January 2007 Archives

The papers, including this one online, were full of reports yesterday of how well the West End did last year – with a record 12.36m attendances, clocking up a box office take of an astonishing cumulative £400,802,809 (which certainly gives me pause when the West End still claims it cannot pay for the upkeep of its own theatres)! But the good news is that the upward trend could be here to stay, since the West End is also carrying an unprecedented advance sale going into 2007 of some £57m (more than double the figure at the same time the previous year).

These buoyant commercial figures, said Charlie Spencer as he welcomed us to yesterday’s annual Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards (of which he is chairman of the drama section), remind us that though our job is to assess and describe artistic and entertainment values, we’re also dealing with a very lucrative business, too.

So there was plenty to celebrate as we convened at the Prince of Wales Theatre for this year’s awards — the ones that, as comedian Arthur Smith declared in his witty introduction, are the “worst dressed and least publicized of all the award ceremonies – and rightly so”. (He urged us to leave our mobile phones on – since it’s a very dull event and we could catch up on some calls, and maybe try out some new ring tones). But one of the pleasures of the awards are their very informality, and the fact that (as one press agent put it to me) two sets of people – on apparently oppositional sides – can come together on the same side to celebrate together.

It’s a chance, of course, for the profession to see who we are – and watch some of our number making tits of themselves, too! Arthur Smith, though, affectionately does most of that job for us – noting, for the purposes of a joke he wanted to shoehorn in about two critic dwarfs having sex in adjoining rooms, that we tend to be on the shorter side, he also spoke of how culturally diverse we are: “They didn’t all go to the same public schools and they went to different Oxbridge colleges.” There was quite a lot of good-natured joshing on Toby Young’s behalf – now retired from the critical throng, as previously blogged about here – but back for one day yesterday to present an award to the most promising playwright, who of course was conspicuously not himself. (Arthur also spoke of the good news that “Toby Young shows no signs of writing a new play”, and then added, “I don’t know that, Toby, but I’m just praying!”).

But if our eccentricities are sometimes exposed publicly here (such as Benedict Nightingale’s of publicly admitting to securing Connie Fisher’s autograph earlier), so are our enthusiasms. It was good to hear The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner speak of the fact that, after 20 years as a critic, she still feels incredibly lucky and privileged to be doing the job – even after nights, and the previous night was one of them, when she said you can’t believe the level of pain that’s being inflicted in the name of entertainment and art (for the record, she was referring to the opening of Steven Berkoff’s Sit and Shiver at Hackney Empire). But then there are nights that make it all worthwhile, and that you will remember for the rest of your life – such as the National Theatre of Scotland’s Blackwatch that she saw in Edinburgh last August, and was directed with “delirious flair and total precision” by John Tiffany, to whom she presented the award for Best Director.

But the great store that are put by our words (and actions) were also exposed by recipients of the awards, too. The Most Promising Playwright winner – Nina Raine, for Rabbit – detailed how she watched us closely as we watched her play, noting, for instance, that David Benedict saw it on a night when a “lunatic” was laughing at every line, that Michael Coveney came in shorts and sat at the side, and that Lyn Gardner stopped taking notes after the first two scenes. But receiving the award, she felt, meant that the “neurotic emotional investment” she had put in us had been repaid. And Tamsin Greig, receiving the award for Best Shakespearean Performance for Much Ado About Nothing, made the day’s wittiest speech – one in which she thanked us for being “lovely clever stupid people” – and referred to the fact that she only read one review, since it was the one her mother would have read had she been alive as she put great store by Charlie Spencer’s words, and found that he had described her as “not exactly beautiful, a little like Edwina Currie.”

The most heartfelt and moving part of the ceremony, however, was the re-naming of the Best Musical Award in honour of the late, great editor of The Stage, Peter Hepple, who died last October at the age of 79. His widow Josie and two daughters Claire and Julie went onstage, with Josie reading a lovely tribute to Peter. He was, of course, a man who devoted his life to the entertainment business, and was an encyclopaedic reference source of it. And that, ultimately, is one of the things that gives a critic authority: having both respect and knowledge for what we’re criticising.

So it was chastening later in the day to finally open my copy of yesterday’s Guardian and find it reported that a theatrical think-tank called “Devoted and Disgruntled”, some 300 theatre practitioners who gathered at BAC had debated, amongst some 125 debates in all, “ways of putting the nation’s critics out of their jobs,” according to Maddy Costa’s feature. She wrote, “As one person says, critics have all been in these strange, solitary jobs for far too long, giving the impression that theatre doesn’t change, that each night’s performance will be just like the one they saw. Worse still, reviewers use the same language to evaluate productions as different as The Sound of Music, the latest David Hare and an avant-garde fringe show. Life could be so much better if theatres selected new critics each year from the ranks of their own audiences, and stopped relying on newspaper coverage.” Apparently, however, “The nation’s reviewers can rest assured, however, that plans for change currently stop at setting up a theatre review website, with audiences as contributors.” Anyone, however, who has trafficked the bulletin boards of the various websites, will know that the public – who have paid for their tickets – can be even more merciless than professional critics. And they’re a lot less accountable. At least, as Arthur Smith pointed out at the Critics’ Circle Awards, we’re prepared to put our names in the papers against our opinions.

And critics can play a powerful role in shaping and encouraging an art form. In a different news feature in The Guardian on Monday about the plight of French art house cinema, it was pointed out that “France has fallen dramatically out of love with the auteur and the whole idea of art house film which it invented.” Attendances for art house films are in freefall – “Le Monde has warned of a ‘catastrophe’, independent producers and distributors are haemorrhaging funds and even highbrow cinema magazines are struggling.” And according to veteran French film critic Michel Ciment, editor of Positif (one of France’s oldest cinema magazines), “Part of the problem is a lack of credibility of film critics in France. In the 50s and 60s they would have frontpage pieces and a huge influence. If they said an obscure film was a masterpiece, 200,000 people would go to see it at one cinema and it would stay on for a year. But critics in France have now lost their power to influence, the public feel they too cosily promote friends, are snobbish and only present esoteric films. The audience feels insulted.”

So as critical power has been eroded there, so has an art form. We all have a responsibility to maintain the dialogue, and critics are a crucial part of it. The think-tank idea that theatres choose critics from the ranks of their own audiences may be democratising that theatrical dialogue – but the public ultimately decides anyway, what to see. (Otherwise We Will Rock You would have shut long ago). And losing expert opinion would mean that theatre-makers would no longer have their work policed and judged by people who, whatever our individual faults and proclivities, have a wide frame of reference for doing so.

Yesterday’s Standard ran a page three feature, and today’s Telegraph has it on page five, that is tantamount to generous free advertising for the new production of Equus that is heading to the West End next month: pictures of the now 17-year-old Daniel Radcliffe, stripped to the waist (and apparently below), against a beautiful white horse. It may be fascinating to watch an actor literally growing up in public, as we’ve watched him progress from Harry Potter to the first emerging signs of manhood with whispy signs of chest hair and a cluster around his belly button, too, but I’m also worried that he’s being fetishized and sexualised, too, ahead of time. Given that the play is about a boy channelling his sexuality in his love for horses, the publicity images may be appropriate; but there’s something also something disconcerting about the boy growing up so visibly.

As the producer David Pugh told the Standard, “We had never seen him with clothes off before. We all went ‘wow’. Thea [Sharrock, the director] went ‘Oh My God’.” And there was relief, too: “When we did the audition we never thought to say, ‘Would you go naked for us?’ We were so overwhelmed with his talent that we set that aside’.”

He wasn’t, after all, auditioning for Puppetry of the Penis, though. (Though who knows? After Celebrity Big Brother, perhaps Puppetry’s producer David Johnson could try a version of Celebrity Puppetry of the Penis. Colin Farrell, your casting call has come!)

In an age where we are surrounded by sexual images everywhere, it’ s probably no surprise that there’s this kind of blanket coverage when even Harry Potter strips. I suppose we grow up faster nowadays. But he’s barely a year beyond the age of consent, so just over a year ago such images would have had the child porn police knocking at the door. Expect the dirty man (and woman) brigade to be buying those tickets fast now….

It has become fashionable to regard Broadway (and increasingly, the West End) as a showcase only: a Disneyfied version of the theatre, offering a shop window for work created elsewhere. But in terms of musicals, at least, Broadway still offers a “gold standard” of aspiration towards which most working in the field aim towards; and its strikingly still the case that Broadway is a home for original musicals of the kind of daring that we’ve not created in London since Jerry Springer – the Opera.

While the West End may nowadays be following Broadway in being saturated by musicals, Broadway still leads the field there. Comparing the listings, the West End has eight musicals that, when they first opened there, were original to London (and include such long-time veterans as Les Mis and Phantom, the pop re-workings of Mamma Mia!, We Will Rock You, Daddy Cool and Dancing in the Street, with film-to-stage versions of Mary Poppins and Billy Elliot completing the list), Broadway has nearly double that number: there are currently 15 shows that were original to Broadway when they first opened (though often by way of an out-of-town or off-Broadway try-out)– with a definite four and possibly five more lining up to open before May. Again, London has more revivals (currently six) to Broadway’s four; and London has more imports from Broadway than vice versa (five to four).

So, though musicals may take precedence in New York, at least they set the precedent, too: they lead, we follow, in every sense nowadays. And if the West End is losing the creative impulse on new plays, too – relying instead on transfers from elsewhere – the original play is less of an endangered species on Broadway than it is in London, too. David Hare’s latest, The Vertical Hour, received its world premiere on Broadway last year, with a cast that included our own Billy Nighy and Julianne Moore; and the coming months will see new plays by Terrence McNally and Joan Didion premiering cold on Broadway too, as Angela Lansbury returns to the stage in McNally’s Deuce and Vanessa Redgrave starring as Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking (coincidentally directed by David Hare). In a big season for plays, there are also commercial imports for the London hits Frost/Nixon and Coram Boy, plus a revival of Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio.

The productivity that has long made Broadway not just a shop window but also a department store of choice for theatre is still throbbing. And nowhere is this more apparent than in two extraordinary new shows there that take their sources from improbable places, but transform them into art of an utterly unique and scintillating variety, that I saw last week there. Spring Awakening – a contemporary rock version of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play – and Grey Gardens (based on a 1975 TV documentary about a the real-life aunt and first cousin of Jackie Onassis Kennedy who were found living in squalor with 52 cats that turned their East Hampton mansion into a 28-room litterbox) are, moreover, the work of writers new to Broadway; so even more importantly, just as new work is being brought to Broadway, so new writers are, too. When, again, has this lately happened in a West End musical?

Of all the blog entries I have written here, the one that generated the biggest postbag and the biggest controversy yet – and even led me to defending my position on Radio 4 – was the one I wrote on theatrical disturbances and the disruption caused by a party in wheelchairs who made involuntary noises during the performance. The conversation, though it got heated, certainly gave me pause to examine my own prejudices, and made me realize, ultimately, that my intolerance for any disruption (and I’m the sort of person who gets upset when someone rustles their programme too loudly) needs to be tempered with an understanding of where the noise is actually coming from, and whether it’s a voluntary or involuntary act.

On the Broadway chat board talkinbroadway, there’s a thread today that touches on a similar theme. The poster writes that they went to the theatre on Sunday – to see a play… but then, “I began to hear this hiss every few seconds, a very LOUD hiss. Almost as if someone were spritzing an aerosol can. I looke around ready to admonish the offender until I saw that it was an old person who was on oxygen. I felt bad, guilty and kept trying to focus on the stage and unfortunately found the hiss very disruptive. It was a small theatre with great acoustics and at intermission I found that it could be heard throughout the space. As the usher and I agreed, what can one say as the person would have died without their oxygen you cannot ask that it be turned off. “ The poster then asks, “How does one handle highly disturbing noise generated by life saving equipment?”

The replies are illuminating. Here are some of them: “From your standpoint: you had an unlucky draw of the cards that night, same as if a seven-footer sat in front of you.From the standpoint of the ill person: this is one of the few recreational pleasures life still offers… Be charitable to your fellow man. You could be that person one day. Meanwhile, summon all your powers of concentration to enjoy the play. It is a good exercise all in its own.”

“I can’t help but laugh as I imagine an outsider reading this post … one who also saw all the recent threads about food in the theatres … what would they think? … “First, they don’t want people to eat, now these crazies don’t even want people to breathe!”

“I was a witness to something similar when I attended a performance of Vanessa Redgrave in Long Day’s Jounrye into Night. The noise was distracting and one man created a big scene with an usher at intermission about this, until it became evident that Christopher Reeve was sitting near the back of the theatre, alone, in a wheelchair.”

The fact is, as I’ve learnt for myself from the controversy I generated, is that you have to distinguish between disruptions that can be stopped and those that can’t (without removing either the offender or the offended from the theatre). In future, as the offended rather than the offender, I would remove myself if the disruption became too much to bear.

It’s a fact that they love their musicals in this town – and no one, as the cliché goes, loves their musicals more than the gay population does. Actually, I know plenty of gay people who don’t like them at all, but then maybe that’s just me. But in New York, the musical is so revered that even the gay bars have musical theatre nights, and none is more celebrated than the weekly soiree at Splash on West 17th Street in Chelsea, where VJ (the video version of a DJ) John Bantay screens numbers from film and stage musicals all night long on the multiple banks of TV monitors around the room – which is then capped by a live appearance by a Broadway star, in an evening called Musical Mondays. Of course there’s lots of Liza – from Cabaret, her Radio City show, and Liza with a Z – and Madonna in Evita; but there’s also a lot more that’s more off-the-wall, like a number from The Will Rogers Follies. Thanks to the annual Tony Awards musical excerpts, and B-roll footage (made for TV news usage) that Bantay has accumulated over the years, you get a veritable (and venerable) history of Broadway, as if placed on a random search.

While Dreamgirls – passed over in this morning’s Oscar nominations for Best Picture – had a better showing at Splash last night with footage from the film already on offer, the evening always ends with the rousing showing of Jennifer Holliday’s amazing performance of ‘And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going’ from that year’s Tony telecast. But last night, too, Bantay showed the original TV ad for the show’s first Broadway run.

And then live in person, Broadway’s original Ulla-Inga-Hansen Bensen Yanson Tallen Hallen Svaden Swanson from The Producers, Cady Huffman, made a star appearance, performing her ‘Now Ulla Dance’ number once again.

There’s obviously nowhere else to be on a Monday night…. Wouldn’t it be great if somewhere in London followed suit?

It’s not just actors and directors who regularly swap territories between the West End and Broadway. It’s also critics. While I’m doing one of my regular Broadway catch-ups, New York Times chief theatre critic Ben Brantley has been in London (as he regularly does at this time of year, since openings on Broadway are slow on the ground in January) doing the same in London, and his reports are amongst the most eagerly anticipated for producers wondering about transfer possibilities for London’s latest shows. At last Wednesday’s press day for the Old Vic double bill of The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, he was just along the row from me.

In the column published on the weekend he hasn’t offered too much hope or comfort for the current crop of musicals in London. The revival of The Sound of Music, he declares, has “a gravely cheerful air that forbids mockery, as if it were a stern but beloved school master reading patriotic poetry” and says that, “From its lush orchestrations to its Alpine-vista scenery, the whole enterprise has a remote, chocolate-box prettiness”.

Of Cabaret, meanwhile, he writes, “When the burned-out M.C. (a sepulchral James Dreyfus) sings “I Don’t Care Much,” you know how he feels. Exhaustion is the keynote here, the ashen mood that descends when a party has gone on for too long. Unfortunately, this means that you are never in danger of being seduced or, for that matter, shocked. (You can find images just as creepy and sexually frank on mainstream British television after 11 pm). The only way Cabaret might be shocking now would be if it were presented with subtlety.”

Porgy and Bess, now reconceived as “a trimmed-down conventional musical with spoken dialogue,” has made this “plot dense show seem more quaint and less credible than it does as an opera, where melodrama is an everyday affair. Admirably acted (Clarke Peters and Nicola Hughes play the title roles) and danced, this Porgy and Bess is least persuasive in its big arias: not, in other words, an example of playing to your strengths”. But at least it has them – unlike Dirty Dancing, which he dismisses as “ notable for having no discernible strengths”. (Both are hoping for Broadway stands — Dirty Dancing has already announced an out-of-town run in Toronto first).

It’s left only to Little Shop of Horrors to save the day: Though it offers “nothing particularly new”, he concludes that, “Aside from a lovely children’s opera at the newly restored Young Vic, The Enchanted Pig, and Avenue Q, the transplanted Broadway hit at the Noel Coward Theatre, Little Shop is the only musical I’ve come upon in London that actually made me feel happy.”

With the West End transfer lining up for it to go to the Duke of York’s – courtesy of mostly American money – at least one set of producers must be happy now, as they seek to rally Broadway money to bring it there.

Some of them were the same people who produced the Broadway revival in 2003, and a US national tour – “both of which failed”, as they admit frankly in their letter to potential investors that I’ve seen. But what’s interesting in their letter is their speculation as to why that happened: “It’s always difficult to know why a show doesn’t work. Certainly we felt that the Little Shop we brought to Broadway and on tour was an extremely professional and entertaining version of this wonderful show. If there is any consensus that’s been built around a theory about the show’s failure, it has to do principally with two factors: first, the fact that it was such a huge, long-running hit in a tiny off-Broadway theatre that some critics – and probably audience members as well – felt that it should never have been blown up into a big Broadway show, and so never really evaluated the Broadway production on its own terms; and second, that Little Shop of Horrors does seem to be a musical that’s performed by every stock, amateur and school theatrical group around the country, making a national tour more problematic than would otherwise be the case.”

But, says the letter, the show “labours under no such burdens” in London. And the labour of love that has brought it to the Menier now has Brantley’s laboured love to take it to the West End.

I saw the original Michael Bennett production of Dreamgirls on my first-ever trip to New York in 1983, when it was still running at the Imperial Theatre – and it blew me away. I went back repeatedly over the next couple of years – and then saw it again when the 1987 touring production returned to Broadway. A couple of years ago I went down to Philadelphia for a local staging, but its one of the enduring mysteries of London theatrical life why this show never travelled to the West End – not even as a one-night concert version (which it incidentally most recently got on Broadway in 2001, when a celebrity charity gala was held of it).

But now London will finally see it, at least on the big screen rather than the stage, when the spectacular new film version arrives in our cinemas from February 2. I am back in New York right now, though, and straight off the plane on Thursday afternoon, I headed to a multiplex on 42nd Street to see it, and once again, it knocked me sideways. Though I ironically miss the cinematic fluidity of Bennett’s staging, it has been brilliantly reconceived as a film musical that makes sense on its own terms that, not since Martin Scorsese’s ravishing New York, New York thirty years ago, has provided such a heightened sense of musical reality with the songs emerging so effortlessly out of the action. And there’s a break-out performance from Jennifer Hudson – an American Idol runner-up – as Effie White that’s so spectacular that she’s become an instant movie star. But let’s hope the Effie curse doesn’t settle on her: Jennifer Holliday, who created the role onstage, was similarly acclaimed, but has never matched the intensity of that original role in her subsequent career.

Interest in transposing stage musicals to the screen again, as was once a Hollywood staple, has never been so high since the success of Chicago five years ago. Mamma Mia! has now been greenlighted, with Meryl Streep announced to play Donna. But surely a screen version of Wicked can’t be long behind. Like Dreamgirls did onstage, Joe Mantello’s production aspires to the conditions of cinema onstage in its constantly unfolding sense of spectacle and storytelling. It may be a little bloated and indigestible overall, but its no surprise that this phenomenal production has become such a phenomenon.

I have now seen it twice in two weeks – last week I saw it again in London when Kerry Ellis replaced Broadway original Idina Menzel as Elphaba, and last night I returned to it on Broadway, too, to see Julia Murney in the role. She is a Broadway-class performer whose sole Broadway credit before this was the short-lived Lennon in 2005, but I’ve been following her for years, ever since she played Queenie in the original off-Broadway production of Andrew Lippa’s version of The Wild Party at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2000 (It went head-to-head that season with another version of the same story on Broadway, composed by Michael John LaChiusa, that starred Toni Collette as Queenie). Murney has the most distinctive and dramatic Broadway voice since Betty Buckley’s, and she is not conventionally pretty which may make her difficult to cast; too, but here – as a woman with outsider status, as Murney must painfully know for herself having looked in on the Broadway arena to which she aspired for so long – she brings the richest emotional colours yet to her intense, soaring ballads like ‘Defying Gravity’, that turn it into the stuff of grand opera. It’s one of the greatest performances on the Broadway stage.

In the midst of BAC’s 25th anniversary celebrations, you’d think that Wandsworth Borough Council would be celebrating this national institution in its midst. But no: the shocking news has come that it is, in fact, facing imminent closure, thanks to a council who have not only just deemed it necessary to cut its annual grant of £100,000, but also now start charging for rent and services at nearly triple the size of that grant (£270,000), thus representing a total loss of some £370,000.

Usually here I would rush to pen a spirited defence of BAC and its place in the ecology of British theatre. But I have nothing to add to what has already been so eloquently said by Lyn Gardner in her blog on the Guardian website, so will merely send you there. As she says, “BAC has always been a place for experiment, a place to take risks, a place that has allowed artists to get down and dirty and be just that little bit bolder than anywhere else in the country. It creates the conditions that allow fledgling artists to develop to a point where they can take flight and go out into the wider world. There is hardly a theatre or arts centre in the country that is untouched by BAC’s work… When will government, both local and national, wake up to the fact that giving money to the arts is not subsidy, but investment - investment which not only has a financial return, but which also brings much wider benefits and improvements to people’s lives? The health of the country demands that we invest in the imagination as well as in hospitals.”

So the annual merry-go-round of the perversities of the Olivier Awards nominations is upon us again, and the year’s most talked-about musical theatre performance has gone unmarked: there is no nomination for Connie Fisher. But she is, at least, in good company: neither is Idina Menzel nominated, who has given the other audience-favourite performance of the year, in Wicked. Mind you, the nominations for the category that both were eligible for — Best Actress in a Musical — is certainly the year’s most crowded, and someone, presumably, had to go: and I, for one, won’t argue with nominations for the likes of Tonya Pinkins (for Caroline, or Change), Elena Roger (for Evita) or Jenna Russell (for Sunday in the Park with George). But Hannah Waddingham for Monty Python’s Spamalot could surely have been moved to the Best Performance in a Supporting Role in a Musical…

Wicked has also been excluded from the Best New Musical category — into which has, bizarrely, been slipped Porgy and Bess — although its a revised version of an old show, it dates originally from 1935. In an era when new musicals have been in short supply, it’s a pity not to acknowledge one that genuinely is.

Yet though the show may not have been acknowledged, it’s interesting to note that Wicked’s director Joe Mantello has made it onto the (very) short list for Best Directors — one in which they’ve only managed to come up with three nominations in all, from all the wealth of fine productions this year. Where’s Marianne Elliott, for instance, for Much Ado About Nothing? Or Michael Grandage for Evita and Frost/NIxon?

The questions go on… and on. Add yours below! But the fact is, the Oliviers produce a snapshot of London theatre every year that is as flawed as it is fascinating in its inclusions as well as exclusions.

What’s the single most discouraging thing that keeps people away from the West End? I would be willing to put money on it that it’s the money – that, in a highly competitive market, there’s only so much of it go around, and that at current top prices that are now hitting £60, people will go less often – and only to things they know are tried and tested, hence the rise of the jukebox musical, the endless film-to-stage transpositions, and the inevitable classic revival.

So what chance does the genuinely new and innovative have in that environment? Avenue Q is the most original new musical in town – but has obviously been fighting for its market share. And while lots and lots of shows mark down their ticket prices through various channels – on discount websites, ticket offers and the half price booth – Avenue Q is trying something else, with immediate effect: it’s re-pricing its weekday and Friday matinee tickets downwards, to a top price of just £35 (and going down all the way to £10), from a previous schedule that topped out at £50.

It will be very interesting to see what effect this has on the box office. There’s a danger, of course, that the public will perceive that they are being sold ‘damaged goods’ and that a cheaper show means its not quite as good as a ‘full price’ one. It will also, no doubt, play havoc with the show’s recoupment schedule – if such a thing is ever in sight at this point – but clearly the new pricing structure must allow, at least, for the weekly running costs to be met, or they wouldn’t be doing it.

But this way, actors (and a set of puppets) are being kept in work, the theatre is being kept lit, and a great show is being kept alive. Anything that achieves that is to be applauded. I wonder if anyone else will be brave enough to follow…..

In the realm of art criticism, “critics have become so close to artists, they practically do their laundry,” according to a feature by art writer Jonathan Jones in today’s Guardian. It’s nothing new, apparently: “Art critics have been fraternising with artists ever since the 16th-century painter, architect and author Giorgio Vasari established that art is worth reading about,” and partly because of the way he made it so: “Vasari invented a way of writing about art that still wins readers – because it is peppered with gossip and quotation and intimate facts (and a few legends).”

Jones suggests, “many critics today regard friendship as crucial to their jobs”, and points out that “with the triumph of modern art in Britain in this century it has produced a courtly bred of critic-hagiographers. When Louisa Buck or Matthew Collings writes about art, there’s a good chance they’ll be writing about their friends.” In the face of a previously hostile press to their work, “contemporary art sought to speak for itself, and saw the critic’s role as making this possible” – so friendly relationships have been deliberately courted, where the “critic” is seduced into the inner circle and can then speak (and more importantly, write) favourably. Naturally, its dressed up as simply being better informed: “The argument, I suppose, is that with a culture as socially sophisticated as today’s art world, it is the insider – the person with access – whose views count.”

But Jones points out the dangers at first hand. He once became friendly with an artist he admired – he wrote a catalogue essay for him, and observed him working on a big project as it evolved in the studio. Then he went the see it when it was completed, at the private view – “and the finished work struck me as astonishingly empty, even though it had been enthusiastically reviewed by most critics. Was I corrupt when I liked it in the studio, or corrupted into disliking it by my later self-disgust at being a suck-up?” He concludes, “For me, writing about art is an honest examination of response. Does it really work? Is it really powerful? These questions seem worth asking in a culture saturated with art. This is a great time to be an art critic, with so many bloated reputations to puncture. All that is stopping us is friendship.”

And friendship with artists is impossible anyway: “They only want to talk about themselves anyway, until they’re about 60, when they start reading a few books and visiting the National Gallery, and you can have a decent conversation about art.”

Putting aside the bitter tone of a spurned friend here, critics and the art they criticise, whatever genre it is, often exist in an uneasy truce, if not open hostility, with each other. It’s a game of personalities, and every one of us will have a different relationship with the business we operate in, whether it be with our fellow critics or other members of the profession that produce the work we review. Theatre, like the private art view, is a very “clubbable” place, and we see each other night after night after night – relationships naturally form. The producers get to know us, and we them. And if, as many of us do, we also write regular interview features, we get to know writers, directors and actors, too. Of course, this is a purely ‘working’ relationship – they’re there to sell something, we’re there to help promote it. But inevitably there is sometimes more to this than a formal exchange of quotes and time. Occasionally you get to look “under the bonnet” of the creative process.

Does it compromise our independence and objectivity? Probably. But then its impossible, whether you’ve met someone yourself or not, to come to something completely neutral nowadays. Even if you’ve not done the meeting, we are so saturated with advance interviews that our colleagues have conducted that we learn something of the personalities involved along the way. And long exposure to someone’s work, as we also regularly experience, gives us sets of preconceptions and expectations.

But I always hold onto one thing in my dealings with theatre folk: we’re all on the same side as far as I’m concerned. I try not to see the relationship as oppositional. We’re both there, whether making theatre or watching it, because we love it. It may not always repay our love, but that’s what keeps up going back for more. But I don’t ask for love from the people who create the work – only for the love of the work itself.

Theatre isn’t all about text. On Saturday I went to the opening night performance of this year’s London International Mime Festival, which for the last 29 years has stubbornly – but often resourcefully – been trying to offer an alternative to the text-based box that most of British theatre operates within. The opening show at the Purcell Room, by a young French dancer/acrobat called Jean-Baptise Andre, was certainly about movement: so much so that early on it felt like a piece of dazzlingly-crafted modern dance as much as a mime festival event. But soon it derailed into the formulaic patterns of a lot of non-verbal theatre: sounds being produced without meaning, effects instead of sense. Perhaps you need a non-literal imagination to follow it; but I was lost. Maybe it’s a specialist club you need to join before you can appreciate it.

On the other hand, yesterday I visited the Tate Modern, that vast cathedral to art in which the gallery itself is a piece of living theatre, especially now with those glorious silver slides plunging through the vertical drops of the turbine hall taking squealing visitors from the top and middle levels to the bottom floor (it’s a pity, though, about the long queues for tickets to participate: the middle slides were hardly being used at all, yet no one could go on them without getting a ticket first). But here, too – on a teaming Sunday afternoon – the public were not only actively engaging in art, but engaged by it: the Tate truly is a place of art for all, and there’s no need for membership of the club first. Though, as it happens, I did go with a paid-up member – which meant we got to visit the final day of the Fischli and Weiss exhibition for free. These multi-media Swiss artists – who work in photography, clay and rubber sculpture, video, film and slide projections – create playful two and three-dimensional art that is by turns witty, intriguing and beautiful.

I am reminded of these visually-based weekend activities by Michael Billington’s feature in today’s Guardian on the past decade of the Royal Court’s life under departing Ian Rickson, as Rickson prepares to hand the artistic reigns to Dominic Cooke. In Michael’s article, he wonders what the Court means today, and where its future lies. He points out that whereas the Court had a virtual monopoly on new writing in 1956, when the English Stage Company took it over, there is now keen competition from the Bush, Hampstead, Tricycle, Soho, National and RSC, not to mention the fact that “regional theatres up and down the land are hungry for local writers.” He goes on to say that “Living dramatists, you might think, have never had it so good. Yet there is a strong opposition that argues that the future lies elsewhere – that young audiences are bored with text-based plays, and crave group-devised work, visual and physical theatre and site-specific experiments.”

Great strides have certainly been made in these areas of experimentation over the last decade, but for Michael, the play(wright) is still the thing: “Rather than reflecting this hectic eclecticism,” he suggests, “I passionately believe that the Court should continue to fulfil its historic role: that of putting the writer at the centre of the theatrical event.”

He therefore praises Ian Rickson’s regime – of which, he says, the prevailing critical view is that he “has been a safe pair of hands, but a tad unexciting” – for “his obstinate belief in the solo writer”, and in particular, for nurturing a generation of dramatists.” While Rickson’s predecessor Stephen Daldry had thrown open the doors of the Court to “a brazen, buccaneering new gang” that included Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Martin McDonagh, Joe Penhall, Jez Butterworth and Nick Grosso amongst others”, he writes that “it was Rickson who ensured that writers went on to deliver their second and third plays, the hardest thing for a dramatist in our impatient culture where people are always frantically seeking the next new thing, rather than admiring maturing talent…. As Rickson himself says, his aim was to create ‘a sustainable culture’ for young writers, and he has largely achieved that.”

Rickson, feels Billington, may have failed when it comes to “overly political work” – though he does acknowledge that plays like My Name is Rachel Corrie, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You and Rock ‘n’ Roll were done on his watch – but says that “since Rickson’s tenure has coincided with Tony Blair’s in Downing Street, I am disappointed the Court has not done more to reflect a tumultuous decade in British life.”

So the challenge to Rickson’s successor Dominic Cooke, according to Billington, “lies in stimulating work that reflects the diversity of modern Britain”. He hopes for plays that reflect the Scottish renaissance, the nation’s ethnic minorities, and plays that will analyse the “tarnished legacy” of “the great illusionist”, Tony Blair.

But most of all Michael hopes for this to be achieved through the Court’s historic commitment to the “solo dramatist.” At a time when theatre more than ever seems to be about collaboration, it may be an old-fashioned belief – but it’s a very welcome one: there may be all sorts of new ways of telling stories on stage, but someone has to write them. And the absence of a playwright creates a vacuum that the Mime Festival show I saw cannot fill.

Of course one of the problems of the internet – and its one I’m contributing to even as I write these words – is that it’s given us so much to keep abreast of. It’s bad enough trying to write this stuff, let alone getting the chance to read it all, whilst also trying to read the traditional media, too. I scan the four “broadsheets” (though only one, the Telegraph, actually remains broad) daily, and if I don’t get a chance to read everything in each, I cut out the articles I want to read later. I am now accordingly surrounded by unread cuttings everywhere I look.

There’s a fantastic site in the US, http://www.broadwaystars.com that essentially provides an online cuttings service to the major features of theatrical interest in the US media (and also provides online links to the Broadway and West End sites and columnists, including this blog, I am happy to say). But in London, we still have to do the searching ourselves.

But today I am going to offer links of my own to a few features that have caught my interest this week. (And before you spot it, yes, I am a Guardian reader! It so happens that this is the paper I turn to first…. But it also has provided the best arts coverage of the week).

• Neil LaBute —- the playwright and film-maker whose first play Bash returned to the Trafalgar Studios last night was interviewed in a Q&A “Portait of the artist” feature in The Guardian on Monday. In response to the question, “What’s the greatest threat to art today?” he replied, “Critics. I don’t think they are afforded the space to value a piece of work anymore. It has lost a lot of its value as a form. It has become bastardised, and the advent of the internet has allowed virtually anyone to become a critic.”

It’s a resonant thought: it often feels like we’re fighting a rear-guard action to keep ourselves in the papers at all. Its important – and not just so that I have a job — that the papers cover the arts, however specialised, and with specialist writers. But using the space for the free contributions of readers is, of course, far cheaper – and seemingly more democratic.

• In a world in which LaBute says virtually anyone can become a critic, anyone can also respond to one. The public dialogue with critics that blogs allow is facilitating a new kind of relationship between us and our readers. In a feature in The Guardian, also last Monday, the paper’s film critic Peter Bradshaw wrote that as a result, journalists are critics are find that “they themselves are eligible for critics, often by very intelligent people who do not happen to be professional writers”, and he says, “it has been a bracing, invigorating but often uncomfortable experience…. The critic is finding that the newly empowered bloggers do not share his or her opinions about the new film, play or book, and especially his or her high opinion of him or herself. So critics must sharpen their wits, clarify their opinions – and, just as importantly, get a sense of humour about themselves.”

• Of course, Guardian readers duly replied to Bradshaw’s column and the paper printed the results yesterday. As one astutely said, “A critic needs to be able to take criticism - and this new format means that they have to learn how to. In the past, criticism of critics was moderated by the editor of the letters page - a colleague! And thank goodness we have critics - they have always helped us to sift, gauge whether something is worth spending money/time on. If we take time, we learn which critics share our tastes and whose view to disregard when forming our own. In the blogosphere we can all be critics - but the same rules apply.”

• But it’s also certainly the case that critics were more powerful when there were fewer outlets. Where, its often lamented, is the Kenneth Tynan of today? As Michael Billington commented in a Guardian feature on Wednesday about him to coincide with the publication of a new collection of Tynan’s work, “Open the Observer on a Sunday and one was also confronted by his beautifully chiselled columns, full of passionate commitment. Tynan made theatre criticism seem glamorous in a way, I suspect, none of us has done since.” He goes on to pinpoint his particular abilities: “First and foremost, the voluptuous precision of his style… He had the born critic’s eye for revelatory detail…. At the same time, Tynan saw individual plays and performances in the wider context of the health of the theatre and the state of the nation.” Billington also cleverly wonders where he would fit in today: “It is tempting to wonder how he would fare today, at a time when criticism itself is changing, partly because of a democratising technology that makes everyone an opinion-pusher, and partly because of a rampantly consumerist culture. But my hunch is that he would have loved the new trend towards fact-based drama and would have relished writing about our more idiosyncratic actors, from Antony Sher to Fiona Shaw.”

• And now we face the final curtain: last Saturday saw the final performance of The Producers at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (before it hits the road for a national tour next month in Manchester). While critics are there to record first nights, what happens on the last one, though? As a fan, I’ve often gone to last nights of shows I have loved, so I can see them off; and away from the pressures of the first night’s mixture of anticipation and fear, they can be glorious celebratory events (if the show has had a successful run) or rather mournful ones (if the show hasn’t had the run it deserved). The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner went backstage to report on the last night of The Producers, and called it “a milestone”. Cory English, who has been playing Max Bialystock, tells her, “Realistically, I’m probably never going to get to play a bigger role, so I feel really emotional. I’ going to miss it.” She reports that he then grins and waves an arm at his palatial dressing room. “But most of all I’m going to miss all this – this dressing room is much bigger than my first flat in New York.”

You can tell its January. So starved are theatre critics of things to review that there are no fewer than four prominent overnight reviews today for a tiny little show that opened last night at the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre. London’s latest nun musical, Postcards from God, that re-tells the biographical tale of Sister Wendy Beckett’s rise to 80s television fame to a musical theatre soundtrack, is the sort of thing you might see late night in Edinburgh somewhere, but feels awfully exposed in the full glare of the London first string critical brigade. But while Jermyn Street might welcome being on the critical map again in such force, it doesn’t actually do them too many favours to be shown in such a mediocre light.

A couple of these reviews are cheats in the overnight stakes – both the Independent’s Paul Taylor and The Times’ Benedict Nightingale crept in a night earlier, to the last preview on Tuesday, but The Guardian’s Michael Billington was sat behind me last night (and whom I ran into in the drama section of the nearby Waterstone’s before the show, trying as I was to salve our dramatic consciences and appease our theatrical palettes before going to have them less than sated just along Jermyn Street), and Fiona Mountford was on the other side of the aisle.

But even if I resisted the show, I’ve long loved Jermyn Street and its indefatigable administrator Penny Horner. Lots of theatres are run on the passions of the people in charge, but now that Dan Crawford is no more at the King’s Head, Penny might well take the prize for London’s most industrious (and individual) manager. Like Dan, she doesn’t take a specifically artistic role, but is the guv’nor in every sense. (I tend to call her Dame Penelope). She answers the phone when you call, is often manning the box office or the bar (the two cubby-holes that function as such on either side of the entrance door), and is generally always to be found in evidence here.

She calls on a loyal band of supporters, too: London cabaret performer (and regular TheatreRadio presenter) Tim McArthur is often to be found manning the box office, and indeed was doing so last night. Of course, some are more familiar with him as another nun – his drag alter-ego, Sister Mary. Last night, however, it was another Sister Act onstage, namely Sister Wendy.

And talking of Sister Act – that’s heading for the stage, too. It opens in Atlanta next week, ahead of a planned Broadway opening.

According to Michael Riedel’s column in today’s New York Post, the kick-off to the US television casting call for a Broadway revival of Grease on Sunday — You’re the One that I Want – is already turning it into a show that people want to see.

It took, he says, $1.3m at the box office after the first programme aired on NBC. And now, he speculates, they’re not only casting around for a cast, but could be casting around for a bigger theatre than the Brooks Atkinson they’re supposed to go into (as he puts it succinctly, “more seats, more money!”).

Meanwhile, the open call for candidates to apply to compete to appear in the London revival of the same show, using the same technique, is due in the pages of The Stage this week.

Its producer, on both sides of the Atlantic, is David Ian, joint holder of the top spot of our Stage 100 list, with Andrew Lloyd Webber. Riedel – who in another column last week labelled ‘You’re the One that I Want’ as being “American Idol for show queens” – went on to say that Ian is “sure to emerge as a power broker on Broadway”. I once interviewed David in the pages of The Stage, and wrote of him then, “He’s a smooth operator and an even smoother talker, with a glowing orange tan and a generous shock of grey-streaked hair that make him look part playboy and part serious player.” Riedel is more merciless. As judge of the TV show, he says that Ian “seems too eager to claim the Simon Cowell mantle. And there’s something creepy about his perpetual tan, which in London theatre circles has earned him the nickname ‘the Oompa Loompa’.”

But how many international producers have played Rocky in The Rocky Horror Show in their time (not to mention done time in Time, the Dave Clark musical that played at the Dominion in the 80s)? I was reminded of this while watching the revival of The Rocky Horror Show at the Comedy last week – and could only wonder, as I saw husband-and-wife team Howard Panter and Rosemary Squire sitting behind me, if they’d ever considered taking over as Brad and Janet (or at any rate, Riff Raff and Magenta)?

David does, it seems, have a good, if unadventurous, spirit in being able to give the public what it wants. It’s a difficult science to get right. As playwright George S Kaufman once memorably expressed the converse, “You can’t believe how many people will stay away from a show they don’t want to see.” In a feature in Sunday’s Toronto Star, theatre critic Richard Ouzounian quotes Kaufman, and puts it to the test against the Toronto failure of the Blue Man Group there – whilst another show, Menopause Out Loud!, continues to thrive, “despite generally dismal reviews, including a scorching one-star blast from me who called it ‘the chintziest musical revue I’ve seen in years.”

He comes up with a two-part formula for commercial success:

1. Identify the audience for your project.
2. Tailor your advertising specifically to the local market.

But while both shows arrived in Toronto with “considerable track records”, he goes on to point out that “they approached our city in drastically different ways and that’s why one succeeded and the other failed. From the very beginning, there was a whiff of arrogance about the arrival of the Blue Men, right from their initial announcement…” and he goes on to complain about a publicity and marketing machinery that failed to give Toronto audiences compelling reasons for turning out to see a show that was “already old news in Boston, Chicago and Las Vegas,” by the time it arrived in Toronto, “more than 14 years after its New York debut”. A damaging labour dispute with Canadian Equity didn’t help their cause.

By contrast, the producers of Menopause had already learnt lessons on its journey elsewhere around the US. “First off was the fact that the show usually got bad reviews – and the bigger the city, the worse the notices. So they tried to make the show as critic-proof as possible by marketing directly to individuals and organizations likely to be interested in a revue about middle-aged women going through a life change.” According to the show’s Toronto PR, “Long before the conventional media even knew about the show, a series of group sales promotions, direct mailing campaigns and project-awareness initiatives were well under way.”

The strategy, says Ouzounian, “also created product loyalty. I have never received as many (or as vituperative) emails after a negative review as in the days following my pan of Menopause Out Loud! Part of me was happy to read the venom flooding my inbox. It meant that they really cared.”

He also points out that it helps that the show had a specific audience in its sights. “The audience for the show is 93 per cent female and 75 per cent over the age of 40. Neither statistic is a surprise; recent (U.S.) figures suggest that the theatre audience in general is 63 per cent female and the average age is 42. It’s simply good business to create a show aimed at the people who already like theatre – but it’s something that the stage version of Lord of the Rings overlooked: the film’s audience was mostly (72 per cent) male, with an average age of 24. The makeup of the audience for a show about menopause isn’t surprising, of course; but it’s amazing how accurately the producers targeted their market.”

And presumably those lessons are now being translated to London, where yesterday the press release came for the show’s opening at the Shaw Theatre in April. Jeanie Linders, who wrote the show, is producing it herself here. Her show has broken rules in other markets, so it’ll be interesting to see how it fares here. It’s a brave choice to go to the Shaw – a handsome but soulless modern theatre buried within a hotel on the Euston Road – whose main claim to fame (since it reopened after the former library around it was re-built into a hotel) was to house the one-night wonder of Oscar Wilde – the Musical in 2004. (I missed it – and was gutted – because I was in New York at the time). But more disturbing is the single ticket price being offered: all seats are £39.50 (though there’s an early bird discount – seats booked before previews begin on March 27 are being offered at £11 less).

This “democratic” pricing is probably necessary in a house the size of the Shaw – but it does price out a lot of people who might have thought it sounded like fun. If the weekly nut to be covered is so high, though, that it is only recoverable by ticket prices at that level, perhaps an alternative venue ought to have been considered.

As a critic, I receive press releases, of course, trying to encourage me to cover shows, but I don’t get the supporters’ letters or mailings that are sent out by theatres trying to lure their regular audiences there who are even more important, I’d say, than critics are. My favourite theatres are the kind where you can just feel that the local support is there; there’s the buzz not just of familiarity (and trust) that a well-run venue engenders, but also the fact that its teaming with people and expectation.

The Orange Tree in Richmond is absolutely one of those theatres, and it’s always a pleasure to go to as a result. And catching up, a couple of weeks after the opening, with its current sell-out production of The Pirates of Penzance last night, I was also struck once again by how cosily familiar, and familial, the place is. Even though it was some way into the run by now, artistic director Sam Walters was not only very much present – but even watched the entire performance! And the tickets were being torn at the door by the theatre’s excellent PR, Nick Budden (who told me he does this duty three times a week). So there’s an active sense of involvement and participation throughout the ranks of the theatre management.

It feels a bit like a local parish; we could be in church (a sense heightened here by the pew-like bench seating). And today, a friend forwarded me a copy of the letter that accompanied the latest season brochure from the theatre, and there’s a very interesting paragraph from Sam that’s very much in the admonishing tones of the local vicar. “You will have noticed that we have to begin every performance with an announcement reminding the audience to switch off mobile phones”, it begins. And indeed, last night John Causebrook, the front-of-house manager, made a nice joke of reminding audiences that should they forget, “we’ve got water… and guns”. But the announcement, Sam’s letter goes on, is not “foolproof in the face of selfishness or stupidity. The Orange Tree has a zero tolerance towards mobile phones and a bonus waiting for the first actor to lead the cast off stage until the offender has been ejected from the theatre. It is infuriating to have to begin every performance with an announcement and to have to disfigure the front of house with huge notices.” The vicar – I mean, artistic director – then suggests, “If you have to bring your phone into the theatre switch it of before you enter the building and then check that you have done so. And if you use it in the interval, switch it off again. The consistency with which a tiny minority is spoiling performances has become intolerable. We long for a blocking device.”

Of course I sympathise with Sam’s frustrations. But I also worry. Human beings are fallible – I know this personally, since I once turned on my phone in the interval, then forgot to turn it off again at Stratford-upon-Avon, and it went off in the second act (as I blogged about here at the time). I don’t think audiences mind being reminded. And reminded again, as they often are on Broadway, at the beginning of the second act as well. Being led out and pubicly shamed would be another story entirely. That’s no way to reward conscientious support.

Auld acquaintance hasn’t been forgotten this new year’s. Theatrical déjà vu permeated last week – after The History Boys (which finally reached the West End last Wednesday, two and a half years since its National Theatre premiere), the rest of the week saw the return of The Rocky Horror Show to the West End (just six months after a previous filler season at the Playhouse, but now at the Comedy which was its original West End home in 1979), and another (and apparently final) go-round for Cirque du Soleil’s Alegria at the Royal Albert Hall.

Rocky Horror and Cirque both, of course, had humble origins – Rocky Horror was famously launched at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs in 1973, while Cirque began its life as a street circus troupe – before becoming the cultural juggernauts and merchandise opportunities they are today. Even in the polished circumstances of their current lives, it’s fascinating to reflect back on what has brought them here, and the impact they have made.

Rocky Horror – a self-styled tribute to B-movies that has long ascended into the ranks of the A-list of the nation’s favourite musicals – curiously last year took another accolade when, out of all the Royal Court’s vast body of significant and important premieres over the last half century, it was voted the audience favourite: a vote engineered, perhaps, by the show’s vast army of fans, no doubt, rather than a true reflection of the opinions of the typical Court audience member, but a statement nonetheless. And in an era when the likes of Eddie Izzard and Grayson Perry have brought transvestism truly out of the heterosexual closet, this pansexual display definitely lacks the shock value (and satirical attack) it once had. But even in the karaoke-meets-panto conditions in which it is now routinely performed – with the audience likewise participating in call-and-response dialogue with the stage – it’s still possible to discern how innovative it must have once felt.

The same goes for Cirque du Soleil. This Canadian-based international circus conglomerate long ago blew the spit-and-sawdust of the traditional circus away – and replaced it with a blend of modern musical, multi-national and multi-cultural spectacle, but the packaging has become its own cliché now (none more so than the thunderously unfunny clowns). But even if the high-gloss finish actually serves to diminish rather than harness the astonishing energy and thrilling skills of the performers, Cirque have broken the mould and circus can never be the same again. And neither will the Royal Albert Hall, which turns into the world’s most glamorous and stylish big top every January to host their annual London residency. The Albert Hall, one of our most populist spaces, is a perfect fit for them.

And finally, it’s a farewell to the public face, at least, of Covent Garden’s Theatre Museum, which shut its doors on the weekend. The indefatigable Blanche Marvin, whose Peter Brook/Empty Space Awards have long had their home here, hosted a farewell drink on Saturday afternoon, and it was exciting to descend, one last time, into the museum’s subterranean depths and not only be amongst friends but also a keen public taking it in for the last time. Perhaps if it had always been as busy as it was on Saturday there would have been no reason to shut at all. But given how confused the message has always been about what the museum is actually doing there, it never managed to establish a proper identity or its place in the theatrical firmament. Now that it has gone, perhaps its time to start thinking about what we really need and want from a museum like this, should it ever be revived again.

The kids in Borough (where I live) were on their way back to school today as I walked to my office. Meanwhile, the bigger kids on the critical centre aisle were also back at school, in every sense, last night with the first West End opening of the year when The History Boys finally made it to town, nearly two and a half years on from its National Theatre premiere and a UK tour, Broadway run and feature film version later.

The play itself is already walking into the history books as one of the most successful new plays ever staged at the National Theatre, and seeing it afresh last night — for the first time without the cast that had originated it on both sides of the Atlantic and on film — was partly to