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.
And just as Young Frankenstein signally failed to live up to the promise of Mel Brooks’ previous film-to-stage adaptation of The Producers, so the adaptation of another John Waters film, Cry-Baby, does not look like lightning will strike twice, either, to replicate the success of Hairspray. Despite a hugely welcome discount offer that has seats for all previews being offered with a top price of just $54 (and wouldn’t it be great if this sort of policy was more widely adopted in the West End as well as on Broadway, where nowadays the discounts are typically so paltry you might as well wait till the show is actually ready rather than pay to subsidise a developmental process?), there were acres of empty seats in the mezzanine even on a Saturday night, which is when I saw it. And that, I hasten to add, was before the interval: a friend ruefully asked me last night, “But did you stay for the second half?” When I said I had, he replied, “You’re the only person I know who has!”
But if Young Frankenstein and The Little Mermaid can be discounted from the Tony race for best new musical — and possibly Cry-Baby, too, will have to get its handkerchiefs out and start weeping now - it has seriously cleared the field for smaller shows to make their mark instead. So In the Heights may well reach the heights; but for my money - or at least press comp - the show to beat is Passing Strange, arguably the strangest, yet also the most beguiling, new musical to have reached Broadway since Spring Awakening. Both of these musicals show that the form is at last waking up to a new sound, look and feel: while most musicals seem to mine a nostalgic vein in period and/or style, these are utterly contemporary. Spring Awakening may be based on an old play and be set in the past, but it propels its stories of teenage sexual angst right into the here and now with songs like “Totally Fucked”. But Passing Strange is even more completely personal; its creator and lead character Stew is right up there onstage in it, as he narrates a show that is like a confessional rock concert about his own rites of passage from South Central LA to a European odyssey through Amsterdam and Berlin. (Intriguingly, one of the producers is Britain’s very own Bill Kenwright, and it is wonderful to see him supporting the future of the American musical as well as being such a flag-bearer for the survival of the commercial play in the West End).
Still to come are two more small shows with bigger ambitions: A Catered Affair, now previewing at the Walter Kerr (and which I’m seeing tonight), that comes to New York from San Diego; and Glory Days, a new musical by creators still in their early 20s, that has just been announced for the Circle in the Square, coming from Washington DC’s Signature Theatre. Together with Xanadu, which opened last summer, that makes eight shows now competing for one of four possible nomination slots for Best New Musical. It’s going to be an interesting race….
At least I’m seeing some real musicals over here. I am hugely relieved to have at least missed one back home: the Spanish Peter Pan - El Musical opened in the West End yesterday, and sounds like it has lived down to the promise of the press event I attended earlier this month - in the (online) pages to which this blog is attached, Paul Vale generously writes that “this production rarely rises above second-rate pantomime”, while in the Standard, Fiona Mountford concludes that it is not “so much an awfully big adventure as an awfully big mistake.” Unsurprisingly, it is handled by the same PR who looked after such similar misadventures as Oscar Wilde - the Musical and Murderous Instincts. The oddness of it all is amplified by the fact that the press opening was designated for yesterday afternoon — a Sunday, but also a Sunday when the clocks went forward. As a colleague remarked to me by e-mail today, “Whilst most of the UK lost only an hour yesterday, I lost 3 hours!”
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