December 2009 Archives

Just the other day I was speculating here that “we may be seeing another musical heading for the finishing line before the end of the week”, and I’m only sorry to be proved right: Finian’s Rainbow has now posted its own closing notice to depart Broadway on January 17.

The producers have blamed “the economic realities of Broadway today”, but in fact they’re the eternal realities: if you can’t or don’t sell enough tickets, you can’t survive. The momentum simply never built around the show, despite positive reviews and word-of-mouth (at least from Americans who saw it; I have spoken to many Brits who never lasted beyond the interval).

Just yesterday I was saying here how fast theatrical news travels in New York. Word-of-mouth about the theatre remains the most potent tool of all, of course, and since everyone in New York, it seems, talks theatre all the time (or at least does in the circles I move in!), there are a lot of words going round plenty of mouths. Even the shop assistants are at it: my partner found himself engaged in an animated theatrical conversation in a clothes shop yesterday.

But the conversation has to begin somewhere, and the web has long provided a focus for it.

When key world events happen, you always remember where you were at the time when you first heard the news. I remember vividly waking up to the news of Diana’s death, for instance, in a phone conversation with my friend Thomas; or coming back to my London office after a business lunch to the news that the Twin Towers had been attacked in New York (but not yet fallen).

Those, of course, were epic, global matters that were of interest to everyone; but in the village that is New York theatre, news travels in interesting ways, too. It has been a subject of such prolonged expectation that the current Broadway revival of Ragtime will shutter this coming Sunday that the New York Times ran a big feature last Friday speculating on the speculation: “The producers say no investors have insisted on shuttering the show, which has been slow to catch on. Advertising has not stopped. A marketing strategy for January is in place. And yet even admirers of this production of Ragtime are treating gossip about the show’s future as hard fact.”

Since I last reported on this blog on Thursday morning, I’ve seen eight shows - and one film (based on a show, of course). New York, as I was saying then, doesn’t stop for Christmas, and neither did I. Even the gym I have joined here was open on Christmas day, and I duly went there, too.

I also had lunch on Christmas Eve with Howard Sherman, executive director of the American Theatre Wing (the founder organisation of the Tony Awards, who now co-produce it with the Broadway League, but also responsible for a range of theatre education initiatives, a bit like our Mousetrap Foundation in the UK but with an even bigger reach); and brunch on Saturday with Mark Ravenhill, who was in town on holiday for Christmas, before he heads off to Australia next week to work on a new, arena stage animatronics’ spectacular of King Kong. Life is nothing if not eclectic for all of us.

It’s always said of New York that it’s the city that never sleeps. But though it may be a 24-hour culture - or even, as the corner shop opposite the apartment block I am staying at here puts it, “open 25 hours” - the thing I love about it most is that it never shuts down for events like Christmas.

Whereas life in London limps to an early close today, it’s pretty much business as usual tomorrow here: there are some 18 shows performing as usual on Christmas Day (out of 29 total). At Radio City Music Hall, home of the annual Christmas Spectacular, they’ve even got three performances tomorrow - at 1pm, 4pm and 7pm - so I’m going to get into the Christmas spirit and go to the 1pm performance.

There are currently 29 shows playing on Broadway; and by my reckoning, you can currently find online discount offers to at least 25 of them. (The only ones not doing ticket offers are The Lion King, Billy Elliot, Jersey Boys and A Little Night Music). And that’s not all: you can also buy advance tickets at a discount for a whole raft of shows yet to open, like A View from the Bridge (starring Scarlett Johansson in her Broadway debut and Liev Schreiber, that begins performances next Monday), Million Dollar Quartet,Sondheim on Sondheim, The Miracle Worker and Collected Stories.

Of course, you still have to pay the service charges online, but at least you’re doing it from the comfort of your laptop (or iPhone). For those hardier souls willing to brave the cold, crowds, endless queues and abrasive staffing, there’s still the tkts booth at Times Square, but it’s no longer the bargain it once was: discounts that were once offered at half price across the board now vary from show to show, with some offering reductions of between 20% and 40% instead.

Sometimes life is all in the timing; and I managed to set off for New York yesterday morning in a lucky window between New York’s own massive snowfall on Saturday evening that saw 14 inches recorded at JFK, and London’s yesterday afternoon.

The difference, of course, is that New York is prepared for theirs, so there was no delay at all in flying into JFK yesterday, unlike the scenes of chaos at London airports yesterday after I had already long left, thank goodness. And although there are now banks of snow lining every pavement here in Manhattan, there’s at least a through-route down the middle of each. It’s sometimes a bit slushy at the crossroads, but you can still get around quite easily.

And theatre, of course, is all about the timing, too. Ragtime first opened on Broadway in 1998, and though much heralded at the time, it lost out on the all-important Tony Award for Best Musical to The Lion King, of all things (though it won both the awards for its book and score, the two key components in the making of a Best Musical, one would have thought), and only ran two years.

Whenever I wonder how on earth people could still feel intimidated by going to the theatre, I have to remind myself that I still sometimes do when it comes to opera. It’s a language I (sometimes literally) don’t understand; and it can seem terribly remote and inaccessible, too, also literally, given the vast sizes of the major opera houses.

Yet English National Opera have done well to break down the barriers of my (in)comprehension, first of all of course by singing operas in English (so at least I can follow them), but also by providing an often vibrant theatrical language to make newly accessible through.

One of the perennial complaints about theatregoing is the iniquitous cost of theatre programmes. According to the West End Whingers, programmes for Legally Blonde, now in previews at the Savoy, cost “an absurd £6.50” - which as they go on to exclaim, “Outrageous! It’s a souvenir brochure of sorts but only contains rehearsal pictures. Proper programmes won’t be available apparently until January when the show eventually opens to the press. Phil just couldn’t and wouldn’t buy one on principle. It’s something that needs stamping on and quickly. Andrew was so loved up with the whole show that he was seduced. Shame on him.”

The management would of course reply that they’re not obligatory; you pay your money (or not), and take your chances. Phil chose not to; Andrew did. But for most people, they are part of the whole experience. And it seems that they’ve now become just another part of the fleecing exercise that the West End has to part customers from their money, on top of the already extortionate price of the tickets and the means of purchase imposed on top of that in booking fees.

I swear that critics don’t collude. We may exchange glances, or occasionally trade barbs or even insults, but when it comes to the writing, we at least (try to) make up our own minds. But sometimes the same phrase will inevitably occur, regardless: just yesterday I dubbed Sandi Toksvig’s Christmas Cracker “a barely-rehearsed, badly conceived mismash of music, magic and supposed comedy” here, and in today’s Times Dominic Maxwell’s one-star review concurs virtually verbatim, calling it a “an under-rehearsed mishmash.”

Dominic goes on to gracefully acknowledge, “It would be Scrooge-like not to mention some real pleasures here — carols by the choir Voicelab, Christmas songs by Maria Friedman. But the legend that is Ronnie Corbett is under-used.” He then concludes, “You will have worse evenings. But you’ll have a lot more fun at your local panto, where they do this stuff for a living.”.

Of course, one of the occupational hazards of a critic’s job is that we have to watch this sort of thing for a living.

I’ve often said before how pleased I am when theatre reviews (or at least cross-references to them) make the front pages of the papers. It’s happened this year for Rowan Atkinson’s appearance in Oliver! at Drury Lane; for the opening of David Tennant’s Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon; and for the premiere of Alan Bennett’s ‘The Habit of Art; and it may yet happen again this week when Kiera Knightley makes her West End debut in The Misanthrope on Thursday.

But the banner headline across the top of today’s Times - above even the paper’s own masthead - which heralds “Pamela in Panto”, and then, in smaller letters, asks, “Is she any good?”, before cross referencing to Benedict Nightingale’s page four review of the Wimbledon panto in which Pamela Anderson is making her London stage debut as the Genie of the Lamp, might suggest a dumbing down of priorities too far.

The headline is a quote from the wisest of all British theatre sages, Peter Brook, and was repeated in a Guardian feature by Michael Billington in 2003 just as Nick Hytner was about to take over the National Theatre and had announced the first of the Travelex-sponsored £10 seasons. Billington said then that the scheme was “going to be the real test of Hytner’s regime”, and said, “It is simply the most radical idea anyone has come up with in years to broaden the theatregoing audience.”

Six Travelex seasons later, it has been triumphantly vindicated. As Billington noted in his end-of-the-decade report in the Guardian last week, “For as long as I could remember, theatre-people had agonised over how to make the medium more accessible. Peter Brook, in a Donmar lecture long ago, supplied the answer: cheap tickets. Hytner proved that was true. In the scheme’s first year, a staggering 33% said they were paying their first visit to the National.”

I actually took a day off from the theatre on Saturday - yes, even theatre critics need to sometimes, even at this time of year, and it’s going to be my New Year’s resolution to try to free myself from the tyranny of constant theatregoing some more in 2010. And yesterday I was forcefully reminded why I shouldn’t try to get to everything.

You know that you are reaching your pain threshold when the bad audiences start bugging you even more than the terrible shows. Going to the matinee of a meagre little Christmas cabaret show, The Great American Seasonal Songbook at Hampstead’s New End Theatre was sad enough; one of the cast of two could barely carry a tune, and looked as deeply uncomfortable as I was feeling. But my discomfort wasn’t merely caused by his dire attempts to approximate the notes, but by the incredible behaviour of those seated on the other side of the aisle in the row in front of me.

Will she? Won’t she? Never mind the fact that Kiera Knightley is currently in previews for her West End debut in The Misanthrope next Thursday, there’s a far more significant one next Tuesday: Pamela Anderson is due to begin her run as the Genie of the Lamp amongst the rotating quartet of stars sharing the role at the New Wimbledon Theatre in Aladdin.

But according to yesterday’s Londoners’ Diary in the Standard, she “hasn’t even started rehearsals, isn’t in the country and her first expected appearance is on Tuesday. A source at the heart of the production says, ‘We’re holding our breath’.”

And so, too, are fellow members of the Critics’ Circle. We already have several competing claims on our attention, not least the RSC, who are opening Dominic Cooke’s production of Arabian Nights at Stratford-upon-Avon that night, and have been offering critics the chance to attend the night before instead. Who’d have thought that the RSC would be upstaged by Pamela Anderson?

Records, of course, are only made to be broken. But two astonishing stories from Broadway prove both the ongoing buoyancy of the Great White Way and the power of star names, both above the title and in it. First, for Thanksgiving week (that ended November 29), Wicked became - in the words of the New York Times — “the first Broadway production to gross more than $2 million in a single week.”

Now in its 7th year there, it always does good business; but what changed that week? According to the gross box office figures, it’s not just that it sold 100% of capacity - but that the average ticket price was a staggering $144.15 - nearly $20 more than the supposed top price of $125. And given that the house is actually staggered from $65 to $125, $125 shouldn’t even be the average ticket price, either - it should be lower. What it means, of course, is that the so-called “premium” tickets — $300 and no change - are being sold to a higher proportion of the house. The days of flexible pricing have truly arrived on Broadway.

Watching the world premiere of John Logan’s play Red last night at the Donmar Warehouse about the artist Mark Rothko, I was put in mind frequently of Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical about Georges Seurat, and not just because Philip Quast - who had played Seurat in that show’s London premiere at the National Theatre in 1990 - was sitting on the front row.

Of course the two shows are both about getting into the minds and motives of the artists concerned as much as their respective artistic processes. They also manage the rare feat of using one art form - the theatre - to actually demonstrate how another works from the inside out, as we literally see paint being transferred from brush to canvas. In the most galvanising scene last night, Alfred Molina (as Rothko) and Eddie Redmayne (as his assistant) prepare the colour base undercoat for a canvas by furiously painting it red.

In Sweet Charity, the title character of Charity Hope Valentine puts her hard-knock life and serial (mis)fortunes down to the “fickle finger of fate”. But there’s something not at all accidental about the revival of the show that contains her at the Menier Chocolate Factory: the theatre seems to be pre-programmed at the moment on a success track. While it’s the British habit, of course, to seek to knock things back down again when they show signs of succeeding on their own, it also has to be said that success there no longer comes as a surprise: it comes as an expectation.

It’s no surprise, therefore, to find a grudging tone to some of the reviews. Even my own rave in the Sunday Express identified a key weakness, “The theatre specialises in stripping the shows back to their basics and in the process revealing their heart and soul. And Sweet Charity, a smart musical about a tart with a heart who is one of life’s losers in love but forever optimistic about the future, comes up another winner here. That’s despite, not because of, a brashly confident performance by former Eastenders actress, Tamzin Outhwaite in the title role. She has plenty of vim and vigour but not much in the way of vulnerability or charm.”

No, the first part of the headline doesn’t refer to where I’ll be heading myself two weeks today to spend Christmas and see in the New Year, but rather to the now annual live festive musical celebration of the season by some of the West End’s leading younger musical theatre actors that is staged under the title Christmas in New York.

I’ve been to every single one since it was launched in 2006 - and even if it didn’t begin auspiciously for me, at least, that year as I managed to write my car off that very afternoon before the show, both the show and I survived the experience (and, as I wrote here, “I still even managed to get to the theatre on time”, which is more than I managed on Saturday without crashing my car en route to another event, of which more in a moment).

Now that the producers have to be wary of selectively (mis)quoting critics, thanks to a EU Directive and the first challenge being launched under it by Westminster Trading Standards against The Shawkshank Redemption as I blogged about here last week, they are clearly going to have to be a bit more creative about where they source them from. Step forward David Pugh, the producer of Calendar Girls, who I noticed the other day has resorted to quoting celebrity endorsements instead outside the Noel Coward Theatre, including the likes of Christopher Biggins.

And even the tiny Union Theatre in Southwark is up for it: it’s the first theatre I’ve seen to quote a tweet for their production of A Man of No Importance that ends tomorrow.

No, that headline isn’t my review for the wonderful new production of Sweet Charity that opened at the Menier Chocolate Factory last night. In fact, it has already long been proved that nowhere in London is currently better at offering stellar musical revivals than the Menier, as witness the fact that their production of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music is currently in preview on Broadway, as I mentioned just yesterday, which follows last year’s Broadway transfer for their production of another Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George, and is to be followed next April by the Broadway transfer of yet another Menier-originated revival of La Cage Aux Folles (and which I will coincidentally be revisiting one last time tonight).

It’s a pity, though, that they’ve effectively given up on new musicals, since premiering Maltby and Shire’s Take Flight over two years ago. My gripe, though, isn’t that there’s gotta be something better in what they’re doing, let alone not doing, since there are no revivals to rival Sweet Charity in town (and it is surely West End bound next). Rather, there’s gotta be something better to sit on while watching it.

Productions are forever being shuttled between the West End and Broadway, of course. Just this week Legally Blonde begins previewing at the Savoy on Saturday, joining a roster of Broadway imports that currently includes Avenue Q, Chicago, Hairspray and Wicked. And last night saw the West End opening for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in a production that also originated on Broadway last year, featuring two of the headline stars of its original Broadway company in veterans James Earl Jones (now 78) and Phylicia Rashad (sister of the play’s director Debbie Allen), while Hair will arrive next April with its entire American cast intact.

Meanwhile, going in the other direction, the Menier Chocolate Factory’s production of A Little Night Music is currently in previews on Broadway (before opening officially on Sunday week, December 13), with the Menier’s La Cage Aux Folles to follow next April. Each is retaining at least one member of the British company in Alex Hanson and Douglas Hodge (who has returned to La Cage for a final stint this week, before it closes here in January) respectively. And Broadway is also currently hosting the London-originated Billy Elliot, Mamma Mia!, Mary Poppins and The Phantom of the Opera on the musicals front, and God of Carnage, Hamlet and The 39 Steps on the plays front.

So at the moment the balance is definitely in favour of British shows on Broadway rather than the other way around.

Not a day goes by, it seems, without theatre critics being under attack (or sometimes attacking each other), as I’ve been regularly chronicling here. Yes, there’s an ongoing debate to be had about the role of critics, to be sure; but we’re not the enemy, however much some defensive theatre folk seem to find it convenient to make us out to be when they - unfairly, as it turns out — cite our behaviour as influencing our responses to their work.

As Michael Coveney pointed out in his blog, “So drunk critics joins the list of stand-by phoney excuses for miffed authors and producers, along with hot weather, Wimbledon on the telly, bad day at the office, late curtain or some inexplicable antipathy towards the theatre staff; it’s never anything to do with the play or the performance themselves.”