July 2010 Archives

A recent report in the Independent on Sunday suggested that it is women who are driving the boom in the West End, and producers are duly targeting female-friendly shows derived from the silver screen. “We have read chick lit and watched chick flicks; now women are queuing up for a stream of female-friendly dramas on the stage. Theatre is awash with shows appealing particularly to women, many based on popular novels and films, and more are in the pipeline. Women are responding in their droves, often on a girls’ night out,” according to the story.

It goes on to cite the successes of Legally Blonde, Mamma Mia!, Grease and of course Dirty Dancing and Calendar Girls; it also mentions Flashdance, an adaptation of the film about a female welder who loves to dance, coming to the Shaftesbury in September, and musical versions of Bridget Jones and Ghost that are in development.

The perennial cry of arts journalists - and a recurring theme of this blog - is how we are going to get paid in the new media economy to do what we do. But who says we should get paid at all?

A fascinating entry on the Arts Journal weblog by Chloe Veltman points out that as, arts journalists increasingly find themselves losing their job or working harder for less money, “arts journalists are starting to look more and more like artists in terms of the piecemeal way that they are scratching out their existences in order to practice their craft. Like the actor who waits tables for a living or the folk singer who temps in a law office to make ends meet, these days, journos are having to hold down all manner of part- and full-time jobs that have nothing to do with the media in order to continue doing what until a few years ago would have been regarded as a profession. Now, arts journalism is for many a vocational sideline.”

I walked past the Queen’s Theatre stage door last week, and there was a mob scene: hordes of teenage girls (and a few gay men from the Duke of Wellington across the street) were awaiting the emergence of Nick Jonas, the 17-year-old member of the Jonas Brothers who was playing Marius in Les Miserables until last weekend, ahead of reprising the role at the 02 Concert on October 3. He previously did the show when he was still a child actor and played Gavroche during the final months of the show’s original Broadway run at the Imperial Theatre, so he has literally grown up with the show.

It made me wonder who else might inspire groupies in the West End. Of course there’s Ramin Karimloo, at least the unmasked stage door version, in Love Never Dies; and Richard Fleeshman has just taken over in Legally Blonde from Duncan James. But otherwise the “hot totty” quotient is decidedly lacking around town.

David Babani’s Menier Chocolate Factory, continuing its nearly unstoppable assault on the West End, transferred its double bill of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine and Educating Rita to the Trafalgar Studios yesterday.

They’ve currently got two shows on Broadway, running on opposite sides of the same street — La Cage Aux Folles won the Tony this year for Best Revival of a Musical, and Douglas Hodge and Terry Johnson won Tony’s for Best Actor in a Musical and Best Director of a Musical; while A Little Night Music saw Catherine Zeta-Jones winning for Best Actress in a Musical (she has now departed the production and been replaced by fully paid-up Broadway and Sondheim Baby, Bernadette Peters, starring opposite Elaine Stritch who has taken over from Angela Lansbury as Madame Armfeldt). And in the West End, the Menier has already got Sweet Charity at the Haymarket.

There’s no cry more heartfelt in modern American drama than Willy Loman’s wife’s cry about her husband Willy in Death in a Salesman: “Attention, attention finally must be paid to such a person.” And it is startlingly referenced in John Weidman’s script for one of Sondheim’s most audacious concept musicals Assassins, which seeks to go into the minds and motivations of the diffuse group of misfits and losers who have made attempts on, and in many cases succeeded in taking, the lives of America’s presidents.

As John Wilkes Booth - the sometime actor who shot President Lincoln (while he was watching a show at Ford’s Theatre in DC) - tells John F. Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, quotes the line to him, Oswald asks, “What’s that mean?” And Booth replies, “It’s from a play. About a salesman. A man very much like you, Lee. Independent, proud, a decent man who tries and tries but never gets a break. So he does something dumb. When things go really sour, when he realizes his whole life has been a failure built on lies, he kills himself. And when he’s dead, his wife stands at his grave and says attention must be paid. She has to beg the world to pay attention to this poor, misguided nobody.”

In a column in yesterday’s Guardian, Deborah Orr wrote, “Many newspaper column inches have recently been expended on speculation about cuts in arts funding. None have been idly squandered on reviewing God Don’t Live on a Council Estate. Which is a bit ironic. What’s the point of moaning about cuts, when critics don’t bother to assess and publicise the innovative and unusual projects that are still managing to get off the ground?”

Orr goes on to make a persuasive case for why attention should be paid to this particular show: the writer, Dean Stalham, ” did a play-writing course some years back, while serving a three-year prison sentence for handling stolen contemporary art, and has since had six shows performed in the West End of London.” (I must have missed those, too).

The main sounds you want to hear at the theatre, of course, are the ones coming from the stage; but sometimes the sounds that fellow audience members make can provide its own commentary. As long as they’re not providing a running commentary (and believe me, we’ve all been there - especially with some parents, who think that their kids need every single moment explained to them), it’s not something you can always police, nor would you want to.

Two striking examples are provided in reviews and blogs I’ve read this week. Ben Brantley, the chief theatre critic of the New York Times who is on his annual extended summer jaunt to London and filing daily blogs on his experiences as he goes, reported that on Monday he went to see All My Sons at the Apollo, and though left dry-eyed himself, he wrote: “Just before the curtain came down, the air was rent by the loudest, most convulsive sobs I have ever heard from within a theater audience. When I looked behind me, I saw a business-suited man the size of a linebacker, his head buried in his hands, being comforted by a petite blonde woman. My date for the show, who is as much in love with theater as I am, said of the sobbing giant, ‘That’s rather heartening, isn’t it?’ I knew what she meant.”

Only yesterday I was pointing out once again just how much theatrical activity there is beyond the West End, and paid tribute to the “enthusiasm, ambition and talent of its creators.” What I neglected to do, however, was pay tribute to the people who work indefatigably - and often without real recognition - behind the scenes to keep the places that this work happens in going in the first place.

The fringe is full of these more silent heroes and heroines that treat the fringe as an end in its own right, as much as it is full of those of vaulting ambition, vanity and ego hoping to leapfrog beyond the fringe and using it as a stepping stone to supposedly greater things. The late Dan Crawford was an icon of this way of working: though the King’s Head did indeed become a seedbed of talent that would go onto fertilise the rest of the theatrical ecology, he was serving behind the bar and operating the lights almost to the end his sadly prematurely-curtailed days. Shows may have left the King’s Head for the brighter lights of the West End and Broadway, but he never did.

I know I am forever complaining, or at least pointing out, that there simply aren’t enough nights in the week to see everything that the theatre has to offer in London - never mind the rest of the country. It’s a nice problem to have, of course, and far beyond the fixed, mostly static auditoria of the West End (though even these have been known to have shape-shifting possibilities, as when the Royal Court took over the Ambassadors a few years ago and turned it into a two-studio space), it’s also a constantly changing environment, or sometimes series of them.

It’s not just that enterprising little theatres like the Cock Tavern will suddenly spring up and put themselves on the map (and looking through Time Out’s listings, I see a couple of new theatres in the fringe section that I’ve not even heard of, the Colour House Theatre in SW19 or the Hot Tap Theatre in SE14, that may yet make a mark). This sector, not dependent on public funding but merely the enthusiasm, ambition and talent of its creators, seems to be as resilient and unstoppable as ever.

It’s both part of the appeal of the theatre and part of the reason why it inevitably lacks a wider, potentially infinite reach like cinema or TV does: the audiences who can actually get to see a performance are necessarily limited. Whereas Hollywood can release a film on countless screens globally on the same weekend - the new Leonard DiCaprio movie Inception, according to Variety, played at some 3,792 locations in the US alone over the weekend just gone, earning domestic revenues estimated at over $60m - even the biggest theatre shows can only play to audiences of a couple of thousand or so per showing, in one theatre at a time only.

Of course, the biggest musical franchises like Mamma Mia! or The Phantom of the Opera may play in many global cities at once, but even they have only played a dozen or so stands simultaneously. With films and TV, too, there’s no timeframe imperative: miss them on their first showings, and the same product will be available on DVD or “play again” soon, and it’ll look and feel the same, too.

At last night’s opening of Aspects of Love, I asked producer David Babani how the show is selling. “Great, but we still need the reviews,” he said. (He must be relieved this morning, since the reviews I’ve seen so far have seen it receive four stars from The Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail, with a three star from the Daily Express). But while the Menier can nowadays command a full compliment of critics on its first nights - in addition to the overnights above, also in attendance were The Guardian, Standard, FT, The Independent, The Observer, Mail on Sunday, the Sunday Express (me!), and Time Out - that feast means there’s a critical famine elsewhere.

I was quoting Lyn Gardner just yesterday who pointed out, “Back in the late 1980s, when I worked on a London listings magazine, deciding what to review was easy: we reviewed everything that opened and would still be on when the next issue was published. That came to about 10 shows a week.” Nowadays there can be three or four shows a night vying for critical attention in London alone, and some shows inevitably get lost in the shuffle.

As chairman of the Critics’ Circle, I suppose I’d have to say that the critics do form a club of sorts, though we’re not always intrinsically clubbable as people. Still, just as people who work in offices get to see the same colleagues, day in, day out, with various degrees of affection and irritability, so we get to see each other, too, most nights, allowing for the vagaries of diaries and scheduling clashes that may send us to different places from time to time.

A few months ago Lyn Gardner wrote a Critics’ Notebook for The Guardian in which she pointed out the scheduling difficulties of being a critic: “Back in the late 1980s, when I worked on a London listings magazine, deciding what to review was easy: we reviewed everything that opened and would still be on when the next issue was published. That came to about 10 shows a week. But the theatre landscape has changed dramatically: today, there can be as many as 10 openings a night across the country. Tonight, I could be at six different shows.”

It is, of course, a critic’s job to say it how it is - or at least how he (or she) sees it. And we don’t always get it right; but worse may be when we overstep the mark. Just the other day I wrote here of how the late William May, the co-creators of a flop musical, Always, had had his life blighted by the negative reception it had received; and his collaborator Jason Sprague had recently written to Charles Spencer to ask, “Was the staging of a musical which, despite its failings, brought pleasure to those who saw it, really worth the ruination of a dream, nay, a life?”

The implication is that it was the critics were part of his downfall; and Charlie feels the sting keenly, writing, “I have no easy answer to these questions or much of a defence to make. There is a point where criticism can descend to mere cruelty, and I fear that my review, which seemed to rejoice in the show’s failures, did just that. Sprague’s pained words will echo in my head the next time I reach for the critical hatchet. They won’t prevent me from using it, but I hope that in future I will refrain from the merely sadistic.”

A critical scalpel may always be more effective than the hatchet anyway; applying precise cuts, backed up with supporting evidence, is always better than bludgeoning something to death.

The theatre experience doesn’t, of course, start the moment the curtain goes up. It begins the moment you engage with the entire process: seeing the ad or reading the review or hearing the friend tell you about it, or (in my case) usually reading the press release. And then, if you plan to see it, you have to go to the box office or make a call or (more often than not nowadays) go online.

And that point of customer contact is a key interaction for theatres, which makes it surprising that so many of them delegate the responsibility to third party suppliers who have no investment in the product. I typically don’t get to experience the horrors that this might entail, since usually I deal with the army of press agents who populate the West End with various degrees of efficiency.

Just the other day I was quoting liberally from a speech in La Bête in which an actor speaks up in praise of critics: “I much prefer to any drooling fan A critic who will SLICE me into parts!/ God love the critic! Bless their picky hearts!

And by coincidence, the sometimes pickled brains behind those hearts have been on display in three shows I’ve seen since then; not to mention the fact that on Saturday I found myself the star of the show myself. More of that in a moment; but first on Friday afternoon I saw Curtains again in a terrific student production at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Theatre, we’re always fond of saying, exists in the moment, and every performance is unique. But how true is that, really? Just how different is Mamma Mia!, Dirty Dancing or We Will Rock You from night to night? What new emotional colours are discovered or uncovered? Actually, it can even happen with Mamma Mia!; I remember seeing it once on Broadway with the extraordinary Carolee Carmello - currently being wasted there in The Addams Family — playing the mother, and she turned “The Winner Takes It All” into a howl of pain for life’s missed opportunities and injustices that was heartbreaking.

But a few shows really are unique, and do not travel on designated tramlines. Improbable’s Lifegame, which makes instant theatre out of an onstage interview with a real-life person that joins them to make a living kind of biography out of what they say, is one such show. And seeing it again last night at the beginning of its current Lyric Hammersmith season, it was one of the most moving shows I have seen all year.

That’s, of course, partly thanks to a subject who gave them some fantastic material to work with.

Yesterday the Critics’ Circle bade formal farewell to Benedict Nightingale, who retired in May as chief theatre critic of The Times; and last night Benedict - now a civilian - was appropriately in the stalls again for the first night of La Bête, where Mark Rylance extravagantly proclaimed (in the rhyming couplets of which the entire play is comprised):

“I’m grateful for a shrewd critique;
It keeps my talent honest, so to speak!
We of the theatre share that common view -
The criticisms of the things we do
Inspire our interest, not our hurt or rage:
We know it’s part of ‘being on the stage’
To have oneself assessed at every turn,
And thus we show a willingness to learn
From judgements which might wound another man.
I much prefer to any drooling fan
A critic who will SLICE me into parts!
GOD LOVE THE CRITICS! BLESS THEIR PICKY HEARTS!
Precisely, and in no uncertain terms,
They halve the apple, showing us our worms.”

Actually, Benedict really is loved, as was palpable at the lunch yesterday held at the National Theatre. We even had a leading actress on hand to show him just how much.

No sooner than I blogged here just yesterday about the vagaries of star ratings, with Nicholas de Jongh once awarding a show that he characterised as “one of the major experiences of my theatre-going life”, yet only awarding it four stars, than de Jongh’s successor Henry Hitchings duly gave a rare five-star rave for You Me Bum Bum Train, a highly interactive theatre event that opened on Monday night.

Mind you, reading both Henry’s review and Lyn Gardner’s three-star notice in The Guardian makes it sound like critics are likely to be reviewing their own performances (and psyches) as much as those they are watching: each spectator’s journey through the show is entirely individual, with the cast far outnumbering them.

I’ve often said here that critics rarely speak with one voice - we hardly ever reach a consensus. You only need to look at the reviews for last week’s opening of The Comedy of Errors at the Open Air, where the reviews have ranged from two stars (Hitchings in the Evening Standard to three (Billington in The Guardian; Spencer in the Daily Telegraph, to four (Coveney in The Independent and Purves in The Times).

But there’s one thing that all of the first night (or rather first day!) critics agreed for on the Bridge Project’s double bill of The Tempest and As You Like It at the Old Vic: lead actor Stephen Dillane had serious audibility problems.

It’s a long way from the urban playground of “bawdy, gaudy, sporty 42nd Street” (as it has once again become, after years of being more seedy and tawdry) to the sedate rural pleasures of the cathedral city of Chichester; just as it’s seemingly a long way from the downtown New York clubs that Rufus Wainwright began his career in and the Royal Albert Hall and London Palladium that he now regularly stars at to Hampstead Heath. Yet this weekend I saw 42nd Street at Chichester and Wainwright in an outdoor concert at Kenwood House; and both were as irresistible in their way as they were seemingly incongruous.

Actually, perhaps one wouldn’t be too surprised to find Wainwright on Hampstead Heath for other, less public reasons, though he’s a good boy now, he insists - he’d just flown in to London from Spain, he told us, where he and his trainer Mark and Stephen Oremus, his accompanist for part of the show and Stephen’s partner Justin made the gayt quartet, “ogling what we can’t have” on the beach.

I’ve been a long-time champion of cabaret, with the proudest of my boasts being having helped to originate the Divas at the Donmar season. So I have not only banged the drum for it in print but I’ve also helped to make it actually happen, and I’d do anything to see it thrive (even paint my face bright blue).

But although cabaret is all about celebrating individuality, I can’t do it alone; and it’s wonderful when others pick up the cabaret Olympic torch. Now that Pizza on the Park has finally shut its doors, alas, there’s a vacuum; and the good news is that I am already hearing good things about the Pheasantry in the King’s Road, where young producer Samuel Joseph is banging the cabaret drum (or at least the ivories).

And last night I went to the launch of yet another initiative, Live at Wilton’s, which brings cabaret full-circle in London to where it arguably all began.

It’s a question that affects all of us who earn a living from our creative endeavours, whether it is making art or merely writing about it: how do we get paid for it when the current tendency, thanks to the internet, is to give it away? Or if you don’t give it away yourself, it is simply stolen anyway, via file sharing?

On the journalistic front, Rupert Murdoch is throwing up paywalls around his old media’s presence on the (not so) new media, trying to lure us in with added, sometimes interactive, content you can’t get in the paper edition, and membership of private online clubs that give access to a range of benefits.

There is exclusivity there; but is it enough to warrant paying for, when you can still get similar coverage for free elsewhere? If I can’t read The Times online anymore, I will simply read The Guardian (whose site is now miles better than its paper), or The Daily Telegraph (which isn’t - it takes days sometimes to see theatre reviews posted, if at all. Charlie Spencer’s review of Stratford’s Morte d’Arthur is yet to appear).