Arriving in LA last Wednesday evening - where film billboards are, of course, ubiquitous on every highway and byway - one of the first I saw was for How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which had a simultaneous US release last Friday to its UK opening. As ever, one can’t escape Toby Young anywhere! Just before I left, I had been speculating here about it that “a story about the failed pursuit of celebrities is in imminent danger of turning Toby into a celebrity himself, if he isn’t already; and he has turned that story of failure around into one that has made him a success.”
Actually, I may have spoken too soon; it opened Stateside to lethal reviews last Friday, including one in the New York Times that referred to the fact that it features “a young actress who will do anything to sell herself out, which at least suggests that, unlike this movie, she has a goal”, while the New York Post quotes someone describing Toby’s writing as ‘snarky, bitter, witless’, and adds, “The last part pretty well sums up this movie”.
But I’ve been since finding kinder reviews online in the UK press - including a four-star rave from Cosmo Landesman in yesterday’s Sunday Times, who declares an interest as being an “old friend of Young’s” who “worked on Young’s magazine The Modern Review” that makes an appearance in the film, so may not be an entirely dispassionate witness.
I’ve also seen a three-star review in The Guardian and a good review from Philip French in yesterday’s Observer, so it may not quite be a critical bust yet. However, the omens, at least in LA, were not good: I took myself to the 2.30pm Friday afternoon screening at the legendary Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard - and was one of no more than a dozen people there on the film’s opening day. Yet when I came out of the cinema, there were hordes of people waiting to go in - but not for the movie but for the 4.30pm guided tour of the cinema, which as one website I found puts it, is “the most famous movie theatre in the world”, partly of course thanks to the forecourt featuring hand and footprints of the stars. Will Toby be asked to immortalise his there in due course? For now, this may be as close as he gets…
For my part, I got close to some big stars over the next few days. Later on Friday, I attended the pre-Broadway try-out of a musical version of 9 to 5 at LA’s Ahmanson Theatre, and just along the row from me was Martin Sheen, who exudes Presidential authority thanks to his role in The West Wing, and was there no doubt to support his TV co-star Allison Janney, who won four Emmy Awards for playing press secretary CJ Cregg in the series, making her musical theatre debut in the Lily Tomlin screen role. Janney has long been one of my current favourite American screen and stage actresses - I’ve previously seen her on Broadway in a Roundabout revival of A View from the Bridge in 1997 - and she owns the stage again here; she may be out-sung by her co-stars Megan Hilty and Stephanie J Block, but she out-classes them at every turn.
And then on Saturday I moved on to Las Vegas, and finally caught Barry Manilow in concert at the Las Vegas Hilton, where he has been a headline act for the last three years. I feel like I grew up on his songs - I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know a Manilow song - and if it’s provided a kind of soundtrack to my life, it’s surely a rich and wonderful soundtrack, too. I’ve seen him live twice before, once in a solo engagement at Broadway’s Gershwin Theatre in 1989, and at Wembley Arena following the release of his 1991 album “Showstoppers” that celebrated Broadway musicals, and he absolutely knows how to deliver: somewhere between Peter Allen and Liberace, but with more sincerity and less flamboyance than either, he’s a one-of-a-kind legend.
His Vegas show - entitled Ultimate Manilow - The Hits — is exactly what it says on the label: a fast canter through his back catalogue, though some like Somewhere Down the Road are re-arranged and slowed down to re-focus on their lyrical content, and provides the evening’s most moving moment when he revealed that his dad was gone before he was two years old, so the song still gives him a lot to think about.
But if Manilow - who at 65 years old still cuts an impressively slim and athletic onstage figure - is sometimes in reflective mood onstage, I also found him in reflective mood offstage, when I went to meet him privately after the show. While fellow pop singer-songwriters like Elton John, Paul Simon, Phil Collins and now Dolly Parton with the aforementioned 9 to 5 have gone on to write musicals for the Broadway stage, Manilow is yet to reach it with one of his own shows; in the West End we’ve had Copacabana (at the Prince of Wales in 1994), and right now Bill Kenwright is touring Can’t Smile without You, a new show that cleverly folds the Manilow back catalogue into a new story, with the engaging Chesney Hawkes providing a terrific stand-in for a Manilow-like (or maybe Manilow-lite) himself. So Manilow is still holding out hopes for his original musical Harmony, co-written with Bruce Sussman, that was aborted on the eve of its Philadelphia try-out in 2003 when its then-producer failed to raise the full investment to take it forward, even though the cast were in the midst of rehearsals already.
Right now he’s in serious discussion with a leading West End and Broadway producer about reviving it again - and I, for one, can’t wait to see it come to reality. Nor, I’m sure, can the Fanilows - as Barry’s legions of fans are sometimes known - and I met two of the youngest on Saturday at the show: Grace, 6, and Ella, 4, were brought to the show by their parents, who revealed that their kids listen to him every day - and that when asked which song is their favourite, one replied, “They all are!”
I caught Barry's show in Vegas last month. I'm not a big fan, but he was great! My only gripe was there was no Bermuda Triangle or One Voice....but that apart, it was a brilliant concert with some great songs.