’ve chosen wisely. The first night critics were out in force, of course, for the opening of the only central London panto this year: the Barbican’s first foray into the field, with the Mark Ravenhill-scripted and Edward Hall-directed version of Dick Whittington and His Cat. To read their reviews, though, they might have been written by one man (or woman): All opened with the surprise that Ravenhill should be commissioned to do it at all. Indeed, can you spot the difference between the opening lines of these two reviews?

“Eyebrows were raised when it was announced that Mark Ravenhill was to write the Barbican’s first ever in-house pantomime”.

And

“Eyebrows were raised when it was announced that Mark Ravenhill was to write the Barbican’s first pantomime.”

Not much difference, is there? The first is Charlie Spencer in the Daily Telegraph; the second, Michael Billington in the Guardian.

Charlie goes on to speculate, “Would Alderman Fitzwarren be presented as a sadistic crack dealer? Would the rats be transformed into a posse of rapacious, venereally infected rent boys? What, above all, would Whittington be doing with his dick?”

In fact, as The Independent’s Rhoda Koenig points out in her opening line, “To answer everyone’s first question about Mark Ravenhill’s version of Dick Whittington – no, there is no anal or oral sex in this version and nothing happens to the cat that will have anyone texting the RSPCA. There has even been some effort to sanitise Ravenhill’s bio – any inquisitive kiddies will learn from the programme only that ‘Mark’s first play’ was a big success.”

That first play – Shopping and Fucking – was famously never seen in its entirety by Mark’s parents; so it was a particular pleasure to be introduced to them by Mark before the show when I ran into him. I asked if it was the first play of his that they’d seen – they answered they’d seen The Cut, half of Shopping and Fucking, and parts of Mother Clapp’s Molly House in rehearsal at the National. Finally, here was a show they could see without fear of being shocked.

If there was no crack cocaine in the show, Ravenhill and Hall haven’t entirely cracked the form, but they’ve made a good stab at it. Matt Wolf, calling it “an amiably shambolic affair that (like most pantos, at least in my experience) is at least a half hour too long but makes up in unforced geniality what it may lack in finesse”, points out that it’s a “knockabout evening that, unusually, seemed to leave the adults in the house considerably more restless than some entirely absorbed kids.”

And that’s the ultimate test of the panto: does it keep the kids absorbed? You need, as usual, to head out to the Hackney Empire for a show that appeals equally to kids and those that bring them there: the magic there is entirely infectious. And while Hall, at the helm of the Barbican’s show, is a panto virgin, the (not so) secret weapon of audience hypnosis at Hackney is director Susie McKenna, directing her eighth panto there. Susie, who has also been a notable principal boy in her time, understands the form from the inside out, and it shows. Why didn’t the Barbican pick her up to do the job for them? Or the Old Vic with their misfiring Aladdin? Unlike at the Barbican though, last Thursday’s press night for Cinderella didn’t see too many of the first night lot in attendance: I saw only the Guardian’s Michael Billington and Time Out’s Rachel Halliburton. While Michael says he wasn’t blown away by it, in his review today he writes, “I admired its multiculturalism and shrewd mix of tradition and innovation. It also has the great advantage of being staged in the most beautiful theatre in London.” The auditorium has its own unique and distinctive part to play in the magic that always makes this one of the best pantos in London.

The unique magic of the Stratford East’s Theatre Royal also has a big part to play in that venue’s annual panto outing. But Stratford East – who have long been pushing the envelope of new musical writing that has already yielded them the vibrant West End hit The Big Life – also use this slot to do something else: they create a genuinely engaging piece of popular musical theatre making that also ticks the panto boxes, and this year’s musicalisation of the Hans Christian Andersen tale The Snow Queen is a real original.

But theatre isn’t just for Christmas – or even about Christmas; it’s for life. Panto can be a wonderful introduction to its joys; but an increasing number of theatres are also pushing beyond the panto envelope, too, to embrace and engage young audiences in big pieces of storytelling theatre at this time of year. The National reaped big dividends last year with their stage adaptation of Coram Boy – a show that may seem improbable fare for seasonal entertainment, with multiple acts of infanticide (with the babies, some of them apparently while still alive, buried onstage in full view of the audience), an onstage hanging and child trafficking playing big parts in the narrative. Once again, though, the kids watching it are big and bold enough to take it all on board; it’s the adults who recoil.

I saw it again on Saturday, and was overwhelmed by its vibrant theatricality and gripping narrative, even more so than the first time I saw it. For some intriguing comparisons, it was fascinating to go yesterday to the new Unicorn Theatre, near Tower Bridge, for another narrative adventure based on a children’s book, Eva Ibbotson’s Journey to the River Sea, and find a young family audience similarly gripped in this beautifully told story of a child confronting an alien landscape. As with Coram Boy, a musical underscoring is key to maintaining the atmosphere; but there’s even a key plot point in common with a young boy whose voice is about to break that leads to other consequences for him.

And then last night I wrapped up a busy weekend of festive (and not-so-festive) theatregoing with the one-off cabaret celebration, Christmas in New York from the occasional Notes from New York series. I’ve profiled the series co-founder, leading man and associate director Paul Spicer in the current issue of The Stage; but last night he and his regular collaborators, including director and musical director David Randall and producer Neil Eckersley pulled off their biggest and most accomplished show yet. With twelve soloists and a full onstage choir, they created a beautiful evening of new Christmas music and old classics to a near sell-out house.

I already blogged from New York myself about two gay ‘boulevard’ comedies, Douglas Carter Beane’s The Little Dog Laughed (now at Broadway’s Cort Theatre after transferring from Second Stage) and Paul Rudnick’s Regrets Only. In a feature in The Guardian on Tuesday, Michael Billington wrote about catching them both, too, and says, “Whatever its faults, New York theatre has virtually patented a new form: the gay comedy of manners.” He traces its origins to Mart Crowley’s 1968 play The Boys in the Band, and says it “launched a series of plays that combined a gay agenda with mass audience appeal.”

But in Britain, he says, aside from Joe Orton’s taboo-breaking farces, “the only real equivalent is Kevin Elyot’s My Night With Reg (1994)”, and he asks, ”When will our own writers wake up to the fact that there is now a big market for gay boulevard comedy?”

Leaving aside the fact that My Night with Reg has a more tragic undercurrent running beneath its surface wit that doesn’t qualify it truly as a comedy, he suggests that the difference between New York and London and the former’s “willingness to combine sexually explicit themes with traditional boulevard forms” is a product, he suspects, “of a predominantly gay theatrical culture and a continuing love of screwball comedy and social comedy.”

It may indeed be the case that many theatrical practitioners – on both sides of the Atlantic – are gay, but even if we’re visible on both sides of the footlights (and even, in a minority, on the critical benches, too), the commercial theatre, at least, is always going to be driven by what sells tickets – and maybe there are just braver producers in New York, willing to put this kind of work on. In a reply in yesterday’s Guardian gay writer Stella Duffy wrote that there are two answers to the question Michael posed about why British writers aren’t writing more gay farces. “One, because British theatres aren’t commissioning them, and most writers have a hard enough time making ends meet without writing work just for the hell of it. And two, if gay writers write gay stories, we’re told we’re ‘ghetto-ising’ ourselves; if straight writers write about gay themes, they’re told they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Meanwhile, however, there’s a sign that the times are changing when it comes to the situation specifically addressed by The Little Dog Laughed – the closeted aspiring movie star. A feature in Tuesday’s Independent addressed what was headlined “Hollywood’s biggest taboo”, focusing on the recent coming-out of two young TV actors – TR Knight, from Grey’s Anatomy, and Neil Patrick Harris, from How I Met Your Mother (who before that had made his name on Doogie Howser, and was seen last year at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory in Tick Tick Boom!). Harris issued a statement recently after gossip started circulating about his sexuality: “The public has always been very kind to me, and until recently, I have been able to live a pretty normal life. Now, it seems there is speculation and interest in my private life. So, rather than ignore those who choose to publish their opinions without actually talking to me, I am happy to dispel any rumours or misconceptions and am quite proud to say that I am a very content gay man living my life to the fullest and fortunate to be working with wonderful people in the business I love.”

While the coming-out of English actors – from Ian McKellen and Nigel Hawthorne to Antony Sher and Simon Callow passes nowadays with scarcely a murmur of surprise or alarm – this has created shockwaves in America. The Independent quotes a film and TV actress Eve Gordon saying, “All my friends who are gay keep it secret. They don’t even know where to draw the line socially. It’s like being a Communist in the McCarthy era. It’s a gigantic terror. So coming out is an incredibly brave thing to do.”

It’s against this context that a play like The Little Dog Laughed resonates all the louder. So perhaps we don’t do satires in Britain about the celluloid closet because we don’t need to.

It depends, once again, on whom you read. I’ve already blogged here about the new West End play seeming to be hurtling towards oblivion, after last week’s opening of the feeble Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks. But the opening on Monday of another new play, John Kolvenbach’s Love Song (albeit imported from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Theatre, where it was premiered in a different production earlier in the year), has given many of my colleagues the chance to ruminate on the state of play regarding plays there.

And it really depends on whether you like this play or not. For the Daily Telegraph’s Charlie Spencer, it’s another encouraging sign that there’s life in the old dog yet: His review begins more like an editorial, in which he analyses the current situation – “in fact, serious drama has been thin on the ground in the commercial theatre for years now, with most plays beginning in the subsidised sector and transferring only if producers think they can make a tidy profit out of them” – but then says, “while it’s true that musicals have dominated the West End in 2006, drama has actually fared surprisingly well,” and he names Rock ‘n’ Roll, Donkeys’ Years, Frost/Nixon and the imminent return of The History Boys (“where it will doubtless prove a smasheroo all over again”) in support of this. By the time he finally comes to Love Song, he uses it for more evidence of his thesis: “This encouraging trend continues with John Kolvenbach’s outstanding Love Song, cannily cast by the producer Sonia Friedman, and unmistakably announcing itself as one of the best new plays of the year”. But he adds ominously, “If this smashing, compassionate new play fails to take the town, then there really will be cause for concern in the West End.” So we better believe it – and support it or the West End really does die.”

But the Evening Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh sounds a far more cautious critical note: “Producer Sonia Friedman valiantly battles to save straight plays from being edged out of a West End where theatre-owners crave musicals. I doubt, though, whether her latest import, in the sentimental-romantic shape of John Kolvenbach’s comic whimsy from America, will ring many bells”

And for Matt Wolf, “The need for good new plays on a dramatically parched West End is only amplified by the arrival of Love Song, in which an attractive cast and some very deft direction do what they can to shore up John Kolvenbach’s smug and sentimental script.”

In other words, the West End play glass is half-full or empty depending on whom you read. It’s the job of a critic, of course, to argue a position from wherever they stand on it, but it’s difficult to draw conclusions based on such a small sampling of new plays that have managed to break through the iron wall of musicals currently reigning. But if we tend to contradict each other on that – and since when were critics merely tipsters, anyway, offering a thumbs-up or down for commercial prospects? – it was also fascinating to notice just how often Elwo