October 2009 Archives

Theatre is, of course, already a large part of my personal therapy — though it could also, as I regularly suggest here, be part of my problem, too, in my apparently total absorption in it. But it undoubtedly also provides a lifeline of meaning and shape to my existence; I see the world through what I see on stage.

It may be a skewed view, but it is, at least, one with a constantly changing viewpoint, and it never becomes tired or boring, because it is always being refreshed and reinvigorated by new voices, new plays, new performances and new ways of seeing things.

And the last of those is course what therapy does for you, too: it gives you new perspectives on old (and new) problems. But there’s a strange sense of déjà vu to leaving the therapist’s couch and seeing it played out with others onstage, and the Almeida is currently offering the chance to do so for the second time this year.

Stop the World - I Want to Get Off was, of course, the title of a 1961 Anthony Newley/Leslie Bricusse musical, but it also encapsulates how I feel a lot of the time. Things are just moving too fast for comfort, and I have regularly used this blog as an outlet to complain about how daunting life can sometimes become, with so many choices and competing claims for my time and attention.

I know it’s a nice problem to have, in some ways: it’s reassuring that there is so much out there to fill our lives with. Only the other week, I blogged here about Charlie Booker’s column in The Guardian, in which he pointed out: “I’m fairly certain I recently passed a rather pathetic tipping point, and now own more unread books and unwatched DVDs than my remaining lifespan will be able to sustain. I can’t possibly read all these pages, watch all these movies, before the grim reaper comes knocking. The bastard things are going to outlive me. It’s not fair. They can’t even breathe.”

But neither, sometimes, can I, when faced with so much to see, not to mention to read and attempt to write (all adding to the world’s word mountain).

According to her programme bio, Diana Vickers first came “the country’s attention in August 2008 as millions of viewers tuned into X Factor”, and she quickly “became one of the stars of the show, a talking point everywhere from factory floors in Glasgow to basement bars in Dalston, and finished fourth.”

And how here she is, just over a year later, playing the title role part in the new West End production of The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. But though she may have become a talking point in Glasgow factories and Dalston bars, I have to confess that until now she had not entered my consciousness at all. It’s not so much that I don’t get out enough that I get out far too much, and am therefore never in to watch TV.

I’ve had a week of serious shopping in New York - losing four inches on my waist size and going down from XXL shirts to even being able to buy one that was merely marked L in the last few months has meant that I have needed to replenish (some of) my wardrobe. But of course, what with the temptations of Junior’s cheesecake on West 45th Street, I’ve also had to make sure that I have maintained that weight loss, so I also went to the gym every single day, too.

But the real reason I was in New York at all, of course, was for one of my annual busman’s holidays, catching up on the season’s new shows. I took things at a modest pace between last Sunday and Thursday, seeing six shows across those five days and even skipping a midweek matinee entirely: “tiny steps”, as a friend pointed out, but part of my attempt to deal with my theatregoing addiction; but then I ended the trip with a final flurry of activity, seeing five more between Friday and Sunday night that entirely reinstated it.

But then there are worse addictions to have, I remind myself, and the weekend actually provided a welcome reminder of just why I love coming to Broadway - and also just how long I have been doing so, as well.

There isn’t a more prolific producer on Broadway right now than the Roundabout Theatre Company: what was originally founded in 1965 as a small off-Broadway producing house has become a Broadway powerhouse, now operating out of three permanent theatres on Broadway, plus a smaller off-Broadway house that has also now spawned a second “laboratory” space.

This week I will have seen all three of its Broadway entries, the latest of which - the Broadway bow of Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie — opened last night.

Meanwhile, last night I was at another Roundabout show, its revival of Bye Bye Birdie that has the entire Broadway critical pack seems to have attacked with such a ferocity that I’m surprised it is still standing, let alone playing.

Just yesterday I reported here that even the New York Times was speculating on the likely future of Shrek - the Musical on Broadway; in a feature yesterday it stated that “The Broadway rumor mill has been speculating for weeks that Shrek might close soon after New Year’s Day”.

No sooner had these words been uttered than later yesterday it was confirmed: it will indeed close Jan. 3.

Just the other day I was noting here just how many new productions of plays there are on Broadway this season: between September and December, some 11 are scheduled to open (out of a total new roster of 18 new productions over the period).

But a feature in today’s New York Times points out that the riches are actually being spread thinly amongst them.

I’ve often noted here just how spoilt theatre critics sometimes are: not only do we not have to actually pay for (most of) our tickets - and I know my own theatregoing lifestyle would be simply unsustainable if I did - but also the arrangements for them, on both sides of the Atlantic, are typically taken care of for us by (usually) helpful press agents. It was interesting, though, to have a conversation with a long-time New York theatre critic sitting behind me at Memphis the other day and finding out that he simply isn’t bothering to see one major new Broadway play, because the press agent is too difficult to deal with and he no longer needs to see everything, so is saving himself the trouble. And I feel exactly the same way: life is too short, and I’d rather buy tickets than have to jump through the hoops seemingly required.

I’m back in New York, where I arrived late on Saturday evening to embark on my usual autumnal catch up on the new season openings - and this year there feels like even more to catch than usual.

Fourteen new productions are currently on the boards that weren’t here when I was last in town in August - and I’ve only got 12 “slots” available to fill, and that’s assuming I do matinee and evening performances at every available opportunity, during the week I’m here up to and including next Sunday! (Admittedly, one of the new shows is the Donmar’s Hamlet, which I don’t have to see again - however tempted I may be to see Geraldine James replacing Penelope Wilton as Gertrude — but it’s still remarkable that the choices outweigh the number of opportunities I have to see them in).

And after I leave, four more major Broadway openings will follow this side of Christmas, including the return of White Christmas. Of those 18 new shows that will have therefore opened between September and December, the plays outnumber the musicals by 11 to 7; and of the musicals, only three are new.

That’s a double sign of the times.

“Tiredness kills - take a break”, say the signs on the motorway. And yet, we’ve all done it: there’s that terrible moment when you realise you’ve actually allowed your eyelids to droop a little on a long drive, and you suddenly come back to realise that you’re actually driving a lump of metal at great speed, and need to focus on exactly what you’re doing.

And though tiredness doesn’t kill in the theatre, I’ve regularly observed some of my colleagues variously “resting their eyes” over the years. Heck, I’ve even done it myself: we’re only human after all. But there’s also something incredibly refreshing when a critic actually admits as much publicly; and in his review today of Endgame, Quentin Letts spends much of the time chronicling his difficulties in staying awake: “The first wave of stupor hit me after seven minutes. By this point we had seen Clov move his stepladder from side to side.”

I consider myself a lucky person - but then I’ve also “made” my own professional luck: I’ve turned my hobby into a career, and I don’t have to pay for most of my tickets, programmes or even (sometimes) interval drinks, either, thank God. It’s seems like a cushy life: only restaurant critics, surely, who eat for a living, have it easier! (But then I’ve lately stopped living to eat, and instead now eat to live).

There are incidental drawbacks: we don’t always choose our schedule, but it is dictated to us by the press night diary that tries to regulate the openings in a way to avoid big clashes, but doesn’t always succeed.

Right now that’s been proving impossible.

Theatre directors wrestle with opera at their peril - and vice versa, apparently, too. Just last week Rupert Goold made his English National Opera debut with a new production of Turandot at the London Coliseum - and was roundly booed by some of the opera critics for his efforts.

In The Guardian, Andrew Clements opened his one-star review by declaring, “English National Opera’s obsession with persuading theatre directors to confront the very different challenges of staging opera, and then watching them fall flat on their faces, continues. The latest ingenue is Rupert Goold, who, fresh from his Royal Court success with Enron, finds himself entirely out of his depth with Turandot. He went on to call it “one of the most dismal evenings at the Coliseum in a long time”.

But on Monday, the Guardian’s theatre critic Michael Billington offered a very different take in a blog posting.

This Friday Heath Ledger’s final film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is being released in Britain. Ledger, of course, tragically died during the making of it, but its director Terry Gilliam completed it anyway: although a recent Observer interview feature with Gilliam suggests that his first instinct was that it would be impossible to finish what Ledger had started, and on the morning after the news of his death broke investors started pulling out - “You can’t believe how quickly the money ran away from this thing”, he is quoted saying - but his 31-year-old daughter spurred him on. “She turned out to be really fantastically pig-headed and good. It was like a mother instinct took over.”

It was her idea that they needed someone to complete Ledger’s role, but “a dead star wasn’t enough. Now we needed a bigger star to continue the movie.” And they hit on the idea to split the role between three: Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell.

Last week was a big one for theatrical torture, and not just because I went to see Terror 2009, the latest instalment in the now-annual season of new horror plays taking place this year in the aptly-spooky surrounds of the Southwark Playhouse.

Even the lights are out as you enter the auditorium, so you have to stumble towards the seating banks by random shafts of torchlight shone by the ushers. Of course, where friends came in separately, this created the amusing spectacle, at least as far as one could make out from the safe comfort of one’s own perch, of them trying to find each other in the sepulchral gloom, and using the lights of their mobile phones to indicate where they are seated.

But make sure, if you do, that you turn it off afterwards. The show that follows begins with the most alarming yet of any reminder I have ever experienced to make sure you turn your mobile phone off.

Today marks the end of an era: you can buy the Evening Standard for the last time on the streets of London. That’s, of course, if you buy it at all. As a journalist, I still love the look and feel of a newspaper in my hands, as opposed to the online version of the same thing; but unfortunately I, like many former readers, have simply stopped buying the Standard in the last few years.

I can access the bits I want to read online - usually the theatre reviews, of course - and when I do pick up the paper, I’ve sadly found that there’s no longer enough to interest me to warrant the 50p. Especially since a repackaged version of some of the same content is available in a slimline newsprint version as London Lite, given away free on the streets (and where it sadly often returned to afterwards, contributing exponentially to the litter crisis around town).

And though London Lite lost its chief competitor a couple of weeks ago when the London Paper (easily the superior product) suddenly folded, it will now have renewed competition from within its own ranks when the full-fat version Standard goes free from Monday.

I’ve previously written here about what a tough act to follow Andrew Lloyd Webber has given himself in re-visiting The Phantom of the Opera, as he’s long been planning to do.

And I’m not the only one who has doubted it: just yesterday, Lloyd Webber overheard two people preparing for today’s press launch of Love Never Dies saying, after they ran a short film listing the previous edition’s many accomplishments, that he must be mad to try to follow it - and wondered aloud what he proposed to call it: “Ugly Bastard 2?”

It’s good to see that David Hare is at last cultivating a sense of irony about his own, notoriously skin-thinned, reception to theatre reviews, even if he’s not toned down his own self-importance that puts himself as the central character of his new play The Power of Yes that opened at the National Theatre last night. (At least he doesn’t play himself this time, as he did in the pair of complementary documentary plays Berlin/Wall at the National and Royal Court earlier this year; Anthony Calf does the honours this time instead, and even takes steps out of the company line-up to take a solo curtain call at the end for his efforts).

There is, of course, a strong dramatic reason for including himself: the play is subtitled “A dramatist seeks to understand the financial crisis”, and follows his own attempt to grapple with making sense of it all.

As a critic, we’re invariably there to review what’s on the stage, not what happens elsewhere in the actors’ lives, or even your own - but the two have a tendency to collide from time to time, and it can set off all sorts of reverberations.

And it is amplified, of course, from time to time by my parallel life as an arts journalist who sometimes meets the actors concerned to write interview features about them. And just occasionally, a relationship you establish in an interview room can continue outside it: it may be a nodding acquaintance is established, or sometimes a conversational one.

I consider myself friendly with some actors, directors and playwrights now, though it’s very rare for this to translate into actual friendship: both parties are instinctively wary of such relationships, but at the same time, we’re only human - and it may happen occasionally.

Creating musicals are famously collaborative acts and there’s a whole army of personnel that are credited somewhere in the programme for them. Some might get billing; others might have their contributions merely relegated to the acknowledgments page. But since you go to musicals, above all, to see stories told in song and music, there’s one person who should stand out beside the composer, lyricist and book writer: namely, the orchestrator, whose job it is to transpose the lines out of the composer’s score and allocate them to the instruments of the orchestra, and is therefore in large part responsible for the colour and mood of what you hear.

And while the producer may - in return for getting the whole show on the road - put his name above even the title, there may be someone else whose idea it was in the first place.

Last night, I saw one recognised, but the other ignored.

After Gone with the Wind turned into one of the most notorious flop musicals of last year - eclipsed only when Imagine This replaced it at the New London Theatre - you’d think that Trevor Nunn might want to avoid titles with the word “Wind” in them. But even if he has not (yet) been asked to take another look at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Whistle Down the Wind, last night saw him back at the Old Vic directing a rare London revival of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee’s 1955 Broadway play Inherit the Wind, bringing his customary flair for animating a stage full of the sense of a bustling community.

And the Old Vic has done him proud, providing a line-up of 29 actors who get bio’s in the programme (plus 34 non-speaking townsfolk listed).

Only yesterday I was writing here about some of the reviews for Breakfast at Tiffany’s that seemed to have been inspired more by the penis than the pen. But at least they were flattering: the critics concerned seem to rise to the occasion in every sense.

As Max Bialystock tells Ulla in The Producers after she auditions for them, “I want you to know, my dear, that even though we are sitting down, we are giving you a standing ovation.” Never mind that it might have distracted them from the play; at least they had that temporary relief.

On the other hand, actors are understandably sensitive to negative remarks made about them, since of course it is their physical appearances they are putting out there.