August 2007 Archives

I’m not sure when the term “dansical” was first coined, but it might have been for Susan Stroman’s Lincoln Center show Contact that had a book but no dialogue or lyrics, providing a narrative purely to dance that saw it win the 2000 Tony Award for Best Musical. It was subsequently adopted as a term to describe the work of both Twyla Tharp (with her 2002 show Movin’ Out, which created a new narrative ballet out of the music of Billy Joel) and Matthew Bourne (when he brought the Tim Burton film Edward Scissorhands to the stage in 2005).

Now it is also being applied by Danish director/choreographer Peter Shaufuss to the “dance concert” Satisfaction that he has built around the repertoire of the Rolling Stones that opened last night at the West End’s Apollo Theatre. But watching this non-narrative revue – which I was reviewing for The Stage – it reminded more of something that long pre-dated Stroman, Tharp and Bourne’s inventions and interventions in the form: the 80s dance revues of Wayne Sleep with his company Dash.

Sleep was also the first star of the Anthony van Laast choreographed dance half of Song & Dance in 1982, which set Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Variations’ to dance. (When the show went to New York in 1985, Peter Martins, who is now director of New York City Ballet, did the choreographic honours). Perhaps that was the first dansical?

But why get stuck on terms anyway? It’s all theatre, and the only difference is which critic is sent. Last night, I felt myself surrounded mainly by dance critics – though I was joined by my theatrical colleagues from both of the Mails with Quentin Letts from the Daily and Georgina Brown from the Sunday, as well as LBC regular Roger Foss. It will be interesting to see how different the critical reactions between the two groups is. Stay tuned!

In December 2005, an extraordinary theatrical event took place at the tiny Gate Theatre in Notting Hill when Thea Sharrock, then the artistic director there, and her designer Richard Hudson reconceived this ever-versatile space to site the audience above and around the perimeter of a rectangular box in which Eugene O’Neill’s rarely-seen The Emperor Jones unfolded. The production was a shock to the system, partly because of the change of perspective: I’ve never watched a play from above before. When it was announced that Sharrock and her star Paterson Joseph – but not the designer, with Hudson replaced by Robin Don – were to re-stage production at the National’s Olivier, I was shocked again: how would they bring the same kind of disorienting intensity to this strange, powerful play?

Seeing the new production open at the Olivier last night, it was amazing to see the same artists responding to the same work in a totally different yet equally compelling way. Theatrical space, of course, is never fixed – the only limit, famously, is people’s imaginations. With an auditorium like the Olivier, the vast stage may give you flexibility to define the space in different ways, but the auditorium itself is a fixed shape and size, and needs to be addressed in its entirety. Don, Sharrock and Joseph rise to the physical as well as emotional challenges of it in bold, powerful ways that replace the overpoweringly intense intimacy of what was achieved at the Gate with a no-less intense epic scale.

But its places like the Gate – and the Cottesloe, Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs and the Menier Chocolate Factory, to name just a few, where each time you enter them you wonder how they will be laid out – that have allowed artists to play with the configurations of the audience space as well as the stage one. And the growing trend towards environmental and site-specific productions keeps taking theatre out of theatres themselves. Sometimes, too, as Punchdrunk are about to do at BAC, the theatre is being taken out of the theatre, and the entire venue turned into a site-specific place.

These are deliberate, calculated interventions to change our perceptions of space; but productions, too, can play with changes of scale. It was fascinating, for instance, to watch the Watermill in Newbury’s radical downscaling of Sondheim’s most epic musical, Sweeney Todd, slowly growing again as it moved first to the West End, then to Broadway. The Menier originated production of another Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George, is undergoing a similar journey: having already played Wyndham’s, next stop is Broadway’s Studio 54 next February, where what was designed to originally be played in very close quarters will have to reach a far more physically distant audience.

It’s not usual at the Proms, of course, to hear lyrics like this: “Smile a rented smile/Fill someone’s glass/Kiss someone’s wife/Kiss someone’s ass/We do whatever pays the wages.” But then it’s not just those lyrics, from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s title song to Sunset Boulevard, that will have had Radio 3 audiences choking on their sherry (or tea or lager – let’s not categorise them too narrowly), but the fact that they were being sung by Michael Ball as part of Prom 58, the first-ever to be devoted entirely to a musical theatre performer to strut his stuff.

Of course, this is far from the only time that the musical theatre repertoire has been represented; a few years ago, an entire prom was devoted to a concert performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Wonderful Town, with a cast that included Broadway’s incandescent Audra McDonald, a performer who was subsequently a soloist for the last night of the Proms, too, so the classical credentials of good musical theatre talent have long been established.

But the Proms are usually about the art rather than the artists: we’ve not had solo showcases (yet) for Bryn Terfel or Renee Fleming, for instance, though both have of course appeared in Proms. But there the music came first, then their casting. Last night’s Prom seems to have begun the other way around, with Ball then left to choose his own repertoire as he saw fit.

And yes, he did break down barriers in the process, proving that he could more than hold his own, for instance, in the classical repertoire when he sang a Bizet duet with Alfie Boe (whom he recently co-starred with in the ENO’s ill-fated Kismet). But this was also, I’m sure, the first time that Frank Wildhorn and John Miles have been heard in the Proms, too, with their indescribably cheesy ‘This is the Moment’ (from Jekyll and Hyde) and ‘Music’ respectively, that threatened to turn the night into a Tom Jones Vegas concert.

Michael made several references to the criticisms that had been made of his appearance here, and in introducing a song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (which he performed in two years ago with New York City Opera), he referred to his character’s song as poking fun at the pretentiousness of people who think that high art is the only art.

That got a round of applause, and it’s certainly to be welcomed that the Proms are expanding their audience and repertoire, with music here also from Queen and Carly Simon. And if this may well have been the first time that many in the audience had attended a Prom, it was my first for this year, too – I had booked also to go to the Cleo Laine concert celebrating her 80th birthday, but it clashed with the opening night for Grease, so I didn’t get there in the end.

I couldn’t help thinking, though, that the Proms would have served Ball better if they’d suggested a musical framework for the evening to give it context beyond his own big personality (and bigger hair); and it finally came to me when he did a sing-off medley between a Lloyd Webber and Sondheim love song (‘All I Ask of You’ from Phantom and ‘Loving You’ from Passion, respectively), which he prefaced by saying that he didn’t think one could choose between them. While Lloyd Webber was elsewhere well represented, too, with songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, the previously mentioned Sunset Boulevard, and Aspects of Love (Ball did his signature song from that show, ‘Love Changes Everything’, as an encore), and Sondheim came back with his lyrics to West Side Story’s ‘Something’s Coming’ (wrongly attributed in the programme running order to Arthur Laurents), it might have been a more musically cohesive evening, and a better tribute to the genre itself, to have spent the entire evening showcasing the work of these two titans of contemporary musical theatre.

Michael would have been the man to do it; he is now, unquestionably, the West End’s leading leading man – or soon-to-be woman (when he stars in Hairspray; as these pictures show, he looks something like a cross between Kim Criswell and Bette Midler). As it is, he merely confirmed last night what we already know: that both he and musical theatre are worth taking seriously.

This Sunday afternoon I am a guest of Elaine Paige’s weekly Radio 2 show, choosing my “five essential musicals.” That doesn’t mean it’s a definitive list of what I think are the best musicals ever written, but ones that all have a special resonance or relevance to me. I won’t spoil the surprise by revealing the ones I’ve chosen here, but will instead take this opportunity to admit to what’s not on the list – but would have been there if I’d been allowed to stretch to another 15! Even then, of course, it’s always going to be a highly personal list!

The next 15, then, by category, rather than order of preference, are:

ACKNOWLEDGED BROADWAY CLASSICS

· My Fair Lady – probably the most brilliantly crafted of play-to-musical adaptations ever made
· Gypsy – maybe the greatest backstage musical of theatrical life
· West Side Story – what a score! As are Bernstein’s songs for On the Town, Wonderful Town and Candide, too. But we can’t have them all on the list!
· Carousel – of course we have to have a Rodgers and Hammerstein, and this is my personal favourite.
· She Loves Me – I’d choose this miniature gem over Fiddler on the Roof to have a Bock/Harnick score

SONDHEIM
Of course there’s a Sondheim on my Essential Five list already, but my next 15 would have three more, at least:

· Sweeney Todd, of course – undoubtedly Sondheim’s dramatic masterpiece, but harder to love than others because of its ugly story.
· Company – the ultimate urban musical.
· Merrily We Roll Along – the score is simply ravishing.

MORE RECENT BROADWAY
Broadway is still the market-leader, of course, when it comes to creating contemporary musicals:

· Chicago – even fresher and more resonant the second time around, Kander and Ebb’s work has to figure on any list of the best shows, and I’d choose Chicago over Cabaret.
· On the Twentieth Century – Cy Coleman is strangely underrated in the pantheons of the Broadway greats, but with the incredible variety of his output, from Sweet Charity and Little Me to Barnum, City of Angels and The Will Rogers Follies, he’s unrivalled. My personal favourite score, though, is On the Twentieth Century.
· Nine – I love Maury Yeston’s melodies, too, and though I adored Titanic and Grand Hotel, too (that he contributed additional material to), Nine’s a ten out of ten, for me!
· Dreamgirls – impossible to separate from Michael Bennett’s original production, of course, that I was lucky enough to see on Broadway, but this is still a stunner.
· Avenue Q – there’s been no warmer or wittier contemporary Broadway musical for years.

BRITISH ENTRIES
I chose one British show in my Essential five list already, but here are two more, finally, that I would add:

· Evita – Andrew Lloyd Webber has to be on the list, not just for a body of work that’s unparalleled in range but also his huge impact on the musical worldwide. And though I love Cats for its joyfulness and The Phantom of the Opera for its theatricality, the Lloyd Webber masterpiece remains Evita.
· Jerry Springer – the Opera – no contemporary British musical has packed so many thrilling melody lines into one score as Richard Thomas’s amazingly fertile and provocative work on Jerry Springer.

Tough though English National Opera’s Kismet was to watch – I blogged here at the time about how the head of one senior opera critic sitting across the aisle from me was operatically rolling so far forward in despair it was virtually buried in his briefcase – it must have been even harder to actually turn up and have to appear in every night. This is usually one of the private agonies of the theatre: actors tend to grin, literally, and bear it, since they don’t want to jeopardise future opportunities by speaking out about what they’ve had to experience. But that unwritten rule was irresistibly broken yesterday, when Michael Ball hilariously trashed Kismet in an interview in the Evening Standard, headlined with his own words, “It was shockingly, gloriously awful”. He went on, “It was like being in a cross between Springtime for Hitler and Carry on Camel”.

Was this one of those shows done with the best of intentions where the flour just doesn’t rise once it was in the theatre? No, he could see it coming: “The rehearsals were a shambles. People were standing around on stage saying, ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’ Can you believe it? I’ve never had a dance lesson in my life but I suggested a few things, just because you have to come up with something with all those people looking at you. It was as if a member of the Stedham Village Players had won the Lottery and said [puts on camp northern accent]: ‘I’m putting on Kismet and I’ll do it my way.’ It was like Aladdin at the Bradford Alhambra circa 1978.”

Ouch! He itemises the problems: “One of the biggest disasters was the design. To stick it all in a bloody great Day-Glo pink blancmange with no room to move and having the male dancers dressed in the same colour as the set so you couldn’t see them and the women, supposed to be luscious and sexy, wrapped up in M&S blue sheets …” And working practices at ENO get a hammering, too: “At ENO, because it’ s subsidised, there’s a civil-servant mentality. Even if you’re in the middle of a song, if the rehearsal reaches its scheduled end, you all down tools. I found that completely shocking. There was no collective sense of continuing to the end - just a matter of minutes - to make the whole enterprise better. One of two people might have done it but the others had already gone home.”

Ball, whose loyal fan club, of course, bought many of the tickets, was tempted to tell the audience what he thought: “I wanted to come to the front of the stage and say ‘We know. It’s as bad as you think. We’re not crazy’.” But maybe he is to say all this in the same breath as adding, “in spite of all that, I loved every second. The people were great and I’d be happy to work at the Coliseum again.” He’s trying to spoil his cake and eat it.

Nichola McAuliffe famously did so in 2004 when she was starring in Murderous Instincts at the Savoy, and before it even opened wrote, in a double-page spread in the Daily Mail, of a producer who was “as mad as a box of frogs”, and rehearsals as being “like a motorway pile-up”. Now she’s done even better with the experience and written a brilliant backstage fictional account of the putting on of a West End salsa musical, called A Fanny Full of Soap.

Actors are invariably glad of the work, whatever it is, but its good to know that their critical faculties are intact, and that even those in hits aren’t necessarily spared its blushes: I have spoken to a couple of members of the cast of Dirty Dancing, and even they have privately admitted it is rubbish. Yet they also know their responsibilities to an audience who have come along to have their memories of the film honoured, and that it is their job to make that happen.

Outside of the Comedy Theatre, they’re still boldly publishing a carefully edited extract from Georgina Brown’s Mail on Sunday review for Boeing-Boeing that refers to “a Concorde cast”. But like Concorde itself, the original cast that gave rise to the quote have long been grounded (so perhaps fair trading officers could question the truth-in-advertising basis of it still being used); but seeing the show again on Monday evening, they’ve at least not been replaced by Easyjet alternatives…. yet.

One of the biggest challenges for producers is how to replace the seemingly irreplaceable: Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick’s unique star power was never equalled during the subsequent take-overs in The Producers on Broadway, which led to that show running out of steam far sooner than it should have, as the producers floundered by merely finding identikit replacements who were made to give approximations of the same performances without being allowed to stamp their own identities on it (which was arguably the reason for Henry Goodman’s downfall in the part when he was Lane’s original Broadway replacement).

In the case of Boeing-Boeing, a hokey-seeming 60s French farce was gloriously transformed into the funniest show in town when it first opened back in February by the amazing trio of Roger Allam as Bernard, the lothario simultaneously juggling three fiancées, Mark Rylance as his panicked friend Robert and Frances de la Tour as his droll, deadpan housemaid Bertha. There was also a particularly hilarious turn from Michelle Gomez as his German fiancée Gretchen. Now, as the production has morphed through a series of cast replacements, the play still achieves lift-off, even with one significant minus amongst the cast but one more definite plus.

The minus is the seemingly commercially-driven imperative for a telly name in the case of Rhea Perlman, who starred as Carla in the 11-year series Cheers and appeared in all 273 episodes, according to her bio, and has taken over as Bertha to deliver a performance that’s all about eye-rolling rather than the real sense of world-weary disdain that de la Tour brought to it. On the other hand, Adrian Dunbar – stepping into the shoes of Bernard – is less bulky than Allam and therefore plays the physical comedy even faster and funnier. Doon Mackichan is every bit Gomez’s equal as Gretchen. But the stand-out surprise and triumph is Elena Roger, late of the title role of Evita who, after closing that show on a Saturday, took over the very next week here as Italian hostess Gabriella and proves to be a highly accomplished comic actress as well. When the show goes to Broadway, as is rumoured, perhaps Patti LuPone — Broadway’s original Eva Peron — could follow in her footsteps…. (She’s already played a maid in the show within-the-show in the Broadway transfer of the National’s revival of Noises Off).

But it’s starting to look like Boeing-Boeing may be on the way to becoming the new Chicago, with other screen and telly names being rotated through it in the coming months – including Jennifer Ellison, last seen in the West End in Chicago, in fact, taking over from Amy Nuttall in October as American hostess Gloria.

And talking of Chicago, I raced in to catch that again, too, last night, before Kelly Osbourne is parachuted in next month as Mama Morton, since I wanted to see real West End performers in it rather than cynically-manipulated stunt casting that here will see a 22-year-old personality, with no stage experience at all and no qualifications for fame other than being part of a dysfunctional family who have lived their lives out in the glare of reality TV: never will lawyer Billy Flynn’s line in the show about phoney celebrities resonate louder. Right now the role that Osborne will take over is being played by the estimable (and experienced) Susie McKenna; and I hope that McKenna hasn’t been shunted aside to make way for Osbourne but is leaving of her own accord.

Mind you, with this show there’s almost as much repeat business on the stage as I’ve done in returning to see it again and again: Josefina Gabrielle, currently playing Roxie Hart, is now on her 6th stint in the show. So I suspect that McKenna will be back once Osbourne is a fast-fading memory.

With a weak dollar and strong pound making London even more expensive as a destination for American visitors than it usually is – and we’re not a cheap city to begin with, even for us! – the West End’s difficult summer could have been anticipated before it even happened. But now a new survey just issued by cheapflights.com confirms what we’ve been suspecting: that London is no longer high on the list of possible destinations for Americans, slipping from 7th most popular destination for which deals were sought on the site in July 2006 to occupy 15th place in 2007.

As cheapflights.com have noted in a press release, “Normally the top main destinations sought by Cheapflights’ US users are seasonally stable with little variation. Predictably these are the leisure destinations of Las Vegas (1), Orlando (2) and Atlanta (6) and the business destinations of New York (3), Chicago (4), and Los Angeles (6). London’s drop from its normal 7th position to 15th is very unusual and likely linked to the increased expense of travel driven by rising exchange rates against the Dollar.”

But reverse traffic has been driven up: for UK users of the site, there’s been a 38% surge in users searching for deals to New York compared to July 2006. And, as I’ve noted here before, with ticket prices in the West End actually turning out to be more expensive than they are on Broadway, you’re better off not just shopping for goods in New York but also for theatre. And you get to see it first there, too. Not to mention in buildings that are fit for the purpose, with seats that aren’t falling apart and air-conditioning as standard. No wonder the West End is being left behind, in every sense.

Only last week I was declaring here that the “wooden, mirrored circular auditorium” of the Spiegeltent – one of the travelling wonders of the theatre world, currently occupying its now-annual spot in George Square, Edinburgh – “could well be the world’s most beautiful theatrical container, as opposed to fixed building.”

Of course Edinburgh at this time of year is full of containers – in one case, literally one, that contains a show called The Container — that aren’t purpose-built auditoriums at all, but spaces from student union bars and sports halls to deconsecrated churches that are pressed into use to become venues. One is always astonished at the resourcefulness of some of the venue managers in finding new nooks and crannies which they open up as venues for hire, and no space is apparently safe: over the years, I have seen rooms at the Assembly Rooms, Pleasance and (this year) the Gilded Balloon, that I used to visit as the respective press offices for those venues, suddenly turned into venues. The Pleasance have, for the past two years, been using empty outdoor space as venues by installing portakabins in those areas, too, that are turned into extremely intimate (and extremely hot) venues.

But there’s rarely anything lovely or lovable (let alone, sometimes, practical or even functional) about these spaces, and it’s a relief to return to the comparative civilisation of “real” theatres after spending some time in Edinburgh. However, on Friday I paid an all-too-infrequent visit to one of London’s most singular and delightful theatrical spaces, the Battersea Barge moored on the Thames towpath between Vauxhall and Battersea Bridges, and was reminded how refreshing non purpose-built spaces can be, too. With the Thames literally lapping at the windows and the barge gently swaying in the river currents while pleasure boats trafficked past, you are simultaneously within the enclosed world of this dinner cabaret setting but also reminded of a world beyond it.

On Friday I saw the last night there for a duo of singers imported from New York, Michael Holland and Karen Mack, whose show Blend-o-matic is a compilation of pop medleys that is literally drawn from a hat: the audience is invited to make selections from a card index on each table that are then put into a hat to be chosen from. It’s a novel way of constructing a show, and Holland and Mack have a rare gift for spontaneous interaction with both the audience and each other that keeps it fresh and newly minted, too.

The only disappointment to an otherwise ship-shape evening, in every sense, was the erratic dinner service. When our dessert still hadn’t arrived after about 45 minutes, I made enquiries after it – and two waiters came in turn to try to take the order again, which had apparently been lost somewhere between them and the kitchen but still took another half an hour to fulfil after that. My partner, in any case, ended up regretting it either way, since it then lay very heavily on him for the rest of the night. So it’s probably best to avoid the food and stick to the (slow) bar service.

It’s sometimes a mystery how a director gets the reputation they do, but sometimes a throwaway remark says it all, and my thanks are due to the West End Whingers for spotting this treasurable remark, made by Maggie Smith to Kathleen Turner, when asked about what sort of director Anthony Page is: “Oh darling, he’s wonderful”, Maggie replied. “He does everything I tell him.” (Turner was being interviewed about being a director for the first time herself this month, staging Crimes of the Heart this month at Williamstown Theatre Festival).

Being able to handle stars, of course, is a not-to-be-underestimated talent, but some directors have a vanity that exceeds that of the stars they are working with. One of my favourite theatre stories concerns a director (who, interestingly, now works very little) who took home a friend of mine from a bar, and on the way there said to him, “Do you know that you’re going to f**k a director of genius?” When I passed this story on to Stephen Daldry, however, I told him that at least he might have a legitimate claim to being able to use the line if chose to.

I once interviewed another director of sometimes-genius, David Leveaux, and asked him if it’s true, as I heard said, that 90% of the job of directing is in the casting, and he replied, “Yes – but then there’s the other 90%”.

We live, of course, in an age of directors’ theatre – it is directors who programme and administer most of our theatres, as opposed to writers or producers – but it may well be that 90% of the reason why a show works or not may not, in fact, be down to them at all. I remember seeing a play in New York that was directed by someone whose work had never been particularly good – until now. I turned to my companion to express astonishment that it was being directed by this person. And as he trenchantly replied, “Even a blind squirrel finds the occasional nut.”

I finally completed my 29-show-in-five-nights Edinburgh run yesterday, but it’s not just me who has already moved on from the festival. Press coverage already started trailing off before the middle of the middle week yesterday, with The Guardian the day before running just one theatre and one comedy review in the main paper and nothing at all in G2. Edinburgh features returned yesterday to G2, but by now the hits are already hits and the world is moving on.

Besides, there is a world elsewhere, though it did sometimes seem as if the entire world was in Edinburgh over the last few days. It was difficult to go anywhere without running into people from London’s wider theatrical community, both on and offstage. But already, too, critics are being called elsewhere, and while Peter Hall’s Bath Theatre Royal season yesterday held a press day for a double-bill matinee and evening opening, the RSC have gone one better today and are running a triple threat of openings for three more plays in their ongoing History Cycle.

I was all set to go today (as I mentioned last week in my blog entry on my future schedule), but after three consecutive nights in Edinburgh in which I only got a maximum of five hours sleep each night, I realised that twelve more hours in the theatre – albeit with breaks – would be a marathon too many. And then, in any case, I looked up the schedule to work out when to go instead, and discovered that, after they open today, this particular cycle of productions plays for just two more days – or one performance for each play – before they vanish from the rep entirely until November. So there was no urgency to reviewing them at all, except perhaps for the marketing department’s benefit. I think I’ll wait till the entire cycle comes to the Roundhouse next year….

So I’m back in Borough, SE1 today, though the last play I saw yesterday, Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, put me close to home before I even got there, set as it is in the Elephant and Castle just down the road. I used to live at the Elephant, and when I said as much to a former colleague, he replied gravely, “You obviously know no fear.” It certainly doesn’t get a good press in Walsh’s play. One character asks another to “paint me a picture of this boulevard and its surrounding environs”, and the answer comes back, “On my palate is only grey… Grey and muck. For these are the two primary colours that make up much of the Elephant.” But even if Walsh is clearly not intent on talking the area up, it does have a distinguished theatrical pedigree: in Twelfth Night, Antonio advises Sebastian, “In the south suburbs, at the Elephant, is best to lodge.”

Last year, however, I moved to Lant Street in Borough, and if Sarah Waters’ account in her historical novel Fingersmith is anything to go by, I’ve not much improved my lot. According to a user summary on Amazon, “Susan, or as she is called sometimes, Sue or Sukey, lives in one of London’s more notorious slums, the Borough. Outside of the doors of the house on Lant Street, pickpockets, thieves and prostitutes work their trade, but within, the oddest of families have formed…” It’s not quite like that these days outside my flat, though I’ll leave it to you to judge how odd things are inside it.

It was only last Saturday that I was writing here of going to Usher Hall for the first time in the 23 years I have been coming to Edinburgh, and last night I did another first: I stepped inside the Fruitmarket Gallery on Market Street, behind Waverley Station, for the first time, too! And although they’re currently hosting an exhibition of the work of contemporary artist Alex Hartley, naturally it was a theatre piece I was actually attending: Tim Crouch’s latest playful experiment in theatrical form called England, which bills itself specifically as “a play for galleries” as it is intended to be performed within them, has Crouch and another “guide” talking us through a story of art, commerce and organ transplant as they walk amongst the exhibits.

I also ended my evening somewhere different, too, paying my second-ever visit to McEwan Hall in Bristo Square – an area that has become the epicentre of the Fringe now, with venues all the way around it from the Gilded Balloon (installed in what those of us who have been coming to the fringe for a while remember as the Fringe Club) and Pleasance Dome to the giant purple tent of the Udderbelly in the middle of it, and George Square just around the corner with the glorious Spiegeltent once again housed in its gardens. A couple of years ago there was a show at McEwan’s Hall that took us on a guided tour of it, which was one way of seeing inside this imposing building; but this year it is the home of the Silent Disco – an amazing interactive nightclub experience which in a stroke solves my main problem with clubs (now that my other main problem with them, smoking, has been banned), namely the noise. Here each visitor is equipped with their own set of headphones, and clubgoers can listen to their own choice of one of two DJ sets that are being spun live. The room, meanwhile, is entirely silent, except for the occasional cheer or whoop.

But if the silent joys of Silent Disco are one sign of me showing my age, another is the sense of déjà vu that inevitably hits you as shows you saw when they were new receive revivals. In the last few years, this has happened to me regularly on Broadway with shows like 42nd Street, Nine, Into the Woods and even Big River coming back there in new productions from the originals that I first saw them in, but now its started happening on the fringe, too. One of the biggest hits of this year’s festival is Tracy Letts’ Killer Joe (at the Pleasance), with Phil Nichol in yet another of his (dis)guises, but I remember seeing the original, and far more galvanising and dangerous, original production at Traverse 2 in 1994, before it transferred to the West End’s Vaudeville Theatre the following year.

I also feel like I’ve been seeing Bob Downe, the brilliantly cheesy Australian lounge act creation of Mark Trevorrow, forever, too, ever since I first saw him at Edinburgh in the 1990s. This year he’s back yet again, and since he was appearing at the Spiegeltent, I couldn’t miss him. I seriously think that this wooden, mirrored circular auditorium could well be the world’s most beautiful theatrical container – as opposed to fixed building – and have loved visiting this travelling space ever since I first encountered it perched on top of the shopping centre over Waverley Station on the Edinburgh Fringe more than a decade ago. It’s a near-perfect space for cabaret performance, too, creating an atmosphere and rapport with the audience that a performer like Downe then feeds on effortlessly.

Nothing, it seems, works faster than word-of-mouth in Edinburgh when it comes to hot shows. On Saturday morning, I experienced this first-hand when, in the space of 20 minutes, two people I was separately speaking to – and had never met before (the first hiding from the rain under a Pleasance courtyard umbrella, the second in a Pleasance queue) – both recommended the same show, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, playing at the Underbelly. I duly scheduled it last night, and found both Ian Shuttleworth (now up from 33 shows when I first met him on Friday to a score of 47) and The Observer’s Susannah Clapp there. With 2,050 shows to choose from, you’d have thought that the chances of running into fellow national critics would be slim, but we, too, follow where others lead, and the talk of the town is difficult to avoid. This extremely original, quirky piece, combining live action and music with animated film, is just the sort of discovery that stands out from the crowd in Edinburgh.

There’s been a lot of talk, too, for Scarborough, a short, intense and almost unbearably intimate and poignant bedroom encounter between a schoolboy, about to turn 16, and his nearly 30-year-old gym teacher in the bed-and-breakfast bedroom that she has taken him away to on a weekend to celebrate his birthday. What makes it even more shocking, however, is that we’re put into literally the same tiny room as them, voyeurs and eavesdroppers amongst the crumpled sheets and torn birthday present wrapping paper. It means that only around 20 people per performance can actually see it, but this is a play that burns itself onto your conscience. And it boasts a performance from James Baxter as the boy that is the best I’ve seen all festival, combining a quite astonishing mixture of vulnerability and maturity. The play’s author, meanwhile, is Fiona Evans, a former press officer of the Assembly Rooms, and it must be wonderful for her to be experiencing such great reviews for a show she’s written, not just representing, there. Press offices are often a good training ground for theatre artists. I well remember the days when David Grindley used to run the Pleasance press office!

But in the midst of so much new work, where we’re all chasing the next thing, I did something that perhaps I should not be allowed to: I went back to see something I’d already seen – just two days earlier! Sometimes a fringe discovery is so exciting that you just want to make it again, even if it means sacrificing the chance of making another one. The show is called Seriously, an Australian theatricalization of the pop repertoire of the Pet Shop Boys, and it simply blew me away — twice. I met its director and conceiver David Knox before the show last night, and he asked me if I was already a Pet Shop Boys fan. No, in fact, I replied – I thought his cast sang the songs far better than Neil Tennant does! And if I know their work at all, it is mainly thanks to the Liza Minnelli album, Results, that was produced and arranged by the Pet Shop Boys — he replied that that was one of his inspirations for doing the show!

In my first despatch from Edinburgh on Saturday I was saying that one should be always try new experiences up here – something The Observer put to the test yesterday by sending their star interviewer, Lynn Barber, to experience the entirely new experience of being here at all — something that will put a triple threat of what she calls her “biggest phobias” to the test, “going to the theatre, staying up late, encountering bagpipes”.

She admits in her very first paragraph, “I’ve spent most of my journalistic life complaining about the amount of coverage that national papers, including this one, devote to the festival – page after page of reviews of shows you’ll never see, performed by people you’ve never heard of.” That much she’d managed to surmise – and dismiss — without even having been here. But two more pages of such coverage to add the mountain of words written (and space therefore presumably wasted) on the festival – including, of course, these ones, but at least we’re not cutting down trees to read or write them – see Barber, who is probably the most incisive and brilliant profiler in national newspapers, reduced to an attack of ordinariness.

Gosh, she notices, there are a lot of shows to see! (“I have a Fringe Programme, which lists over 2,000 shows at about 250 venues”). Golly, anyone can come and put on a show here! (“There is no quality control. It is open to all-comers. Anyone who can find the money to book a venue and put an ad in the Fringe programme can mount a show.”) My, some shows have trouble getting audiences! (“I don’t know if it’s true but several people told me the average attendance at a Fringe show is two. I do know there were only nine people at the second performance of Night Time at the Traverse, and the Traverse is reckoned to be one of the best theatres in Britain.”) The Pleasance, she tells us helpfully, is “a courtyard surrounded by performance spaces”, where “in theory you could spend the whole day… watching shows continuously from midday to 2am.”

She intends to go to the opening Fringe procession down Princes Street – but stays home because “a) it was pouring with rain and b) there was a threat of bagpipes so I stayed indoors whimpering instead.” And yesterday, whimpering as I read this while it was indeed pouring with rain outside, I thought what a pity it was that someone who I’ve long thought of as one of the best journalists in Britain should use this journalistic opportunity (no doubt all expense-accounted) to sneer instead of cheer at one of the most astonishing events in the world. Yes, there’s a lot of rubbish; but as she reports Stewart Lee telling her, “all the most interesting people are here. Not necessarily the best or the most successful but the most interesting… I’d rather see anything here — anything out of 2,000 shows – than anything in the West End, which has had all the life sucked out of it.”

Barber is finally jolted into life by the Polish company Teatr Biuro Podrozy’s Macbeth: Who is That Bloodied Man?, “even though it started after 10 and was outdoors, i.e. freezing”, which she finds “one of the most exciting things I have ever seen: stormtroopers on motorbikes roaring up ramps with flaming torches, men on stilts as the witches, Macbeth dragging a naked man in a cage, a wonderful singer warbling away on a high platform, and occasional gobbets of Shakespeare, though luckily without the tiresome Porter.”

Of course, it’s the kind of thing you can only see in Edinburgh – or maybe outside the National in their annual Watch this Space Festival, but not inside it. When Barber goes to a 9.30am performance the next day (“let me repeat, 9.30 in the morning” – she now reveals an aversion to mornings as well as late nights, so wants to be cross about both) of Mark Ravenhill’s bold experiment to write and produce a brand-new play for each of 17 days this Festival, she calls what she sees “one of those plays meant to ‘shake us out of our complacency’ – as so many contemporary plays are, in my (admittedly limited) experience – but why doesn’t someone try to shake contemporary playwrights out of their complacency and tell them that putting static actors on stage to utter liberal pieties at tedious length does not actually constitute entertainment?” (And writing observations like this at even more tedious, self-confessedly ill-informed length constitutes journalism?) It makes her declare, “I would make it a rule that all contemporary plays from now on have to be performed on stilts, preferably with motorbikes and flaming torches, so at least there is something to watch when the words are too boring.”

Those last five words say it all: it’s fine for her to write dull words, but not for others to try expand the world (or at least themselves) with theirs. And Edinburgh sees playwrights like Ravenhill stretching their own creative envelopes as they do so: as he said in an interview in the Scottish edition of the Sunday Times yesterday of this particular project, “It’s production line writing. But it’s a great discipline. Edinburgh makes you do things you wouldn’t normally do because you need to stand out from the crowd. So I thought, ‘I’ll write a play for every day of the festival.’ As a playwright, you are usually looking at a subject every year or so. For this I have to find something new every day.”

As it happens, I started my own six-show day yesterday by attending one of these yesterday; and it was wonderful to see not just Ravenhill or his actors (yesterday, borrowed from Dublin’s Rough Magic Theatre Company) experimenting in this way, but also seeing a packed house also ready to take a risk on supporting it. (It has been proving so successful that from this week it is being moved from the small basement Traverse 2 to the larger main house Traverse 1).

But what I love about Edinburgh is the parallel universe you sometimes feel you are inhabiting; to be sitting in a full theatre, at 9.30 on a Sunday morning, shows that there is both a hunger and an appetite for something different and thoughtful, beyond the stiltwalking sensationalism of “event” theatre that so much of Edinburgh is also about. In fact, in a festival where plays have to be shoehorned into fitting slots that maximise the number of performances that each venue can accommodate so that many run for barely an hour or so, the Traverse continues to be a bastion for the unfashionable full-length play as well as these 20-minute experiments. I stayed on after the Ravenhill to see Rona Munro’s Long Time Dead — a two-and-a-half hour play that thrillingly takes us on a journey to scale mountaineering heights as well as the gentler slopes of human dramatic interaction. How amazing to be watching this at any time of day – but at 11 in the morning, you’re not just being transported to a different world but are already in one.

So what if, straight afterwards, you’re sent crashing back to earth, as I was, with a feeble commercial comedy about male mid-life crisis like Certified Male starring Les Dennis? And awful though it was, the same producers behind it were also responsible for the last show of my day yesterday, Eurobeat – Almost Eurovision, a brilliantly-sustained and hilarious recreation of a mock-Eurovision Song Contest, that could transfer intact to the West End tomorrow, and should.

Edinburgh for just about everyone is always a triumph of hope over experience: every year those of us on the professional end of it all – whether as performers, producers or even critics – come back, and are reminded mainly of why it’s a relief it happens only once a year. I hit the bottom level of mediocrity almost immediately, just two shows in after arriving yesterday, and suddenly remembered how worn down one becomes by the constant possibility of making bad choices. No wonder some stick to the “brand” names of comedy – at least you know that you’re going to get what’s on the label.

On the train up yesterday, a couple who joined at York with their teenage son were on their way to Edinburgh to pursue what dad said was his son’s interest in “wacky comics” – and they were going to see seven of them in a two-night stay. They were staying at the city centre Novotel Hotel, and reckoned that – with the cost of the accommodation, train tickets and three tickets to each show – their brief stint on the Edinburgh fringe would set them back £1,000. “But it beats sitting on a beach!”, said mum.

Right now, I’d prefer to be on a beach myself (It’s currently resolutely grey and there’s the constant threat of drizzle that I arrived in yesterday, too – typical Edinburgh weather). But the joy of Edinburgh, too, of course is always the possibility of discovery – though with some 2,050 shows to choose from, it could take a lot of digging. Yet something else strange happens up here: there’s a gravitational force, it seems, that draws most of us commentators to similar things. Yesterday The Scotsman published its first round of Fringe Firsts to new work – and I realised that I’d already made plans to see four of the six shows they honoured.

I knew I had arrived in Edinburgh, of course, when I saw my first fellow critic – and inevitably, it had to be Ian Shuttleworth, who was seeing his 33rd show already this festival, while I was seeing my first! Later in the day, I ran into The Stage’s own Nick Awde (though this was cheating, since he’s doing triple duty here – as well as writing reviews for The Stage, he’s also written one play and co-written another, and it was at one of these that I saw him); and saw Dominic Maxwell of The Times on the street.

But though Edinburgh is full of familiar faces and places, one should always try new experiences here. Yesterday was the opening night for the International Festival, and although I’m giving tonight’s theatre premiere of a new production of The Bacchae with Alan Cumming a pass (since it comes to Lyric Hammersmith next month and I’ll be able to see it there), I went to the Festival’s opening concert last night. And I realised that though I’ve been coming to the Edinburgh Festival for 23 years now, this was the first time I’d ever been inside Usher Hall!

What finally lured me in? The Festival was launched with a concert performance of Bernstein’s Candide – yet another in the ongoing colonisation of all things cultural by the forces of the Broadway musical that has already this year seen another Bernstein show, On the Town, revived at English National Opera and Carmen Jones produced at the Royal Festival Hall, as I was blogging about last week. (And the night before I came to Edinburgh, I caught the latest Sondheim gala concert celebration at Cadogan Hall, where a company that included Daniel Evans and Maria Friedman were accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra). It is indeed wonderful to be able to hear these scores so ravishingly rendered with full orchestral accompaniment, not the feeble, heavily amplified bands that often pass for orchestras in the West End nowadays.

There’s nothing, of course, lowbrow about Bernstein, and a concert performance turned out to be the perfect opportunity to savour this score, since the show itself is virtually unplayable in the theatre (though it hasn’t stopped both John Caird at the National in 1999 and Hal Prince attempting to do so on Broadway again two years before that). But the great thing about hearing it again in Edinburgh, too, is also the kind of juxtaposition that is only possible here: I went straight from Candide to the Gilded Balloon for a late-night show called Discotivity, which replays the Nativity story to a camp pop soundtrack of disco hits from the Village People’s ‘YMCA’ to ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’, starring 2003 Pop Idol winner Michelle McManus. I’d say it was as camp as Christmas if it wasn’t, in fact, trying to put the camp into Christmas. At just 40 minutes long, it doesn’t outstay its welcome, either, but sends you happy into the night…. just what the fringe is about.

While others like Lyn Gardner in The Guardian and The Stage’s own indefatigable team have been putting in the legwork up in Edinburgh for the past week, trawling through a relentless schedule of shows that they see so we don’t have to, I’m only finally going up today – and five nights is all I can take. Mind you, I’m down to see at least 26 shows (so far) over the next five days, so I’m not planning on exactly slacking.

Those who can’t stand the heat, of course, are always told to get out of the kitchen; and I have to confess that I don’t much like cooking, so I’m happy to do so once I’ve had a bowl of cereal and cup of coffee and let others confront the Edinburgh monster for the undigested feast it has become.

But then I’ve looked back over the last month of my diary before heading up to Edinburgh, and I realise that I’ve had something of a feast myself back home, but without getting the indigestion that is an inevitable fact of life in Edinburgh.

This time last month I was flying home from the US, where I’d just spent ten days in San Francisco, New York and Provincetown. In the space of a day less than a month since I landed on July 11, I have been to the theatre 23 times (seeing 22 shows in all – one I saw twice!) in London; saw two more shows in the Manchester International Festival; two more at Blackpool; and attended three concerts or cabarets (Streisand at the O2, Barb Jungr at the Almeida, and the Kronos Quartet at the Barbican). In addition, I have seen four films at the cinema, and I have also had a day out at Brighton Pride when I went to no theatre at all (though I did check what was playing at the Theatre Royal just in case!).

But beyond those cultural activities and the day job of reporting on them, my work over the last month has also entailed hosting a week-long series of daily seminars on London theatre with a group from the University of Berkeley, that involved talking to them about the show they had seen the night before then hosting a live Q&A interview with someone from the show, so that week alone I interviewed actors Sam West, Dale Rapley and Susannah Fielding, plus directors Anna Mackmin and Lucy Bailey in front of an audience. Last week, I also did a post-performance onstage Q&A with the entire cast of In Celebration, so that’s seven more actors I spoke to. I have also had private one-on-one interviews with David Suchet, Paterson Joseph, David Ian and Jude Kelly for interview profiles I’ve had to write. And outside of all of these, I have also had separate individual lunches with Nick Hytner, SOLT chief executive Richard Pulford, Shaftesbury Theatre executive producer James Williams and Trestle Theatre Company’s new artistic director Emily Gray, and breakfast with New York press agent Adrian Bryan-Brown.

Phew! I’m suddenly realising that Edinburgh might, in fact, be a break after all that. But then there’s not much of a break either in the next two weeks. No sooner do I get back from Edinburgh next Wednesday evening than I will drive up to Stratford-upon-Avon to stay the night, ready for the Thursday 10.30am kick-off for the all-day press day of the final three instalments in Michael Boyd’s latest RSC History cycle. I’m then home on Friday, before going to New York tomorrow week – this time to interview Chita Rivera ahead of her London season at Wyndham’s next month. I get back home on Wednesday August 22 – just in time to get to Manchester the next day for the press opening of the Take That musical Never Forget, which also coincides neatly with the start of this year’s Mardi Gras the next day, so I’ll stay an extra night to catch the beginning of the festivities, which is the start of the bank holiday weekend…. when, on the Sunday, I am guest of Elaine Paige’s Radio 2 show, selecting my Five Essential Musicals!

Hey mama, welcome to the 60’s/
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh/
Oh mama, welcome to the 60’s/
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh/
Go mama, go, go, go!

Cole Porter, it ain’t. But Hairspray, coming to the Shaftesbury Theatre at the end of next month at last, defiantly turns to the nostalgia clock back to the 60s, as that song demonstrates, the same decade pastiched in Little Shop of Horrors and celebrated in Dirty Dancing, by way of a 1960 and 1987 film respectively, to add layers of irony and resonance of their own from the periods the original films come from as well.

This week also saw a double dose of the 50s – the return, on consecutive nights, of the musicals Buddy (following the brief career of Buddy Holly, from 1957 to 1959) and Grease (set in the mid-50s). Choose a decade, it seems, and there’s a musical (or two) to remember it by currently on. Last weekend The Drowsy Chaperone, set in the 20s, shut shop early, but in case you’re desperate for a 20s fix, there’s always Chicago, of course (first produced in 1975) and the return later this month of the Open Air’s production of The Boy Friend, Sandy Wilson’s 1954 pastiche of a 20s musical, to look forward to.Set in the 30s, you’ve got not one but two musicals about the rise of Nazism in Austria (The Sound of Music) and Germany (Cabaret), shows originally produced on Broadway in 1959 and 1966 respectively. Billy Elliot is set around the 1984 miners’ strike, while Fame – the Musical is set at New York’s High School of Performing Arts in the early 80s, before the school moved location from West 46th Street up to its current location behind Lincoln Center.

Are all musicals backwards looking, if not actually backwards (and I don’t mean in the sense that the action in Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along rewinds)? There are very few contemporary-set musicals on in London at all. We Will Rock You tries to buck the trend by setting itself in the future – 2300, to be precise, a time when rock music has been outlawed (but not, unfortunately, stretching it seems to that of Queen) – but in fact looks like old hat as a result. Mamma Mia! may be set more in the here and now, but its soundtrack is entirely from the 70s and 80s pop repertoire of Abba. In fact the sole contemporary-set originally-scored musical playing in London right now is Avenue Q (though Blood Brothers was also contemporary to its time when the original production opened back in 1983, but now comes with a nostalgia hue of its own to that time).

Contemporary playwrights usually attempt to shine a light on how we are living now; its odd that so few writers or producers of musicals do, preferring to ask us to wallow in the past. No wonder musicals are seen as a fundamentally conservative genre, massaging us with reminders of the past, but rarely pointing us towards the future.