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]
Even the usually restrained Michael Billington started a solitary slow hand-clap as 7.10pm advanced and the curtain hadn’t risen yet.
But that scrum, though it may not necessarily be the best environment in which to judge a show, remains part of the “event” of a big opening, and it’s the sort of thing that the papers feel they have to respond to, as well. Overnight reviewing is far from standard nowadays, yet this morning The Guardian, Times and Independent already have their overnight reviews online, while the Telegraph does, too (though Charlie Spencer snuck in a night early on Monday to see it, he admits in his review – in his case, because he was off to New York yesterday).
Pre-empting this blanket coverage, Mark Ravenhill rose to the defensive in his regular Guardian column on Monday, now reprinted online as a blog to suggest, in the muddled fabric of British theatre, it might be time to differentiate between the different genres it embraces and, as the headline to the blog puts it (though I’m sure Mark himself doesn’t write that bit), declares, “It’s not snobbish to reduce coverage of West End musicals.” Leaving aside the fact that reducing coverage of openings like Hairspray wouldn’t necessarily open up the space to other, presumably more “worthwhile” theatre openings but would simply be swallowed up by other art forms, I’m not sure that Mark should dismiss musicals quite so readily. It may be true, as he complains about the first night of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat that he went to this summer, that “the audience was full of the kind of celebs who might endorse Asda” and the result was “a kitschly enjoyable event, though it had as much to do with a night of good theatre as homemade porn does with a lifelong relationship”; but there are musicals and there are musicals.
It is, indeed, snobbishness to reduce them to one type; and I’d suggest that beneath the surface bubblegum pleasures of Hairspray, it gives audiences something more serious to chew on: as it charts the journey of a young overweight girl to realise her own dreams, she also happens along the way to wake up to a personal social activism that has her directly challenging racism in 60s America. Like the giant hairspray can that is a Trojan horse to contain Michael Ball’s larger-than-life Edna Turnblad, the show is its own Trojan horse, cleverly disguising a thoughtful message beneath its glittering surface.
Hairspray doesn’t take itself seriously, but it deserves to be taken seriously: in Sondheim and Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along, budding composer Franklin Shepard tells his lyricist friend Charley Kringas, “Musicals are popular. They’re a great way to state important ideas. Ideas that could make a difference. Charley, we can change the world.” Hairspray is precisely about the kind of individual activism that can do just that.
Then again, do people who go to see musicals actually WANT to see a serious point being made? I want to go and see Hairspray but not because of any underlying politics or life changing meanings but because it sounds like a chirpy, happy sort of show that sounds like a fun night out. Plus the songs remind me a bit of High School Musical and as a *shock horror* uneducated musical fan who has only just found the genre, I'd like to go along and see some similar 'make me feel better about life' type high energy fluff. But then I don't really read the daily reviews of plays or musicals, I go from clips I hear/see on youtube, by pictures I see for the shows and the prices of the tickets I can get. Maybe the theatre world is splitting into two. The kids who don't care what came before and who will happily see all the musicals the critics slate and the old musical aficionados who think nothing is as good as the original or will never live up to something they saw when they were an uneducated kid themselves.
I agree with Mark Shenton! I reviewed Hairspray on BBC radio 4's Saturday Review and said almost word for word what he does here - you can probably still check it out on 'listen again' BBC Radio 4, Mr Shenton.