September 2010 Archives

You can take the person out of Newcastle, but you can’t take Newcastle out of the person. I’m coincidentally having a very Geordie time of it at the moment. Last night I went to see Jill Halfpenny performing the latest instalment in Neil Marcus’s inspired and inspiring Great British Songbook cabaret series, proving the vitality of British songwriting across the ages to stand easy comparison with the Great American Songbook.

Early on, the Geordie-born lass offered one terrific entry, “The Collier Laddies Wife”, that not only established her origins, but also her credentials. This wasn’t going to be an evening of obvious choices, nor of obvious interpretations. Doing the Beatles classic Ticket to Ride, for instance, she channelled her childhood vocal heroine (and coincidentally mine) Karen Carpenter. I still think that Karen has one of the most beautiful voices I’ve ever heard, and it’s a brave person who tries to mimic her.

It’s one way to cut down the running time: reduce the time of the interval. When Trevor Nunn directed his last stage version of an epic novel, the ill-fated Gone with the Wind, audiences had barely got out of their seats for the interval before they had to race back in again, and the same thing happened last night at the opening of Nunn’s adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong. It was also notable that, unlike the usual endlessly delayed first night curtain as the critics wait for the rest of the audience to amble to their seats, last night there was a concerted effort, too, to get the house in - and the show up very nearly on time.

If they could do it last night, why can’t they do it every night? Last week there were even delays getting the 50 minute Krapp’s Last Tape up on time, though it seemed a bit silly for one of my colleagues to try to start a slow hand-clap going, since it was hardly going to eat into the leisurely time even overnight critics would have to write it up.

Last Friday the Evening Standard’s diary editor Sebastian Shakespeare wrote a column headlined, “Why not give Asbos to these theatre yobbos?” He was lamenting the behaviour of the first night audience for Michael Gambon’s appearance two nights earlier in Krapp’s Last Tape, and wrote: “Will theatregoers never learn? This week’s first night of Krapp’s Last Tape at the Duchess was punctuated by the persistent chirrup of mobile phones. Samuel Beckett’s play only lasts 50 minutes so you might think the audience would have sufficient stamina to forbear from communicating with the outside world, or at the very least have the wit to turn their phones to mute. But no.”

But then the production was directed by the Gate Theatre, Dublin’s Michael Colgan, so I wondered if one or two of the interruptions might have been from his own mobile.

I can make extra hours in the day by simply getting up earlier - and I regularly do - but it’s difficult to make extra nights in the week. At the moment, I’m seeing shows every night Monday to Sunday; so the only answer is to add in matinees, too. The week before last week I saw eleven shows, by doing four matinees in addition to an evening performance every night, and the week that ended yesterday I was due to do the same thing, only to be reprieved at the last minute from reaching that tally by the cancellation of the matinee I was due to see yesterday of Closer than Ever at the Landor owing to the indisposition of Ria Jones.

And I’m not the only one adding matinees to my schedule to try to fit it all in: both Charlie Spencer and Susannah Clapp were both also at the Saturday matinee I went to of Yes, Prime Minister, which opens tonight, and which the producers had invited critics to attend at previews last Thursday, Friday or Saturday.

When Les Miserables first opened at the Barbican Theatre in 1985, no one could have predicted the phenomenon it became. Many of the reviews were sniffy, even downright hostile: the late Jack Tinker famously dubbed it “The Glums”, an epithet that stuck as solidly as Paint Never Dries has now stuck to Love Never Dies.

But as Michael Coveney pointed out and I already quoted yesterday, it wasn’t entirely slated, either, receiving “at least four rave reviews — from Benedict Nightingale, myself, Clive Hirschhorn and Sheridan Morley.” It’s striking, though, that none of that quartet are where they were then, either: Sheridan is no longer with us at all, Benedict retired earlier this year, Clive is now long retired from the Sunday Express (whose berth I now occupy) and Michael himself is now on Whatsonstage.com instead of full-time on a paper.

And last night’s official return of Les Mis to the Barbican finds itself in a mostly new guise, too.

I was highlighting divisions in the critical ranks only yesterday, but few musical theatre writers inspire greater divisions than Stephen Sondheim. I recently pointed out that the Sunday Telegraph theatre critic Tim Walker admonished him as a “terrible lyricist”, which frankly beggars belief. Whatever else you may say about Sondheim’s work - there are those who accuse it of being emotionally distant, too clever by half, too rarefied - you can’t say he’s a bad lyricist.

But if there’s a show that’s going to divide Sondheim’s fans and foes more than any other, it is surely Passion, his demanding, disquieting 1994 Broadway chamber musical about a dangerous, obsessive love that literally becomes a matter of life and death.

Only the other day I was noting the Evening Standard’s weird new propensity to delay the appearance of some of its theatre reviews. Better late than never, I suppose, but yesterday they broke even their own recent record, finally running Fiona Mountford’s joint review for Love on the Dole at the Finborough and Scorched at the Old Vic Tunnels. The press night for Scorched was September 6, and that for Love on the Dole was September 9, so they’re precisely two weeks late with the review of the first and seven publishing days late on the second.

In the same blog entry last week, I was also pointing out differences of critical opinion on the Young Vic’s The Human Comedy, and a correspondent to it sagely replied, “Why would you even imagine that reviewers might all have the same opinion of a production? If that were to be the case, there would be no need for more than one reviewer to go to any show.”

Producers are, of course, first and foremost money men (and women): they raise the money that gets a show put on. And if they are good at their jobs, they also sometimes raise the stakes, too, in terms of a creative input into what they are putting on.

Cameron Mackintosh has long been the Dolly Levi of the musical theatre: when Dolly is asked what she does for a living in the opening scene of Hello, Dolly!, she replies succinctly, “Some people paint, some sew… I meddle”. He raises the money for his shows, but he also famously meddles in them.

The new ENO season at the London Coliseum opened on Saturday with a new production of Gounod’s Faust that marked the UK directorial debut of the Broadway theatre director Des McAnuff. In a step that smacks slightly of desperation, the ENO press ads for the production proclaim it to be “from the DIRECTOR [their capitals] of the smash-hit JERSEY BOYS”, and then adds in a joining bubble, “Includes many classics and the stirring SOLDIER’S CHORUS”.

I can’t imagine anyone booking to see it on the strength of the first claim - and if they do, they’re in for a bit of a surprise: this is as far away from Jersey Boys as it is possible to get (with one exception: McAnuff has worked with his designer, in this case Robert Brill with whom he has previously worked extensively at home including the most recent ill-fated Broadway production of Guys and Dolls, to give us the trade-mark industrial look of his shows that always seem to be encased in a steel framework of platforms and staircases).

What’s the chicken and what’s the egg when it comes to a great production of what seems like a great play? It’s particularly difficult to separate with a brand-new play, where they way you are seeing it now cannot be compared to a previous production. The production may make more of something than is really there; by the same token, what might have been a good play can be scuppered forever by a bad original production, meaning that it is never seen again.

Seeing a new scrappy and rather tatty new touring production of The Madness of George III last night in Basingstoke, for instance, made me realise how well served Alan Bennett had been by his original production of the play at the National Theatre in 1991, where Nick Hytner gave it a graceful fluidity and its star Nigel Hawthorne gave the title character an unbearably moving pathos. Both qualities were signally lacking in the grinding, episodic production I saw last night and Simon Ward’s performance, in which he resembled a permanently baffled looking Ann Widdicombe.

Two perennial themes of this blog are about how critics, viewing the same show, often arrive at very different judgements; and how little space we are sometimes afforded in which to justify those judgements.

On the subject of the latter, it’s clear from Fiona Mountford’s five-star rating to her review for JT Rogers’ Blood and Gifts which opened at the National on Tuesday that she was obviously highly impressed. But she only then gets precisely 202 words in which to say why.

Theatre critics have had to get used to the squeeze on space; we have to not so much fight as to cling desperately onto our corner.

Seeing a show like Complicite’s amazing A Disappearing Number, it’s impossible to take it all in on a single viewing; but you do, at least, hope to get a full view. I was surprised, at last night’s West End first night, just how much I lost from my front stalls seat last night, on the extreme right hand side of the third row.

This was, after all, a top price ticket (£45 if I’d bought it). But thanks to a stage left projector machine right in front of me, great chunks of the shimmering imagery being conjured at the back of the stage (that I knew was happening, but could barely make out) were lost. A show that has been touring globally ever since its 2007 premiere may not be able to adjust itself immediately to every single venue it visits - and matters were no doubt not helped by a disappearing set that meant that the first two days of the run last Friday and Saturday were lost, so it didn’t actually begin its West End run until Monday - but the Novello, with its wide sweep of seats unbroken by a centre aisle, has plenty of extremities. Those of us seated in those extremities need to be thought of (or the seats left unsold).

Just yesterday Lyn Gardner posted a Guardian blog on the current buoyancy of the fringe theatre sector, and how it has become a destination in and of itself. As she writes, “Once, the fringe was somewhere you graduated from and never went back to. But increasingly it seems to be the place you go to put on the shows you really want to do, but maybe can’t interest a subsidised theatre in, or - if you’re an actor - where you play the roles you really want to play. Linda Bassett’s searing performance in The Road to Mecca at the Arcola springs to mind.”

Lyn goes on to cite the facts that the tiny Cock Tavern is about to stage a retrospective of plays by “the great, neglected Edward Bond”, Jermyn Street are currently offering the premiere of a new play by 91-year-old NF Simpson, and Snoo Wilson - “by far the most imaginatively riotous of the playwrights spawned by Portable Theatre in the mid-1970s - a group that included David Hare and Howard Brenton” - has a new play at the Arcola as evidence of past masters being re-absorbed into the fringe.

I popped in to a birthday party yesterday - but not my own, even though it was actually my birthday yesterday. The Young Vic threw a bash to mark the start of its 40th anniversary year, whose season kicks off tonight with the opening of The Human Comedy which I’ll be reviewing for The Stage, so it will be available online here tomorrow.

The Young Vic, like I did a while ago, is now advancing into middle-age; but like me, it still feels young, even if a gym injury has me on painkillers and has me visiting a physio later today. Just as I was clearly attempting to lift something above my weight, the Young Vic has long punched above its weight to become one of the most ambitious, challenging and interesting producing theatres in London, in what has lately been turned into one of its most versatile spaces (or series of them). And as The Human Comedy demonstrates - as was done last year with the award-winning Street Scene — it is a theatre that is also uniquely plugged into its own community, drawing on a chorus of 80 local performers in addition to professional principals.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: it’s a nice problem to have. I’m referring to the simply staggering number of theatrical openings we’ve suddenly got; after the Edinburgh-induced famine in London, there’s now a veritable feast.

By the end of play(s) this Sunday, I will have seen nine shows this week; during the coming week starting Monday, I am now scheduled to see eleven! That means I am going every single night, plus matinees from Thursday to Sunday. And it’s not as if I don’t have a day job, too: seeing the shows is one thing; I’ve also got to write about them - not to mention juggle various interview features where I’ve got to meet the subject, then transcribe the tape and write up the interview, too….

No, it’s not the name of an intellectual gay porn movie; rather, ‘Flip Flop Paradigm’ is one of the numbers - there are some 29 in all - listed in the programme for Shoes, the new ‘dansical’ at Sadler’s Wells, featuring music and lyrics by Richard Thomas.

Richard wrote the score to Jerry Springer the Opera, easily the best British musical of the nearly twenty years that separated its 2003 National Theatre premiere from Howard Goodall’s The Hired Man in 1984 - so I went to Shoes with lots of hope, but also plenty of trepidation: would he - could he? - match the bravura and daring of the earlier show?

I once saw Michael Billington, driven to distraction by the late start for the West End opening night of Hairspray, begin a slow handclap to try to urge the curtain up; and last night it was the turn of Charles Spencer to do the same thing at Deathtrap, which finally started at 7.20pm, but not before Charlie had actually left his seat to go and remonstrate with someone.

As always, there seems to be a conflict between what used to be the primary purpose of a press night, namely for the critics to see a show and deliver their verdict, and what they have actually turned into: a media scrum for minor celebrities, whether it be John Barrowman and Louie Spence, Stephen Fry and Nigel Havers, which slow down the progress of people to their seats.

Of course theatre can happen anywhere and at any place, as the Edinburgh Festival annually demonstrates and the new fashion for lots of site specific and temporary installations also shows. But for many of us who love the theatre, part of the ongoing relationship with it is with the buildings in which it is housed. Shows may come and go (apart from The Mousetrap, that is, and possibly Les Miserables), but the theatres are always there: their walls hold the memories of everything we’ve seen there.

We even come to love the flawed ones for the same reason: just last week, when Michael Boyd announced the reopening of Stratford’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre after its complete overhaul, Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian, “The new theatre promises a radical revamp of Elisabeth Scott’s 1932 original: a vilified, endlessly adapted building which, even when it opened, was described as a jam factory and a tomb. Early on, when it had an orchestra pit, an old actor famously said that playing on the Memorial Theatre stage was ‘like addressing Boulogne from Folkestone, though on a fine June night you could distinctly see the front stalls in the distance’ Yet you can’t divorce a theatre from its memories; and, whatever its handicaps, the theatre housed great work. I was first taken there, as an eight-year-old in 1948, to see, of all things, Troilus and Cressida with Paul Scofield: good seats, wonderful experience.”

I seem to have spent a lot of time standing this weekend, and I wasn’t even at Shakespeare’s Globe or flying Easyjet and facing their endless queues. Being kept on my feet was entirely voluntary. On Saturday evening, I had bought a standing ticket to see Earthquakes in London again at the National’s Cottesloe, and last night I was standing at the grubby Cafe de Paris for the London debut of West End Bares, a long-running Broadway charity fundraiser Broadway Bares, in which dancers and other cast members from current shows do routines that involve shedding various amounts of their clothing.

I can’t quite believe it, but Earthquakes in London only opened at the beginning of last month but is already nearing the end of its run: it’s only booking to September 22.

Now I know what Lyn Gardner and Dominic Cavendish must spend a lot of timing doing and feeling like: getting on and off trains to regional places in pursuit of theatre, and feeling shattered. On Wednesday afternoon, straight from the RSC’s press conference to announce its re-opening of Stratford-upon-Avon’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre, I travelled up to Newcastle to attend the opening night of the new tour of Chess; and then came back to London yesterday morning, only to change trains and stations from King’s Cross to Euston to go back up to Northampton for the matinee of a new touring production of Tell Me on a Sunday, before instantly returning yesterday afternoon in time for a Royal Court first night.

At least all the trains ran on time, but it’s tiring sitting on full, squashed trains, endlessly listening to other people’s mobile phone conversations (when they can get signals, that is; dropped calls seem to be the order of the day, particularly on the Northampton line) - memo to self: always make sure I book the silent carriage in future. The East Coast line at least offers the distracting possibilities of WiFi, but that signal seems to be intermittent, too: this is not so much internet surfing as internet paddling.

Like too many London-based critics, I don’t get out as much as I’d like to.

It happened with The Producers — and now it’s happening to The Addams Family. It’s called the Nathan Lane factor - that rare example of a star made by the theatre, rather than the movies, whose absence from the show can alone cause a fatal slide at the box office.

Mr Lane was on holiday last week - and the result contributed to what the New York Times called “a $361,518 nosedive in the grosses of his musical, The Addams Family, in which he plays the patriarch Gomez. The show, usually one of the highest-earning on Broadway, fell to $764,231 from $1.1 million the previous week, by far the most sizable drop in week-to-week grosses that are released by producers every Monday.”

The London critics, or at some of us, were back out in force last night, including Michael Billington, Libby Purves, Henry Hitchings, Sarah Hemming, Michael Coveney and Sam Marlowe. But in a holdover for those of us who had also been to Edinburgh, we were summonsed not to a conventional theatre but to the Oikos Project’s Jellyfish Theatre - a new temporary venue billed as a “salvaged stage” that is the “UK’s first functioning theatre made entirely in reclaimed and recycled materials.” Edinburgh is full not so much of “found” theatres as temporarily “made” theatres and site-specific installations; here was a bit of both.

Unfortunately Oikos - the debut play there - is also made entirely out of recycled ideas and is utterly unsalvageable.