June 2010 Archives

Theatre people are accustomed to not only wearing their hearts on the sleeves, but speaking out loudly and publicly what others might keep more discreet. An almighty row has clearly been brewing behind-the-scenes of the current Barbican-bound “new” touring version of Les Miserables, with Trevor Nunn putting all his cards (and even his Cairds) on the table about it in an interview in today’s Daily Telegraph.

According to Nunn, the original creative team were neither consulted nor asked to do the revisions themselves and says that “if John Caird and John Napier and myself had been asked to do a revised version of Les Misérables that could tour the country and tour other countries in a way that didn’t involve a revolving stage, which makes the touring very difficult, we would joyously have accepted. We would have kept all of the ingredients that we originally invented, and we would have found slightly different solutions staging-wise. We were not asked. In fact, we knew nothing of it. We were kept in the dark. People who were asked were an assistant director of John Caird’s and mine working on the show and John Napier’s assistant who had worked for John Napier many times in different productions abroad of Les Misérables. Those people were asked to become a new production team. Everywhere [it] is being advertised [as] a new production. It is not a new production. It is a variant production that owes everything that’s good about it to the original production. And everything that’s not so good about it, and is uncomfortable about it, is the work of a group of assistants. Do you gather that there is some unhappiness here?”

When the National launched the pilot scheme of its NT Live initiative last June - which borrows the idea originated by New York’s Metropolitan Opera to broadcast specific live performances into cinemas around the country and indeed the world, thus reaching a potentially global audience - there are those of us who wondered whether it would, in fact, be possible to recreate the theatrical experience in another place.

The joy of theatre, after all, is its apparent exclusivity: it is only happening right here right now in the room that you are sharing with tonight’s other spectators. It is unique and no two performances are ever completely the same. But can that unique performance ever reach a wider audience than those watching it tonight? And should it even try?

A friend posted on Facebook last week that he “hasn’t been to the theatre in 6 days, hasn’t seen an episode of any Law & Order in 8 days and found himself discussing the World Cup voluntarily. Please help me. Operators are standing by.” He was in Dublin, but at least he’d begun his trip there by seeing Stockhard Channing’s Lady Bracknell. (Bizarrely, this production had entirely passed me by until another friend alerted me to it after he saw a banner ad on the Guardian website. So, yes, banner advertising does work….! But if I’d found out sooner, I might have been tempted to go to Dublin myself!)

I, on the other hand, have been in Barbados, where there wasn’t even that much of a crumb of things theatrical; but then who needs theatre when you can go swimming in the warm Caribbean sea every single day, and - as we did on Friday - go swimming with giant turtles coming right up to your face?

Yes, I know temperatures in London have been virtually Caribbean-like, as I found out when I got back to the sweltering city yesterday; but I’d rather enjoy them in the Caribbean myself while looking over vast stretches of golden sands, not on insufferably hot tubes or unbearably stuffy theatres.

“Is Mark Shenton going mad?”, someone asked in response to my blog entry yesterday, before helpfully suggesting, “Take a holiday Mark, you’re losing it.” I don’t know about the former, but in fact the latter is precisely what I will be doing tomorrow, so here’s advance notice that I will not be blogging (or tweeting or even texting) for the next week: I intend to go completely cold turkey on all things online, as I go somewhere hot.

But the correspondent to this blog was asking the question aloud because he suggested that the day before he said I was “complaining that Broadway runs were so long compared to England”, but then yesterday I had written “a blog complaining about how short Broadway and London runs are.” In fact, I’d not contradicted myself at all.

One of the biggest changes to the commercial theatrical landscape - on both sides of the Atlantic - over the past decade or so is that sightings of big star names turning out to do plays has gone up; but the runs they are prepared to commit to has gone down. Time was that a producer would require a minimum commitment from his star of six months, and perhaps a year; now, the 13-week run is the norm.

This has partly been fuelled by the studio theatre culture: if big stars, from Nicole Kidman and Gywneth Paltrow to Jude Law, Rachel Weisz and Ewan McGregor, crave a return to the stage, they can give themselves a fix at a place like the Donmar or Almeida, but without interrupting their movie careers for too long.

On Monday, I was toasting the British victories at this year’s Tony Awards here, though it’s an interesting fact that they were each in American work, whether it was in the Donmar Warehouse offering the world premiere production of John Logan’s Red that then transferred to its current Broadway run; or the coals-to-Newcastle transfers of the Menier’s productions of La Cage Aux Folles and A Little Night Music.

Creatively, this could mean that London is now so enthralled to American work that it makes no difference anymore: are we simply being used as a cheap try-out house for Broadway success? And although we may see it first, is Broadway reaping the longer-term benefits while London theatregoers only get a try-out taster?

Broadway has always been Big Business, but now that it has topped the billion dollar club for the first time in terms of revenues earned last year (and that’s at the box office alone, never mind ancillary earnings or other benefits to the local community, with Broadway’s total economic contribution to New York City calculated to amounting to some $9.8billion), it’s a business that lots of people depend on - and one that needs to change, adapt and grow, not stagnate, if it is to remain relevant going forward.

We’ve also reached a cross-roads where that need is more urgent than ever: As Jesse Green writes in the current issue of New York magazine, “In an entertainment environment crowded with cheaper options, the old theatrical formulas won’t build audiences for the future.” Green writes these words in a profile about Jordan Roth, the thirty-four year-old producer turned president of Jujamcyn Theatres, the third biggest theatreowning chain on Broadway but definitely its most adventurous.

As Green puts it, Roth is trying to change things from the inside out, to “test the long-advanced but little practised theory that, even on 44th Street, new work, newly told, can create new audiences.”

At the 1982 Oscars, the screenwriter of the multiple award winning Chariots of Fire Colin Welland famously collected his award by proclaiming, “The British are coming!” And at last night’s Tony Awards on Broadway, it was like we were reclaiming the colonies.

Brits and/or British-originated productions took ten awards (out of 26 categories), including six for the Donmar-originated Red that saw it take the all-important Best Play Award as well as Tony’s for director Michael Grandage and his designer Christopher Oram (whom Grandage touchingly referred to as “my inspiration and my rock”), another for featured actor in a play Eddie Redmayne, and two more for Adam Cork’s sound and Neil Austin’s lighting.

That was the highest number of any Tony wins for a single production.

Even by my own sometimes overly-busy standards, the coming weekend promises to be a bit of a whirlwind. I’m off on a 10.35am flight to New York this morning, arriving at lunchtime; and I depart Monday morning at 8am, arriving back in London at 8pm that evening. In between, I am seeing four Broadway shows - plus going to attend this year’s Tony Awards, being held on Sunday evening at Radio City Music Hall.

And it doesn’t stop after I get back home, either. I’ll sleep at home on Monday night (one of the advantages of taking the day flight home is sleeping in your own bed at the end of it, instead of hovering somewhere over the Atlantic), then first thing on Tuesday morning I head to Liverpool for a conference on musical theatre, being organised at LIPA by lyricist Jenifer Toksvig; I am staying there overnight, before returning to London on Wednesday afternoon in time for that evening’s opening night for the Almeida’s Through A Glass Darkly.

Arriving at the Duchess Theatre last night for the opening of The Fantasticks, theatre owner Nica Burns was on the red carpet and beckoned me over to admire the freshly repainted front-of-house canopy. But what she really, really wanted me to see were the loos downstairs.

Why is it, as my colleague Roger Foss asked me, that theatre owners always seem most proud of their loos when they refurbish their theatres? Cameron Mackintosh always shows them off eagerly whenever he has completed another of his theatre refurbishments; and it’s true that they have become a standard bearer for the West End. But actually they’re a crucial part of the theatregoing experience: there’s nothing that signifies dump more than the place one goes to take one if it’s in a right old state.

It’s always dangerous to speak your mind, especially if you’re an actor and - consciously or not - reveal your prejudices in the process. Broadway actress Alice Ripley, who won last year’s Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her performance in the Pulitzer Prize winning Next to Normal, has set off a firestorm of protest, after she took issue with someone who posted a negative comment about her on the Broadway bulletin board broadwayworld.com and posted in reply herself, “Quote from a numb butt on Broadway World: ‘I’ve seen N2N 8 times with Alice Ripley, which is 7 times too many.’ Ha ha ha ha!!!! This frustrated actor (I won’t say fag) is my new best friend! Thanks for looking down on losers like us that work for a living. You are the opposite of a wonderful audience.”

Actually, he sounds like a pretty wonderful audience to me: he’s been to see the show 8 times after all. But he’s clearly pricked her where it bleeds in referencing his own disdain of her performance (though quite why he keeps going back in that case isn’t explained); but you don’t, unless you’re one yourself, idly throw out the fag slur and not expect a comeback. (The fag that is me has seen the show five times, Alice, and I’m seeing it for a sixth time this coming Saturday; I’m going to be watching your performance through new eyes now).

This year an original British musical received its world premiere in the West End - an all-too-rare feat. And it was, of course, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, still the only British composer of musicals who seems to be able to regularly command the field in arriving straight into the West End.

But if Love Never Dies, that show never flies, either; so are British musicals finally reaching a stale mate? That long-aborning (and now possibly abortive) attempt to capitalise on the success of The Phantom of the Opera is otherwise marooned in a sea of revivals, jukebox shows or transfers from Broadway. We have to trawl back to Too Close to the Sun, last year’s fiasco by John Robinson that followed his equally disastrous previous effort, Behind the Iron Mask, to find a new British musical receiving its premiere direct in the West End.

All that’s needed to make theatre, it’s sometimes said, is “two planks and a passion”. To which Paul Taylor once wittily said, in describing a Robert Lepage production, that you might want to add in “a million computer projections, an infra-red surveillance camera, an environnement sonore, a harness, somersaulting scenery, an optional mud bath and a passion”.

Usually, but not always, theatre is also harnessed by something else: four fixed walls. Those walls may not be covered over in the case of places like Shakespeare’s Globe or the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, but walled - or least fenced - they both are; and the companies that operate out of them are fixed institutions.

A particular era in London cabaret is coming to an end with the imminent closure of Pizza on the Park; as Andrea Marcovicci remarked in her final run there that I caught last night, it might have all been very different if it had been called Piazza on the Park. The restaurant at Hyde Park Corner, whose basement contains one of the finest rooms in the world for cabaret, is making way for a boutique hotel; and a boutique art form is duly being shown the door.

Marcovicci’s has brought her Johnny Mercer programme to London to bid farewell to the room with; and as Mercer himself put it in one of his most famous songs (that she briefly has us join in singing), “you’ve got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative/ latch on to the affrmative, don’t mess with Mister In-between. /You’ve got to spread joy to the maximum/ Bring gloom down to the minimum, /Have faith or pandemonium/ is liable to walk upon the scene.”

It’s one of the recurring themes of this blog that critics regularly don’t agree with each other, but somehow the rest of the world still seems shocked when one steps out of line. The Guardian’s regular online feature rounding up what the critics say did one on the new production of All My Sons that opened last week at the Apollo Theatre, and pointed out, “It’s not just actors and playwrights who suffer in public, you know. Theatre critics also risk their reputations every day. It is perilously easy to come home from a new revival of All My Sons, for instance, file a few thoughtful words of mild disappointment and forget about it - only to pick up the papers the next day, and read the tide of unanimous praise thundering in from everybody else. Suddenly you are marooned on an island of your own opinion. Population: Neil Norman.”

But if the Daily Express’s Norman is singled out for his dissent, the Sunday Express man finds himself singled out for his emotions. That man, of course, is me - and the Guardian sets it up by saying that “words alone, even superlatives, could not convey the depth of Mark Shenton’s feeling in the Sunday Express. Watching this ‘shattering’ production, he confesses, ‘my face became streaked with tears’.” The Guardian then suggests, “No doubt he was the ‘hardened fellow critic’ that [the Daily Telegraph’s Charles] Spencer spotted ‘weeping’. If only Neil Norman had seen him too.”

Actually, I was sitting some way away from Charlie, so I’m not sure he could have even seen me.

Everything about The Late Middle Classes is now late: it’s written by the late Simon Gray, the original production was directed by the late Harold Pinter, and it’s arrival in London’s theatreland last night is 11 years late, too. It was famously finally kept out of the West End in its original 1999 incarnation when the then-owners of the Globe Theatre (now the Gielgud), Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Company and its then-production director Nica Burns, chose a now (and even then) quickly forgotten musical Boyband to fill the theatre at the 11th hour instead of booking this serious, searching play that captures the heart and pierces the soul.

That still shocking fact of commercial theatre life - that theatreowners will choose poor commerce over good art - has never gone away; even now we have Thriller - Live occupying the Lyric, one of our prime playhouses on Shaftesbury Avenue, while the self-same Gielgud has only followed Avenue Q with the Broadway import of Hair (which has just announced that it is shutting in September, thus abandoning its original plans to replace the imported Broadway cast with local talent).

Michael Grandage is rapidly on his way to establishing a global profile not just for the Donmar brand (which now plays everywhere from its home base at Covent Garden and West End residencies last year at Wyndham’s and this year in the smaller of the Trafalgar Studios to Broadway and BAM, Australia and Argentina), but also for himself in turn. The weekend before last he collected the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director a Play for the Broadway transfer of his Donmar production of Red, and he’s also up for a Tony Award the weekend after next for the same production.

And just three nights before the Drama Desks, he also made his operatic directing debut, staging a new production of Billy Budd at Glyndebourne; and even before the (rave) reviews were out, he is already signed up for further operas at Houston Grand Opera (Madame Butterfly, opening in October) and at the Met in New York (Don Giovanni, in the 2011/12 season).