June 2007 Archives

Regular readers of this blog will be used to me posting entries early in the morning – it’s typically my first job of the day. When I was recently in Australia, of course, I was able to get well ahead of the game – starting the day 9 hours ahead of London meant that the day’s entry would go up well ahead of anyone actually getting up at home. But now I’m going to fall well behind for the next week, as I am now in the US again, and San Francisco (where I have begun this trip) puts me 8 hours behind in the other direction. So forgive the lateness of the posting, but better late than never!

Theatre, of course, is an industry like any that lives by the laws of supply and demand; but there’s always a finite supply in the theatre, dictated by the number of seats there are physically available in the theatre to sell (though looking through the weekly published box office figures for Broadway, theatre producers in New York seem to be able to play God and regularly exceed their 100% capacity – but that’s thanks to selling standing room).

But while Mel Brooks’ The Producers blazed a new trail six years ago when, in the immediate wake of its sensational opening, immediately hiked its top ticket price to a new high and also introduced the new phenomenon of “premium seating” that effectively turned the producers of The Producers into their own ticket touts, it seems like Brooks is going for bust with Young Frankenstein that he’s also turning into a musical now, with two levels of higher priced tickets being offered before it has even opened on Broadway. Best seats for weekend performances will, according to a story in the New York Post today, be priced at $450 (premier seats) and $375 (premium seats). Clearly, writes Riedel, “Brooks is confident he’s got a winner on his hands with “Young Frankenstein. But a lot of industry insiders say the sky-high prices reek of arrogance. ‘The show isn’t even running yet, and they’re treating it like it’s already the biggest hit ever,’ one veteran producer sniped yesterday.”

Will (false) pride come before a fall, this time? Obviously the pressure is going to be on Brooks and his director Susan Stroman to deliver as never before. The Producers arrived as something of a surprise hit; Young Frankenstein, however, is already burdened by expectation – and now by the producers’ greed.

In other news in the supply-and-demand corner, a story in The Stage yesterday revealed that “Britain’s leading drama schools are almost twice as difficult to gain entry to than either Oxford or Cambridge universities” – the ratio of applicants to places available was seven to one in 2005, with 11,184 applicants applying for the 1,550 places available at the 21 training centres within the embrace of the Conference of Drama Schools.

But if it’s hard to get into those schools, it’s still even tougher on the outside for those who’ve even managed to graduate from them. An Oxbridge degree doesn’t automatically open doors, either – but at least you don’t have to keep being re-examined and re-evaluated afterwards, as actors do afresh for each job.

When Kismet first opened on Broadway in December 1953, fate (which in fact is the translation of its title) was famously on its side: New York was in the middle of a newspaper strike, so the reviews didn’t appear. Watching the ENO’s lumbering but luxurious revival last night, I wondered if the only thing that could save it would be another strike today, too – but then there’d have to be an electronic media meltdown, too. If, however, you’re reading this, kismet is not on their side this time.

There’s a critical convention that critics don’t talk to each other about what they are seeing, either during the interval or after the show, at least within the confines of the theatre – the walls have ears, and there are sensibilities to be hurt. One West End producer, overhearing a negative comment made by a critic on her way out, lodged a complaint with her paper afterwards.

A friend of mine in New York has devised the “five block rule” – that you shouldn’t talk about a show until you’re at least five city blocks away from the theatre. On the tube back from the Lyric Hammersmith on Tuesday evening after seeing Angels in America, I got into animated conversation with a colleague – and he reported to me yesterday that after I got off the tube, the man who had been sitting next us who had been earwigging all the way leapt across the carriage to gleefully tell a friend what he’d heard. So perhaps the five block rule should be extended to five tube stops, too.

But sometimes you don’t need to actually speak to a colleague to know precisely what they are thinking… and feeling. Body language can be just as articulate. At Attempts on Her Life, the critic in front of me was slumped down in his seat so far I thought he would fall off the edge of it. And last night, the looks of silent – and not so-silent – suffering on the faces of colleagues at the London Coliseum said it all. Across the aisle from me, a senior opera critic – seated directly in front of ENO’s chief executive Loretta Tomasi – repeatedly slumped over and buried his face in the bag on his lap. I swear he was even hitting his forehead in frustration.

The look of wide-eyed horror on another’s face in the interval was equally articulate. One colleague came across the foyer and simply exclaimed to me, “F….ing hell!” I couldn’t have put it better myself. Last week, choreographer Javier de Frutos suddenly withdrew from the production before it opened. Audiences may wish they were able to do the same. And with a scheduled run of 19 performances (though the first was lost owing to de Frutos’s departure) — at up to £83 a ticket — it could turn into the toughest ticket to shift of the year.

Today is the 40th anniversary of the first cash withdrawal from a bank money dispenser – from a Barclays Bank branch in Enfield. And yesterday saw producer Cameron Mackintosh – himself coincidentally also born in Enfield – also marking his an important milestone in his becoming a theatre producer with a big private lunchtime bash at the Prince of Wales Theatre. Yesterday was 40 years, to the day, since he made his producing debut – sharing the producers’ billing with Hubert Woodward and Robin Alexander – for the Kenton Theatre Summer Season’s opening production of William Douglas Home’s The Reluctant Debutante.

But there was nothing reluctant about this debutante, as the 40 years since have gone on to prove, and though there have been missteps, as there are in any producing career, he’s turned musicals into his own private cash dispensers. Globalisation has, of course, become the buzzword of the age; but Cameron cleverly spotted its potential early on for musical theatre, exporting his products on a global scale and turning musicals like Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables and Miss Saigon into a worldwide cultural currency.

But if globalisation suggests a lack of the personal touch, the difference with Cameron is that he’s always been meticulous about overseeing his operations personally. When he first set about bringing Mary Poppins to the stage, he told me he identified with the title character – a meddler perfectionist (who sings about herself that she “perfectly perfect”) – and he said, ““I try to make my shows perfect, and have driven people mad for 30 years doing so, so she entirely has my ethos as a producer.”

Yesterday, a collection of friends, family, staff, colleagues, rival producers and even a critic (me!) who have been variously driven mad (and with whom “I’ve had some fantastic rows”, he said) were gathered together to mark the anniversary in the perfectly perfect surroundings of the Delfont Room at the Prince of Wales Theatre – one of a stable of theatres he now, of course, owns, and has spent vast amounts of money bringing into the 21st century (a rolling programme of refurbishment that has now reached the Gielgud which is currently being made-over).

But aside from his own productions and now the theatres, Cameron has always been a life force in the lifeblood of British theatre, too – a nurturer of talent offstage and on, whose Mackintosh Foundation gives money to many good causes. He doesn’t just make money – he spends it, too. It’s not a one-way traffic from the public pocket into his; nor – apart from an early heads-up when he persuaded the Arts Council to co-fund touring revivals of Oliver!, Oklahoma! and My Fair Lady to major regional theatres in the late 70s and early 80s – has he claimed money from the public funding purse to do so. In fact, he’s probably paid that back many times over in his support now for the National Theatre.

Theatrical love-ins can be excessive – but the modest gathering of around 150 of Mackintosh’s peers (and a few peers of the realm, including Lord Lloyd-Webber and Lord Melvyn Bragg) was actually far more restrained. Cameron merely wanted to say thank you – and we returned the compliment. And although the thank you lists could stretch in both directions for miles, he confined himself to paying tribute to four men, without whom “I might otherwise be in jail” – Bob West (doyen of West End company managers), and Martin McCallum, Matthew Dalco and Nicholas Allott, who have all variously served duty as his senior executive staff.

Since the Mouse first squeaked on Broadway 13 years ago, bringing a live action version of their film hit of Beauty and the Beast to the Broadway stage (where it is still running and has now entered the record books as the sixth longest running show of all time, just behind Oh! Calcutta!, of all things!), Disney has gone on to roar as a major theatrical player.

Successors (and successes) like The Lion King have not only established the brand, but also stretched the envelope for the kind of work they were capable of: after the theme-park literalness of Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King was a bold and imaginative piece of theatre making that brought Julie Taymor’s amazing creation of animals through puppets to Broadway.

Aida, an attempt to create an original pop musical (with a score by Elton John) out of the legendary story, took Disney further away from their own territory, but they tooled it into a four-year hit nevertheless.

In the process, Disney have provided a safe haven for Broadway family entertainment that may have made it a bit more like a theme park than before, perhaps, but has also introduced entire generations to the theatregoing experience, and that can’t be a bad thing.

But is the bubble now bursting on this particular chapter of Broadway history? Even Disney’s fabled marketing and cross-promotional possibilities haven’t been able to save their stage version of Tarzan, which has suddenly and dramatically announced its Broadway closure on July 8.

“The sales trends over the last few weeks just haven’t held up,” according to David Schrader, managing director and chief financial officer of Disney Theatrical, quoted in Variety. But by Disney standards, not only is the barely two-year run a surprise, but so is the suddenness of the announcement to close, with just two weeks notice. As Variety points out, it’s “another indicator of the show’s struggling sales. For other productions the company has announced the end of a run months in advance to capitalize on a resultant bump in receipts. The strategy is currently working well for Beauty, which announced six months ago it would end its 13-year run in July and is now logging impressive receipts in its final frames.”

In the last season, Disney brought their stage version of Mary Poppins – co-produced with Cameron Mackintosh – to Broadway, and though snubbed in all but one of Tony Award categories it was nominated for (its sole win was Bob Crowley’s scenic design), sales for that are holding up. But the fact that the original London production is flying away, in every sense, in January, after only three years, doesn’t augur too well for the longer-term prospects of Mary Poppins on Broadway. I would have expected it to have run for years and years here.

Maybe there just isn’t enough audience to go around anymore. Disney was always in danger of cannibalising its own audience; later this year it is bringing The Little Mermaid to Broadway, but has already seen off its own competition there by installing it into the Lunt-Fontanne, i.e. to replace Beauty and the Beast.

Disney’s producing wobble with Tarzan, however, proves that even Disney are not infallible.

No, that isn’t a critical response to watching Elaine Paige again in The Drowsy Chaperone, as I was doing on Friday evening, but a purely physical one. I had, it’s true, not been feeling quite myself all day, and had laid low at home instead of taking myself into my office. (Although I am freelance, I rent an office, roughly five minutes walk from my flat next door to the Menier Chocolate Factory, so that I have somewhere to go to in the mornings and people to interact with, rather than out of my bedroom and into the lounge which is the usual lot for freelancers).

But I had been greatly looking forward to seeing The Drowsy Chaperone once again since it’s a hoot (and EP is a self-satirising delight), and even if I was feeling a little whoozy myself, took myself into town at the end of the day to meet a friend and see the show. There are no centre aisles anymore at the Novello Theatre, so I was seated in the middle of a row. Within minutes of the show starting, however, I turned to my companion and said I think I’d have to get out, as I thought I might be sick. So I stumbled out over the rest of the row during an applause break and promptly retreated to the loo, where I was.

At least I thought ahead a bit, but the absence of a centre aisle here might have rendered me susceptible to being the cause of something that a friend of mine once bore horrific witness to at a Richmond matinee: a case of projectile vomiting by one patron over the rows in front of him. But the loss of the centre aisle, it seems, is not just a practical problem for me, but is something that is much to the chagrin of my critical colleagues, apparently, according to the silliest of the silly accusations that AA Gill threw at the theatre critics in his pointless cover feature on the supposedly parlous state of theatre criticism in yesterday’s Sunday Times Culture section. Let’s ignore if we can (though it’s difficult to do so) the pompously smirking self-regard of the cover picture that makes the author not just the star of the story but of the week (was the Sunday Times that desperate yesterday)? Or the fact that the Sunday Times has done more to diminish the status of its theatre coverage than any other paper, relegating its much-respected and long-serving number one theatre critic John Peter – of whom producer Bill Kenwright said in the round-up of critical fraternity in The Independent earlier this year, “a JP rave can sell more seats than any other critic” – to number two, while putting in his place someone who reviews just one show a week?

But the real point of AA Gill’s piece seems to be to make the self-aggrandising point that it’s the work of good food critics, presumably like his good self, that have led to its current high chattering classes status: “Every room in the culture needs strong criticism; it needs committed critics to keep the form strong and innovative. Look at restaurants and food. The incremental improvement in the quality and sophistication and enjoyment of eating, cooking and buying food has coincided with the rise of good, angry, witty, opinionated writing.”

He then makes a seriesof astonishing and impertinent claims: “What the critics actually have to say about the theatre is growing in irrelevance, mostly because none of us knows what they think about the theatre…. The only context for theatre in their reviews is other theatre. Drama exists in a closed museum of nostalgic experience. Yet theatre is all about the real world. How often do you hear a critic mention seat prices, or whether the stalls might be value for money for an audience that probably doesn’t get to the theatre more than twice a year? The critics’ experience rarely seems to coincide with the lives of those sitting with them in the dark.”

Actually, some of us mention seat prices quite often. I wrote an entire feature on it for The Stage a few weeks ago. The other night, after the opening night of The Lord of the Rings, I was interviewed by a TV station after the show, and was asked if I thought the show warranted the reputed £12.5 million that had been spent on it. I replied that the more pertinent question wasn’t how much it cost to put on, but how much it cost to see: was it worth the £60 it cost to buy a top price ticket? (In my opinion, yes it is). But on the Sunday Times online, someone has replied to AA Gill’s invective, and agreeing with him about the failure of critics to mention seat prices – “or programme prices or bar prices or booking fees or sight-lines and audibility from the balcony” – adds, “Thank goodness for the blogosphere which is giving a voice to real paying theatregoers and their real world concerns. Check out West End Whingers, City Slicker, Interval Drinks and any other number of London theatre blogs for a fresh perspective.”

We are, its true, getting a greater – and welcome – democracy of opinion about London theatre than before, in which the public, who actually buy the tickets and support the theatre, are having their say as never before: indeed, the free London Lite makes a daily highlight of a public review, often wildly at divergence with the critical opinion, but unlike the critics’ reviews, we don’t have an idea of who the writer is or what their preconceptions are.

Critics are paid to do what they do precisely because they (hopefully) have a wider frame of reference than the public that their opinions can be tested against (and the public, in turn, likewise acquire a frame of reference from reading a critic regularly to test their own against). There’s also a key difference between writing about food or TV, as Gill does of both, and theatre: everyone eats (and most people watch TV), so everyone has an opinion about it. For Gill, though, the quality of the writing itself may be more important than the authority of what is being said.

The Sunday Times also asked a number of directors and producers what they thought about the state of criticism, and as ever it was Peter Hall, who — taking the long view, born of his considerable experience and earned authority – was able to say, “I think critics are better today than when I started: better informed and with a more international view. None of us likes being criticised, any more than we like school reports, but criticism is an essential part of life, and critics serve the public well.”

Kingsley Amis once famously said that a bad review might spoil your breakfast, but it shouldn’t spoil your lunch, and in this spirit, I shouldn’t allow a bad article about critics to have spoiled mine. But as it is, and returning to where I started, having spent Friday evening throwing up, I couldn’t eat lunch anyway and was laid low for most of the weekend, so I cancelled most of it: I was due to see two shows on Saturday and another yesterday afternoon, but bowed out of all three. However, I finally dragged myself out to the beautifully refurbished Royal Festival Hall last night for an amazing Philharmonia Orchestra concert featuring Mitsuko Uchida playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 25 in C, which was a tonic for the soul (and a still-dodgy belly).

Live music is one of life’s great pleasures: inhabiting the same sound space as music is being conjured in front of you can, like great theatre, be a deeply spiritual experience. And the best part of the new Festival Hall is that it proves that it doesn’t have be a physically punishing one, either: the seats are blissfully comfortable and every creature comfort has been thought of, including a drink’s holder (during a press tour of the venue a few weeks ago, it was pointed out that these were mainly for pop concerts so that people could bring drinks in, which they would do anyway, and this way there was somewhere to put them rather than on the floor. But last night I used it to hold my water bottle, which was very handy!). I love the Royal Court for the same reason: not just the thoughtfulness of the “love seats” idea (in which you can remove the armrest between yourself and your companion for greater intimacy), but also the handy, airline-type pocket located in the back of the seat in front of you, so you have somewhere to put your programme.

With theatre-in-the-round (or semi-round), you have to accept that your view will not always be the best available but perspectives will keep shifting as the action does. So seeing The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder at the National’s Cottesloe on Wednesday evening, I accepted there were moments when I lost sight of an actor’s face or reaction as a result, but the benefits of seating the stage-level audience in three rows on three sides (just as the two circles at the Cottesloe also do) afforded a greater immediacy and democracy of views, too, since the setting – in the house, garden and outside caravan of the Lewisham home of the title character – was also in and amongst us.

That’s wholly different from the situation at the Donmar, where the stage faces out front and so do the actors most of the time, towards the central banks of seating in the stalls and circle. Finally catching up with their highly acclaimed current production of Betrayal yesterday afternoon, having been away in Australia when it opened, I was seated in B31 – the seat closest to the centre of the stage right side block. And it was one of the most frustrating experiences of my theatregoing year.

I could sense there was great acting going on from the wonderful trio of Toby Stephens, Sam West and Dervla Kirwan; but I frequently couldn’t see it. The three-hander functions mostly as a series of two-person encounters, and one or other of the actors in each of the scenes regularly had their backs turned to me, or worse, actually sat in a place so that not only could I only see their back, but the view of the other actor was also entirely obscured from my view. I might as well have been listening to the play on the radio.

And frankly, in a theatre that only seats 250 to begin with, it seems perverse to have a situation in which a proportion of them don’t have access to the full experience of what is being put on. I lunched with a leading West End producer before the show yesterday, and funnily enough he mentioned that he had been interested in transferring it – but needed to see it again from the centre, as he’d seen it from the side, before he contemplated it. Watching it from the side, I knew exactly what he meant.

The performance also happened to be a schools’ matinee. My heart sometimes sinks when I happen to go to one, since I fear disruption from inattentive kids; but on the other hand, I have to remind myself that it was precisely a theatre trip, to see a production of Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea when I was just 14, that changed my life and set me on the professional course I have ultimately ended up on. I have to say that both Betrayal and The Deep Blue Sea, with their darkly tangled stories of the pain and hurt of infidelity, strike me as odd choices for school audiences who necessarily won’t yet have experienced those kind of challenges in their young lives; but then The Deep Blue Sea obviously resonated with me at some primal level, and has continued to deepen as I’ve got older and experienced both the pain of desperate longing and unequal relationships for myself.

Yesterday’s kids were, for the most part, with the play; but it only requires a few chatterers to disrupt the flow for everyone else in a place as small as the Donmar. And behind me, but too far away to shush myself, three girls kept up a constant hiss of whispered commentary for the last 45 minutes or so. The frustrations of my compromised view was finally exceeded by the frustrations of the chattering, neither of which I was in a position to alter.

How close to the “product” should a critic get? Are we part of the process of putting on theatre, or should we be entirely outside it? A friend and colleague, Georgina Brown, recently did a stint serving on the board of the Bristol Old Vic, until she resigned following their decision to suddenly close the place for refurbishment, though without plans in place to do so until yesterday’s announcement that they now need to raise a whopping £2million to complete the financing on the £7million projected costs.

Georgina, who has a home in nearby Bath, was able to bring both local and national insight to her place on the board, composed largely of local dignitaries who had no wider view of the theatrical landscape that she has acquired in her job. But did this compromise George when she came to review plays there, giving them unduly unfavourable reviews? On the contrary, she says, she was more likely to be harsher in her judgement than not. And for George, she found the experience, though ultimately the bleakest episode of her professional life, illuminating rather than compromising for herself personally. She was able to get “under the bonnet” (my phrase, not hers), of the way the theatre, or rather one particular theatre, works.

How many critics have an intricate knowledge of the workings of theatre and how it is actually put on? But do we need to have? Surely we should come there, as the public does, as (hopefully informed) commentators on what’s onstage, not on how it got there?

But since we are also part of the story of what happens once it does – creating a public record of the event – we could do with using every bit of armoury available to make us more informed. And audiences are increasingly responding to trying to do the same: the National Theatre’s platform programmes have become one of the fastest growing parts of their repertoire, with some 30,000 people a year attending them now.

Being on a theatre board provided George with a unique perspective – one that we could all benefit from. And they benefited, too – she was performing a valuable (and freely given) public service.

As it is, critics are, like it or not, part of the human fabric of the theatre. We have friendships – and sometimes hostilities – with each other and with other theatre professionals. Does chatting to a fellow critic in the interval about what they think compromise what we think? (Note from the Critics’ Circle rule book – it’s bad form to do so, but the rule is more honoured in the breach than the observance.)

But what about something else that many of us do – interviewing the director, playwright or star before the production opens? Surely that’s a backstage glimpse, too, of the intentions rather than the final product, and is bound to influence what we think. Again, as with George’s experience at Bristol, we may find that the inside knowledge makes us harsher judges – we may, as a result, register the gap between what they said they wanted to achieve and what they do actually achieve even more powerfully. But even if we don’t write the profiles ourselves, we may well read them – and that may brings us (as it does the public as well) to the play with some preconceptions. In my case, I sometimes do the interviewing publicly, when I host National Theatre platforms (though they’re usually after the opening and I’ve already written about them).

The “inside track” of the potential, perceived or real, of having preconceptions from being on a theatre board or having conducted an interview with someone with the show is even more pressing when someone’s a biographer — and therefore even closer to the subject. The Michaels, Billington and Coveney, still review Pinter plays and Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals respectively, even though both have written biographies on them. Coveney is also married to West End press agent Sue Hyman – and reviews shows that she looks after (and could therefore be said to have a commercial interest in the success of, since the longer it runs, the longer she’s paid). Of course, I’m sure that he takes pains not to let it impact on his judgement, which presumably may make breakfast a little frosty sometimes, just as Georgina went out of her way not to allow her place on the Bristol board to influence hers.

The truth is that we are never a blank slate – and it’s an imperfect world. Personal relationships always play a part in everything we do. It’s what makes us human, if not necessarily humane.

Yesterday The Stage reported from the Performing Theatres Conference that Chichester’s Jonathan Church had said that audience comfort was being put ahead of facilities for backstage staff and actors. “In the last ten years, a lot of money has been spent on theatres making their customer care better - we’ve got glitzy bars and fantastic box office systems,” he is quoted as saying. “We’ve become complex, big businesses, running catering companies and doing international touring - yet the people who actually make the work are paid badly, housed badly and work in poor conditions. How many actors do we ask to work in ludicrous environments? To rehearse in sports halls that are too dusty? It seems worse because they’re working in buildings that have had millions spent on their refurbishment yet the conditions for the actors or technical people haven’t progressed in 40 years.”.

He, of course, is speaking from the apparent luxury of a subsidised infrastructure, one that has benefited from the lottery windfall that has enabled major capital improvements to a lot of theatres up and down the land. Today will in fact see the launch of a campaign to refurbish the Bristol Old Vic, clearly a case, if proof be needed, of the rashness of the Board’s decision to close the theatre so summarily, since the refurbishment plans they gave as the reason for it were clearly not very far advanced. Attached to an invitation to the launch, being held at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane this morning, was a note: “Quite simply if we don’t raise the final amount of money needed to refurbish, the oldest continuously working theatre in the country will shut for good and a valuable resource for the region will disappear.”

The irony that this event is being held at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane – one of the supposed jewels in the West End crown – is that its one of the most historic theatres in London, too, and could do with a major refurbishment itself. Attending the premiere of The Lord of the Rings there last night, on an alternately barmy and stormy night, the humidity outside was exceeded only by the stifling heat inside.

It’s sadly an annual complaint in the West End – I blogged about it last July and said, echoing Church’s sentiments, “The unwary may find themselves trapped in a kind of theatrical hell. And if it’s bad for us, spare a thought, too, for the actors, who are performing under heavy lights and heavier costumes.” The Evening Standard, who also wage an annual war against the conditions on the tube, sent their thermometers into London theatres to measure the heat inside them, and headlined it, “We’re all sweltering, and it’s not just Jeffrey Bernard feeling unwell….” Readings were duly taken at the Garrick, home of Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, where they found an actual temperature of 35.5C (87F), which converts to an “experienced apparent temperature” (combining temperature and humidity readings) of 39.53C (103F).

When I interviewed Andrew Lloyd Webber earlier this year about the lack of air-conditioning at places like Drury Lane, he told me that the fact that it was a listed building meant it would cost £20million to put in an air-conditioning plant, whereas without listing he could achieve it for £1million. While another theatrical insider I put this to asked me politely if he said this before or after lunch, it is unquestionably a massive task to upgrade big old sites like this, listing or not. But when customers are, in the case of Lord of the Rings, being asked to pay up to £60 a ticket, they deserve at the very least not to have sit in huge discomfort fanning themselves feebly with their theatre programmes. The only relief last night was when a massive wind effect engulfed the auditorium. More, please!

The alternative may be to simply shut down the West End for the summer. If the theatres cannot be upgraded, let the theatres that don’t have air conditioning simply shut down operations from June to September. The prospect of losing a quarter of their annual revenue might, in fact, find them realising that its affordable to install some kind of air conditioning after all.

Just as, at the Old Vic, it might be time to fix the seats before the expect people to sit on them. They may, according to some of my colleagues’ notices, be staging a creaky old play in Gaslight, but that’s no reason for the seats to groan even more, unless they’re doing so in sympathy. As Kate Bassett commented in the Independent on Sunday, “It’s hard to say which is creakier: the Old Vic’s rickety seating (which artistic director Kevin Spacey should oil immediately) or the rusty vintage play up on stage.” In The Observer, the diary column reported that at Gaslight, “many lines were rendered inaudible by the squeaking of the ancient seats in the stalls. And it is not just that they squeak. Several are sprung so badly that they jab you aggressively in the rear. A woman in row M actually cried out ‘Ouch!’ during the first act. Something for Spacey to get to the bottom of, as it were.”

Though I was in Australia for the two weeks, it never felt like I was much away: even if I was starting my day when you were ending yours of the day before, then ending mine while London was still hard at work so was a little out-of-synch, e-mail and the internet was delivering a constant feed of news and views from across the world (or at any rate, for my world of the theatre). Travel, they say, broadens the mind; but the internet also shrinks the world.

As I flew back across time zones and continents on Sunday – and gaining back the day I’d lost going there – it may have taken some 31 hours to travel door-to-door from my hotel in Adelaide to my flat in Borough, but watching the route map as I flew I also noticed just how much territory one covers: just leaving Australia’s mainland takes the first four hours, then you’re finally over the oceans before skirting Indonesia to head into Singapore for a one-hour stop-over; then on across a great swathe of Asia, skirting Bangkok in Thailand and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia (both of which have been stop-overs for me in the past) to cross over India, then the entire reach of Europe from Russia to the Middle East and on to London. The world suddenly seems a lot smaller to me.

But then globalisation has also contributed to the sense, of course, that the world is shrinking, too. With Starbucks on every street corner, it now seems, in New York and increasingly in London, as well, they’ve just opened their first outlet in Adelaide. Lucky Adelaide!

But it’s not just coffee, of course, that the principle can be applied to. Cameron Mackintosh long ago exported the phenomenon of the identically-reproduced musical across the world. Australia, being thousands upon thousands of miles from the West End and Broadway but an English speaking territory all the same, is often at the frontline of decisions whether to allow local producers to “do their own thing” or require slavish reproductions of the original productions. According to a feature in The Australian last week, “Historically, big Broadway musicals travel under so-called replica rights, whereby an Australian production will be restaged by the originating creative team. Upcoming productions of Wicked, Monty Python’s Spamalot (both in Melbourne) and Billy Elliot (Sydney) will be realised in such a fashion. It not only maintains a production’s integrity but boosts the producer’s returns. Non-replica rights, in which a company can take the show and reproduce or even re-imagine it with their own creative talents, as do Melbourne’s the Production Company and Peter Cousens’s new Kookaburra: The National Musical Theatre Company, don’t come up as quickly, if at all.”

But the quirkier and edgier the show, the more likely it is that Australian creative teams will be allowed to put their own imprint on a show there. Melbourne Theatre Company have originated new productions of the Broadway hits Urinetown and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (the latter of which has now just transferred to Sydney Theatre Company). According to Simon Phillips of MTC (Melbourne Theatre Company, that is, not to be confused with Manhattan Theatre Club), “It’s about scale. The kind of shows we at the MTC can think about producing are smaller-scale shows. We go for the quirky little ones and often the timing is freer and the producers aren’t over-protective.”

But sometimes the authors are. According to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald ahead of the transfer of Spelling Bee, composer William Finn and book writer Rachel Sheinkin went to see it in Melbourne, and their arrival was, according to Phillips, “horrific, with Finn in particular a tough critic at first”. Phillips is reported as saying, “We ended up sayhing, ‘Actually, we can’t take it on, because what he’s saying is, ‘In America, this is what they did, this is right’.” Finn apparently eventually came around. In an e-mail to the Herald, Finn is quoted as saying that what was an ensemble fo unknowns in New York became in Australia “many powerful performances overflowing with talent all going at the same time…. In Australia, the show rocked. Which is weird, because the music, which I wrote, doesn’t rock at all”.

The West End and Broadway, of course, regularly trade shows and personnel between them. Cameron Mackintosh once again blazed the trail of having his own office in New York to manage his operations there (though he still contracts out the management of individual shows out, as many shows do there); and ATG have recently established a New York office, too. But Broadway producers are increasingly formalising their approaches to the West End as well, realising they need to be in on the “ground floor” to get ahead of the game. Anita Waxman and Elizabeth Williams were the first to broker a first-look transfer deal for Donmar Warehouse shows, though they were not involved in the most recent transfer to New York of the Donmar-originated Frost/Nixon which saw original London co-producers Matthew Byam Shaw, Arielle Tepper Madover, Robert Fox and Act Productions head up a consortium of producers that also included David Binder, Debra Black, Annette Niemtzow, Harlene Freezer and the Weinstein Company to take it there.

Of course, the American producing model is that many cooks are needed to make the broth over there. Bob Boyett, however, is putting fingers in many pies, to continue the cooking analogy: as well as having a first-look deal with business partner Bill Haber under the banner Boyett Ostar for National Theatre productions – from which they have already spearheaded Broadway transfers for Jumpers, Democracy, The Pillowman, The History Boys and Coram Boy, with varying degrees of success – he has recently brokered a three-year deal on his own score with the Menier Chcolate Factory to bring their productions to the US as well.

The Menier is therefore being set on a global path, though in fact it is for American shows that they have made their name here: their West End transfers have been for the off-Broadway hit Fully Committed, as well as new productions of the Broadway classics Sunday in the Park with George and Little Shop of Horrors. But Sunday is now to be the first of their shows to transfer back to New York – and though Boyett is a keen investor, the transfer of that to Roundabout’s Studio 54, where it will be a Roundabout Theatre production, pre-dates this new arrangement rather than initiates it.

Next up at the Menier, of course, and bringing this blog entry full circle, is the premiere of Maltby and Shire’s Take Flight – a show that the Menier’s David Babani first oversaw the workshop of at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival in 2004, which is where I saw it, too, on my first trip Down Under So Take Flight took its own first airborne steps at Adelaide, and now may well being launched on an international journey here.

Finally, and jetting also to a new way of doing things in the West End appropriately enough is Boeing-Boeing, that I noticed yesterday are applying a new budget airline philosophy to selling their tickets: book 4 weeks in advance and tickets are just £10, increasing to £15 at 3 weeks, £20 at 2 weeks, and £25 at 1 week, if you quote “high-flying offer”. With Elena Roger having recently swapped Evita for Boeing-Boeing, surely this should be high-flying adored?

The Adelaide Cabaret Festival still has a week to run, but alas, it’s happening without me. After two weeks Down Under – one week in Sydney, one in Adelaide — I’ve had to come home – real-life has to kick back in, and I’ve got off the plane this morning with the prospect of tonight’s opening of Into the Woods at the Linbury Studio; but I’m already expecting to feel a pang of déjà vu. One of the last events I went to in Adelaide on Saturday was a masterclass in singing Sondheim held by director (and long-time friend of the composer) Jeremy Sams, and one of the singers was tutored in “Moments in the Woods” from Into the Woods.

Jeremy’s involvement in the festival stretched from a personal cabaret retrospective of some of his work to two masterclasses – as well as the one on Sondheim, he also did one on writing for the musical theatre. One of the participants in that was Eddie Perfect, whose Shane Warne – the Musical was premiered in a workshop concert version yesterday as part of the festival; I was already on a plane back to London by the time the curtain went up, but I’ve been following Eddie’s work ever since I first met him on my first trip to this festival four year ago, so he allowed me a rare glimpse into the creative process of getting a musical up on its feet so quickly for that showcase. He allowed me to watch the tech run on Friday afternoon. And I was so impressed by what I saw and heard that I went back on Saturday morning for a two-hour band call, too.

Dame Edna – who is coming to Adelaide next week, after the festival ends – gave an interview to the local paper, The Adelaide Advertiser, on Saturday, where it was reported that she once “likened Adelaide to a diagnosis from her gynaecologist – all quiet on the surface but it seethes underneath” – and the same is true of this festival. Everything seems so slick and effortless, but behind-the-scenes a lot of very hard work goes into putting each show on. Especially in the case of shows like Shane Warne that have never been seen before anywhere; but there’s also something about getting a show up this fast that concentrates the minds and talents of the artists. There’s a phenomenal degree of commitment to their work: to show the work – and themselves – to their best advantage.

And while there’s a phenomenon known in New York as “workshop love”, where a musical looks far better in the ‘naked’ state of a workshop than it does by the time it is fully dressed, I have to say that what I saw of Shane Warne – the Musical contained some of the freshest, most eclectic and invigorating musical writing I’ve heard in a theatrical setting since Jerry Springer – the Opera. Musicals based on real-life, living personalities are obviously gifts for creative writers (just as musicals based on dead ones are apparently death to the theatre – think Napoleon the Musical, Lautrec or Leonardo, to name just three). Biographical musicals like Shane Warne have, first of all, great title recognition: people know, or feel they know, him, not just for his sport but for his tabloid-fuelled life story. (David Beckham and Wayne Rooney might be good subjects for the same reason). But the wonderful thing about Perfect’s musical is not that it attempts to satirise and poke fun at him, but that it actually does something intensely serious and committed: it looks at the man, the myth, and has him wonder what his own legacy might be – there may come a time when no one remembers who he is. But no one who sees this amazing musical will ever be able to forget it. And Adelaide saw it first.

That’s a big part of the festival: it is not just a showcase for work created elsewhere but a developmental platform, too, where artists can stretch themselves – and each other. They learn, and they teach, too. The masterclass series offers a wonderful window into the creative process on both sides of the fence: for participants in it, naturally, but also for members of the public (and critics like me!) who don’t usually have access to the working processes of directors, composers and performers.

The cabaret cliché of singers of a certain age, disposition and background re-visiting the classics of yesteryear is certainly a valid and enduring part of the landscape. Some of the greatest exponents of the genre do indeed tick all the boxes, keeping hope (and their own careers) alive to find a refuge from casting agents, the competitiveness of constantly seeking jobs and the demands of eight shows a week when they do get them by instead becoming masters of their own destinies and repertoires. But as long as younger singers, too, embrace the genre, you know its survival is ensured.

On Wednesday night, a young New York-based singer/composer/pianist Tony DeSare went back-to-back in the Adelaide Cabaret Festival’s Dunstan Playhouse with an Aussie all-women quartet who call themselves Women with Standards, and both produced slick, enjoyable canters through a past pop and Great American songbook repertoire, interspersed (in DeSare’s case) by original compositions. DeSare – a cross between Harry Connick Jr and Ben Stiller, though not quite as cute as either – fronted a big band, and revealingly brought a lot more individual personality to the proceedings than the British Gary Williams did when joined the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in the Festival’s opening concert. The difference, I think, is that whereas the big band supported Mr DeSare, Williams seemed to be more in support of the ASO.

In the case of Women with Standards, it’s a pity that their high standards of musicianship didn’t quite extend to the standard of their dress: only the spiky-haired Libby O’Donovan seemed to have taken the trouble to find something hip and funky to wear; the others looked like they were wearing off-cuts from some long-shuttered suburban cinema curtains. It matters only because an attempt to look classy and sophisticated simply made them look cheap.

From old-style cabaret to definitely and defiantly new: last night Hobart-based Mikelangelo offered a quirky programme of new original material, delivered in his intense, distinctive style, of which both style and content reminded me a bit of the Tiger Lillies, particularly thanks to his frequent use of accordian accompaniment (but without the falsetto shrieks). This self-styled “Nightingale of the Adriatic” or “bull of the Balkans” has also created a hilarious cabaret persona to house his songs within; and while they’re, of the most part, serious, his deadpan comic delivery between them are superbly executed exercises in seeming spontaneity. Last night, it included an extended comic riff on his state of his quiff – “I’m very happy with the hold of the pomade tonight,” he told us, and then proceeded to explain the minutiae of using it (as opposed to Brylcream) to get the desired effect. Mikelangelo knows just how to get his own desired effect on an audience, too, who – once they tune in to his wavelength – are carried along on a wave of intrigue and revelation.

London-based performance artist Christopher Green has created a number of memorable characters, the most famous of which is probably Tina C, the drag country-and-western superstar. This year s/he has created a new show specially for Adelaide, Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word, which offers Tina C’s unique take on the status of Australia’s indigenous Aboriginal population and how to create harmony, in every sense, between them and the non-indigenous invaders (or visitors, depending on how polite you are being). Joined by Auriel Andrew, an indigenous performing legend in her own right, Tina C created an unusually thoughtful and provocative drag show where – and this is the highest accolade to it – you actually forgot that it was being performed in drag. As with Dame Edna, the character suddenly seemed all-too-real.

So does another amazing Christopher Green creation, Ida Barr – a rapping geriatric former music hall star, who at last year’s festival was the caller for a mass group bingo session, but this year simply reminisced in a free teatime event that had the entire audience on its feet doing the Hokey-Pokey by the end. It was outright hilarious.

Critics have it easy — typically, we simply ring up or e-mail a press agent and (most of) our needs are taken care of. They want us there (for the most part) and we (usually!) want to be there!. But I wonder just how much that equation works with theatres looking after the people who really matter: the ticket buying public.

I am provoked to ask this question by an experience this week of trying to buy tickets for the San Francisco run of Jersey Boys. I wanted to just be a punter: the show is a Broadway sell-out, and I’ve already had my press tickets when I saw it there, so rather than impose on the press agent again when I head out to the West Coast in a couple of weeks’ time, I thought I’d just try to buy a ticket.

It’s not as easy as it seems. The first challenge was trying to find the “official” website for the theatre. I knew it was playing somewhere in San Francisco; and the first place google took me to seemed promising: the site was called curran-theater.com, which seemed legit, since that is indeed the name of the theatre that it is playing at in the Bay Area. But no — when you read the (very) small print on the homepage, you discover that someone has cleverly bought up the name, and “We are in no way associated with or authorized by the Curran Theatre and neither that entity nor any of its affiliates have licensed or endorsed us to sell tickets, goods and or services in conjunction with their events.”

But here they are, selling tickets in conjunction with their events — at prices, for the performance I was interested in, from $150-$200. It was the price itself that made me smell a rat — not the disclaimer (which I’d missed), since that was higher even than the Broadway price.

Eventually, I found the official website for the theatre — http://www.shnsf.com/ — and was duly re-directed from it to purchase a ticket via Ticketmaster. No problems there, and at least they’re transparent about their pricing and service charges. But as I proceeded through the transaction, I felt like I was being ripped off all over again: the ticket may have cost $85, but by the time I was done, the cost was $101.15, with three separate service charges being applied: a ‘convenience charge’ of $9.75 (what a euphemism!); an ‘order processing fee’ of $3.90 (what was the convenience charge, then?); and best of all — a delivery charge of $2.50 — which since I had selected the “TicketFast Delivery” system, means I was PRINTING OUT THE TICKETS MYSELF! In other words, I was being charged $2.50 for the privilege of using my own printer cartridge. All they did to earn the $2.50, in addition to the convenience and processing fees, was to send me an e-mail linking me to the place I could do so from.

No wonder punters feel ripped off. I realise that ticketing costs have to paid for somehow, and using a 3rd party agency to run the ticketing externally means convenience for theatre and (potentially) the customer, but an online purchase saves the theatre and agency almost all the costs of managing the process, right down to the necessity to print the tickets.

PT Barnum used to say that there’s a sucker born every minute (or at least he did in Cy Coleman’s musicalisation of his life), but nowadays it’s a blog that is born every minute. Mostly, of course, they’re a lot like keeping a personal diary – available for public consumption, but mainly for the writer’s benefit, not the prospect of anyone actually reading it (a friend who writes for The Independent told me she once feels the same way about her work there being very much like keeping a diary in that sense).

But while bulletin boards have a long history on the web of creating a community, in whatever field it specialises in, another community of bloggers is gradually emerging in the theatre world that’s creating a new dialogue, debate and diversity of different ways and opinions of experiencing the theatre, whether from the inside (written by directors, writers or actors), the critical ranks, or the public.

Of course critics are already paid for our opinions, so are we being greedy to contribute to this community as well? Speaking for myself, the blog you are reading now enables me to expand and broaden the sort of things I talk about, and perhaps engage with it more informally than in the space-limited platforms I write for elsewhere. But I am no longer far from the only critic blogging regularly: amongst my colleagues on this side of the Atlantic, you can also find Michael Billington and Lyn Gardner posting regularly on the Guardian arts blog; Kieron Quirk keeps a blog on the Evening Standard website; and Michael Coveney posts regularly on his Insiders’ View blog.

On the other side of the critical fence, arts practitioners are understandably more wary of airing their opinions in public, so some hide under the cloak of anonymity — though Encore Theatre Magazine offers quite a lot of informed and provocative opinion that wouldn’t necessarily be possible if it was written by named sources). But the trail in personally-owned blogs was long ago blazed by director Paul Miller on his remarkably honest, revealing and perceptive blog; and he has been joined by playwright David Eldridgeand even composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who posts a regular video blog on his personal website

These are variously helpful at demystifying the critical and creative processes; but it’s the public blogs that interest me even more. While public bulletin boards are full of disparate (and dare one say it, often desperate) voices clamouring for attention, a far greater degree of commitment is required for a member of the public to keep up a regular blog – and have something useful to say. And, rather like following a critic on a newspaper regularly, a regular blog also lets you get to know the writer’s voice, tastes and prejudices.

There are many out there, but my favourite is that of the West End Whingers: a brilliant exercise in style, wit and content, it is written by two people who have created a very distinctive editorial persona, and fulfil it with panache and something to say. Sean in the Stalls is the diary of a compulsive 25-year-old theatregoer who sees everything and has an opinion on it all, a more mature thatregoer John Morrison offers the wisdom of a more long-distance view, and Natasha Tripney, an aspiring arts journalist, flexes her critical muscles on her regular blog.

As with the daily papers, it’s impossible to read all of the above all of the time – you wouldn’t get any work done! – but these are the ones I read most regularly myself. No doubt I am missing other good ones – in which case, please tell me about them!

The notion of “best” when it comes to the arts is not an objective science; one person’s favourite performance of the year isn’t another’s, let alone performer. So are prize-winning ceremonies, or “top 45” lists, ever worth any more than a provocation to disagreement?

I thought of this twice yesterday, first when I caught up with The Observer’s survey of the excellence on British theatre acting with lists of 45 of what they called “our finest young talents and treasured veterans”. Sure, no such list purports to be comprehensive – or even representative. Since each candidate here is actually interviewed, perhaps it was to do with the ability to get them to speak, and those who didn’t lost the chance to be included. But why are Eileen Atkins, Maggie Smith, Patrick Stewart, Vanessa Redgrave and Derek Jacobi, for instance, missing from the veterans list? Or Daniel Evans, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Imelda Staunton, Michael Sheen, Alex Jennings and Tom Hardy missing from the lists of those in their prime?

Then on Sunday evening in New York – already Monday lunchtime where I am in Australia – this year’s Tony Awards were announced, with a virtual clean sweep to Spring Awakening in the musicals field and another to The Coast of Utopia (now shut) in the plays one. It was mostly very predictable, but every now and then there was a surprise: Julie White, who starred in the long-shuttered (and short-lived) Broadway transfer of the off-Broadway hit The Little Dog Laughed had the last laugh to scoop the Tony from under the nose of the favoured Eve Best (who invariably lives up to her name) or the utterly beloved Angela Lansbury (who at 81 was making her Broadway return for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century, and was therefore expected by some, including me, to sweep in on a sentimental vote)?

I recently interviewed Angela for a profile that ran in last weekend’s Sunday Express, and she warned me that she wasn’t necessarily here for the long haul. This is simply a re-introduction to Broadway for me, but not necessarily an ongoing affair. I don’t think I want to spend a tremendous amount of time in it. It is tremendously hard work – not that I’m not up for that, I am, but I’d rather do things from time to time rather than on an ongoing basis now.” But she’s also indefatigable: I was surprised when the show’s PR instructed me to ring her as early as 9am New York time – and even more surprised when she answered the phone herself. She’s not just an early riser, but also clearly not a star who surrounds herself with a galaxy of assistants. That’s class.

Cabaret is often about exposing yourself – sometimes literally so, as in the case of British performance artist Ursula Martinez who, as part of a phenomenal evening called Variete during the opening weekend of this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival, makes a red handkerchief disappear and reappear out of various parts of her body until she’s completely naked and there’s only one more place for it to produced from, and she duly extracts it out of. The show was an indoor version of Australian impresario and musician David Bates’ travelling Spiegeltent cabaret shows that we’ve seen in Edinburgh under the name Le Clique, and is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Variete truly is the spice of life here. This is a cabaret, too, where a man inserts an entire fork up each nostril. Or another man does a handstand on another’s head. Another still does amazing things with a spinning diabalo. This is as far away from your songbook cabaret shows as it is possible to go, yet it is also, utterly, uniquely and indisputably, cabaret as well: a shared experience between performers and audience that’s about breaking down barriers between them and also celebrating their humanity (or maybe superhumanity).

At other times, of course, cabaret is about other intimate revelations. Philip Quast, an Australian actor who has long been resident in Britain, returned to the very stage where he began his professional acting career in the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Dunstan Playhouse, and he told us how he had appeared as Adam, in the nude, in a production of The Wakefield Mystery Plays. One woman in the audience, he remembered, screamed. (Whether in horror, admiration or fear he did not explain). A few days later he got his first fan letter: a woman wrote in to say how impressed she was by his performance, but felt it necessary to point out that Adam would not have been circumcised.

Quast was appearing as part of an exhilarating evening in the company of Jeremy Sams, director of The Sound of Music in the West End but whose career has also stretched from musical direction and translating plays and musicals to composing incidental music for plays and writing the book for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I should declare an interest here: as Julia Holt, director of the Cabaret Festival, put it in a programme note, “I was lucky enough to be introduced to Jeremy Sams by British theatre critic Mark Shenton a couple of years ago.”

But the joy of a festival is that, having made the introduction, he was able to validate his presence here with a rich, broad introduction of his rich, broad career to the Australian theatre public in his first visit Down Under. And beyond this showcase evening, Jeremy has also shown still more facets to Adelaide in a public Q&A interview chaired by Julia yesterday, and also in a masterful Masterclass on writing for music theatre. I was particularly moved, during the Q&A, by Jeremy’s declaration of the appeal of theatre, and how we’re all pulled towards “this weird cult” for a reason – adding, cryptically and no doubt for my benefit, “even journalists” — and identified how it could be to do with the fact that many of us come from imperfect families, so we make a version of family life in a place where we can have more control over it and experience fewer surprises.

But the cabaret festival itself springs lots of surprises, and for Jeremy’s masterclass yesterday, he was joined by three up-and-coming writers of musicals, Eddie Perfect (whose new show Shane Warne – the Musical is being showcased at the Festival next weekend) and Matthew Robinson and Casey Bennetto (whose shows — Metrostreet and Keating, respectively — were seen at last year’s festival). Masterclasses are usually forums for teaching students; but here the joy and surprise was the sharing of one professional with others who are already establishing themselves as such. Jeremy has thought long and hard about the structure of musical theatre: about how the very fact that one chooses to write a musical at all dictates that certain structural decisions must inevitably follow. My eyes and ears were opened to new thoughts that will make me see musical theatre in a different way.

And another masterclass today in performance for musical theatre, this time held by Philip Quast, was a vibrant and charismatic lesson in taking a song, moment by moment, line by line, note by note, to discover what it is about and both the acting and emotional choices that have to be made along the way.

The cabaret festival also requires choices to be made: there’s simply too much to see, so you can’t see everything. But the joy of cabaret – already a sharing, caring sort of art – is that the show doesn’t end when the spotlight fades (there are no curtains). The conversations continue in the bar afterwards, and all around the festival centre. Also, all the visiting artists (and myself and New York cabaret writer James Gavin) are housed in the same hotel, five minutes from the Festival Centre. Unfortunately the foyer café is shut for refurbishment this year, so the daily impromptu morning breakfast rendezvous isn’t taking place. But today I made my own, meeting Jeremy in the foyer and going for breakfast instead at the hotel next door. We sat down at 10am and didn’t leave till they threw us out at 12noon to close for the day!

….and not just at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue, though that song from that show has also given the genre its biggest cliché, one that both defines it and yet is also something that it struggles to escape from. For the essence of cabaret is both that it is about life and that it is alive; but is there life in cabaret?

As I’ve worried away at here before, there isn’t much of a life to it in London and New York nowadays, though various “new cabaret” outlets are emerging that reconnects cabaret with burlesque, vaudeville and variety, in which cabaret has become an umbrella for intimate, live performance that simply isn’t categorisable elsewhere. (Time Out London intriguingly dub their section “Social Club”, though the New York edition long ago ditched their dedicated “cabaret” listing section and incorporate the listings into the music section instead). But halfway across the world, in Adelaide, Australia, there’s an annual attempt to bring the world of cabaret to both a teaming and diverse life that suggests there is an ongoing future to cabaret. And it has taken a festival of vision and dedication to prove that if you build it, they will come.

At last night’s opening of this year’s festival, it was revealed that the box office take for last year exceeded that of the Melbourne International Arts Festival; proof, indeed, that a niche festival can make a bigger economic mark than one with more global ambitions. 84 shows sold out last year. This year’s programme has some 450 artists giving 178 performances of 68 shows in the next fortnight. And forging the kind of artistic connections that a festival can specialise in, last night’s opener brought one local cultural institution, the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, into the cabaret fold with a programme of big band swing that celebrated Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra to get things off to a popular, old-fashioned start, many of them in their original Nelson Riddle arrangements. With most cabaret, you are lucky to get a piano and double bass accompaniment; here, the songs were spectacularly served with six double basses amongst a full orchestra heavy on strings and brass under the baton of British conductor John Wilson.

But while at least not distracting from the spectacle of that orchestra, the songs were less illuminatingly served by British singer Gary Williams, who merely offered an object lesson in the bland leading the band. It’s the kind of smooth but superficial and soulless delivery that gives cabaret a bad name.

For more intensity and integrity, I went next door to the Banquet Room to hear German singer Eva Meier perform a programme of European chanson. Here’s an artist who properly connects with her repertoire. And that’s at the heart and art of cabaret.

Only the other day Nick Hytner – who, contrary to what you might think from reading this blog, doesn’t occupy my every waking thought – was suggesting that theatre critics should look a little beyond their patch and parish and explore the multi-dimensional joys of the arts world. Yesterday, I did just that in Sydney – first of all taking the chance of a rainy day to retreat indoors to the comfort of a Sydney Symphony Orchestra afternoon Beethoven concert at the Sydney Opera House; and later visiting one of Sydney’s art house cinemas to finally catch up with The Lives of Others, that people have been telling me to see for ages.

My eyes (and ears) were duly twice opened. The first surprise and pleasure of the classical concert was to discover that, contrary to the disappointment I expressed yesterday about the apparent mundanity of the Opera House’s interior spaces (at least in comparison to the spectacular exterior views, which it perhaps inevitably cannot hope to match), is that filled up with a sold out audience (some 2,679 seats), the big concert hall comes alive. I suppose I should have anticipated this: venues are never seen at their best when they’re empty, and it’s the audience who supplies the missing piece of alchemy. But for a venue that seats so many people, it’s also surprising to realise that each member of the house can see virtually every other member of it; unlike conventional, tiered auditoria, the Opera House’s concert hall has the entire audience sharing the same space in a wrap-around embrace. And even though I was in the second from last row of the house, I felt completely a part of it.

But then a programme that comprised Beethoven’s 6th and 3rd symphonies cannot fail to embrace you, either. There’s something uniquely transcendent about listening to music live. I may not exactly be a classical musical intellectual, still less a snob, but I’m a fan: I have Classic FM as the more or less permanent soundtrack to my working day, on in the office and even here, I continue to listen remotely via the internet. But hearing music being played live is something else.

Going from this to the totally absorbing and beautifully acted The Lives of Others – a story of theatre writers and actors being kept tabs on in Stasi-era East Germany – was equally thrilling. Though film speaks in a different, more realistic, language than the theatre, the breadth and intelligence of the storytelling here engaged my mind and captured my heart just as potently as the best theatre can.

And now I’ve just arrived in Adelaide, where – for the fourth year running – I have come to attend the annual Adelaide Cabaret Festival. The best cabaret reaches the parts that no other theatre does: a combination of music and personality that makes you feel like you’re being addressed personally. I will report more tomorrow on tonight’s opening.

On my first trip to Sydney two years ago, I remember seeing those glorious white-tiled arched sails of the Sydney Opera House, looking as if they are leaning into the wind over Sydney Harbour, for the first time and I nearly cried I was so moved. It may be a familiar sight from a million postcards, but nothing prepares you for the joy of seeing it in its natural setting; truly, one of the wonders of the architectural world.

But nothing, also, prepares you for the stark mundanity of what is inside it; the original visionary Danish architect Jorn Ultzon of course famously fled, as costs spiralled and he fell out with the city fathers, after completing the work on the external structure but not the interiors, which were then completed by another architect, Peter Hall. No wonder they prefer to keep the inside secret: unlike, say, our National Theatre at home that is open all day every day for anyone to visit, you can only enter this building if you have are ticketed for a performance – or on a public guided tour. So that’s what I did yesterday, and saw a building that is, even now, 34 years on from its original completion, in a state of scheduled redevelopment – some of it once again under the (remote, by webcam) direction of Ultzon, who has never returned in person to see his completed masterpiece. They are adding access lifts, and have also reconfigured the entrance foyer to the three smaller theatres – the Drama Theatre, Studio and Playhouse – that weren’t part of the original building plans but inhabit an undercroft-like area below the concert hall.

I am off to a Beethoven concert this afternoon, to see (and hear) the main hall in action; but this is a venue that seems to wear its splendour on the outside – the opposite of our Barbican, which of course is a hideous mess (despite the supposed “improvements” to the foyer spaces and still doesn’t really have a viable entrance), but boasts two excellent venues inside in the concert hall and theatre.

And last night I visited the permanent Wharf Theatre home of Sydney Theatre Company, which is the city’s main “institutional” address. This company is currently led by actress and director Robyn Nevin, will next year be taken over by the husband-and-wife writer/actor team of Andrew Upton (currently represented in London by his version of Gorky’s Philistines at the National) and Cate Blanchett, and looking at the posters that line the walls, the programming has specialised in imports of British and US hits – Amy’s View, Closer, Woman in Mind, The Herbal Bed, Festen, Democracy, Frozen, Far Away, Howard Katz, The Breath of Life from London, and the likes of Master Class, I Am My Own Wife, Doubt, Proof and The Shape of Things from New York – alongside lots of plays by local writing legend David Williamson (who seems to be nearly as prolific as our Alan Ayckbourn) and other local writers.

Though some of their shows play at other venues, including the Opera House’s theatres, the Wharf – literally situated on one in the shadow of the Harbour Bridge – is a spectacular and welcoming two-auditorium venue. My only regret last night was not being in a fit enough state to actually enjoy the challenging drama on offer in the form of a specially commissioned new play by British playwright Stephen Jeffreys called The Art of War. Performed with commitment by Sydney Theatre Company’s own resident twelve-strong permanent acting ensemble under the direction of former Complicite regular Annabel Arden (and husband of the playwright), it deserved more attention than my sleepy self could give it. As I kept fading into and out of consciousness again from the accumulated exhaustion of a day touring the opera house and then visiting Taronga zoo yesterday plus my jetlag disorientation, I eventually gave up the battle at the interval and went home. But it’s a play I’d definitely like to see again somehow when I’m able to give it my proper attention: combining the political and the personal, it’s the sort of thing that Max Stafford-Clark could do brilliantly.

No, I’ve not become all Peter Stringfellow or, for that matter, Liza Minnelli (though a boy can dream). My nightlife as a theatre critic is pretty much confined to spending it indoors at theatres, not nightclubs; but seeing the premiere production of Priscilla Queen of the Desert – The Musical in Sydney last night, which contains songs like ‘I Love the Nightlife’, ‘I Will Survive’, ‘Shake Your Groove Thing’, ‘Go West’ and ‘Boogie Wonderland’, was to see the theatre turned into a giant retro disco night as filtered through a gay drag sensibility in, of all places, the Australian outback, as a trio of drag queens head from Sydney to Alice Springs in an outwardly decrepit but inwardly fabulous tour bus (and, replacing Phantom’s chandelier and Miss Saigon’s helicopter, what we duly have here onstage is indeed a giant tour bus). What was so refreshing and disarming about the 1994 movie – presenting a story of wit, warmth and prejudice being broken down in this apparently hostile setting – has been lovingly preserved here to the accompaniment of the same 70s and 80s pop disco soundtrack.

The result is somewhere between La Cage Aux Folles, the San Francisco pop-and-drag pageant Beach Blanket Babylon and The Rocky Horror Show, in which two theatrical phenomena now happily collide — the screen-to-stage adaptation and the jukebox musical. The result is a show that simultaneously embraces its pop cheesiness and hoary (sometimes whorey) drag jokes, but also has a genuinely affectionate and surprisingly affecting heart.

That balance isn’t always held in perfect check, at least not yet in Simon Phillips’ production that early on had me worrying it might be a travesty as well as a transvestite show; but once the story kicks in and the bigger drag posturings are left behind, it reveals its art, heart and craft. It’s helped by a performance of immense dignity from Australian theatre veteran Tony Sheldon in the Terrence Stamp role of Bernadette, and no less delicate support from Jeremy Stanford as the formerly married Tick (the Hugo Weaving role) and Daniel Scott as Adam (played in the film by Guy Pearce).

Between them, they make you care about their individual journeys as well as the bigger journey they are on together, which is no mean feat in a production that sets its feathered fabulousness and sequined splendour within a sometimes tackily rendered setting that has Sydney’s harbour bridge realised only in an outline of fairy lights and a Greek chorus of singing divas being flown in from the flies to good vocal but not visual effect.

But more importantly it also marks a coming-of-age of the coming-out story of the mainstream gay transvestite musical: not since I saw the original Broadway production of La Cage Aux Folles in 1983 on my first-ever trip to New York and was thrilled by its popular embrace of a serious gay relationship onstage has there been a show that humanises drag queens quite like it. But La Cage arrived just before the plague of HIV and AIDS really hit, and whatever strides the show made, producers became uncomfortable about portraying gay lives onstage quite so openly in mainstream musicals again — though off-Broadway, composer William Finn hauntingly tackled the spectre of AIDS in Falsettoland, his sequel to March of the Falsettos, that were then combined into a Broadway double-bill Falsettos in 1992 (still shamefully unproduced as such in the UK). Instead, we have had the “safety” factor of a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman in Victor/Victoria being brought from screen to stage in 1995; and the occasional gay character, like Mamma Mia’s Harry Bright, whose sexuality is kept secret until virtually the end.

So Priscilla isn’t just a good time, but is a sign of an important shift, too, to bringing gay characters centrestage again. Maybe next time we can we take gay characters not just out of the closet but out of the clothes closet, too?

Just when the row over the accusation that too many senior working theatre critics were “dead white men” and cut from the same (all-male, 60+, Oxbridge) cloth was simmering down, its instigator Nick Hytner has stoked up its ambers again in a column in The Observer on Sunday, in which he admits how it came to be said at all: he was ambushed by “a smart young journalist” who was asking him about the prominence that female theatre directors were now enjoying, to which he replied, chatting “idly and intemperately”, that some male theatre critics gave them a hard time. He says it would be unjust not to withdraw the charge, given the flimsiness of the evidence – “The odd offhand reference to the naughtiest girl in the school, an occasional frivolous off-the-record joke, an apparently patronising air - none of it would exactly stand up in court” – and so he does. The apology may be grudging even as it repeats the original accusations, but at least they are withdrawn.

But while his remarks did usefully open up a debate on the role of theatre critics and the (lack of) diversity of their voices, perhaps the question needs to be returned to the sender about diversity in the National’s own backyard, or at least back office. Led by the two Nicks – Hytner and Starr, both of them gay men – the staff is predominantly white, with most of the black and Asian faces in the building amongst the cleaning and catering staff, and the occasional actor. Black or Asian directors have been nowhere to be seen: even when plays by black or Asian playwrights, like Kwame Kwei-Armah, Roy Williams or Ayub Khan-Din have been staged, they’ve been given to white directors (including Hytner himself). As Clint Dyer, who directed The Big Life that transferred from Stratford East to the West End in 2005, told me when it did and he became first black British director ever to have a show open there, “The wonderful thing about being black in this country is that you have an amazing opportunity to be the first at a lot of things!”

But since Hytner was looking at gender, not race, let’s look at that too, and notice that though the theatre has been employing lots of women directors, where are the female playwrights? In The Observer, he writes, “It’s uncontroversial to believe that our theatrical heritage flourishes best in the context of a contemporary repertoire that challenges and amplifies it. Something like half of the National’s repertoire is brand new - and there’s nothing new about that. What does seem to me to have changed is where much of the new work comes from. There is a vitality and diversity about contemporary culture that is reflected not just in the subject matter of contemporary theatre, but also in how it’s made.”

But in fact, if you look at that half of work that is brand new, nothing much has changed at all when it comes to the gender of the playwrights creating it. Since Hytner took over the National in 2003, new plays by women dramatists or adaptors have been confined to Rebecca Leinkiewicz’s The Night Season (2004), Caryl Churchill (adapting Strindberg’s A Dream Play in 2005), Anna Maria Murphy (the imported Kneehigh production of Tristan and Yseult in 2005), Helen Edmundson (adapting Coram Boy in 2005), Deborah Gearing (whose Shell Connections play Burn was re-staged professionally earlier this year) and Emma Rice (co-adapting A Matter of Life and Death with Tom Morris). Total: six.

Over the same period, we’ve had new plays, musicals or adaptations by Owen McCafferty, Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Michael Frayn, Nicholas Wright (twice, once with his adaptation of His Dark Materials, the other with a new play), David Hare (twice with new plays, twice with adaptations), Derek Mahon, Roy Williams, Keith Johnstone, Alan Bennett, Martin Crimp, Lee Simpson and Phelim McDermott, Simon Stephens, David Farr, Steven Knight, David Edgar, Mike Leigh, Howard Brenton, Samuel Adamson (twice, once with a new play, once with an adaptation), Mark Ravenill, Enda Walsh, David Eldridge, Conor McPherson, JT Rogers, Tony Kushner, Joe Penhall, Ayub Khan-Din, Tom Morris, Andrew Upton and Matt Charman (whose new play The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder is about to open). Total: 32 (three of whom have been multiply represented).

There’s quite a gender divide, isn’t there, that far exceeds that of women to male theatre critics. But Hytner then changes tack and introduces a new element to the debate: that “my experience now is that theatre makers are equally excited about breaching cultural barriers and experimenting in form. Their dialogue is often less with the theatre than with other artforms”. So he urges theatre critics to get out more. “It mightn’t be a bad idea to give the five-nights-a-week theatre critics a bit of a break too. Maybe they could go to the movies and to the opera, and tell us what they think. I’ve known theatre critics complain that they never get to see a movie. They should be given the chance - they’re missing out on a lot that those who make theatre, and see it, refer to constantly.”

I am guilty as charged here in not going far beyond my own brief (though I do go to English National Opera opening nights, since they are enlightened enough to invite theatre critics to their work, unlike the Royal Opera House), but I wonder if the theatre PRs and theatre companies beyond the National – whose openings are automatically covered by all of us – will thank him for suggesting that we stop going quite so much. I am besieged daily by e-mails and phone calls from PRs wanting me to see shows they are looking after. And there are already far too many openings to see as it is. If I start cutting back on my commitment there to accommodate other art forms, won’t I be letting them down? There are few enough critical voices to go around as it is amongst those of us who are committed to the five-nights-a-week routine – or more – especially when some see considerably less as it is.

But Hytner also wonders, though, “whether the concept of the super-critic who sees everything and knows everything is as useful as it was. There are critics whose experience spreads wide rather than deep, who, like much of the audience, know less about theatre history, but are passionate about contemporary art, music and dance. They can respond to the hunger I sense in artists and audiences to break down barriers and chart new ground.” In other words, he’s asking for less specialist coverage; but surely instead of wising up to a wider world, this can only lead to the kind of dumbing down we are already seeing in many outlets, including some national papers, whose gossip columnists do double duty as theatre critics.

The familiarity of my greeting is not just because I’m Down Under, writing this in Sydney; but also because last night I saw Dame Edna being Back with A Vengeance in her home country (if not her home city, which of course is Melbourne). I have been seeing Barry Humphries’s now-legendary Dame, I now realise, for some 28 years, ever since I first saw her at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1979 (in a show called A Night with Dame Edna). I have since variously seen her in shows at Drury Lane (An Evening’s Intercourse with Barry Humphries, 1982, and Back with A Vengeance, Dame Edna’s Second Coming, in 1989), the Strand (Back with a Vengeance, 1987) and the Theatre Royal, Haymarket (Edna – the Spectacle, in 1998); as well as on Broadway (Booth Theatre in 1999).

I have seen her variously tumble out of a giant Maltesers’ Box to make an entrance in one show, and then exiting by ascending, on a hydraulic lift, over the heads of the audience in an attempt to reach “the paupers” (as she routinely describes those seated in the cheaper seats – “hold on to your seats,” she once cautioned them, “we don’t want a shower of the underprivileged”). I have also, thanks to Edna, seen the inside of Jeffrey Archer’s penthouse flat, between Vauxhall and Lambeth bridges, some years before Archer’s fall-from-grace. (I should explain: when Edna came back to the West End for the 1998 Haymarket run, Archer had a producing interest in the show and opened his flat to Edna to host a press conference in. The chance to see inside this fabled residence was one sure way of getting us to attend. And yes, the views are spectacular.)

Seeing her again last night in Sydney, however, was something special – here was a homecoming for an international Australian celebrity, albeit one who is entirely manufactured, that at once so gloriously skewers the cult of celebrity yet has become an iconic (and ironic) one in her own right. But even more astonishing is the realisation, in a show that is staged as a celebration of 50 years in showbusiness, that her creator Barry Humphries – now 73 – has been going at it so long: he actually first created Edna as a young actor touring in a production of Twelfth Night with the then-nascent Melbourne Theatre Company, and according to the entry for Humphries on wikipedia, “the first stage sketch featuring Mrs Norm Everage, called ‘Olympic Hostess’, premiered at Melbourne University’s Union Theatre on December 12, 1955”

And here she is, nearly 52 years later, still amongst us: as ageless as she is peerless. Her shows – which she prefers to think of as “sharings” or “conversations between two people, one of whom is a lot more intersting than the other” – are noted for the intimate rapport she establishes with an audience: the put-downs are legendary (looking for the best word to describe what one of the women near the front was wearing last night, she comes up with “affordable”), but she insists, “I don’t pick on people – I empower them”. It’s done with such affection that no one is ever affronted. The celebrities, of course, get their own just desserts – on one of her TV interview shows she asked Roseanne, “Is there anything you’ve ever wished you hadn’t eaten?”, and I recently read an interview with Edna in the Daiy Mail in which she bemoaned the rise of reality TV, and referring to Heather Mills’ recent stint on the American show Dancing with the Stars, she went on to say, “I hope that Sir Paul McCartney finds love in the arms – and legs – of a real woman”.

Last night, Heather Mills also got a mention from Edna’s legendary warm-up artist, Sir Les Patterson, whose vulgarity is rivalled only by Edna’s glamour: “I’m as busy as Heather Mills in an arse-kicking contest,” Sir Les told us, inbetween constant adjustments he makes to his crotch area. Sir Les also had an idea for a reality TV of his own: to have a show set in an all-woman prison for which the public would vote for “which lezzos you want to see locked up together for the night.” Edna, of course, would never stoop so low; though her crinkled face of disdain for the idea of “same sex couples” attending her shows suggested that she’s cut from the same reactionary cloth.

That’s part of the joy and danger of it all: just how far s/he’ll flirt with uncomfortable ideas. Humphries, of course, is licensed to do so by his characters; but for the first time last night, I saw him do something I’ve not seen before: he took a final curtain call as himself. He is playing at the Capitol Theatre – so beautiful, Edna says, that its “a wonder it wasn’t pulled down – it must have been an oversight” – where Billy Elliot will have its Oz premiere in December, to June 9.