The perils (and pleasures) of star casting and the fringe….

One of those return visits was to Prick Up Your Ears: the producers invited critics to re-review it before they announced its premature closing for this weekend, saying, “It would be great to count on your support for the final few weeks of our run, given the journey this production has had.” By the time I accepted the invitation to go back last Thursday, those final few weeks had turned into just one and a half more; but I decided to go again anyway, as I’ve long admired Con O’Neill, who had newly taken over from Matt Lucas.

On the original press night, all eyes were naturally on Lucas: could he carry it off? Not all the reviews were in agreement, but in my review for The Stage, I wrote: “Matt Lucas, exposing himself emotionally as well as physically as Ken, is a revelation - we already know he can do funny talks, walks and accents from Little Britain, but he also mines a far darker pain here that is heart-rending.”

But Lucas was also, of course, the key selling point of the show, and my (and the audience’s) inevitable focus on him may have disrupted one of the play’s intentions, which was to paradoxically show his character Kenneth Halliwell being ignored in Orton’s rise to fame. O’Neill now restores the balance of the play to make it being about the fatal imbalance in that relationship, and gives Chris New’s cocky, sexy Orton more of a chance to make an impression in turn.

New, of course, is a star in the making; but neither he nor O’Neill were enough to sell tickets. And the play also tells us nothing new, either, about a story we know all too well from the biography, diaries and film version already. So a star was needed to make audiences take an interest in it again.

Going to English National Opera the next night for the opening of a new production of Bartok’s one-act opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle meant I had a double dose of director Daniel Kramer, who also staged Prick Up Your Ears. It’s encouraging to see, in both cases, that he’s reigning in some of the extreme flamboyance that marked out some of his earlier work, and mining instead a deeper emotional vein as he tackles stories of variously deeply dysfunctional relationships.

ENO have paired it with a new dance piece set to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and though it is difficult to know what it is doing in an opera house (even if it is one that is regularly used to house dance when ENO are not in residence there), it at least allows the company to expand its artistic reach with a choreographer, Michael Keegan-Dolan, who has previously worked on David Alden’s production of Ariodante there. In Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, the young composing team are advised by a producer who hears their work, “Why can’t you throw ‘em a crumb?/ What’s wrong with letting ‘em tap their toes a bit?/ I’ll let you know when Stravinsky has a hit / Give me some melody!” Maybe, though, Stravinsky finally has a hit at ENO.

There’s plenty of melody, by contrast, in David Yazbeck’s vibrantly catchy score to The Full Monty, which I went to see in a new production at Catford’s Broadway Studio on Saturday night. This is the stage version of the 1997 British film, first premiered on Broadway in 2000, that relocates the action from Sheffield to Buffalo, NY; and it has always been a mystery to me why it wasn’t a bigger hit than it was. It only managed a run of just under two-years on Broadway, and then just over six months when it came to the West End’s Prince of Wales in 2002. Yet it is a beautifully crafted piece of popular theatre, with a great title and even bare male flesh on offer: what’s not to like?

As it happens, at Catford’s Broadway Studio, on Saturday, a lot: but I’m not referring to Thom Southerland’s buoyant production (which comes to the New Players next month), but to one of the most disruptive audiences it has recently been my displeasure to be amongst. I suppose the title sets up expectations for a hen-night out; but that’s no reason for the audience to behave like they’re at one.

Even though the audience barely reached 20, there were pockets of disruption all around. Four women guzzled their way through a noisy parade of snacks throughout, and kept up their own running commentary on the show, firing particularly nasty homophobic comments about the gay characters. One man, accompanying a woman, was also speaking out loud early on, while downing a pint; and left the auditorium twice during the first act before disappearing entirely. And another woman arrived late in a wheelchair, then during the second act took a call on her mobile while the show was still on before disappearing soon after (I assume the call was to tell her that her homebound transport had arrived!). But the disease even spread, it seems, to the two-person orchestra, who also seemed to strike up an independent conversation at one point. It was thoroughly bizarre.

So was my first attempt to go to the Finborough Theatre in Earl’s Court last Wednesday to see their current production of Michael John LaChiusa’s 2003 off-Broadway musical Little Fish: I got a call earlier that day from the theatre to tell me that the pub had failed to pay their electricity bill, so the supply had been cut off! Fortunately, the bill was paid soon after, and performances resumed, so I finally caught it last night.

LaChiusa is a prolific and idiosyncratic talent in American musical theatre writing: he writes some gorgeous but insistently jagged melodies. And though he regularly sees major stagings of his work in the US, from Broadway (both commercial and not-for-profit) to off-Broadway producing houses and even opera houses, we’ve only ever seen his work on the fringe here. Just a few weeks ago I saw his First Lady Suite at the Union Theatre; as I said in my Stage review here, “LaChiusa, who first premiered this show at Off-Broadway’s Public Theater, has a constantly intriguing musical voice that combines classical, operatic and Broadway influences.”