January 2008 Archives

The first complete version of Jerry Springer – the Opera was premiered, after developmental stagings at BAC and on the Edinburgh Fringe, as the debut production of Nicholas Hytner’s regime at the helm of the National Theatre in 2004. It has taken nearly five years since then for New York to catch up and have its very own Jerry Springer moment, but it has finally happened this week – and is one of the main reasons that brought me to town at this time. Seeing it last night in the second of only two concert performances that were held at Carnegie Hall was to witness another in the glorious collisions of high and low culture that the show so expertly navigates, and added yet another layer to find it being presented in so auspicious a concert hall.

But that, of course, is only one dimension to this multi-faceted creation, which in the years since it was written has intriguingly found it become part of a bigger story.

We’ve already had the Evening Standard Theatre Awards and there are the Oliviers still to come, but in between there’s the annual, far more informally presented Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards, for which a refreshingly low-tech ceremony was held in the best bar of any West End theatre, the downstairs room at the Prince of Wales, and hosted by the Chairman of the Drama Section of the circle, Charles Spencer.

This was a chance for the critics to take to the stage for once, and allow the actors to put a public face on those they usually face on the other side of the footlights. I always worry on these occasions what an eccentric bunch we must seem, a suspicion confirmed when Charlie couldn’t locate his glasses as he took to the stage to introduce the event – but subsequently confessed that they’d been around his neck, hidden by his tie, all along!

Last week was a busy one in the London theatre – but more did not necessarily mean better. It’s a law of the theatre, as it is of life, that not everything can be fabulous. But sometimes shows sneak in so low under the quality radar that you wonder – sometimes aloud – how they ever got there.

As Keiron Quirke noted in a review for the Evening Standard last Friday, “It’s almost inspiring. However impressive producing a play in the West End may seem, the truth is that any Joe with money can hire a commercial playhouse. An Audience with the Mafia is the proof. This, in a sweet, stumbling way, is an utterly dreadful bit of theatre.”

This time last week I asked some questions – and today I may have some answers (as well as some more questions).

On The Guardian theatre blog – probably the most active one out there – they even do a blog about blogs called Noises Off, and last week’s round-up from Kelly Nestruck linked here to last week’s questions, so mentioning it in return now makes this a blog about a blog about a blog. Can things get more circular?

What’s the chicken and what’s the egg down at the Young Vic these days? A few months ago I already noted here, “There is now a sense that the Young Vic’s bar and restaurant both function entirely independently of the theatre, attracting an audience entirely of its own who hang out there all evening, while the theatregoers themselves are regarded as an inconvenient intrusion.” But I’ve grown to love the restaurant, especially for its unusual and flavoursome sausage dishes – South African boerewors, or last night, Russian sausages; so now I’ve become one of those who go there just for the food, even without seeing a show first.

Indeed, I was at a first night at the National last night for Happy Now?, and arranged to meet a friend afterwards at the Young Vic instead of at the National, which (though it stays open after the shows, unusually for London theatres) tends to become a bit forlorn and vacant after hours, though it is teeming by day. The theatre part of the Young Vic was entirely dark last night – yet when I arrived at 9.30pm I grabbed the single free table in the restaurant, and the bar was packed both upstairs and down.

The ad in yesterday’s Standard for the new production of The Importance of Being Earnest starring Penelope Keith stated clearly at the top of it: “Opens tonight”. But that’s not strictly true – yes, it began performances last night, but it didn’t actually open. “Opening night” is not till today week. Of course, that’s not an unusually long preview period for a West End play: they are doing a total of nine previews (two of them matinees) before the “official” opening. But then they opened in Bath last September, and had an eight-date regional tour in October and November. So although they’ve had a hiatus, it’s actually had a ten-week run already.

Which means, of course, that audiences – paying full-price already (there are no preview price reductions for this production) – are getting a production that has been well run-in already. But if it’s good enough for audiences to pay full whack for, how come it isn’t good enough for critics to see yet?

It’s that time of year again: no, not for another David Hare play (though that happened, too, yesterday), but more pressingly, like all freelancers, I can’t avoid the fact – as the ads everywhere keep reminding us on street billboards, in all the newspapers and even on Classic FM – that the deadline for filing our annual tax returns is looming on January 31. (Heck, if they didn’t spend so much on advertising, perhaps they wouldn’t need to collect so much in taxes). So I spent much of yesterday thinking about collecting together my earnings for the last tax year to give to my accountant — but I never quite got around to doing it.

But at least it wasn’t quite as taxing as actually watching that new David Hare play later. I’d seen The Vertical Hour when it received its world premiere on Broadway in November 2006, where it was quite an event: not just that Sam Mendes was making a rare return to stage directing with it, but also, of course, the star billing that had Julianne Moore making her Broadway stage debut in it. As it happens, Britain’s Bill Nighy stole the star notices.

I’ve not looked forward to a movie quite as much for years as I have the new screen version of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd; but at the same time, I was in no rush. The fact with film is that it will be exactly the same if I see it today or next week – though of course the thing that may change between now and then is me, and one’s responses are never divorced from who we are (or where we are at) when we see it. I was also, to be honest, full of trepidation: how would a show that I’ve known intimately ever since it was the first full-scale Sondheim musical I ever saw, in the short-lived import of the original Broadway staging to Drury Lane, in 1980, translate from the big stage to the widescreen?

I have also seen it since in every possible stage permutation: from fringe studios (the late, lamented Half Moon on the Mile End Road – now, incidentally, a pub — and a promenade production at the Bridewell) to the National Theatre and the West End’s actor-musician production that originated at Newbury’s Watermill Theatre and ended up back on Broadway, and opera stagings from Opera North and the Royal Opera House.

I’ve got a few questions to kick off the week that I’ve picked up from various items in the news and blogosphere over the last few days.

• Who is the sleeping critic?

In Friday’s Daily Mail, Quentin Letts wrote a “blind item” in his weekly review page – “The late Sheridan Morley, a celebrated snoozer, has a successor. At one point in Scenes from a Marriage, Iain Glen screams, very loudly, twice. Yet even this was not enough to waken one critic, whose only response was a rumbling snore.”

I wasn’t there on the opening night, so I don’t know who it can have been – but at least I therefore know it wasn’t me! (I went the following night, and was held entirely rapt throughout).

The current issue of Time Out, whose theatre section provides a helpful index of opening nights for the week, lists some 20 London theatre openings over the five “working” nights between the Wednesday just gone and next Tuesday. Of course, some of us “work” on Saturdays and Sundays, too, though there are thankfully no openings actually listed for the weekend – but there are four shows down to open tonight alone, which is typically a night that theatres choose last to open a show on, since some critics are reluctant to come out on a Friday evening.

Twenty shows across a five-night stretch therefore means an average of four openings a night (maths was never my strong suit, I hasten to add, but this much I can work out!); and it means inevitably that lots of them will get lost in the critical schedule. Even Time Out itself, which used to be a leading outlet for fringe reviews that few others (apart, of course, from The Stage) covered, now caps its weekly review coverage at around 12 shows. Partly, I assume, it’s space; but it’s also cost – sending reviewers to more would simply cost them too much in freelance fees.

I’ve avoided blogging much here on the Arts Council’s proposed cuts for some 194 of its clients (and new funding proposals for others) since they are being widely discussed elsewhere, though I did report my shock and surprise when the Drill Hall announced an immediate closure – not even seeing out the terms of its current grant provision. But now that the deadline for appeals to be lodged has passed and those affected have presumably done so, the Arts Council will have to consider each carefully on a case-by-case basis, bigger questions are also now inevitably being asked, too, about the way the Council itself is run – and whether it, too, needs culling in the same way it has dictated the bleak future now faced by some of its possibly soon-to-be-former clients.

Commercial theatre producers, of course, come in all shapes and sizes, but the process that brings them there always fascinates me: why would you want to ever want to do something so intrinsically risky and fraught with difficulty (not to mention temperament)? There are, surely, easier ways to make money. As the old quip goes, how do you become a millionaire producer? Start off as a billionaire producer!

Last week I met Bill Haber, a relatively recent arrival to the Broadway fold who is currently represented on Broadway and in the West End by Monty Python’s Spamalot, but has long been one of the biggest power brokers in the entertainment business as a co-founder, with Michael Ovitz and others, of CAA (the Creative Artists Agency), in 1975 that went on to become one of the most powerful artists’ agency in the world.

I was heartily encouraged when the press release arrived for the stage version of Brief Encounter that the brilliant young director Emma Rice is bringing to the Cineworld Cinema in the Haymarket, restoring it to its original use as a theatre (when it was known as the Carlton, though the original stage was completely lost when part of the site was sold off to become part of an adjoining office block). Ticket prices were listed as being just £25-£29.50, which I thought was a terrific move towards making the West End more realistically affordable (and draw the younger audience that Kneehigh seeks to attract). But it turns out that the press release wasn’t telling the whole truth: if you visit the show’s website, it turns out that these prices are only fixed to March 2; from March 4 onwards, they spike upwards to £35-£39.50.

It has always been the case, of course, that the Travelex £10 season at the National doesn’t in fact mean that the whole house is £10; just that the majority of the seats were, with only the prime centre stalls area going at £25.

Our job as critics is usually to review the show onstage, not to become part of it; but when we unwittingly do, as I reported here the other day (and the Independent’s diary column have also picked up on today) that Quentin Letts and myself did at the opening night of La Cage Aux Folles at the Menier Chocolate Factory, it’s been interesting to find ourselves mentioned in the reviews themselves. As Michael Billington set the scene in The Guardian on Friday, “Front-row spectators sit at cafe tables and the actors weave among us, at one point hilariously effecting a civil partnership between two surprised drama critics”.

But it’s also been interesting to note that two more colleagues who were drawn to comment on the scene actually misidentified the actor who effected the union as being Douglas Hodge, whereas in fact it was Philip Quast who took our hands and put them together.

I spent most of yesterday with Nick Hytner – in spirit most of the time, but in person for part of it. In the afternoon, I went to see his production of Much Ado About Nothing again – one I recently declared to be one of my five favourite shows of last year, so it was a pleasure to see again. Then, after the show, I conducted an onstage interview with Nick himself on the stage of the Olivier Theatre that had been arranged for the National’s priority members who had seen the production in the afternoon, too.

Immediately afterwards, I stayed backstage to do a face-to-face interview with Zoe Wanamaker (and discovered that she’d heard the interview with Nick on the theatre tannoy – including his declaration that she had sulked when she worried that she wasn’t going to do something that Simon Russell Beale does in the show; and Simon, in turn, popped into Zoe’s dressing room to say he’d heard it, too!). Then I crossed the river to see The History Boys again – my fourth time, but my first with Des Barrit (I’d previously seen Richard Griffiths and the original cast on its opening at the National in 2004, then again on Broadway, then last year when Stephen Moore led the cast of the West End transfer to Wyndham’s).

Last night’s eventual opening of La Cage Aux Folles at the Menier Chocolate Factory, after two postponements, was worth waiting for: during the second act, Philip Quast (as the nightclub manager Georges) came into the audience, and partnered me off to the person sitting on the other side of the aisle to me …. namely, the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts! Quast/Georges grabbed each of our hands and made us reach each out and hold the other’s – then declared us “a perfect match”!

I’d have preferred to have been paired off with the Menier’s restaurant supervisor myself – except that he wasn’t in attendance last night. The lovely Douglas was apparently back home in Oz – no doubt attempting to escape the attentions of website journalists (I’m not the only one, apparently, to have made my interest clear).

It is, as we know, a rich man’s (and woman’s) world; and as the Abba song famously suggests, the answer is to find a sugar daddy: “If I got me a wealthy man/ I wouldn’t have to work at all,/ I’d fool around and have a ball…” An alternative suggestion is to “head to Las Vegas or Monaco,/and win a fortune in a game”. But one more option, unexplored in the song, would be to write, direct, choreograph or produce a hit Broadway musical: each of those participants is always cut into earning a negotiated percentage of the gross weekly take. For playwrights, that used to 10%, though according to Edward Albee speaking in a Drama Desk panel in 2005, that’s now typically 5%. The Society of stage Directors and Choreographers contract specifies in its current collective bargaining agreement that directors should earn a minimum of 2% of all weekly grosses, choreographers 1.5%, and director/choreographers 2.75%.

That translates into a lot of money being made: Mamma Mia!, for instance, earned $1,422,454 on Broadway the week before last, so Phyllida Lloyd, the director, would have pocketed some $28,449.08 for that week on Broadway alone.

One of the New Year resolutions I listed the other day was to try to get out-of-town more. The Sunday paper I write for is, of course, called a “national newspaper” but it’s all-too-easy for London-based critics to stick close to home, since there’s invariably so much to see here and in any case, newspapers prefer their journalists not to run up big expense bills travelling. (I try to make regular nods to my readership beyond London by writing about touring productions whenever I can – ones that potentially reach more of them than a show that is seen for a four-week run in, say, Leeds only).

But getting out of town takes time as well as money – we don’t get paid extra for time spent on the road, only for the words we write, wherever they come from. The “posh” dailies employ diligent second-stringers – The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner, the Daily Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish and Sam Marlowe in The Times – to keep the regions covered, plus assorted stringers in Scotland and points north to complement them. But many of us are essentially one-man (and one-woman) bands – and space dictates, too, that the regional productions we do see have to fight for theirs within our columns as it is.

The great Christmas and New Year hiatus to life in the arts (or at least some of the arts pages) is finally over – The Guardian has finally restored its daily reviews page today, absent these last two weeks. This may suggest that there has been nothing to review since Christmas, but The Times managed to keep up a regular review service in its T2 section, despatching a trio of critics, Benedict Nightingale, Sam Marlowe and Dominic Maxwell, to pantos and Christmas shows up and down the land, from Southampton and Birmingham to Leeds and Wimbledon all of last week, while the Telegraph, too, had regular despatches from Charles Spencer and Dominic Cavendish. Yesterday’s Sundays, too, mostly managed to field a review column – I had six shows in mine, while the Sunday Telegraph, I’m told, finally got to Much Ado About Nothing (only three weeks late).

In yesterday’s Observer (sister paper, of course, to The Guardian), former Guardian editor Peter Preston noted in his media column, “Each year, Newsnight packs up for the 10 weekdays of Yule as though news vanishes at Christmas. At which point something big - in this case the assassination of Benazir Bhutto - happens, and viewers wanting a little analysis are left bereft. Simple point: the world doesn’t stop turning or burning while Jeremy Paxman stuffs his turkey or Kirsty Wark slices her haggis. If there’s a need for news, it’s constant, and long hols, apart from being irritating, send a contradictory signal. For public service, read public snooze.” The Guardian arts desk could perhaps learn the same lesson.

Apart from planning to get ahead on filing my tax return before the looming January 31 deadline, there’s an even more pressing engagement ahead: I am going to Devon tomorrow for four days, and no, there’s no theatre involved! Just time in a country cottage near Tavistock, with a log fire burning, two dogs and a tortoise (not mine), a child (not mine, either) and a friend (all of the above belonging to her!) for company…. Bliss! And maybe, just maybe, it can get me started with 2008 as I mean to continue, to go a little easier. (So this blog won’t be updated, either, till next week, either…!)

I do, it is true, often set myself a relentless pace. But one of the miraculous things about living in London is that you need never run out of new things to see and do. And, as regular readers of this blog will know, too, if ever I’m need of a different kind of stimulus, I invariably go to New York (my next trip is already booked: I head off on January 29, to coincide with Jerry Springer - the Opera receiving two concert performances at Carnegie Hall). I also have another US trip planned after that one, to go to San Francisco, Las Vegas and Palm Springs, at the end of February. (This time, to coincide with Bette Midler’s new gig as one of the regular headliners at Caesar’s Palace, replacing Celine Dion who has just ended a five-year engagement there).

So the madness won’t, I promise myself, stop entirely.