This time last week I was trudging through the wet streets of Edinburgh; I was there for five days and it rained on each of them. And I got home to London to yet more rain. Of course, I’m a critic, not a weather forecaster, and it usually doesn’t really matter what the weather gets up to - I spent most of my time indoors in darkened theatres anyway, or in my office writing about what I’ve seen.
In Edinburgh it only becomes an issue when you’re racing across town between venues and have to dry off each time you arrive anywhere. And in London, it only really becomes an issue when you’ve got a visit planned to somewhere like the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park - as I did last night, for the opening of their “summer” musical Gigi.
I duly spent yesterday obsessing about the weather, and when a thunderstorm and rain kicked in briefly in mid-afternoon, I thought we might be done for.
It gave me a taste for how Timothy Sheader, the artistic director there, must spend most of the summer, constantly checking out weather forecasts and looking out the window to wonder what the skies are going to offer each night. (Shows there have to be called off if the weather is too bad, since neither the auditorium nor the stage area have a roof over them; whereas at Shakespeare’s Globe it is only the groundlings that are entirely exposed to the elements).
But weather forecasters are similar to theatre critics: theirs is an inexact science, and they don’t always get it right. In fact, checking out Peter Cockroft on the BBC London website yesterday afternoon, graphics suggested the rain was threatened and would only pass over by around 9pm. As it happens, I arrived in Regent’s Park just before 7pm and there was happily no rain in sight - and although the evening got chillier as the night drew in (Time Out’s Tamara Gausi, sitting behind me, told me she regretted having forgotten to pack tights), it actually stayed dry all night.
At least fretting about the weather creates a tension that might be otherwise lacking on the stage; but the charm of the Open Air Theatre also works by a kind of alchemy entirely related to its setting. You’re put in a good mood, of course, by the picnicking when you arrive, either with the food you’ve brought with you, or the excellent onsite catering; but the start of the show, still in daylight, makes the adjustment to focus on the show hard after the festivities that have preceded it (and which some members of the audience, like the party across the aisle from me last night, refused to give up, carrying on their conversations - and eating - even after the show has begun.)
A soufflé of a show like Lerner and Loewe’s slight and sluggish adaptation of Colette duly starts off feeling rather laboured, artificial and contrived. But as the night draws in, a different sort of magic takes over, and the theatricality of the occasion kicks in, and with the show twinkling in the warm glow of the lights below, you can only surrender to the occasion.
Still, one sometimes succumbs to irreverent thoughts. I’ll never forget another first night here, when Judi Dench directed a production of Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse here in 1991, and the rain started: my companion turned to me and whispered, “It’s God crying, at the sound of Louise Gold’s voice.” Louise was also, coincidentally, part of the original cast of Ziegfeld, a musical biography of the legendary impresario that played at the London Palladium a few years before that in 1988. It was an ill-fated show that saw original star Len Cariou replaced during the run by Topol - who was the star of the show last night, too. And I remembered that, when Ziegfeld was revamped for Topol’s take-over, a new dramatic device was introduced, with him stepping in and out of character by telling us that when he was wearing a red carnation he was Ziegfeld, and when he wasn’t wearing one he was our narrator. So last night, as he swapped from red to white flowers in his lapel and then none at all, I kept myself amused by wondering who he was pretending to be at each moment.
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