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!)
From the film version of a Broadway classic that is so skilfully embedded into one of cinema’s instant new classics, to Hairspray, which has gone from film to stage musical and back again, and I finally caught (some of) on Saturday afternoon in the cinema, where it is in fact being turned back into something of a live event, courtesy of the Singalonga franchise. While you can do this for yourself - just buy the DVD for £6.99, which has its own lyric track - audiences hungering for a live interaction with the movie are turning up at the Prince Charles cinema, some in costume, for an afternoon of strenuous, enforced jollity.
While this phenomenon evolved organically for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with the audience scripting their own impromptu replies to the film and coming dressed as various characters, Singalonga is turning this kind of participation into a commercial opportunity. While I loved the first manifestation of this with The Sound of Music (first at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in 1999, though someone recently told me that in fact the idea was born in a bar, Centrestage, devoted to playing videos of showtunes in the Yumbo Centre in Gran Canaria - Wall-e would be in his element), it has turned into something crude, cheap and opportunistic now, that instead of celebrating the film merely exploits its goodwill.
It takes an awfully long time to get going: a beehived host desperately tries to get the audience enthused, like a Butlin’s Redcoat, about the various items in the unbelievably cheap “goodie bag” and talk us through the participatory moments that each should be used for; she then teaches the moves for the dance-a-long that accompanies a couple of the songs; and holds a fancy dress competition of those who have come dressed for the show. By the time the film itself started, I was losing the will to live; and though the film, or what I could see of it through the wall of dancing people, is a lot of fun, watching it this way wasn’t, so I fled at the interval. Audiences are paying a lot of money - in this case, £14.50 — to essentially entertain themselves, and I left them to it.
There’s a different kind of audience participation in seeing plays at Shakespeare’s Globe; but it makes a lot more sense in a live arena, where the audience’s own energy irresistibly fuels that onstage, than in a cinema where the film proceeds regardless of what the audience is up to. I was at the Globe on Saturday evening to finally catch The Frontline, Che Walker’s specially commissioned contemporary play, and it was fascinating to see the Globe audience bringing the same kind of openness and pleasure to a new play as they do to a Shakespeare classic. The house was packed, too; as is the play, with character and incident. It doesn’t all quite come together, but somehow, the Globe harnesses such a vibrant communal spirit that it doesn’t really matter. Before the show, I ran into the playwright’s actress mother, Ann Mitchell, who told me she was seeing it for the third time - obviously a loyal mum, but I’m sure there are other pleasures, too, to sharing it with a different audience each time.
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