May 2007 Archives

After a two-week near-famine of theatre openings, this week (in which we lost Monday, of course, because of the bank holiday) has seen a sudden flurry of activity, and I’ve been chasing my tail to accommodate it all – before I fly off to Australia tomorrow. But first I’m heading for another marathon today: Trevor Nunn’s new production of King Lear is finally being unveiled to the press this afternoon, some 10 weeks since it began performances at Stratford-upon-Avon, followed by (on schedule) the opening of The Seagull tonight. We’ve been told to expect running times of 3hours 35minutes and 3hours 10minutes respectively (an earlier release from the RSC specified 3hours 9minutes for the latter, which sounded like taking the stage manager’s stop watch a little too literally), so it’s a Nicholas Nickleby of a day ahead. But, somewhat bizarrely, having kept us waiting so long to see the shows at all, the RSC just yesterday made an announcement that both productions will come to London, opening at the New London in November – so I needn’t have rushed up the M40 today after all. (Though I’m sure seeing the shows at Stratford will have a bit more atmosphere that in that concrete lump of the New London, unloved since Cats – another Nunn production, as it happens – long departed).

But there have been double (and triple) bookings most nights this week. On Tuesday, both Fiddler on the Roof transferred from Sheffield to the Savoy, and the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs opened their latest new play Alaska. Meanwhile, out-of-town, Manchester opened a new production of The Tempest with Pete Postlethwaite as Prospero, and Northampton’s Royal opened Patrick Marber’s Closer. Then last night, the West End’s new production of Sartre’s Kean (starring Antony Sher in the title role) went head-to-head with the National’s Philistines; and today, as well as Stratford, the Menier are opening All Mouth here in London. And there’s no let up tomorrow (though there is for me!) when Riverside Studios open Forgotten Voices (and in an unusual step, take it to Edinburgh after London, rather than the other way around) and Chichester’s Minerva has Patrick Stewart giving us his Macbeth.

And to complicate matters even more for me, in the midst of all of this I had a 60th birthday party for a colleague I share an office with – yes, critics have personal lives, sometimes! – so that knocked last night out for me entirely (but not, in fact, going to a theatre: her party was held at a place called the 20th Century Theatre in Westbourne Park, which is one of London’s “ghost” theatres that is now used for private functions, but was once variously a repertory theatre and a music hall, and is where a 17-year-old Laurence Olivier made his professional debut. Last night, entertainment was provided onstage, inbetween courses of dinner, by members of the Carla Rosa opera company).

So I moved everything around: I snuck in (with permission) to Kean early by going to see last Saturday’s matinee; then saw Alaska at the Royal Court on Saturday evening (without permission, so I bought a ticket – yes, critics pay for their seats sometimes! — only to discover that the director had relented on her decision not to allow critics in early after I had already made my own arrangements. Obviously I was breaking the official embargo in trying to do so, but it was the last preview before the press were coming in anyway, so how much would it change between then and Tuesday? And as it happens, I loved it anyway, so I needed to make no allowances in my review.)

Then on Sunday, I went to an early preview matinee of All Mouth at the Menier, where more allowances will have to be made for seeing it early; on Monday, I went up to Northampton for Closer (it’s a play I remember fondly from the original National Theatre, West End and Broadway productions – I saw it in each incarnation—so I was keen to see it again ten years on); then on Tuesday went in a night early for Philistines before doing the matinee of Fiddler on the Roof yesterday afternoon. Phew! Now I’m off for one final marathon run today at Stratford, before leaving London behind me tomorrow. I will catch up with you again from Sydney.

The Royal Festival Hall is about to be re-born after a two-year closure, and seeing it unveiled to the press yesterday, it certainly does have a cleaner, fresher, brighter look – though it will, of course, take a while for it to start feeling “lived in” again. Audiences, of course, will provide their own energy, and so will the resident artists: as Vladimir Jurowski of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment commented in a break from rehearsals at the press conference yesterday, “It will take us up to two years to learn how to operate in it – the hall has to get used to the musicians and the musicians to the hall”.

Audiences and artists alike have been having to embark on those learning curves all over London in the past few years: reacquainting ourselves with places that are familiar yet different. The joy of the Festival Hall refurb is that the physical space of the auditorium is pretty much the same; but while a lot of the work is behind-the-scenes, much of it, too, was in opening up the front-of-house areas, with some 35% more public space opened up by “clearing the clutter” that had accrued in every nook and cranny of the venue as offices were added over the years. These are now in an out-house, next to the railway arches, leaving the hall and foyers entirely for performance and the public.

Originally budgeted at £91m, the costs have now reached $111m, and are expected to rise to $115m – some of it reclaimed from the retail rentals that the site now offers to restaurants (the first part of the project to re-open as it did last year) and shops. London is, of course, in the grip of an amazing regeneration of its leading public art venues that has already seen the refurbishments of the Royal Albert Hall (£70m), Royal Opera House (£78m), London Coliseum (£41m), Royal Court (£26m), Almeida (£4.3m), Hackney Empire (£17m), Young Vic (£12.5m) and the foyer and public areas for the Barbican Centre (£14m) and Lyric Hammersmith (£2.6m); as well as the completely new builds for Hampstead Theatre (£15.7m) and the Unicorn (£12.6m). Outside of London, too, there has been lots of work, including the mammoth project to renew the RSC’s base at Stratford-upon-Avon (£100m, with £6m spent on the temporary installation of the Courtyard Theatre that the company is occupying while the main house is shut).

These, of course, are all public-private partnerships, with lottery, Arts Council and local government funding matched by private sector and corporate donation – it was amazing to hear that Vivien Duffield alone put £5m into the Festival Hall kitty. But she’s not the only benefactor to London’s arts venues, and some refurbishment projects have been done with private money only, such as Cameron Mackintosh’s ongoing upgrades to his own venues that have included a £7m spend on the Prince of Wales and a £1.7m refurb of the Novello. A scheme to re-do the Queen’s and Gielgud (and add the Sondheim studio above the Queen’s), originally budgeted at £20m, seems to be on hold; part of the problem, no doubt, is that the Queen’s now has Les Miserables in residence, so the work can’t be started till that departs, but also, when I last spoke to Cameron about this, he told me that he’d already spent more than he’d anticipated. Perhaps the idea to name a theatre in Sondheim’s honour – still, bizarrely, not done in his hometown, even though they have theatres named there for dead white male theatre critics and even a living theatre producer (Gerald Schoenfeld of the Shubert Organisation) – should be moved to one of Cameron’s other theatres, such as the Queen’s.

Elsewhere, however, the West End significantly lags behind the public sector in bringing its buildings into the 20th century, let alone the 21st. The cry for public funding may be hard to justify for them, especially when so much of it is now going to be diverted to funding the Olympics already. But I recently came across an interview with the Old Vic’s Sally Greene that appeared in the Daily Mail online last year which suggested a personal approach to finance that would mean that public funding is probably unnecessary there. She tells us she makes frequent trips to New York, “looking for new productions or ideas. I used to travel club class, but now it’s first class. On one of these trips, we take new writers to produce work off Broadway. I spend about £38,000 a year on fares.” And when she gets there, she tells us her favourite hotel is the Four Seasons, where she tells us, “The room rates are from $3,700 (£2,000) a night for a small one, and their penthouse suite is $15,000 a night.” Meanwhile, for trips to Paris – where she always stays at the Cotes near the Champs Elyees, where “my room number is almost always 110, with a balcony overlooking a courtyard”, she gets there by Eurostar: “Premium First, which is wonderful because there are often few people in the carriage.”

Of course a producer’s creature comforts are none of our business; but our comfort as an audience at one of their theatres is, and as long as money is being spent so freely like that, why isn’t it also being spent on the venues, too?

The point of theatre, of course, is that what’s on the stage speaks for itself; a show that needs a good programme note for its creator(s)’s intentions to be known has failed, at least on one level, to communicate itself fully. But theatrical communication is a two-way street; and creators, of course, learn from their audiences, too. Sometimes, as the old ad for BT used to say, it’s good to talk. And for as long as I’ve known it, the National – alone amongst London’s leading theatres – has offered a year-round complementary (but not, alas, complimentary – you have to pay £3.50 for the privilege) series of “platform performances” to offer artists an opportunity to explain themselves and audiences a chance to interrogate them.

These informal occasions, done on the stage of the show in question before the evening performance at 6pm, naturally attract the theatrical enthusiast: people who want to expand their knowledge of a show, and have been sufficiently challenged by seeing it to want to get some context and meaning from the creators. It’s a chance for artists and the audience they are serving to get closer to each other. And sometimes, as a critic whose work records my own reactions to something publicly, I get the chance to mediate that dialogue in public, too, as I did on Friday evening when I hosted a National platform with director Emma Rice and Tom Morris, her co-adaptor, on the current production of A Matter of Life and Death.

The show has given rise, of course, to an (ongoing) argument of the role (and age) of the critics, or at least the “dead white male” variety castigated by Nick Hytner as a result of (some of) their reviews for this piece, which in fact were far from universally damning – the joy of London’s wide-ranging press is, as I’ve often pointed out here before, how widely different the opinions can be on the self-same show. (And for the record, even amongst the senior broadsheet overnight critics, while de Jongh, Spencer and to a lesser degree, Nightingale were in the naysayer corner, both Billington and Taylor found much to admire).

But though that debate has in some ways usefully focused attention on just who we all are and how critics, whoever we are, never come to the theatre as a blank slate, it has also, less usefully, distracted from the work itself. So it was good, as a critic who actually did enjoy the piece, to bring the conversation back to the work itself, and note that except for one brief public comment from the floor, the reviews were not even mentioned.

Good theatre, as I’ve already said, shouldn’t need to be explained; and indeed, one of the great joys of Emma’s work for her company Kneehigh (co-producers with the National here) is the visceral engagement it provides for audiences that transcends verbal communication — text, as she explained, is just one part of her armoury, and that text (mostly provided by Morris) remained fluid virtually to the first night. But one fascinating admission was made by both of them: that they had failed to make it clear that there really is a choice of endings, and that the outcome truly does depend on the flip of a coin.

Alan Ayckbourn, of course, has long revelled in such theatrical devices, indeed once on this very same Olivier stage in Sisterly Feelings, seen here in 1980, in which a flip of a coin also spins the play in alternative directions. (According to the synopsis on alanayckbourn.net, “There are two alternative scenes for Act I, scene II and Act II, scene I. The decision for which scene is used in Act I is decided by the flip of a coin. The decision for which scene is used in Act II is made by the actor. This is a play about two sisters and the choices they make (or have made for them) over the course of a few months. There are four possible versions, determined by one random and one deliberate choice. The story starts with a funeral, at which Dorcas, Abigail and Simon are faced with a dilemma and decide to toss for it. This means that either Dorcas or Abigail goes with Simon. Later at a picnic, Dorcas has a deliberate choice. One decision leads to a night under canvas for Abigail, the other to a day of sports for Dorcas. The inevitable end of either choice is a wedding.”)

In the case of A Matter of Life and Death, the flip of the coin literally decides life or death. But though Rice and Morris have experimented with different ways of communicating that this really does happen in the play, audiences don’t believe it. During previews, they experimented with getting a member of the audience to call the fall of the coin – but one night that member called the opposite of how it had fallen to try produce the happier ending (the actor, however, decided to play it as fate had decreed, rather than as the audience member had falsely called it). Theatre, that great ephemeral, playful art, changes nightly in the playing. That discovery alone adds yet another dimension to the piece that I had missed when I saw it. And now I want to see it again, to see if the choice goes the other way.

Is the Young Vic due for a name change? Should it be called the Young Opera Vic soon? I’m beginning to think so. Since re-opening in its splendid refurbished premises last year – with a community opera, Tobias and the Angel – it went on to stage a children’s opera The Enchanted Pig as its (rather sophisticated) Christmas show last year. At an ENO press conference last month, it was announced that ENO would take up residence at the Young Vic in April next year to offer the British premiere of a contemporary European opera Lost Highway, based on the cult 1997 David Lynch film of the same name, as well as a new production of Harrison Birtwistle’s one-act opera Punch and Judy (to be directed by rising young directorial star Daniel Kramer in his operatic debut, though many of his legit productions have been positively operatic already).

And at this week’s Young Vic press conference on Wednesday morning, artistic director David Lan announced that his second season in the new theatre will kick off with another community music theatre piece, an adaptation of the 1997 film La Vie en Rose, while the Christmas slot will be filled once again by opera – albeit radically filtered through a South African, mostly a capella, lens, as Mozart’s The Magic Flute is reinvented as The Magic Flute Impempe Yomlingo, which will play in rep with A Christmas Carol Ikrismas Kherol. No mention was made at the press conference of the ENO residency, as it went beyond the geographical time frame of what David was announcing; so I did.

But when I raised the subject of David’s operatic ambitions for the theatre, which looks like it is becoming an artistic cornerstone for it now, he said he had the same answer he’d given me last time I asked the question at the ENO press conference – to which I replied, yes, but then I didn’t know of these plans, which makes the thought that this was a deliberate policy even more compelling. In fact, David says, he looks for shows that challenge them as a theatre – “things that we don’t quite know how to do” – in his bid, above all, to always aim to create exciting theatre: “How much excitement can we get onto our stage?” is his credo. Distinctions between different types of theatre are, he feels, a distracting irrelevance; it’s all about creating good shows (and of the last season’s big flop, the restoration comedy The Soldier’s Fortune that he himself directed, he quipped early on that they’ve addressed that problem “by not giving that director another job here”).

It’s certainly interesting that London’s operatic provision is being stretched in this way – beyond the annual Almeida Opera summer season, there’s not much small-scale or chamber opera around, and little room, therefore, for new opera writers to test their musical feet or different approaches to production to be offered beyond that of the major two houses. But its definitely a change of direction for the Young Vic, whatever David may say about it simply being part of a desire to do good shows.

Meanwhile, last night saw a very good show at one of the main houses: English National Opera offered its first-ever production of Britten’s haunting final operatic work Death in Venice, written in 1973. Under the starkly poetic direction of Deborah Warner, the opera – for much of its passage, a one-man internal monologue and meditation on his obsessive interest in a young Polish boy – offers a tour-de-force for singer Ian Bostridge. Warner, with her designers that include regular set and lighting collaborators Tom Pye and Jean Kalman, brings darkly textured detail to some gorgeous stage pictures; while in the pit, the ENO’s young new music director Edward Gardner brings a similar precision to the music.

“Perhaps war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography”, quips someone in London’s latest documentary play Fallujah, and although this is a serious and dignified (if flawed) presentation, it challengingly pushes you right into the cut and thrust of the argument by being staged as a promenade piece in a great industrial warehouse off Brick Lane. Thus two of the big trends in theatre combine: the current passion for verbatim theatre, and that for theatre in “found” spaces. Except that they’re difficult to find! Perhaps fringe theatre is God’s way of teaching me London’s more intimate topography.

The posters and listings for Fallujah merely say its on at the Old Truman Brewery, and I remember a previous theatrical excursion there last Christmas, when a bit of it was converted into the “Reindeer Theatre”, that was also impossible to find – on both occasions that I went! The first time there was literally no signposting at all, and eventually one gathered in the empty car park/covered market area and was then ushered upstairs to what turned out to be an elegant temporary installation of a theatre next to a winter wonderland of trees that had also been built. When I went back a couple of days later, during the afternoon, the market was in full swing – so the entrance system of two days earlier didn’t apply. Suddenly there was a new entrance, again not signposted.

When I returned last night to the Old Truman Brewery for Fallujah, I suppose I half expected it to be in the same area as the Reindeer was, but there were no signs of life there. My companion and I wandered all the way around the Old Truman Brewery, stopping in various shops and even an upstairs gallery (because the door from the street had the word ‘theatre’ graffiti’ed on it) to ask them if they knew where this event was taking place and none did. There was a huge banner above the street advertising the show, but no sign of where, in fact, it was on. I rang the ICA from my mobile, whose production it is and who are listed on the poster for the box office. They told me it was in the Atlantis Building…. But still not where the Atlantis building was. It eventually took a security guard to point us in the right direction.

Meanwhile, we’d picked up another couple of lost souls on the way. And when we finally arrived at the venue’s entrance – which, for the record, is in the Truman Brewery but on the right hand side of Brick Lane as you head north, not the left where the bulk of the Brewery seems to be – I was fairly fuming, and expressing my frustration, discovered that lots of other people had the same problem.

Perhaps it’s a test of disorientation; to fling us outside of our comfort zone before the show even starts. But for me, with the temptation of so much curry on Brick Lane, I was frankly seriously considering walking out before I’d even walked in.

A similar thing happened the time I went to see Punchdrunk’s Faust at a warehouse on Wapping Lane. I’d been told there would be parking at the venue, but drove the length of Wapping Lane without finding an open gate that would allow this to happen. I parked on the street; and when I came to the venue itself, marked by a couple of posters, the gates were indeed fully closed.

Though Punchdrunk and Fallujah at least offered professional box office services via the National Theatre and ICA respectively, its all very well selling tickets to your show but its an important part of the process to at least enable your punters to then find you easily. No wonder it’s easier to stick to conventional venues: at least I know where Shaftesbury Avenue is. And sometimes conventional venues can be used to spring their own surprises: going to see My Child at the Royal Court last week, there was an amazing dislocation (that I won’t spoil for you if you’ve not seen it yet, and you must!) when you enter via the usual theatre doors, but are ushered into a totally unrecognisable space.

No one ever built a monument to a critic, goes the old saying (though on Broadway they’ve memorialised critics by naming at least two prominent playhouses after them: the Brooks Atkinson and the Walter Kerr). But yesterday, the life, times and many friendships of Sheridan Morley were remembered at the Gielgud (the subject, of course, of one of his multitude of biographies) in a wonderful, nearly two-hour tribute to a critic who held the rare distinction of actually being held in affection by many in the industry, as the incredible turn-out of actors and writers proved, both in the (packed) stalls and onstage in an impeccably produced show.

I remember devouring Sheridan’s expertly-turned celebrity profiles in The Times, which were models of their kind, when I was at University in the early eighties and hoping that I, too, could one day do that sort of thing for a living. And now that I do, Sheridan’s way of making a review “travel” – with versions of the same review appearing here, there and everywhere — have provided me with my own template as a freelancer (though I try to change the form of the words more!). Edward Fox read a tribute from Miles Kington, Sheridan’s former Punch magazine colleague, in which Miles recalled asking him once if it seemed right getting paid three times for the same piece. Sheridan replied, “You’re quite right – there must be a fourth place slot somewhere.” Cameron Mackintosh later pointed out that Sheridan’s reviews could provide the key to “a dubious quotes ad” – since you got three reviews for the price of one from Sheridan, a producer could make it look like he had more good reviews than he really did! Of course, since each review actually did appear, this wouldn’t fall foul, I imagine, of the new legislation I recently blogged about of reviews being misquoted from.

Sheridan was often referred to affectionately yesterday as Sherry, but I remember reading a letter by him to The Stage in which he specifically disavowed that nickname, and his widow, broadcaster and writer Ruth Leon, always uses the full form of his name, so I will, too. Ruth, resplendent in a matching black and white skirt and blouse suit, was on hand as the elegant host to yesterday’s event whose intention, she said early on, was to provide a kind of “verbal photo album” to his life. Staged as a sort of literary soiree, with all the speaking guests seated around tables on stage (so you don’t get that usual endless procession of people on and off stage; Sheridan the sometime director as well as critic would have been impressed), it moved swiftly, seamlessly and lovingly from personal reminiscence to songs and readings.

Sheridan, who always loved stars, would certainly have been impressed by the roll-call of talent assembled in his honour: cabaret singer Steve Ross (coming over specially from New York and singing “Old Friend” from I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking it on the Road, not as the programme had it, “Old Friends” from Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along); also coming in specially from trips abroad, Miriam Margolyes and Simon Callow; old University chum Oliver Ford Davies; fellow writer and biographer John Lahr, who knew him from the age of seven, when they attended primary school together in New York (and with whom Sheridan shared a special affinity as a fellow son of someone famous, with the combination of privilege and neglect that such children can suffer, since the parent gives the best part of themselves to the public as Lahr noted here); and actors that also included Corin Redgrave, Lucy Fleming, Simon Williams, Liz Robertson, Jenny Seagrove, Rosemary Ashe, John Owen Jones and Michael Law.

The only pity, as Ruth said, was that the one person who would have most loved it all couldn’t be there. But his infectious public sense of joie de vivre – that often sadly turned itself privately into deep depression – was ever-present. As Ruth also said, the phrase that occurred most often in all of the thousand plus letters, and another thousand e-mails and phone calls, that she received after his death was that he was a “man of the theatre”. Simon Callow nailed it when he said that Sheridan was a “chronicler of the passing scene” as much as he was a critic; and Cameron Mackintosh, referring to Noel Coward’s famous “talent to amuse”, said that Sheridan had, above all, a talent to enthuse.

And yesterday his palpable love for the theatre was repaid by the theatre world’s love of him. It’s a personal pity for me that he’s not here, either, to read this entry: I saw him at a theatre in the last week of his life, and the next day, he sent me a handwritten postcard to say that he’d forgotten to tell me how he’d been talking to someone about the Royal Court’s last press conference that he hadn’t been at — and they asked him how he knew so much about it. He replied, he told me, that he did so by reading this blog. If you weren’t at Sheridan’s memorial yesterday, I hope this blog entry likewise at least helps you to remember him.

It’s a familiar cry in the theatre: not when someone is taken ill in the stalls, but when the show itself is limping, or worse, onstage. On Broadway, where are they ruthlessly apply the scalpel to creative teams and casts in attempts to fix problems on the way to the first night, this is standard practice. After Disney tried out Aida in Atlanta in 1998, for instance, the principal creative team that included director Robert Jess Roth (who was also responsible for Disney’s first theatrical foray with Beauty and the Beast, still running on Broadway even now but soon to make way for The Little Mermaid at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre) were dismissed, as were most of the principal cast with the exceptions of Heather Headley and Sherie Rene Scott. Robert Falls took over direction, and also re-wrote the book (with an assist from David Henry Hwang). Crucially, too, Bob Crowley stepped in to re-design it. At Atlanta, a malfunctioning pyramid almost did for the show: as composer Elton John said afterwards, “Every time I saw the show, it broke down. It got on the cast’s nerves. It dragged everybody down.” They finally took a different version to Broadway’s Palace Theatre in 2000, with a brand-new set. It went on to a run of three and a half years.

In the case of Twyla Tharp’s Movin’ Out, the work done between a troubled Chicago try-out and a Broadway triumph was done by Tharp herself. But a triumph isn’t always guaranteed: even she couldn’t rescue her follow-up, The TImes They Are A-Changin’, inbetween San Diego and Broadway. More recently, The Pirate Queen was re-tooled en route from a Chicago try-out to a Broadway opening at the Palace Theatre: in came Richard Maltby Jr to rework the book and original lyricist John Dempsey’s work; also new to the team, Graciela Daniele joined to provide “musical staging”, with original choreographer Mark Dendy relegated to the title “additional choreography”. But whether or not these changes are going to change the long-term prospects for the show remains to be seen. It is still clinging on to life at Broadway’s Hilton Theatre, but with Mel Books’ new musical Young Frankenstein apparently trying to get its teeth into the theatre, there could soon be a blood-letting and The Pirate Queen could be made to walk the plank (instead of continuing to tread the boards).

This phenomenon is now, curiously, discreetly invading long-runners over here. Interestingly, when Michael Grandage’s Piccadilly production of Guys and Dolls was sent on the road, where it continues to tour now, the director was newly credited as Jamie Lloyd – with a line below his name, “Original production directed by Michael Grandage”. Ditto for choreography, now attributed to Chris Bailey (with “original choreography by Rob Ashford”). Is this generosity to their juniors, or a reflection of the fact that Grandage and Ashford haven’t gone too close to the touring production at all?

And in the last fortnight, I’ve noticed two West End shows with new billing. Christopher Renshaw, original director of We Will Rock You, has all but disappeared from the billing for that production: the directorial credit now goes to Ben Elton (who also wrote the book), with a credit for “original West End production directed by Christopher Renshaw” (but no programme biography). Ditto with Fame — the Musical, Karen Bruce is now credited for its direction and re-staging; while Runar Borge and Lars Bethke are credited respectively for directing and choreographing the original London production (but at least both still get bio’s in the programme).

No, that’s not a typo — I’m not referring to OCR’s (original cast recordings), but to OCD – Obsessive Compulsive Disorder – which a friend the other day wondered whether I was suffering from. Let me explain: he said this as I was on my way to see Evita for the second Friday running, having also gone the previous Friday – and I will be going to see it yet again this coming Friday, too. That’s in addition to the opening night I reviewed – and an earlier return visit I paid to the show, too.

But seeing it again – and again and again – over this compressed period has been about pure pleasure: I go to the theatre most nights of the week (and weekend, too, if possible), and it’s not always for things I want to see, but rather the things I need to. The joy of going to something like Evita is that it’s for a production I love, and want to share with friends. (And I should add that I put my money where my enthusiasm is, because I actually pay for each of these visits, albeit on the half price offers that are floating around at the moment. I’ve previously blogged here about how producer Bill Kenwright has called me a f*ing junkie – a “review” I intend to have engraved on my tombstone, so I obviously agree!)

I loved Evita at the first night at first sight, but seeing it each successive time has allowed my enthusiasm for it to grow still deeper and richer, just as the production has, too. I’m thrilled both by the operatic grandeur of Michael Grandage’s incredibly rich and opulent staging, and by the seductive choreography of Rob Ashford which (though it steals both a little — and sometimes a lot — from his ‘Havana’ and ‘Luck Be a Lady’ steps from Guys and Dolls) weaves a tapestry of tango-inflected movement around the show as nothing since the original Grand Hotel (as opposed to the Grandage one at the Donmar) did. But most of all, I’m thrilled by the firebrand performance of Elena Roger in the title role. She’s no great beauty and her articulation is sometimes as indistinct as her voice is sometimes shrill; but there’s such presence and vibrancy that she offers one of the most exciting musical theatre leading performances I have ever seen. I can’t wait to see it again this Friday.

Yet the production will have run for less than a year when it closes the next day. And it now looks likely that the Broadway transfer of the National’s Coram Boy will also shutter this coming weekend. It’s another example, like last year’s transfer of Festen, of a critically lauded London success failing to live up to its reputation on Broadway. (But whereas Festen on Broadway was nowhere near as good as it had been in London, I actually thought Coram Boy was even better there than here). It does, however, once again highlight crucial differences between the two capitals of the English-speaking theatrical world; just as the Pulitzer and Tony Award winning plays I Am My Own Wife and Wit failed to take the town over here, either. (And let’s not forget, however hard we try, Fuddy Meers – a comedy about an amnesiac — that came briefly to the Arts).

In the midst of shows like this over which I enthused, others – like We Will Rock You, that last Monday celebrated its 5th birthday in the West End – have rocked on despite the negative opinions of myself or most of my colleagues. Is there a bigger rebuke to the power of the critics than this? Are we so out-of-touch with popular taste? Nick Hytner, of course, already thinks some of my more senior older male colleagues may be so, and in yesterday’s Observer, its (female) critic Susannah Clapp seems to think that some of us don’t get out — or at least ABOUT — enough: that our job is partly about providing “some recognition of overall trends in the theatre” — such as the development of movement theatre that A Matter of Life and Death exemplies, “which until now has been mostly seen on the Fringe, where it has regularly disproved the idea that theatre audiences are always over 40. I’ve had some of my best experiences in the theatre watching it. Over at the Telegraph, Charles Spencer has had some of his worst.” This leads Susannah to write that Hytner’s “outburst has been useful: it has focused attention on the difference among critics not just about a particular show, but about a whole range of work.”

Susannah does indeed regularly go off-beam in the shows she gives coverage to, preferring to review a site-specific piece in a forest to a safe West End show. But those shows aren’t as easy for her readers to see (and are not only geographically more inaccessible but also have often ended their runs by the time her review appears). And it’s a crucial part of the job to serve our readers: I’m fully aware that a regional tour of, say, Boogie Nights or One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest with Shane Ritchie will reach more of my readers (and be of more interest to them) than a play at Soho or the the Bush. But I try to give at least a mention to a little show in a 100-seater studio like Trafalgar Studios, where Terre Haute is currently playing and is one of the best plays in London at the moment, even as the bulk of my column yesterday covered the birthday celebrations of We Will Rock You and the West End return of Fame.

I had a better time at the Bush (where I saw Elling) and the Trafalgar Studios, but the pressures of lack of space and my readership dictated that I paid more attention to the other shows than these. But even as I loved Elling and Terre Haute, I realise they offer no competition to the commercial behemoths I had to cover.

Still, the big shows can fend for themselves, regardless of their critical reception. The original production of The Sound of Music was critically reviled. And during its out-of-town try-out, Oklahoma! – the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical widely credited with revolutionising the Broadway musical – famously had its commercial chances assessed, not by a critic but by a rival producer Mike Todd, as “No girls, no gags, no chance.”

Calling the critical shots, as it’s our job to do, we do run the danger not just of “getting it wrong” like Mr Todd did, but also of influencing each other. I finally caught up with The Thing About Men at the King’s Head yesterday, and I have to say I went with a heavy heart after reading the opinions of some of my colleagues. But it was a seriously pleasant surprise: a quirky, clever musical about infidelity and male friendship and the unusual bisection of the two as a cuckolded husband (who was philandering himself) bonds with his wife’s new lover. In one of the classiest productions seen at the King’s Head for some time, a first-rate West End cast of Hal Fowler and Nicola Dawn as the married couple, Tim Rogers as the wife’s new lover, and Paul Baker and Tiffany Graves hilariously covering an assortment of other characters, give it a smart and sassy treatment.

When we die, we hopefully live on in the memories of those we leave behind; and though it’s far from the only way in which that kind of legacy can be judged, public memorial services are one gauge of the impact that one life can make. Two memorials that I’ve attended in the last week – for The Stage’s very own Peter Hepple (indefatigable even in death, since extracts from his writing still appear regularly in the paper) last Friday, and for director Steven Pimlott yesterday – proved to be both paradoxically life-affirming occasions.

I knew Peter better than I did Steven – Peter was a colleague whom I used to see regularly at first nights and around town, whereas Steven is someone whom I interviewed three or four times (a couple of them as “phoners” rather than face-to-face), but whose work, of course, I knew well. But by the end of yesterday’s beautiful memorial on the Olivier stage (the director in him would have been impressed by the simple but effective stagecraft and excellent stage management), I felt I knew him well, too – from his love for rollercoasters (footage that he’d shot hurtling around one got the celebration off to a bracing start) to an eclectic professional reach that stretched from Shakespeare to G&S, opera to Lloyd Webber.

For Steven, said Andrew Lloyd Webber in a loving, off-the-cuff speech, there were only two kind of music, good and bad – he was no snob. They worked together on the revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the London Palladium in 1991 (a production itself now being revived, once reality TV has helped to cast it, at the Adelphi in July), and Andrew remembered how Steven commented when they arrived at the Palladium that “this was a building that wanted to love whatever is on its stage,” beautifully nailing the contribution that a building itself can make to a show’s success.

But then Steven was himself a man who seemed to inspire love amongst everyone and in whatever he was staging. Many spoke of his love of life and his passion – as Declan Donnellan said of him, “he was the most alive person I ever knew”. And even as he faced death, he was completely alive: in video footage taken while he was ill, he was seen saying that he never asked “Why me?” but rather “Why not me?” when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. “It’s part of life. It’s all nature, it’s how things happen”.

But we still lost Steven far too soon. His wife and daughter both took to the stage – one to sing, the other to play the piano – and their loss in incalculable. But as yesterday’s memorial demonstrated, we all felt a part of that loss. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. I started crying during Raza Jaffrey and Stephen Rahman Hughes’ rendition of ‘The Journey Home’ (from Bombay Dreams, that Steven directed) and continued through Maria Friedman and Philip Quast’s recreation of ‘Move On’ from Sunday in the Park with George that they both starred in the British premiere of, under Steven’s direction, at the National in 1990.

Peter Hepple, who wrote for The Stage for half a century and edited the paper for some twenty years, was also much loved: a rare thing for a critic and entertainment writer. But he was loved not just by his colleagues, but also by the business itself, as tributes from the likes of Barry Cryer and Danny la Rue made clear. As Barry pointed out, Peter was naturally self-effacing – he had a way of backing into the limelight, who made self-deprecation into an art form.

Charlie Spencer, who openly acknowledges that he spent some of his happiest days of his professional life working for The Stage with Peter after arriving there as a burnt-out Fleet Street hack, called him the least elitist of reviewers, as happy reviewing variety acts as shows at the National Theatre. Peter also bequeathed Charlie an immortal phrase that, in the cut and thrust of arts journalism and the constant rows and rivalries that erupt, is always worth remembering: “It’s only rock ‘n’ roll”. I wonder what Peter would make of the current row over the “dead white males” charge levied against critics by the National’s Nicholas Hytner. Peter, who was reviewing until two nights before he died, aged 79, would probably just reply, “It’s only rock ‘n’ roll.”

Though Trevor Nunn, of course, is keeping critics waiting to see his new production of King Lear that began public performances two and a half months before we are finally being allowed to review it (after which it has less than three weeks to run!), no such embargo applies to other columnists or the public itself to write about it. So we’ve already had Germaine Greer in The Guardian go on about Ian McKellen dropping his trousers to display “his impressive genitalia to the audience” (which she says was “for many of us the only memorable moment” in the production), and a big feature in The Independent about Nunn’s folly in keeping the critics at bay, in which Adrian Hamilton writes that Nunn “seems to have absorbed too much of the old king’s foolishness although not - if reports coming out of the RSC headquarters are to be believed - much of his fondness”.

Hamilton goes on to explain the circumstances in which the delay has occurred, namely Frances Barber’s injury, but says of keeping the critics out, “This is not only a discourtesy to the poor understudy, Melanie Jessop, who is having to take on both parts for nearly two months and will never gain a review out of it, but it is also an insult to the thousands of theatregoers who have paid good money for their seats and are now being told that the production they are witnessing is unworthy of presentation to the critics.”

He rightly points out that “press critics are not the be-all and end-all of theatrical success and judgement”, and notes, “The days so beloved of the Broadway comedies of the Thirties and Forties, when the players eagerly rushed for the first editions of the newspapers to revel in a success or slump in despair at a failure are long over. Many papers no longer even cover first nights on the night. It can take days for a review to appear.” (The paper he is writing in, The Independent, is one of the most guilty in this department.)

But that vacuum is increasingly being filled, as I’ve noted here before, by blogs, bulletin boards, and the publication of reader reviews (The Independent may have failed to produce an overnight review of its own for the Derby Playhouse production of Merrily We Roll Along, and still hasn’t reviewed it, but the day after the opening had a reader review instead).

One danger of reader reviews – who have bought their tickets and are therefore not subject to the usual “discretion” of embargoing their comments until after the official opening – is that they haven’t necessarily seen a finished product. But yesterday’s edition of London Lite – the free version of the Evening Standard – offered a “Backstage Blog” review of Lord of the Rings, which has been previewing for less than a week, and was headlined, “A musical only orcs could love”. The “review” attached to it says, “I wouldn’t get too enthusiastic! It is an awful production. Terrible singing, lack of tunes, terrible acting, strangely gesturing elves and a Gandalf who couldn’t seem to remember a single line! Gollum just seemed to be a poor shadow of Andy Serkis’s interpretation and the only actor who seemed worth his pay packet was Sam, who was excellent and stole the show!”

Of course, that’s just one person’s opinion (just as a critic’s is, too) – but it is being given prominent and damaging play in a London freesheet more than a month before the opening. The producers of Lord of the Rings have every right to be furious.

The announcement of the nominees for this year’s Tony Awards yesterday kicks off the official Tony race, but already there are big winners – and some losers. The new Boublil/Schonberg musical The Pirate Queen, for instance, is a complete no-show; so, somewhat more surprisingly, is David Hare’s The Vertical Hour, which closed some months ago and is therefore already forgotten, but whose Bill Nighy was long ago considered a shoe-in for at least a nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play. Also snubbed is Kevin Spacey’s return to Broadway in A Moon for the Misbegotten (though co-star Eve Best is nominated for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play); and Frost/Nixon’s Michael Sheen, though his absence from the chart clears the field for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play to his co-star Frank Langella. Missing, too, is Hal Prince from the Best Direction of a Musical stakes, and LoveMusik – the show that has brought him back to Broadway – also fails to secure a Best Musical slot. Neither does Legally Blonde, the latest screen-to-stage bubblegum adaptation, but with only four slots to fill and six possible nominees, as I wrote here previously, something had to go and these are two that were lost in the mix.

It does mean, however, that the Tony Awards have at least not delivered another snub to Disney, as they did with last year’s Tarzan, and have included Mary Poppins in the Top Four, which is co-produced by Disney with Cameron Mackintosh. But Mackintosh has been snubbed with the return of Les Miserables failing to secure a Best Revival of a Musical nomination.

On the other hand, Coram Boy – widely dismissed by some (but not all) New York critics – leads a Tony fight-back, winning six nominations – including three for director/designer Melly Still (as director, and for her costume and scenic designs with Ti Green). She is one of three British directors, all making their Broadway debuts with imports from London, to be nominated for Best Director of a Play – she is joined by David Grindley (for Journey’s End) and Michael Grandage (for Frost/Nixon) in a category in which the sole American entrant is Jack O’Brien, who directs a Broadway version of a play cycle begun in London, Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia. There’s also a British entrant in the Best Director of a Musical category – John Doyle for his production of Company.

If British directors often fare well in the nominations process, so do British designers – and Bob Crowley gets three nods (for his co-design with Scott Pask of the sets for The Coast of Utopia, and for both scenic and costume designs of Mary Poppins); with further nods to Jonathan Fensom (scenic design for Journey’s End); and lighting designers Paule Constable (Coram Boy), Jason Taylor (Journey’s End) and Howard Harrison (Mary Poppins).

British actors don’t score as highly as usual, though British-born (but Broadway’s very own) Angela Lansbury gets a Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play nomination for her Broadway return in Deuce, as does Vanessa Redgrave (for The Year of Magical Thinking) in a category that also includes A Moon for the Misbegotten’s Eve Best. And Gavin Lee from Mary Poppins is nominated for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical. Matthew Bourne and Stephen Mear are nominated for Best Choreography for Mary Poppins.

Roll on June 10 now, when the winners will be announced.

You should never, of course, believe everything you read in the papers (including, of course, expecting the critics to necessarily reflect public taste as I was writing only yesterday)!, so before we get too exercised about Nick Hytner’s alleged dismissal of some of my colleagues in yesterday’s Times, we need to find out the context in which he said it.

But as reported in The Times (and then given a full-page feature in the Standard later yesterday, under the headline, “Now theatre critics are panned”), he has complained, “I think it’s fair enough to say that too many of the theatre critics are dead white men. They don’t know it’s happened to them but it has”, he is quoted as saying.

He was apparently responding to the negative overnight reviews for the National’s stage version of A Matter of Life and Death, three of which – it is true – were written by men well into their sixties, The Guardian’s Michael Billington, Benedict Nightingale of The Times, and the Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh. But the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer, who was also negative, is not much older than Hytner himself. And he took the extraordinary step of linking their age to supposed sexism in their attitudes to the fact that the director of A Matter of Life and Death is a woman. Apparently, women directors – and particularly lesbian directors — get a significantly different treatment at the hands of the “dead white men” who are reviewing than men: “I know that Katie Mitchell gets misogynistic reviews, where everything they say is predicated on her sex. Gay males have never had a problem in the theatre … The ones who have it worst are the gay women. They really get it in the neck and there’s a lot of sniggering.” I didn’t, however, notice any such misogyny over the reception given by the “dead white men” to Marianne Elliott’s production of Pillars of the Community for the NT or Much Ado About Nothing for the RSC. Or indeed, of any sniggering when it comes to the work of Phyllida Lloyd or Deborah Warner, for instance.

He goes on to note that he’s not the only one exercised about this fact: “In private the female critics are voluble about this,” he says, and whatever else he is saying, he is also breaching an easily-traced confidence, not to mention betraying a note of sexism himself, in also saying, “I think it’s a very good thing that at least on Sunday there’s a female voice or two amongst the theatre critics”. Actually, there’s more than a voice or two – the Sundays have three first-string theatre critics who are women, the Observer’s Susannah Clapp, the Independent on Sunday’s Kate Bassett, and the Mail on Sunday’s Georgina Brown. But there are also numerous other female voices on the critical benches, from Jane Edwardes in Time Out and Claire Alfree in Metro to such influential deputies as Lyn Gardner in The Guardian, Sam Marlowe in The Times and Fiona Mountford in the Evening Standard. To fail to acknowledge them reeks of Hytner’s own of dismissal of their presence.

It would, in fact, be far more pertinent to note the absence of black or Asian critics amongst the critical fraternity, but I didn’t notice Hytner commenting on the absence of such commentary in his own well-received production of Rafta, Rafta – an Asian play that, it might be noted in reply, is being directed by a middle-aged, middle-class white director. Instead of giving an Asian director the opportunity to stage it, he has kept it for himself.

As Benedict Nightingale noted in his well-aimed riposte yesterday — a day on which he happened to be celebrating his 68th birthday – “Let me defend my tribe. We have a far broader spread of critics, in terms of gender and age, than when I started reviewing. Personally, I vow to give up when I lose my sight, hearing, enthusiasm or belief in gender equality. And I’m stunned to discover that Nick, so correct in other ways, is an ageist bigot. “ Next month, Nick Hytner is coming to talk to a meeting of the Critics’ Circle. It certainly promises to be an interesting meeting…. Watch this space!

”Only hard-core Queen fans can save it from an early bath,” wrote my Daily Express colleague We Will Rock You when it opened in May 2002, and I myself called it a “grim spectacle” and “tacky, trashy tosh” in the Sunday Express. Those were some of the kinder comments: the Daily Mail said it was a “shallow, stupid and totally vacuous new musical,” the Mail on Sunday agreed that this “dire, dull show” could “easily be summed up in two words: rock bottom”, and the Telegraph opined that far from being guaranteed to blow your mind, it was instead “guaranteed to bore you rigid”, concluding “The show is prole-feed at its worst”.

Yet tonight – having outlived at least two of the above critics, at least professionally speaking – We Will Rock You celebrates its 5th birthday at the Dominion Theatre. As the famous saying goes, “nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public”, and the same thing clearly applies here.

When the editor-in-chief of Variety, Peter Bart, objected to what Matt Wolf, his then-London critic, wrote about the musical Billy Elliot, he wrote in an editorial, “The job of critics is to deliver their opinions, to be sure, but it is especially troubling for Variety critics to appear disdainful of ‘audience’ shows… Over the span of its 100-year history, Variety critics have often pointed up the commercial potential of major blockbusters while acknowledging their artistic shortcomings, but we’ve made some bad calls, too.”

In his view, that was one of them; and Matt eventually paid the price, as I blogged here. But if we all had to walk the plank after our negative reviews of We Will Rock You, there might not be any of us left in the critical stalls.

Actually, would anyone care – or notice? Clearly, the audiences flocking to see We Will Rock You five years on are not paying attention to the reviews; nor do they at Fame – the Musical, as I realised while I was sat amongst a packed stalls at the matinee on Saturday. Some shows happily achieve their own public momentum, regardless of what the critics say, and are therefore critic-proof in every sense: Dirty Dancing is surely another, as I blogged about when it opened, though the reviews in that case were quite favourable: obviously we didn’t want (in Peter Bart’s words) to “appear disdainful of ‘audience’ shows”.

It is not, perhaps, our job to cheerlead bad public taste – or indeed to sneer, as I might well be here, at that public taste. But we ignore it, too, at our peril. Of course, first nights are not an appropriate place at which critics can glean what the public taste is anyway – the audience is so full of vested interests that the reaction isn’t “real”. But its instructive to go see a show like Fame, at a “real” performance with a “real” audience, and realise just how much real pleasure it is giving.

Even if, in the case of Fame, it actually shortchanges them: they’ve come to see the film onstage, and except for an early burst of the title song and a curtain call rendition of it in full, they don’t actually get it. (Dirty Dancing, by comparison, is far more literal, recreating the movie scene-for-scene). But it gives them a bunch of youthful kids, full of zestful energy, an engaging story of sorts (if not a particularly well structured one, dramatically speaking), and finally the sight of kids dancing on top of a yellow New York cab, which makes them think they’ve been given the movie experience. It’s a brilliant double-bluff.

We Will Rock You, meanwhile, gives audiences repackaged versions of the Queen songs they’ve come to hear, all wrapped in a big, noisy spectacle. That seems to be enough. Critics, in these circumstances, are the proverbial eunuchs at an orgy; maybe we just don’t have the balls to join the party.

Britain’s regional theatres have enjoyed a renaissance in the last decade or so, with many putting themselves firmly back on the theatrical map after years of chronic under-funding was finally reversed; but now the promise of lottery-funded refurbishments seems to be taking priority over artistic achievement. Last December, I reported here how Sheffield parted ways with Sam West, despite the excellent work he’d been doing in his two years there, when the board decided to shut down producing operations while the Crucible was closed for refurbishment rather than continue its artistic programme elsewhere, as the Young Vic successfully did during its refurbishment.

Now comes the news that Bristol Old Vic is following suit, with the announcement yesterday that artistic director Simon Reade is to step down in June following what a press release calls “the Bristol Old Vic Board’s decision to take the earliest opportunity to refurbish its historic theatre building”.

But just how early is this opportunity in fact being taken? The Old Vic has a producing programme that’s currently scheduled (according to the company website) through to September 22. But who runs the theatre after June 2, when Simon leaves?

And while Sheffield had long advanced plans to refurbish its theatre, this is the first I’ve heard of Bristol planning to do the same thing. How far advanced are these plans? When will building commence? Or is the building simply being mothballed?

The Arts Council, as funders of the theatre, need to be asked whether they’re there to fund empty buildings, or ones with thriving artistic policies. (Of course, open buildings can be empty, too, as we know from too many theatres up and down the country). But hard questions need to be asked here, since Bristol – once a template for the regeneration of British theatre – could be a worrying sign of the beginnings of its destruction. Talent like Simon Reade shouldn’t be squandered and lost in a drive to rebuild the bricks and mortar, because without an artistic soul, the theatre is nothing.

The Broadway season has ended with a washout – but it’s been far from one. In fact, the rain in 110 in the Shade – which opened last night at Studio 54 as the final opening of the Broadway season – is a cleansing, liberating sort; it ends a long drought in the rural farming community it is set in, but also in the life of its heroine, Lizzie Curry, who finally finds the possibility of love.

I saw it on Sunday, and it was the highlight of my recent trip – not that it’s the greatest of musicals, or even of productions, but this 1963 Broadway musical is thrillingly galvanised by the presence of Broadway’s greatest working musical actress, Audra McDonald. I don’t bestow the honour lightly; but in a city full of great performers, often doing great work, McDonald reaches parts that no one else comes near to: the deepest reaches of your heart.

She is such an inherently truthful actress, with not a false note in her (of either voice or of emotion), that you are utterly swept away by her, just as the character she is playing is finally swept away by the competing attentions of two men. I found myself surrendering to tears through much of the second act; and I was not alone. In a review in today’s New York Times, Ben Brantley points out, “ When you listen to Ms. McDonald’s Lizzie sing about the ache of loneliness or her disgust for the words ‘old maid,’ you don’t know how she feels; you feel how she feels. You’re likely to find tears in your eyes by the end of even comic songs.” As he also says of her, she makes a “dazzling case for the musical as a dramatic form that plumbs hearts and minds. She so blurs the lines between spoken and musical expression that one seems like a natural extension of the other. Singing for Ms McDonald is just a more emphatic and articulate way of talking, one that’s needed when emotions are so intense they can’t be captured without the texture and shading of melody.”

And what texture and shading she brings to both character and melody! The parched landscape that her character inhabits is only matched by the parched landscape of suitable Broadway musicals for Audra to inhabit; so it is essential to take the opportunity – any opportunity – to see her return to the Broadway stage where she has already won four Tony Awards and may well be heading for her 5th now.

It is the Tony’s, of course, that mark the official beginning and end of the “season” here – unlike in London, where we don’t really have one beyond that of the calendar year, New York marks its theatrical year out in Tony eligibility rules; the season ends at whatever date the Tony nominating committee deem is the final one for a production to open to be eligible for consideration for the current year’s Awards. And this year, that cut-off date was last night – hence the last minute flurry of openings here that I have blogged about here before.

And now Broadway’s favourite sport kicks off in earnest: Tony handicapping. First of all for the nominations – who will get nominated, and who will be left out of the running (particularly in the h