August 2010 Archives

OK, it’s nothing compared to the now infamous Wikileaks release of data relating to the war in Afghanistan, but it’s a cause for serious theatrical concern that a secret that has been honoured for 58 years and counting for the world’s longest running play is now instantly available on the click of a mouse.

I am, of course, talking about The Mousetrap and its entry on Wikipedia where the identity of the murderer is clearly revealed.

The ads for Hair are currently trumpeting about going out on a high since the show closes tomorrow week at the GIelgud Theatre; and I decided to put it to the test by seeing it once more, not while stoned, but from a height. I bought a £17.50 ticket for the so-called “Grand” circle on Wednesday night (which turned out to cost £19.25 by the time a £1 restoration levy and £1.75 booking fee had been added), and found myself perched on a side seat on the right hand side of row E up there.

The website for the theatre does warn, “Please note that some of the £17.50 Grand Circle seats may have a slightly restricted view”; but that’s putting it mildly.

My final tally, after four short nights and five long days in Edinburgh, was 25 shows - which, of course, was merely scratching the surface of what was on. Given that there were nearly 2,500 shows this year, I saw precisely 1% of the total.

Still, as tasters go, I got in some appetizing starters, a couple of wonderful main courses and even a dessert or two (yes, I succumbed to the crepe stand next to the Gilded Balloon twice for my standard order of banana with maple syrup - but have been in the gym at 7am today to make up for it).

The Scotsman gave The Stage a four-star review yesterday - and itself five stars - for its review coverage of the fringe. There’s nothing like a pat on the back, of course, but when you give it to yourself, it’s a bit tricky to get to the itchiest bits sometimes. Still, The Scotsman makes a good stab: according to itself, The Scotsman “remains the gold standard” of festival reviewing, carrying “an international brand name as the newspaper on the doorstep of the festivals since 1947”.

And it’s true that The Scotsman - if hardly read much outside of the festivals (its circulation in June was less than 45,000 copies) - still has a pull during the festival, partly because its daily reviews supplement is the biggest comprehensive of any newspaper title, and partly because its free goodie bag with every copy bought in the main festival sites like Bristo Square and the Assembly Rooms includes packets of shortbread biscuits and crisps as well as mini bags of Nike and Ikes, which provide great emergency sustenance when you’ve forgotten to eat in Edinburgh yet again (there’s also mini bags of lavazza coffee, but unfortunately there’s no easy way to brew it on the move, but I’ve brought five home from Edinburgh with me from my daily purchases of the paper there).

I’ve been coming to Edinburgh since 1984, when I first produced a trilogy of Cambridge student shows - all directed by Nick Ward - and brought them to the Royal Overseas League on Princes Street, whose room at the top of a long staircase we hired (and rented out spare slots to other companies).

The next year, I brought a series of shows from the Cambridge Mummers to the Roxburgh Reading Rooms - now the Zoo Roxy - which we again hired for ourselves, and again rented our spare slots to other companies. And the year after that, Julius Green - now a producer himself for Bill Kenwright - and I collaborated in hiring the Roxburgh again, partly as a home for his own Park Bench Theatre Company, and partly as a commercial venture. We had already worked out that being landlords at Edinburgh was more profitable than being an originator of product.

That model was only beginning to take hold in Edinburgh in those days.

The question I’m most often asked regarding the Edinburgh Festival is how do you choose what to see? With this year’s fringe festival the largest-ever — comprising some 2,453 scheduled shows, an increase of 17% on last year’s total - that becomes an ever-harder task, or at least an ever-heavier one: carrying the fringe brochure — that this year runs to 340 pages — around is now like carrying round the phone directory for a city the size of somewhere very much like Edinburgh.

Here’s a personal tip: get a couple of copies, leave one at home that’s “clean”, and just tear out the pages of the shows you are interested in from the other to carry around for reference.

When Sister Act opened in the West End last year, I have to admit I was particularly resentful of the cheers it received on the first night - and the favourable reviews of some of my colleagues the next day - because it followed so hard upon the failure of a genuinely original musical Spring Awakening to take the town. If this is what audiences and critics want, I thought, there really is no hope for the musical as a creative force in this country.

But I did note in my own review for the Sunday Express, “a lot of people are going to like Sister Act, a new stage musical version of the 1992 film comedy, and from the cheers reverberating around the theatre, I am not going to deny them their pleasure. It depends, I suppose, on how intrinsically funny you find the sight of nuns to be, especially as they let their wimples down and kick their legs up in dance. But there’s something coarse, camp and desperate, too, about this production: director Peter Schneider never builds the comic energy in the flagging script and Alan Menken’s pastiche disco score is unmemorable. Sheila Hancock, one of our most treasurable actresses, is all but wasted as the Mother Superior, but Patina Miller is feisty and rather fabulous as the lounge singer who, on the run from her mobster boyfriend, seeks refuge in a convent.”

Time was that the musical theatre used to create its own stars: think of Merman, Martin, Channing, Jerry Orbach and Robert Preston in the great age of musicals, or even more recently, the likes of Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, and (over here) Elaine Paige and Michael Ball, all of whom made their names in musicals and have mainly stuck with it (or rather, been stuck in it, never matching their theatrical success elsewhere).

Nowadays, of course, the theatre regularly (and increasingly) borrows stars that have been created first elsewhere, whether in TV and film (for example, Amanda Holden, recently announced to star in the London edition of Shrek, or Daniel Radcliffe, who we’ve watched grow up on film as Harry Potter, showed us just how much he’s grown up in every sense in Equus, and next year is doing How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying on Broadway) or even boybands (think of Duncan James or Simon Webbe - the former previously in Legally Blonde, the latter currently in Sister Act, both alumni of Blue).

In August, all roads — and some critics — lead to Edinburgh, apparently, but it’s reassuring to those of us currently left behind that not everyone’s there. In fact, at last night’s opening of Into the Woods at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, the chief critics of three of the four broadsheet papers were in attendance; as were the lead critics for the Evening Standard (which strangely does cover Edinburgh, even though it’s far from its circulation area), Metro, the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Express (me!).

But I am breaking the resolution I struck last year not to go at all to Edinburgh, and will be heading there on Friday to dip a toe gingerly back into the fray. The previous year had been so relentlessly wet that I decided to give it a miss; and reports I’m hearing from this year is that it’s as wet as ever.

The first part of the title to this blog is a lyric from Next to Normal, a Broadway musical that I have developed a (not-so) quiet passion for, bordering on a compulsive obsession. You need only to have shared some of the conflicting emotions of its leading character Diana - the highs and lows of depressive illness - to feel a special affinity with it; but more than that, like all great art it takes you into the heart, mind and soul of another person to directly affect yours.

And I’d like to think that even those whose lives have been happily untouched by the desperate doubts that depression gives rise to - though as Diane says in the show, anyone who thinks they’re happy just hasn’t thought about it enough - may feel moved by it, too.

Theatre people are often intensely protective of their world, and sometimes denounce (partly from envy, partly from a desire to protect their own jobs) the infiltration of the theatre by actors from the other side of the divide: film and television.

In the wake of the domination of this year’s Tony Awards by film actors like Catherine Zeta-Jones (who actually began her career on the London musical stage, but never mind; she’s now forever best known as the wife of Michael Douglas and an Oscar winning film star), Denzel Washington and Scarlett Johannson, Broadway regular Hunter Foster (currently starring in Million Dollar Quartet there) even started a Facebook group, “Give the Tonys Back to Broadway”.

I’m still in Provincetown, where as I reported here on Tuesday, I fully intended to steer clear of theatre but failed at the first hurdle and went to an autobiographical show about a former porn star/male escort on my first night in town. It’s not the sort of thing you see on a usual night in the West End or on Broadway, so at least I was varying my regular diet.

But I have otherwise been true to my word, and avoided the rest of the “entertainment” on the strip, which inevitably includes a bit of stripping (Naked Boys Singing is a hardy perennial here, though perhaps I should call that a softy perennial since there’s little arousing about this show) and lots of drag (which I usually find something of a drag).

Just as what you see on the stage isn’t the full story of how it came to be there, what you read on the page (or screen) is only the end of the critical journey for a journalist reporting on it. Of course, though there’s a finality to what appears in print, it is only the starting point for another conversation nowadays as we are increasingly called to account for our words as readers react online to them.

But critics, like the theatre makers we respond to, are driven by deadlines, all to do with the first night, itself something of an artificial construct, because of course a work of theatre is never really done but is constantly evolving and possibly changing night to night.

Travelling over to Provincetown on the ferry from Boston yesterday, I said to my partner, “Well, at least we’ll get a few days off from the theatre this week.” But no sooner did we arrive in P-town (as it is universally known) and walking down Commercial Street from the ferry jetty to our hotel than we ran into the actor Tom Judson, handing out flyers for his one-man show Canned Ham. It was on at 10pm last night, and was the only time he was doing the show this week (the rest of the time here Tom, who is an accomplished musician, is accompanying legendary drag queen Varla Jean Merman in her own show). So of course I had to go!

Now I’ve long known that Tom Judson is Gus Mattox - or rather that Gus Mattox is really Tom - a high-profile gay porn star (and 2006 Gay VN Award winner for Performer of the Year).

While Ben Brantley is in London on an extended stay and filing daily blog reports from there that are essential reading for theatre people on both sides of the Atlantic, at least to give an early heads-up for what might be worth producers taking across the pond, I’ve been having a whirlwind weekend catch up of my own in New York.

I’ll be there next weekend, too, bookending trips inbetween to Washington DC, where I arrived yesterday for an overnight stay, before going on to Provincetown on Cape Cod today where I’ll be spending the rest of this week.

So I’m actually on holiday, and being on holiday means doing things you enjoy - so I’ve mainly gone for repeat viewings on my Broadway and DC itinerary, catching up with things I’ve previously seen and already enjoyed, and/or seeing friends, including friends in shows.

Edinburgh, of course, is a party that everyone is invited to - or at least those who can afford the extortionate room rates and rentals, and the ever-escalating cost of tickets (a quick glance at this year’s bulging Fringe brochure finds tickets for “fringe” plays like Simon Callow’s latest solo turn in Shakespeare: The Man from Stratford reaching £22, while John Godber’s Up ‘n’ Under — that I first saw on the fringe in the 80s! - hitting £19.50).

But it’s a party that I gave a wide berth to last year, having spent the previous year drenched all five days I was there, and vowing to give myself a break from as a result. So I took myself off to New York and Provincetown instead last year, and even though friends and colleagues like Lyn Gardner tell me that it was a bumper fringe, I didn’t feel like I’d missed out too much.

Still, there’s a gnawing anxiety as the fringe starts (as it officially did yesterday) and the seemingly saturation press coverage begins that there’s a party somewhere that I’m missing.

Who is the most grumpy, curmudgeonly figure in British theatre? There are lots of people - and not just former theatre critics of the Evening Standard or Daily Mail, where it seems to go with the territory - who could qualify. Steven Berkoff used to be one, though he lately seems to have mellowed a bit, instead of bellowing a lot; but yesterday Jonathan Miller emphatically restated his claim to the title.

He told The Independent that he’d not been to the theatre for “nearly ten years”, saying, “I’m not interested in theatre, I never was. I don’t want to go to the West End; I hate travelling, I prefer to be at home with my grandchildren, and just go to Marks & Spencer.”

How to explain the phenomenon of Wicked? When it premiered in New York in October 2003, after an earlier try-out in San Francisco, Ben Brantley in the New York Times was dismissive, labelling it a “Technicolorized sermon of a musical” and calling it an “equally arch and earnest show”.

He reserved his praise only for star Kristin Chenoweth, the original Glinda, saying she “must put across jokes and sight gags that could make angels fall. Never for a second, though, does she threaten to crash to earth. Even lying down, Ms. Chenoweth — who performed similar magic in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown four years ago (and won a Tony) — remains airborne, proving that in the perilous skies of Broadway, nothing can top undiluted star power as aviation fuel. Be grateful, very grateful, that Ms. Chenoweth, who spent a brief exile in the land of sitcoms, has returned to the stage with none of the routinized glibness associated with weekly television. She provides the essential helium in a bloated production that might otherwise spend close to three hours flapping its oversized wings without taking off.”

But take off this show most certainly did, even though it was beaten to that season’s Tony Award for Best Musical by Avenue Q.

Sondheim’s “Invocations and Instructions to the Audience”, from his 1974 musical The Frogs that offered an early example of site-specific theatre since it was originally premiered in Yale University’s swimming pool, contains much splendid theatrical advice: “Don’t say ‘What?’/ To every line you think you haven’t got. / And if you’re in a snit / Because you’ve missed the plot / (Of which I must admit/ There’s not an awful lot), / Still, don’t / Say — / What?” And later, “Please, don’t fart — / There’s very little air and this is art.”

That last line could, of course, be written for the Royal Albert Hall, whose lack of ventilation is legendary, but no one, nowadays, disputes that Sondheim is indeed art. It took the Proms a long time to get there - even Michael Ball (who coincidentally starred in the original London production of Passion) got a Prom of his own long before Sondheim did - but then musical theatre typically offers a parallel universe to the classical repertoire that is usually celebrated here, and the only other major cross-over that has previously been offered was Leonard Bernstein, who of course left Broadway behind him for a career in “serious” music, after casually dropping off West Side Story before he went. (I remember going to a wonderful concert staging of his Wonderful Town as a Prom once).

But better late than never, on Saturday evening the Proms offered a celebration of Sondheim’s 80th birthday (which itself was better late than never, since the actual birthday was back in March).