A tale of two cities in musical revivals (and socialising opportunities)…..

Seeing Gypsy last night, for instance, I realised that this is the third Broadway revival I’ve seen in the last 19 years of the show, from Tyne Daly (in 1989) and Bernadette Peters (2003) to the current Madame Rose of Patti LuPone. I’ve also seen, over the same period, Betty Buckley just across the river at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. In London, however, it has not been seen since 1973 when Angela Lansbury played the role at the Piccadilly Theatre, ahead of a Broadway transfer the next year.

I interviewed Angela on the phone only last week, before coming to New York, and she told me of that production, “We did Gypsy in London first - it was an experiment in a way. The boys who produced it, Barry Brown and Fritz Holt, were young producers, and they had managed to get the money together and the co-operation of Steve Sondheim, Jule Styne and Arthur Laurents, to allow them to do it. They believed I could do it, but I had terrible fears of being unable to sing it - after all, this was a role I had associated 100% with Ethel Merman, even though I’d never seen her in it, but I cherished the vinyl recording, which was the best show album ever made. So I resisted the idea of doing it; I didn’t want to try take on Merman’s legacy. But I managed to get myself up to a point where I could sing it, and brought my own interpretation to it. It turned out to be a wonderful, wonderful thing to have done, and it took me back to Broadway.”

So it was the West End that led both Lansbury and Gypsy back to Broadway, for the first time since it had originally been done in 1959. But South Pacific, from exactly ten years earlier, has never until now had a Broadway revival. Yet in London, we’ve had two in the last twenty years alone: at the Prince of Wales in 1988 and at the National in 2001. Now Lincoln Center Theatre are staging a long overdue New York revival that opens officially tonight; and at last offers a homegrown R&H again, too: the last Lincoln Center revival of R&H’s Carousel came from the National to the Beaumont in 1994; while Oklahoma!, too, came from the National to Broadway’s Gershwin in 2002.

That phenomenon of taking coals to Newcastle is also exemplified by the season’s third major revival, Sunday in the Park with George, that had to wait for a London return before it made its current Broadway one, and has now been imported to Roundabout’s Studio 54 in that production, complete with its Olivier Award winning leads, Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell. I saw Dan sitting in front of me at Juno the other night at City Center; and the next day, his day off, he told me he was off to have two wisdom teeth out. But even though the understudy was primed and ready to step in for him on Tuesday night, he was back onstage. And lovely Jenna, whom I have known through both her mum and another mutual friend for a number of years, came over for brunch on Tuesday morning with her partner Raymond Coulthard. (My host Mike at the apartment I am staying at is a big fan of Extras, and before they came over we dug out the episode that Ray appears in, hilariously playing a leading actor who beds an extra and delivers her the immortal instruction, “Put some minge around it”).

That’s one of the fun things about New York: there’s more time for everyone to be more sociable. Partly it’s a question of geography - Manhattan, and Broadway in particular, is much more compact than London, so we’re all literally closer to each other. But there’s also more of a sense of community over here, and you only need to go to Bar Centrale - the bar above Joe Allen’s on West 46th Street - as I did last night after seeing Gypsy, to run into a who’s who of Broadway: last night Matthew Broderick was at an adjoining table, and Michael Riedel was working the room, too!