West End glitches and outdoor (lack of) whinge(r)s….

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.