Girl (and gay) power, on and offstage….

It makes sense: women have always been the majority ticket buyers, as figures from SOLT cited in the feature bear out, with 68% of theatregoers in 2008 being female Women also buy 57% of the theatre tickets sold by lastminute.com. Targeting shows specifically towards them can only help drive that demand: as Martin Ronan, executive producer of a tour of Girls’ Night Out is quoted saying, “What producers have become more aware of is if they can actually target a show specifically at that audience there’s a better chance of selling tickets. I think [theatre] has always been female-driven, but there’s been an increase in the product out there for them.”

Just yesterday Lyn Gardner wrote a Critics’ Notebook feature in The Guardian about going to see Legally Blonde last week - and enjoying the audience even more than she enjoyed the show. She wrote that Sheridan Smith was “still giving 110% on a hot midweek evening six months into the run.” But, she added, “the most enjoyable aspect of the evening was the audience, who were all giving it 110%, too - despite the over-inflated seat prices, over-heated premises and £7 programmes. Approaching the theatre we were met by a sea of young women dressed in shocking pink and, rather more bizarrely, a party of boy scouts. Once inside there were Mexican waves in the dress circle, and an engagement with what was happening on stage that was touching in its intensity. I’m certain that the woman behind me would have climbed on stage to biff Warner when he proposed to Vivienne if she had only been close enough.”

By coincidence, I also went to see Legally Blonde again at yesterday’s matinee, and can confirm that the level of engagement - and sheer pleasure that is contagious on both sides of the footlights - is indeed high. This is a show that speaks to its audience - and the audience speaks to it (but not, I’m relieved to say, aloud, except in their appreciation). And the gender profiling of the audience contributes to that: it is mostly a sea of women, with a few pockets of men. Like Wicked — strangely not cited in that Independent on Sunday piece - and also Shirley Valentine and Educating Rita that both returned to the West End this week — this is a story of female empowerment, and the entirely delightful Sheridan Smith sells it with such knowing charm that even my inner woman was cheering her on.

But this is also a show that cannily also addresses another key ingredient of the musical theatre’s typical fan base: gay men like me. There’s lots of strutting bare male flesh on display (though one of the dancers could do with losing the spare tyre growing around his midriff), which reminded me that director/choreographer Jerry Mitchell also choreographed The Full Monty. (If only he could have exported some of that fun across the street to Love Never Dies that he also worked on). And in one completely hilarious song, “There! Right There!”, a perjuring poolboy in a murder trial, who claims to have been the alleged female murderer’s lover, is challenged on whether “he’s gay or European”, that includes such ripostes, “Depending on the time of day, the French go either way” and “They bring their boys up different there/ It’s culturally diverse/ It’s not a fashion curse”. The witty David Rockwell design and Kenneth Posner and Paul Miller’s lighting provides a final flourish of its own to the number: it lights the proscenium in the colours of the rainbow flag.

No wonder it’s a hit; it ticks all the boxes and doesn’t miss a trick. But if a hit musical like Legally Blonde motors on a wave of such confidence, it’s interesting to see the series of crises that lead even more often to catastrophe in musicals. And last night I went straight from Legally Blonde to Blink Twice!, a revue devoted to songs from flop shows that you might have missed if you blinked.

As I point out in the review I’ve written for The Stage, “It’s virtually a rule that musical sequels are never as good as the originals - think Bring Back Birdie forBye Bye Birdie (they shouldn’t have), Annie 2, The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public, or Love Never Dies, now better known as Paint Never Dries, for The Phantom of the Opera. But the peculiar thing about Blink Twice!, a sequel to last year’s revue devoted to songs from forgotten and/or flop musicals, is that it’s actually better than its predecessor.”

But it was also interesting to note that, whereas the audience for a hit musical like Legally Blonde is predominantly women, it is men who are in the majority of the audience for Blink Again!. I don’t think that’s just because the Above the Stag Theatre is above a gay pub in Victoria (though it probably helps); but rather there’s an endless fascination amongst a particular sector of gay men for flop musicals. I certainly collect them even more avidly than I do successes (heck, I even saw The Fields of Ambrosia twice, just to make sure it was as bad as it seemed; ditto Imagine This and Desperately Seeking Susan). No wonder that, out of 22 flop shows represented last night, I’d seen the original productions of no less than 14 of them. It was also pointed out last night that Frank Wildhorn’s The Scarlet Pimpernel had three separate incarnations on Broadway during its original run in an attempt to get it right, and even a change of theatres, during its run; I was drawn like a moth to the flame and saw each of those different versions.