April 2009 Archives

One of the things I am enjoying most about posting “tweets” on Twitter.com, which you can follow here (and from which you can also find the latest five entries appearing alongside this blog) is to post links to interesting theatre-related interviews, quotes and news stories I have come across. In case you are have not been following them, though, here’s a round-up of some of the latest gems on advice about directors, regional theatre and other subjects.

• Frances Barber, interviewed in The Guardian on April 21, was asked, What’s the best advice anyone ever gave you? She replied, “Years ago, Judi Dench told me, ‘Don’t argue with the director, darling; just say yes and then do it in whatever way you were thinking of anyway.’ Now, I never, ever argue.” That’s nearly as terrific in terms of advice about directors as that given to Kathleen Turner by Maggie Smith about what sort of director Anthony Page is, before Page directed Turner in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: “Oh darling, he’s wonderful”, Maggie is reported to have replied. “He does everything I tell him”. (Page’s latest production, a revival of Waiting for Godot, opens at Broadway’s Studio 54 tonight, and he’ll no doubt be doing everything that Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin and John Goodman tell him to, too).

“If a play opens outside of New York, does it really exist? Don’t ask my colleagues—they wouldn’t know,” Terry Teachout, the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal, “tweeted” yesterday, linking to a provocative blog he posted yesterday about the fact that his paper is, through his own efforts, “the only national general-interest publication that bothers to cover plays outside the New York area with any regularity.”

He points out that, while the current Broadway revival of The Norman Conquests had received rave reviews, no one mentioned that it had been revived by the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre a year and a half ago, and he was the only New York critic who had actually reviewed a production which he says, “was exactly comparable in quality to Matthew Warchus’ Broadway staging.”

It’s happened before and it will happen again: productions cross the Atlantic - and change their leading actors and venues - at their peril. Many is the Broadway hit that has come to London and quickly foundered: in an interview in The Times last Saturday, it is clear that Stephen Sondheim is still smarting from the initial failure in London of Sweeney Todd, when it came to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1981, and ran for just over three months.

As Sondheim tells interviewer Alan Franks, “I don’t know how you’d print this in your newspaper, but, well, when the critics s* all over it … oh, that was dreadful, because, you know, I’m an Anglophile, I love coming here.” (London - and its critics - have, however, long since made amends with this show, which has gone on to be produced subsequently at venues from the National Theatre, Royal Opera House and Royal Festival Hall to the West End’s Trafalgar Studios, as well as fringe stagings from the Bridewell to the Union Theatre).

But it cuts both ways. We’ve also sent numerous shows the other way, too, and seen them quickly fail on Broadway.

I typically go to the theatre around five or six times a week, sometimes more - on Friday, as I reported here, I put three evenings worth of theatregoing into one long marathon day at the Tricycle, which started at 10.45am and didn’t finish till 10.05pm (a day that also saw Vanessa Redgrave in attendance with brother Corin, there to support Corin’s daughter Gemma in the plays), then on Saturday night I saw a 7.30pm show followed by an 11pm cabaret at the Prince of Wales’s Delfont Room, so last week I saw nine shows in all.

It’s not always easy - but then no one forces me to do this, of course. I choose this life - or it chooses me (I’m sometimes not entirely sure which!). And yes, there may be longeurs and you may sometimes wish you were somewhere, or someone, else - but as the cliché goes, “no pain, no gain”, and last week’s theatrical outings saw a lot of gain — and some pain — out of them.

But what sustains one’s enthusiasm and passion along the way?

Last night saw the Broadway opening of the transfer of the three parter Old Vic production of The Norman Conquests — but while each stands alone, of course, and can be seen individually, its curious to note that last night’s “official” opening night performance was, in fact, of just one part, Round and Round the Garden.

The major critics, however, attended a trilogy day there saw all three parts - and trilogy days will continue to be presented throughout every Saturday of the run, and - on two particularly punishing weekends for the cast - on Sundays as well, over the weekends of May 16-17 and June 27-28; the full schedule can be found on the official website here. As Ben Brantley puts it in his rave review in today’s New York Times, they are played in “giddy rotation”, and he goes on to mention the ” seven speeding hours it takes to perform Mr. Ayckbourn’s three comedies, first staged in the early 1970s and looking younger and healthier than ever in the production that opened Thursday night.” I guess it is just too complicated to explain that only one of them opened last night!

Meanwhile today sees me heading off imminently to the Tricycle Theatre for a different sort of trilogy day entirely.

I have often noted before how critics often differ in their opinions on particular shows - as I said here last June, “There are no critical absolutes - no right or wrong - when it comes to reviews, and of the great things about London is that there are still enough journalistic outlets for a range of opinions to be expressed (even if those expressing them still come from a relatively narrow background of class, education and race - where, apart from Tamara Gausi who is one of the regular Time Out team, are the black voices, for instance?)”

On that occasion I was talking about the press reception to Michael Frayn’s Aferlife that had just premiered at the National.

The death of newspapers (and their cuttings libraries)
Only yesterday the New York Times Company posted a loss for the first quarter of this year of $74.5m, with a reported drop in advertising revenue of nearly 30%. According to one news story, the company - which also publishes the Boston Globe (which, earlier this month, it had threatened to shut down unless the unions agreed to cost-cutting measures), International Herald Tribune and other papers - “has been grappling with a steep drop in print advertising revenue, steadily declining circulation and the migration of readers to free news online.”

So it was no surprise to sit in Hampstead Theatre last night and watch Michael Frayn’s play Alphabetical Order and watch the story of another newspaper - which has been going for a over a hundred years, we are told — ceasing publication. Except that Frayn’s play was actually written in 1975 (and originally premiered at the old Hampstead Theatre, too); but even if the fact that the play is set in a non-digital cuttings library - and there’s not a computer screen in sight, or a mobile, for that matter - in sight lets you know that it is a period piece, newspapers have obviously been dying for even longer than we thought.

The Phantom of the Opera is already a musical that is loaded with premonitions of theatrical disaster, most notably when that chandelier apparently comes crashing down over the heads of the audience at the end of the first act. Of course, it doesn’t actually land on their heads - after the Phantom shakes it, the chandelier falls sharply before sweeping itself onto the stage and lying in a collapsed heap there - though the theatre ceiling, ironically, actually came crashing down directly across the street from where Phantom is playing, when the grand chandelier of the Theatre Royal, Haymarket apparently slipped four feet from its bearings, dislodging chunks of the plaster ceiling which rained down on patrons below as they watched a stage adaptation of When Harry Met Sally there in 2004.

Having seen that feeble production (though I was not there that night), I am sure it was the most dramatic event of the evening.

Today I’m sharing some recent quotes, particularly about critics, that I’ve been collecting….

Flatulence and personal reviews….
Martin Clunes, interviewed in The Guardian on April 14, 2009, was asked if he suffers for his art, and replied: “I get a lot of flatulence when I’m nervous. But that’s more discomfort than suffering.” And asked What’s the worst thing anyone ever said about you?, he replied, “A lot of journalists describe my appearance in unfavourable terms. When I played Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, a critic for the magazine City Limits wrote that ‘Martin Clunes is physically and spiritually repulsive’. But you get used to it.”

I got an e-mail from a friend in New York yesterday that asked me, “Is Susan Boyle as big over there as she is here?” I had in fact blogged about it here yesterday already, and at the time Boyle’s rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” on Britain’s Got Talent had, I wrote, been viewed over 11.3m times. As I write today, that’s now up to over 17.5m; and there are now numerous other TV clips to view, too, including Diane Sawyer’s interview with Boyle on Good Morning America yesterday, which she introduced by saying, “Everybody has been talking about it - I couldn’t go anywhere yesterday where people weren’t talking about Susan Boyle.” As she went on, “In this world of perfectly packaged telegenic clones, Susan Boyle offered something else - shy courage and heart.”

It was a challenging interview for Sawyer - asked to comment on saying she had never being kissed before, Susan said, “No comment - I don’t want to talk about that!” And asked what she would do with the money if she won, Susan sensibly replied, “It’s baby steps at the moment - we’ll see how things progress!”

But giant steps are already being taken in globalising her.

The reality TV castings of West End musicals, from The Sound of Music that started it to Joseph, Grease and Oliver! that followed it, have in fact all been won by aspiring, professionally-trained actors - so that the TV castings have, in the end, merely served as another channel for them to be discovered by, and more importantly, publicised by, creating a sense of public ownership in the making of their stardom that has in turn propelled each of those productions to commercial success.

But now the true amateurs are having their day, too. Last May, 14-year-old George Sampson won the second series of Britain’s Got Talent, and by August was making his West End debut when he went into the cast of Into the Hoods, then playing the Novello. As I blogged at the time, I drove past the theatre one night and saw mob scenes at the stage door.

Only yesterday I was saying how familiarity breeds content, hence the seemingly unstoppable stream of adaptations of well-known films for the stage. But many well-known plays (and some musicals) also come around again and again, too, and the proof of how good they are is that, far from providing a wallow in familiar territory, they can unnerve you with new discoveries each time.

Shakespeare, of course, underpins this - and if we are blessed in this country to see new productions of the major plays repeatedly, it’s a curious fact how they often arrive together.

Familiarity, I never tire of saying, breeds content, at least when it comes to audiences wanting bang for their buck in the West End or on Broadway. No wonder that when Dirty Dancing opened in the West End in 2006, it reportedly had an advance box office of £12m - the largest apparently recorded until then, only beaten by the £15m reported advance for the revival of Oliver!, cast by reality TV, earlier this year. And last Friday, Baz Bamigboye reported in the Daily Mail that Oliver! is already close to recouping its £4.5m costs.

Variety’s David Benedict also reported last week of the stage version of Calendar Girls that, “After becoming the fastest-selling U.K. tour in history, the show sailed into town April 4. The London run is playing at 94% capacity and brandishing a £1.7 million ($2.5 million) advance. Not only is that double the figure generated by Pugh and Rogers’ production of Equus, starring Daniel Radcliffe, but the $65 top-price ticket for Calendar Girls is $7 lower than that of Equus. Current sales rate should see it nudging $3 million by mid-April.”

I’ve been blogging here since August 2005, on a virtually daily basis (apart from weekends, and occasional “rest” days), and am fast heading towards posting my thousandth entry; but yesterday I finally joined another blogging revolution: I started posting “tweets” on micro-blogging site Twitter.com. (You can find me there as ShentonStage).

This is the site where you both choose to follow other micro-bloggers and are followed in turn. (It’s a whole new concept in professional and personal stalking, but where instead of being intrusive or even illegal, it’s the entire point). But I’m not going to post minute-by-minute updates about my latest trip to the bathroom or to the dentist (though I am actually going to the latter today); instead, I intend to use it as a tool to offer breaking theatre news and direct those that choose to follow me to stories that I have either written or found elsewhere.

Yesterday, for instance, I started by posting a link to my blog here, and another to my latest blog on The Guardian website, too, about Daniel Evans taking over the artistic directorship of Sheffield Theatres.

‘Send in the Clowns’ may just be Stephen Sondheim’s most famous and recorded song, first turned into a chart hit by Judy Collins in 1975, two years after the Broadway premiere of the musical that inspired it, A Little Night Music, and since recorded by everyone from Sinatra to Streisand (who, naturally, persuaded the composer to adapt some of the lyrics, as only Streisand can, with a new verse: “Who could foresee/I’d come to feel about you/What you felt about me?/Why only now when I see/That you’ve drifted away?/What a surprise…./What a cliché….”).

There have also been recordings by artists as diverse as Shirley Bassey, Bing Crosby, Grace Jones, the Brotherhood of Man, Frida Anni-Frid Lyngstad (of Abba), Olivia Newton John, the Tiger Lillies, Glenn Close and Tom Jones, not to mention, of course, Elizabeth Taylor, in the best-forgotten 1978 film version of the show.

But what does it mean?

And again and again. And I still can’t resist it. I’ve almost lost count of the number of times I have now seen Mamma Mia! on stage, though this blog actually acts as a useful aide memoir sometimes: back in April 2006 I wrote here that I’d just seen it for “the twelfth time that I can remember”; and later that year saw it once more when the international touring production visited Manchester, and which I reviewed here, so that makes thirteen.

Then last year, of course, came the film, and a whole new set of records were broken - it quickly became the highest grossing British film of all time, outstripping even Harry Potter, and the DVD release was the fastest selling in history, shifting some 1.6m on its first day alone, and total sales by the end of 2008 at over 5m copies. The Official Charts Company estimates that one in four British households now owns a Mamma Mia! DVD. But when I saw an advance screening of the movie last summer, I wrote here that it had me wanting “to run back to see it onstage now instead.”

I’ve finally done so last night.

No, I’m no longer there; but I’ve left behind lots of British talent, on both sides of the footlights. Heaven only help them when they finally get back home, though, if my homecoming experience is anything to go by! So, first of all, apologies for not posting anything here on Friday, but secondly, an explanation: I only got back late on Thursday evening, much later than planned, after enduring the usual Heathrow nightmares - more than half an hour being held in a holding pattern over London, then another 20 minutes wait on the ground before a gate could be found for the plane to actually head towards.

I can’t help thinking that Heathrow is constantly taken by surprise whenever a plane arrives: “Jeez, what’s that big metal object coming in from the skies? We weren’t expecting one of those! Give us a moment, I mean half an hour… And you mean there are passengers aboard who will want to disembark? We better find a gate for it to park at!!!! Give us another half an hour! And there’s luggage we have to deal with, too? Whoa! GIve us a break!!!! We had no idea!”

No, the title line of this blog posting isn’t a private message (though that’s in fact what I’ll be doing today, returning to London from New York), but a line from the penultimate show of my stay in New York: I saw musical theatre composer Jason Robert Brown in a stunning cabaret at the jazz and cabaret club Birdland last night, in which he sang “Flying Home”, that amazing song from Songs for a New World.

Each time I’ve seen him over the years I’ve grown deeper and deeper in awe of his phenomenal talent, both for writing some of the most melodically thrilling songs in contemporary musical theatre, but also for the unbridled passion of his delivery of them.

Hair is finally back on Broadway - the show that, over 40 years ago, famously brought both youth and the new sounds (both of music and of protest) that some of them were making to Broadway. That production premiered off-Broadway in 1967 under the auspices of the Public Theatre before transferring first to a disco, the Cheetah, on Broadway and 53rd, then in April 1968 to Broadway’s Biltmore Theatre in 1968, where it ran for over 4 years and 1,750 performances.

Later the same year it quickly transferred to the West End’s Shaftesbury Theatre, where it ran even longer than it had on Broadway, clocking up a run of 1,997 performances, with an original cast that included Paul Nicholas, Oliver Tobias, Marsha Hunt, Diane Langton, Peter Straker and Tim Curry - and, in her West End debut, Elaine Paige as a member of the Tribe & understudy to Sheila/Jeannie. But the show literally brought the roof down - its run was curtailed in July 1973 when the theatre’s roof literally fell in, thus initiating a run of bad luck that the theatre has laboured under more or less ever since, until another show with hair in its title — Hairspray — has finally reversed it. .

Efforts to revive Hair, however, since have regularly floundered.