April 2010 Archives

To see one faded icon of movie musicals making an unfortunate spectacle of herself might have been a misfortune; but was going to see another likely to be carelessness? Do we need to muck around with our treasured memories that much? The thing about film is that preserves what was forever; the theatre has an unfortunate habit of exposing people for who they are now.

Despite the game-but-grim spectacle of the all-too-quickly abbreviated West End run last month of 76-year-old Shirley Jones (who was forever immortalised in the film versions of the stage hits Oklahoma!, Carousel and The Music Man), I still couldn’t resist last night’s arrival of another member of Hollywood movie musical royalty, Debbie Reynolds, who turned 78 at the start of this month and is best known for her starring roles in such movies as Singin’ in the Rain and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, for the latter of which she was Oscar nominated for Best Actress.

Just last week I was bemoaning here how few new musicals on Broadway this season have featured original scores; and Variety is now speculating, “History could be made when the Tony Award nominations are announced May 4. It’s just possible that in the best musical category, all four nominated tuners will be what’s affectionately or disparagingly called a jukeboxer — that is, a show built around pre-existing songs.”

They go on to point out, “Of the prospective nominees, five are songbook shows that have received reviews ranging from respectable to very upbeat — American Idiot, Come Fly Away, Million Dollar Quartet, Fela! and the soon-to-open Off Broadway transfer Everyday Rapture, with the originally scored Memphis falling into the same critical range. Only The Addams Family, appears to fall off the Tony cliff with its near-universal pans, including the critics’ ho-hum response to David Lippa’s original score.”

It’s a pity that a trade paper, in noting the dearth of original musicals, fails to properly name the writer of one of only two of them: it’s Andrew, not David, Lippa.

The other day a good friend wrote to me: “I have a new approach to the theatre - because I just so cannot afford to go, instead I buy the play or borrow the play from the London Library - I am at the moment reading Beyond The Horizon, and Posh just arrived in the post yesterday.” It made me realise, once again, how my own theatregoing habit would be entirely unsustainable if I didn’t do what I do, but plays live on the stage, not the page; so I’m not sure that approach ultimately serves the art as well as it should.

But for lives, once lived but now departed, one of the ways they can live on - apart from the work they have left behind, which is their biggest public legacy - or in the memories of those that loved them, which is an even bigger private one — is on the page. Yesterday saw the annual presentation of the Theatre Book Prize, now in its 13th year, presented under the auspices of the Society for Theatre Research; and this morning will see the presentation of the 3rd annual Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography.

The world has lately seemed constantly out of kilter with itself. Even our now taken-for-granted rights to take to the skies whenever we wish was challenged by the volcanic ash crisis, which grounded planes for all of six long days over London and much of Europe last week; though curiously for me, I was entirely unaffected on either side when I went to New York over the exact same period - as I previously reported here, I flew out on the very morning that the airspace was shutdown on what turned out to be the fourth-from-last flight to leave Heathrow, and I returned overnight last Wednesday on one of the first flights back, which didn’t involve pulling any favours (or buying a new ticket) but was simply my scheduled return flight anyway.

But if I came back to earth (or at least England) on schedule, I also came back with a bit of a bump. There was plenty to be discombobulated about, and not just for the usual reasons of jetlag. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy may exclaim “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore!” but on Saturday evening I had to pinch myself that I was in Chichester, seeing Edward Bond’s 1973 play Bingo revived to launch this year’s season in the Minerva.

Yesterday saw the Sunday Times publishing its annual ode to wealth envy, their pseudo-scientific assessment of the fortunes of Britain’s apparently wealthiest thousand people, though just how they arrive at their computations is a mystery that must be as reassuringly opaque as Lord Ashcroft’s non-dom status was for so long. Still, that particular good Lord can weep while counting his ever-increasing riches: according to the Sunday Times, it has gone up by some £150m over the last year (which is probably close to the sum he avoided paying as tax on his reputed £1,250m fortune).

Meanwhile, that other good Lord of the arts (and some bad musicals), Andrew Lloyd Webber somehow sees his star fall by some £50m, and his position on the list from 52 to 89, thanks to a write-down that saw, according to the Sunday Times, the Really Useful Theatre Group’s profits falling from £73.1m to £9m in 2008/9. And that’s before accounting for the capitalisation of Love Never Dies that has opened in the current financial year.

Last night saw the opening of yet another Sondheim revue on Broadway, Sondheim on Sondheim, that is a shiny little jewel in the now-prevalent events that are being staged to mark his 80th birthday. London’s Donmar Warehouse, who have previously staged the British premiere of Assassins plus new productions of Company, Into the Woods, Merrily We Roll Along and Pacific Overtures, will stage Passion in September, surrounded by more events under the umbrella title Sondheim at 80 that will include conversations between former artistic director Sam Mendes and Michael Grandage about staging Sondheim at the Donmar, as well as the composer himself in discussion, and one-off concert performance revivals of Company and Merrily We Roll Along. And the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park is staging Into the Woods as its summer musical this year, too.

But Broadway is the true home of Sondheim, though it’s ironic that the two previous Sondheim revues to be seen there both originated in England: first all of 33 years ago, when Britain first brought coals to Newcastle with the transfer of Side by Side by Sondheim to the Music Box Theatre in 1977 that had begun its life at Cleo Laine and John Dankworth’s Wavendon Theatre, before Cameron Mackintosh picked it up, sight unseen, and moved it first to the Mermaid, then to Wyndham’s.

Last night saw the triumphant opening of American Idiot on Broadway - a show of galvanising energy and theatrical excitement that’s like a 3D, flesh-and-blood music video come to life, as it brings the entire album of the same name by rock trio Green Day to life, plus a few bonus tracks from their latest album 21st Century Breakdown.

It is, in the words of New York Times critic Charles Isherwood today, “a true rock opera, almost exclusively using the music of Green Day and the lyrics of its kohl-eyed frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong, to tell its story.” In a sense, it picks up where The Who’s Tommy (brought to the Broadway stage in 1993) left off, giving piercing expression to tales of disaffected, disorientated youth.

Of course, neither were conceived originally for the theatre, and there is, therefore, a little shoe-horning required.

Theatre producers typically operate above the title but below the radar. Of course, the costs of putting on shows being what they are nowadays, many of the producers above the title merely buy their way in -but it comes at a high price, literally. There may already be 17 producers above the title of The Addams Family, for instance, but a London investor in the show tells me that the $200,000 he raised wasn’t enough to buy billing, merely a future stake in the possibility that it may come to London eventually and he wanted to a part of it. (He may be regretting the decision now).

But the last few years have seen stars becoming producers - lending their names (and following) to shows that help put the shows above the radar.

In my last blog on Friday, I was proudly boasting that I was on the fourth-from-last-flight out of Heathrow to New York, and how lucky I was. I’m not so sure now: I may never get back! I’m due to host a Critics’ Circle lunch in honour of Alan Ayckbourn at lunchtime on Thursday, and would have been flying home overnight on Wednesday to do so - but now even if I start swimming now, I’m unlikely to make it.

Last night I ran into London producers Sonia Friedman (who, like me, had made it over last Thursday - she was on the first of only two flights to make it to New York that day from Heathrow; I was on the second) and David Babani, and they’ve already looked into when the Queen Mother 2 is next making a transatlantic sailing, which is apparently April 29. Of course, by then the navy may have sent a frigate to pick us up instead….

As the world knows now, Wednesday’s eruption of a real volcano in Iceland, instead of the financial one that first blew up there two years ago but in this case has helpfully been dormant for some 187 years saw it finally choose to bubble up again this week. According to The Guardian’s news report today, it has “sent a plume of ash across some of the world’s busiest flight paths” that “has brought the worst disruption to international air travel since September 11.”

And it very nearly grounded me, too: I was flying to New York yesterday morning on a flight scheduled to depart Heathrow at 10.35am, but finally took off at 11.47am after the pilot got a new route to avoid affected airspace.

The London premiere of Rufus Wainwright’s debut opera Prima Donna at Sadler’s Wells on Monday - a sort of operatic re-write of Sunset Boulevard, about a retired opera singer who is ready not for her close-up but to hit her high notes again - has, like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s own version of that story, a fraught backstage history all of its own that would be worthy of a show in itself.

Originally commissioned for New York’s Metropolitan Opera, they mysteriously rejected it when Wainwright submitted the libretto in French. (Yet the Met isn’t English National Opera but traditionally does operas in their written language; if Wainwright chose to write it in French, surely that makes it his correct artistic choice).

So instead it was picked up by last year’s second Manchester International Festival, whose inaugural edition two years previously had its biggest hit with Damon Albarn’s Monkey, an opera that subsequently came to the Royal Opera House and then had a hit season in a specially created tent at the 02 Arena. Albarn and Wainwright are just two of a wave of contemporary recording artists and composers who are re-imagining the templates, platforms and outlets for their work.

And it brings with it new challenges.

I have regularly sung the praises of the Broadway musical Next to Normal here, which I have now seen five times in New York — and can’t wait to see in London one day. London does not have a good track record with adventurous new Broadway musicals - look at the commercial fate last year of Spring Awakening, though it posthumously won both the Critics’ Circle and Laurence Olivier Awards for Best New Musical, which was a vindication of sorts - but this one might finally break through.

Not only has it achieved that rare feat on Broadway in actually recouping its investment, as I reported here last month, but yesterday it was announced that it had won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, with the Pulitzer committee commending it for expanding “the scope of subject matter for musicals.”

As the New York Times headlined its previous feature about the show’s recoupment, “Broadway’s Unlikely Hit Gives Hope to the Bold”.

Nowadays, it seems, you can do most things from the comfort of your laptop, or even iPhone on the move (though just where everyone is going I wonder, since they can simply stay put and have the world, or at least a virtual version of it, come to them). And even when you do go out, there’s a compulsive need to let the world know: I was at a lunch party yesterday where at least two of the group were twittering and facebooking just where we were (and who we were!) on their iPhones as we ate.

But theatre, I always hope, will survive, because the live theatrical experience cannot be directly replicated in digital format, though I sometimes wonder, too, whether the integrity of the theatre can survive the intrusions of the digital world: a few weeks ago, at the opening of Mrs Warren’s Profession, a woman across the aisle from me, who was accompanying a national critic, was checking her Blackberry throughout the performance. If a critic’s friend doesn’t realise how simultaneously rude and intrusive this is, what hope is there for the rest of the population? (I’ve also previously blogged here about once being at a first night at the Donmar Warehouse where someone was texting throughout the second act of a performance - as we kept realising by the repeated pinging sounds from the replies he got — who was subsequently identified as Michael Colgan, artistic director of the Gate Theatre, Dublin).

But if the digital world is inevitably coming to the theatre in some unwelcome ways, the theatre is nowadays moving closer towards the digital one, too, with relationships it is openly soliciting.

In Sunday in the Park with George, Sondheim’s wise and infinitely moving meditation on the making of art as seen through the eyes of artist Georges Seurat, there’s a great line I return to again and again: “White: a blank page or canvas. His favourite — so many possibilities.”

But though creating art may be all about facing the blank page (or even computer screen) and filling it with new ideas, responding to art is another matter: none of come to it as a blank slate. At the most profound level, we bring who we are to what we see; more superficially, we bring how we are at a particular moment - and sometimes who we are with — to the moment, too.

In Willy Russell’s Educating Rita, the title character gets a lesson in striving for objectivity in literary criticism, but it’s not always so true about theatrical criticism.

Every so often, with columns to fill, some journalists will wake up and suddenly notice something that regular readers of this blog don’t need telling: the theatre is actually good and worth celebrating!

On Sunday, Minette Marrin (whose name evokes for me two New York associations: the off-Broadway theatre the Minetta Lane; and the Broadway star Marin Mazzie!) sounded off in the Sunday Times on the miracles of Easter, with “the first signs of spring, my children’s birthdays, happy memories of Easter egg hunts and family rituals and altogether a feeling that the miserable grip of winter is loosening.” Aw, shucks! But more intriguing is the leap she then went on to make, between the need for religious festivals, even after the loss of a particular faith, and the theatre, which she says, “partly meets that need and is also true cause for celebration in this country.”

Paint never dries, they say; or at least the West End Whingers did when it came to redubbing Love Never Dies — as Ian Shuttleworth notes in the Prompt Corner column of the latest issue of Theatre Record, the show “may also represent the global breakthrough of bloggers the West End Whingers”, who coined the oft-noted alias Paint Never Dries”.

But it’s been left out to dry in other senses now: it was reported last night that the Broadway premiere, originally announced for November, is being delayed till Spring 2011.

It seems late in life to be discovering the theatrical wonder that is Pina Bausch’s work, but on Saturday evening I finally did so, when I caught her landmark 1978 work Kontakhof revived at the Barbican Theatre, in its senior citizen version (with performers 65+), that the Barbican was also offering over the weekend being performed in rep by an alternative teenager cast. That in itself suggests the incredible breadth of theatrical imagination that was Bausch’s stock-in-trade; but nothing prepares you for the emotional depth and detail of its repetitions of idiosyncratic movement and how overwhelming it feels when being performed by “real” people rather than professionally trained actors or dancers.

It reminded me quite forcefully of the wonderful Young @ Heart chorus, who I saw at last year’s Manchester International Festival: as I wrote here at the time, “I also caught the pure joy - mixed with the regret of time rapidly passing - of the extraordinary Young @ Heart, a chorus of singers from 73 to 89 from America facing their (and our) sense of mortality with defiance and determination. I saw one of their shows a few years ago at Lyric Hammersmith, but this one had me in tears even more often.”

Bausch’s work, of course, has been incredibly influential on a whole range of theatremakers.

There were lots of April Fool’s doing the rounds yesterday, amongst which my favourite non-theatrical one was the Independent’s story that London Underground was in talks with Cern (The European Organisation for Nuclear Research) about “the possibility of using the 23km tunnel of the Circle Line to house a new type of particle accelerator similar to the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva”. The online version rather undermines the joke, by saying: “Added at noon on 1 April; Before you read, check the date!”

But on the theatrical front, The Stage scored a particular bulls-eye with its story of how Nimax Theatres plan to tackle the rat infestations in the West End: it will release pythons into its auditoriums. Nica Burns is quoted saying, “Ferrets were our first option, but because of the pheromones they excrete when in season, we felt that it might be unpleasant for theatre workers and audiences alike. On the other hand, snakes are quiet and unobtrusive, and we are confident that performers and audiences won’t even notice they are there. They can be released after the performance overnight and returned to their handlers in the morning, in plenty of time for them to be removed before the matinee.”

Broadway had some marvellous ones, too.

Just yesterday I was highlighting once again - at considerable length (sorry!) - how different critical perspectives on the same show can be, and how different that can be to the views taken by the general public.

But it’s also a theatrical truism that no two performances are ever alike, either. On Tuesday night, producer Bill Kenwright was lamenting in the interval at the West End opening of Bedroom Farce (that he has transferred from the Rose Theatre, Kingston to the West End’s Duke of York’s) that the audience weren’t responding as vociferously as that they had during earlier previews. Though I think it’s sometimes the default position of a producer to say that press nights never offer their shows at their best, and you should have been there the night before, it’s also true that there’s an indefinable tension in the air, on both sides of the footlights, that rubs off on the performance. And it can be especially damaging to a comedy, which depends on laughter for its motor. But press nights are no laughing matter for the actors, nor critics rushing off to meet a deadline.

So what should the producers do?