October 2007 Archives

This time last year hardly a week went by without a big new musical opening in the West End – no wonder that, as I reported Bill Kenwright telling me at the time, “you get rave reviews, which we did for Cabaret, and you don’t have time to glory in them, because the next week it’s Spamalot, then it’s Dirty Dancing, then it’s Caroline or Change. Whereas normally people would be speaking about those Cabaret reviews for six or seven weeks, now it’s onto the next one. This week it’s Porgy and Bess, and then next week it’s The Sound of Music. They just keep coming.”

This year is altogether more measured – though Porgy and Bess came and went, and Caroline, or Change was only in on a limited season anyway, the others are still with us, so there’s hardly room for any new shows to come in. Ditto on Broadway, where the only two new musicals that will open this side of Christmas are Young Frankenstein (opening next week, assuming star Roger Bart is able to return to the title role from his current back injury) and Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

No wonder, then, that the arrival of Hairspray at the Shaftesbury last night was an opportunity to let our hair down – or rather, put it up (or what’s left of it, in some of our cases). And jostling with Cilla and the inevitable Biggins to get into the theatre, down the single tiny barricaded passageway that was created alongside the theatre’s notoriously narrow entrance, this was the a typically annoying first night experience. [CLICK BELOW TO CONTINUE READING]

According to a report in yesterday’s Evening Standard, Knight Frank estate agency have designated the South Bank as one of London’s prime property hot spots, adding the area to its house price index for the most sought-after parts of the capital that have previously included Mayfair, Belgravia and Kensington.

Perhaps the Monopoly board will have to be re-drawn sometime soon. [CLICK BELOW TO CONTINUE READING]

In the copy of The Stage currently on the newsstands (October 25), I have written I have written an extended essay on the current state of musical play, particularly when it comes to new writing, expanding on some of the themes I have been developing in this blog. (It’s one of the most useful things about keeping to the discipline of writing this almost every day that it enables one to think aloud!) But it’s also wonderful to see something I have previewed coming to fruition, as with the Perfect Pitch festival I also wrote about here. CLICK BELOW TO CONTINUE READING

I hit the ground running yesterday – after landing at 9.30am, I was home by 11.30am and then at Wimbledon Theatre by 2.30pm for a matinee of the touring production of Doctor Dolittle, starring Tommy Steele, before going to a new musical, Blair on Broadway, at the tiny Hen and Chickens Theatre pub in Islington last night. (Hence no time, alas, to blog yesterday)! [CLICK BELOW TO CONTINUE READING]

Like Christmas, preparations for which seem to start earlier and earlier every year, the advance guard for the hyping of next year’s Tony Awards has officially started today, with Michael Riedel’s column in today’s New York Post that speculates whether Cry-Baby, the latest musical to be based on a John Waters film after the success of Hairspray (which itself finally officially opens in London next week), may turn out the show that everyone has to beat. [CLICK BELOW TO CONTINUE READING]

Right now Broadway is full of interesting double acts: you can see The Ritz, Terrence McNally’s bathhouse comedy, and also Young Frankenstein that features as its second act showstopper the Gershwin classic ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’. Young Frankenstein’s cast includes one of Broadway’s loveliest ingénues, Sutton Foster; meanwhile, off-Broadway (at 37 Arts) there is a “straight” musical version of Frankenstein, too, and it coincidentally features Sutton’s older brother, Hunter, as Victor Frankenstein.

Perhaps Hunter could have been sent a few blocks north last night to take over as Frederick Frankenstein (pronounced Fronkensteen, of course) in Young Frankenstein, since Roger Bart was out (and will be for most of the week apparently, suffering from a slipped disc, someone told me last night). [CLICK BELOW TO CONTINUE READING]

Broadway’s theatre district is famously far more compact than the West End – the theatres in New York literally rub shoulders with each other as only happens at the bottom of Shaftesbury Avenue at home, and are mostly squeezed into a 13-block radius on either side of Broadway (but mostly west) between West 41st Street and West 54th Street. So it creates a greater sense of urgency around the streets there: everyone seems to be going to a show or otherwise connected to the theatre. And your chances, even by day, of running into people you know are amplified: I run into far more people on the streets here than I ever do in London (except, of course, on a first night, where we’re all in the same place at the same time, turning our lives into Groundhog Day).

No sooner did I arrive on Thursday afternoon, for instance, than I went to a diner on 8th Avenue on my way to the theatre, and actor Kevin Chamberlin walked past the window on his way to the show he is starring in on Broadway (a revival of The Ritz), saw me and came in to say hi. [Click below to continue reading]

America may be the land of opportunity where anyone can become President (even those who don’t actually win the public vote, it seems); but it’s also increasingly the case that this ultimate supposed democracy extends to the fact that anyone can be on Broadway, too: all you need is to win a reality TV competition. American Idol has become Broadway’s biggest open audition – and a key selling point, too. The Color Purple has had a new injection of life from the arrival of Fantasia Barrino, winner of American Idol’s third season, who took over the lead role of Celie earlier this year. I finally caught her in it when I saw it on Thursday, and she lives up to her name: she’s fantastic. [Click below to continue reading]

Critics, I know, have it easy: my main expense in life would be theatre tickets, but those come free (and usually in the best seats in the house; or, when they don’t turn out to be that way and I couldn’t actually see over the head of the person in front of me, as happened last week with Glengarry Glen Ross, I simply asked if I could go again, and they were only happy to accommodate me, which I duly did yesterday). Even when I go abroad, I can usually get free tickets if I can plan in advance: I didn’t pay for any of the five shows I saw last month in Las Vegas, and am off to New York today with the prospect of seeing nine shows between tonight and next Wednesday’s matinee, few of which I will actually pay for.

Sorry, I’m not trying to be smug – I’m just supremely grateful. [click below to continue reading]

Departures of actors in the midst of rehearsals are invariably covered by the euphemism that the actor concerned has had to withdraw for “personal reasons”. In the case of Anthony Flanagan, who withdrew from the West End production of Glengarry Glen Ross the Friday before last, the play was in the midst of previews that had already begun. The understudy was hastily put on that night and no performances were lost, though an interview I was due to do with Jonathan Pryce at lunchtime on the Friday was cancelled when I got there – the company had been hastily convened to rehearse with the understudy.

By Monday morning, Peter McDonald was in rehearsal to take over, and when I returned to the theatre at lunchtime for my now rescheduled appointment with Pryce, he told me that McDonald had arrived for his first rehearsal that day already word perfect. [Click below to continue reading]

Theatre, like the airline industry, has always been a supply and demand business; so although there is an official “rate card” for prices that are charged for the tickets to both, in fact it’s a very fluid science. Regular theatregoers have wised up to this, of course, and as a leading producer told me only the other day, it’s what has driven advance sales down: people wait to see what offers become available, and only pay top dollar (or rather pound) when the reviews persuade them that they absolutely must.

But what happens when the demand outstrips the supply, and shows sell out? [click below to continue reading]

I’ve already recently written here applauding the extensive refurbishment work that Cameron Mackintosh recently did to the Gielgud Theatre, but wondered aloud that the work he has been doing at his theatres “surely must embarrass and shame the rest of the West End who are simply not keeping up.”

So it was a pleasure to attend the delayed press night on Friday for Glengarry Glen Ross at the Apollo Theatre just across the street and find that the stalls bar, at least, has been entirely re-carpeted and painted (the stinging smell of fresh paint was still very much literally in the air), though the refurbishment stops at the doors to the bar and doesn’t even extend to the incredibly grimy gentlemen’s toilet that leads directly off from it, whose floor was awash with water in the interval. [click below to continue reading]

The fine line between hype and hope can be like a runaway train: once the hype has escalated into too much hope, there’s no stopping the disappointing. Previews only began last night, but already the backlash is beginning to form around Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks’ sequel to The Producers, which the latter was going to be a tough act to follow in any case. In today’s New York Post, Michael Riedel notes that after two invited dress rehearsals this week, “a decidedly mixed word-of-mouth has been floating around Shubert Alley”.

And though Riedel says it’s a small thing, he adds that is “slightly ominous nonetheless: tickets for this Saturday evening’s performance of Young Frankenstein are being sold by some brokers for less than their face value…. What was originally priced at $121.25 has now fallen to as low as $79”.

Where can I get one? [Click below to continue reading]

The edition of The Stage that is on newsstands today (or your mailbox, postal strike permitting, in the next few days) has a front page picture of three glamorous musical theatre professionals – and me! The pro’s are musical theatre actress (and new mum) Anna-Jane Casey, rising composer Grant Olding (who is currently under commission from the National Theatre, no less, to write a new musical), and musical director/actor David Randall – and I am photographed looming large behind them!

We’ve been brought together under the auspices of producer Neil Eckersley to be the judges of a new songwriting competition that’s launched in the paper today, the winning entry of which will be performed in this year’s Christmas in New York gala at the Lyric Theatre on December 9, produced by Eckersley as part of the occasional Notes from New York series. [Click below to continue reading]

With Hairspray beginning performances in London tomorrow at the Shaftesbury, there are now ten shows playing in identical productions on each side of the Atlantic, with Jersey Boys set to join the line-up when it arrives in the West End from Broadway early next year and two more titles (Grease and Rent) also playing simultaneously but in different physical stagings. There’s an unequal distribution in the direction of the traffic – of the ten shows playing in both London and New York, four of them were born in West End, the other six on Broadway.

But yesterday’s announcement that Monty Python’s Spamalot is to do a leading ladies swap in January – we’re sending them our Lady in the Lake Hannah Waddingham, they’re sending us Marin Mazzie – makes me wonder why we don’t do this more often. [Click below to continue reading]

“Another long exhausting day, Another thousand dollars, A matinee, a Pinter play, Perhaps a piece of Mahler’s.”

Thus sings the character of Joanne in Sondheim’s song ‘The Ladies Who Lunch’, immortalised in the original Broadway production of Company that it comes from by Elaine Stritch, anatomising the life of society ladies who have time and money – but also “look into their eyes,/and you’ll see what they know:/Everybody dies.”

But while we are all waiting to die, matinees – if not, always, Pinter plays – are a fun way to pass the time. [Click below to continue reading]

In the wake of Nick Hytner’s press conference last week that announced the annual report for the financial year that ended in April and [I previously blogged about here (http://www.thestage.co.uk/shenton/2007/10/keepingthenationaloutofthethe.php)], The Guardian’s Michael Billington sought to identify the sweet smell of Hytner’s success: “Cheap tickets, obviously: the £10-ticket scheme in the Olivier is the most radical, yet basically simple, audience-building idea in my lifetime. But Hytner has also realised a fundamental truth: that there is no longer a single, monolithic audience for theatre but a series of separate constituencies, hence his scheduling of canonical classics by Shakespeare, Shaw and Coward for the ‘brochure’ audience. He has also realised that there is a younger group hungering for a more innovative kind of physical theatre: exactly the people who flocked to Emma Rice’s A Matter of Life and Death and Katie Mitchell’s version of The Waves. Productions like Coram Boy and His Dark Materials have also redefined what used to be patronisingly known as ‘children’s theatre’.”

Yes, there are horses for different courses. And Hytner himself commented at the same event that he’s happy with the fact that regular audiences will pick out two or three shows a year that they want to see. It’s his job to make the choice as diverse as possible. [Click below to continue reading]

Everyone’s a critic, as the familiar mantra goes, but the new ecology of blogs and bulletin boards and the democratisation of opinion that they have permitted means that critics themselves aren’t immune from being publicly criticised. We can’t possibly complain when this happens: if you give it, you have to be able to take it. Just as we’re not necessarily nice or right, nor are they.

It’s rare for the criticised themselves to fight back publicly, but that’s exactly what Harvey Fierstein – who has written the book and stars in a new Broadway-bound musical version of A Catered Affair, based on a Paddy Chayefsky teleplay that was turned in to a 1956 film starring Bette Davis, Ernst Borgnine and Debbie Reynolds – has done. [Click below to continue reading]

While the West End offers a range of mostly static spaces – and a mostly static imagination for the kind of work it typically embraces that nowadays seems to rely mainly on adapting films into musicals or increasingly plays – it is, as ever, on the peripheries that the more challenging work is happening, stretching forms, buildings, artists and repertoires, as well as making rediscoveries from the past that the commercial theatre has already forgotten about.

One of the biggest movements of the last ten years has been the widespread development of site-specific work and found spaces, both neatly colliding in this week’s opening of Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death, which saw BAC – a venue that is itself a found space, converted out of a former town hall – turned into a site-specific place that is the first of three “Playground Projects” that the venue is set to host over a five-year period, the goal of which is, in the words of BAC’s press material, “to open up the Town Hall and create a 21st-century flexible performance space by seeing the building though the eyes of artists and audiences.” [click below to continue]

Long before Nicholas Hytner’s present position as artistic director of the National Theatre, he directed a play by Joshua Sobol there called Ghetto in 1989, inspired by the true story of a theatre that operated in a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. But though that kind of theatre had a vibrant part to play in the life of its community, as the play showed, Nick has – since he took the National over five years ago – been determined to keep his particular theatre from becoming part of the ghetto of London theatres that appeal only to an inner circle of people whose “business and chief passion is the theatre”, as he said yesterday at an informal press lunch to mark the National Theatre’s publication of its annual report for 2006-7.

I remember him once dismissing what he called the “court” theatres, like the Donmar and Almeida, that almost inevitably only play to a particular coterie of London theatregoers – those who get organised enough to actually buy tickets to go to them. And yesterday he rose to this theme of wider accessibility both in his published introduction to the report and in person. [click below to continue reading]

A theme I have constantly returned to here is the practical matter of managing a critic’s diary: on the one hand, we should consider ourselves extremely lucky to have so much to juggle that its simply an impossibility to see everything that’s out there; but on the other, it does mean hard decisions sometimes have to be made about what gets covered. The posher papers, as well as the Evening Standard, have deputies to pick up the slack; and in the case of the FT, two equal first-string critics (down from a lead and two deputies).

In New York, of course, critics are able to juggle their own diaries, since they are invited not to one particular performance but to a range of “critics previews” in the run-up to the official opening from which they can choose when to go. But here the official invite comes to the first night and the first night only, which then becomes a negotiating point around which we plan our lives: if there’s a clash, we have to choose one over another, then see if there’s another way to see the second thing. It can and does frequently have a knock-on effect on other productions. [click below to continue]

Though Andrew Lloyd Webber and Boublil and Schonberg may be commanding bigger worldwide audiences for their shows, I don’t know of a musical theatre composer around today with a bigger personal cult following than Jason Robert Brown – partly, perhaps, fuelled by his exclusivity. Cultists like to think that they’re privy to a well-kept secret, and with runs of his three so-far produced shows at only the Bridewell (Songs for a New World), Menier Chocolate Factory (The Last Five Years) and Donmar Warehouse (Parade), Jason Robert Brown is still pretty much a secret to most of the world.

But you wouldn’t have guessed it from the tumultuous reception that greeted Jason last night when he hosted a night of his songs, from those shows as well as his new shows 13 (premiered in LA earlier this year) and the yet-to-be-produced Honeymoon in Vegas, at the South Bank’s Purcell Room, where the performance sold out – by Jason’s own sardonic reckoning – in “about seven minutes”. But then that’s also the point of cults: keep the gigs small, and the demand seems even higher. [Continue by clicking below]