December 2008 Archives

I’ve previously noted here that it’s the time of year when critics typically file their lists of the best and worst of the last year, and while I have now gone into print in both the pages of The Stage and the Sunday Express with mine, I realise I’ve not quite exhausted my choices, nor settled on my definitive hits (and misses) of the year.

I realise, for instance, that in my Stage feature, I named half a dozen “Best Musical Productions” - and entirely neglected to mention one of the very best of the year, the Union’s amazing (and amazingly creepy) chamber treatment of Sweeney Todd. But at least the theatre won the Peter Brook Empty Space Award (of which I am one of the judges) last month for Up-and-Coming Theatre.

“Madame is indisposed”, says the maid/butler Jacob before Albin/Zaza makes his/her first appearance in La Cage Aux Folles, but she wasn’t the only one thus affected at the Playhouse Theatre last night. I had gone again as the guest of my New York friend Bert Fink, who is in town to see a few shows and who had been persuaded to see this one by the prospect of seeing Douglas Hodge’s deservedly acclaimed performance as Albin/Zaza (I would have to say that - one of my own quotes about him adorns the theatre front-of-house!).

But we’d already heard at a lunch on Sunday that Hodge had been out on Friday and Saturday night, and that by Saturday not just Hodge but also his first understudy, Adrian der Gregorian, was off, too, so the second cover Robert Maskell had taken over. (One blogger, the Teenage Theatre Critic as he calls himself, was there on Saturday night, and reported on that performance here). We were, however, hopeful that at least one of them might have returned by last night.

We may have effectively hit the pause button on our lives last Wednesday - and though the retail sector immediately went back to work just two days later with wall-to-wall sales from Friday, many won’t be in their offices for another full week. But I’ve trudged into mine today, since there’s still plenty to write about - even if I’ve actually taken a theatrical break of my own and only finally returned to the theatre last night (and that was pure pleasure, not to work, seeing Maria Friedman’s show at the Trafalgar Studios again)

But though all British newspapers turned into snoozepapers on Christmas Day and didn’t publish at all - and The Guardian, alone amongst the quality nationals, chose not to publish on Boxing Day, either - the world doesn’t stop turning, nor sadly do people stop dying, just because they do. But it meant that the death of Harold Pinter on Christmas Eve went unreported by The Guardian in print till Saturday - even though it has Britain’s leading authority on his work, Michael Billington, on its staff, who has written the definitive biography of the man and his work.

It’s that time of year when critics file their annual reports - a duty more pleasurable, at least, than filing one’s annual taxes, which are due at the end of next month! As Andy Field wrote in a Guardian blog yesterday, “So 2008 comes spluttering to an end in the traditional way: coughing up its memories and confessions in a column-filling flurry of ‘Highlights of the year’ articles. Critics and artists are dragged away from panto (or whatever it is that AA Gill does at this time of year) to carefully consider their favourite things from the last 12 months for us to disagree with.”

I’ve duly done so in a full page feature myself in the current double issue of The Stage, and I’ve just filed another shorter version for this weekend’s Sunday Express, but as Andy goes on to say, “This parade of lists and awards always leaves me a little dissatisfied. It’s not that the small, elite group of high-profile shows and artists that end up on these lists aren’t great. It’s just that in my head, I don’t remember a year by a few stand-out productions that tick all the boxes on some scientifically divined checklist of good.”

Instead Andy suggests, “The year for me is a collage of moments of wonder and beauty and strangeness and fear.”

The fat lady - or at least the Witch, Wolf, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel and Jack (of the Beanstalk fame) - haven’t sung yet, so this year’s theatre openings are still not over. No, there’s not a sudden rush of last minute panto openings to accommodate - though John Barrowman’s appearance, for the second year running, as headliner in Birmingham Hippodrome’s annual panto (in Robin Hood - the Pantomime Adventure) only began its run last Friday, so has also cut it right to the wire - but I’m actually referring, of course, to Into the Woods, which is opening tonight in a new production at Highgate’s Upstairs at the Gatehouse, and where you will duly find me this evening.

I know I routinely complain in these parts that there’s simply too much for single reviewers to see it all, and that’s a problem accentuated at this time of year with the surfeit of Christmas-themed shows that each have relatively short runs; bravo, though, to The Stage, for its exemplary coverage of getting to most, if not all, of them in its nationwide reviews spread that is simply unrivalled by anyone else. (I’ll be in Highgate tonight for this paper, as it happens).

I was there at the beginning, so I felt I should be there at the end: the curtain came down on Imagine This for the last time on Saturday, just a month and a day after I had been to the first night, so I went to see it again as it did. As a critic, I had apparently played my own part in its early demise: according to producer Beth Trachtenberg, the public’s response to her show was “directly opposed to a narrow-minded critical belief that musicals are limited in their emotional impact and ability to deal with meaningful subject matter in a powerful and sensitive manner.”

In fact, I strongly believe that musicals can have the highest emotional impact of any kind of theatre - and love it, above all, when they deal with meaningful subject matter. My own view, expressed in my Stage review here, was that it failed as musical drama, not for its subject matter.

As if Broadway isn’t in a parlous enough state as it is, with countless shows heading towards an early January closure, one of the autumn’s few critical hits (if not yet commercial ones) has suddenly dramatically lost its star: Jeremy Piven, best known for his appearances on the TV show Entourage, has withdrawn from the Broadway revival of Speed-the-Plow. After missing Tuesday’s performance and both of Wednesday’s performances, it has now been announced that he will not return, after his doctors apparently “advised him that he should end his run immediately”.

While Variety has reported that “legiters view Piven’s health claims with scepticism - and freely trade gossip about the actor’s perceived bad behaviour, including ignoring the traditional half-hour call time”, the New York Times has published a lengthy report on the diagnosis of his doctor, Dr. Carlon M. Colker, who said that the actor had come to him complaining of excessive fatigue and exhaustion, and after undergoing tests, it had been discovered that there was “a very, very elevated level of mercury” in his blood. The actor had said he was a frequent sushi eater who consumed fish about twice a day, and that he used herbal remedies.

It was quite an evening, at least offstage, at the Bush last night. The theatre has had a year of crises, beginning with the threatened withdrawal of part of their Arts Council grant that they waged a successful fight to retain in the end; but meanwhile the building itself was subject to a series of plumbing leaks and other technical problems when Josie Rourke’s inaugural season as artistic director got underway.

I remember being called up earlier in the day for the press night for Joseph Fiennes’ appearance in 2,000 Feet Away to say they were having problems with a leak and weren’t sure if the performance was going to happen, though it did in the end. But then there followed a post-summer programming gap, when the theatre website looked barren and there was a strange silence emanating from Shepherd’s Bush Green.

Part of the problem was subsequently revealed by the first production of the autumn, when the theatre staged the Broken Space season - a festival of ten short new plays, presented in near or total darkness, as a creative response to working without a lighting grid. But last night the theatre was nearly dark for another reason entirely: Ralf Little, currently starring in 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover At Christmas — a slightly revamped version of their summer sell-out, basically a sketch show on the theme of relationship break-ups scripted by six young playwrights), got stuck in traffic on the M1 motorway, and a courier bike had to be despatched to retrieve him from it and speed him to the theatre.

A scratchy recording of the national anthem, played as the lights went down before the curtains opened on the Tricycle’s new production of Joe Orton’s Loot, produced one moment of critical uncertainty at Monday’s opening night: “Do we stand?”, the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts, sitting in front of me, turned around to ask. I think he was joking, but I said that if he didn’t, I would blog about it - so he briefly rose. It’s good to know that some traditions aren’t quite dead, even if the play that followed, of course, is all about detonating such moral certainties.

And then, at last night’s opening of the RSC’s The Cordelia Dream at Wilton’s Music Hall, another leading theatre critic found himself suddenly propelled out of his seat, but for a different reason entirely. The man next to Michael Billington was lurching so wildly sideways that Michael had to keep fending him off, while the person sitting behind them tried unsuccessfully to keep the lurcher upright; eventually, Michael decided it would be safer to sit on the steps in the aisle instead of his seat.

Though Cats seems to be somehow unaccountably missing from the current TS Eliot Festival season at the Donmar Warehouse, at least a question I first asked here back in February 2006 has at last been answered: “Can it be long before Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard is ready for her close-up… again?”

She returned to the West End last night, just fifteen years after originally premiering at the Adelphi, but in a far smaller and more intimate guise, courtesy of the summer production at Newbury’s tiny Watermill Theatre which employed their now-familiar practice of actors doubling up as their own musicians. A technique that was born of economic necessity in cash-strapped regional theatres - especially ones with seating capacities as low as at Newbury - has now become a fast track to West End exploitation, ever since their Sweeney Todd became a hit at the Trafalgar Studios in July 2004 and then went all the way to Broadway, and was followed by Mack and Mabel moving to the Criterion in 2006.

Blackberrys aren’t the only things that curve nowadays; so does Britain’s newest - and most futuristic - theatre building, and it is even called The Curve. Situated in Leicester, and replacing the former, mostly unloved Haymarket that shut two years ago, it was officially opened by the Queen two Thursdays ago, then had its first preview for its first in-house production, a new musical called Simply Cinderella, that night, before opening officially just five nights later last Tuesday.

Unfortunately it clashed with the transfer for the RSC’s Hamlet to the Novello that night (which went ahead, despite the fact that star David Tennant had to withdraw), so I didn’t go till last Saturday; but away from the pomp and heightened circumstance on an official opening, it was arguably better to see it already functioning as it was meant to be: as a working theatre, already inhabited by audiences and actors doing what the theatre is there, first and foremost, to accommodate: the putting on of shows.

Ian Shuttleworth has helpfully pointed out in his regular editorial introduction to Theatre Record, the publication that invaluably collects every national review published into one place, that I “unintentionally but perhaps tellingly misspelt” the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s name as Alistair Daring, not Darling, in my blog entry here on the reduction in the VAT rate; it’s obviously such a good typo I’m going to leave it uncorrected there!

The Guardian, meanwhile, called me Mark Shepton when they quoted me this week on David Tennant’s absence from the press night of Hamlet here; as Shutters, as Ian is usually called, e-mailed to suggest to me last night, “Clearly, you need to beat them about the head with a Shepton mallet!”

Ian then added, “I’m sorry, I’ve just been to Peter Pan at Richmond, and so this is the best calibre of gag I’m currently capable of producing…”

The theatrical recession is starting to bite at the top as well as the bottom. Last week, I reported in a Guardian blog on a scheme to offer a family package to Cameron Mackintosh produced musicals in the West End and on tour for just £50 for four seats in the upper circles and balconies (though not, his office subsequently told me, in either the worst seats in the house or because his shows were particularly ailing, but simply to make them more accessible to families).

Now it is has been announced that the one of the world’s most famous opera houses, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, is to start holding weekly draws on its website in which its priciest seats - usually selling for $140 to $295 - will be made available for just $25 for Friday and Saturday evenings. They are being subsidized by $3m in donations from the company’s board.

David Tennant’s entire run in Hamlet, both in Stratford-upon-Avon and now on its transfer to the West End’s Novello Theatre, was famously sold out ahead of the first night in either place; there were even reports of desperate fans of the actor being duped by forged tickets being produced to the show, copied from some 800 tickets that had been sold in person at the box office.

So the critics might be said to be entirely superfluous to requirements, at least commercially speaking, but then that’s only part of what we do: we’re also there as validation for the work done, to bear independent, hopefully expert, witness to it, and to write the show, literally, into the history books.

But it always seems strange to me, too, that with the amount of work there is to cover at theatres up and down the land — and especially at this time of year - that we dutifully return to re-review RSC productions that have already received the full treatment at Stratford, in this case just over four months since we first saw it there.

When Rodgers and Hammerstein’s now-legendary first musical together Oklahoma! first tried out in New Haven in 1943, one of the early reports of its likely prospects for Broadway proclaimed, “No legs, no jokes, no chance!” That verdict, of course, proved entirely wrong, and the history of modern musical theatre was re-written when it actually opened in New York and eventually became the longest-running musical of its time.

But in the show-within-the-show that is presented by a bunch of Jewish actors in Imagine This, a musical set in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, the lead actor assures the Nazi commander of their re-telling of the Masada story, “You’ll love it. It has singing, dancing and all the Jews die in the end.”

That joke may have scored points for irony, but the London critics were not similarly enamoured (with the exception of Tim Walker, who gave it four stars in the Sunday Telegraph, and another review in freesheet London Lite). Now it has been announced that the musical is to shutter prematurely at the New London Theatre on December 20, just a month and a day after it opened there.

There was at least one unhappy punter in the interval at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue: she was wondering when Eddie Izzard was going to appear. She had bought her tickets online for last night’s performance there, and it was only after sitting through the first half of Christmas in New York, the third annual West End celebration of new and traditional seasonal music focused around that city, that she realised she might be in the wrong place, or at least here on the wrong night. (The theatre had helpfully posted notices on the front doors explaining that Izzard was not on last night, but she must have missed it).

For the rest of us, though, this was the happiest way possible to begin the onward rush towards Christmas that has become a wonderful beacon for young talent, on both sides of the footlights, to receive a festive West End showcase.

Full disclosure: I go back a long way with Maria Friedman, onstage and off, and have seen a lot of her over the years on both, and either side of the Atlantic. I’ve seen her in musicals in Oldham, Leicester and Plymouth, at the National Theatre and in the West End, from such short-runners as Spin of the Wheel (in 1987 at the Comedy) to her Olivier-award winning runs in Passion (1996 at the Queen’s) and Ragtime (2003 at the Piccadilly), as well as The Woman in White both in the West End and then Broadway. I’ve also seen her in plays at Hampstead, the Ambassadors and Royal Court, not to mention countless musical galas (especially Sondheim ones).

I’ve also interviewed her both privately (first when she brought her first solo show, By Special Arrangement to the West End’s Whitehall Theatre in 1994, after premiering it the year before at the Donmar Warehouse, then again when she was in The Woman in White and yet again this year when she did her solo show at the Menier in March) and publicly, earlier this very week on the stage of the Shaw Theatre in the ongoing “Spotlight On” series I am now hosting regularly there. (Next up: Ruthie Henshall in January, then Michel Legrand in February).

But this week I am seeing more of her than ever.

The good news, as the West End Whingers have already rejoiced, is that the mad scramble for seats at the Menier Chocolate Factory is now over: tickets are now fully reserved (though, at four to each unremittingly hard red bench, it’s no less of a tight squeeze). The bad news is that this has had the unexpected result of actually slowing people down on getting to them: not because they can’t find them (the numbering is big enough), but because no one rushes in anymore to secure their seats when the doors open, leading to a slow dash instead through the single-file entrance funnel just as the show is supposed to begin.

The result is that the curtain up is inevitably delayed, and last night’s opening night didn’t start till nearly 8.10pm, so it finally came down after 11pm. (The post-interval attempt to get the audience back to their seats proved similarly difficult).

As Dogberry famously says in Much Ado About Nothing, comparisons are odorous; but it never stops critics making them. Last night a new production of Carousel opened at the Savoy Theatre, and in Benedict Nightingale’s review in The Times this morning, he begins by stating, “Some productions stick in the mind for aeons, which is bad news for revivals of the same show that are unlucky enough to follow them. And I must confess that, despite the soaring notes that came from Lesley Garrett last night, I spent much of Lindsay Posner’s staging of Carousel nostalgically recalling Nicholas Hytner’s great production at the National a decade ago. Not the details. Just the overall feel, which was simple yet sad and, in its unpretentiously solemn way, as deep as a Broadway musical could be.”

Actually, and not to press those details, Hytner’s admittedly great production opened at the National on December 10, 1992, so almost exactly 16 years ago. But yes, it does linger inevitably in the memory of those who saw it; and when I suggested as much to Kim Poster, lead producer of this new production when I saw it at Monday’s final preview, she was right to reply that she wants to be judged on this production, not on the memory of previous ones. Besides, there’s a whole new generation of audience out there who couldn’t have, or didn’t, see that earlier production.

It is, of course, entirely possible to have an opinion on something you’ve not seen or experienced for yourself first-hand: we do it all the time, in all walks of life, and reach our own conclusions based on the limited evidence that has been presented to us, mostly via the media or through talking to friends and colleagues.

But it is the job of a critic or cultural commentator to at least have experienced the work that they are critiquing professionally in full. But Norman Lebrecht — an assistant editor of the Evening Standard, cultural columnist there, radio broadcaster and novelist - hadn’t actually troubled himself to see Imagine This before declaring it “one musical too far”.

I admit it: I don’t always get it right, especially when it comes to judging the commercial prospects of something. After I saw Les Miserables at the Barbican when it first premiered there in 1985, I thought Cameron Mackintosh would be a fool to transfer it to the West End; but he did, and there it still is, the longest-running musical in history. And when I first saw the movie version of Mamma Mia! at a screening back in June, I wrote here that “maintaining the joy, spontaneity and surprises of the stage version of Mamma Mia! proves more difficult onscreen”.

Yet that same movie has, according to a feature in The Guardian last week, “taken £369m worldwide at the box office to date, becoming the most successful musical film in history, trouncing West Side Story, Cabaret and Grease. When released on DVD on Monday, it quickly became the fastest-selling film in British history, shifting 1,669,084 copies on its first day. It now only needs to inch past Titanic to become the highest-grossing film ever in Britain - it is already the highest-grossing British film of all time at the UK box office, beating the Harry Potter films hands down.”