As if the West End isn’t dominated already by musicals, as I’ve blogged about before, they seem to be everywhere else as well, from English National Opera (where, as David Lister pointed out recently in The Independent, “in the current ENO season, from April to July, there have been a total of 58 performances, of which 40 have been of musicals and only 18 of opera”) to the Menier Chocolate Factory (which of course has made its name as producer of fringe musicals that have gone on to a longer life in the West End and, soon, Broadway) and Donmar Warehouse (soon to stage the British premiere of Jason Robert Brown’s Parade).
In this surfeit of musicals, do we need one of the capital’s leading concert venues, the Royal Festival Hall, to put its large subsidy – and a big six-week chunk of its programme — towards yet another musical, Carmen Jones, which opened last night? Last seen commercially 16 years ago when it was revived under the direction of Simon Callow at the Old Vic, Kelly is using it to tick a lot of boxes – her stock-in-trade. As she told me in an interview I did with her last week that ran in last weekend’s Sunday Express, one of the reasons for doing it is about “saying to people that great classic music theatre has a role to play in a venue that is dedicated to music. And if it has a role, we must do the great classic works, and I think that Carmen Jones is one of those.” But, she went on, “Secondly, I wanted an opportunity to work with different kinds of performers – I wanted more black performers to be on our stages, and correspondingly, more audiences to feel as if this was their hall as well. And I wanted the opportunity to work with the orchestras directly myself as a creative person rather than as an administrative manager.”
All good and well for her own artistic development and her laudable desire to expand the audience development of the hall, too; and it has to be said that an orchestra of some 55 would not bless a West End production of this show. But trying to squeeze a large orchestra as well as a large cast onto a concert hall stage brings to mind the proverbial square peg and round hole. It just doesn’t fit. The hall has no wing space or flying capability, and the (visible) back wall isn’t integrated into the design, as it is at the Donmar or Almeida, but simply makes the set look incomplete.
"I wanted more black performers to be on our stages" - the thing is, Jude Kelly has really shot herself in the foot with the staging she's chosen. And may well have shot a lot of other people rather more grievously.
Those black performers are mostly capering along behind a deliberately prominent orchestra pit that runs almost the full width of the stage - there's a kind of catwalk in front of the pit for the principals to disport themselves on occasionally, but mostly the orchestra are closer to the audience than are the performers.
And I didn't see a single black face in that orchestra. My companion spotted one possibly-Oriental player, and that was it.
So not only are there more white people in front of us, and also in front of most of the black people... but the very architecture - catwalk-pit-upstage - makes it look like segregation. I mean, if the performer playing Cindy Lou were to go and sit among the woodwind, she could be a new Rosa Parks!
Really, a phenomenal lack of joined-up thinking going on there. Possibly with the best will in the world, Jude has nevertheless reinvigorated the token-black repressive-tolerance aspect of Carmen Jones all over again more than half a century on.
I think the word is "oops".