Electronic Christmas greetings….

But also it seems silly to wait until after Christmas has already gone to talk about to two events that were amongst the highlights and lowlights of the season so far. The highlight is the annual Theatre Quiz that always brings the National’s platforms year to a close. It used to be that a team from the National would go head-to-head with a team from the RSC, but once the RSC stopped its year-round presence in London the National now goes head-to-head with itself, so last Friday a team from the Lyttelton, with four cast members from Present Laughter, triumphed with 89 idiosyncratically scored points over a team from the Olivier’s War Horse company, who scored 67. (The audience join in, too, and got 40 points this year).

It’s a pity that the RSC, who are in fact in town this year with King Lear and The Seagull, not to mention God in Ruins (which I’d rather not), weren’t conscripted to join the party again, but this was nevertheless a delightful occasion as always to test one’s own theatrical knowledge of the year, along with such quirky categories as guessing which National Theatre productions particular wigs, frocks and sound effects come from. (And for Ian Shuttleworth, who replied to my Friday blog about critics giving the game away about a highlight of the National’s current production of Much Ado About Nothing by asking if there was anyone who didn’t know who the culprit in The Mousetrap is, quiz mistess Emma Freud revealed that identity, too).

Then on Saturday afternoon I went to see (part of) Christmas on Broadway at the Indigo2 room at the 02. I’m afraid I fled at the (extremely late-running) interval; but by then I had seen more than enough, even if I hadn’t managed to hear much of it properly. Afternoons of live entertainment rarely come as dispiriting and depressing as this supposed seasonal treat, where four headliners – including one of our absolutely finest musical theatre actresses, Maria Friedman, strangely relegated to secondary billing alongside an X-Factor finalist – fought a sound system that variously made them sound disembodied and metallic.

The matinee performance began 35 minutes late while sound checks were apparently taking place; but clearly the problems weren’t solved by the time the performance actually finally began. But then this lazily put together collection of show tunes failed to deliver either context or content, pace or place at all, even without the barrier to any kind of pleasure being offered by the sound. It is difficult to believe that a director was even credited for arranging the woeful parade, but Fiona Laird is named as such.

When poor Maria Friedman was reduced to spouting such drivel as introducing Boublil and Schonberg as “two of the greatest geniuses of musicals ever”, it was clear that the presentation was hardly aimed at musical theatre cognoscenti. But was there a need to patronise the kind of audience that did turn up? Or to fob them off with an ill-fitting Sound of Music medley from the ill-at-ease eight-strong ensemble?

I left before the star-billed Marti Webb reprised some of the Lloyd Webber standards she has been associated with, but her sole first act appearance with ‘Hello Young Lovers’ sounded harsh and unsympathetic. Friedman hardly fared better with ‘If I Loved You’, that most tender and aching of ballads that emerged from this sound system sounding shrill and piercing. X Factor’s Rowetta seemed to have two emotional moods – loud and louder. Only Stephen Gateley, who is probably more at home on this kind of concert stage than the others, looked comfortable and confident, certainly more so than the last time I saw him, paradoxically, in a stage musical when he starred briefly in the touring Godspell earlier this year.

The Christmas part of the show was apparently relegated to a group finale. Christmas in New York, recently seen at the Lyric, was a far more effective seasonal celebration than this crassly put-together commercial attempt.