June 2008 Archives

You sometimes see review columns, particularly with the Sunday papers, by-lined by an unfamiliar name (except to eagle-eyed regular readers who actually keep track of who’s who in the critical world), being footnoted with the declaration that the usual critic “is away”. This keeps their name in currency and suggests that they will be back. The daily papers, of course, have teams of critics; so when - as he has been for the last couple of weeks - Benedict Nightingale of The Times doesn’t appear, they don’t draw attention to this fact but you simply notice that Sam Marlowe is covering more things than usual.

Things are more confusing on the Evening Standard where, in the absence of Nicholas de Jongh, another Nick - Curtis - pops up at some of the bigger openings, instead of the “official” deputy Fiona Mountford.

All of this is by way of explaining that I am away from today to this time next week, so I will not be appearing in this spot until tomorrow week, Tuesday July 8.

It’s a recurring theme here to note just how swamped with openings we occasionally become - just three Mondays ago I came back from New York to the prospect of three clashing first nights on that same night, while the next night had two, as I reported here. At least it meant that I was spared having to see Dickens Unplugged (which is officially unplugged tomorrow); but if only we could have been spared All Bob’s Women, too.

However, that has managed to arrive in a week when we have been having trouble filling our critical dance cards; and so it is that some of us have been lured to the Arts yet again, even though it is fast turning into a venue where a sense of doom envelops you the moment you walk in.

That’s because a sense memory has started to attach itself to a place which has recently only seen terrible shows.

Blog readers,

Below appears the first guest blog on Shenton’s View. It is written by Alistair Smith, The Stage news editor, and is a trailer for a new blog to be launched on The Stage website which will deal with news comment and analysis.

For the moment I am happy to welcome it as an occasional guest on my own blog to introduce it to regular readers. Please feel free to comment and let us know what you think.

Mark

Yesterday I saw a classic musical, originally premiered in a Broadway theatre in 1956 (where it ran for barely two months), in an opera house and another contemporary musical, originally premiered in the West End in 1999 and now long-established as a global stage hit, re-made for the multiplex cinema.

It was interesting to see each adapt — or not — to their new environments; and while Candide, the famously problematic Leonard Bernstein-scored musical adaptation of Voltaire’s moral fable of a man’s journey through serial adversities, has found a new lease of life in opera houses (where its dramatic problems can be over-ridden by, or at least traded for, musical brilliance), maintaining the joy, spontaneity and surprises of the stage version of Mamma Mia! proves more difficult onscreen.

It’s partly, of course, a question of the audience itself and what we bring to it.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I go to the theatre a lot. Partly, of course, it’s because I do happen to love it - but fortunately, too, it’s my job to do so. (I often think that my theatregoing habit would be unsupportable if I actually had to pay for it!) But the job, for me, doesn’t stop there; it doesn’t just fill the nights but also most of the daytimes, too.

That’s because what I do isn’t merely defined by what happens onstage but also off it, and - in common with many other critics and arts journalists - I also write (and sometimes lecture) about the business of the theatre from the wings, whether interviewing actors one-to-one for profile pieces, hosting live interviews in front of audiences, chasing news stories, or talking to producers about more general business issues than the shows they are doing right now.

It benefits me in the sense that I get a wider perspective of this intense little world than just what happens when the curtain goes up; and I hope that the extra knowledge I get from this informs what I see when it does.

Were it not for the 19-day strike of stagehands that shut down most of Broadway last November, the figures released for the Broadway season that ended on May 25 would have broken all-time records, as reported here. While the shows grossed approximately $937.5million (including an estimate for Young Frankenstein, which alone amongst Broadway’s shows isn’t disclosing its takings), compared to the previous season’s record of $938.5m, it is estimated that were the strike not to have intervened grosses would have reached $975m. So that means that the strike - which didn’t, coincidentally, affect Young Frankenstein — cost approximately $37.5m in direct earnings.

But while the box office takings go ever skyward - partly propelled by the ticket prices that do, too (but also by year-on-year increases in attendances, which in the season just reported clocked up a paid attendance of 12.27m, against the previous year’s 12.3m, and which are estimated would have been 12.9m if the strike had not occurred) - so do the costs of putting the shows on in the first place and keeping them running, which is why the producers were seeking the concessions they did from the stagehands.

It’s a similar story in the West End.

It is hard work being a composer - and even harder to get a show put on, as any composer will tell you. But there are ways to make your work get heard - and far more widely than West 45th Street or Shaftesbury Avenue and their environs. It’s called, of course, the internet; and the London debut of American songwriter Jeff Blumenkrantz last night has demonstrated perfectly how its reach can work.

Last night’s concert happened, in fact, thanks to Facebook, and a Danish postgrad student at Mountview called Thomas Bay Pedersen; and due, in turn, to Jeff’s personal website, which brought his music to the ears of one of Thomas’s tutors back home in his native Denmark in the first place, and who introduced Thomas to Jeff’s work via the podcasts he offers there of many of his songs. Thomas duly connected with Jeff on facebook - and as they were chatting, Thomas mentioned how great it would be if Jeff could appear in London. Jeff replied that he was coming over in June, and Thomas suggested he contacted Amy Maiden - another Facebook ‘friend’ who has previously produced one-off concerts for other American writers Jason Robert Brown, Andrew Lippa and Georgia Stitt in London.

And so it is that Jeff was appearing in St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge last night under Amy’s auspices.

Theatre PRs — or publicists, as they call them on Broadway - play an even bigger role in managing the media there they do over here. And they have wider responsibilities to do so - it’s their job, for instance, to keep the programmes (Playbills) updated, which - since they are printed weekly - is a constant task. So while London theatre PR offices are typically a handful of people, at the most, if not one-man (or woman) operations, New York’s biggies - in particular, the two mega-agencies, Boneau/Bryan-Brown and Barlow-Hartman - seemingly have armies of publicists and assistants; and do an amazing job at it, too.

But now this behind-the-scenes function, which is already accorded a place on the title page of the Playbill and poster, is not only moving into the spotlight but above the marquee itself, with the news yesterday that a Broadway house is being named after a Broadway publicist for the first time, with the brother and sister-in-law of the late Sam Friedman using funds from a foundation they established to donate a substantial sum of money to Manhattan Theatre Club to re-name their Broadway house, the Biltmore, in his honour.

There’s nothing new to rich people buying and selling honours - just ask Tony Blair - but on Broadway, the commercialisation of the naming game is taking on new levels.

We all need to step out of ourselves from time to time. And so it is that I came yesterday to be understudying no less than Elaine Paige in her occasional ‘Spotlight on….’ series of West End and Broadway celebrity interviews at the Shaw Theatre. With Elaine unwell, I was asked to step in to hold the spotlight on Michael Ball; I’m not much of a follow-spot operator (though I did do it once in my student days at the Cambridge ADC, when the operator didn’t show up on a show I was producing!), but the good thing about Michael is that - like all star performers - he knows how to find the glow of the spotlight and bask in it.

So although the audience may have been expecting both the leading man and woman of the West End musical stage to be in the same place at the same time, they got the leading man and me instead; but since that leading man was the ever bouncing Ball, I reckon they still got pretty good value.

It’s a recurring theme of this blog to point out how divided theatre critics can be on the same show. But of course it doesn’t just go for me and my colleagues, but also for ones in all disciplines: it’s been fascinating this week, for instance, to see the polarisation amongst dance critics in their reaction to English National Ballet’s Strictly Gershwin arena stage dance show.

On the one hand, there have been four star raves from Judith Mackrell in The Guardian and Debra Craine in The Times; on the other, there’s been a pan from Ismene Brown in the Daily Telegraph and a one-star review from Sarah Frater in the Evening Standard.

As always, it’s a question of taste and aesthetics.

On Sunday, a friend e-mailed to ask me if I’d seen Anthony Neilson’s Relocated at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs - “I was one minute late yesterday, due to roadworks and a very bad bus situation, and the show has no latecomers point, so I had to miss the show. Wondering if I can miss it, like I could have missed his last play at the Soho.” I don’t know the answer, as I’ve not seen it yet (but I will find out next Monday).

As it happens, though, I’d been at the Court myself the night before, but in the even more intimate confines of an upstairs rehearsal room, accessed via the 3rd floor administrative offices, to see the last performance of Mike Bartlett’s grippingly compelling Contractions, and latecomers would not have been welcome there, either. In these tight spaces, the theatre has to make a call to measure the disruption to the performance that could be caused by a late arrival against the timetabling difficulties that some of its customers may have; and in both of these cases, latecomers have to be treated as no-shows entirely.

It’s better to arrive a week too early than a minute too late, as I discovered for myself on Sunday evening when I turned up at St Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge for what I hoped would be an evening with American theatre songwriter Jeff Blumenkrantz.

What a difference 43 years makes! When the hit West End version of the French comedy Boeing-Boeing first crossed the Atlantic back in 1965, it was a fast flop, clocking up a Broadway run of just 23 performances - it opened on February 1 and shuttered on February 20, even though the original London production had run for over seven years and 2,035 performances after opening the year I was born, in 1962. But last night the transfer of last year’s London revival was named Best Revival of a Play in this year’s Tony Awards, and Mark Rylance took the top personal British honour of the night to win the award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play.

Boeing-Boeing’s success - over more serious-minded imports like Macbeth, and new local productions of Pinter’s The Homecoming and Les Liaisons Dangereuses — proves that comedy is a serious business, too; but then so is Broadway.

The guessing game is nearly over. Broadway’s annual Tony race comes to a climax with the presentation of the Awards themselves this Sunday evening, and although the New York Times today leads a feature on handicapping the potential winners by saying, “Really, we never learn. After a primary season that proved scientific polling has the precision of a coin toss, after years of losing 10 bucks in the office Oscar pool (darn you, documentary short subject), after Big Brown did whatever he did last week at the Belmont Stakes, you would think we would have come to our senses”, they haven’t - and duly make their predictions today here.

By coincidence, I was in America last Saturday evening when the Belmont horse race was being run, and watched it live on TV as it happened - something you would not normally catch me watching, but I was in Chester, Connecticut, having just seen Jason Robert Brown’s new musical 13 that afternoon, and staying at the house of a friend whose wife, JoAnna, owns a horse herself! - so at least I know the scale of the upset of Big Brown’s defeat.

It’s the Tony equivalent of Patti LuPone losing out the Leading Actress in a Musical Award this Sunday.

There are no critical absolutes - no right or wrong - when it comes to reviews, and as I’m sure I’ve said before here, one of the great things about London is that there are still enough journalistic outlets for a range of opinions to be expressed (even if those expressing them still come from a relatively narrow background of class, education and race - where, apart from Tamara Gausi who is one of the regular Time Out team, are the black voices, for instance?).

So although only yesterday I was suggesting that the National seemed to have followed Fram with Afterlife to produce what I called a “double whammy of failure”, Sam Marlowe’s four-star review in yesterday’s The Times insisted that “Frayn’s erudition sparkles and there’s a buoyant sense of fun in Blakemore’s production to match its braininess.” On the other hand, The Independent’s Paul Taylor and Telegraph’s Charles Spencer were with me, with Paul’s two-star review calling it “a disappointing dud”, while Charlie writes that he was “reminded of such earlier Frayn turkeys as Look Look and Here” and realising “with a lurch of regret that he has another flop on his hands here.”

I suppose everyone has to make their own minds up.

Only yesterday I was saying here that all things are connected. And that, of course, is entirely one of the points of Facebook, which establishes the interconnections between the people we each “know” (and, of course, are also online!) and helps us expand that network. I finally joined up just the other day, and already I am astonished at how easy it is to make contact with people - and the variety of ways it allows you to do so, from an instant message to an e-mail, even if you didn’t previously know their e-mail address!

Of course, lots of people tell me what a time waster it is - and (being of a somewhat addictive nature!) how easy it is to get sucked into doing so, as you obsessively seek to build your “friends” list.

What’s worse - suffering from chronic toothache or having to return to London via Heathrow? I had the double whammy yesterday - but at least with toothache you can visit the dentist, as I did the moment I finally got home, and have it relieved, whereas there seems to be no relief on earth, just countless excuses, for the ongoing fiasco of the running of our busiest international gateway.

All of this is by way of explaining the rare absence of a blog posting yesterday - I flew home overnight Sunday from New York, and after a three-hour delay leaving JFK (thanks, first of all, to another plane that was blocking our way off the departure gate, and then a storm that blew in to take the edge off the 34 degree heat that New York was suffering from all day, but meant the removal of all ramp staff during its thunderous progress), arrived at Heathrow only to find that the queues at immigration resembled the chaos of a third world airport - and that was in the EU Passport holders line, which went far beyond the immigration hall and back towards the departure gates themselves. Having landed at 11.40am, I finally cleared immigration a full hour later, at 12.40pm.

It was announced yesterday that life will soon be a cabaret no more in the West End - Rufus Norris’s production of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret will end its run at the Lyric on June 21 (though we needn’t feel its absence for too long - the show then hits the touring road at the end of August). By coincidence, I found this news out in Washington DC, where I had travelled yesterday to visit a new production of K&E’s last completed musical The Visit. And the day before, I had also re-visited Curtains, Ebb’s final posthumously produced original show whose work had been completed by Rupert Holmes, before that show closes on June 21.

If the giddy, old-fashioned musical comedy charms of Curtains caught the self-referential mood of recent times - joining shows like The Producers and Monty Python’s Spamalot in being about the backstage process of putting on musicals — The Visit is a darker throw-back to the Kander and Ebb of Cabaret and Chicago.

For a city that even has the word “new” in its name, it’s perhaps no surprise that New York still puts a theatrical premium on new work, particularly when it comes to the musicals that are this city’s major theatrical life force. Of 26 musicals currently playing on Broadway, 17 of them are in their original productions that were new to Broadway when they first opened there, including seven that hail from the last season alone. (An eighth original musical to have opened, Glory Days, came and quickly went). No wonder there was tight competition for the four available slots for Tony nominations for Best Musical this year.

The West End, by contrast, has 24 musicals on right now, but only ten were “new” shows when they first opened.

Last night I sat in another newly-refurbished jewel of a Broadway theatre (where, once again, the ongoing programme of renewal and maintenance puts the West End, Cameron Mackintosh’s theatres apart, utterly to shame), and watched a newly-refurbished jewel of a comedy, Boeing-Boeing, take flight again - even if, for the most part, it did not reach the same cruising altitude as it did on this production’s London opening night the February before last.

On that occasion, of course, we arrived at the Comedy Theatre with very little expectation, except a negative one: wasn’t this a hokey 60s sex comedy that was going to seem terribly dated?

If you walk past the Imperial Theatre on West 45th street, the front-of-house signage is already up for Billy Elliot that arrives there in October; and meanwhile, their “virtual” front-of-house in the shape of the show’s website is literally counting down the days till then (3 months, 28 days, as of today).

It is also already offering a primer to guide American audiences around things they may be less familiar with, like a timelines of the Miners’ strike and a multiple choice quiz on Geordie slang! I tried the latter, and I won’t tell you my score - but the result came back that “you’ve got a bit of Brit in you. Although some words might leave you gormless, you’ve a knack for the twang of the slang. Divant worry, you’d fit right into Billy’s town in County Durham”.

But back in the real world, I walked past the Imperial’s rear entrance on West 44th street yesterday and the stage loading doors were open; work is already being done to ready the theatre for it.

I’m on New York time this week, hence the late hour that I’m posting this! (I will aim to post by 2pm London time). But then between jetlag and my typical schedule over here, I don’t know whether I am coming or going anyway, since my life becomes even more frantic when I’m in these parts than it usually is!

And I gave myself a headstart on the jetlag front by virtually missing an entire night’s sleep the night before I travelled on Friday morning: on Thursday, I went up to Liverpool to see the new touring production of Evita that has been launched there by producer (and local boy) Bill Kenwright as his contribution to this year’s s Liverpool European C apital of Culture celebrations. I didn’t get home till 1am, worked till 2am, had a quick nap to 3.30am, and was then up again to complete my review column for yesterday’s Sunday Express and writing this blog before leaving for the airport at 7am for a 9.45am flight!

But then theatre - and theatre people - seems to chase me everywhere I go.