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).
Given that the Menier doesn’t do an early curtain up on press nights as it is, but schedules those performances to start at the usual 8pm, I suspected that most first night critics - and there was a typically impressive turn-out, with lead critics of the Guardian, Times, Telegraph, Mail, Standard, FT and Sun all in attendance, plus from Sundays, The Observer, Mail on Sunday and myself (the Sunday Express) - would at least not be attempting overnight reviews.
But that was without counting on the impressive speed and tenacity of Michael Coveney, currently standing in for Paul Taylor on The Independent, who crouched on the stairs during the curtain calls (but didn’t exit until after they’d been completed) and whose 530-word review has duly appeared this morning.
I don’t know what The Independent’s final deadline is; but Michael could not have had much writing time at all on it - yet his review is full of precise and articulate references to the specifics of what he saw last night that proved he was paying full attention throughout. (Another leading critic nearby was, meanwhile, frequently asleep).
The Menier has, of course, become a fast-rising star on the map of London’s theatreland - its last Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George, not only transferred to the West End but also to Broadway; and this one could well follow it. Only yesterday I was noticing here how some famous and important shows seem to come around more frequently in London than they do on Broadway, such as South Pacific which had to wait until this year for its first official revival there (though one correspondent accurately replied yesterday that it has had several major New York revivals elsewhere in the interim, just not ones that were Tony eligible).
The same is true of A Little Night Music, that - since its original Hal Prince staging was imported to London’s Adelphi Theatre in 1975, has had two more major London outings, first when a Chichester Festival Theatre revival came to the Piccadilly in October 1989, and then when the National staged it in 1995. On Broadway, meanwhile, it has not been revived since its original 1973 staging; though there have been other New York runs, including a New York City Opera production in 1990 that was revived in 1991, and then re-staged there in 2003 (where I saw it with a cast that included Jeremy Irons as Fredrick Egerman, Juliet Stevenson as Desiree Armfeldt, and Claire Bloom as Madame Armfeldt).
There have, however, been plans before to get it back to Broadway - including, it is revealed in a programme note, once under the helm of Trevor Nunn, who is making his Sondheim debut with this production, but who says that he has previously attempted to work with Sondheim several times, “including once proposing to him a new piece that we might develop together, but somehow each time the plan was blown off course or dwindled away. At last, I was committed to doing a new production of A Little Night Music
Instead, he - and we - have had to wait till now for that to happen; and it has been worth the wait. And Nunn - who has famously worked with forensic skill on studio plays (where his credits famously include having created the RSC’s Other Place and opened the Donmar as the RSC’s London studio home), but has never done studio musicals - says, “Of course, the limited spatial and physical circumscriptions are part of the Chocolate Factory brand but for me, they are entirely overridden by this venue’s enviable and total intimacy; a chamber theatre for a chamber musical”.
And if it’s amazing to find Nunn, reinventing new ways of working on musicals at 68, this plays to his strengths as a director, who besides being master of the big visual picture that he has brought to animate such larger canvases as Nicholas Nickleby, Les Miserables and even Starlight Express, is most brilliant when working closely with actors. One who has done so wrote to me only last night to say, “I worship Trevor. On his day (and everyone says it) he is the greatest teacher and so many of us have reaped the rewards of his skill.” But there are some who think he has sold out - as my actor friend went on to say, “He made the mistake of making money and people don’t like artists making money. They are supposed to be poor and suffer.”
Some critics seem to think so, too. In an interview with Nunn published in the New Statesman in 2001, Johann Hari writes that, “For some, such as his nemesis Michael Billington, the Guardian’s theatre critic, Nunn has squandered his subsidy on the candyfloss of easy populism.” Hari tracks down this enmity as having its roots -“as with all the strongest enmities - in friendship.” He quotes Nunn as saying, “he used to be a very good colleague. I employed Billington once. At the RSC, I got him to edit a small in-house magazine. I knew him very well.”
And then he amplifies: “It started to break down when he wrote a virulent whole page about Nicholas Nickleby, saying it should never have been done. It was an odd reaction to make to a show that had people walking out ecstatic every night. Tickets were exchanging hands on the black market for £200 apiece. He went on and on, writing that it was some kind of disgrace that the subsidised theatre should be doing this, because there were so many unknown German expressionist plays that should have been done instead.”
Now that Nunn, of course, is a free agent, he doesn’t have to worry about that wider repertoire, but can pursue projects purely on the basis of his own interests. There may have been those of us who were immensely puzzled by the interest he took in Gone with the Wind earlier this year that came and went in a quick fizzle at the New London Theatre (and has now been duly expunged from his programme biography), but he’s now back on track with a show worthy of his talents.
But it’s also intriguing to note that Nunn, who was publicly outspoken in his criticism of reality TV casting when How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? was first premiered in 2006, seems to have embraced its participants so fully since. As Andrew Lloyd Webber commented earlier this year, “We just observe with interest that Sir Trevor [Nunn] has just cast Darius from Pop Idol as Rhett Butler in his new production of Gone with the Wind. I find that very intriguing. A little baptism has happened here, I think. Of course, he claims he had never heard of Darius prior to the audition.”
And now starring in Night Music as Anne Egerman is Jessie Buckley, who - as her own programme bio points out - “came to prominence coming second in Andrew Lloyd Webber and the BBC’s production of I’d Do Anything.” Buckley was, of course, Oliver! producer Cameron Mackintosh’s own choice to play the role of Nancy, but she was voted out by the public. As Nick Hytner has been quoted by Michael Riedel in a New York Post column saying, “For the first time, somebody said no to Cameron. And it was the public. Which proves that democracy does work.”
Impressive work by Mr Coveney as you observe but strange that his review in The Independent awards five-star but his (later?) review on What's On Stage gives only four stars.