March 2008 Archives

The battery has been down on this blog, too, for the last few days. But now that we’re back, I can catch up the weekend over here in New York, where the other Battery is also down. Not that I’ve been that far downtown, either; but thanks to one Broadway show, I have at least been as far uptown as 181st Street to Washington Heights, from the comfort of a stalls seat on West 46th Street. (Ah, the joys of the theatre: you can travel the world without having to stray beyond the comfort zone of Times Square!) That show, of course, is In the Heights, a downtown show (well, it began on 37th Street, to be more accurate) that is now playing in midtown and that is about uptown!

In what is being regarded as a poor season for new musicals on Broadway, the two most anticipated blockbusters have failed to send queues around the block: Young Frankenstein is now seriously ailing at the box office with its highly controversial premium seating that has now been totally abandoned and discount offers doing the rounds everywhere; and a friend told me that when he saw Disney’s The Little Mermaid the stalls were half full.

If you’re managing to read this, then the web server is still up – but Scott, our lovely webmaster, has warned me that blog access will temporarily be suspended today as they are migrated to a new server, and the interface is upgraded. I’ll be temporarily suspended, too, when that happens, mid-air – en route to (yet another trip to) New York. And it’s just as well: I need a break (and so do you)!

I certainly know how to fill a day, and that’s without even the jetlag still to come that will throw my internal body clock out of kilter: yesterday morning I was up at 5am to write yesterday’s blog entry (a daily priority!), and today I’m bettering that with a 4am start.

A good friend has been ribbing me mercilessly for daring to imply, in a recent blog headline here that Jersey Boys was a musical of magnificence – and perhaps I should indeed clarify. Worn down, as those of us who know and love our musicals, by the endless parade – or maybe that should be charade – of jukebox shows lazily constructed out of past pop hits, I was hankering after a glint of originality and style; and Jersey Boys finally delivered a bit of both, in its smart storytelling device and equally smart production.

However, as Martin Samuel suggested in a recent feature in The Times, “Musicals don’t arrive neatly packaged in a CD case at the Virgin Megastore like a series of dots waiting to be joined at a planning meeting by a producer hard-up for ideas and original material. They are new concepts, fresh works. Jersey Boys might have risen above the jukebox-musical formula with its clever take on the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and it pitches up from Broadway clutching four Tony Awards, including Best Musical, but it has not introduced one fresh note of music, one lyric that hasn’t been heard, to the world. You want a sing-song? That is what the piano in the pub is for. I like a show.”

The lights went out but the show still went on. With most of central London, it seems, in a constant state of being dug up, it’s not just difficult to walk along Shaftesbury Avenue (and don’t even think of trying to walk down Old Compton Street uninterrupted), but also local businesses are being affected by the sort of regular power outages that they’ve come to expect in South Africa, for instance, at the moment, where power is being rationed as the state-owned electricity company implements a series of rolling power-cuts (known euphemistically there as “load-shedding”) because supply cannot keep pace with demand. But this is central London, for heaven’s sake – and, as with the ailing infrastructure of the tube and the crumbling state of most of our theatres, no one much wants to take responsibility for such things.

But the Gielgud Theatre is one of the theatres that has had lavish love and attention bestowed on it, courtesy of producer/theatre owner Cameron Mackintosh; and when, mid-way through last night’s press performance of God of Carnage, the lights suddenly blew, I wondered briefly if it was a dramatic effect as the actors continued to play through very much diminished lighting. But no – soon a stage manager interrupted Janet McTeer mid-sentence and said they would have to stop the show. And minutes later, Cameron himself walked to the front of the stalls and told the audience it wasn’t because he hadn’t fed the electricity meter — Les Mis was down next door, too.

Would you do anything for Oliver!? Well, I performed the ultimate sacrifice myself – I stayed in on a Saturday night to watch the edition of I’d Do Anything that introduced the finalists; but then I was in Brighton over the wind-swept bank holiday weekend, and it was warmer inside than out.

While the earlier two rounds of casting by reality BBC TV shows had produced Connie Fisher (professionally trained but had hitherto been professionally unemployed) and Lee Mead (who had already had understudy roles in the West End under his belt), it is now starting to look like this is merely a professional audition in front of the TV cameras: one finalist, Francesca Jackson, has even had a principal role in the West End, appearing as Joanne in the recent production of Rent Remixed, girlfriend to Maureen – who happened to be played by Denise van Outen, one of the judges of this show. Is this a conflict of interest, or just a natural extension of how showbusiness works anyway?

But then some commentators are starting to notice that there are other even more serious potential commercial conflicts of interest going on.

It was one of those days, where a different sort of show was taking place in the audience to the one onstage – and made the stage experience correspondingly hard(er) to engage with. Of course theatregoing is always a complete experience, and it is impossible to separate the audience you see something with from what is happening onstage – at the best of times, the audience becomes an integral part of the transaction, and not just in a Punchdrunk sort of way (though you might well be left feeling punch drunk by the experience when that communication circuit is completed).

But yesterday I had a triple fill of different kinds of circuit breakers, and not just because in the evening I actually saw a triple bill.

If, according to the theatre critic character in Nicholas de Jongh’s Plague Over England, going to theatre for him is about avoiding the cold douche of reality, there’s no such possibility at the Tricycle – as a quote from Time Out on their website has it, “The Tricycle has a soaring reputation for making sure that its audiences engage in what is happening in the world”. And that’s born out with typical Tricycle tenacity and an unexpected dramatic ferocity in the current transfer there of the RSC’s production of Roy Williams’ Days of Significance, which officially opened there last night.

Not that most of the critics were there last night: thanks to one of those press night clashes for which the RSC seem particularly adept (or maybe that should be inept?), the year’s biggest musical was opening in the West End too.

When I fill up at the petrol station and I’m offered premium fuel at a higher price, I never know quite what that means – all I know is that I have a faint feeling of being fleeced (mind you, nowadays one has a faint feeling every time you fill up, period. Whenever I tell my American friends that it costs me around $110 to fill my standard sized car now, they are amazed; their President – and our then Prime Minister – may have pursued an illegal war, but at least they can still fill up their 4x4s for $30; what benefit did we get?)

But when The Producers first opened on Broadway in 2001, its producers became their own touts, introducing “premium” seats at four times the “top” price so that they could cream off the profits that would otherwise go to scalpers. It worked with The Producers, at least initially, as the laws of supply and demand in the theatre mean that when the demand far exceeds the supply, there’s no way to increase the revenue by adding seats so simply increasing the price imposed a different kind of regulation on the market. Those who were impatient to see the show could do so, at a price; or otherwise wait until, as they inevitably did, the demand fell away and the supply duly increased.

In The Mikado, Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, famously has a little list “of society’s offenders who might be underground,/And who never would be missed”. The media, of course, is obsessed with lists of the opposite kind – of those that, in the opinion of the compiler(s), matter. Leaving aside the impossibility of achieving some kind of objective finality to such things, it’s always fun to see who someone thinks counts – and suddenly the spotlight has been turned on critics.

It helps that we’ve been in the news lately – thanks to the successful appeal against a libel conviction by an Irish restaurant critic who had been sued for her unfavourable review of a Belfast pizza restaurant, and a London theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh who has been in receipt of mostly good reviews himself for his own first full-length play, Plague Over England. The simple principles of writing reviews, favourable or unfavourable, was summed up by the apparently offending restaurant critic Caroline Workman, who said after the appeal, “Nobody likes a bad review, but if I can’t write honestly, good reviews are pointless.” Interestingly, I’ve had Nick de Jongh previously threaten to sue me over comments I’ve made about him in this blog (although no feedback, yet, to my positive response to his play, both here and in my Sunday Express review).

But now critics in every discipline have been put under the critical microscope ourselves, for a list in the Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine that evaluates the best now working internationally, and can be found here.

Arthur Miller’s The Man Who Had All the Luck – his first Broadway play and a fast flop that ran for just 4 performances in its original 1944 production – didn’t of course prove that Miller was that man; nor would the apparent good fortune of the most famous event of his private life, his marriage to Marilyn Monroe twelve years later, who was then one of the most desired female movie stars on the planet. The title of the 1961 screenplay he wrote for what turned out to be her last film seems to be more prescient: The Misfits. But watching the Donmar Warehouse revival of The Man Who Had All the Luck yesterday afternoon, I started to wonder if I was the man who has all the luck.

Unlike David Beeves, the title character of Miller’s play, I won’t ruin it by constantly doubting it and waiting for that luck to run out, but will relish and celebrate it instead. Days don’t get too much better than yesterday’s.

I have long credited Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea for being the play that changed my life – I previously wrote here about the schools trip I was taken on to see a production of it when I was 14, and which duly awakened a personal passion for the theatre that of course has also become my professional journey, too. Every time I see it now, of course, I marvel not just at the depth of feeling in the play in its story of unequal love and the distress, demands and sacrifice experienced by the parties to it, but just how the young me even had the slightest access to the dark charges of pain it releases. It’s great writing, of course; but somewhere within it is something universal, too: even though I could not possibly have yet experienced anything like it shows at 14, somehow I could see the future in it, too that now, 30 years later, I truly comprehend.

I try to never miss the chance to see a production now.

Producers are, inevitably, a glass nearly-full breed rather than a glass half-empty one: they always travel hopefully. No one, Bialystock and Bloom apart, ever intends to produce a flop, I’m sure. But after watching the revival of Ring Round the Moon at the Playhouse last month, which I saw at the final preview the night before it opened, I wrote in my Sunday Express review: “When a character played by Leigh Lawson gleefully tears up bank notes, I couldn’t help feeling that the producers of this production might be doing the same thing with this deeply old-fashioned evening.” And lo and behold, an early closing notice has been duly posted for the production to close at the end of this month, with a release issued yesterday declaring, “Despite positive reviews, ticket sales have not been sufficient to sustain the run and therefore the producers have made the difficult decision to close the show.”

Of course, critics aren’t always right – I would have said the same thing about We Will Rock You (or indeed for the prospects for transferring Les Miserables from the Barbican to the West End all those years ago).

It is one of the greatest regrets of my theatregoing career that I managed to miss the one-night run of Oscar Wilde – the Musical when it came and went from the Shaw Theatre in the space of one October night in 2004. I was in New York at the time, so it passed me by; but in what sounds like a uniquely jinxed opening (and closing) night, the sound itself was partly to blame – according to The Guardian review at the time, “You begin to wonder whether the sound system is being affected by the hefty rumbling of Oscar Wilde turning in his grave.”

Call me morbid, but I love to ambulance-chase dying musicals on their way to the graveyard (I even went to the final matinee of Desperately Seeking Susan to see it once again before it shut shop, just so I could lock it into my memory forever). I am always delighted to be able to say that I saw Carrie both at Stratford-upon-Avon and in its short-lived Broadway incarnation, for which it has become a by-word in musical flops – musical theatre historian Ken Mandelbaum even named his tome about flop musicals “Not Since Carrie”.

But now, having missed Oscar Wilde in London, I may at least get a chance to see it in New York.

It’s not just because we’ve already had the Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Awards (plus the South Bank Show Awards and, in this reality TV era where the public is forever being invited to make its own choices, Whatsonstage.com’s increasingly high-profile Theatregoers’ Choice Awards) that the Oliviers have a déjà vu feeling about them. But also, by coming last and so late in the day, all but two productions to receive awards last night have long closed. Even many of the entertainments that interspersed the awards last night were from shows that had already shuttered: we got performances from the casts of Little Shop of Horrors, Parade and Fiddler on the Roof, plus Hairspray and The Magic Flute (the only two shows still running to get awards) and The Lord of the Rings.

That’s no problem, of course, in terms of celebrating and remembering theatrical excellence; but unlike, say, New York’s Tony Awards, which have a crucial commercial imperative, there is little value to them here in those terms. And also, of course, though the awards are meant to reflect the diversity and appeal of London theatre, they routinely manage to show mostly how head and shoulders above the rest the subsidised theatre is: not just that seven out of 19 theatre awards went to the National Theatre, but the rest of the tally saw productions and personnel at the Royal Court taking two, the Barbican two, the Donmar Warehouse one, and productions that came to the West End via Chichester and the Young Vic three more — all of which left the commercial West End itself winning just four awards, all of them for Hairspray.

What applies to the fine art of striptease, in the immortal words of Gypsy’s Mazeppa, is also nowadays the ultimate maxim for modern producing: “You Gotta Have a Gimmick/If You Wanna Have a Chance!” No one exemplifies it more brilliantly than Andrew Lloyd Webber: as his wife Madeleine proudly proclaimed to the Evening Standard after Summer Strallen’s official opening night in The Sound of Music on Monday night, “Andrew at [nearly] 60 is coming up with the ideas that younger producers should be having”. She was, of course, referring to his masterstroke of using television to promote that production, first by turning a complete unknown into a star when Connie Fisher was found via reality TV contest – and now by turning an established West End talent into a showbiz wannabe via a TV soap, Hollyoaks, when Summer Strallen was “infiltrated” into the series in a storyline that had her aspiring to be in The Sound of Music.

As the Standard story put it, Lloyd Webber himself “even made a cameo appearance on he serial when her character stalked him and demanded the chance to prove she could make it in the West End”. And Lloyd Webber is the past master, too, at the soundbite: “We had the most fantastic spring with Connie and I think we’re going to have a glorious Summer”, he quipped to the Standard (though he did, at least, have the good grace to preface it by saying it was “a corny thing to say”).

When I went to the first night of La Cage Aux Folles at the Menier back in January, I managed to become part of the show – and some of the reviews (and diary columns, too!) – when Philip Quast, playing nightclub host Georges, managed to marry me off to Quentin Letts in a blissful piece of counter-intuitive relationship making. Now that the Menier run is about to end this weekend – and no announcement, yet, of a transfer, so this may be the last we see of it – I went again last night, and this time had an even stranger, but even better, evening!

It started off with discovering I was sat at the same front row table as the mother of the Menier’s last hit – namely, Patrick Marber’s mum! And just along the row, waving hello, was the Menier’s next attraction – Maria Friedman, who was once, of course, Quast’s co-star in a break-out show for both of them, the original production of Sunday in the Park with George that they starred in together at the National Theatre – a show, of course, since revived at this very theatre before going on to the West End and now Broadway.

But there were also two understudy notices up.

I’ve got to finally hand it to Nicholas de Jongh. Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I’ve had regular reason to comment on the Evening Standard’s chief theatre critic’s behaviour in the stalls and in print (when he outrageously, in my opinion, wrote about “a very few inches of adolescent male flesh” in reviewing Daniel Radcliffe’s nude appearance in Equus). But now that he’s premiered his own first full-length play, Plague Over England, at the Finborough, not only does it have a high degree of self-revelation (one of the leading characters is a critic, who tells us of his life’s calling that it is an attempt to “avoid the cold douche of reality”), but also has him cheekily referring to his own paper, the Evening Standard, as a “nasty little gossip sheet”. (I wonder how Nick’s editor, Veronica Wadley, took that line in when she attended the press night last Friday). And Nick, whom I have regularly seen “resting his eyes” in he stalls, even has the theatre critic losing his job when he falls asleep in the stalls and snoozes once too often.

But his play kept me wide-awake last night, even though I had (not so freshly) arrived off a flight from San Francisco at lunchtime yesterday.

Time was that critics would rush out of the theatre as the curtain fell, rush to a bar, car or office and scramble off a review, then phone it into their papers – where it would appear in the next morning’s edition. Nowadays, however, not only is the middleman (or usually woman) removed with copytakers largely a thing of the past as critics file their copy direct from their laptops by e-mail, but even the destination is different: who needs to wait for the paper to even be printed?

I know that when I write this blog I can upload it live on this site within about three minutes of finishing it. And The Stage itself has been at the forefront of reviewing practice, uploading reviews to the website attached to this blog well ahead of their publication in the paper itself, which – since it is a weekly – would mean a long wait for the reviews otherwise.

But now even the dailies are at it.

Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s 1971 musical Follies famously set the imploding relationships of two one-time Follies dancers with their husbands against a final reunion of former performers before the theatre itself was imploded. It was staged as if it were a Follies show, but that was the closest I thought I’d get to a genre that was not merely dying but apparently dead.

Not so, however. The tradition turns out to live gloriously on in Palm Springs, a Californian desert oasis that nests in the immediate, sometimes cooling, shadow of a mountain range that I came to on Friday to chill in (or rather warm up in the sun at) after my hectic few days in Las Vegas. This town, once famous for its predominantly retired population, is now possibly also even more famous for being one of the West Coast’s major gay resorts – and the two happily (and occasionally unhappily) collide in The Palm Spring Follies, a show that features an unbelievably sprightly and vigorous onstage population of performers, many with former Broadway credits, with ages stretching from their 50s to 84. And instead of being set in a theatre that is being pulled down, the show is being performed at one that it has actually rescued.