July 2008 Archives

The Sun is already a title with the highest circulation of any daily English-language newspaper in the world, selling over 3.1m copies daily to a daily readership of approximately 7.9m. So they are unlikely to have noticed the extra sale they made yesterday to me - or to any others who may have been lured by all the free press publicity in other papers like The Guardian that has attended their media partnership with the Royal Opera House to offer a ticket ballot for readers to attend the first night of their production of Don Giovanni on September 8 at greatly reduced prices from £7.50 to £30 (with free glass of bubbly thrown in with every ticket bought!).

I have already doubted elsewhere, in a blog posted on The Guardian earlier this week, if this is the right way to go about making high culture seem more accessible to the masses: after all, only a maximum of 2,200 people will actually get hold of those tickets, so as I said there, instead of taking the Opera House away from what I called “the corporate champagne-and-canapes image” that currently attaches to the place, the ballot “actually reinforces the elitism at the root of the problem, proving just how hard affordable tickets are to come by - in effect making it into another of life’s lotteries.”

In fact, you don’t even have to be a Sun reader to apply.

Only yesterday I was saying here how the rise of citizen journalism, via blogs and bulletin boards, allows more outlets for the expression of interactive critical opinion than ever. I typically try to avoid taking this particular road of reading them ahead of seeing a show for myself, but it’s not always possible to avoid the deafening din of the chatterati.

And sometimes to go forewarned is to go forearmed, and while a yellow card on the football pitch may indicate a player receiving a caution, a friend who directed me to a bulletin board thread on The Wizard of Oz before we went to follow the yellow brick road for the opening of the show at the Royal Festival Hall last night allowed me to proceed with a little caution myself.

I have previously written here about the number of layoffs amongst film critics at American papers, with one commentator stating baldly, “Critics today are viewed as cultural dinosaurs on the verge of extinction.” There are, inevitably, lots of financial reasons for this - as papers lose readers and advertising, the costs attached to employing full-time critics (or even freelance ones) is a place that they can make instant savings on.

And the rise of citizen journalism, via blogs and bulletin boards, means that there are more outlets than ever for the expression of interactive critical opinion. On the one hand, this has potentially shifted the power axis away from professional commentary towards a public community that makes its own collective mind up, but on the other means that critics could be more valuable than ever, to offer both a starting point for those conversations and, arguably, a more authoritative voice amongst them. Many is the posting on, say, talkinbroadway.com, that kicks off by quoting a critic’s review - and then continues from there.

Meanwhile, the papers - like the karaoke musicals that seem to require audiences to pay good money to entertain themselves - are getting their readers to write the paper, too.

The sudden heatwave may not be helping the theatre much - and neither, of course, are the forecasts of economic doom and gloom screaming from every newspaper front page. Why spend money you’ve not got (or soon won’t have anymore, if the stories are to be believed), on entertainment that may not be entertaining enough for the money - and is often to be found in venues that add physical suffering to the financial one to be there in the first place?

I sometimes think that those West End theatres that refuse to move forward and install proper working air-conditioning (and not just euphemistic air-cooling, which is no such thing) should simply be forced to go on hiatus at this time of year and shut up shop until they do.

Blogs are, of course, nowadays ubiquitous, as the democratisation of opinion they allow means that there’s a public forum for everyone to express theirs, if they so choose. But is anyone reading them all? I’m always gratified by the responses I get to this one, both privately amongst people who talk to me about what I’ve written, and by posting public responses.

Though posting here every day has become an increasingly significant part of what I do — and certainly the first job that I complete each day — it is still far from my only job; so I was intrigued to read Charlotte Higgins, who has been The Guardian’s arts correspondent for the last four years, state in a feature in The Guardian on Wednesday that after being “a reporter who tried to fit blogging in around the edges of my life, I’m about to move online. From this week, blogging will take its place at the heart of what I do.”

Charlotte has duly launched a rolling blog, where she can potentially post updates throughout the day.

There are only a handful of theatres beyond London that can now routinely count on a mass showing of national critics - I was surprised earlier this year when I went to see the opening of the Manchester Glass Menagerie with Brenda Blethyn (in a production that is soon to be revived for a national tour) that only Sam Marlowe and John Peter, for The Times and Sunday Times respectively, were there, too, though local stringers for The Observer and The Independent, namely Clare Brennan and Lynne Walker (whom I do not know and therefore would not have recognised) also filed reviews, and Lyn Gardner obviously went on another night for The Guardian.

Nowadays, however, it’s primarily Stratford-upon-Avon and Chichester only that can count on getting most of the big guns out (and perhaps my gun just isn’t big enough, but I have been negligent about getting to Chichester at all this year so far, though am heading there next week to finally catch Six Characters in Search of an Author and The Music Man, even as The Circle and the Ronald Harwood double-bill of Taking Sides and Collaboration are also about to open, so I’ll be chasing my tail on those, though The Circle is already booked for a national tour after Chichester, so I’ll catch it then).

You can be sure, of course, that we’ll all be at Stratford for the RSC opening of the David Tennant Hamlet on August 5, even if it means interrupting the early days of the Edinburgh Fringe for some.

Is it really exactly a year since we were last at the Almeida hearing Barb Jungr in concert? Last year she was there singing Bob Dylan on a Monday (July 23); last night she was back on a Tuesday, “a good night for some depressing material”, as she called it, to re-visit a repertoire of chansons that she last did “en masse” in 2001, when she had recorded her first album for the label she has been at home with ever since, Linn Records, of Brel, Ferre and Piaf. Now that umbrella of chansons also embraces material that she has also featured in subsequent collections, including the current Nina Simone tribute (Just Like a Woman - Hymn to Nina) and her 2005 album of songs previously recorded by Elvis Presley (Love Me Tender).

She kept warning us that it made for a very dense, intense collection of difficult songs; but Barb, as ever, brings both great personal warmth and such a richly heightened sense of drama and theatricality to them that she takes us on a dark journey with that material effortlessly.

The theatre, like life itself, is full of coincidences and chance meetings. Who could have planned it, for instance, that last week Zorro — based on Isabel Allende’s 2005 novel, and boasting her name above the title as one of the co-producers - should open the very night before Allende was also personally name-checked in The Female of the Species, and the audience even given a lesson in how to pronounce her name. “Dear girl, it’s ‘Ay-enday’,” says the writer character Margot (played by Eileen Atkins), correcting the student intruder Molly who had mispronounced it, and saying: “Nothing tells you more about a person than how you pronounce a writer’s name.”

Nothing tells you more about a playwright, either, than the kind of smug, easy literary put-downs that in Joanna Murray-Smith’s play have Margot and Allende apparently swapping quotes on each other’s book covers that declared each other a genius, but then Margot revoking her fictitious one here: Molly exclaims of Allende, “She’s fantastic!”; and Margot replies, “Marvellous, yes. Marvellously… marvellous. Full of… marvelosity. But if you ask me, no genius”. Mind you, who needs fellow writers to put you down when your involvement in a show like Zorro proves the case.

The Edinburgh Fringe, of course, is just around the corner; but it started for some of us on Friday evening when the Almeida offered the UK premiere of its Traverse-bound production of Adam Rapp’s Nocturne — and, though beautifully acted by Peter McDonald, reminded me of one Festival rule: avoid one-man plays. No one else is going to arrive to change the pace.

But it kicked off a weekend of many changes of pace and place, though the highlight had to be seeing the show-tune loving, lonely earth robot Wall-e, propelled into a journey into outer-space, whose favourite thing is watching endless re-runs of songs from the film version of Hello, Dolly! — “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” and “It Only Takes a Moment”, both of which, incidentally, featured Michael Crawford. And it only took a moment, of course, to fall in love with Wall-e, too. (How many of us seek refuge when we’re feeling similarly lonely in showtunes? I could certainly identify!)

People usually complain when critics give bad reviews; one member of the theatregoing public, Ian Senior, was so incensed by what he saw as critical sneering, particularly against musicals, that he launched a regular newsletter, now discontinued, called R Cubed News that ran for 176 issues in which he turned his vendetta against critics - or cretics, as he labelled them - into an obsession. Apparently a professional economist, he even devised a scheme for measuring the financial cost of each bad review.

None of which, of course, accounts for the ongoing commercial success of the likes of We Will Rock You in the face of overwhelmingly negative reviews, but then it is perhaps the exception that proves the rule. But I have a far more serious complaint: critics giving good reviews to bad shows can be just as damaging.

The West End had what Variety would call a “boffo year” last year, breaking all previous records in both attendance and revenues, as I previously blogged here. But I’ve just come across an interesting report of just how those record figures break down: of the overall ticket sales, some 65% were for musicals, 22% for plays, and the remaining 13% for dance, opera and other performance.

That’s no surprise, I suppose, given the numerical dominance of the West End by its musicals over its plays; though as SOLT Chief Exec Richard Pulford previously put the record straight for me last year, there are actually significantly more plays produced annually than musicals overall, and that’s even the case when you take the National, Donmar and Royal Court out of the equation.

In fact the ongoing productivity of the West End is a thing of wonder.

The London Underground likes to state the obvious, and in the absence of anything more constructive and practical on their own part, posters everywhere at the moment tell us: “We know the Tube can be uncomfortable in hot weather.” They then issue a few tips “to help to take the edge off the heat and minimise delays”, amongst which they suggest, “Always carry a bottle of water with you.” The same suggestion, of course, could apply to going to unventilated West End theatres the moment the temperature gauge outside hits anything above 20 degrees; and the PRs were helpfully handing out bottles of water to critics arriving for last night’s opening of Zorro at the Garrick Theatre.

Inside the auditorium, too, it turned out that the theatre owners were also following London Underground’s lead - while some stations are benefiting this summer from some 40 industrial-sized fans being installed around the network, the Garrick had ten portable air-conditioning units dotted around the auditorium desperately trying to cool the place before the show planned to heat it up again.

Only yesterday I was reporting here on the rise and role of the blogosphere, and how it is affecting and challenging the critical discourse. But it is also a window that allows us a glimpse into an artist’s soul and disappointments, too.

So instead of hearing me speculate on the latest producing disaster at the Arts Theatre - where All Bob’s Women had only recently already come and quickly gone after some of the most lethal reviews in recent memory — you can read about the fate of Jay Johnson’s The Two and Only for yourself on his personal blog.

And it makes for extremely illuminating reading. For, unlike All Bob’s Women, this is a show which arrived in London with a Tony-Award winning Broadway pedigree and though it had not been reviewed very widely (and for that the difficulty must come from the fact that that the show fell into a black hole somewhere between theatre and comedy critics), those that did have been favourable, notably including a four-star rave in The Guardian. But on the same day that The Guardian review appeared last Tuesday came the fatal blow.

Back in April I posted a blog here under the headline “Is it curtain for critics?”, noticing the number of film critics that had been laid off at various American papers; and it is the same headline that The Observer used for a four-page Review section cover feature yesterday on the growth of the blogosphere.

As someone with a foot in both camps - so to speak - and was name-checked as such in the feature for, it is of course something I am watching closely. In fact, most critics are watching our backs a lot of the time - not just for the fear of a knife being plunged into it by an aggrieved theatre practitioner (or reader, if we have any) that disagree with us, but also because it has reminded us of our accountability.

Something strangely unheralded is happening in Liverpool at the moment. Not just that the city’s celebrations of its European Capital of Culture status, that they are now halfway through, has been barely noticed by the cultural commentators in London (myself included), though you could justifiably ask if the programme has until now been one that is worthy of such wider commentary.

Unlike last year’s Manchester International Festival, which made an immediate splash on the artistic consciousness (in an admittedly much more concentrated time period) - and which sees one of its hits, the Damon Albarn scored Monkey - Journey to the West come to the Royal Opera House later this month - Liverpool has felt, at least from afar, as if its concerns have been more about local branding. It feels like there’s a lot of brightly-coloured packaging, but not a lot inside.

But yesterday I went to Liverpool and unwrapped a perfectly-formed gift inside that packaging.

As I was saying only yesterday, I was feeling nauseous before I even sat down to watch High School Musical the night before, so I can’t blame the show for my physical condition; but by yesterday the experience of seeing it loomed even larger as symptomatic of a larger virus - outside of my own body - infecting the commercial theatre. That’s the sense of financial imperative and artistic laziness that allows this kind of thing to happen at all.

I see that Lyn Gardner made similar points in her Guardian review, and also compared it to The Lion King and Dirty Dancing at the same time: “Julie Taymor’s stage version of The Lion King took the movie and gloriously reinvented it; High School Musical Live on Stage merely tries to cash in on demand. In effect it is a piece of live merchandising. It’s a product, not a production, and one which has a pile it high and flog it cheap mentality…. Will the deficiencies stop this being a spectacular success? No. Because like Dirty Dancing this show isn’t designed for anyone other than those who already have the movie and have bought the I Love Troy T-shirt from the Disney store. It’s not about art, but about artfully parting you from your cash. “

At least I wasn’t parted from my cash - only my time.

A friend once sagely remarked that you can’t fight a hit - and just as critics have been powerless to stop the waves of musical mediocrity represented by the likes of We Will Rock You, Dirty Dancing and Never Forget (the latter of which just yesterday announced an extension of its current booking period to November 15 at the Savoy, with plans to then transfer to another West End theatre), so it is utterly pointless to resist the onward onslaught of Disney’s High School Musical.

Yes, I know that I’m hardly the target audience for it, being roughly 30 to 35 years too old for its intended tweenage audience of 10-15, and it’s true, too, that I was feeling waves of nausea even before I sat down in the Apollo Hammersmith last night, having returned from Gran Canaria the day before with something of a fever, so perhaps I need to make allowances (yes, even critics are human sometimes!). But from the moment the curtain went up to literally deafening screams from the overwhelmingly youthful audience, I felt like a complete outsider.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been having withdrawal symptoms from my self-imposed “blogging leave” of the last week. And being entirely away from the theatre, too, for a full week has been a bit surreal (yes, life - and the theatre - does go on without me!). But I’ve also been discovering how very tiring it is to do so very little! During my week in Gran Canaria I wrote a bit every day, and of course checked the web daily for breaking news, at least of the theatrical variety - but otherwise I managed to turn a darker shade of pale as I spent a lot of time in a cooling pool-side Jacuzzi, treating myself to afternoon ice cream sundaes and late evening meals and not doing a whole lot else.

But if I’ve been away from London theatre and my blog, it’s been fascinating to catch up, vicariously, with the annual theatrical marathon of New York Times chief critic Ben Brantley, who is in London for a month and filing a daily blog of his own about what he sees (and sometimes, who he sees - Ralph Fiennes was just down the row from him at Major Barbara at the National - and even what he eats: he has “bad and restless dreams” after seeing Anthony Neilson’s Relocated, adding, “and I don’t think it was just from eating a comforting slab of Fortnum and Mason treacle fudge”).

This isn’t the first year that Brantley has been blogging from London - he did it last year, too.