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.
It was like having an out-of-body experience: the audience were tuning into something that I simply wasn’t on the same wavelength of. Of course, most of them are arriving with a prior knowledge, and devotion to, the original Disney channel movie, just as the Dirty Dancing audience craves nothing more than a facsimile of what they already know and love.
If only, however, they could be better shows. Here’s a golden opportunity to awaken new generations to the joys of theatre, but instead of offering the sublime artistry of, say, The Lion King, which put a brand-new interpretative spin on a well-loved property, Disney have done this one strictly by numbers, in every sense. Those numbers are occasionally the saving grace, but the clumsy book and feeble characterisation (magnified by performances that search out over-the-top cliché at every turn) make me suddenly feel sympathy with Tim Walker’s point - at least until seeing Marguerite changed his mind - that he’s “never really understood why critics are supposed to go to musicals…. What is more, it is inhumane to make us go. Nicholas Hytner was right about critics: we are mostly white middle-class males, and that means we look awfully out of place among all the yelping teeny boppers who attend these garish extravaganzas.”
That is precisely how I felt last night. At least Christopher Hart of the Sunday Times, seated in front of me, had borrowed two young girls to accompany him, so had an excuse for being there. But if the energy of the company is at least unflagging - and truly tired me out in my compromised state - the disgraceful state of the Apollo Hammersmith is also a source of ongoing astonishment. In the seat I was sat in - Stalls 040 - one armrest was entirely shorn off leaving exposed metal, and the other was heavily taped up with masking tape.
Yesterday the West End announced record takings for 2007 - some 13,636,540 people attended the theatre last year, a 10% increase on the previous year, with total ticket revenues rising to £469,729,135 (up from £400,802,809 in 2006). Yet this is the same industry that pleads poverty when it comes to upgrading their own facilities - and is seeking out state concessions to do so. Andrew Lloyd Webber - who according to the Sunday Times Rich list is richer than the Queen - has seen his Really Useful Group publish results that recorded profits of nearly £22m for 2006/7 - thanks, in part, to “strong trading results from the theatres”.
As I wrote in a blog for The Guardian back in May, despite these results Lloyd Webber has used his position in the House of Lords to advance his campaign that some public responsibility should be taken for the upkeep of those same theatres. He complained, “Such expenditure yields no economic benefit in terms of the operational viability of [the] buildings. Not one more seat becomes available for sale as a result. Indeed, improving the audience experience while retaining the architectural qualities of the building normally means losing seats, which commercial theatres can ill afford to do. He also said (a claim first made in a letter to the Times a few years ago): “The public funds given to refurbish the Royal Court exceeded the total profit made by the four Shaftesbury Avenue playhouses since the second world war.” In other words, those four theatres - two under Mackintosh’s control and two sold by Lloyd Webber’s company to Nimax Theatres as part of a £10m package - have not yielded the Court’s £29m refurbishment costs in over 60 years. But when I queried this fact with Really Useful Group chief executive Andre Ptsasynski, he admitted that he had not adjusted earnings for inflation. And the fact that the Apollo and Lyric were sold off with the uneconomic Duchess and the remaining years of the lease on the Garrick for more than £10m shows there’s considerable value in them still. In fact, that is precisely one the problem besetting the West End: these assets have been passed from pillar to post, earning inflated profits each time they’re sold on, and will be even more valuable once they’re in a fit(ter) state…. Now Lloyd Webber has said the Palace theatre is becoming “extremely unviable to operate”. No one, of course, is forcing him to continue running it. But with more than £8.3m in personal fees alone for his composer’s royalties reported in 2006/7, he surely has the resources to follow Mackintosh’s lead, put his money where his mouth is and ensure the future of the West End theatres - which are, after all, the source of his prosperity.”
Last week critics were invited to re-review Spamalot playing at the Palace, and as Fiona Mountford said in her notice about Sanjeev Bhaskar, who has taken over as King Arthur, “The star of The Kumars at No42 slots in easily, although he might find summer a hot time to wear chain mail in a theatre with no air conditioning”. In my own review in the Sunday Express, I went further: “Director Mike Nichols - who began his own career as a revue performer - pushes the show forwards with such propulsive comic momentum that it doesn’t flag for a moment, even when the theatre’s lack of air-conditioning threatens to suffocate audiences that are not already being strangled by laughter. (Note to theatre owner Andrew Lloyd Webber: please spend some of the profits your theatre group registered last year on actually upgrading the theatres you own).”
I am dreading going back to the Novello when I see Hamlet in December. I was there last winter for Shadowlands, and it could do with a refurb.