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.
Alongside the more internationally-heralded resident Chicago companies Steppenwolf, the Goodman, and the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, the Victory Gardens is one of a record four companies from this city to have picked up the special Regional Tony Award, given annually to a regional theatre company in the US; but it is, incidentally, the only one of those four from which a show has not transferred to London - yet.
And to rephrase Isherwood’s opening question, Is Laurence Mark Wythe the most talented British composer of musicals that Brits have never heard of, too? Actually, outside of Andrew Lloyd Webber (and of course Elton John, though musicals are an incidental added feature to his composing career), most Brits could not easily name a British theatre composer, either.
But it’s also inspiring to see how having a sponsor and a champion can bring a career out of the shadows and onto an international platform like this. That Wythe has come this far - and also, not coincidentally, also the reason that I was there last night - is thanks to London producer, theatrical investor and benefactor Hilary Williams.
I first met Hilary and her husband Stuart, who are patrons at home of such theatres as the Donmar, Almeida, National, Gate and RSC, at a house party given by fellow National Theatre benefactors Jack and Linda Keenan, who I had in turn met through Edgar and Judith Wallner, following a National Theatre fundraising auction at the Roundhouse in 2007, at which one of the prizes was to spend an evening with a theatre critic - namely me!
That one evening has turned into several more with all of them, and last night it turned international when I duly detoured to Chicago from New York to cheer this musical that Hilary has championed so admirably on its way. She produced it at the New End - as well as funding a subsequent cast album of that production with a cast that includes Emma Williams (now in Zorro) and Stephen Ashfield (now in Jersey Boys), that means the show can be heard far more widely than the short run it had in Hampstead. Last year I also went to a dinner party at Hilary’s home where Emma and Stephen turned up, too, to sing songs from the show.
So I’ve started to experience Hilary’s enthusiasm for the project first-hand; and shows are nothing if not championed and nurtured. A fresh creative eye in the shape of Chicago director/choreographer Tom Mullen has also given it a new and more powerfully authentic dynamic. The highest compliment I can pay to what I saw last night is that it now looks and feels like an off-Broadway sort of show, so it may finally be en route to where it actually belongs. This is a studio musical about two sets of relationships - one couple on the eve of getting married, another on the eve of getting divorced - that fits perfectly at the Victory Gardens; and once again proves how we fundamentally lack these kind of development spaces in London.
The New End was an over-tight fit; yet the next step up, outside of the now re-opened Leicester Square Theatre (formerly the Venue) in London would have been a West End house, and it would have sat awkwardly there and been over-exposed. It’s too intimate a piece for that, and needs the close-up focus of a theatre like the Victory Gardens, which only has seven rows wrapped around the stage in three seating blocks, to hit home with its alternately comic and truthful songs about the endless reconfiguring of relationships. As The Stage’s own Paul Vale - quoted on the Chicago publicity! - put it in his review of the New End production, it is “a remarkably successful collaboration with searing ballads and snappy, insightful comic numbers”.
It has also been smartly re-rendered here with a creative use of video and projections, designed by Mike Tutaj, that engage the eye while the music engages the heart. But if the Victory Gardens have scored a victory of their own in letting this particular garden of musical theatre grow, it is also thanks to another Chicago initiative that the show came here at all: a reading was first presented as part of last year’s STAGES, a festival of new musicals in progress, staged annually by Theatre Building Chicago. A pathway was thus created for it to be seen that has led directly to last night’s Chicago opening.
While the British theatre lags desperately behind America in promoting such initiatives, there’s at last some heart and hope that we may be catching up: later this month Trafalgar Studios 2 will host this year’s Perfect Pitch festival from November 25-29 that will offer 45-minute showcases for six new shows in development. Two of them, intriguingly, are by Laurence Mark Wythe — The Lost Christmas and Through the Door (the latter co-written with Judy Freed), so he may not remain a secret for too much longer!
Leave a comment