January 2010 Archives

I often complain, but also secretly celebrate, the fact that there’s so much to see that I can’t possibly see it all; and of course we all have to make choices as a result. Whether you’re a critic or just a regular theatregoer, you go partly by your instincts and intuition, based on past experience, but you also want to be able to take risks, too, or you never expand on that experience.

That’s where critics can be useful - they might point you to things you wouldn’t think of seeing otherwise. I regularly use reviews to steer me towards new experiences, like Nic Green’s Trilogy that I saw at the Barbican last week.

For the seventh year running, the West End has just reported record figures, in both attendance and revenue, with each year eclipsing the last. Attendance has set an all-time record of over 14m for the first time, up 5.5% on the previous year, with revenues some 7.6% up, topping half a billion pounds, which demonstrates an even more important fact: the growth in income is outstripping even that of attendees, so the latter are paying ever more for the privilege.

All of this has defied every expectation.

Yesterday saw me hosting the annual Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards at the Prince of Wales Theatre, and I have to say that the day passed by in a bit of blur for me, inevitably, so I will await the more considered reporting of bloggers like Michael Coveney and the West End Whingers, for a full report of what they thought happened.

Did I really hear our incomparable guest speaker, Arthur Smith, tell us that Libby Purves - who in June will be taking over from Benedict Nightingale as chief theatre critic of The Times - reveal that she sells crack in Broadcasting House, and gives blow jobs to John Humphreys after the Today show? (I should have checked with Humphreys myself last night, since he was at the first night of Enron).

Later this morning my friend and long-time colleague Benedict Nightingale will be on hand to present the award for Best Actor at this year’s Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards, that I am hosting as chairman of the Critics’ Circle at the Prince of Wales Theatre.

I’m thrilled that he’ll be doing it, but it’s a bittersweet occasion, as just yesterday it was formally announced that he’s finally stepping down, after some 20 years in the post, as chief theatre critic of The Times.

On Friday night, I bore witness to one of the most astonishing acts of audience participation I’ve ever seen: at the end of Nic Green’s Trilogy at the Barbican Theatre, female members of the audience were invited onto the stage to strip naked behind the curtain, then it was opened again to reveal them in all their glory before the rest of the audience joined them in a rousing, celebratory singalong of ‘Jerusalem’.

They even put in a new centre aisle at the Barbican Theatre - an unnecessary extravagance, I’d have thought, for just two performances - for the first time in the venue’s history, to facilitate the passage of audience members to the stage; but they could just as easily have reached the stage via the normal exits, as we did in November in the constant two-way traffic between the stage and the auditorium during the Roman Tragedies.

I was noting just yesterday that we’re in the midst of the awards season, and yesterday I found myself at the Royal Opera House for yet another at lunchtime: it was the 10th anniversary of the Critics’ Circle National Dance Awards, and the great and good of the dance world were assembled in the Floral Hall to honour recipients in a mammoth 16 categories.

Looking at the list of nominees, I realised with some trepidation what a parallel universe this is.

We’re in the midst of the awards season, of course; and just as the Golden Globes (presented by the Hollywood Foreign Film Association) last Sunday prefigure the Oscars that will follow on March 7, so over here we’ve already had the longest-running Evening Standard Theatre Awards, before the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards next Tuesday celebrates its 21st anniversary, then the Oliviers follow on March 21.

Each of these are decided by variously constituted panels of experts - whether it be a small group of invited leading critics in the case of the Standard Awards (though, curiously, only its own lead reviewer and not his deputy), a wider pool of critics in the case of the Critics’ Circle Awards (drawn from the entire membership of the drama section, or at least those who choose to exercise their private ballot), and a specially appointed panel of theatre professionals and selected members of the public (chosen by interview) in the case of the Oliviers.

According to Wikipedia, the notion of “six degrees of separation” - in which everyone on earth is at most six steps away from any other person on earth - is sometimes also referred to as the human web. Wikipedia also tells us that the idea was “popularised by a play written by John Guare”; but that play, which took its title from the phenomenon, was originally premiered in 1990, just before the explosion of an even more enveloping web than the human one: we’re now just one click away from each other nowadays.

So the play’s return to the Old Vic last night is re-cast therefore entirely as a quaint period piece: it’s lead character Ouisa would not now, as she does here, have to go trudging through the “eight miles of books” at New York’s fabled Strand bookstore to find an out-of-print biography of Sidney Poitier to establish that he didn’t have a son after all, as the young black man who turns up at her apartment claims to be, but could simply go to wikipedia to discover that “he has four daughters by his first marriage and two by his second.”

Nothing dates faster than the recent past.

Going to the theatre as regularly as I do, you soon learn to know where to expect discomfort as a matter of course, and how to mitigate it, if possible. You know, for instance, that all the seats on the hard benches of Shakespeare’s Globe are bum-numbing; but that if at least you get the back row of any of the levels, you will at least get a back rest. (My own favourite seats are therefore the ones in the fourth row of the middle gallery).

And if you go to the Trafalgar Studios, as I did last night for the opening of The Caretaker, your best bet is always Row E - it’s where the old dress circle used to end, and has a useful extra bit of legroom before the seating continues its steep rake down to the stage. Unfortunately I wasn’t in Row E last night, though - and when I collected my tickets, I discovered they were in Row J.

Last Wednesday, Legally Blonde opened officially, but as I’ve previously reported here, the critics went in ahead of time so that on Thursday all of the daily papers were able to run their reviews in synch. And it meant that the PR and advertising people were instantly able to rustle up a quotes ad, so that on Friday they were able to run a full page of quotes extolling the show’s virtues in that day’s Evening Standard. It could, thanks to those words, be deemed to be an instant critical as well as commercial hit.

And although critics do not, of course, write to offer a marketing tool, we are an intrinsic part of the process. We offer another form of independent validation of a show’s quality, so it is clear that what we say still matters to the producers - when, of course, we’re speaking in their favour, though when we don’t, they’ll hastily answer that the public love their show and its for them that they’ve produced it, as James Seabright did in response to my blog posting last Friday about how terrible his production of Jihad! The Musical is, writing, “I think that our audiences are finding more to enjoy in this show than you did.”

An act of theatrical terrorism was perpetrated on the London stage last night, and the serried ranks of London theatre critics - plus no less than three of Britain’s most prolific theatrical lyricists, Herbert Kretzmer, Don Black and Anthony Drewes - bore appalled witness to it.

The scene was Jihad! The Musical at the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre, and even if I didn’t exactly wish for a suicide bomber to arrive and put an end to it all, it did make me pine wistfully for the likes of Too Close to the Sun instead. At least that was a show that earned its sense of feeble incompetence by not quite realising how deeply terrible it was; Jihad!, by contrast, parades its feebleness quite openly, since that’s partly it’s supposedly satirical purpose.

So the verdicts are in for Legally Blonde, based on a range of previews that critics attended instead of a single opening night. And although both Michael Coveney and myself - who both coincidentally and not by design happened to see the show on the same night last Saturday - have already blogged about our experiences with the new protocol, has it made a difference to the reviews, too?

Several today inevitably reference the audience.

Time was that we’d have a gentle introduction to the New Year after the annual onslaught of pre-Christmas openings. Last year the latter went on even later than usual - the RSC didn’t open its transfer of Twelfth Night to the Duke of York’s until December 22, by which time I was already in New York, so it’s created an overflow for me into January and I finally caught up with it last night.

The RSC, of course, are re-inventing their production models, reinstating the concept of a core ensemble-driven company, some of whose shows are destined for a London season at the Roundhouse later this year. But Twelfth Night is an old-fashioned throwback to a unit company, set up just for this one show to showcase at Stratford with an immediate turnaround to a London transfer, that was built around a West End “star” at its centre, namely Richard Wilson.

I didn’t spot the front-of-house sign that warns of full frontal male nudity till I was on my way out of the Tricycle Theatre last night for the interval, and by then I’d already had my pulse quickened by the early delivery of that promise when hunky Tom McKay wandered starkers onto the stage in the opening minutes of last night’s opening of the new Frank McGuinness play Greta Garbo Came to Donegal.

It was the gay equivalent of the moment that caused both Quentin Letts and Charlie Spencer to salivate so openly when they caught sight of Anna Friel’s derriere in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; Quentin even went so far as to recommend that readers “book a seat in the gods for a view of her derriere, by the way”.

Well, Mr McKay certainly got McGuinness’s play off to a lively start for me last night.

We’ve had a long time to get used to the idea: back in July I wrote here of the intention of producer Sonia Friedman to invite critics not, as is usual practice, to the first night of Legally Blonde that takes place this Wednesday, but to a series of five previews between last Thursday and tomorrow night instead.

And though our reviews are officially embargoed until Thursday, the night after the official opening (and will give the daily papers the chance to at least publish the reviews simultaneously in all editions as a result, since everyone will have seen it well in advance of that date now), the fact that I went on Saturday evening - as did Henry Hitchings, Michael Coveney and Matt Wolf - is not similarly embargoed, and it’s amazing how different it felt.

We’re nearly beyond the annual list season, where everyone compiles their best and worst of the year (and some have gone even further to offer their best and worst of the last decade). I did it myself in the pages of The Stage before Christmas, where I wrapped up the year by nominating six of the best plays, revivals, musical productions, actors and actresses, as well as six of the worst of the year, too.

But this was filed before I saw Sandi Tokvig’s Christmas Cracker at the Royal Festival Hall, and have eclipsed the lot in terms of the worst of the year. Still, at least it wasn’t around long, even if the memory of it may unfortunately linger.

But once again proving that one man’s meat is another’s poison is the fact that Annie Get Your Gun at the Young Vic made it onto my musical productions of the year - but the West End Whingers nominated it as their worst musical of the year, calling it “such a crime against musical theatre that the Young Vic production wins hands down.”

I was dreading the return trip from New York overnight on Tuesday, especially since Newark Airport had had a security shutdown on Sunday that led to the evacuation of a terminal, and then I read online before I left Manhattan that the South East was expecting up to 18 inches of snow. In fact, there were no delays going through security at Newark at all - and even more surprising, flying back into Heathrow yesterday morning was, against all the odds, plain sailing (to mix metaphors on modes of transport), and instead of being held in the usual holding pattern over the airport, we actually flew straight in, actually landing ahead of schedule at 9.10am instead of 9.15am.

But as usual, the routine chaos of Heathrow didn’t entirely let us down: once on the ground, there was a 20-minute wait for a gate to open up (we obviously shouldn’t have arrived so promptly!); then the interminable wait for luggage, which didn’t arrive till nearly an hour after we had landed.

Just yesterday I was complaining here about the perennial problems of bad audience behaviour on Broadway; but I’m relieved today to be able to report on a theatregoing experience that totally contradicts it.

Easily the most demanding - and also the most rewarding - musical now playing on Broadway is Next to Normal, an astonishing show that burrows deep into the pain, pressure and even exhilaration of bipolar depression. And even though I doubt that the packed house last night could all have had personal experience of the illness, you could hear a pin drop for most of it — apart, that is, from the sound of stifled (and some not so stifled) sobs.

Theatrical disruptions come in all shapes and sizes, and have been a recurring theme on this blog over the years. But attending my first play of the new year last night at the off-Broadway theatre Playwright’s Horizons - the sort of place where you expect an attentive, responsive audience, since it attracts a proper playgoing crowd - I found the year (and the play) getting off to a bad start.

No sooner had the lights gone down and the actors started doing what looked like warm-up exercises onstage, someone in the audience wisecracked loudly, “So far, so good.”