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”.
Of course, it’s nothing new: the producers of Chicago have long advocated its application, as long as the celebrity value of whoever is rotated through the show can get it attention – a (perhaps inadvertently) ironic take on the show’s own satire of the fickleness of celebrity.
Mind you, the West End has suddenly taken a Scandinavian turn that’s casting celebrity in another light again: with Nina Söderquist, another TV reality show created star going into Spamalot courtesy of a Swedish series, there may be Easyjet-loads worth of visitors from there; and once they’ve seen Spamalot, the producers of Chicago are now banking on them wanting to stay on and see their show, so have now just cast Birgitte Hjort Sørensen, who played Roxie Hart in the Copenhagen production last year, to take over that same role in the West End production at the Cambridge on Monday.
And as if reality TV isn’t enough, Andrew Lloyd Webber has brilliantly marshalled the PR value of TV to give another more established West End talent a wider public: before putting Summer Strallen into The Sound of Music next Tuesday, she’s been playing a character, Summer Shaw, in TV’s Hollyoaks who dreams of being in a West End show – and gets her wish here. The real and the fictional become strangely blurred.
Leave a comment