October 2010 Archives

This week saw the arts funding cuts already starting to bite, when ACE announced the first tranche of across-the-board reductions; but also the first signs of the sponsorship culture that’s going to fill the gap for some.

Though yesterday it was revealed that the Royal Opera House have put plans for ROH North, their Manchester offshoot, on hold, with a spokesperson quoted as saying, “In an ideal world, we would take this forward but the project is not likely to move anywhere because of the funding situation”, it was also announced yesterday that the National Theatre is moving forward with its own £70m NT Future development plan of its South Bank home, and the ball has started rolling nicely with a £10m personal donation from Lloyd Dorfman, founder and chairman of Travelex and member of the NT Board.

No, I’m not referring to the famous leaking roof the King’s Head (or Bush Theatre, or insert the name of your favourite damaged fringe theatre here), but to the physical need to go to the bathroom. Toilet matters are often a big concern in the theatre on both sides of the footlights.

For audiences, particularly female ones, there’s the unseemly rush to the loos in the interval, where - unless the woman concerned is at a Delfont Mackintosh Theatre or, soon, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon - much of it may be spent waiting in a queue for a cubicle.

Some of that queuing has now been transferred to the chaps, and not just at Sondheim galas where the men frequently outnumber the women.

Are we re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic as we face a collective sinking - or is there going to be a passing lifeboat to clamber aboard? Having been braced to expect the worst, of course - and the worst is definitely yet to come - it is a brave new world indeed where the arts can actually be relieved at the result of the comprehensive spending review and the way its 29.6% overall cut (to be implemented by 2014/15) is being phased in.

Yesterday Arts Council England (ACE) announced that its group of Regularly Funded Organisations (RFOs), are to start off by sharing the pain of all having their funding reduced next year by 6.9% in cash terms, which equates to 8.7% in real terms. But while, as Nick Hytner crisply commented yesterday, “The Arts Council has done very well to translate a 14% cut into a 6.9% cut for the vast majority of its clients”, this is, of course, only the beginning.

Theatre is all about communication: channels of dialogue and non-verbal exchanges that occur onstage between characters and between stage and audience, and between audience and audience (though preferably not while the play is going on, at least when it comes to audio communication).

Just the other day we saw the premiere of a really remarkable play, Nina Raine’s Tribes at the Royal Court, that demonstrated not only the kind of miscommunications that can charge up an entire family, but also how we shouldn’t take the ability to communicate, or even miscomunicate, for granted, as it showed the exclusion that a deaf member of the family experiences.

But theatrical communication doesn’t, of course, stop with the play.

Regular readers of this column will already know what a fan I am of all things cabaret; and the weekend saw me at two of the best - and opposing - spectrums of the art. At one end, what a pleasure it was to welcome La Soiree to town - a retitled, but fortunately not repackaged, version of La Clique, the divine burlesque and comedy variety bill that has previously played at the Hippodrome (now being converted into a casino, where rumour has it, a cabaret space will be incorporated as part of their licensing requirement to maintain a theatrical element to the venue’s usage) and Roundhouse.

But now they’re back in the wooden mirrored Spiegeltent environment that it was originally staged for, and there’s no more atmospheric space for the show than this, set up in the Doon Street car park site behind the National Theatre.

John Lennon would have turned 70 earlier this month if he was alive; as it is, this December sees the 30th anniversary of his murder. And just as an older generation than mine always remembers their JFK moment - where they were when they heard that the President had been shot - so there’s a John Lennon moment for anyone who was around in 1980. He was shot outside his apartment building in New York - a place he had ironically made his home precisely because he could walk the streets unmolested.

But Liverpool, of course, was the place of his birth; and it is there that Bob Eaton first launched his tribute biographical musical Lennon in 1981, soon after his murder, when Eaton was then running the Everyman Theatre.

I quoted Rory Kinnear’s advice the other day that the best performance to go to is “halfway through the run - when the cast is relaxed, but not bored. Not on press nights and not on Saturday nights, when their heads are too caught up with ‘important people’ watching. Midweek matinees and Monday nights are best; the actors are less worried and enjoy it more.”

Though critics can’t typically heed that advice - press nights, after all, are specifically designed for us - we can’t always go when we’re summonsed, and occasionally have to catch things later in the run. I was in New York, for instance, on October 1 when Faust officially opened at the Young Vic, so I only finally went last night. Better late than never?

Actually, a few of my colleagues seemed to suggest that never might have been better than late.

Last night I saw yet another incarnation for Tomorrow Morning, a musical I now have two original cast albums of - from its London premiere in 2006 and its subsequent Chicago production in 2008 - both of which I also saw, as I previously reported here. I’ve also heard some of the songs performed at a private dinner party held at the home of producer Hilary Williams, whose personal faith in (and financial support of) the show has been nothing short of remarkable.

Now it’s back in London, this time at the ever up-and-coming Landor, which has long been in the making as a fringe powerhouse for musicals, but whose time seems to have finally arrived.

Yesterday’s Guardian featured an insiders’ guide to the arts, in which leading practitioners - and Guardian critics - provided some useful tips to seeing the world from the inside out, rather than looking from the outside in.

Richard Eyre, for instance, provided this commonsense approach to the question, “How much should I trust reviews?”, by answering, “The simple answer is that it depends what they’re saying and who’s saying it. Evelyn Waugh said that reading reviews is ‘like sitting in a railway carriage and hearing a fellow traveller pointing out objects of interest and getting them all wrong’. Mostly true, but some theatre critics do have a gift for describing a performance and giving an account of how the audience responded. Others, following editorial policy, record merely whether the show is a hit or a miss. Others still are prescriptive: they write about the play or production or performance they would like to have seen, rather than the one they did. In short, they write about themselves rather than the event.”

Today sees the launch of a new online musicals monthly called, simply, M, which you can reach here. In the words of its editor/creator Christopher D Clegg, they are trying to create a “Vogue” like feel; in the event, it feels more like the gay weekly QX, complete with a buff chorus boy showing (nearly) all in the case of Jack Jefferson from Love Never Dies.

But if it is more fanzine than magazine, it’s also genuinely refreshing to see a younger generation taking charge of their passion and going beyond the blogosphere, twitter or bulletin board dialogue to attempt to create something more substantial in terms of editorial content.

I know I can’t be everywhere, but I was sorry not to be at the 80th birthday bash for the Apollo Victoria last Sunday or the 100th anniversary lunch held for the London Palladium on Tuesday; but then I wasn’t invited to either, so I can hardly be surprised that I wasn’t there!

Still, it’s good to read of extensive plans to remodel the London Palladium that Andrew Lloyd Webber announced on Tuesday. As reported in The Stage, he spoke of “the beginning of the biggest programme of refurbishment and change in the Palladium’s history”, and said, “I’m delighted to announce the restoration of the iconic revolving stage and plans for the complete refurbishment of the front of house areas.”

If everyone in the theatregoing audience is a critic nowadays, thanks to blogs, bulletin boards and twitter, on the other side of the footlights it seems that everyone’s becoming a producer, too.

Of course, cabaret artists have long often been their own producers, booking and promoting their own shows; and it has long been a model for young theatremakers to set up their own companies to do their own work through, like Deborah Warner did in her early work with Kick Theatre Company or Steven Hoggett and Scott Graham do even now through Frantic Assembly.

But even in the mainstream commercial theatre, there is good form for creative people to seize control over their own producing destinies.

We may be moving inexorably towards the American system of critics’ previews, in which reviewers are invited to a range of performances ahead of (and including) the opening night, with not one but two shows that open this week offering the opportunity for critics to officially come in early.

The only problem is that our diaries are already filled to overflowing; so although it’s a nice courtesy not to be confined to a single performance, in practice it meant that most of the major critics were still in attendance at last night’s official opening of Onassis instead of the previews from last Thursday to Saturday that were also on offer.

It will be interesting to see, though, just how this shakes down for tomorrow’s opening of Flashdance, which offered all of this week’s previews ahead of time.

My heaving bookshelves are testament to a seemingly endless appetite for theatrical lives; I can’t wait for the copy of the new biography about producer Michael Codron that’s even now on its way to me in the post. No independent producer in the last fifty years has affected the landscape of the West End play as he did, one which steered the commercial careers of everyone from Ayckbourn and Orton to Frayn, Gray, Harwood, Hampton, Stoppard, Pinter and Hare.

But notwithstanding his enormous output and influence, he doesn’t even have a Wiki page of his own; and he is so publicity-averse that the programmes for the shows he produces may contain his billing above the title, but carry no biography for him personally. He was clearly of a different era entirely: his job was behind-the-scenes, and below-the-radar, in every sense.

A new musical, based on Pedro Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, started previewing last Friday on Broadway. The curtain almost didn’t go up - after twice postponing the previews, Friday’s performance turned out to effectively be the show’s first onstage full run-through, as its cast had not managed to get through to the end before. The director Bartlett Sher duly made a pre-show curtain speech, warning spectators about this and craving their indulgence.

Of course, when audiences are paying up to $120 a ticket - and, this being Broadway, is full of vipers and sniper fire - such requests have a tendency to fall on deaf ears. By the time the curtain fell just a few hours later, the major bulletin boards - at broadwayworld.com and talkinbroadway.com - were starting to fill with the commentary of some of those who’d been here (and many who hadn’t).

Just the other day, Michael Billington wrote a Guardian blog about the imminent departure of Michael Grandage as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, and lamented the fact that “the fashion today is to go freelance rather than opt for the stress of running a building”.

This, he goes on to suggest,” is to the detriment of our theatre. I wish some of our immensely talented directors, people like Deborah Warner, Katie Mitchell, Phyllida Lloyd and Rufus Norris, had put down permanent roots. As Sam Mendes, Grandage’s predecessor at the Donmar, once said, ‘It’s a world now of freelance directors, all working in the same few theatres, all discussing the same few plays’.”

Just a few weeks ago, the Sunday Telegraph’s esteemed theatre critic (and daily paper diarist) Tim Walker fired a warning shot across the bows of the National Theatre regarding not just its future funding prospects under the new Tory government, but it’s very future existence.

Outraged about the attack by one character in Blood and Gifts on Margaret Thatcher’s legacy and reputation, he wrote, “What, honestly, can I say to commend such lines as: ‘Here’s to Maggie Thatcher and her tight purse-strings. May she be dragged through Downing Street, draped in a burka, and stoned.’ Worse still, there is a line about how the former prime minister should be sodomised for the spending cuts that she oversaw after taking office. This happens to be a woman of 84 that Rogers is writing about. If the National can do no better than this, then it seems to me there is a real danger that the Coalition won’t merely think in terms of staunching the budget of the great carbuncle on London’s South Bank — they will send in the bulldozers and be done with it.”

Time Out magazine was established some 42 years ago as one-stop shop to collect information on London’s entertainment world under one magazine roof. It survived a breakaway group of staff members setting up a competing title in 1980, City Limits; but that folded a long time ago, and more recently, the more tourist-friendly What’s On in London magazine (that I once contributed regularly to) also collapsed, leaving Time Out as the sole paid-for entertainment listings title.

Some national papers have experimented with regionally-editionalised listings guides of their own, but the only one that has really “stuck” is the weekly Saturday Guardian Guide, though The Independent’s weekly Information supplement attempts to cover some of the same territory. The Evening Standard flirted once upon a time with a weekly listings mag called Hot Tickets, but that too is no more.

So this means that in the land of the listings, Time Out is still king of the print publications. But like King Lear did, it is now dividing its own kingdom.

Critics have, in this attention-deficit age, mostly signed up to facilitating the quick critical fix: the star rating that provides an instant visual summary of what a critic feels about the show. (Only The Observer amongst the national papers doesn’t provide them, and neither does The Stage). There is, of course, no scientific formula for how it is arrived at; how we arrive at our decisions as to what to award a show is up to us. And just as the words they accompany are ultimately and inevitably a subjective statement of opinion, however we seek to dress them objectively, so the way each of us applies our star ratings is a personal choice, too.

Some critics are frugal in their ratings; in a recent Guardian blog, Matt Trueman pointed out, “You have to go as far back as August 2009 to find Lyn Gardner’s last full house (Love Letters Straight from Your Heart, since you ask)”. Ian Shuttleworth, responding to the Guardian blog, wrote that he gives “maybe one five star review a year in the FT”. Others are far more generous: hardly a week seems to go by without Libby Purves, chief theatre critic of The Times since June, awarding a show a full house, so much so that “doing a Libby” is now critical shorthand for giving shows a five star rating.

The Broadway musical - once central to America’s cultural dialogue, whose music used to dominate the charts and routinely get transposed for big screen treatment - managed, of course, to get sidelined after the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll. But in the last decade of so, Broadway has been playing furious catch-up, and if you can’t beat them, you might as well join them.

Broadway is now full of pop and old rock, from Mamma Mia! (Abba) and Jersey Boys (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons) to a revival of pop hit makers Bacharach and David’s only Broadway show Promises, Promises and Rock of Ages, a loud but dismal compilation musical around 80s songs that is threatening to come to London.

I wasn’t going to blog today, but as I was leaving London for New York yesterday morning I got a call that Michael Grandage was going to formally announce his departure from the post of the artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse today, and Monday is too far away not to comment on it till then.

Few directors in London or indeed New York have made a bigger personal splash over the last decade than Grandage, but the remarkable thing is that it has been achieved mostly in the service of two theatres - at one point, two theatres simultaneously - rather than the service of his own directorial ego.