March 2010 Archives

It’s a recurring theme of this blog that the critics often disagree. I recently noted here how I’ve lately found myself at odds with Michael Billington on various productions. And that’s healthy: a general critical consensus could suggest not so much that our tastes have all become mysteriously aligned, but that the artistic leaderships have also identified these and are now playing safe. I prefer things to be a bit more unpredictable, and that I therefore have to make up my own mind.

Take the recent reviews for The White Guard at the National’s Cottesloe: there was a flurry of overnight five star reviews from Michael Billington, Charles Spencer and Michael Coveney, but a more cautious three stars from Henry Hitchings in the Standard: “Visually and technically this is a remarkable production. However, it’s rather confusing, and the storytelling fails to resonate. The play’s historical and political burden is substantial but it isn’t genuinely engaging.”

And on the weekend, some more reviews endorsed this viewpoint.

Theatre is, famously, a risky business; you’ve got to be ready to stake everything if you want to succeed. Cameron Mackintosh used to stay one step ahead of the game, in the days long before internet banking, by having his bank account in remote places, so that the cheques would take longer to clear.

Andrew Lloyd Webber invests in race horses — and just yesterday it was reported that on Saturday his horse Dar Re Mi (so named because it was born during the previews of The Sound of Music at the London Palladium) galloped to victory in Dubai’s Sheema Classic on Saturday, netting him some £2m in winnings. (According to a report in The Times, he’s recently named a home-bred two-year-old filly after his new musical Love Never Dies; let’s hope it wins better reviews than the show).

And Bill Kenwright, of course, has staked a lot of money on football, as chairman and owner of Everton, which can be just as risky as producing shows. Last year he stated publicly that he was on the look-out for more investment: “The truth is Everton do need a billionaire”.

That’s probably what owners of West End theatres need to be, too.

Last Tuesday I called it here “the theatrical embarrassment of the year so far”. I was referring to the appearance of Patrick Cassidy, half-brother of David, who had come to London to support his mother Shirley Jones, the Hollywood legend (and occasional Broadway star) in her London stage debut of what was supposed to be the first of twelve concerts. In fact, I’m told that by Tuesday evening the worst bit - the song he sang about his passion for his wife, which I said involved him “virtually dry-humping a portrait of her”, had been cut - and so was the interval. (Presumably both were strategies to stop the mass walk-outs).

But by Friday, the theatre’s website was announcing that the run was going to be summarily curtailed and end the next night, a week early, citing Jones’s “serious vocal chords problems.” There’s something, of course, that doesn’t add up about such a claim, not least the fact that she was willing to go ahead and risk even worse injury by performing twice more before going home.

Who goes to the theatre in London? And who on Broadway?….
Yesterday the Society of London Theatre published a report - yours for just £50 (or a top price ticket to Jerusalem, plus post and packing - the sort of add-on you find yourself paying for your theatre tickets too) - looking at the people behind the statistics of London’s record year in theatreland. We already know a lot of people go to the theatre; but who are they?

The report, compiled from self-completed questionnaires returned by 4,600 theatregoers canvassed at 37 different productions during 2008, comes to the not-too-surprising conclusion that not only do lots of people go to the theatre, but also that lots of the same people do.

Just last week Robert Gore-Langton wrote a column in the Daily Telegraph that was headlined: “Jerusalem - whatever happened to sensible prices?” He began the piece by saying, “Occasionally, there crops up in the West End a show you can’t afford to miss. Then there are those you can’t afford to see. Jerusalem manages to be both.”

He goes on to call it, “The most entertaining new play in years and the theatre event of the century so far,” and says, “At last, I thought while watching it, here is a play that my 19-year-old son and his cronies would adore. It might even convert him to theatre, which he regards through bitter experience as an overrated diversion for people like me and other assorted ‘losers’. So I bought tickets for him and a chum. The damage for a pair of seats at the back of the stalls? £104. As they say in the West Country, you’re havin’ a laugh. In the end, my son loved the show. Really loved it. But he won’t recommend it to his friends. Even the seats in the gods cost around £20 full-price - not a sum anyone he knows is likely to shell out.”

Given my privileged position (and I never take it for granted), I seldom have to “shell out” myself - but Jerusalem is an exception. Funnily enough, this weekend my partner and I are taking two friends of his to see it and its cost us £198 for four tickets.

I have already noted some of the surprises at this year’s Laurence Olivier Awards here, the biggest of which was the triumph of a tiny fringe play, The Mountaintop, over the much bigger hit(ter) of Jerusalem. The Guardian’s “What to say about the Olivier Awards blog even lead with a quote from my blog, “Well, nobody saw that coming. Literally nobody. As Mark Shenton remarks, even Marla Rubin, one of the producers of The Mountaintop, ‘was proudly telling me of their nomination before the ceremony, before adding: ‘But we don’t stand a chance of winning’.’ Yet win best new play it did, despite opening in a 65-seat venue and coming up against both Enron and Jerusalem.”

Later, The Guardian also comments, “Nor were all the winners to everybody’s taste. ‘The winning production of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof came from Broadway, where it had failed to secure even a single Tony nomination,’ Shenton observes with what I fancy is a grumbling tone, ‘yet here it was deemed the best of the year’s play revivals in a category that also included Arcadia, The Misanthrope, Three Days of Rain and A View from the Bridge, as well as Streetcar’.”

Actually, I’ll leave the grumbling and rumbling to others.

When I saw the stage adaptation of best-selling novelist Martina Cole’s Two Women at Stratford East last month, the publicity came with an interesting warning: “Ages 15+. Contains swearing, and is not for the easily offended.” I guess that, whereas TV famously has a watershed after which anything goes, the curtain at the theatre typically goes up before that, and some theatregoers need to be warned about what to expect. Plus there’s no off button in the theatre, except getting up and leaving, which could make for a short evening.

That’s where critics are useful, too: they may, at least, warn unsuspecting punters what to expect. When Rhoda Koenig reviewed the play for The Independent, she cautioned, “The standards of soap, not theatre, are the ones to apply, but not because most of the cast are alumni of EastEnders. The novelist Martina Cole, whose oeuvre has sold more than eight million copies, has an imagination bounded by bad TV, crime news, and confession magazines and a vocabulary that would not tax speakers of pidgin (foul-mouthed ones, that is: one word appears so frequently that Cole has probably had a key for it fitted to her computer).”

And its true that it appeared frequently in Patrick Prior’s stage version, too.

Happy birthday to Stephen Sondheim, who turns 80 today; but also to Andrew Lloyd Webber, 62 today. It is a curious fact that the two figures who have dominated the Broadway and British musical landscapes over the second half of the twentieth century should share a birthday; but also instructive to compare and contrast their impact, legacy and approval ratings, whether at the box office or the critical stakes.

Of Sondheim’s 18 original Broadway credits (whether for writing lyrics, music and lyrics, or in the case of the short-lived Getting Away with Murder, a play), plus three revues of his work (including Sondheim on Sondheim, which has just begun previewing at Studio 54 ahead of an April 22 opening), the original runs of almost every single one has been little over a year, and sometimes considerably less. (Even the original productions of such landmark shows as Follies, A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd were respectively 15 months, 17 months and 16 months). The longest-running first run Sondheim has ever had in his home town was for Company, that ran for 21 months.

By contrast, of course, Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera is now the longest running musical of all time on Broadway - 22 years and counting; while Cats ran for just short of 18 years. Even Starlight Express, with a run of 23 months, and Evita (3 years 9 months) outran anything Sondheim ever wrote.

Yesterday afternoon I caught a matinee of the touring production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - a show that looms large in my career, but one that will forever be remembered as a sell-out for other reasons than the ones at the box office that also followed. The personal significance of the show to me is that its original West End opening eight years ago, at the London Palladium, was the first show I ever reviewed for the Sunday Express; but in a wider landscape, it also marked a low point in the clash between subsidised and commercial theatre cultures, when Adrian Noble elected to take a leave of absence from the RSC to direct it, even as the company was in the midst of a fatally ill-judged restructuring that he had himself implemented that left the company permanently homeless in London, a state of affairs that continues to this day.

And no sooner were the reviews in than he resigned his post as that company’s artistic director. Of course, his predecessor Trevor Nunn had often taken leaves of absence himself, to direct shows like Cats, Starlight Express and Aspects of Love, but he had a trusty right-hand man Terry Hands to keep steering the ship. This time, however, the captain steered the ship right into an iceberg - then was the first to jump into a lifeboat, or rather a flying car in this case, before it sank.

The RSC has, fortunately, lived to see another day; and just the other week Noble himself seemed to find a return to form in his well-reviewed production of Hedda Gabler (now on tour).

The other day a theatre studies degree student who had attended the recent critics’ forum I participated in at the Royal Holloway College a few weeks ago wrote on this blog to say that from what she understood the critics on show that night (Lyn Gardner, Kate Bassett, Ian Shuttleworth and myself) had suggested that we “don’t really do much research before reviewing a play, outside reading new material that is.” She then asked, “If you do happen to research before reviewing, what do you think would be the most important aspects of production (Theatre Companies Manifesto, the Theatre’s history, playwrights construct) to have information on? We are writing a casebook to show the importance of research and pre-knowledge of the play.”

I replied that I always think that theatre is best experienced on the stage, not the page, so no, we don’t tend to approach theatre as academically as some of our European colleagues do. Frankly, we are supposed to review what we see, and it shouldn’t require a long reading list first. (A few years ago, when Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia opened at New York’s Lincoln Centre, the New York Times wrote, “If ever a play required a reading list, The Coast of Utopia is it,” and duly provided one.)

Theatre journalists on both sides of the Atlantic were bombarded by e-mails from “Phans” of The Phantom of the Opera in the weeks preceding last week’s opening of Love Never Dies: even Ben Brantley, reviewing the show in the New York Times, referred to the endless scuttlebutt, saying, “When the news got out that there was to be another show about the Phantom — to be set in early-20th-century Coney Island, no less, instead of gaslight Paris — a few of those fans took to their cybersoapboxes to cry sacrilege. Soon theater writers (including me) were receiving e-mail messages from Phantom-ites lamenting the show’s rank inappropriateness. And they hadn’t even seen the darn thing. Once the musical went into previews, many were reporting in chat rooms and blogs that their darkest fears had been confirmed.”

Brantley then went on to say, “Of course, bad advance word on the Internet has sometimes proved false. (Ever hear of Avatar?) And I would be delighted to tell you that’s what happened here, especially since Love Never Dies is scheduled for Broadway this fall. But how can I, when at every opportunity Mr. Lloyd Webber’s latest sets itself up to be knocked down?”

But now it is setting itself up to fight back.

Andrew Lloyd Webber may be smarting from some of the reviews he’s received for Love Never Dies, but I guess he will take comfort from the fact that Les Miserables was far from universally adored, either, when it first opened at the Barbican Theatre a quarter of a century ago, under the auspices of the RSC, then the full-time resident company there, in a co-production with West End producer Cameron Mackintosh. And it was by no means certain that it would fulfill its transfer to the West End, as it had already been booked to do, afterwards.

As the late Sheridan Morley and Ruth Leon report in their book about Mackintosh, ‘Hey, Mr Producer’, “Cameron, with the hostile reviews now all in, had to decide irrevocably whether to go for the West End. The advance at the Barbican was still minimal and on sides he was being advised to let the show die a quiet RSC death. He now faced the most crucial decision of his entire working life. Within 48 hours of those reviews hitting the streets, he had to decide whether to invest a further £300,000 in transferring the show from the Barbican to his own management at the Palace, or whether to cut his losses and close at the Barbican, thereby losing only his £50,000 deposit, plus, of course, an entire two years of his working life.”

Everybody, the chapter goes on, was against moving Les Mis into the West End.

Immediately following the opening of Love Never Dies last Tuesday I reported some of the initial verdicts here, which ranged from two stars to five; and quoted director Jack O’Brien who had commented to me in an interview for this paper, “Honest to God, we are not going to know what anybody thinks for a long time. There is too much noise.”

The noise has only been getting louder in the last few days, and the sounds coming from the critics aren’t getting any better. Though the initial flurry of yaysayers seemed to outnumber the naysayers, the latter have been gaining critical strength in the days since: in addition to the two star overnight notices from Benedict Nightingale in The Times and Henry Hitchings in the Evening Standard (that was published after I’d already posted Wednesday’s blog), it has also now received further two star reviews from Ian Shuttleworth in the Financial Times and Claire Allfree in Metro in the dailies, and another pair of two star reviews in yesterday’s Sundays, from Christopher Hart in the Sunday Times and myself in the Sunday Express.

The news from Stateside at the start of the week that Variety, the industry trade bible, had laid off both its chief theatre and film critics (David Rooney and Todd McCarthy), and would be farming out the work to freelancers instead, has sent shockwaves through the reviewing industry: what value does this demonstrate is being put on the words of respected critics? As David Cote, Time Out New York’s theatre editor, put it in a Guardian blog, “Variety has effectively told the world that it doesn’t care about having an authoritative critical voice.”

As I pointed out here on Monday, they are just the latest casualties in a shrinking critical world in New York. As Cote went on, “In both the short and long term, the trend is disturbing. From a strictly corporate view, however, it’s expedient. The brand remains prominent, but the particular voice of the critic becomes negligible. Cynics might say this allows the editor to soften a negative review, or bury it online, so as not to alienate or annoy advertisers. Using writers with less power and prestige also allows a publication to bend the copy to advertorial ends.”

It’s in the nature of blogs to be somewhat self-revealing, as you inevitably reveal some of your obsessions (and obsessive irritations — and sometimes limitations!) to the world. I was surprised to receive an e-mail the other week, for instance, from a young producer (who obviously reads this blog regularly), inviting me to see his show and promising in the subject line, “Ample parking”. He then added, “I’m also happy to personally undertake finding you a free parking space in close proximity”. Obviously my regular diatribes about this particular irritation made him try a unique way to entice me. It worked; the only problem, when I did indeed get there, is that another perennial irritation presented itself: an incompetent venue box office that never had the tickets he’d duly arranged!

It’s obviously something that irritates my fellow blogger Michael Coveney, too, who recently publicly berated the Arcola for its own lack of attention in this area: “I’ve just rung the box office, in box office hours, of the Arcola Theatre in Dalston to ask about the running time for tonight’s opening of Thomas Bernhard’s Heldenplatz. Answer came there none. Or, rather, came there a recorded answer referring me to on-line booking facilities. Theatre, the most personally involved and involving of all the arts, sometimes wonders why it fails all the time with its public. Here’s why: they’ve forgotten about the most important people in their artistic equation — the public.”

But often Michael treats us, too, to reports of his strange encounters on Hampstead Heath, where he was recently “forcefully embraced and given a good licking, but not by anyone I knew.”

The word, of course, has long been out on Love Never Dies, or Paint Never Dries as it has been now been frequently dubbed in blogland (following the irrepressible lead of the West End Whingers) and now cross-referenced in multiple pre and now post-opening news features about the show. (As I previously pointed out here last week, the PRs definitely missed a trick in not acceding to the Whingers’ request for press tickets: had they done so, their comments would not have been published until after the show opened to the rest of the critics, and would have been lost amongst them, instead of - in at least one case this morning - being contained within them).

But how important has the avalanche of advance word been? Michael Coveney’s blog posting on Whatsonstage today interestingly points out, “All the peeved bloggers on this site and elsewhere have certainly had a deleterious effect on the show that the critics, on the whole, have managed to correct. I was called by at least two television stations asking for my comments on a show that is clearly perceived as a flop. The idea that the babble of the blog is inseparable from critical assessment is taking serious and dangerous hold.”

Just yesterday I was writing here about three of my favourite London venues, from one of London’s grandest, most opulent (and biggest) theatres, the London Coliseum, to one of its scruffiest, the Union, plus the plush stalls bar of another, the Prince of Wales’s Delfont Room, that doubles as a wonderful late night cabaret room.

But the great thing about London is that there are always new venues and places to discover, or indeed watch being created. And though you can take the boy out of Elephant and Castle (as I was three years ago by moving up the street to Borough), you can’t entirely take Elephant and Castle out of the boy, so I have a strange residual affection for the place, including the often reviled Shopping Centre that used to dominate the infamous roundabout.

We all have favourite places we like to revisit regularly, but it’s one of the particular pleasures of the London theatrical scene is the sheer diversity of the experiences on offer. One night, as I did on the weekend, you can be at the hole-in-the-wall (and I’ve not counted them, but there are surely plenty of holes in those shabby, blackened walls) that is the totally unfunded Union Theatre; the next, in the plush, ornate splendour of the London Coliseum, refurbished to the tune of £41m thanks, in part, to the lottery and other grants and donations. And I then went on from the Coli to the wonderful Delfont Room at the Prince of Wales Theatre - itself refurbished in 2004, but purely via the private funds of its owner Cameron Mackintosh - for a late night cabaret.

At the Coli, there’s a champagne bar offering bottles of Bollie at £95 a pop; at the Union, one of London’s finest lattes is personally prepared for you at the outdoor cafe for you for just 90p. You pay your money, as they say, and you make your choice.

The unstoppable avalanche of claims and counter-claims on Love Never Dies is reaching a crescendo, as the show prepares to welcome its first reviewers tomorrow and on Monday, before the official opening on Tuesday.

As Michael Coveney - author of the best biography of Lloyd Webber - pointed out in a blog yesterday, “Everyone I know seems to have seen Love Never Dies already, and comment on the score is flowing freely through the newspapers and on the blogosphere. Critics have listened to the score and the Press previews are starting on Saturday. So once again the whole idea of a First Night next Tuesday is a wash-out. And the peculiar thrill of being able to say ‘I was there’ when the show opened is blown away on the wind.”

The way this process has been (mis)managed is part of the problem.

An obituary writer predeceases her subject….
There was sad news reported on Sunday of the death of veteran director and choreographer Wendy Toye, who died on February 27 at the age of 92. She had a long and illustrious innings, though, from child dancer who made her first appearance at the Royal Albert Hall at the age of four and by nine had choreographed a ballet at the London Palladium. She would go on to appear in films and as a stage dancer, before becoming a stage director for the first time in 1946, directing musicals at a time when the industry was dominated by men (as it remains by and large today, with the few exceptions of the likes of Susan Stroman in the US and Phyllida Lloyd with Mamma Mia! globally).

But the most intriguing fact of the Guardian’s neatly-penned obituary by Wendy Trewin, published in the paper on Monday, is revealed in a footnote to the online version: “Wendy Trewin died in 1999”. So the writer long predeceased her subject’s own death.

As the first night of Love Never Dies approaches, it’s becoming difficult to avoid the droning sound of both friendly fire and enemy attack overhead. Of course, part of is that you simply can’t avoid the PR machine: here’s Andrew Lloyd Webber and his star Sierra Boggess on The Jonathan Ross Show, reprising the title number that they previously premiered on the South Bank Show Awards; there’s another interview feature with his Lordship.

Edward Seckerson, writing up the latter in last Friday’s Independent, warmly declares that Lloyd Webber’s “work a throwback to a bygone melodic style - more gracious, more opulent. His lyric ballads are surely unsurpassed since the heyday of Ivor Novello, Frederick Loewe and Richard Rodgers. The middle-eight or ‘release’ of ‘Look with your heart’, another song from the show, is pure Rodgers; it sings and plays like an affectionate homage. But it’s what I call the emotional memory of these melodies that give them such dramatic potency. The Phantom’s big number in Love Never Dies, ‘Till I hear you Sing’, is one of the best ballads Lloyd Webber has ever written - an absolute corker - but it stays with you because something about the ache within it won’t let go. When Christine agrees to sing for her mentor one last time she does so to the same tune and the frisson of recognition it engenders makes for a real goosebumps moment. That’s what great melodists do - hard to define but easy to recognise. It’s where the next note seems somehow inevitable the second after you’ve heard it. Rodgers once said ‘a great melody implies its own harmony’ and Lloyd Webber certainly holds true to that maxim.”

Maybe, of course, you listen to this score a few times to get its full measure. That’s presumably why Lloyd Webber has had copies of the album sent - individually watermarked, and labelled “unique and traceable” to prevent us, from trying to share it with anyone - to critics ahead of next week’s opening.

Ghost Stories, that opened last night at the Lyric Hammersmith, carries a health and safety warning even before you see it: the Lyric’s website promises (or threatens), depending on your disposition, “Please be advised that Ghost Stories contains moments of extreme shock and tension. The show is unsuitable for anyone under the age of 16. We strongly advise those of a nervous disposition to think very seriously before attending.”

I also received a call from the show’s press agent yesterday urging me not to give some of the show’s secrets away when I came to review it. The audience are also told, as the final safety curtain comes down (and never before should the word safety seemed so appropriate), “Please keep the secrets of Ghost Stories”.

It’s an occupational hazard, and there’s always a fine line between informing a reader of what to expect, and spoiling their enjoyment by ruining the surprise(s).

Film and theatre critics have typically been background figures - shadowy men (and increasingly women) who scribble in the dark, whether of a film preview theatre (where they’re kept entirely separate from the public who read them) or a theatrical first night (sitting amongst an artificially constructed group of the so-called public, who are in fact usually investors, agents or celebrities there to boost the news value of the occasion). So no one used to recognise critics, except people who were inside the business itself, who might make it their business to know who they were (at least they could avoid being indiscreet in their presence!).

Some critics have not always been honoured even with a personal byline - for decades, Variety used to sign their reviews with an abbreviated version of the reviewers’ names (I remember the main London reviewer used to be someone mysteriously simply designated as Humm).

But nowadays critics are being outed as public figures as never before. That’s partly because of the near-universal adoption of photo bylines, so at least our readers now know what we look like. But also, increasingly, is the phenomenon of being appointed to the role after some kind of media profile elsewhere.