December 2007 Archives

The New London Theatre on Drury Lane was always one of the West End’s biggest white elephants, one of those awful civic-like lumps of modern theatrical architecture that was unresponsive to most of the shows that attempted to play there. Until Cats, of course, took the gamble and utterly reinvented it; suddenly, and for the next 21 years, Cats finally put it on the map in every sense, proving once and for all that any theatre can work as long as those putting a show on there know how to respond to it, as director Trevor Nunn and designer John Napier made this show tumble beyond the stage and entirely inhabit the entire auditorium, even pressing the “moving platform” that the stage is built on into the action.

After Cats departed, however, it looked like it was doomsday, again, for this theatre: not just that it’s seating was falling apart and barely touched, but also that attempting to use this space in a prosc arch configuration simply does not work. But last week I finally caught the RSC transfer of Trevor Nunn’s production of King Lear from Statford’s thrust-stage Courtyard Theatre, and once again I was thrilled to discover a theatre exactly meeting the needs of the show playing there.

It’s that time of year again: everyone is making lists of their best (and worst) of the year, and while The Guardian was intent on stealing a march on everyone else by publishing their critics’ top picks for 2007 as early as December 11 as I blogged here, most have sensibly left it till rather later. I’ve got one running in the Sunday Express this weekend, but have elsewhere chosen my personal top five here.

Also last week I hosted the annual discussion on theatevoice.com, in which a group of critics that featured the Independent on Sunday’s Kate Bassett, Time Out’s Jane Edwardes, Variety’s David Benedict and myself gave our personal roll-calls of honour. I’m always struck on such occasions by both the universality of some choices – we all chose War Horse, for instance, for a category I designated as “best creative contribution”, while both David and I chose Mark Rylance from Boeing-Boeing for Best Perforformance, both Kate ande Jane chose Tom Hiddleston (who played Cassio in the Donmar Othello and was also featured in Cheek by Jowl’s Cymbeline) for Newcomer of the Year, and both David and Kate chose Dennis Kelly’s Taking Care of Baby, as their best new play.

William Finn has one of the most unique, idiosyncratic voices amongst Broadway’s current crop of musical writers, as you can currently discover both on Broadway (with The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, but only to January 20, so hurry if you’re in the area and have not seen it yet) and off-Broadway (with Make me a Song, a revue of his songs, that ends even sooner on December 30 at New World Stages, but whose website is currently promising a London run).

But one of my favourite collections of his material is Infinite Joy, an evening that he hosted himself at the Public Theatre’s Joe Pub, and in which he performed a song called “Stupid Things I Won’t Do” that contains one of my favourite lines of his: “Reading papers when there ain’t a review is a stupid thing/and I won’t do it”. Hear, hear!

So it’s here at last: Christmas Day — and I can’t go to the theatre today even if I wanted to. At last, a break! (If I were in New York, on the other hand, there’s be shows and movies on tap, since New York stops for nothing; A Chorus Line, Jersey Boys, Les Miserablesand The Phantom of the Opera all have performances there today). And no, I don’t have to work, either. But I’m writing this blog, partly to alleviate the shame and embarrassment of not having sent a single Christmas card this year – and I’ve not even done my usual electronic mail-out this year instead. (That’ll have to wait till I send New Year greetings now….!) While even the Queen has gone digital this year and now has a dedicated youtube channel to reach her subjects, telling us on her first television Christmas message fifty years ago that “I very much hope that this new medium will make my Christmas message more personal and direct”, I’m using my blog to do the impersonal thing instead and reach those of you I know and those I don’t with my own Christmas hello!

Only last week I was writing here about a Variety review of Kiki and Herb that spoilt many of the jokes and narrative surprises by repeating and revealing them. But Kiki and Herb were only here for one night only, and the proportion of the audience who actually read that Variety review was probably negligible.

But don’t critics have a responsibility to keep the surprise they’ve enjoyed alive by not repeating it in their review when something unexpected happens? There’s a moment – or two – in Nicholas Hytner’s new National Theatre production of Much Ado About Nothing that possibly the biggest, laugh-out-loud funny belly laugh of the year, but it was made all the richer for not expecting it.

Amidst the current fashion for shows in “found spaces”, I always wonder what’s the chicken and what’s the egg: did finding the space dictate the show that was created, or did wanting to do a particular show lead its creators on a search for an appropriate space to stage it in? Certainly one of my theatrical highlights of the year, when Neil Bartlett did The Pianist in a warehouse off a derelict railway sidings in Manchester that was duly full of Holocaust echoes, was partly created out of the amazing physical space that triggered those associations, as I reported here.

But I think I am even more impressed when theatre practitioners make a seemingly four-walled traditional space, with fixed seating, into something more mutable.

Everyone else, it seems, is either getting ready for the Christmas festivities with endless bouts of shopping (myself, I am leaving it to Monday, and even then will squeeze it around a final panto at Wimbledon) or partying (the extent of mine, as I previously wrote here, was to go to the Barbican’s interactive Office Party Xmas 2007). But for me the pre-Christmas rush is a different kind of experience as the diary gets even busier than usual before everything shuts down again. There are still pages (web and real) to fill, so I’m not just writing against the clock, but also collecting the things to write about. So although I rent an office near Southwark Station to work out of, I’ve been barely there for the last fortnight.

First the Lord giveth, then the Lord has taketh way. After the good news in October of the treasury settlement to the Arts Council of a rise in funding from £417m to £467m (a welcome increase above the headline inflation figure of £2.7%), at a time when many in the arts world were bracing themselves for standstill funding or worse, the Arts Council wrote to its clients, “We are delighted that this settlement indicates that Government listened to the case for the arts made by us all, and has recognised the need to continue to invest in world-class arts for more people.” But now has come the announcement that they are looking afresh at the way those funds are being distributed, and – in what The Guardian has called “the most bloody cull since the Arts Council was set up more than 50 years ago”, nearly 200 arts organisations in England have now been told that their funding will end from next April.

It may only be 15 minutes from London Bridge to East Croydon, but somehow it has always seemed to be an adventure to go to this strange satellite town to London: usually one merely passes through it on the train to Gatwick or Brighton, but if you actually exit the station, there’s not just the odd sight of trams running down its streets (though they may yet make a comeback elsewhere soon), but the sense of “foreigness” is also accentuated by the fact that most people know the area as the place that resident aliens have to go to sort out an immigration issue at the nearby immigration department headquarters. That’s how American-born Rhoda Koenig of The Independent made her first visit there some years ago; but last night she returned for only her second visit to the area for the other, sadly less typical, reason to go there.

That was to visit a dynamic, but largely unsung, little producing theatre, the Warehouse, right beside the station that also takes you to other worlds, frequently Australian, as artistic director Ted Craig, who has run it for the last 22 of the 30 years of its life since it was founded in 1977, hails from Melbourne.

One of the luckier side-effects of being a freelancer is that I don’t get invited to any Christmas office parties. As a non-drinker, I could obviously never see the attractions of free booze, and wasn’t ever pre-disposed to the sense of enforced jollity that prevailed at any of them. I would invariably make an appearance – and then leave as early as sociably possible. And then, as a senior manager, I would come into the office the next day dreading the social mess I would have to clear up: I’ll never forget coming in to find that Mike, one of my senior editors, had actually challenged the MD to take their argument outside over the fact that the free bar had suddenly dried up…. Yet somehow, in the five Christmases since I last had a full-time job, I have curiously missed this bizarre social ritual: everyone, it seems, is going to a party, and I’m not invited.

Maybe it’s just for me, therefore, that the Barbican’s BITE season have concluded their year in the Pit by staging Office Party Xmas 2007, which is exactly what it says on the label: a recreation of a typical Christmas party in all its boredom, embarrassments (yes, that was me onstage at one point, decked out in Christmas gear and with my shirt unbuttoned to my waist) and petty politics.

Treasure Island, the show that almost didn’t go on at Derby Playhouse when the theatre went into liquidation on the day of its original press performance but that the cast performed that night anyway before it was prematurely shut down, today receives a five-star review from Alfred Hickling in The Guardian. As he tells it in his review, the offstage story about getting the show back on the road seems even more of a story than the show itself: “After a week of darkness in which candlelit vigils were held in support, a skeleton staff – many working unpaid – have banded together to reinstate the run of the Christmas show. It’s an extraordinary achievement, which required the rights to be renegotiated, the cast to be re-contracted and the swords recalled from the armoury.”

What’s value for money in the theatre? And, since critics rarely pay for our tickets, how would we know anyway? Still, in an interesting blog on The Guardian website, Lyn Gardner – who has before told us about buying tickets for her family to see Hairspray which she hadn’t got press tickets for, as she wasn’t reviewing it – poses the question when she compares the cost of seeing two shows against their running times: a 75-minute (including interval) double-bill, The Family Plays at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs (with a ticket price of £15) and the 6.5 hour double-bill of Nicholas Nickleby at the West End’s Gielgud Theatre (for which she reports that mid-price tickets for both parts would set you back £65, working out at under £11 an hour).

Christmas seems to get earlier every year — and so now does the end of the year, too. In yesterday’s Guardian, Michael Billington was already offering his best and worst of the year, which kicked off with a warning shot about the state of regional theatre following the closures, mid-season, of Bristol Old Vic and Derby Playhouse. “Regional playhouses are vital to the structure of the nation’s theatre: close one or two and the dominoes start to tumble”, Michael writes; but Derby has, in fact, already re-opened just as suddenly as it closed, with its Christmas run of Treasure Island suddenly salvaged and resuming performances last Saturday. (The theatre’s ongoing future is, however, still far from secure, and on its website, it is both soliciting ongoing support, and points out that the theatre is still in administration and is only able to sell tickets for Treasure Island). But Michael is undoubtedly prescient about the dominoes effect: after first writing this entry earlier this morning, I received an e-mail a few hours later that told me that Exeter’s Northcott Theatre, which has re-opened just today after a £2.1m redevelopment programme, is facing a bleak future following the loss of its £547,000 Arts Council grant from April 2009. The theatre had been closed for nearly a year, with the Arts Council supporting the redevelopment both with a £100,000 grant towards it and a further £540,000 in revenue grants to support it while it was closed.

Theatregoing should, where possible, be as complete an experience as possible: I love to get nourishment for the mind and body in the same place – and in particular, I always feel that it’s a great idea to put my money where my mouth is, and since I (usually) get my tickets for free, at least try to support the theatre by spending it instead in their restaurant if I can. So when I paid a trip to Birmingham Rep yesterday to see the matinee of Stiles and Drewe’s musical version of Peter Pan (thus completing the set, by the way, of their trio of the S&D-penned Christmas shows this show that also include the Barbican’s panto Jack and the Beanstalk and Honk! at the Watermill in Newbury, which is incidentally a theatre with an ace restaurant attached), I headed straight to the theatre’s restaurant, the Wine REPublic.

But it wasn’t to be.

There was a tiny respite from the current critical schedule yesterday when, at less than 24 hours notice, the press performance for the Old Vic’s Cinderella yesterday was suddenly cancelled owing to the reported indisposition of Sandi Toksvig, and although there is an understudy, a statement was issued that declared, “We felt that, in fairness to the company and to the production, the show should be reviewed, as rehearsed, with Sandi in this central role”. I wasn’t going anyway – I was already committed to an event with my partner’s family, so had booked to go this Thursday afternoon instead, which may indeed turn into the new press performance! That, of course, was itself freed up by the second postponment of the Menier Chocolate Factory’s currently-previewing La Cage Aux Folles, which was originally going to open on December 3, got moved to this Thursday, and has now been moved again to January (in this case because of the illness of Douglas Hodge).

But its indicative of the juggling that has to happen at this time of the year that things are so pressurised already that there’s hardly any slack in the system.

No, I’m not heading back to New York yet again, at least not just yet (though a colleague I met at the Barbican last night was surprised to see me: “I thought you’d moved there!”, she said). Instead, I’m referring to th Christmas in New York show that takes place at the Lyric Theatre this Sunday, and I’m planning on taking special care when I try to get there.

I loved it last year, despite the fact that less than three hours before I went to see it I had written off my car. It was entirely my own fault – I’d been to a matinee at the Unicorn Theatre in Tooley Street, near London Bridge, and parked my car on a side street. When I came to pull out again into Tooley Street again, I thought it was a one-way street – except that it wasn’t, and I was brutally sideswiped by an oncoming bus hurtling up in the other direction. My first thought, after examining the tangled mess of what my car (but fortunately not me!) had become, was how was I going to get into the West End to see Christmas in New York.

November 18 marked the 10th anniversary of the opening of the current West End revival of Kander and Ebb’s Chicago, but last night it was formally marked with a special one-off celebratory performance at the Cambridge Theatre. Producers Barry and Fran Weissler are past masters, of course, at the art of stunt casting (in Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, an actress who is attending an audition sings, “Why am I working so hard?/These are the people who cast/Linda Blair in a musical”, which the Weisslers did indeed do, when Blair did a stint in their mid-90s Broadway revival of Grease); but last night they pulled off the ultimate stunt, reuniting members of the original cast and many of their successors to share their roles between them – sometimes simultaneously, with three Billy Flynn’s at one point giving ‘em the ol’ razzle dazzle, three Mary Sunshine’s observing there’s a little bit of good in everyone, and six Amos Hart’s proving far from invisible as Mr Cellophane. (A similar stunt was pulled off in 2006 when the production reached its 10th anniversary on Broadway, too, which you can see some of here).

And the award for the West End’s hottest playwright goes to…. William Shakespeare. Rupert Goold’s production of Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart in the title role, ended its sell-out run at the Gielgud Theatre last weekend, but not before earlier in last week taking the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for both its director and star. It would have extended, I’m sure, but for the fact that the Gielgud was otherwise booked to take in another Chichester transfer, of the two-part The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, that takes over from today. But there’s still plenty of Shakespeare in town.

Mel Brooks’ musical version of his film comedy The Producers is famously an equal opportunities offender – it pokes fun at the Nazis, highly sexed (but physically infirm) old ladies, camp gay men and tall Swedish women with equal and reckless comic abandon. Seeing it one last time last night in Cardiff on the final leg of its current UK regional tour, with Peter Kay returning as Roger De Bris for its last week there, was to see a master comic at work who had the audience eating out of his flamboyant hands (even as he chewed the scenery, almost literally). But he also introduced one yet more topical note of controversy, when his character introduced his choreographer Scott, then separately addressed Scott’s over-stocked nether regions, “Hello, Mohammed”.

As Barbara Cook sang an unamplified (and gloriously unadorned) version of Bernstein’s “Some Other Time” with the kind of haunting clarity and emotional intelligence that is her hallmark at the conclusion of the 80th birthday tribute in her honour at the London Coliseum last night, both my good friend Dan and I were in tears. “Let’s be glad for what we’ve had/and what’s to come”, she sang, and we can only hope that that there’s much more to come. At 80, she’s in astonishing shape: not just looking physically stronger and comfortable than she has for years, but vocally, too, she’s in prime condition. There is, in my opinion, simply no greater singer alive today. “I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love with a wonderful guy”, she sang earlier; and I could only think, “I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love with this wonderful gal!”