November 2007 Archives

With the strike at last over – the news of which took over the entire front page of yesterday’s New York Post, proving just how central theatre is to the lifeblood of this town, and a story also appearing on the front page, just below the masthead, of the New York Times as well – Broadway sprung back into action yesterday. Opening nights have been hastily reconvened, as I mentioned yesterday would have to happen: The Farnsworth Invention will finally open on Monday, August: Osage County on Tuesday, The Seafarer on Thursday, and Is He Dead? on Sunday week. The Homecoming, originally due to have begun previews last Friday but which had a one-off run-through to a free audience who were asked to donate to BC/EFA instead last Sunday, will now begin performances this coming Tuesday, and delay its official opening by three days to now open on December 16. Only Disney’s The Little Mermaid has put back its opening substantially, and although it has resumed previews, will now open on January 10 instead of the original December 6.

The PRs rushed to get the news out that Broadway is back in business, offering photocalls and press interviews at every turn.

While Mel Brooks’ The Producers in 2001 may have ushered in a new age for the Broadway musical – even if it was a throwback sort of self-referential metamusical that took as its primary subject Broadway itself – his second musical, Young Frankenstein, seems to have put it back on the slab, literally. Mel Brooks has created his own monster, but unlike Dr Frankenstein (pronounced Fronkensteen, of course), even a creative team that is once again headed by Susan Stroman and a stellar cast cannot bring this one to life. I finally saw this corpse of a musical last night, and the best bit came at the curtain call: not just that it had ended at last, but that star Roger Bart stepped forward and announced that the strike, too, had ended, too, at last — to the loudest and most prolonged cheers of the evening.

The panto season is nearly upon us back at home, of course, but Christmas is celebrated in New York on a bigger and more lavish scale than anywhere I know – and everyone seems to join in. Even though New York is apparently home to the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel, and has the biggest concentration of Jewish people in one city than even Jerusalem, this is a holiday season that appeals to the entire city. The ball starts rolling with last week’s Thanksgiving celebrations, and doesn’t stop now till Christmas. On Monday night the Christmas tree at Lincoln Center had its official lighting; tonight it’s the turn of the one at Rockefeller Centre.

But even if Broadway got its Grinch back for Christmas (with Dr Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the first show to be hit in the stagehands’ strike, re-opening last Friday in a complicated arrangement with the union that suggested it should never have been targeted in the first place), the biggest show of them all is always the annual Radio City Christmas Spectacular.

The ongoing strike of Broadway stagehands is turning into more of a nailbiting thriller than anything seen on its stages for years. Talks between the union and the League of American Theatres and Producers resumed on Sunday, after the two marathon days of talks the previous weekend broke down, and didn’t stop till 20 hours later yesterday morning at 6.30am, as I reported here yesterday. And after resuming after a 12 hour break last night at around 7pm, they’ve talked through the night once again, and as of a few minutes ago (at 7.45am local time), it has just been announced that the talks have broken down and no further talks have now been scheduled.

But if they’ve been talking a lot inside there, people are also talking about little else outside it, either. And if Broadway does, inevitably, have a palpable impact on its immediate environs – with everyone from restaurants (the waiter at the Polish Tea Rooms in the Edison Hotel told me on Saturday evening that business was down by at least 50%) to slews of pedicabs (as all-pervasive here as they are in London now) and souvenir shops all seriously affected – it’s also making people think of a life beyond Broadway.

Talks finally resumed yesterday in the stagehands’ strike that has brought most of Broadway to a standstill – and on went through the night, only finally being adjourned without resolution at 6.30am today, which must have felt a bit like being at one of those theatrical all-nighter marathons that Ken Campbell used to do. Talks will resume again tonight at 6.30pm.

But meanwhile, the new Broadway production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming – with a cast that includes Ian McShane, Eve Best and Raul Esparza — that should have begun previews on Friday put itself in front of an appreciative audience last night, by doing a one-off charity run-through at an off-Broadway theatre, the New World Stages, instead.

Cabaret has long been a refuge in which Broadway performers can take charge of their own destinies (and repertoires) to present versions of themselves that are not dependent on the approval of casting directors to get work from, but with which they can travel the country, and quite often the world, singing. Right now, cabaret is also a useful refuge from the strike: at least on cabaret stages you don’t need stagehands.

On Friday night, I sought my own refuge from the picket lines on the streets outside most Broadway theatres to duly go to a double header of cabarets, and last night went off-Broadway for a musical revue that continued the trend for hearing theatrical music in intimate surroundings. It was a reminder both of the brilliance and limitations of the genre: here were opportunities to see and hear great talent in close proximity – but at the same time regretting the fact that they weren’t being allowed to let their talent fly free on a Broadway stage.

The first show to be shut down in the current strike of Broadway stagehands that began nearly two weeks ago was Dr Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, for the purely logistical reason that on the Saturday morning that the strike was called it was the first show to have a performance, with an early matinee scheduled for 11am. Today it becomes the first show to return to the boards, since the stagehands union have done a deal with the producers to remove the picket line and allow them to resume performances. That is great news for producer James Sanna, whose show is on a limited run for the holiday season only; but it has led to a war, conducted in the Manhattan courts this week, against his landlords, the Jujamcyn organisation, who didn’t want striking workers back on their payroll (since it is the theatres who pay the stagehands, not the producers) until the entire dispute was resolved.

To emerge from the subway blinking into the bright lights of 42nd Street, you wouldn’t even think there was a Broadway theatre strike on: the three Broadway theatres that are in fact on this rejuvenated (and somewhat homogenised) stretch now are all open for business. That’s because they all fall out of the control of the three main chains that dominate Broadway, the Shuberts, Nederlanders and Jujamcyns, so have all made separate negotiations with the unions.

It has given Mel Brooks and Young Frankenstein one of its unexpected breaks: in the wake of the often hostile reviews it opened to, it is now one of the few large-scale musicals actually running. But it’s therefore all the more ironic that, having set up tickets to see it as my first show in town last night, I got to the box office to discover that my seats weren’t there. I’ve yet to discover where the problem lay, but I had an e-mail from the press agent the night before confirming I was “all set” for last night. Though a friend waspishly noted yesterday that this is “the one show on Broadway where its the audiences who are picketing afterwards, complaining about what they’ve had to sit through”, I did want to see it again: I saw it in previews when Roger Bart was out, and want to be review it, too.

As the Broadway strike continues to halt proceedings at 27 Broadway houses, displaced audiences – and even critics – have to look elsewhere. And that includes me: I head off to New York this morning (hence the early hour of this posting!). Charles Isherwood, the number two theatre critic of the New York Times, handily addresses precisely my problem in the paper today: “The impact on the ever-fragile theatrical economy has been much discussed, as has the larger influences on businesses that benefit from the thousands of theatergoers who flood Midtown before and after shows. But the trauma inflicted on a very small but, in my biased view, hardly worthless demographic has gone sadly unremarked upon. No one has probed the painful effects of the strike on, oh, a full dozen or so of our city’s citizens: theater critics. What are the suddenly idle Addison DeWitts doing with all the spare time they have on their hands? How are we poor souls managing to fill the lonely hours when we are not sitting in darkened theaters or thinking up soul-crushing things to say about people?”

Charles may be wittily demonstrating a kind of pathological narcissism, as my good friend Dr Barbra would say. She’s a psychotherapist who occasionally posts replies here – and leads her to think that this blog is all about her, proving herself to be a fellow sufferer of the syndrome.

Theatres and restaurants can have a lot in common: they’re both about putting on a show and nourishment for the body and soul. And just as a theatre has a producer, there’s the restaurateur whose passion finds the funding for it and co-ordinates everything that happens under the restaurant’s roof; the chef is akin to the director, mixing and stirring the ingredients; they even both have a script (or menu) and set designer (or interior decorator).

I tend to treat food a bit functionally myself: my bulk will tell you that I enjoy it, but I don’t tend to make a production of it (certainly not at home, where my kitchen is hardly ever put into use!). But on Sunday I was taken to a restaurant in Wapping that blew my mind and is an entire production it itself.

I reported here a week ago on the strike of Broadway stagehands that turned most of the Great White Way into the Great Dark Way the previous weekend. The strike has continued all week long with neither side speaking to each other, and amongst many other casualties that tragically included a striking stagehand who died of a heart attack on the picket line, there was also the loss of two major opening nights (for The Farnsworth Invention last Wednesday and The Seafarer on Thursday).

But when it was announced that talks would resume on the weekend, hopes picked up that business would be restored in time for the usually lucrative Thanksgiving period that surrounds this Thursday’s holiday there. However, those hopes were dashed last night when, following two long days of negotiation on Saturday and Sunday, the talks broke off last night without any resolution.

I can’t say I hadn’t been warned. For weeks now I’ve been hearing the rumours that Desperately Seeking Susan was lining up to be a disaster: someone I know had already dubbed it Desperately Seeking an Audience. And I’d had personal testimony from four separate friends who had been to previews that it was simply awful.

It’s difficult to shut your ears to this sort of clamour, but at the same time that’s what previews are for: they’re there for the producers and creative team to hear it, too, and try to fix what they’ve got. And I also gave the show the benefit of these doubts by meeting and profiling star Emma Williams for the Sunday Express last weekend who was, incidentally, absolutely delightful.

In Hairspray, set in 1963 Baltimore, the young, plump heroine Tracy Turnblad goes on a mission to fulfil her wish that the local TV talent show she aspires to be on be racially integrated more regularly than a once-a-month “Negro Day” special, and says, “I wish every day was Negro Day!” And one of the black characters Seaweed replies, “At our house, it is!”

Tracy could have been talking about the London stage, too, where – though colour blind casting may have been embraced in the casting departments – plays by black playwrights, and/or ones that revolve around the black experience, are still typically few and far between. And in turn, audiences are predominantly white, too. Until now: to use Tracy’s phrase, several days have been Negro day for me over the last week.

While the ongoing Broadway strike is affecting business in the here and now – with losses mounting daily, tonight’s opening of The Farnsworth Invention likely to be indefinitely postponed and unless a sudden resolution occurs, the same thing to follow tomorrow for Broadway import of the National’s The Seafarer – the bottom has fallen out of the bottom line on Broadway at the place where it counts: the box office. And if and when it finally is resolved – and the New York Times today reports, “from the way things look, it could be a long run” – there’ll be another potentially lethal obstacle for producers to face: the lack of an advance sale. As the strike becomes ever more protracted and uncertainty prevails over when shows will resume, consumers will not be banking their money with box offices anytime soon for future performances that may not happen.

Differences of critical opinion are nothing new: one of the refreshing things about being a critic in London is that there are so many of us that no one has the last word on anything. But it must be awfully confusing for the readers – or at least those who read more than just a couple of notices. The last week, for instance, has seen a couple of openings where the opinions offered couldn’t be more extreme.

Since a stagehand strike was finally implemented on Saturday morning, after several months of threats from both the theatre owners (to lock the stagehands out) and the workers (to withdraw their labour) unless they could come to an agreement on a new contract, 28 Broadway shows have been dark – while eight others are still able to play, either because they are in non-profit houses or other theatres that are covered by separate contracts with the stagehand union, Local One. But tonight the Great White Way will turn into the Great Dark Way, since none of those eight shows play on Mondays.

Tom Conti isn’t the only actor I’ve seen this week returning to a role he has played before – but at least in the case of veteran actor Warren Mitchell, who I saw yesterday in Visiting Mr Green, a play that he first visited in 1999 at West Yorkshire Playhouse and has since played in Australia, he’s honest about his reasons for doing so: “You get to a certain age, in my case 81, and it’s not so easy to learn lines any more, so as I’ve played the part it isn’t such a struggle.”

Nor, in the case of Mel Brooks, who is also 81, is it so easy to come up with new lines, either, hence re-visiting another of his films, Young Frankenstein, for his stage sequel to the runaway success of The Producers that finally opened on Broadway last night.

Only the other day I was railing against theatre programmes and wishing they were free, as well as wondering about the other mark-ups, like restoration charges, that are being widely levied now. Visiting Richmond Theatre yesterday, as I often do for Wednesday matinees, I discovered that the programme for Romantic Comedy may have contained colour production pictures and quite a bit of extra editorial on the play, too (a four-page interview with playwright Bernard Slade, two more of quotes on love triangles, and four more on famous marital mismatches), but star Tom Conti had elected not to have the customary bio at all.

Actors, directors and playwrights routinely have to regularly face the slings and arrows of outrageous reviews, but what happens when critics themselves face the critics? It’s particularly difficult when, within the small world we operate in and see each other across the aisle vitually every night, the critic who suddenly finds the boot is on the other foot has to face the fact that its his own colleagues who are doing the kicking. Toby Young and Lloyd Evans, then job-sharing on The Spectator, found this out the hard way when they multi-tasked to write two plays that were seen at the King’s Head. Next up to face up to his critical colleagues on the other side of the pen will be Nicholas de Jongh, who has written a play that will be premiered at the Finborough next year.

But what happens when the critic is as almost universally admired as Michael Billington?

If the reviews for last week’s opening of Hairspray are anything to go by, it’s a smash hit. If there were any negative reviews, I’ve missed them: this was one of those rare occasions when the critical throng seemed to speak with one voice. (Literally so, it seems, in the case of Mark Ravenhill and me: just yesterday Mark added a comment to last Wednesday’s blog entry here to point out that he “said almost word for word” what I had written there on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Review last weekend – but since I’d filed my blog four days earlier than his comments were being broadcast, great minds must have been thinking alike!)

If the LSO can do it, why can’t the West End? I’m talking about the provision of free programmes, both in the concert hall on the night and even more impressively, available to download online from five days before each concert, too, at lso.co.uk. It’s not always possible to read a programme in the dark – and you may well want to concentrate on the music – so it’s particularly forward-thinking to allow audiences to read them before they get there.

How close should a critic get to the process of the theatre and its practitioners? Is our job confined to what happens on the stage after the curtain goes up and stops when the curtain comes down again?

I, in common with many of my colleagues, don’t just write reviews but also regularly write interview and theatre programme features as well, and I also host discussions – either publicly, as in National Theatre platforms or other post-show talks, or privately, such as the one I do every summer with a group of American theatre visitors for whom I host a daily seminar of the play they’ve seen the night before, and then have the director, writer or a cast member from the production in to talk to the group afterwards.

So I get to look beneath the bonnet, or rather behind the stage or pass door, of what happens in the theatre.

A few weeks ago, I saw the new Disney/Pixar film Ratatouille, in which of the leading characters is a pompous, slightly sinister restaurant critic, Anton Ego, who professes to love food but hardly ever enjoys it, and doesn’t seem to love life much, either (he reminded me inadvertently of one of my more senior theatre critical colleagues). Towards the end of the film he delivers a speech (voiced by Peter O’Toole) about the fundamental worthlessness of his calling: “In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.”

It’s a popular view to dismiss the work critics do in this way, but critical opinion is still courted by chefs just as much as by theatre or film directors.