September 2009 Archives

I’ve previously noted here when Breakfast at Tiffany’s was first announced that it was the first time ever that a West End play has had above-the-title billing from a commercial sponsor. And at last night’s opening, the programme for the show had a special sleeve with their name on it that you had to break before you could get into it.

Pity that there was no easy way to break out of the theatre while watching it (especially as I was in the middle of a row, a few seats away from Anna Friel’s partner David Thewlis and her dad, the latter of whom rushed up to me at the end to enthuse about how good it was, and I feebly mumbled something about “we’ll see”, which made no sense, since I’d already seen just how bad it was).

Theatre isn’t created in a vacuum: though for most audience members, including some critics, the story of a production begins when the curtain goes up and ends when the curtain goes down, there’s a far bigger backstage life to how and by whom theatre is created. I think it’s important for critics to have a sense of the bigger picture, if not the entire framework, as it helps put the world we are reporting into some sort of context. So I try to stay on top of developments offstage as well as on. It partly feeds into the news stories I file daily for Playbill.com, as well as this blog and ones I file occasionally for The Guardian, too; and then there’s the offstage world I participate in regularly myself.

Just yesterday I spent a wonderful afternoon at Chiswick’s Arts Educational School, leading seminars on the history of musical theatre with three classes of Year One students.

The National finally opened its production of Brecht’s Mother Courage on Friday night, a week later than originally anticipated after preview problems, as I previously reported here. I saw it on Saturday afternoon, and I wish I could report that it was worth the wait, but there’s an awful lot of waiting to be done as Fiona Shaw trundles that infernal cart around the battlefields of Europe. At least the first preview audience, released at the interval as the show hadn’t been fully teched, had a mostly lucky escape.

At a press conference last week, Nick Hytner admitted that the show had taken longer to get ready than it should have, and declared it was both “bad and wrong”, and took the rap for it, too: “In the end, we bear responsibility.” That admission takes courage, and it’s good to see the buck stopping somewhere.

I missed the Stratford-upon-Avon double opening of the Russian plays The Drunks and The Grain Store yesterday, and now I’ve effectively missed them. What’s astonishing is that, having finally had its press performances yesterday, they each only have a single performance to run - they returns to the rep next Thursday, October 1, and then they’re done.

I suppose these were short runs to begin with - both were only ever booked for 10 performances each - but it seems weird to have the press in for what seems like a mere afterthought, in that case. Sure, actors and creative teams like previews to hone their shows, but at this rate, why have the critics there at all? Perhaps its time to revert to seeing previews.

Only yesterday I began by saying that the 24-hour channel of constant news and views, but also of meaningless chunter and blather, of the internet meant “it was a challenge to stay strong and focused above the din”; and today a feature in The Guardian confirms it: ” Researchers now say that the stress of not being able to process information as fast as it arrives - combined with the personal and social expectation that, say, you will answer every email - can deplete and demoralise you.”

When, earlier this summer, I took a week-long break from the internet - I stopped blogging, tweeting and even checking e-mail - on a week’s break in Gran Canaria, I felt much lighter and altogether less burdened. But the moment I returned to the usual routine, my constant anxieties about keeping up with it all returned.

The internet, of course, is all about buzz and chatter: we are now plugged into a 24-hour channel of constant news and views but also, of course, even more meaningless chunter and blather. It’s a constant challenge to stay strong and focused above the din; and this blog has long been a journalistic attempt to provide myself with a daily structure in which to make sense of some of it for me, let alone the added benefit of sharing it with you.

But the world takes a lot of keeping up with, and the good thing about the theatre is that it provides my own personal channel for me to make sense of some of it through. Last night I finally got to grips with a bit of what the financial markets are all about in the Royal Court’s London premiere of Lucy Prebble’s Enron — and I also got a lot about what the hype around the production has all been about, ever since it premiered at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre in July.

Because it was announced that it would transfer to the Court before it even opened there, I decided to wait out seeing it till it moved - but there was a danger: would it live up to the hype?

While opera productions invariably open to the press on their first public performances - but usually discreetly hold an invited dress rehearsal beforehand in front of a non-paying audience - a tradition has long built up in the theatre that productions will benefit from being “run in” before the press actually sees them.

This gives the creative team time to work with their production, once they see how it lands (or doesn’t) in front of a live audience. Many writers, directors and actors don’t see the process as complete until that happens, and it’s usually a key part of the way productions are structured. But a production should, at least, be ready for a paying audience by the first public performance (though it wasn’t, apparently, for the first preview of Mother Courage at the National, which didn’t even manage to get the end, as I reported here last week).

Regular readers of this column will know how much I love musicals and how much I like to champion them. But so often, unfortunately, they behave like a chronically unfaithful lover, and repeatedly let you down. And eventually, it’s tempting to simply give up hope. Never mind that the West End and Broadway are full of musicals: finding an original one is hard to come by. This year we saw the fast failure of the most original ones to venture our way in ages, when Spring Awakening came to the Novello and quickly went.

Only Sister Act has stayed around, and that - with its pre-existing film source and pastiche score - is merely mediocre, but makes us feel pathetically grateful that it least it’s a new one, even if it deliberately sounds instantly recycled. On Broadway, things have been better this year with the thrilling Next to Normal, but beside it there’s also been Rock of Ages, another dire rock compilation show.

One of the great things about my job - and about live entertainment in London generally - is the incredibly wide range of experiences it embraces. On Wednesday, for instance, I was at the tiny Bush, watching Jack Thorne’s cleverly personalised account of the morning after Labour’s historic landslide election victory, as it affects a Tory MP grandee who has just lost his seat, a young Lib Dem supporter and the girl he’s just picked up, and two teenage schoolboys who campaigned for Labour.

And then last night I was in the vast 02 Arena, watching the world premiere of the latest stage version of the Ben Hur story, but even on the immense 3D scale that it was being presented in and my seats in the central section of the lowest seating tier, felt remote, disconnected and almost entirely pointless.

The sad news of the passing of Patrick Swayze, aged just 57, earlier this week led to a dimming of the lights outside the Aldwych Theatre, where a stage version of Dirty Dancing — the film that first made him famous - is currently playing. While the obituaries and news columns, of course, focused on his dignified battle with the cancer that killed him, it is the legacy of Dirty Dancing that he is going to be remembered for. And yesterday’s papers had tributes from some of those whom the movie had affected.

These included, in yesterday’s Independent, a male dancer with English National Ballet, Daniel Jones, who declared, “When I was younger and doing ballet there was a bullying attitude towards male dancers, but when Dirty Dancing came out, things changed. It was the coolest film…. It made dancing cool. It was all about partnership, whereas Fame and Footloose had been more about individuality. The most famous dance scene was the lift and it brought the difficulties of partnering a dancer into the limelight. Everybody tried to do that lift: not many succeeded. Swayze was a really cool guy who danced - that meant a lot for boys like me.”

Last night a colleague said to me, “please make it stop”. He wasn’t referring to the opening of The Mysteries that we were watching - though I think my partner might have wished it would - but to the relentless onslaught of openings that were are currently in the midst of. There isn’t a single night off for the next two weeks, and it’s even started including weekends, as witness the Sunday matinee opening of The Shawshank Redemption last weekend.

I’ve often complained aloud here that there simply aren’t enough nights in the week, let alone hours in the day, for everything I want to see and do. But right now it has become actually impossible, with multiple clashes on most nights.

I always love it when the theatre leaves the arts pages and makes the news ones, too, since it has the potential to bring the excitement of the theatre to a much wider audience. Even if it’s usually only because there’s a celebrity attached: yesterday the Sun’s Bizarre column broke the news that Lily Allen is in talks to follow in the footsteps of her dad Keith (due next month to star in a new production of Trevor Griffiths’ Comedians at the Lyric Hammersmith) and brother Alfie (seen last year in a national tour of Equus) and tread the boards in the West End in a Neil LaBute play seen on Broadway earlier this year, Reasons to be Pretty.

Even though it’s not yet confirmed, it’s already got the arts commentators all a-twitter (in every sense).

Going to the theatre every night is a daily escape for some of us - on either side of the footlights - from the reality of who we really are. Just recently Harvey Fierstein brilliantly defended the idea of Mandy Patinkin joining Douglas Hodge in the Broadway-bound Menier Chocolate Factory production of La Cage Aux Folles, against what the New York Post’s Michael Riedel called Patinkin’s “reputation for wreaking havoc behind the scenes”, by telling Riedel, “Listen, you’ll never see an actor as a spokesman for Mental Health Month, OK? Do you think we want to play other people onstage because we’re so happy being ourselves?”

And on Saturday night - partly to ‘celebrate’ my own 47th birthday, but also to bid farewell to Philip Quast (in the role of Georges that he originated at the Menier, and Patinkin is now up for) and Roger Allam - I was taken out of myself by going to see La Cage Aux Folles yet again. Only the other day I was admitting here that ” I seem to turn up at some musicals for the changing of a lightbulb”, and it’s true, I am a serial repeater.

I go to the theatre a lot I reckon - but the great thing is that there are always new plays and playwrights to be discovered. And some, of course, are not new at all, merely forgotten. I’ve recently written here of the rediscovery of my old friend Nick Ward’s The Present at the tiny Cock Tavern in Kilburn, and how artistic director Adam Spreadbury-Maher there is on a mission to remember what he calls “amazing existing work”, as well as find new work.

I suppose it is wonderful that there is so much good new work about that we can afford to be so cavalier with the repertoire of the past; but this last week I’ve also encountered a series of old plays for the first time that make me think we are perhaps too cavalier with them.

Love Never Dies, the long-aborning sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, is being launched via teasers on social networking sites this week like Twitter, with The Phantom himself posting comments like this one yesterday: ” On the eighth day of October I will be making an announcement of global importance. Your obedient servant, The Phantom.”

As our The Stage’s own phantom presence, Tabard, has this week pointed out, “Time was that a big new West End musical would be launched via a big press launch, followed immediately by an explosion of press advertising.” Doing this soft-launch via such teasers, on the other hand, is a bold move, and Tabard has noticed that the website for loveneverdies.com is already aggregating Twitter comments and posting them on its homepage.

The kids at the primary school behind my flat are back, as their wild screaming matches in the playground just on the other side of the wall to my outdoor terrace reveal at the start of every day and at breaks throughout the day thereafter. And last night the critics were back at school, in every sense, as we descended en masse to the Lyric Hammersmith for the opening of Simon Stephens’ bracing and brilliant new play Punk Rock, coincidentally set - like the Lyric’s Spring Awakening earlier this year - in a school, too, but minus the tunes and dancing.

Instead, we got a stark and discomforting portrait of the pains and terrors of adolescence and being at school from a contemporary British perspective, but written as if from the inside track.

I’ve not been to one of the NT Live broadcasts yet, in which a play is beamed live from the National Theatre to cinemas around the country and even the world; but last night I went to a Shaftesbury Avenue cinema to see the screening of a live performance I originally saw at the Royal Albert Hall in May 2008 of a concert version of the musical Chess, and here’s an amazing thing: it was even better on screen that it was in person.

I wrote here at the time about the history of the show, and the tiny part I had once played - or at least been witness to - when it transferred, all too briefly, to Broadway.

One of the many reasons I never get bored by my job or the theatre is that it is never just one kind of thing: it’s not just that there are, of course, limitless stories to be told via it, or even seemingly limitless ways to tell them, but also that there’s also countless places for them to be seen in. Yes, there are places we go back to again and again throughout the year (or at least across the years), but then there are the places we only dip into occasionally, or to be surprised by for the first time.

And this last weekend was full of contrasts in every department. It started on Friday evening with a return visit to the grandest of West End addresses, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, to see Omid Djalili take over the lead role of Fagin.

The theatre may be riding out the recession - reports from the West End, Broadway and this year’s Edinburgh Fringe suggest people are fortunately still seeking refuge in live theatre, even as the rest of the world buckles and variously implodes. It’s a one-of-a-kind experience, unrepeatable and unmatchable — you can’t go elsewhere for it but the source, and the good news is that people are still doing so.

Things are also, as I’ve previously written here, good for the movie and live music industries.

But hardly a day goes by when you read of dire reports of endless pub closures (some 52 a week in the first six months of this year, according to this story on the BBC website), and restaurants facing difficulties.

It’s difficult keeping up with Alan Cumming. The week before last I met him on what has been his home territory of New York’s East Village for the last decade, for a profile that ran in last week’s copy of The Stage. That very day, he’d just arrived off the red-eye from LA, and we very nearly missed each other as we were actually sat in adjoining restaurants, both sharing the same name, on Avenue A (I nearly typed Avenue Q, which would have only added to the problem!), as I wrote here at the time.

But if it’s difficult to keep up with him in terms of his travels, his onstage antics are just as peripatetic and free-ranging. Last night he was back on the West End musical stage for the first time in over 15 years, since he starred in the Donmar’s Cabaret in 1993 - the show that, of course, subsequently took him to New York five years later and led to him living there.

Sometimes media folk are even more navel-gazing than so-called luvvies - but at least, I suppose, we’re usually examining other people’s navals rather than our own. But there’s a rather odd column in some papers that seems to be written only for the consumption of other journalists, namely the media column, of which the Independent on Sunday’s “Feral Beast” seems to thrive on snippets gleaned, not always accurately, from other hacks.

I was the victim of this myself a few months ago, though I freely admit I gave some of the information in this blog.

In New York, the Labour Day holiday - on the first Monday of September - traditionally marks the end of the summer theatrical season, and the start of the autumn one. That’s not till next Monday over there, so they’ve got a brief reprieve. But for us, it’s the final August bank holiday weekend that officially sees off summer, and even if it barely arrived this year - except for two weeks, one in June and another in August, both of which I was coincidentally away for - at least it ended with one grand flourish yesterday with a lovely warm day.

Things were sunny in every sense in Edinburgh, too, where the Fringe officially ended yesterday on a high note.