It’s always encouraging when the theatre makes front page news. For last night’s opening of Oliver! at Drury Lane, today’s Times has a two-column picture of Rowan Atkinson running the full length of the front page, trailing a review and news story on page 4; while The Independent has a banner, immediately below the masthead with Atkinson’s face cutting into the paper’s own name, running the full width of the page, trailing its page 3 critical verdict. The Daily Mail devotes most of page three to Quentin Letts’ review, accompanied by two colour pictures. Even The Guardian splashes Michael Billington’s review across page five, with two colour pictures.
No expense had clearly been spared for the show we saw last night. As urchins spilled out over every corner of the huge stage in the opening number - Michael Coveney says in his review in The Independent that he lost counting at ninety, though by my own reckoning there were in fact 48 - and Anthony Ward’s astonishingly detailed and realistic sets looked like something out of a soundstage for a film as much as a theatrical one, you couldn’t but marvel at the scale of the thing. Though this is a re-tread of Cameron Mackintosh’s 1994 London Palladium production in terms of most of its technical credits, it seems to have been amplified and expanded.
And I couldn’t help wondering if, in these credit crunch times, this could be the last gasp for productions of this scale and expense.
In fact, of course, as economists are sometimes fond of telling us, you have to speculate to accumulate, and the money that Mackintosh has spent on this production is already coming back in spades: according to a report in today’s Times, Oliver! is “already the fastest selling on record, with £15m in advance ticket sales banked before it opened last night at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, £3m more than Dirty Dancing managed in 2006”.
But the running cost must also be vast, so how much of that goes towards recoupment and how much towards keeping the show paying its bills is another question. But Mackintosh has always played the bigger game, and it’s wonderful to see the full-on confidence that he has demonstrated towards a show that’s been part of his entire professional life - as he told the Daily Mail last week, he was an ASM on a tour of the show that started in Manchester in November 1965: “I was actually in the show, moving props around and padding out the chorus. By the end, I was hooked - I knew exactly how that set and show worked. It was a fantastic education. I was able to study one of the best musicals ever written and see how it was put together.”
It was also during on the first night of that production that Cameron, then 18, met composer Lionel Bart for the first time. “I was the boy who took him backstage on the opening night and he asked me if I was in the show. I told him that I was. He then said: ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ To which I replied: ‘I want to put on shows like this, Mr Bart’. And he reminded me of that many, many years later. He remembered. Well, I was quite pretty in those days!”
Bart famously sold the rights to his own show - and Mackintosh later on acquired them. In act of remarkable generosity, he gave Bart some of his rights back. “I just thought it was right,” Macintosh told the Mail. “Lionel lost it through his own fault but I wouldn’t have felt right if he didn’t own part of it again. And I got so much pleasure out of him being happy - a man who’s written one of the great shows of all time and one that I’ve used as a benchmark for my own career.”
Bart died in 1999, so wasn’t there last night to see his show triumph all over again. But he was there in spirit, and in his glorious melodies - and in a giant photographic image that was flown in at the curtain call.
A friend informs me that today’s reviews aren’t, in fact, the first that the show received: last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph jumped the gun. Someone called Fiona Matthias — not a name I recognise from the usual arts desk — filed a report that boldly proclaimed, “It is already leaving audiences exiting the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane with feelings of an evening well spent. It is certainly how I felt on Friday night when I went looking for an antidote to the new year blues”; and she concluded, “It is a pretty fine life when the West End can produce shows like this one in times such as these.”
Theatre critics are under threat, as never before, from a rapidly changing media; and now that news reporters are going in to see preview performances and filing their stories as reviews, the gloves are clearly coming off — even if the review this particular news reporter has written definitely lacks punch.
Mr Coveney seeing double again?
I have not seen the show yet but I thought that Coveney was especially cruel to Jodie Prenger in the Independant version of his review. There is a thin line between being critical of a performance and becoming personally nasty.
"The moment Prenger appears, I'm afraid, the heart sinks. She seems to be hiding from the audience. Her voice is okay, but she can't act and she doesn't have the depth of lung power to fill a plastic bag, let alone a West End theatre on a nightly basis. Did nobody know this when she appeared week after week in that TV show? If not, what do they know? "As Long As He Needs Me," one of the great theatre songs of our time, is a total embarrassment compounded by a naff downstage centre rush for applause."
Over on the Newsblog, we have collected summaries of some of the major reviews, including Coveney's.
"I couldn’t help wondering if, in these credit crunch times, this could be the last gasp for productions of this scale and expense"
Please don't tell us they're cancelling Ben Hur!?!