February 2008 Archives

It is famously said that what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. That’s usually used as a licence for people to cheat on their partners. But it also applies to many of the shows that play here – though there are Vegas sit-down productions of West End and Broadway hits from the long-running stands here of Mamma Mia! (at Mandalay Bay) and Spamalot (at the Wynn, where I have been staying) to the arrival in April of Jersey Boys (at the Venetian’s new Palazzo extension), many other theatrical attractions can be seen in Vegas only and nowhere else.

That trend has been led by Cirque du Soleil. They may, of course, be a globalised travelling circus franchise, but they long ago hit on the idea of making their Vegas shows unique to it; and in the process, they created a new template for entertainment here with a series of no-expense-spared productions that have seen them reinventing themselves and the forms they work within with each show, from the water-based spectacle of ‘O’ to ‘Love’, set to a pre-existing pop soundtrack.

Las Vegas, where the Rat Pack once wrote themselves into the history books (and countless spin-off tribute shows) for their live appearances, later became a kind of retirement home for old-timers to have one last gasp of public attention. But nowadays its star (and its stars) are riding a crest of a wave of fame and acclaim: not only is there serious money to be made here, but also – by putting down roots in Las Vegas for resident seasons – performers can not only avoid the rat race of having to tour and instead get audiences to come to them, but also there’s an opportunity to build properly theatrical shows specially for Vegas, too.

With the departure of Celine Dion after a long residency at Caesar’s Palace, her place has just been taken by the inimitable Bette Midler who started last week, and who I saw last night; she’s sharing the massive Colosseum space with Elton John (who also took over when Celine had breaks) and Cher, who begins her own show from May 6. “Does it get any gayer?”, Bette asked last night; and you may well ask.

The New York Times apparently called the 1964 film of Viva Las Vegas, starring Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret, as being “about as pleasant and unimportant as a banana split”. I actually happen to like banana splits, and I love Las Vegas. Since I first came here in late 2000 for the first time, I have been back four more times now…. and I will keep coming back, at least as long as there are shows to see. In five trips, I am yet to spend a dime, let alone a quarter, in one of the casinos; I am, I guess, what the casinos here would call a “loss leader”; I’m not pouring money into the local economy, its true – but maybe I can encourage a visitor or two to follow me?

But then the shows are themselves loss leaders, too. There is no way they can recoup on their own account – even with a top price of up to $150 in the case of Cirque du Soleil’s ‘O’, ‘Ka’ and ‘Love’, and a panto-style schedule that has them giving two performances a night; but the level of investment in creating the shows in the first place is so high and the weekly running cost so massive (with up to 75 performers in each show), that a recoupment schedule has to be a distant hope. But meanwhile, the shows provide an “anchor” tenant for each hotel that they are resident in: something that makes them a destination, and not just for those staying there, to provide all sorts of ancillary income to them that isn’t accountable just in the ticket price.

And it brings visitors to town who might not otherwise come here at all, like me.

What’s the worst part of my job? Actually, I like almost all of what I do – what’s not to like, being able to go to the theatre every single night and getting paid for it, or meeting people one admires and then writing about them? But the writing, whether of reviews or interview profiles, is actually the easy – or at least the pleasurable – part. Before you can get to that point, there’s the more tedious part of planning and juggling diaries – one that you don’t entirely have control over, as I’ve often pointed out here before, with the phenomena of clashing press nights. Or worse still, that of clashing PR priorities, whose job it is to manage the publicity process on behalf of their clients: I don’t for a minute imagine it is an easy job, trying to keep so many balls in the air and keep everyone happy all at the same time, and they sometimes have to make choices.

But there’s a difference between prioritising some channels and invoking delaying tactics to keep others hanging on. If I’m not going to get an interview, I’m always happiest if the PR is upfront enough to say so: at least I can then move on.

Even if I say so myself, I work hard; but I sometimes think I play even harder. Right now I am in San Francisco, filing this at 10pm on Sunday night local time, which is 6am London time – the typical time, in fact, that I’m up and invariably writing this when I’m at home! But being still up now, instead of just getting up, feels like I’ve done an all-nighter, which – given the jetlag I’m still suffering from on my third day since getting here on Friday afternoon – is pretty much what I feel I’ve been doing the whole time. And although I’m officially “off-duty” here, I’ve just done a three-show weekend, too. Maybe I simply don’t know how to do anything else: put me in a town where there’s theatre to find and that’s what I’ll do. (It’s what made a holiday last year to Gran Canaria so ultimately refreshing: theatre simply wasn’t an option!)

But I could hardly resist a one-off star cabaret show on Saturday evening which paired singer-songwriters Amanda McBroom and Melissa Manchester on the same bill for the first time – especially pertinent since the main reason I’m on the West Coast at all is to head to Las Vegas on Tuesday to see Bette Midler, who just last week kicked off a two-year residency at Caesar’s Palace in the spot previously occupied by Celine Dion, and both McBroom and Manchester have close Midler connections.

Is it worth beating a dead horse? Perhaps not; but seeing a beached whale always brings crowds to the shore side. Only yesterday I was writing here of Jo Brand’s appearance in the Carl Rosa Opera Company’s production of The Pirates of Penzance that she “rather scarily brought the Victorian values of this production even closer to home, since she resembled nothing so much as a funereal Queen Victoria, who subsequently morphs into a white blancmange.” Elsewhere on this site, you can also read Paul Vale’s even more brutal assessment: “Brand’s inability to either sing, dance or act brings the proceedings to an unworthy low, creating to all intents and purposes, car crash operetta”.

I was talking to a friend last night about the idea of colour-blind casting (and with not a black face in sight in the Carl Rosa Company, it’s not something they clearly advocate in their pursuit of maintaining the purity of those Victorian values), and he hit upon the phrase, apropos of this production, “talent-blind casting”.

The current West End G&S season for the Carl Rosa Opera may have been booked as a five-week filler at the Gielgud, wedged in between the end of the Chichester transfer of Nicholas Nickleby and the arrival next month of Yasmina Reza’s new play God of Carnage, but going to see the matinee of The Pirates of Penzance yesterday I was amazed to see a returns queue stretching down the side of the theatre. There clearly is an audience for this kind of thing – even if it was the kind who, as I overheard the man behind me saying, want things the determinedly old-fashioned way, “not murdered as they do at the Coliseum”; while another person, just down the row from me, was actually following the libretto from as CD booklet in his lap, and seemed to have his eyes there far more than on the stage.

The latter may, in fact, not have been an altogether bad choice: if you wanted to see cardboard sets and wooden performances, this was clearly the place to be.

Cabaret is a genre I return to regularly here, or at least as regularly as I can find it in London – there may be plenty of new variety and burlesque about, but “traditional” cabaret (by which I mean a singer and a song, heard in an intimate setting) is in desperately short and inconsistent supply. We’ve lately, however, had a bit of a feast here: only the other day I reported on three shows I’d seen in the preceding week, and last night I went to one more entry in Jermyn Street Theatre’s current American Songbook in London season.

Cabaret, of course, has a past – both in the rich seams of material it draws off, and also in the ranks of performers like Barbara Cook, still going strong at 80 (and about to open another season at New York’s Café Carlyle from March 4), and Julie Wilson, now 83, whom we saw here last week; but does cabaret have a future?

Who says that West End managements aren’t an accommodating lot? I snuck in a night early to see Ring Round the Moon last night, ahead of tonight’s opening night, which was accommodating of them in itself, but I noticed that a lot of seats had snuck out of the theatre: an entire row was missing about half way down the stalls, to provide access to a new centre aisle in the front half of the theatre. Producer Karl Sydow was occupying the seat across the aisle from me, and I asked him if this was a permanent step or just put in for the critics – and he confirmed it was the latter.

The trouble with the Playhouse (and theatres like it that have “continental” seating, from the Lyttelton to all of the refurbished Delfont Mackintosh houses) is that it forces the aisle sitters to often have the worst views.

I just counted up the shows I saw between last Monday and last night, and in that seven day period, I saw nine! And that’s even with taking one night off – for bad behaviour, namely to go to the Bush Theatre’s annual fundraising pub quiz, held in a Hammersmith working men’s club (apparently much favoured by Peter Gill as a rehearsal studio, since he once lived nearby) on Friday night, where a star-studded audience of Bush alumni (well, Richard Wilson, Neil LaBute and, er, Tim Fountain) celebrated the restoration of the Bush’s grant – while contributing funds beyond it. The table I was on, called Critical Mass though critics didn’t exactly provide the majority on it, got regular mentions from quiz master Ralf Little because of our presence there.

We didn’t do too badly, either, coming in fourth.

One of the inevitable side-effects to writing a blog regularly is to put one’s own life and habits in the public domain – and sometimes, of course, the lives and habits of others, too! – in a way that once would have been confined to one’s friends and family. You will know, for instance, if you read yesterday’s entry what a lark I often am (I wrote it at 5.15am) – and last night I was an owl, writing again at 11pm – so, to the question that is sometimes asked of me, “Do you ever sleep?”, the answer is that yes, I do, but not much. I’m not an insomniac – I just don’t have much time to do it. One or two of my colleagues, of course, frequently catch up in the stalls; just yesterday Quentin Letts was admitting as much in his review for The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other in the Daily Mail: after describing how, for 75 minutes, 27 actors walk on and off in various guises, he listed some of these and included a circus band who, he added in parentheses, “woke me up at 7.51pm – thank you”.

I’ve started to actually suspect another of suffering from narcolepsy – according to dictionary.com, “a condition characterized by frequent and uncontrollable periods of deep sleep” – but in a review for the same play yesterday in the Evening Standard, Nicholas de Jongh admits to another condition that the play awoke, so to speak, in him: it left him asosiopetic, he says, and defines it as “a condition in which the sufferer is unable or unwilling to say anything.”

There are, of course, already not enough hours in the day: it’s how I come to be writing this blog at 5.15am today. How else am I to do all the other jobs that I need to do today – and see a matinee (at the Orange Tree – another New Year’s resolution honoured!), then Ute Lemper opening tonight at the Shaw?

But seeing a show like The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other last night was to lose precious hours in my life forever – and have plenty of time to contemplate their disappearance. Not only was it far from true to the first part of its title (going past the hour and a half mark), but also too true to the other part, spending that seemingly interminable time letting the audience get to know nothing, either, of its cast list of some 450 “characters”, who merely endlessly parade across the vast, bleak terrain of a breezeblock town square.

Maybe something was lost in the translation – yes, it does have a translator, though no dialogue at all – but nothing seems to happen, very slowly, for 95 minutes.

In an interview in yesterday’s Independent with Kamal Ahmed, The Observer’s former political editor who was recently accused in Nick Davies’ book on the British media of becoming too cosy with Alastair Campbell so that he became “a conduit for government announcements”, it is suggested that colleagues feared that Ahmed “had crossed the line between dispassionate journalist and government aide”.

Of course a lot of arts journalism is PR led, too – and there’s an increasingly worrying trend for actors to employ personal PRs who not only set the terms of an interview (and even sometimes sit in on them, too) but also seek to control the outlets it can go to, requiring you to sign a release that says you will go back to them if you seek to use it elsewhere than the place originally agreed to.

It’s becoming almost déjà vu for theatre companies to want to throw off the constricting shackles of traditional theatre spaces and take over other “found” spaces to create their work in: there have been shows on the Edinburgh fringe that have taken place in public toilets and have even had the (necessarily tiny) audience seated in the back of a car as it was being driven around the city. Two of the best things I saw last year were Neil Bartlett productions that saw Genet’s The Maids played out in a backstairs room of a Brighton hotel, and even better, an adaptation of the Holocaust memoir The Piano staged in a hauntingly atmospheric Manchester museum space attic that is next to a disused railway platform and sidings, adding a frisson of recognition one now inevitably has, from endless movies, to how prisoners were transported to the camps.

Just last week I also saw a company called Angels in the Architecture take over the Royal Apartments at Kensington Palace to stage their version of Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage in – the story of one romantically abandoned queen being played out in the one-time home of another, Diana, Princess of Wales. But quite apart from those subconscious (or maybe self-conscious) associations, it was of course part of the pleasure of the evening to take an intimate peek inside this palace.

So shows like this turn us into sightseers, as much about seeing the venue as they are about seeing the show.

Chita Rivera begins her stage cabaret act with the Jerome Kern/Dorothy Fields classic “I Won’t Dance”, but despite the song claiming that “My heart won’t let my feet do things they should do”, her legs insist before too long – and she has wins our hearts entirely. At 75, she is still astonishingly lithe and limber, despite a close encounter with a taxi kind in 1986 that nearly ended her career: “Everything stretches a little differently now, when you have sixteen screws in your leg and a new hip!”, she told me when I interviewed her in New York in November, the full version of which you can read in the current (February 7) issue of The Stage.

I saw her on her home turf then at Feinstein’s, as I blogged about here at the time here, but seeing her again at London’s Shaw on Friday evening — on the first of a three-night run that has, alas, now finished – I was struck by something anew: they just don’t make them like her anymore. And nor can they.

I’ve previously reported here that actor David Haig recently told me how matinees nowadays are busier than ever: ““When I was first in the West End you could not rely on the matinees to be full,” he told me, “but nowadays you can rely on the matinees to be full and not the evenings. I think it is to do with a generation of the public who used to go in the evenings, but who are now older and more comfortable going to a matinee.”

This was born out yesterday when I went to see the quintessential matinee play featuring a quintessential matinee star: the revival of The Importance of Being Earnest with Penelope Keith. The Vaudeville Theatre was so packed that it felt like being at a Wednesday matinee at Richmond. And – proving that I, too, am well on my way to becoming a matinee lady – I am also fond of repeating myself, so let me do that and say what I said the last time I wrote about matinees: “There is something uniquely reassuring to feel the warm glow of appreciation that comes from an audience who have invested in going to the theatre all of their lives.”

The nominations for this year’s Olivier Awards, officially announced this morning online at 12.01am, represent a clear divide that reflect an increasing reality: it’s the subsidised sector that was responsible for most of the theatrical excellence over the last year, at least as far as these awards are concerned, with 46 of the 75 nominations in the 18 theatre categories going to productions and people seen in shows that were either seen at subsidised venues, or originated in them before transferring to the West End.

The commercial sector mainly scored on musicals only: of the remaining 29 nominations taken by them, no less than 24 were for West End-originated musicals or work done in them, either as actors, directors or designers. They were for just four shows: Hairspray with a record-breaking 11, The Lord of the Rings and The Drowsy Chaperone with five each, and Little Shop of Horrors with three. (Two nominations were also taken by the West End transfer for Fiddler on the Roof, but that originated at Shefffield’s Crucible Theatre).

I was noting here only the other day how the attempt at price gouging with a top price of $450 that was instituted by the producers of Broadway’s Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, its principal creator, and Robert FX Sillerman, the latter of whom is now taking the rap for that policy) has created a damaging negative perception around the show. It is now desperately shifting unsold inventory at the half price booth, less than a couple of months after its opening in New York, and is now courting the group bookers that it was previously shunning.

By contrast, when the London production of Avenue Q was struggling to build its own audience a year ago, the producers took drastic action: as I reported here at the time, they reduced weekday top prices to £35. And what has happened? At a time of the year when the West End is typically limping along, Avenue Q is doing stonking business.

We are used to seeing National Theatre and the occasional RSC show heading to Broadway or at least BAM (across the river in Brooklyn, and I’m ashamed to say, a place I am yet to visit – and I’ve been coming to New York since 1983)! But the transfer of Sunday in the Park with George from Southwark’s Menier Chocolate Factory back to the city of the show’s original creation, where it is now previewing at Studio 54, is surely something of a first; for an unsubsidised London fringe theatre to be playing with the big boys is simply amazing.

New York’s Roundabout Theatre Company are producing it, in association with commercial partners that include Menier benefactor Bob Boyett, but it is definably the Menier production, even down to an above-the-title credit for the Menier Chocolate Factory (followed, in brackets, by the line “David Babani, Artistic Director” – though when the production was originally created there and the venue duly took an Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer, which I previously wrote about here, the venue was co-run with Danielle Tarento, now obviously removed from this production’s history).

When the Sunday Times last Sunday reported a list of companies that were likely to be reprieved in the Arts Council’s swingeing cuts, following a conversation that arts correspondent Richard Brooks had with the Arts Council chairman Sir Christopher Frayling, I wrote here last Monday that it seemed to me that “once again the Arts Council has wrong-footed itself with this pre-emptory statement from Frayling”. The Arts Council were quick to issue their own immediate rebuttal, and I updated my entry later that day to include it: “The names and number of organisations mentioned in the Sunday Times article are purely speculation on the part of the journalist”.

But comparing now the list of those organisations that have been reprieved with the ones that Brooks was apparently only speculating about, he seems to have speculated with a remarkable degree of accuracy.

Walking down West 45th Street from Broadway, what do you see? Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer is at the Booth; Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll is at the Bernard Jacobs (which I still prefer to call the Royale); Aaron Sorkin’s The Farnsworth Invention is at the Music Box; and Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County is at the Imperial. There’s also A Chorus Line (at the Schoenfeld, or Plymouth as I again prefer to remember it) and Avenue Q (at the Golden). Real new plays (two originated in London, two from American writers) are outnumbering the musicals four to two along this particular stretch of hallowed Broadway turf.

And walking up Shaftesbury Avenue, by contrast, what do we find? The revival of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret is now in its 2nd year at the Lyric; next door at the Apollo is the vanity (or maybe insanity) filler show An Audience with the Mafia; then there’s the Gielgud, currently hosting a five-week season of G&S operetta from the Carl Rosa Opera Company; and then the Queen’s has Les Miserables. Time was that each of these four houses would typically host some of the most prestigious plays in town.

Of course you need to take a broader picture than just those two streets in each city, and another snapshot taken in a few weeks time could yield an entirely different picture.