November 2008 Archives

The price of theatre tickets has long been a moveable feast - while producers, of course, set what are effectively “guide prices” for their box offices to sell tickets at (and build their official investors’ recoupment schedules out of), everyone knows that the theatre has followed the lead of the airline industry in following a policy of flexible pricing, which basically means getting what the market will pay, whether that is the full box office price (or even a premium beyond it, with selected seats increasingly held back, as they are at every Broadway show nowadays, for sale at a higher rate that may include a free programme and hospitality drink before the show), or a substantial discount below it, from the half price booth or mail-out offers.

Indeed, some tickets are even given away, partly in an effort to build audience word-of-mouth from within (you’re not going to get people talking about a show unless they’re actually seeing it), but also to create a greater sense of occasion for those who have actually paid to be there.

Just this time last week I was sadly noting the passing of Clive Barnes, at one time the most powerful theatre critic on Broadway (when he was in post at the New York Times for over a decade from 1967, rather than his subsequent days at the New York Post, which he joined in 1978, proving that it was the paper and not the person that the power resided in). And in a video tribute posted on the New York Post website, one of those who bore generous witness to his craft was Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the Shubert Organisation, who said, “”His enthusiasm for the theatre was reflected in his reviews, which were never cruel and did not involve any personal attacks on people in the business.”

But this week came the news that Schoenfeld has now followed him into the great theatre in the sky, and an even more powerful figure has duly left us: indeed, in a New York Times profile exactly three years ago, Jesse McKinley called him “by most accounts the most powerful person in American theatre”.

That piece, however, went on to reflect an anxiety that has now become a reality: “His succession and what it means for Broadway remains a dominant mystery in an industry famed for its uncertainties.”

London’s annual theatre awards round has begun, with the presentation on Monday of theatreland’s longest-running ones, the Evening Standard Theatre Awards, now in their 54th year (Still to come: the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards, of which I am now chair of the drama section that presents them, are to follow on January 27, Whatsonstage.com’s annual Theatregoers’ Choice Awards, and of course the Oliviers). The press generally may be losing sales and cutting back everywhere (where the Standard has recently had further newsroom redundancies and is cutting back from three daily editions to just two), but at least it is keeping faith - and appearances - with its theatre awards, presented this year at the Royal Opera House.

It gives the paper, of course, news of its own making to report, and it’s great that a paper that serves London should be maintaining its commitment to its theatre in this way; but how long can it be before a ceremony like this might be regarded as a profligate use of the paper’s ever-dwindling financial resources?

Just how bad are things going to get? While we’re not - yet - following Iceland into the wholesale collapse of global banking systems, most industries are suffering; and though things are not quite as catastrophic for Broadway as they are for the car industries in Detroit, at least not yet, disaster seems to be not far away.

Box office figures for the week that ended November 23 show five shows dipping precariously below 50% attendances, and another five below 60%. And one of the latter, bizarrely, is the now-previewing Shrek, with attendances of just 53.9%, proving that a very popular title isn’t enough in the current marketplace: people need to know that the show is actually delivering before they will book for it, and the word is not out yet either way.

Yet it’s the injection of new shows like Shrek around the autumn season that is meant to prop up the season as it moves into winter.

When it comes to reviews, there’s no right or wrong, as I’ve often said here before, though it doesn’t stop me wondering what kind of madness is about when I disagree so vehemently with some of my colleagues, as happened this summer over The Female of The Species and Zorro. Who was out-of-step with the prevailing wind, them or me?

But what’s good is that there is a broad spectrum of opinion being expressed - and there are, at least at the moment, still a wide number of press platforms available in which that can happen. And indeed, some of these are now expanding: once critics would have their last word in their reviews; now, these are just the springboard for challenges elsewhere, and critics are fighting back, with a ferocious new dialogue taking place with readers, practitioners and even each other in the blogosphere.

I know I’ve been party to this on this blog myself - but now the battles are going even more public.

As if the credit crunch isn’t going to affect the ever-burgeoning development departments of theatres up and down the land, who have been learning from the American way of supplementing their grant incomes by corporate and private donations but now may find many of these drying up, how can they begin to legislate against a fraudster?

The Royal Opera House, stung by the false promises of benefactor Alberto Vilar in whose honour they had designated the restored Floral Hall as the Alberto Vilar Hall in 2000, hastily renamed it when less than half of what had been pledged — £4.4m against £10m - was actually received.

On Wednesday, Villar was convicted with his former business partner Gary Tanaka on 12 counts, including money laundering, wire fraud and lying to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, following a scheme to steal some $20m (£13.5m) from clients. As The Independent reports today, “Vilar’s arrest in May 2005 shocked the arts world, because of the scale of money he had donated - or, more to the point, pledged. In 2002, Forbes ranked Vilar 256th on its US rich list, with a fortune of about £570m. The previous year, The Daily Telegraph hailed him as the biggest benefactor in the history of the arts, after he reputedly gave more than £140m in four years to opera, ballet and orchestras. Only he hadn’t.”

As well as the Royal Opera House, New York’s Metropolitan Opera and the Washington Opera are among other institutions which the story reports says Vilar had not honoured all his pledges to. But if they’ve been victims in the sense that money they were expecting has not arrived, worse off are investors, like Lily Cates - mother of one-time teen movie star Phoebe Cates - who has lost some £3.4m dollars she had entrusted to his company. She was robbed, according to the report, to pay off another investor, some of the firm’s bills, and to fulfil another charitable pledge that Vilar had made to his former university.

There’s a chastening lesson in all of this for theatres that rely on such donations, of course - not only if it doesn’t arrive, but if it does, where has it actually come from?

Last night I saw the opening of Eddie Izzard’s new show, Stripped, at the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, while two doors away, at the Gielgud, Bill Bailey has also just begun a run of his stand-up show Tinselworm. The Avenue, once our premiere play strip in town, has clearly turned into something else; but who is to deny their immense popularity, or the theatre owners the chance to earn valuable rental income (not to mention, of course, bar revenue, these being comedy shows)? Izzard’s general manager Mark Rubenstein told me before the show that the entire run sold out before all the ads had even run for it (though they do have house “keeps” that are released daily).

But what’s interesting, too, is the perception that they’re ‘sizing down’ by playing such venues. Both men have played big arena tours that have included Wembley Arena; Bailey’s current show was also seen at the Newcastle Metro Arena which seats some 9,600 people, and as he says in an interview in today’s -Independent, “I actually got a bit freaked out at the beginning. The first 10 minutes I have no memory of, it was like some kind of out of body experience, and then I got a grip and it was fine. I don’t think some of the subjects translate in a big stadium like that, they just can’t. It took a while to get my head round it. I don’t know if I’d do it again.”

Instead, he talks about being “really pleased” to be doing the show in a theatre which, with a capacity of under 900, he calls “intimate”: “”You can hear what people are saying and if you’re engaging with the audience everyone has to hear what’s being said… I could focus on the detail, and that’s what I love, the twists and turns that you can get into. I think I’ve probably built up this need to do the show like this, in a small space, where there are things I want to get off my chest, and that’s part of stand-up, that’s what it should be.”

I guess that the Gielgud and Lyric are small compared to the arenas they have both played at, and Izzard’s command of the room is so magnificent that he seems to have the audience hanging on every single word, but these are a far cry from the comedy clubs that both began in. And the audience, too, isn’t necessarily your typical comedy audience, either: in the interval last night, I ran into Peter Hall - who directed him in Lenny in 1999, a play in which Izzard appeared nude and I was mentioning only the other day — and Sir Peter declared what a really good actor he is, too. Watching Izzard last night, not just telling jokes but also acting them, you knew exactly what he meant.

And if there’s a touch of the rock star about his stage entrance to a fanfare of lights being beamed over the audience, this is amplified by a programme that comprises a long interview essay on him, but otherwise contains a giveaway 2009 calendar and selection of five Christmas cards (complete with envelopes!).

It’s not, of course, the business of critics to be liked, let alone loved. Yet the passing yesterday of Clive Barnes, at the age of 81, has provoked an outpouring of generous tributes: in a video on the New York Post website, the paper for which he was both the lead theatre and dance critic for over 30 years and for whom he was still writing as recently as last month when he reviewed the current Broadway revival of All My Sons, Harvey Fierstein says, “I loved the man, though I’m not fond of most critics. A lot of critics just don’t review what they see -they come in with an idea of what it should be and then review what they think it should have been, I always found that Clive reviewed what he actually saw, and that made him quite unique in my book.”

Another Broadway veteran, John Cullum, declares, “I always turned to Clive to get the opinion that I thought was the most honest and least opinionated, from a person who really loved the theatre.” And Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the Shubert Organisation, added, “His enthusiasm for the theatre was reflected in his reviews, which were never cruel and did not involve any personal attacks on people in the business.”

The West End transfer of Sweeney Todd to Drury Lane in 1980 - in a shamefully short-lived transplant of Hal Prince’s Broadway production - was the first Sondheim musical I ever saw in a version of its original production, and it had an indelible impact on the 17-year-old me: I turned into a Sondheim freak overnight!

The ultimate manifestation of this was the fact that I would later go on to co-found The Stephen Sondheim Society, and although I have long left it behind, it continues to thrive. And four years ago, my enthusiasm for Sondheim, both professional and personal, came full circle when I hosted a National Theatre platform on the stage of the Olivier with the master himself.

Sweeney Todd remains my Sondheim desert island disc; if I could choose only one, that is, to take with me.

When Daniel Radcliffe first opened in Equus, currently running at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre, he frankly admitted to an unusual problem: his penis got stage fright. As he told the New York Times at the time, he suffered from what he called Michelangelo’s David Effect, and said that David “wasn’t very well endowed, because he was fighting Goliath. There was very much of that effect. You tighten up like a hamster. The first time it happened, I turned around and went, ‘You know, there’s a thousand people here, and I don’t think even one of them would expect you to look your best in this situation.’ “

One leading London critic duly mocked him, writing that “never in modern times has such excitement been stirred by the prospect of viewing a very few inches of adolescent male flesh”; but as I suggested at the time, I was sure that young Daniel could rise to the occasion, so to speak, far more impressively than this limp criticism.

And it turns out that he can, in every sense.

There may still be 38 days to go before Christmas actually arrives, but I have already experienced Christmas twice over in New York (and that’s before we even get to Christmas in New York, the third annual celebration of classic and new Christmas music that will this year be headlined by Maria Friedman at the Lyric Theatre on December 7, and is the best alternative to actually being there).

On Saturday I caught a preview of what promises to become a hardy Broadway perennial, a stage version of Irving Berlin’s festive screen favourite, White Christmas, that began performances at Broadway’s Marquis Theatre the night before.

London critics are used to being part of the event of a first night, but it creates an unusual tension: we’re there to work and to judge, and the rest of the usually invited audience of friends and investors are there to cheerlead and hopefully celebrate. On Broadway, however, they typically remove that element of tension by getting the critics out of the way ahead of the official opening night; they are invited to the final previews instead, so by the time the actual opening night arrives, it’s mainly a press photo-op event, and the reviews - for good or ill - are already in the bag, awaiting publication later in the evening.

So last night it was highly unusual to be in the midst of the unwrapping of a major Broadway hit, there to both review but also to celebrate a show I already knew and loved, in the shape of Billy Elliot.

Musicals are, of course, taken seriously in New York, or rather more seriously, than anywhere else I know: everyone talks about them, everyone goes to them, and Broadway revolves around them. (Or at least it does in the circles I move in!) The West End may have followed Broadway’s lead in being dominated by them, too, but somehow they merge into the background, along with the rest of our theatre, as something that’s just there; we take it entirely for granted.

And yesterday I saw, first-hand, an example of why New York, despite the ever-relentless tide of jukebox musicals and the occasional British import like Billy Elliot that opens on Broadway tonight, still produces the goods more than we ever do: it invests in the talent, and in schooling and developing it.

Musicals are even taught as an academic discipline here, in a two-year, full-time program at NYU’s Tisch School on 2nd Avenue, called the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing course.

On Monday evening, as I wrote here yesterday, I saw What’s that Smell: The Music of Jacob Sterling, which is all about a fictional composer of bad musicals, with extracts from some of the shows he has written. Amongst them is a musical version of the classic Goldie Hawn comedy Private Benjamin — written as his graduate thesis from SPASM (the South Palo Alto School of Music) - from which we hear the song “He Died Inside Me”. And last night, entering the Schoenfeld Theatre to see the new Broadway production of All My Sons, who should be entering the theatre at the same time as my companion Mike and I but Goldie Hawn herself!

Mike, of course, couldn’t resist telling Goldie about it - and, as far as I was concerned, it was more entertaining to have shared that joke with her than to have experienced What’s that Smell myself. And it helped to take a little off the edge, too, of last night’s missing star from All My Sons itself - Dianne Wiest, who is cast in the co-starring lead role of Kate Keller, was off.

Only the other day I wrote here about how there’s a line in the new Broadway musical 13, set in Appleton, Indiana, that has one of the kids there referencing the fact that there’s a Broadway musical version of Shrek on the way. As one reader perceptively replied, “The Shrek line in 13 is totally out of place. Kids in rural Indiana, no matter how sophisticated, aren’t going to know or care about the fact that Shrek is becoming a Broadway musical. It’s that kind of self-referential ‘in’ joke that is part of the problem with Broadway musicals. The fans (and I’m one of them) love getting these jokes but what do outsiders make of them? I’ll tell you — nothing. They just don’t get it. Now one ‘in’ joke does not kill a show or an entire genre - but the cumulative effect of all these things is to alienate the audience.”

I’ve reflected here before that “After the age of the megamusical that was patented in London with shows like The Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon, we’re now in the era of the meta-musical, as epitomised by The Producers, Spamalot and The Drowsy Chaperone - shows about shows (sometimes, in turn, about shows), in which the fourth wall regularly comes tumbling down and the actors frequently address the audience.”

Only yesterday the New York Times Arts and Leisure supplement led with a feature on Chicago theatre, and highlighted the career of a noted local theatre director there that began by asking, “Is David Cromer the most talented theatre director that Americans have never heard of?”

Charles Isherwood went on to query his own question: “Er, silly question, I know. Most Americans could not name a single theatre director, talented or not, Tony-laureled or obscure, unless a nephew, daughter of second cousin happened to be one. But Mr Cromer has a low profile even among the theatre cognoscenti in New York, because he has worked for the last two decades in Chicago, mostly at the kind of small, funky spaces that seem to take root in almost every neighbourhood in this theatre-rich town”.

And yesterday I came to Chicago myself, to see the official opening last night of a British musical originally premiered at Hampstead’s New End Theatre in July 2006, Tomorrow Morning, at just one of those small, funky spaces that Isherwood alluded to, the Victory Gardens, a two studio theatre located in a former movie house.

It is unfailingly the case that I run into more people on the streets, as well as the theatres, of New York than I ever do at home, at least away from opening nights where a critic’s life is often groundhog day, being surrounded by the same line-up of colleagues night after night. But on Friday I actually travelled to New York with one of them, Georgina Brown of the Mail on Sunday, who was not across a theatre aisle for a change but across a British Airways 747 one; but if that wasn’t coincidental - since we were both on flying on official business (or rather official premium economy), as part of a press junket arranged by Radio City Music Hall to see their annual Christmas Spectacular - a typical series of chance meetings happened the moment we arrived in town on Friday evening.

Walking down Broadway on our respective ways to All My Sons (Georgina) and 13 (me), I ran into one of my best friends in town, Bert Fink, who happens to be head of Public Relations for the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organisation but whose Chelsea flat I sometimes stay at; and then dropping George off at the Schoenfeld Theatre, I ran into London playwright Roy Williams on the sidewalk, on his way in to see it, too. (George later told me she also saw Simon Russell Beale there).

Yesterday, of course, a new era dawned for the United States with the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land. But in the midst of the celebrations, he also cautioned in his victory speech, “The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.”

As he went on to warn, “For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime — two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.”

Yes, but what about the state of Broadway?

Nina Soufy (left) and Blanche Marvin at the Empty Space… Peter Brook Awards

America went to sleep last night knowing that they had decisively voted for change - and I awoke at 5am to find out the momentous news for myself. My friends in New York, of course, had been hoping for the best but fearing the worst - and one of them sent me a moving e-mail that describes the scene in the living room of his Chelsea apartment as the evening unfolded.

“We gathered tonight with pizza, red wine, and lots of trepidation. What was predicted to be an easy, early night for Obama suddenly seemed to be a little tougher when Bush states he was supposed to ‘flip’ from ‘red’ to ‘blue’ were taking longer than the pundits thought”, my friend wrote.

To state the blindingly obvious, the internet is changing the way we both forge and maintain relationships of all kinds - to strike a personal note, I met both my current and previous partner online first. And just being here on this blog, I have forged all kinds of other professional as well as personal affinities. It’s a way for me to connect to the world, and the world to connect to me, on a daily basis. (Even my parents use it as a way of tracking what I’m up to).

On the one hand, it means I am living my life more publicly than ever before; but then as a critic my job is to put my opinions out there, and this forum is another way of doing so. Sometimes, I realise, there’s a danger of being too frank - admitting here to an error in my review of Waste, for instance, was picked up by the Independent on Sunday media diary on the weekend, but with speculation in the Observer on the same day that the Daily Mail may be buying the Indie titles for a mere pound (plus taking on their considerable debt liabilities), the Independent may soon have bigger concerns about maintaining their own independence than further publicising my own already admitted failings.

The internet is also having a very real and very practical effect on the world on the theatre.

Jodie Prenger may have been the public’s choice to play Nancy in Oliver! that begins performances at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, next month - but producer Cameron Mackintosh last week announced his own choice, namely Tamsin Carroll — who starred in his 2002 Australian production of the show, and won, according to the press release, “every single major Australian award for Best Actress in a Musical” for doing so - as her official alternate, assuming the role on Wednesday and Thursday evenings when Prenger is not scheduled to appear. Intriguingly, the official press night that has been announced for the show is January 14 - a Wednesday. So does that mean the press will be invited to review Carroll instead of Prenger?