Musical theatre is a powerful muse. As Franklin Shepherd, a composer tells his lyricist collaborator Charley Kringas as they start out on their career writing musicals together in Merrily We Roll Along (which in fact happens at the end of the show, since the action travels backwards in time), “Musicals are popular. They’re a great way to state important ideas. Ideas that could make a difference. Charley, we can change the world.”
Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the score to Merrily, may not have changed the world - but his shows have certainly changed musical theatre. And though Merrily was one of his most notorious Broadway flops when it first premiered there in 1981 (and ran for just 16 performances, some seven more than the even bigger flop of Sondheim’s 1964 show Anyone Can Whistle), it has found an extended life far beyond it, not least when Michael Grandage staged it at the Donmar Warehouse in 2000. Merrily comes from the inside track of the pain and pleasure of creating musicals - both in its story of the fractured relationships that lie behind them and the show’s own fractured journey towards claiming its place as an essential part of Sondheim’s repertoire. It is therefore a testament to the fact that flop shows can be reclaimed - and proves that different ideas about producing them can make a difference, too.
I thought of some of this as I watched last night’s premiere of a major new touring production of The Witches of Eastwick, another musical that had a difficult birth.
It premiered at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in June 2000, and though it may have had its titular characters flying (literally over the heads of the stalls audience and heading for the upper balcony), the show failed to soar, at least commercially, as its producer Cameron Mackintosh had obviously hoped. He subsequently scaled the physical production back and moved it to the more intimate Prince of Wales, and it was all the better for it, but by then the die was cast - or the witches’ spell was broken - and it only ran for seven more months.
But it is a show that refuses to die, variously produced in the years since in Australia, Russia, Czechoslovakia and last year at Arlington, VA’s Signature Theatre. I didn’t see any of those versions, but returning to it now, it’s a pleasure to find it reclaimed as a splashy satire of American small-town values and the big-time emotional journeys towards self-realisation taken by three lonely women as they encounter a life force bigger than any of them have experienced before.
Musicals, of course, can burn with their own inner life forces, too, and this is clearly one that refuses to be snuffed out. And just as the women in it have to find their own powers of self-belief, it has been brilliantly reclaimed by the belief in it of its creative team, led by the rising star director Nikolai Foster, and its hands-on producers Kenny Wax and Michael Harrison.
I must declare an interest here: I’ve known Kenny for about twenty years now, ever since he joined Dewynters (where I was then working in the publishing of theatre programmes and souvenir brochures) as a foot messenger - but he was, even then, a man with a mission and not just packages to deliver. He was soaking up how the business worked - and soon moved on, first to become a runner on Cameron Mackintosh’s Tricycle Theatre production of Just So, then joining Imagination Entertainments, where he would eventually lead the team that produced the British premiere of the Broadway show Once on this Island at Birmingham Hippodrome before bringing it to the West End’s Royalty Theatre. In 1995, he went freelance and set up his own production company.
And though it would be delightful to report that he has had nothing but success since, he’s in fact learnt the hardest way possible. Just as his mentor Cameron Mackintosh’s first West End venture with a revival of Anything Goes was a massive flop, so was Kenny’s - but at least he took an even bolder route to his own failure. Instead of reviving an acknowledged success, he put a brand-new musical into production — Maddie, written by the then previously-unknown team of composer Stephen Keeling and lyricist Shaun McKenna. He tried it out at Salisbury Playhouse in September 1996, and received immense encouragement from a Daily Telegraph review by Charles Spencer, who declared, “I don’t want to start a frenzy of hype and inflated expectations, but this show could be just what we’ve been waiting for: a new British musical by previously unknown hands which is blessed with wit, charm and terrific performances. So many new musicals have bitten the dust in recent years that one is chary of over-excitement.” But Charlie succumbs to the temptation, and duly declares, “If the show transfers, as I hope it will, the West End might just go mad for Maddie”.
Understandably encouraged, Kenny set about taking it there - and was given another helping hand by Charlie, who wrote a subsequent feature about the difficulties the show was having to raise the necessary financing, and prompted over one hundred Telegraph readers to become “angels”, backing the production to the tune of £150,000. When it opened at the Lyric Theatre the following September, Kate Bassett - then Charlie’s deputy - reported, “I am horribly nervous. Here I am reviewing Maddie, the new British musical which has made it to the West End thanks to the generous support from Daily Telegraph readers…. So, you can imagine, I was praying that I would like Maddie. And mercifully my prayers were answered.”
But other critics weren’t so generous. Michael Coveney, then on the Daily Mail, declared, “Maddie is a baddie… and a soppy one at that — Maddie, first seen at the Salisbury Playhouse, should have stayed there.” And if one critic helped to create the energy to make the transfer possible in the first place, it seems the others helped to kill it. Six weeks later, it closed.
Kenny was obviously badly burned - but the important thing is that, like Mackintosh, he never gave up. And even if he has subsequently learnt the hard way a second time with another fast West End flop when he revived Neil LaBute’s Almeida hit The Shape of Things at the New Ambassadors in May 2004 (where it ran for less than a month), he has built up a substantial and successful production business the old-fashioned way: by being a touring producer. It’s a time-honoured route, and still the backbone, for instance, to Bill Kenwright’s production empire. Last year he toured Hobson’s Choice out of Chichester Festival Theatre, and gave a major touring make-over to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love, also directed by Nikolai Foster.
The interesting thing is that he’s not deterred by scale or reputation: neither Aspects nor Witches have the legacy of major previous success, yet also both demand big productions. But he also produces casting aces, without which it would be impossible to sell them: for Aspects, it was David Essex; and now for Witches, Marti Pellow, who has considerably more musical lustre than the West End’s original Darryl van Horne Ian McShane.
As the witches triumphantly sing, “I wish I may, I wish I might feel the joy I feel tonight forever”, I thought of Kenny, who once upon a time wished he might be a theatre producer, and has proved that he is.
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