Leading critics… and leading men

Of course, we don’t know what criteria they used – though the judges are listed here and include Robert Butler, former theatre critic of the Independent on Sunday; Jasper Rees, a regular (and excellent) arts interviewer for the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times; Simon O’Hagan, former Arts Editor of the Independent on Sunday; Matthew Sweet, who did a brief stint as a number two on the Evening Standard’s theatre desk; and author and former literary editor Blake Morrison, who has himself reviewed theatre for The Observer a few times. So, as the introduction to the list has it, the list was subject to peer review – the kind of thing that the Arts Council coincidentally rejects when it came to evaluating their theatre client list – and has a kind of authority, even if it is, in its own words, “not a scientific survey”.

Just four theatre critics are listed: Michael Billington, Mark Lawson, Robert Cushman and Daniel Mendelsohn. I won’t argue with Billington’s inclusion – at 68, he still remains the most incisive, enthusiastic and diligent of my colleagues, and I was amazed, going to the tiny Union Theatre on Friday night for their rare revival of John Gay’s 3 Hours After Marriage, to hear that he’d beaten me to it, going the night before; even after all of these years on the job, he’s still tracking the fringe. I never see Lawson – since I don’t watch television much, but his brief is much wider than just theatre on Late Review, which could of course arguably make him a better critic, since he has a wider perspective than the rest of us.

I used to revere Cushman when I was growing up and he was theatre critic on The Observer – now he is theatre critic of Canada’s National Post, and I just found a review of his of a new show in Toronto called 3 Mo’ Divas that he blissfully describes as “an evening of gold-plated copper-bottomed garbage.” He goes on: “The rangy vocal demands necessitate two alternating casts, billed in strict no-losers-here fashion as Cast 1 and Cast A. (This brand of egalitarianism was anticipated years ago by Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents, who in their musical Anyone Can Whistle divvied up a whole town into a Group A and a Group 1. They meant it, though, as satire.) I saw Cast A. I doubt if it matters much which you see, since the format is designed to stamp all the individuality out of both of them and their material, with every song choreographed to within an inch of its death.” It’s that kind of incisive commentary that I remember so fondly from his Observer days, too – how many other critics working today would have such an encyclopaedic knowledge of musical theatre as to reference a rare flop Sondheim musical so precisely?

But I’m puzzled by fourth choice Daniel Mendelsohn, whom I have to confess I have never even heard of. According to his personal website, he won the 2002 George Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism for his theatre reviews for the New York Review of Books, for whom he also writes on book and film. I’m obviously just not well read enough: he is also the author of a memoir of “sexual identity and family history”, a “scholarly study of Greek tragedy”, and a best-seller in which he sought to discover the fates of six family members who perished in the Holocaust.

So I will start to pay more attention to the theatre coverage of the New York Review of Books now. But there’s only so much international reading you can do, and I already try to keep track of what’s being written about on both sides of the Atlantic. (A handy shortcut to keep up-to-date on New York theatre writing can be found on broadwaystars.com, a one-stop source of links to current theatre news, features and reviews from every major outlet. If only someone would do the same thing here….).

But talking of Broadway stars: we had a brief appearance here by one last Friday and Saturday, when Lauren Kennedy came to the Menier Chocolate Factory for a couple of performances to introduce her new album, “Here and Now”. She has a bubbly, blonde effervescence, and the album (and concert) were a delight for the fact that she chooses to concentrate on mostly new material by new(ish) writers, rather than the more established, well-trodden repertoire. But Lauren – to whom London theatregoers were first introduced when she starred here in the National Theatre production of South Pacific — also brought out her National co-star Philip Quast, who until the previous weekend of course was starring on this very stage in La Cage Aux Folles, to join her – and he knocked me out with his rendition of “Letting You Go” from Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years. If I were to draw up a list myself of the world’s foremost leading musical men, he might well be at the very top of that list now.