August 2009 Archives

We’re rushing into the the final weekend for this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, so - unless I get on a train tomorrow and pay an impromptu last minute visit - I’ll have missed it. But though I’ve deliberately kept myself out of the loop this year, it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to escape it entirely: already my inbox is filling up with news of immediate London transfers.

In yesterday’s LondonPaper, The Stage’s own Alistair Smith provided a quick round-up of some of the shows that are on their way, though it turns out that the winners of this year’s Edinburgh Comedy Awards (being announced tomorrow), won’t in fact be having their usual post-Edinburgh West End showcase after all.

Alice Cooper may have famously sung ‘School’s out for summer/ school’s out forever’, but there’s no such luck for real-life kids: they’re about to head back indoors. So it’s with slightly weird timing that Stage Entertainment UK last night officially launched the national tour of the stage version of High School Musical 2 at Wimbledon Theatre, which takes place in the summer American schools break period and revolves around the summer vacation jobs taken up by some of the Wildcats at Lava Springs Country Club.

It’s like Dirty Dancing for sprogs: there’s no hint of sex, watermelons or putting Baby in a corner, but there’s the same mindless mining of a familiar property set in a holiday camp in the hopes of turning it into another musical theatre franchise.

Actually, I’m never really sure I want to be home again after a trip away - especially one as good as the one I’ve just had to the US. When the cold douche of reality arrives, to quote a character from Nicholas de Jongh’s play Plague Over England, I’d really rather be away still.

But at least I had a treat awaiting me: my first show back last night was the revival of Hello, Dolly! at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, and what a complete pleasure and treasure it proved to be. Of course the score is an everlasting tuneful delight; but I’ve previously only ever seen the title character of Dolly Levi monstrously incarnated by Carol Channing (in a 1979 London revival at Drury Lane, and then in a Broadway return by her in 1995) and - even more alarmingly - by the late Danny La Rue in a production at the Prince of Wales in 1984, and the show seemed a dated, caricature vehicle for phoney, over-the-top characterisation and emotions.

As I get older, jetlag makes ever-fiercer claims on my body, and despite taking the day flight back on Sunday, I’m still having trouble readjusting to being home. Fly overnight, of course, and you lose the night’s sleep coming back: with just over 6 hours in the air on the return leg from New York, there are simply not enough hours to get enough time to sleep; but travel back by day, as I did on Sunday, and you have to up so early that you effectively lose the night’s sleep the night before.

On Saturday, we went to one last show in the evening - the Broadway revival of Hair — then met up with my New York host (who had got back that day from Boston) for a late night dessert. We finally got to bed around 12.45am - and the alarm was set for 4.45am, just four hours later, as the car was collecting us at 5.30am for the 8am departure from Newark.

Apologies for a missed blogging day on Friday, but as usual in New York there are simply not enough hours in the day, and I just ran out of time. Even by the standards of my typically frantic scheduling when I’m there, I was trying to stretch time too far, and something had to go. (Apologies, too, to those I didn’t get around to seeing, or even contacting)

This trip was complicated by the fact that I wasn’t entirely on work duty the whole time anyway: travelling with a partner who had never been to New York before, we were also trying to do the tourist sites, too.

Can you ever have too much of a good thing? It was only a year ago, after all, that a 50th anniversary production of West Side Story came to Sadler’s Wells for the summer, and then embarked on two sell-out national UK tours. That production saw Joey McKneely recreating Jerome Robbins’s original choreography: a former dancer who had learned some of the steps directly from Robbins himself when he was part of Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, a spectacular 1989 career retrospective of the legendary Broadway director/choreographer, McKneely has now made a directorial career himself from staging productions of West Side Story around the world, from Milan’s La Scala to the Chatelet in Paris.

But now Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book to West Side Story, has himself assumed the directorial reigns, and McKneely has been relegated in the billing to reproduction choreographer for the new Broadway revival of the show that opened at the Palace Theatre back in March. I was in no rush to catch it then: I figured it would be around for a while.

It’s closing next week, and now it’s finally selling out. When The Little Mermaid, the latest in the Disney franchise of screen-to-stage adaptations, first opened on Broadway in January 2008 - after over two months of previews - I thought it might run for years. Never mind that it wasn’t very good; nor was Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, and that ran (at the same theatre, the Lunt Fontanne) for over 13 years and 5,461 performances, that puts it currently in the record books as the 6th longest running show in Broadway history. (It is, however, being fast chased by the revival of Chicago, with Disney’s own The Lion King not far behind).

But The Little Mermaid never truly caught on; perhaps Disney’s family audience had already been stung by the failure of a stage version of Tarzan to deliver, either. Or maybe audiences believed, as I did, that it would be around for years anyway, so there was no need to rush.

OK, I should have trusted my instincts and known better. A Broadway show called Rock of Ages, featuring 80s rock songs by a set of groups I’d never even heard of, let alone heard, like Journey, Styx, Poison, Red Speedwagon, Foreigner and Night Ranger wasn’t written (if that’s not too strong a word) for me in mind.

On the other hand, critics like Charles Isherwood in the New York Times had given it a surprising welcome when it opened back in April, declaring it “a seriously silly, absurdly enjoyable arena-rock musical” and “about as guilty as pleasures get”. He went on to dub it, “Call it Xanadu for straight people — and straight-friendly people too.”

When I last checked in here, I was reporting on throwing up on a whale watch on Cape Cod, and the lousy weather we were experiencing there (which were not unrelated).

By Friday, however, normal service was restored on both the health of my stomach and of the weather, and in brilliant sunshine we took ourselves to the pool at the Crown and Anchor hotel in P-town, right beside the beach, for much of the day.

It’s a tough life, I know, but someone’s gotta do it.

There are lots of drag shows in Provincetown, but life is never a drag here, even if the weather is proving to be a bit of a downer - I thought I had come away to a week in the sun, but although we arrived here in brilliant sunshine on Monday and it continued on Tuesday, it has been grey and overcast since, with downpours of rain last night.

Not that the whales, of course, mind that inhabit this part of Cape Cod, and make whale watching one of the favourite mainstream tourism activities here.

Just a month ago I was admitting here publicly that I had never played bingo in my life, until the Manchester International Festival show Everybody Loves A Winner gave me a taster of it. And last night, I played it for real and for an entire evening - and although I wasn’t a winner myself, there were three wins on my table that helped subsidise the pizza we went for afterwards!

A weekly institution in Provincetown, the game is held in the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House, a beautiful church building on Commercial Street.

You can take the musical theatre queen out of London (or New York), but you can’t take the musical theatre queen out of the boy. As I wrote yesterday, even a train trip to Boston became an instant exercise in musical theatre trivia; and now that I’m here in Provincetown, you can’t walk down the main drag without running into a drag queen - or a (nearly) naked boy — trying to entice you to their cabarets, which inevitably includes a P-town edition of Naked Boys Singing.

There’s also the occasional gay-themed play — 2 Boys in a Bed on a Cold Winter’s Night, promising (of course) “sexual content and nudity” - and shows with titles like Willie Wanker and the Hershey Highway.

At the end of June I holidayed for a week in Gran Canaria, and went completely cold turkey on the internet - which included posting blogs here - as well as the theatre. I’m away again, and writing this looking out over the ocean again from a terrace at my guest house in Provincetown on Cape Cod. But this time it is not so easy to avoid the theatre or the internet, so here I am.

After a weekend in New York, I set off yesterday morning to P-town (as it’s universally known), and the first part of the journey (after the cab from the apartment to Penn Station, that is) was aboard Amtrak’s Acela Express service that travels up from Washington DC to Boston.

This being a gay destination - P-town, not Boston, I hasten to add - the theatrical friends I was travelling with played a musical theatre game the moment we pulled out of the station: how many musicals could we name that had scenes set aboard trains?

As regular readers will know, I have taken the radical step of passing on being in Edinburgh this summer. It’s the first time I’ve not been for at least a decade, and I’m feeling a small sense of loss - but an even bigger one of relief. No, I don’t need to chase around that gorgeous city, getting frustrated by not being able to see it all. (No one can - no, not even my colleague Ian Shuttleworth, who typically manages to break the one hundred-and-counting show mark). I know that’s not the point of Edinburgh - and it’s not a competition, either - but somehow I feel lost if I can’t do it all. So I would have doomed myself to fail before I even begin.

But then I wrestle with this, as other readers will know, in London, too. Even with the best will (and diary) in the world, you can’t get everywhere, though God knows I try. Instead, I have fled both London and Edinburgh, and come to New York instead - my other favourite place on the planet.

Tonight I head off to New York (and will be blogging from there, when I can); but before I go, I’m rounding up a few stories to bring to your attention.

• Holding onto art:

One of the biggest joys of the theatre is that it is ephemeral: it exists in the moment of its playing, and no two performances are ever alike. But if performances vanish, plays at least are written down; what about dance? Can it, or should it, survive the lives of those who have created it? In an excellent feature in yesterday’s Guardian, its dance critic Judith Mackrell pondered this question in the light of the recent deaths of Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham. As she asks, “What happens to dance once the artist who made it is gone? No other art form would accept for a second that death implied the possible death of an artist’s oeuvre.” She points out, “You only have to imagine a situation where the paintings of Rauschenberg or Bacon were taken down from galleries as soon as those artists died; where the novels of Saul Bellow were removed from the bookshelves, or the music of Stravinsky was silenced.”

So last week’s reports of the cancellation of this year’s ‘barbecue summer’ may have been premature, after all; according to a news report in today’s Telegraph, it now “looks like summer could be making an unexpected comeback”. A spokesman for the Met Office, Barry Gromett, is quoted as saying, “It is looking much more promising. Don’t give up on the barbecue summer yet.” And then, naturally hedging his bets, he adds, “Obviously we cannot be 100 per cent sure, but short range forecast is looking good.” Uh-oh - that sounds ominous. I thought it was long-term forecasting that was the problem - if they’re not sure about short-term forecasting, either, we truly don’t know what to expect.

Still, why do I care? Sorry to gloat, but I am off to New York tomorrow night, so am eagerly checking their weather reports instead (and somehow, they seem to be more accurately called there). But I also want to enjoy my last couple of days in London, too - and I’d rather it wasn’t too hot tonight, in fact, since I’m heading to the Finborough for the opening of State Fair, and if there’s one thing I have vowed in summer’s past, it is not to go to the Finborough on a hot night.

Only the other week The Times did a round-up of readers’ horror stories from the “dress circle of hell”, describing their bad experiences of going to the theatre, some of which I blogged here — one complaint was about a critic who apparently caused a distraction at a Prom, as he “consulted his orchestral score, wrote notes and generally fidgeted”.

A couple of years ago I was similarly directly accused of being distracting to a fellow member of the audience when I saw a touring production of Aspects of Love in Newcastle, as I bloged about the time here, which makes a nice change, of course, from me complaining about other audience members providing the distraction.

The moral of both stories is that we can all annoy each other, inadvertently or not, when we’re watching a performance, and it’s worth being mindful of on my side of the critical pen as it is on others who are simply there to enjoy the show.

But where does behaviour cross over from being an irritation to being an active nuisance that the theatre needs to deal with?

It’s a recurring theme, of course, nowadays: everyone has an opinion, and there are more and more places to express them, so what’s the point of professional critics? In Edinburgh, it will shortly be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, and that goes for the reviews too, where there are now so many outlets - from established local and national newspapers and magazine titles to freesheets and others that spring up overnight just for the festival - that the audience for some shows seems to be comprised only of reviewers.

But maybe it is precisely because of this onslaught of opinion that reliable, trusted, professional guides are more necessary than ever.

Only the other day I was blogging here about the fact that I’m not going to Edinburgh this year, and yes, I am starting to feel the pain: the media onslaught of preview coverage began on the weekend, and you start to see what you might be missing. A fellow Twitterer Tom Hughes posted a comment this morning, “Today I am sad to not be going to Edinburgh this summer. I will miss it.” Perhaps we need to begin a support group. Another friend who goes to Edinburgh every year actually snuck in early by going last week, where he found “the streets are empty and there isn’t a hint of the onslaught of people that are due to arrive next week…” (But he’s back home in London this week by the time the festival actually starts, so is missing it, too).

I had publicly wondered a couple of months ago if they were going to materialise at all this year, but according to a report in Saturday’s Guardian, sales are actually up, with the fringe reporting figures “a fifth higher than they were in 2007 at the same time”, and the fringe is once again setting new records for the number of shows on offer.

But if I’m not heading to Edinburgh, how about letting it come to me? And isn’t London a year-round festival for arts lovers in any case?