July 2007 Archives

Last night was the opening of the Bolshoi Ballet season at the London Coliseum, and around 7pm the crowds were thronging the pavements of St Martin’s Lane, pushing and shoving – and that was just the dance critics (I was able to welcome Alastair Macaulay home when I spotted him amongst them from my table in the Café Nero next door; he was back on assignment to review the season for the New York Times, but unlike Ben Brantley, isn’t producing a daily blog of his adventures). Meanwhile, across the street, a far more orderly – and notably younger, not to mention frequently female — crowd were entering the Duke of York’s to see the superb revival of David Storey’s modern classic, In Celebration.

I had, of course, seen In Celebration already on the press night, but last night I went back – not to review it but to host a post-show Q&A with the entire cast for The Mousetrap Foundation, under whose auspices many in the audience were seeing the show for just £5 each. This is a programme that makes the theatre accessible, in every sense, to young people – those attending pay a fiver, and Mousetrap pay the producer a proportion of the rest of the ticket price, while also arranging extra events like the Q&A to enrich the experience further for them. It’s a fantastic scheme, building – in a practical and meaningful way – audiences for the future. (The producers of In Celebration in fact already have an excellent access scheme of their own in place, in which those under 25 can book good tickets in advance for just £15, too).

But what is there in this dour, gritty Northern mining family drama to attract a younger audience, you may well ask? The answer, of course, is obvious: Orlando Bloom, international Brit movie star of Troy, Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean fame, making his theatrical stage debut. But even though he’s the first person to walk out onstage when the play begins, there’s no whooping and hollering: this audience is way too cool for that. And they are extremely attentive throughout, being drawn into the world of the play and saving their cheers for the end. Amazingly, no mobile phones go off at all during the performance. This is the best-behaved audience I have been amongst for ages.

Fielding the Q&A, I am expecting to have to fend off questions about movie stardom, and the question duly comes: “International movie star, a heartthrob who is beloved of so many women – how do you cope with the attention?” But the young woman posing the question doesn’t direct it to Bloom, but to Tim Healy, who plays the miner dad in the play!

It was me who was forced to lower the tone. I told the audience that the last time a David Storey play was seen at this theatre, The Changing Room (when the Royal Court revived it as part of their season there while their home theatre was being refurbished), the entire cast took their clothes off – but unfortunately, I added, last night they kept theirs on. Lynda Baron replied that she’d be up for it. But as Mark Lawson pointed out in The Guardian in a pre-opening interview with Bloom when rumours of stage nudity started circulating on the internet, “The only undressing stage direction to be found in Storey’s text is a hospitable invitation to Steven to take off his coat if he’s staying. Is it possible that the new staging reinterprets this scene so radically that Bloom keeps on going once he’s got his coat off?” Lawson then reports Bloom’s reaction: “The actor has bad news for anyone hoping for Last Tango in Wakefield: ‘I heard what they’re saying. But you’ve read the play. Where would I possibly get my clothes off in it? It’s bizarre’.”

But if the audience are entirely respectful, asking intelligent and focused questions about the play, it is after the performance that insanity suddenly takes over – not, I hasten to add, inside the theatre but outside it. The area around the stage door is positively mobbed. Traffic in St Martin’s Lane is brought to a standstill as the crowds spill into the street, and the car waiting to pick up Bloom blocks the flow further. I’ve not seen mob scenes outside a theatre like this since Julia Roberts’ appearance on Broadway in Three Days of Rain would bring West 45th Street to a nightly standstill.

One of the play’s co-producers Michael Edwards tells me that they’ve had to add four security men to the budget, who are very diligent – sometimes too diligent. The other day Dearbhla Molloy – who plays Bloom’s mother – had to call stage door from her mobile to be allowed past them.

Musicals aren’t written – they’re re-written, goes one famous dictum about musical theatre. But Stephen Sondheim has added a clever variation to that in one interview I have read: “Musicals aren’t re-written – they’re written with an audience,” he said, and added, “I love changing things in front of the final collaborator, which is the audience.”

In other words, smart writers and creative teams listen to what audiences tell them in previews, and make changes appropriately. But then musicals live or die by their audiences, or lack of them, once the finished result is presented: in what is possibly the harshest theatrical economy of all, the question is always whether anyone actually turns up, in sufficient numbers, to keep a musical running commercially. And there are never any guarantees: Boublil and Schonberg may have created arguably the world’s most popular musical in Les Miserables, but earlier this year they wrote a show, The Pirate Queen, that will go down in history as one of the costliest flops in Broadway history, according to Broadway columnist Michael Riedel. They could, of course, have seen it coming: it played an out-of-town try-out in Chicago last autumn, and they were immediately in trouble. New staging and book support were brought in from Graciela Daniele and Richard Maltby Jr respectively, but they couldn’t fix it.

Nor have serial attempts to fix Boublil and Schonberg’s previous show, Martin Guerre. “Look, It’s Martin Guerre/Standing So Brave/Back from the Grave!”, sing the chorus at one point of the return of the eponymous hero, presumed dead, and so is the show, back from the grave yet again, in a UK regional production at the tiny Watermill Theatre in Newbury that I saw on Saturday. This is the musical that Cheek by Jowl’s Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod famously staged the premiere of at the Prince Edward Theatre in July 1996, but was sent back into rehearsals even while it was running, extensively re-tooled, and re-opened to the press in November 1996. Another director, Connall Morrison, took another look at it for a production at West Yorkshire Playhouse in a version that that subsequently toured the US in 1999, where Variety’s Minneapolis critic Chris Jones noted, “Shorn of spectacle, stomping, shouting and most of the superfluous plotting, there’s no question that this latest incarnation of the long-troubled tuner Martin Guerre is a vast improvement over the production that first underwhelmed the public at London’s Prince Edward Theater in 1996”. Jones went on to note, “Lord knows, the creative team worked themselves to the bone —- effecting radical surgery on book, music and lyrics.” Then he says, “But the generally impressive improvements in Schonberg’s score do not have much impact on the main issues here —- the music was always strong.”

Those main issues in Minneapolis surrounded the book and the actors’ engagement with it to give it a convincingly truthful life. And in the close-up proximity of the Watermill – even one whose rustic wooden environs are beautifully suited to the show’s intense and intimate world – we’re still at one remove from being able to believe and truly engage with it.

Perhaps its just not fixable. “If at first you don’t succeed, try again,” may be a good philosophy for life, but not always for musical theatre. Repeated attempts to revise Frank Wildhorn’s The Scarlet Pimpernel – which opened originally in 1997 at the Minskoff, then was re-tooled and re-opened to the critics there a year later, then re-tooled yet again when it was moved to the Neil Simon Theatre in 1999 – didn’t prove third time lucky, but did, at least, prove the resilience of the producers, and kept the show running far longer, with their constant hope triumphing over experience, than if they’d given up sooner.

Producers, of course, invariably believe in their shows – it’s why they put them on in the first place — often when no one else does. The jury is still out on the prospects for the revamped stage version of The Lord of the Rings, which opened unsucccessfully in Toronto last year. But despite running up massive losses there, it was extensively overhauled to bring it to Drury Lane. Having seen both productions, I know that serious work was done, as I reflected in my Stage review. As Rob Howell, the designer of the show, told me recently of the opening in Toronto, “Any opening night is a snapshot of where got to at that point, with everybody doing what they can to make sure that the snapshot is complete. But if we’d had another month, it would have been different, so it was a document of where got to.”

And as I previously blogged here, Matthew Warchus told me a few months before the revamped production opened, “We wouldn’t be here if the Toronto experience wasn’t positive enough. It revealed how close we came to getting it right and what needed to be recalibrated.” Toronto, he said, was a “stepping stone” to where they are now; but was it far enough?

Sometimes even more radical surgery is required. Disney, of course, famously shut down their production of Elton John’s Aida after its problematic Atlanta try-out, and put an entirely new creative team in place who re-staged, re-designed and mostly re-cast it before attempting Broadway, as I’ve previously blogged about here. Andrew Lloyd Webber shut down Hal Prince’s production of Whistle Down the Wind after its Washington DC try-out in 1996, cancelling the Broadway transfer that was scheduled for April 1997 (I remember seeing that the front-of-house had even gone up at what was then called the Martin Beck Theatre), and subsequently re-staged it with a new director, the Australian Gale Edwards, at the helm for a West End premiere at the Aldwych in 1998, where it ran for two-and-a-half years.

It’s a truism in the theatre, as in life in general, that the higher you aim the further you may have to fall; and so it proved on Wednesday evening when the Menier Chocolate Factory premiered an entirely original musical by veteran Broadway composer/lyricist team David Shire and Richard Maltby Jr, joined by book writer John Weidman, called Take Flight.

In an age of lazy, sometimes hazy jukebox compilation musicals and endless revivals – with the Menier currently represented in the latter corner by the current West End transfer of their last musical, Little Shop of Horrors – it is indeed ambitious to stage an entirely new musical, not to mention one that may be based on pre-existing real lives, but not a pre-existing novel or film. Instead, Maltby, Shire and Weidman have chosen to musicalise an intricate story around some of the early pioneers of flight, from inventors the Wright Brothers to adventurers Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, who set records for flying alone across the Atlantic.

But while I saw an earlier draft workshop version of this show at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival four years ago where it could be judged on entirely different terms as a work-in-progress and where the Menier’s David Babani first worked on it as well, this theatre – but clearly not this show — have now reached a point where its no longer possible to look at work being presented as purely developmental. By throwing open the doors – and getting the likes of the first string critics of both the London and New York Times to attend, and having the work funded by New York producer Bob Boyett (also in attendance last night, along with his New York publicist Michael Hartman) – it means that both judgement is invited, and a future life anticipated.

Inviting the former too early, however, may stall the latter – and while Maltby and Shire famously wrote one of the seminal jukebox compilations of my life when they brought some of the songs they had written together into the revue Starting Here, Starting Now (the title song of which was sung, coincidentally, by Barbra Streisand as the opening number of her current tour), I feel I may have to adapt that title myself: Starting Here, Ending Now.

What might pass muster in a festival of new musicals crash-lands in such an exposed place. The Menier is, in this case, a victim of its own success; we come to it now expecting a fully-formed work, and it is presented as such, not as an experimental try-out. Similarly, the transfer of Martin Wagner’s The Agent to the Trafalgar Studios last night – after a run in March at Islington’s Old Red Lion, with one of the two actors now changed – moves it to another level of scrutiny that this particular work can’t live up to. It’s a bright but slight play, and unlike the transfer of Elling — another fringe hit from the Bush to the main studio space upstairs – it feels cumbersome and overloaded now with expectation.

Next week will mark the second anniversary of me blogging here: I started on August 3, 2005, and the entry you are now reading is number 540! (And for a year before that I was doing a blog elsewhere). As a relatively early conscript to the blogosphere – though not as early as director Paul Miller – I have watched its growth with interest, welcoming the refreshing new voices it has allowed (everyone and anyone can now have a platform for critical views, not just critics!), but also the fact that it is levelling the playing field. Critics can sit in the reserve benches (with their reservations), if they like, but we may miss the game entirely if we do. And to continue mixing sporting analogies, we’re being urged to leave the security of the commentator’s box and come out onto the terraces, too, to join in with the public cheers (and sometimes jeers) – some of which may, in fact, be directed at us. If, in the clamour of this new mob rule, we may be shouted down, we just need to shout louder. But at least everyone is shouting, and it’s about something we all love: the theatre.

The Guardian, first as ever with so many things, was (I think) the first major national paper to embrace the possibilities of the blogosphere, and got their major critics in on the act. But while Michael Billington and Lyn Gardner post regular entries on The Guardian’s theatre and performing arts blog, there’s a much wider plurarity of voices also posting columns there, from theatre practitioners to other (non-Guardian) journalists, not to mention the immediate public responses (once you’ve registered) that it automatically allows. The great thing about the blogosphere is that it is both readily interactive with its readers, and has introduced a wider accountability to them (even if its only a one-way street, since the readers themselves don’t have to be accountable to those who write blogs but can easily hide behind anonymous pseudonyms that they have registered).

It’s the height of the summer (even if, when you look out of the window, you can’t quite believe it), so the tourists are out in force – including theatrical ones. And arguably the most important theatrical tourist of the year is the annual summer appearance here of the New York Times chief theatre critic Ben Brantley, who I saw both at The Hothouse at the National last Thursday and again at the Menier Chocolate Factory’s opening of Take Flight last night. In previous years, of course, we’ve had to await his weekly reports in the paper itself, such as the one that appeared on Monday that covered his double-dose of Pinter (with Betrayal side-by-side with The Hothouse, as well as In Celebration and Baghdad Wedding. But this year we are also getting a daily blog, the London Theater Journal, in which we’re able to keep track of his various movements – from sightings of Pinter at the Wolseley Restaurant, to those of his bowels (with a case of food poisoning keeping him for attending Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat on Tuesday night).

He is, as he proudly boasted at the beginning, seeing 28 shows in 21 days – now, after his food poisoning incident, possibly being reduced to 27 shows, though he may yet sneak in an extra matinee to bring the total back up again. But while his personal theatrical marathon means that he is usefully acting as an informal scout to American producers, waiting on the sidelines for his approval or not on possible transfer prospects, his presence on the blogosphere is exposing him to more immediate reactions, too. And it means that bigger questions can be asked. As one correspondent asks, “I wonder why Ben Brantley and the Times repeatedly covers theater in London, but rarely covers the Unites States regional theater scene. Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Guthrie, the Goodman, ART, the Huntington, et al… numerous theater across the Unites States, big and small, often produce significantly superior work to that being performed in Manhattan. Doesn’t the New York Times, as the most respected American journal both domestically and abroad, have a greater responsibility to review and discuss the theater art being created in its own nation? It seems I read a London review every month or so, as well as a huge London theater feature twice a year, but only find an American regional theater review 4 or 5 times a year. Why?”

The answer, of course, is partly today with a critic’s own passions – I go to New York more often myself, for instance, than Manchester – but also to do with the readers. If you’re interested in theatre, the two big theatrical destinations are New York and London. And just as I regularly cross the pond to Broadway, there are large groups, both formal and informal, of theatregoers who come here from America regularly.

Last week, for instance, I was hosting a week of seminars for a group of mostly Californian theatregoers who come to London annually for three weeks, under the umbrella of an extension program organised by the University of Berkeley in San Francisco, and see a play every night. The next morning, they all convene in a conference room at a University of London hall of residence, where a critic — either Matt Wolf (for their first week and this week as well) or myself (last week) — lead a discussion on the play they’ve seen the night before, and then we are joined by someone connected to the production, whether the director, writer, or a cast member. Amongst my guests last week, I had actors Sam West (for Betrayal), Dale Rapley (for the Globe’s Merchant of Venice) and Susannah Fielding (for The Rose Tattoo), and directors Anna Mackmin and Lucy Bailey (for In Celebration and Glass Eeels respectively).

I found hosting these informal sessions frequently as fascinating as I hope the group did; they provide a unique window into the creative process. Though I often speak to actors, directors and writers about their work for interview profiles, on those occasions we’re both doing a job and a tape recorder is running; at the Berkeley sessions, everyone is far more relaxed. Since its clear that the place the group is coming from is their love and enthusiasm for the theatre, the guests typically respond with a kind of openness I have seldom encountered in other public forums, where they don’t allow their guard to drop quite as much. So last week, for instance, we learnt just how much a freelance director typically earns! (The answer: not much!)

But coming full circle back to Brantley and his blog, I found that one of my group responded to his entry about the authenticity of the American accents in London plays, and in particular The Rose Tattoo. Brantley praised Zoe Wanamaker – “her accent is stitched tightly and consistently into the character” – and then wrote, “But as for her fellow performers: Mamma mia, honeychile! I grew up in North Carolina, so Serafina’s Southern neighbors in particular had me digging my nails into my palms. (Whether evil-minded sluts or a virtuous sailor, they all sounded like they had just arrived from Tobacco Road.) Susannah Fielding, the lovely young actress who plays Serafina’s 15-year-old daughter, switched between regulation music-hall Italian and regulation musical-hall Southern, which might have been meant to indicate she was of a transitional generation. But that doesn’t account for the pure English received-pronunciation vowels that floated in from time to time.”

Fielding may not be able to defend herself, but her appearance as a guest of the Berkeley group last week led to this reply from Daniel Curzon, who was part of it: “The actress playing the daughter came to the class I am attending. She explained her accent as being a result of an idea by the director who died (half Sicilian, half Southern), but felt uncomfortable doing it that way. I told her it was MOMa, not MaMA in the South. She said it was supposed to be Italian. Another linguist in our class said second generation children don’t have mixed accents, perhaps some of the parents’ language but learning native English from their peers.”

The West End has officially overtaken Broadway on (regular) price on a like-for-like basis: Hairspray, currently charging from $20-$110 (£9.70-£53.36 at today’s rates), will charge £20-£60 when it opens here in October. And Jersey Boys, currently running on Broadway with a weekday regular top price of $116.50, rising to $121.50 on weekends – i.e. £56.45 to £58.87 at current exchange rates – will open at London’s Prince Edward Theatre next March also with a top price of £60.

Of course, this leaves out of the reckoning so-called premium seats – a Broadway epidemic, ever since The Producers ushered them in six years ago – in which the best seats in the house for Jersey Boys, for instance, go for between £301.50 to $351.50. Every show on Broadway does these now – but the number of tickets involved is a moveable feast, varying from show to show (and maybe performance to performance: if they don’t sell at the premium price, they will be marked back to be sold at the usual price).

But though Jersey Boys may be overtaking Broadway over here for “regular” post-opening tickets, it is at least taking the welcome step of offering substantial preview discounts – top price during previews is just £40, a full third off the usual price. As Michael David, the Broadway producer of Jersey Boys, told Variety in a recent feature “We go with no assurances of how our show will do there. We have to have appropriate recognition that the market there is not our own.” Hence, even though they have an already tried and tested show, they are testing the waters here and not arrogantly assuming (as many Broadway producers do) that a Broadway hit will spell an automatic West End hit. (Amongst the differences they feel they have to take into account: “We’ve had conversations about what the term ‘Jersey’ means to the English. We have a considerable amount of consciousness-raising to do before we get there”, David told Variety).

If only more producers could recognise this fact and let their shows find their market – and one way to facilitate that is to let the market find them with significantly reduced prices for early performances. Yet something that was once “standard” practice has fallen into abeyance, with only Avenue Q of the recent arrivals to offer substantial discounts (and sold out during previews as a result; those low prices have, of course, as I blogged here been subsequently been reinstated for week nights in any case, proving that there is an audience for the show – just not at the typically prevailing top prices we currently have). Hairspray, by comparison, isn’t doing reduced prices for previews at all. (And the other two new musicals coming to town imminently, Desperately Seeking Susan and Bad Girls, are only offering £10 off the regular prices.)

But while we are matching Broadway for prices now, we still don’t quite match them on costs – either of capitalisation or for the weekly “nut” (i.e running costs). The weak dollar is bumping the capitalisation up a bit: according to Thomas Viertel, one of the producers behind bringing Hairspray to London, “It’s slightly cheaper, but it’s not the howling bargain it once was.”

Nor, it could be said, for audiences either, where London theatre tickets used to be so much cheaper than those on Broadway. Yet once the show is up, the weekly running costs here are considerably lower – with lower costs for everything from actors’ salaries to theatre rental and advertising rates. It means that shows in London can run safely here at lower capacities than they require on Broadway to stay afloat. But, as the transfer of The Drowsy Chaperone has just proved, sometimes even a Tony-winning Broadway hit can’t even achieve that.

Kookaburra, a new company dedicated to the production of musicals in Australia, opened with great fanfare earlier this year in Sydney, and although Pippin, their debut production, was neither a critical nor commercial hit, it set up their stall as a company prepared to go off the map. Pippin is a personal favourite of mine – I’m planning on naming it as one of my “Five Essential Musicals” when I am guest of Elaine Paige’s Radio 2 show soon — though I’ve yet to see a production of it that actually works. (Alas, I missed the original seminal Bob Fosse production, and perhaps it ultimately needed Fosse to give it life – as the “Magic to Do” sequence in Fosse showed, he was a magician of the theatre).

But for just their second show in June, Kookaburra scored a major coup: staging a revival of Sondheim and Furth’s 1970 Broadway classic Company, they managed to lure the 77-year-old composer all the way to Sydney to see it earlier this month, and he held an audience Q&A, too. The company was now moving up a significant notch in terms of its standing in the global theatrical community.

However, it has now just squandered that goodwill overnight, with a decision last week that was simply so dumb that it beggars belief. Last Wednesday, one of the company of Company rang in sick; and since Kookaburra does not employ understudies, a quick re-think had to happen. According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, Kookaburra’s “founder and chief executive, Peter Cousens, reportedly ordered the director, Gale Edwards, to radically recraft Wednesday’s production. Two songs, including a bedroom scene and a duet in the second act… were jettisoned along with lines of dialogue.”

”Just wing it!”, Cousens was reported to have instructed the company, according to another report in the Sydney Morning Herald. The report goes on, “No announcement was made, despite the songs being listed in the program, as well as the names of the characters and the actors performing them. Was the audience to assume that April, a chatty air hostess, had missed a connection and was stranded in Tel Aviv for the night? The musical finished 20 minutes early and the equivocations of the protagonist Bobby about marriage and commitment were considerably weakened.”

Cousens, who in the first Sydney Morning Herald report denied issuing the instruction that the show must go on regardless, was said in the second report to have “met the cast on Saturday, apologised and accepted full blame for the fallout”.

The company have now issued a statement and added a performance to try to make amends: “In response to the adverse reaction to an edited performance of Company at the Theatre Royal on Wednesday 18th July, caused by the serious illness of a cast member, Kookaburra would like to restore the integrity of this performance, by holding a special charity performance of Company in support of Oz Show Biz Cares, one of the writers’ favorite charities and the Actors Benevolent Fund”.

But the error of judgement, it has to be said, was spectacular, showing such a disregard for the integrity of the work itself that there are those wondering now if the company can survive. I hope it does. I am looking forward to their productions of Three Brides for Three Brothers, Less Miserables (cutting the barricade scenes!), and Maury Yeston’s Nine being restored to its original Fellini source by being staged with a cast of 8 ½. But what happens when the chorus rings in ill for Sweeney Todd and the fabled barber doesn’t have enough victims to despatch to their deaths? Oh, hold on, that’s already happened – John Doyle’s Newbury revival that somehow ended up on Broadway ran out of people to kill, too.

Forty-one years on from her first (and sadly last) West End theatrical stage appearance in Funny Girl, Barbra Streisand has been back in London in concert, helping to inaugurate the 02 Arena as a venue that finally makes sense of the white elephant of the Dome and has turned it into a handsome addition to London’s large-scale entertainment portfolio.

I went last night, and though the venue is undeniably large and the demand for the restaurants currently far outstrips the supply so I was forced to visit the Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream stand at the Vue cinema upstairs for a pre-show snack, the seats are actually comfortable, the staff universally friendly and polite, and the tube station is right next door – compare and contrast with the refurbished but still ghastly Wembley Arena.

That, of course, was the scene of Streisand’s last come-back concert 13 years ago, so she’s gone up in the world and so, too, have her prices: from a ridiculous £360 top then, to an absurd £500 now – a price that got a couple of friends I know last night seats in the 40th row of the flat arena area. And while I still feel uncomfortable about an egotism — whether her own or that of her management, but in either case she is complicit in — that, instead of rewarding the fans for their loyalty (as witness Prince’s example here, where all seats for his 21-night run at the Arena will be just £31.21) seems intent on fleecing them instead, nobody is, I suppose, forcing us to pay up. There is, of course, an inverse logic that enhances the value of something that costs more, and feeling that’s it’s exclusivity increases the experience or leaves you feeling ripped off is surely purely in the eye – and wallet – of the receiver.

As it is, I thought that my own £100 (plus £12.50 service charge) was well spent, in the end, for a seat behind the stage. Sure, I often only got a side or rear view, but then how different is that to seeing Betrayal at the Donmar Warehouse? In a programme that highlighted her theatrical roots – beginning with the Funny Girl overture performed by the lavish 58-piece orchestra and leading into her first song, ‘Starting Here, Starting Now’ by Maltby and Shire (who, coincidentally, have a new show premiering in London this very week, when Take Flight opens at the Menier Chocolate Factory on Wednesday) – we had songs from Lloyd Webber, Bernstein and Sondheim, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Maury Yeston, amongst others.

And to emphasise the Broadway connection, she was joined by four Broadway actors: Hugh Panaro (last seen in the title role of the short-lived Lestat, and before that doing a two-year stint in the title role of The Phantom of the Opera), Michael Arden (late of the short-lived Twyla Tharp Dylan musical The Times They Are A-Changing), Peter Lockyer (last of the comparatively short-lived Broadway version of La Boheme by Baz Luhrmann) and Sean McDermott (last seen on Broadway as a take-over Danny Zucko in Broadway’s last revival of Grease that ended in 1998, a role to be played in Broadway’s next Grease, of course, by a performer chosen by reality TV). Those names, of course, would have meant nothing to the bulk of last night’s London audience, but it also does highlight a problem – and proves why Streisand herself was so wise to cultivate her career away from Broadway: there simply isn’t much of a career to be had there any longer. After principal roles for all of these actors there, here they are now, doing back-up work.

And it was a fact also brought home to me by a conversation I had with the person sitting next to me, who had seen Streisand’s last London appearance 13 years ago – and was worried that if he didn’t see this show, might discover that in 13 years time from now it would be too late. By then, Streisand would be 79 – so I said “not necessarily – Barbara Cook, after all, turns 80 this October and is still going strong”. And he replied, “Who’s Barbara Cook? I’ve never heard of her!” It’s his loss. Cook’s career, begun like Streisand’s on the Broadway stage, has been continued on the concert and cabaret one, but wider celebrity has eluded her.

Yet Cook, who lives inside and through her material and has grown with it to a peak of artistic expression and perfection, is the greatest contemporary singer alive (in my humble opinion). And though Cook may, famously, go up on her lyrics from time to time when she performs live (as she does all the time, not every 13 years), that only amplifies her humanity. Streisand, as I was able to see for myself from the rear view I was getting, has every line and lyric autocued. Bizarrely, it was only when Streisand went off script last night for an anecdote about someone (whose name she then couldn’t recall) who played New York’s Bon Soir nightclub with her early on in her career that she felt not just unguarded but also vulnerable. While Cook, at 79, sounds as good as she ever did because she is all about interpretive truth, Streisand by comparison negotiates gingerly around some of the frayed edges of her voice to try to continue reclaiming the technical perfection that has always been one of her calling cards.

Still, at least (to borrow a lyric from Funny Girl’s ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’) she doesn’t fake it – Liza Minnelli (and Connie Fisher, for that matter) have been known to mime to recorded music. Performing ballads like the Legrand classic (to lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman) ‘What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?’ or ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers’ (Neil Diamond, to lyrics by the Bergmans again) brings out her expressive, lyrical strengths. She may be less secure on the belt now, but she’s still a bracing performer.

The West End first night of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat may have ground to an early halt when the Ishmaelites failed to come riding by, so that Joseph’s brothers had no one to sell him into slavery to. Dark rumours immediately started to swirl around of sabotage, being unguardedly spoken about as early as the interval, and were picked up in the press the next day, suggesting that a backstage dispute over crew wages led someone to literally pull the plug on the production.

While readers of The Stage will of course know that some of the backstage staff are permanent members of an individual theatre’s payroll, such as the chief electrician, chief carpenter, chargehands and dayman, and others are drafted in as needed by the particular production management hiring the hall, things are complicated at the Adelphi where Lloyd Webber has not only written the show, but is also its producer and owner of the theatre as well. So the buck(s) stop with him.

If these allegations have any substance, an urgent investigation needs to be launched and the police called in to deal with what could be criminal sabotage. As it is, Joseph got on the road to Egypt again fairly quickly, with the only other glitch being a vocal entrance by narrator Preeya Kalidas that was entirely off-key. Was there a saboteur in the orchestral pit as well? Or did she just make a mistake?

There is, of course, no accounting for the vagaries of nature, whether climactic in terms of top notes for Kalidas or climatic in terms of the weather this summer. Luckily the weather hit the right notes last night – and so did the cast – for the opening night of Lady be Good, this year’s musical at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park that marks the final new production of artistic director Ian Talbot’s last season at the helm (though he’s signing off his regime by reprising last year’s hit production of The Boy Friend, in which he also appears, to end the season). The Park, as its universally known, is this year celebrating its 75th anniversary, and Ian has been at the helm of it for the last 20 years.

He’s put it on the map in lots of ways: what was once best known in the business as a place to get an Equity card is now a serious theatrical destination in its own right. Even the arrival of the rival Shakespeare’s Globe over a decade ago hasn’t dented its popularity as an outdoor Shakespearean destination and few summer events are more keenly anticipated than the park’s annual musical. On a balmy summer’s night, with Gershwin tunes floating effortlessly above the breeze of the trees (and the occasional rush of jet engines from aeroplanes flying overhead), there’s nowhere nicer to be…. and nothing, even for a West End Whinger, to complain about. I smuggled one of them in last night as my incognito guest. Phil was working, so it was Andrew who joined me – reporting gleefully that Phil’s attempts to do a rain dance all day had obviously failed to work. I think Andrew was disconcerted by the levels of eccentricity that he encountered amongst the colleagues of mine he met, or rather were ignored by. So there may have been nothing to complain about on the stage, but the offstage drama has probably given him a lot to whinge about.

Earlier this week I noted the West End’s current domination of musicals over plays, but appearances can be deceptive. I am reliably informed — by none other than Richard Pulford, the Chief Executive of the Society of London Theatres — that taken across the entirety of 2006, if you wanted to see a musical in a West End theatre, you had 34 shows to choose from, overall. And if you wanted to see a play (in a commercially-run West End theatre, i.e. not including the National, Donmar or Royal Court), there were nearly double the number to choose from: 63. (Trafalgar Studios 2, which I characterised in the same blog as a fringe theatre in the West End, isn’t included in the count, either – it does not come under the auspices of the Society’s reach either, in terms of “full member” status that would enable productions staged there to be considered eligible for the Olivier Awards it presents annually.)

So plays are still reaching the West End – perhaps they’re just failing to run, but then maybe neither are they meant to. Musicals, because of the vast costs of capitalising them in the first place, tend to arrive with longevity in their sights. And that, as I also pointed out the other day, has longer term implications to the real-estate market of the West End: if they fulfil their ambitions to run indefinitely and turn into The Mousetrap or The Woman in Black, they take theatres out of circulation. And gridlock ensues. But theatre owners, who are not charitable institutions, want longer-term tenants who are doing good business at the box office, since their slice of the cake will be larger as a result – not to mention the ancillary incomes that the theatre keeps entirely for itself, from bar sales to programme sales, as well as their percentages of merchandise operations that they may not even have to run (and certainly don’t have to capitalise) but earn a proportion of.

Though some theatre owners like Howard Panter of the Ambassadors Theatre Group (whose stock of buildings are mainly playhouses, not musical venues) proactively work to fill their venues by being principal producers as well, landlords have to work with what the market offers them; and that’s the bigger crisis affecting the long-term future of the West End. Despite SOLT’s attempts at running bursary schemes to nurture the next generation of producers, it remains a fairly stagnant pool: though in a vanity-driven world you can get to call yourself a producer (and have your name above the title as such) by simply ponying up the cash that helps to put a show on, the people who actually devote their lives – and seek to make a living – from being a producer are few.

I’ve blogged about this before, noting then, “It has long been a dinosaur industry – not, in fact, unlike my own” (I was writing long before Nick Hytner’s “dead white males accusation”), and added, it is “still dominated by the same players who have been doing it for the last twenty-five years or more.” Of the few plays on in the West End right now, two of them are duly being presented by veterans Bill Kenwright (producing The Letter) and Duncan Weldon and Paul Elliot (The Last Confession).

Still, it’s a step too far to say of Sonia Friedman, who has this week added In Celebration to her West End slate that currently includes Boeing-Boeing, that she is “our last, serious hope of keeping straight plays alive in a West End deluged by musicals,” as the Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh claimed when he reviewed In Celebration this week.

It’s true that she’s a force of nature (and of nurture, in terms of bringing projects to fruition), but to give her sole credit here is to also ignore the contributions – financial and also artistic – of the business partners that she regularly joins forces with, like Michael Edwards and Carole Winter in this case, or Mark Rubenstein whom she has worked with in the past. But even if she rarely works alone, she’s also not the only game in town: what about Matthew Byam Shaw, who brought Frost/Nixon to the West End, Kim Poster (currently, its true, adding to the roster of musicals in town with the transfer of Fiddler on the Roof from Sheffield to the Savoy, but more typically producing plays), Nica Burns (who may be more preoccupied with keeping her theatres open at the moment, but has regularly been a lead producer of plays) or Caro Newling of Neal Street Productions (who brought The Hound of the Baskervilles to the Duchess earlier this year)? We need more producers, its true; but let’s not snub the contributions of those that are still trying to plant seeds in the barren ground of the West End and hoping to end the play famine.

After the transformation of Connie Fisher from (Drama school trained) nobody who had not yet worked professionally to overnight star, round 2 in the reality TV casting stakes saw actors who actually already had professional credits to their names seeking to go the extra mile. So last night it was the turn of Lee Mead to graduate from West End understudy and chorus to principal role when he took the title role in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, after winning the TV series Any Dream Will Do, and though the part hardly allows the colour and range of an actor’s talents to be displayed in the same way that Maria in The Sound of Music does, what was (in this production’s original 1991 incarnation at the London Palladium) a star vehicle for Jason Donovan – sitting last night in the stalls beside Daily Mail critic Quentin Letts – has now turned into a star-making vehicle.

But yesterday, too, just hours before the first night, the producers of Monty Python’s Spamalot issued a release that actually made me wonder whether it was a spoofalot and had me checking whether the date was actually April 1. Apparently a Swedish broadcaster TV3 is going to stage a reality TV show to find the West End’s next Lady of the Lake for the show, in a nine-part live series called West End Story. After open auditions in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo, a shortlist of 12 contestants will be produced and one a week will be voted off the show. When there are four finalists left, they will be flown to London to rehearse the show with the West End cast, returning once a week to face the judges and the Swedish viewing public, with the eventual winner joining the London cast.

So how, exactly, will it profit the London production, apart from delivering a calculated snub to the West End acting community, that is? According to the press announcement, Sweden is one of the biggest markets for musical theatre across Europe – and London sees over 700,000 visits every year from Swedes, with a very high percentage of them seeing a show. So this will position Spamalot as the show, presumably, that they should see.

Myself, I think the producers have missed a trick. Far closer to home is the Lakeside Shopping Centre in Thurrock, Essex, and perhaps the contest – The Lady of the Lake(side) – could have been staged there. But why stop there? Perhaps Robert Fox could have passed on Maggie Smith in The Lady from Dubuque and done a star search for title character in Dubuque itself. (Mind you, perhaps he should have passed on the show entirely). The RSC should search for its next Hamlet in Denmark; Mamma Mia!, for its next cast in Greece; and Trevor Nunn, soon to stage a musical version of Gone with the Wind, needs to scour Atlanta to find his Scarlett O’Hara.

Or how about, as I suggested to Mark Ravenhill at the opening of Joseph last night, a reality TV show to cast a revival of his play Shopping and Fucking? The boys could demonstrate their skills at both activities live. Perhaps a proposal could be put to Channel 5 now…..

Last night’s opening of the revival of David Storey’s In Celebration at the Duke of York’s brought the number of commercially produced plays currently running in the West End to ten. Yep, ten. And that includes The Mousetrap and The Woman in Black, as well as The 39 Steps (which looks like it is going to follow in The Woman in Black’s footsteps, so to speak), as well as the return of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), back at the Arts. And the stock of what remains is, like In Celebration, predominantly revivals of old classics – Maugham’s The Letter, Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight and the farce Boeing Boeing. So the new plays can be counted on two fingers: Roger Crane’s The Last Confession (from Chichester to the Haymarket) and the Norwegian comedy Elling (from the Bush to the Trafalgar Studios).

Of course, it doesn’t seem as dire as all that, what with the subsidised likes of the National, Royal Court and Donmar Warehouse adding to the West End mix, as well as the little second studio at the Trafalgar Studios also offering a platform for new work (Mojo Mickybo this week, to be followed next week by the arrival of The Agent), but with just 100 seats, that’s just a fringe theatre that happens to be in the West End. And with more and more of what used to be playhouses now given over to musicals, from the Lyric (Cabaret) and Queen’s (Les Mis) on Shaftesbury Avenue to the Garrick (soon to house Bad Girls – the Musical) and even the smallest houses like the New Ambassadors (Little Shop of Horrors) and soon the Duchess (the return of Buddy), plays are being squeezed out on every corner.

Where will it end? We only need to look across the Atlantic to discover where: there are currently just four plays running on Broadway, all nearing the end of limited runs, and once the last of them, The Year of Magical Thinking, closes on August 25 (with Deuce, Frost/Nixon and the Roundabout revival of Old Acquaintance all departing the previous week on August 19), there will be precisely none until things get going again in September when Roundabout stage revivals of Shaw’s Pygmalion (at the American Airlines Theatre) and Terrence McNally’s The Ritz (at Studio 54).

The writing is now on the wall for us, as well: As Charles Spencer wrote in a review earlier this month, “Enjoy The Last Confession while you can. It could be one of the last of its kind…. It’s popular drama at its best, asking tough questions about faith and organised religion, while also exploring conspiracy theories about the possible murder of a truly holy man….” But then he wonders, “Will it prosper? In almost 30 years of covering the West End, I can’t remember the straight play being in a more parlous state. Audiences seem to be losing their appetite for drama, comedy and thrillers, and heading to musicals instead. And producers seem all too happy to encourage them to do so.” He uses the rest of his review to ponder this state of affairs – and concludes, “Unless producers start showing more guts, enterprise and imagination, I fear the West End could become little more than one vast neon-lit jukebox.”

Manchester has just stolen a march on Edinburgh, in every sense, with the inaugural Manchester International Festival that ended yesterday. In a feature in The Observer yesterday, Ruardidh Nicoll wrote of the gauntlet that Manchester has now thrown down: “While the party hasn’t exactly spilled on to the streets, the thundering hooves are there.” It has beaten Edinburgh to it — not just for the fact that its taken place a month earlier than Edinburgh, but also – just when a new international festival director at Edinburgh, Jonathan Mills, is taking up the reigns there for the first time this year – Manchester’s Alex Poots has set out his stall with a daring and original policy to mainly do daring and original work.

It was the living embodiment of something that Edinburgh only latterly woke up to the possibilities of: as Brian McMaster told me last year in an interview for The Stage, as he came to the end of his 15-year tenure at Edinburgh, “”I came to the conclusion that the way forward for the International Festival in relation to the fringe was to do larger-scale work, basically, and to make more of our own work - it shouldn’t be things that could happen anywhere else.”

And that’s precisely what Poots has been doing in Manchester, with a risk-taking programme of work that was commissioned for and originating there, though a further life is hoped for some of the programme elsewhere. I was away when the Festival kicked off, so I missed the early festival sensation of the Damon Albarn-composed “circus opera” Monkey: Journey to the West, but while an Albarn musical has long been mooted for the National Theatre, that is yet to reach fruition so Manchester stole a march on Nick Hytner, too, who has been trumpeting the prospect of it for a couple of years now.

But on Saturday, on the penultimate day of the festival, I finally went up to Manchester to see two amazing shows that more than justified the train journey and the ticket prices (since I was going so late in the day, I took the unusual critical position of actually paying for my tickets – nothing I could say could possibility influence the box office at this point, so I thought it only fair to contribute to its coffers).

First off, I joined a tiny coachload of prospective “viewers” to see a semi-detached house that was up for sale near Old Trafford, being sold by someone called Jeffrey Parkin – better known, in another of his character manifestations, as Johnny Vegas. The show, called Interiors, was a fascinating – and comic as well as quietly desperate and moving – manifestation of promenade theatre in a (very) site-specific location. But given the space restrictions of the semi, it was necessarily limited to a small audience (capacity: 20), and even though two viewings a day were arranged, the total run across 12 days (plus 2 preview days) meant that it would have been seen by a total of not much more than 500 people across the entire run. The result is that it was a piece of “coterie” or “court” theatre – a wonderful one-off event for those lucky enough to get tickets, but actually a show you were more likely to hear about than actually see.

By contrast, the second show in my visit is a show that everyone should see: Neil Bartlett’s extraordinarily vivid, intense and harrowing version of Wladyslaw Szpilman’s war memoir, The Pianist (best known for the Polanski film version), was hauntingly staged in a tall, bare, wood-beamed room by director Neil Bartlett, accessed from beside the genuine disused railway sidings of Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry, redolent of so many images of how the final journey began for so many people from the Warsaw Ghetto to the concentration camps. Szpilman, a concert pianist, escaped the fate of the rest of his family by hiding out in just such an attic for some three years; and the narration of his life story by actor Peter Guinness is thrillingly underscored by live performances of the Chopin music of Szpilman’s concert repertoire played by pianist Mikhail Rudy.

I would love to know what was the chicken and what the egg with this show: did Bartlett decide to do The Pianist here because he found the space, or did he want to do The Pianist and then looked for the perfect space? Either way, it’s the perfect venue for it; and I just hope that – if and when it comes to London, as it surely must – somewhere equally resonant can be found. (Mind you, it’s been nearly a year since the National Theatre of Scotland’s smash hit with Black Watch premiered at Edinburgh, and we’ve still not had it in London). Part play, part recital, this extraordinary piece about survival needs to survive to play another day and in another place: it is the best thing I have seen all year.

One of the things that AA Gill used to point an admonishing finger at theatre critics for In his recent Sunday Times feature on us was the fast retreat some make up the aisles on a first night: “When it’s over and the audience applaud and cheer and, more than likely these days, rise to their feet for a standing ovation, you may notice a little gang of hunted characters sidle out of the stalls and scuttle up the aisle. They seem to be escaping, running away. Many will be dressed in old macs, shiny-buttocked suits and cheap, comfy shoes, and be carrying sagging briefcases and Tesco bags. They keep their heads down and don’t look back, and they don’t do applause. You might imagine they were rude, disrespectful philistines. But you couldn’t be more wrong. These creeping things are the critics, keepers of the flame of theatre, the referees of the muse, and they’re running out not because they want to get to the bar first, but because they write their reviews overnight for the morning’s first editions. Well, they used to. Not all papers now do ‘overnights’, but even those with nothing to write on the spot will probably be rushing for the exits.”

As someone who doesn’t have to file “on the night”, I typically wait for the final curtain call before bolting for it, but unless you make a well-timed exit, its true that you can become embroiled in the slow crush of humanity trying to leave, which on a first night can be especially trying as air-kissing minor celebrities – which sometimes include AA Gill – hog the foyers. And going through this ritual night after night, we can be excused for wanting to make our excuses and want to get home ahead of the crowd.

But the genuine “overnight” critics really do have to get out: by the time a supposed 7pm press night curtain actually goes up, it can be closer to 7.15pm or even 7.20pm by the time the same air-kissing celebs have finally made it to their seats, so we’ll be lucky to get out much ahead of 10pm (or later, if it’s a Trevor Nunn production). And the overnight critics have to typically file their finished reviews by 11pm. So there isn’t much time for consideration, let alone writing; but the discipline often creates a sense of urgency that communicates itself on the page, too, and gives overnight reviews the real quality of making news on the spot, too.

In New York, by contrast, critics are invited to critics’ previews – a choice of several performances, ahead of the “opening night”, when they can come and see a show and then write at more leisure as reviews are embargoed until after the opening itself. (Now that all papers has a web presence, too, it means that the reviews are ready to go live there the same night as the opening, though some papers have been known to run their reviews a few hours early and thus effectively steal a march on others).

In London, for reasons of deadline or sometimes press night clashes (that regularly happen, despite a first night list being maintained by the Society of London Theatre to supposedly avoid them), critics will sometimes get special dispensation to attend a final preview – this is particularly the case with some of the Sunday papers like the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph, both of which absurdly require final copy from their critics for that Sunday’s edition by Wednesday morning – so anything that opens, or is reviewed, after Tuesday night would have to wait otherwise till the Sunday after. Or there may be occasions of personal circumstance or preference that compels one to attend early, too – in the last couple of months, I’ve been travelling a bit, as regular readers of this blog know, so I’ve had to juggle my schedule sometimes to get everything in.

Last month, for instance, there was a press day for the two-part Angels in America at the Lyric Hammersmith on a Tuesday that clashed for me with an invitation to Cameron Mackintosh’s party to mark his 40th anniversary as a producer, so I asked to go to the first part the night before. Even though the production had been touring for two months already — and been already been reviewed on the road by some national media — the director initially turned down the request, even though 15 hours or so separated the curtain down on Monday night’s last preview and the curtain up on the Tuesday matinee, so there would hardly be any more time to make adjustments to the “finished product”. When I pointed out that in that case I wouldn’t be able to go at all, since I was heading to the US a day later, I was finally allowed in.

But this week, as I returned from that trip to the US in time for the press night of St Joan on Wednesday night, I discovered looking around the Olivier stalls that many of my senior colleagues were AWOL. Kate Bassett of the Independent on Sunday was in front of me and Paul Taylor of the Indie across the aisle, and Ian Shuttleworth of the FT a few rows back, but otherwise the rest of the first night pack were nowhere to be seen. But yesterday, The Guardian, Times, Telegraph, Mail and Standard all published reviews. And, I subsequently discovered, The Observer’s Susannah Clapp and Mail on Sunday’s Georgina Brown had also snuck in early, as (no doubt) had the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times. Somehow, unannounced, Tuesday had become an unofficial “critics’ preview”.

This was partly, no doubt, caused by an opening night clash at Shakespeare’s Globe on Wednesday evening – we couldn’t be in both places at once, so something had to go early. (And interestingly, that’s what Paul Taylor did – his overnight review yesterday was for Love’s Labours’ Lost at the Globe, which he’d obviously seen the night before the night before). But it was also a practical necessity: Shaw can run long, and even with cuts, Marianne Elliott’s production had a running time of 3 hours 10 minutes. So overnight critics would have had their work cut out for them trying to review it on the opening night.

But could the critics’ preview become a formal institution, rather than this informal one? Producer Sonia Friedman has been amongst those trying to introduce something like it – as did Spamalot when it opened here – by holding a press night separate to the opening night. But the problem with that was that the reviews were not embargoed till after opening night, but duly appeared after the press one – with the opening night therefore taking place with the reviews literally already in the bag.

Friedman’s contention was that first nights themselves are an artificial construct, and critics don’t see the show with a “typical” audience; but while first nights can be an unsightly scrum, they also position critics as part of the “news” of the event, rather than only being there to provide a critical afterthought.

The fifth edition in the Harry Potter movie franchise, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, opens in UK cinemas today, and I can’t wait to see it. Not because I’m a Harry Potter fan, but because I’m an Imelda Staunton fan (and, to declare an interest, a friend, too).

I’d been following her stage career, of course, for years and years, ever since she was promoted from being a Hotbox Girl to Miss Adelaide in the National’s original 1982 production of Guys and Dolls, when she came to Cambridge in a touring production of She Stoops to Conquer, and I was producing a student production of Guys and Dolls at the time. I sent an invitation to her to come to our rehearsals, and got her photographed with our Miss Adelaide. More than a decade later, I ran into her in Dress Circle in Covent Garden and reminded her of the meeting. She was at the shop looking for pointers about how to get a big band show promoted that she was about to do at the Talk of London nightclub, then part of the New London Theatre. I was on my way to a meeting at the Donmar Warehouse to discuss what would become the inaugural Divas at the Donmar season. Without skipping a beat, I asked Imelda if she’d like to be one of our divas. And thus it came to pass that she became part of the opening season. As she said in a programme note, “And it all happened because I met a man in a shop!”

In 2005, of course, Imelda was in the running for Best Actress in the Oscars, thanks to her performance in the title role of Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake; and now she’s winning fresh plaudits for her role as the latest baddie, Dolores Umbridge, in the new Harry Potter film. As David Edelstein writes in his New York magazine review, “Above all, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is dominated – nearly subsumed – by Imelda Staunton…. Plump and pink, a tea-cozy Fascist, Staunton’s Umbridge is the distillation of every twisted, reactionary instructor you’ve ever had.” And in the New York Times, AO Scott concurs, “Devotees of fine British acting can savor the addition of Imelda Staunton to the roster of first-rate thespians moonlighting as Hogwarts faculty.”

That roster is, as Edelstein enumerates, “the usual embarrassment of British riches: Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, Robbie Coltrane, David Thewlis, Brendan Gleeson, Richard Griffiths, Fiona Shaw, Julie Walters, Jason Isaacs.” He leaves out another of my favourite actors, David Bradley, but asks, “Where is Bill Nighy? Vanessa Redgrave?”, before commenting, “After collecting their Hollywood paychecks, these actors now have no excuse not to do more plays for scale.”

And that is, of course, the wonderful thing about the London stage: that so many of these actors will do just that. Imelda herself was onstage earlier this year at the Almeida in There Came a Gypsy Riding, and (though hardly working for “scale”) Maggie Smith has just finished a run in the West End in The Lady from Dubuque. And, course, let us not forget (as if we could!) that Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe, recently made his West End stage debut in Equus, too. We are privileged indeed.

Is there a more depressing major (and majorly profitable) airport in the world to arrive at than Heathrow? The indifference, disorganisation and outright contempt for passengers is simply staggering: arriving back home there this morning after a trip to the US, none of the escalators or travelators between the gate and customs hall are working; there are just two immigration officials for the EU passport holders line so even though they only give a cursory glance to each one it still takes ten minutes to get past them; I have to check three cubicles in the loos before finding the fourth one that is actually clean, and even then the toilet seat is entirely cracked; and there are no trolleys in the luggage claim area. Mind you, at least I did get my luggage back, even though I was travelling BA who are notorious at the moment for separating passengers from their luggage.

This is, of course, a familiar litany of complaints, while the Spanish company that owns the BAA simply sit back and collect massive operating profits. Why do I bring it up in a theatre blog, though?

Partly because the Heathrow (lack of) welcome is just another factor that may be discouraging tourists who contribute so much to the attendance figures in the West End; but also because BAA is not unlike that of some of London’s major theatre owners, providing the essential receiving house for airlines or shows to park at, but often failing to do more than only running repairs to the infrastructure of the places they’re charging so much to their tenants to be resident at.

But theatregoers and passengers alike may start voting with their feet unless things improve radically. As it is, one of the many reasons that people will prefer to go to the places like the National is the comfort factor, apart from the definable artistic policy that makes going there a trusted experience. Just as transit passengers may find it more comfortable to book trips through cities like Paris or Frankfurt or Amsterdam with well-run airport hubs and will abandon Heathrow entirely, so theatregoers have already started avoiding the West End. I know people who actually consider it both a cheaper and more comfortable experience to see things on Broadway now than in the West End.

At least Broadway theatres are (for the most part) kept up to an attractive standard. And with the current exchange rates so in our favour, the prices are more or less compatible, too.

I’ve been in the Cape Cod resort town of Provincetown – known universally as P-town – since Friday, a tiny seaside hamlet with a registered local population of some 3,431 people at the 2000 census – but which swells to some 55,000 during the summer tourism height, many of them gay and lesbian travellers who have long “adopted” it as their own, with every week seeing an influx of different interest groups that choose a particular week to come. This week, for instance, is Bear Week (a London colleague, hearing that I was here for that, e-mailed to say to let him know when it was Beached Whale week, and he’d be here); next week is gay families week. And a friend tells me he was here once when he noticed there were a lot of large black women in town, and asked them what group they were from, and was told that there was a meeting of lesbian court stenographers in town).

It being bear week, the town was packed to heaving: as one drag comic was reported to me to have told the crowd, “I love bear week – the town seems so much fuller. Its the same number of people, just seems fuller….” S/he was referring to the fact that the bears, as they’re collectively known, are bigger (and usually furrier) gay men, who therefore take up more room. Drag, of course, is a major component of the theatrical attractions that are variously on offer throughout the season; and with a number of makeshift venues turning themselves into rooms that offer two or three shows a night, usually of about an hour each, it’s a bit like a mini-version of the Edinburgh Fringe, but devoted exclusively to queer, or queer-friendly, artists.

And talking of big, in different senses, I saw two of the biggest shows in town: veteran lesbian comic Lea de Laria (who has latterly forged a career as an occasional stage actress and rising jazz artist) and legendary porn star Jeff Stryker in a one-man, one-appendage show that (un)naturally showcases his major asset.

I’ve not always been a big fan of de Laria: certainly as a stage actress, in which I’ve seen her in the Broadway revivals of On the Town in 1998 and The Rocky Horror Show in 2000 (in which she played Eddie in male drag) and the off-Broadway musical Little Fish in 2003, she can be strident and abrasive. (Reviewing her in one of them, I once said of her that “she has less charm than pubic lice”). But seeing her swing, in every sense, in her live solo show, backed by a stonking three-piece band, I was smitten. Perhaps theatre roles are just too constraining to accommodate her large talent, because she’s a take-no-prisoners live performer.

There’s something uniquely liberating in a performer who comes onto her audience quite so aggressively: a pretty “femme” sitting near the front was virtually (and willingly, it seemed) seduced from the stage. I hesitate to repeat what she said in a family newspaper – ok, since you asked, she ended the show telling her, “I’m going to f* your brains out”, and then added, “It’s not like this seeing Dianne Reeves!”). But even more aggressive than the sexual come-on is the anti-Bush diatribe – sporting a tee-shirt that said, “I hated Bush before it was cool”, she launched into an attack on how much she hated him – but would consider having sex with his twin daughters (though would draw the line at their mother). The elderly gentleman sitting next to me grumbled, “He’s saving your life whether you like him or not,” which was a little disturbing: to find another gay Republican in P-town, of all places (besides British-born political columnist Andrew Sullivan who has long been resident in the US, and was around town all weekend), was scarier than anything de Laria said.

But the great thing about de Laria is that she can achieve a change of moods on the turn of a dime, switching effortlessly from out-there comedy to inside-the-soul music with a programme, mostly of Cole Porter standards, that she brings a real and remarkable sensitivity to.

And if that wasn’t enough, there was also a priceless anecdote about sharing a dressing room with Elaine Stritch once for a benefit show that she specifically asked us not to share with anyone else – so I won’t. (She claims never to have told it before in public, so I’ll keep the secret for now!).

From the sublime to the fairly ridiculous – Jeff Stryker is arguably the most iconic performer in the history of gay porn, a performer who from the mid-80s to the mid-90s starred in a number of movies, in which his robotic delivery of “dirty talk” became nearly as famous as his particularly notable asset. Now aged 44, and with a son that he raised himself as a single parent (after a lengthy custody battle, according to his entry on wikipedia) who is now 17, its slightly sad to see him still living on the vestiges of his porn fame; but maybe we’re the sadder ones for still buying it.

There was certainly a big curiosity factor to seeing him live, which I’ve in fact done once before, when he did a “play” called [Jeff Stryker Does] Hard Time, coincidentally at a theatre called the Provincetown Playhouse that was located off Washington Square in New York in the late 90s.Whereas that show aspired to being a prison-set drama in which there were other actors, last night’s show here had no such aspirations, but was called (with no apparent sense of irony) A Sophisticated Evening with Jeff Stryker, that was structured as a confessional in which he “revealed” some of the things that have happened to him, followed by the “meat and potatoes” (in every sense) in which he revealed even more.

For my own part, I was strangely struck by his facial resemblance to London theatre marketing and advertising guru Adam Kenwright, though I can’t personally vouch if Adam lives up to Stryker’s accomplishments in other departments.

In the current penchant for adapting any movie – hit or flop – for the stage, it’s perhaps no surprise that someone has now alighted on bringing Xanadu – the 1980 movie musical flop featuring songs by the Electric Light Orchestra that starred Olivia Newton-John in her first film after the success of the film version of Grease – to the Broadway stage.

It finally opens there tomorrow at the Helen Hayes Theatre, and I caught a preview last Thursday – the night before the press officially started being admitted, as they do in New York, ahead of the official opening. But without pre-empting what the reviews are yet to declare, a fascinating feature in the New York Times on Saturday offered a window into the minds of the young(ish) group of debutant theatre producers who have raised some $5million to bring the show to New York. “We’re trying to stay true to the spirit of the film,” 37-year-old producer Robert Ahrens is quoted as saying. “But nothing is perfect, so we’re trying to improve on it.”

But I don’t think anyone would ever make a claim for perfection for the film version of Xanadu. Indeed, playwright Douglas Carter Beane – whom Ahrens, according to this feature, “stalked” to do the book for it, until his initial no turned to a yes – has astutely remarked of the film elsewhere, “I blame cocaine… It’s like people say, ‘When you hear Ray Charles play, you can hear the heroin’? When you watch Xanadu, you can see the cocaine up on the screen.”

I hesitate to say that when you watch Xanadu on stage, you can see the helium of its creators being intoxicated by camp – and the producers desperately hoping for a winning formula. Dan Vickery, a 43-year-old pharmaceutical company adviser, tells the New York Times, “When I did research to try to understand what is popular, there is an element that is good music and a brand name”. This, presumably, has both: title recognition and songs that people recognise, too.

But if the producers themselves lack name recognition, that’s intentional: “Pretty much if you look at every show in town, you’re seeing the product of someone from the establishment,” said another, 26-year-old Brian Swibel. “Our show feels indie, because this is an entirely fresh team on the producing side.”

And, as in London, what the theatre establishment needs more than ever is replenishing of its ranks with fresh talent. But – and this is the most ominous sign for the producing of this musical – that talent needs to learn its craft, not assume it knows best while flying blind. Yet another of the producers, 26-year-old Tara Smith (who is Swibel’s girlfriend and who worked in reality TV before turning to screenwriting and developing her own musical), says, “Our advertising company will say, ‘We think you need to do X, Y and Z’. They’ll give us the statistics behind it. We’ll look at each other and be like, ‘We kind of want to try it this way’. They’ll say, ‘It’s not done that way’, and we’ll say, ‘Well, we want to try it.’”

I suppose that part of growing up is learning by your mistakes. But you also need to accept the wisdom of your elders. And to paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, if Everybody Says (Xana) Don’t, maybe there’s a reason. In fact, even that title got there first: in 2003, there was a little gay musical that played off-Broadway called Zanna Don’t! and it didn’t: there was even talk of taking it to Broadway, but it never got there. There’s a lesson in there somewhere….

It feels like only yesterday that The Drowsy Chaperone transferred to the West End – the fastest transfer of any show from Broadway for years, barely a year from when it first opened in New York – but today, a month to the day since it officially opened at the Novello Theatre, it has already posted its closing notices — a notification that came just the day before, too, that original co-creator and invaluable star Bob Martin leaves the show (with the League of Gentlemen’s Steve Pemberton taking over from Monday).

What happened? Did the show simply not travel? In a spookily prescient piece of knowing updating to the show’s script for London, Bob Martin (as Man in Chair who is our guide and narrator to his favourite musical that comes to life within the show) tells us that when that show came to London’s Novello – which was then of course the Waldorf Theatre before it became the Strand before it became the Novello – it failed, as Broadway imports are often wont to do. “That’s still true today,” says Bob/Man in Chair. And so it has proved.

But a new, original musical was always going to be a tough sell, albeit one with a recognisably déjà vu feel to it that is reminiscent of so many other shows. It seems that there is room only at the moment for the tried – if not trying – and already tested; if you’re going to spend up to £55, in this case, you want to be sure what you are getting. But with this show, you had to take it on trust that you would have a good time.

And trust me, you would. (Even watching it the last time through a haze of needing to throw up, as I previously blogged about here, I was able to connect with it). But is the producers’ early admission of failure with this show – making them take such a prompt decision to now close it rather than hope for audiences to build — a sign of a deeper unease in the West End?

Though the West End is giving the appearance of buoyancy with few dark theatres – only the Gielgud is dark for a prolonged period this summer, but using the time for scheduled maintenance and refurbishing work – actually a lot of shows are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. And in fact the surfeit of product that is actually running may be contributing to the malaise, rather than a symptom of its absence: there’s too much on for too few to see.

Maybe Broadway actually gets it right when the annual summer post-Tony Awards clear-out happens, that I previously blogged about here – by reducing the ticket pool of available seats, the audience that does want to go to the theatre is concentrated into a smaller number of shows actually running.

There was a feature in the New York Times last Sunday about the phenomenon of actors getting entrance applause – the potentially disruptive way a Broadway audience, particularly, will applaud a familiar actor, rather than the character he or she is playing, for simply making their first appearance.

On the one hand, as director Doug Hughes (who staged Inherit the Wind that I blogged about yesterday) commented in the feature, there can be something wonderful “about an audience saying to a performer, ‘We’re thrilled to see you, we’re on your side, we wish you well”; but on the other, it becomes a bigger challenge for the actors to establish the characters they are meant to be playing when the audience has already voted their approval, with their hands, of the actor themselves.

When Denzel Washington starred in a Broadway production of Julius Caesar in 2005, director Daniel Sullivan added a short, silent stroll across the stage for him so his entrance applause did not disrupt the performance, according to the New York Times feature, and quotes Wasington’s co-star Colm Feore commenting that “the genius of it was being modestly straightforward about the fact that it’s going to happen and preparing for it, so we never got derailed.” Likewise, in the current Terrence McNally play Deuce that stars Broadway veterans Angela Lansbury (back on the Broadway stage for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century, at the age of 81) and Marian Seldes, the applause for the actors is cleverly turned into applause for the characters they are playing.

They are playing a pair of retired tennis pros who have come to watch a championship match, and as the audience inevitably applauds them, we are in fact turned into the spectators of the tennis match doing so: it is only the cry of the umpire, “Ladies and Gentlemen, quiet please” that finally hushes us, whether as courtside fans or theatre fans.

But last night, going to see Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of John van Druten’s Old Acquaintance, a pleasingly old-fashioned 1940 romantic comedy, the déjà vu of another aulde acquaintance that time has nearly forgot was reawakened when the curtain went up and the audience applauded the set. And did so again for the second act, too. Alexander Dodge’s sumptuous designs are indeed a visual treat; and in this increasingly frugal times, they let the audience know that love, care and attention has been lavished on bringing this world to the stage. They do what a good set does: it makes the audience feel both at home and wish they were indeed at home inside this particular set. (“I’d like to live there”, said my companion).

It’s sometimes said of over-designed musicals that you go home humming the sets, but here the hum of applause that greets the appearance of each one is one of contentment.

And last night these were followed, naturally, by entrance applause for star Harriet Harris; and of course, the regulation standing ovation, too, at the end (which is invariably on Broadway a sign of the audience applauding itself, for having had the grace, taste – and money – to be there).

It’s one of the perks of the job of being a critic that we typically (though not always!) get some of the best seats in the house: the producers want us to see their shows from the best possible place, not stuck up in the gods or behind a pillar (though, as I recently blogged here, even a press ticket for the Donmar’s current production of Betrayal found me in the side block, often seeing the back of one actor who would thereby entirely obscure the view of the other one). But though things are seldom as bad as George S Kaufman’s immortal comment, “I saw the play at a disadvantage - the curtain was up”, it can be interesting to be on the other side of that curtain.

I’m not saying that I’ve suddenly taken up acting (though I did indeed make a brief appearance on a Broadway stage before, some years ago, when I was conscripted into the onstage silent movie enactment in Fool Moon, as I also previously blogged here; but rather last night I found myself at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre watching a really fine production of an old theatrical warhorse Inherit the Wind from the onstage seating that the production incorporates. No, it isn’t a gratuitous attempt by the producers to add to the capacity of the show, but rather a dramatic choice since it helps to fill the courtroom that the play is set in and populate the stage left jury box that would otherwise have just two real actors in it!

Of course the worry in such situations is that, Donmar-like, you end up getting a lot of rear and side “shots” of the action, but actually the arrangement makes up for in immediacy what it sometimes compromises in direct-on view. And you do get the acting truly in 360 degrees – an actor may turn away from the front, but in the process we’ll get a reaction shot that no one else does.

And to watch not one but two great American stage actors duelling it out here – Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy – at such close quarters added depth and resonance to it, since the 4th wall of theatre had not so much been breached as entirely dissolved. We were at one with them, not merely breathing the same air but occupying the same physical acting space. (Broadway currently, of course, also has the female veterans out in force, too, in Deuce, which has Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes volleying dialogue like the tennis balls their characters used to hit; what a pity that wasn’t done with onstage seating: I would like to have shared a stage with them, too!).

But best of all for me was seeing what the actors see from the stage itself. Not just the glorious magic of a classic three-tiered Broadway house – and one in which every last seat last night looked occupied – but also being able to feel the audience feeling the play. It totally absorbed them. And one woman, I couldn’t help noticing, more than most: she was sitting in the very front row, three seats in from the aisle on the stage right side of the auditorium, and yet regularly had a pair of binoculars clamped to her eyes. One of the joys of the theatre, I know, is getting a close-up view; but from the front row, surely she didn’t need to get any closer? Perhaps she should have got herself an onstage seat. That would have dissolved the distance for her even more.

The idea of “Broadway” stretches far beyond the (roughly) 12-block stretch of midtown New York that it geographically inhabits, but acts to provide a branding resonance beyond the idea of an individual show that has originated there: it is a standard bearer for supposed excellence, providing an imprimatur of quality as well as a statement of its birthplace, New York, New York. If you can make it there, goes the song, you can make it anywhere – so a show that has faced that toughest of markets goes out into the world with a marker that becomes a whole philosophy.

In San Francisco, entire seasons for its three major receiving theatres, the Curran, Orpheum and Golden Gate, are sold on their Broadway entries; and the promotional subscription leaflet sells this idea of Broadway beyond the individual shows that it contains. “Broadway is passion”, says one: “It is the raw language of the heart, revealed right here, right now.” Another announces, “Broadway is magic. It is an opportunity to live and play in an unknown world. Making dreams and fantasies real.”

That’s an awful lot of burden, if you ask me, to lay at the door of The Drowsy Chaperone, for instance, that’s part of that season. But seeing Jersey Boys at the beautiful Curran Theatre on Sunday evening, I was struck, too, by its formulaic kind of constructed-by-numbers production (in every sense: it’s a songbook show that tells the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons out of their many hits) that’s been so carefully manufactured to have a generic reach.

It’s the quintessential Broadway show: safe, familiar and unchallenging – but also (and here’s the important thing) great entertainment. What’s not to love with a soundtrack that many of us have lived our lives against the background of in the last 40 years? It’s the Abba and Mamma Mia! trick, too: music that everyone knows. But more than that, set to a well-crafted storybook show that transcends a concert.

The only problem is that there aren’t more shows like it. Those three San Francisco houses are invariably dark for great stretches of the year, since there simply isn’t the hit product being generated on Broadway to keep them open all the time.

Still, San Francisco has a thriving local theatre scene, and I paid two visits to the New Conservatory Theatre Center on Van Ness Avenue as well over the weekend. First I saw a local version of Richard Greenberg’s baseball comedy Take Me Out, in a production which mainly made me realise how keenly I missed Denis O’Hare as the outsider financial adviser who discovers the redemptive powers of baseball, and brought real heart to the play as opposed to the way that the local actor here merely indulged in excruciating caricature. But at least local audiences are being exposed to the play, and not paying Broadway prices, either: top price at the NCT is $32.

I also saw (some of) James Kirkwood’s Legends, a notorious touring flop when it was first seen in a 1986 production that starred Carol Channing and Mary Martin but never reached Broadway. The play has become a legend itself, mainly because of Kirkwood’s own blisteringly brilliant first-hand account of its travels and travails, Diary of A Mad Playwright, which has to be one of the best backstage theatre books of all time. But, rather like Simon Gray’s diary series of the staging of several of his plays, the book about the play turns out to be far better than the play itself: by the interval I’d seen quite enough to realise that the play was probably beyond the help, or even hindrance, of whoever was playing in it.

The West End in the summer months is never far from a crisis, as the good weather deters audiences from venturing into the stifling conditions of many of our theatres that try to compete with the tube in the discomfort stakes; and the tourists are deterred from venturing to Britain at all thanks to the current currency rates. Even if the Gielgud is the only West End theatre currently dark (and using its lull wisely for a scheduled refurbishment in Cameron Mackintosh’s rolling programme of upgrades to his theatres), and the Playhouse will be after this coming weekend’s closure of Dancing in the Streets, both theatres also already have their next attractions lined up, with the Gielgud set to take Desperately Seeking Susan and the Playhouse now announced to take in the Young Vic’s production of Tintin.

But the surfeit of product does not mean a surfeit of profit. Everywhere you look West End producers are merely clinging on, and it doesn’t take much to rock an already unstable boat. So the events of the early hours of Friday morning, when one car bomb was placed in the Haymarket and another towed away from around the corner (proving that not even those hell bent on death and destruction are immune from Westminster’s vigilant parking controls), will certainly have wider repercussions.

The night before, critics played their own part in carrying out a controlled explosion on another theatrical bomb – the ENO production of Kismet, and though we are not routinely bomb disposal experts, this one was apparently built by amateurs so it wasn’t hard to defuse. As Edward Seckerson wryly noted in his review in The Independent, director Gary Griffin’s “sole contribution to the evening would seem to have been to applaud and laugh loudly from his seat just across the aisle from me. With his excellent track record, Griffin should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.”

But joking apart, there’s something to be proud of in the resilience of the West End in the face of such a hostile market. On Broadway at this time of year, they simply give up the ghost. If the Tony Awards don’t bring the necessary recognition, there’s an immediate clearing out of the weaker candidates. Two shows (Company – which did actually get Tony recognition as the Best Musical Revival — and August Wilson’s final play Radio Golf) both closed yesterday, and seven more are already scheduled to go, either at the end of their scheduled runs or sooner, by August 25 (and Grey Gardens loses its two leading ladies on July 29, so barring a last-minute re-cast, expect that to depart, too — SEE AMENDMENT BELOW). The net result is that Broadway will soon only have 21 shows playing.

And unlike in London, where one closing typically marks the opportunity for an opening to take its place, on Broadway there can be considerable lulls between bookings. One of the Shubert Organisations flagship theatres, the Imperial, has been dark since the early closure of Coram Boy; and still has nothing lined up to go in to replace it.

AMENDMENT: Since writing the above, a friend has written to point out that Grey Gardens only loses one of its Tony winning leading ladies on July 29, namely Mary Louise Wilson, but Christine Ebersole stays on. The ads, in that case, are very misleading: “Final weeks together! See the two most acclaimed performances on Broadway together thru July 29”, they trumpet. It’s true that, if one leaves, the two most acclaimed performances are no longer together… but extrapolating that the other of these acclaimed performances on Broadway should still be available to see isn’t clear.

FURTHER UPDATE: Later in the day, it was indeed announced that Grey Gardens is to shut on 29 July, so my original guess that it might close then has proved prophetic.