March 2009 Archives

Yesterday I mentioned one Broadway sport: checking out the number of producers on a show’s billing. That’s where the money comes from, of course; but the other favourite sport is watching the money coming back in - or not.

And unlike in London, where SOLT and its members keep such information close to their collective chests, the weekly grosses here are publicly available to everyone, in box office figures released weekly by the Broadway League, and published in Variety and online by Playbill.com here. (In London, by comparison, the best you can hope to do is make educated guesses about how shows are doing, based on the kind of discounts they are offering and their availability at the half price ticket booth).

I am taking a temporary break from the London rat-race of constant theatrical openings to do battle with an even bigger rat-race of them in New York, where producers (and therefore critics) are faced with the annual rush to the Tony Awards finishing line that this year sees 20 shows opening on Broadway in the two months of March and April alone (the cut off date for consideration for eligibility for this year’s awards is April 30), whereas the previous ten months had seen a total of 23 shows opening. (And that’s without counting on the off-Broadway scene, where many more openings are also scheduled).

That’s putting New York critics under a lot of pressure.

No, I don’t usually post blog entries on the weekend - I deserve a bit of a break! - but I’m in New York, where it so grey, rainy and misty that I can’t even see the tops of the buildings of Midtown Manhattan from the 30th floor apartment I am staying at, so I feel (almost) at home. (Mind you, I treat New York as a home from home anyway, so I hardly need the weather comparisons to complete the circuit).

I’ve been cramming so much in here since I arrived on Friday afternoon that I am grabbing a moment, before heading to a jazz brunch in Harlem, then a Broadway matinee and then a Broadway opening night, to write about the final performance I caught last night of British cabaret and jazz singer Barb Jungr’s debut season at the Cafe Carlyle on the upper East Side, that is already unlikely to be beaten as the highlight of this trip.

I keep promising to offer links to other stories I find online, but I never get around to it. Today, as I get ready to fly off to New York in a couple of hours time, I will simply leave you with these, and will see you again from the other side of the Atlantic!

• Jonathan Pryce, currently appearing in Dimetos that opened at the Donmar Warehouse this week, on keeping working, quoted in an interview with Benedict Nightingale in The Times, published March 23:

“You get to 60 and you think: ‘Why do I keep on, do I really care any more? Do I care enough to do a play at the Donmar rather than staying at home?’ Well, I do. I haven’t been able to give it up and I don’t want to. As long as there’s a theatre industry, given our massive financial problems, I’ll keep on working.”

Critics are used to complaining about having their words wrenched out of context and plastered over ads and front-of-house displays, though nowadays there’s a EU directive that actually threatens legal action against if managements mislead the public by selectively quoting from reviews. But that’s not the only game being played. Earlier this year I spotted that newspaper ads for a show called Madame Zangara’s Theatre of Dreams were using quotes from the company’s own PR agency - and others from reviews that had never been published, as I blogged here at the time.

And now, hot on the heels of the opening of Priscilla Queen of the Desert on Monday, quotes ads have started to appear in the papers - I’ve seen them in yesterday’s Standard and London Lite, plus today’s Times - for the show, which as I noted here yesterday, received reviews that ranged from two to five stars.

There’s no accounting for taste, as they say, and it is refreshingly proved by the fact that yesterday’s overnight reviews for Priscilla, Queen of the Desert ranged across the full gamut from two stars (Guardian, Independent) to five stars (Daily Express), with a couple of four stars in between (Times, Telegraph).

It is sometimes misleadingly suggested that there’s a “critical cabal” that makes critics present a united front - most recently claims were made that we were somehow in cahoots over giving Nicholas de Jongh’s Plague over England an easy ride, but if the Guardian’s round-up of reviews of the play wrote that “the critical cabal had heaped it with praise”, Rhoda Koenig responded in a letter to the paper, “Your author may know where they meet to confer and cackle, but no one has told me.”

However, the rumour persists.

This week is being bookended by the transfer of two musicals to the West End. On the one hand, there’s Spring Awakening - the best new musical I’ve seen in years, it says on the ads (and outside the theatre), and I know it because I said it! - has moved from the Lyric Hammersmith to resume performances at the Novello, prior to an official opening on Thursday. And that’s where I will have to be, even though I am heading to New York the very next morning and even though I attended - and paid to see — the last night at the Lyric the weekend before last. I’m a fan who puts my money where my mouth and pen are…

And on the other, last night saw the London press night for Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, that has transferred from even further afield, namely Australia - where I first saw it in Sydney in 2007, and declared of it then, “it’s the best show of its kind since Mamma Mia!” (and, given that I’ve just rsvp’d an invitation to attend the Mamma Mia! 10th anniversary performance the week after next, that means it’s the best in a decade, which is a judgement I’m happy to stand by).

Newspapers - and jobs for arts journalists, in particular, as I selfishly highlighted here only last week - are under threat as never before. Just yesterday The Observer ran a story pointing out that, “After years of losses at many titles, and a long debate about how to respond to the threat posed by the internet, newspapers have reached a tipping point - and the industry faces an uncertain future. More than 70 US titles have closed so far this year, with the loss of more than 5,700 jobs… In the UK, dozens of titles have closed in the past 12 months and consultant Deloitte predicts that one out of every 10 print publications will have to reduce how frequently they publish, go online-only, or close down in 2009.”

This is born out everywhere - and in the magazine market, too, where Arena magazine has just published its final edition, after 22 years; while I also hear that the next issue of Whatsonstage.com’s magazine, distributed free in theatres around the West End, is also to be the last in its current form.

Once again the West End has been beaten to the kind of tribute it could pay to one of its own by Broadway: after the death of Natasha Richardson was announced late on Wednesday in New York, Broadway theatres dimmed their lights for a minute last night to honour her. Maybe that’s appropriate — in the last fifteen years, she’d been seen more on Broadway stages than London ones, and New York was her home - but at the same time wouldn’t it be lovely if this kind of symbolic recognition of the passing of the actress could have been acknowledged so promptly in the city where she was born?

The same thing happened when Pinter died, too, as I reported here at the time, with the West End only mustering a partial response four days after Broadway did.

It was on Tuesday morning that I first read about Natasha Richardson’s skiing accident in Canada the day before on this site, with the posting of a short news story here. The report said that “the seriousness of the accident has not been confirmed”; and googling news stories later in the day revealed no further information.

On Tuesday evening I went down to Chichester to see the opening of The Last Cigarette, and after the performance, reflecting on the loss of Simon Gray (and of Harold Pinter, who also makes an appearance in the play), a theatrical acquaintance there told me of how raw he was with grief for both of them still, and then added, “And now for Natasha, too… She’s not coming back.” It was the first I’d heard of the possible severity of the case.

Never mind that the polar ice-caps are shrinking: here’s conclusive proof that the world is indeed warming up faster than ever. It’s barely mid-March, the clocks haven’t even turned back here yet (though, weirdly, they did a couple of weeks ago in New York), and already we’ve been summonsed to our first opening of the Chichester Festival Theatre’s summer season, which took place last night in the Minerva studio with the premiere of a new stage version of Simon Gray’s The Last Cigarette.

Strangely, the weather even turned sunny for the occasion, so we could almost fool ourselves into believing that summer has actually arrived.

At this year’s Olivier Awards, David Hare paid generous tribute to Harold Pinter’s life and career, and repeated his assertion, made in The Guardian in the immediate news of Pinter’s death, that “Yesterday when you talked about Britain’s greatest living playwright, everyone knew who you meant. Today they don’t.” As I previously suggested here, “It sounds suspiciously like [Hare is] making a claim to be thought of as the heir to that title”. But someone else was also in the Olivier Awards room that night who could actually claim the title even more easily, who was there to collect the Society of London Theatres’ Special Award for his lifetime achievement: Sir Alan Ayckbourn, who turns 70 next month.

And yesterday I travelled up to Scarborough to meet him at his unostentatiously grand home - a series of adjoining terrace houses that he has made into one, overlooking the sea. A blissful moment of social awkwardness occurred that could have come straight out of one of his plays when I arrived: they were resurfacing the road outside his front door, and the only way across to it was to walk over the freshly-laid tar. Heather, Alan’s wife, answered the door and asked if I’d had to had to cross it, which of course I had - so I had to take off my shoes to enter the house!

I put my heart - and some of my soul - into going to the theatre as regularly as I do. So I take it personally, and the theatre world sometimes repays the compliment. For better (mostly, we hope) or for worse (sometimes, inevitably), we’re in this together. This weekend everything I did came with a personal connection of some kind attached, whether established with the performance being watched, the personnel attached to it, the audience watching it with me, or all of the above.

It started on Friday with a trip to the Union Theatre: I’m there every day, in fact, since it is roughly a minute from the office I rent, and they do the best (and best priced) coffee, bagels and pastries in the area at the small outdoor cafe in front of it. The two men that run the cafe also happen to be actors, and I chat to them every day, too, in between the double servings of lattes I pick up on my way to the office, and then again at lunchtime and often on my way home again, too. (Yes, that’s far too much caffeine, I know, but it’s one of the few indulgences I have nowadays).

And right now, in addition to working the day shifts on the cafe (and one or other of them are routinely in at 6.30am to set up), the two are also appearing in the current play there at night.

Nicholas de Jongh’s current appearance on the marquee of a West End theatre with his play Plague Over England was, I wrote here a few weeks ago, the first time a member of the Critics’ Circle had a play on in the West End since Jeremy Kingston’s Signs of the Times played at the Vaudeville in 1973.

But I’ve now discovered another regular first-nighter has had a previous life as a playwright! Researching the career of veteran composer Sandy Wilson for the public onstage interview I am doing this afternoon with him at the Shaw Theatre, I discovered an intriguing credit buried in one online bio: “He contributed material to the Peter Cook revue Pieces of Eight in 1959, and in 1960 wrote some songs for a play by Robert Tanitch, Call It Love, at Wyndham’s Theatre (the show was a disaster)”.

You’ll have heard of Cook, of course; but I didn’t know that Robert had this sort of prior pedigree.

As the Barbican Centre’s own publicity strapline has it, “Do something different”. And it’s a mission I have been trying to implement in my own life lately - though theatre critics are traditionally stuck in a kind of groundhog day of a seemingly endless cycle of theatre openings, I have been trying to free myself a bit from the hamster’s wheel.

So what if I can’t see everything? No one ever can. So on Tuesday night, for instance, instead of going to Hampstead’s opening for Berlin Hanover Express, I took myself to Pizza on the Park instead, as I reported here yesterday. I have been to too many duff new plays at Hampstead Theatre since the theatre re-opened to need to chance another; and then the first review I turn to confirms my fears.

There’s an item on the menu at Pizza on the Park called PoP Glory, and yes, it is: three scoops of vanilla ice-cream, drizzled with pieces of chocolate brownie and soaked in chocolate fudge sauce. But enough about my own guilty pleasures; the more public glory days of Pizza on the Park are also back again, in the shape of indisputably London’s best cabaret room, that is - at last - presenting cabaret full-time again.

And we have two producers to thank for it: American cabaret singer Jeff Harner and his partner Keith Turnipseed (yes, it really is his name), who - after presenting two seasons of their self-styled American Songbook in London series at Jermyn Street Theatre - have now pitched a new cabaret tent at Pizza on the Park, and turned it into a year-round cabaret room once again.

Boris Johnson didn’t make it to the Olivier Awards on Sunday - I guess Beijing is easier to get to than Park Lane if you’re the Mayor of London, particularly given the state of London’s tubes on the weekends (the night before, I’d driven to Clapham North’s Landor Theatre, thank God, instead of tubing it there, and found out that others had to make their own way there without the benefit of the Northern Line). But he sent a video message, applauding the theatre as of his manor’s major visitor attractions, and linking it to its impact on other services, including our “restaurants, taxis and, of course, our fantastic tube and bus services” (as long as you’re not trying to get to fringe theatres on a Saturday night, presumably).

He also said that the theatre industry was in an “advanced state of credit crunch denial”, and it’s true that with records being broken for attendance and revenue last year, as well as for advance sales going forward, as I previously reported here, the theatre business is defying the trends elsewhere. And yesterday came news of another intriguing sign of credit crunch defiance: Avenue Q, that was to have closed on March 28 at the Coward, is instead merely going on a temporary hiatus - and will re-open at the Gielgud from June 1.

It was a good night for Black Watch, the Donmar Warehouse and the RSC (with four awards apiece), as well as for the Menier Chocolate Factory (with two awards for the West End transfer of its production of La Cage Aux Folles) at last night’s Laurence Olivier Awards, but otherwise the riches were spread far and wide, with the remaining six awards spread between individual contenders: there was one award each for Jersey Boys, God of Carnage and La Clique (as Best Musical, Comedy and Entertainment respectively), and one each also for Zorro, Piaf and August: Osage County (the latter nod, for best set design, was unusually the National Theatre’s sole win last night, and in that case it was a visiting import, not a production that it had originated, unlike last year where it took seven awards).

But if the National’s star suddenly fell last night, it was good to see the RSC make an awards comeback - and particularly to see its productions of The Histories so acclaimed. (There was, of course, the unfortunate fact that David Tennant was ineligible for consideration for the Best Actor category, since he had been able not given enough performances in London in the role to qualify, or the RSC might well have scored an extra award there).

It’s time to move on from the critical minefield of the reception to Plague Over England — its supporters and detractors must simply to agree to differ, whatever the agendas that each might have - but I can’t let go, just yet, of a strand that simultaneously has everything and nothing to do with the play itself: namely, the dark stain of homophobia it has provoked, which proves that nothing at all has changed, at least in some quarters of the press, since the time the play was set.

According to Michael Coveney, “jokes in the reviews are being misconstrued as signs of homophobia”, before proceeding to immediately misconstrue my own review in the Sunday Express to suggest that I thought that that the critic character in the play is Nicholas de Jongh’s revenge on Milton Shulman. I said no such thing - I merely pointed out that the title of the play alludes to a headline that once adorned a Shulman feature.

I am still, despite the online revolution of which this blog is a tiny part (one of a reported 200million blogs out there, apparently, in which case I must thank you for taking the trouble to read this one!), a newspaper junkie, and I start every day by reading The Guardian and Independent, and sometimes the Times and Daily Mail (but only if a colleague I share an office with brings her copies in!).

But how do you find what’s worth reading out there, online or in print? The randomness is, of course, part of the appeal; but I do wish we had the equivalent here of a website called broadwaystars.com, that posts links to all the breaking news stories, major reviews, interviews and features on Broadway theatre that can be found online.

Patti LuPone is one of those divas whose performances can be regularly said to stop the show; but she took this quite literally in January, when she was so affronted by a theatregoer taking a picture of her in the middle of one of her final performances of ‘Rose’s Turn’ that she stopped the show - and ordered the offender out of the theatre. We could all hear just how she did so, thanks to another offender who wasn’t taking a picture but recording the entire performance - and posted the results on youtube for all to hear, as I previously blogged about here. Unfortunately, the clip isn’t there anymore: the original link now goes to a page that says it is “no longer available due to a copyright claim by Actors Equity Association”.

But here she is now, in an interview in Playbill.com’s Diva Talk column, saying that when she finished performing the same song at the final performance and was greeted with wild applause and a standing ovation, “I felt like a rock star. There’s no other way to put it.”

It is always interesting when the subject of theatre reviews leaves the reviews pages themselves and turn up as part of a larger dialogue elsewhere. I see it as part of the job of this blog to monitor as well as provoke that discussion; and I have twice now already blogged about the reception to Nicholas de Jongh’s Plague Over England, first immediately after its opening, and then again yesterday, after the blatant exhibition of homophobia that was exhibited in the Sunday Times review.

At the risk of beating this subject to death, I return to it yet again today to direct you to some stories that have evolved out of it in the online and print pages of The Guardian.

Nicholas de Jongh’s play Plague Over England harks back, of course, with some discomfort and poignancy, to a different era of gay life when homosexuality was not only illegal but gay men were routinely subjected to what amounted to a witch-hunt. We may assume that we’ve come a long way from then - and Claudia Pritchard, reviewing the play for the Independent on Sunday yesterday, suggests that “as the play leaps abruptly to a more enlightened age…the implication that everything is all right now is oddly parochial - homosexuality is still illegal in 80 countries, and many victims of persecution flee, scared and scarred, to Britain”. It’s in fact her own review that is oddly parochial: she calls it a pleasing evening, partly thanks to the fact she states in the next sentence that “For the first time in 40 years at the theatre I didn’t have to queue for the Ladies”.

We’re not told why - could it simply be because the audience was so thin the night she went, or because so few women were in the audience? I’m not sure it’s a recommendation of the play, though. Even more disturbing, however, was another of the Sunday reviews yesterday, that shows we may not have come very far at all in terms of attitude and prejudice.