November 2010 Archives

It’s the show that nobody can quite believe is finally happening, least of all me. Originally announced to open back in February, the Hilton Theatre (as it then was; it has now been redubbed the Foxwoods, underlining the fact that it is now hosting Broadway’s biggest-ever gamble) was gutted to accommodate Spider-man - Turn Off the Dark, but they have only finally turned on the lights now.

Work had to stop when the show’s original producer ran out of money. Then the cast who had been booked to star in it started dropping away; in April, Alan Cumming - who was due to play the Green Goblin, departed, citing a scheduling conflict; the month before, Evan Rachel Wood, who was due to play the love interest Mary Jane Watson, had withdrawn as well.

The usual trajectory for a hit show is to milk it for all it is worth - once it is established, to keep it alive for as long as possible. They used to advertise Cats with the slogan “Now and Forever”; and though a university doctor friend of mine, working in a genitourinary clinic when I ran into him by chance (he was working, I was not!), once quipped, “Nothing is for life - except herpes and genital warts”, it turned out not to be true about Cats, at least.

It may, however, prove to be the case with The Mousetrap, which I noticed as I walked past it the other day is now in its 58th year - when I first saw it back in 1979, it was merely in its 27th year! In the new Judy Garland play End of the Rainbow, set in 1969, she quips that she has to sing something, or “you can all go to The Mousetrap — and I wouldn’t wish that on anybody!”

We live in a 24-hour news culture nowadays, of course, bombarded on every side by messages targeted at whatever we’re interested in, whether it be via the still viable but shrinking traditional media, a range of variously “professional” or on-the-hoof websites, or the more instantaneous but potentially more unreliable social networks of Twitter, Facebook and bulletin boards.

Of course when it comes to theatre, our world has always traded in gossip, and the social networks give a place for that to be exchanged and heard. But divisions between what used to be professional media and other outlets are rapidly coming down, so now idle gossip is traded as news, and news become the stuff of idle gossip.

Yesterday Tracie Bennett, a two-time Laurence Olivier Award winner for supporting performances (in She Loves Me all of 15 years ago, and again in 2008 for Hairspray), woke up not only to find herself the lead picture on the front page of The Times, but also to the kind of reviews that suggested that she’d only just been newly discovered. The Daily Telegraph review was even headlined, “A dazzling new star is born,” for her performance as Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow.

Actually, Bennett, who is actually two years older than Garland was when she died at the age of 47, has been around the block; it is nearly 30 years now since she did a stint in Coronation Street, playing Sharon Gaskell, foster daughter to the Faircloughs. But her time to be formally anointed has clearly come at last; and I just hope that she doesn’t suffer the Garland curse now. In 1986, Lesley Mackie won the Olivier for Best Actress in a Musical for playing Judy in a biographical stage musical, simply entitled Judy, that transferred from Greenwich to the West End. She has been barely heard of since.

Richard Dreyfuss is once again in a play - and once again he’s not learnt his lines. When he last appeared in London in Complicit at the Old Vic in 2008, he was furnished with a visible earpiece from which to take prompts. A previous scheduled West End appearance in The Producers, where he was supposed to take over the role of Max Bialystock, was unceremoniously cancelled with just nights to go, amidst stories that he wasn’t ready to play the part. And now the New York Times has reported that the first night for his current off-Broadway appearance in Colin Greer’s Imagining Heschel has also been cancelled - though the run is continuing (through November 28), it will not be reviewed.

The reason? According to Allan Buchman, the founder and artistic director of the play’s producer Culture Project who is quoted by the New York Times, “he and others decided the production was not ready for critical scrutiny, and that they feared mixed or negative reviews would damage the play’s chances for future stagings. Among other issues, rewrites to the script were underway through late last week, and Mr. Dreyfuss, 63, had agreed to perform on the condition that he not have to participate in a normal rehearsal schedule and that he not have to commit all of his lines to memory.”

It’s a striking fact that, commercially speaking, there are very nearly as many plays running on Broadway than in the West End. While London currently has 15 plays running in West End theatres (including the long-runners The Mousetrap, The Woman in Black, The 39 Steps and War Horse), New York is just two behind, at 13 plays in Broadway houses.

Of course, the key difference is that I’ve not included the National, Royal Court, Donmar, Almeida or Young Vic in my London tally, nor the Lyric Hamersmith, the Bush, Hampstead or the Tricycle. Equally, my New York calculation does include Lincoln Center Theatre, the Roundabout and Manhattan Theatre Club (all of which operate commercially on Broadway), but doesn’t include any of their off-Broadway outlets, or those of the Public Theatre, the Atlantic Theatre Company, New York Theatre Workshop, or MCC, for instance, all of which are producing plays regularly.

It is how capitalism works: you charge whatever the market will bear to maximise profits against the costs of actually producing the goods. And all industries, of course, look around and see what their competitors are charging so that they are not out of synch and lose out to their rivals. It is why petrol is, give or take the odd penny, the same price in the same areas; and how a jar of coffee from Tesco’s is pretty much the same price as the same brand at Sainsbury’s. (If you want to be more upmarket and choose to go to Waitrose or M&S, paying a premium is part of the appeal).

And the same principles apply in the theatre: though the subsidised theatres can afford to charge less (precisely because they are subsidised, therefore paradoxically giving themselves a commercial advantage), West End managements watch each other closely as they nudge their prices up.

It is a striking coincidence that Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, the two most influential musical theatre composers of the second half of the last century, were born on the same day (March 22, though 18 years apart). And while Sondheim was famously mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II, it was Richard Rodgers who played a key role in influencing the young Lloyd Webber. Meanwhile, more comparisons between the two men’s output are, of course, frequently made, highlighting the one’s critical success and the other’s commercial success.

But seeing Sondheim’s Passion and Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies again back to back, as I did on Tuesday evening and Wednesday afternoon respectively at the Donmar Warehouse and Adelphi Theatres, both underlines their differences but also reveals similarities, too.

I touched a nerve, it seems, in my blog yesterday about cheap and free tickets, in which I mentioned befriending, or becoming, a theatre critic - and mentioned the fact that London PRs “are wise to the myriad people trying to pass themselves off as theatre critics simply because they set up a website or even just a blog.”

Of course everyone’s a critic nowadays, since you don’t even have to do that to comment - you can simply post on bulletin boards. But some bloggers on the twittersphere immediately took this personally, and one even put out a call to arms for people to stop following me.

Last week’s Time Out was billed “The Cheap Issue”, and offered myriad ways to cut-price London offerings. These included the Arts Council backed A Night Less Ordinary scheme, which offers free or cheap theatre tickets to those under 26; but points out that “the government has recently ‘curtailed’ the initiative” but says, “most of the theatres are still offering the tickets until the scheme closes at the end of March 2011”.

I’d be very interested to see how successful the scheme has been at promoting audience development, the holy grail of every theatre; but somehow it feels like it has fallen below the radar, and of course with the great swathe of arts funding cuts ahead, is sure to be even less of a priority than before, though it should, of course, remain near the top of the list. Without building the future audience, there is no future.

But though there’s no such thing, they say, as a free lunch, there are still such things as free theatre tickets, and not just at the Scoop, the annual summer theatre season beside City Hall; you just need to know how to find them.

….is my idea of everything to do, to misquote Cole Porter, and that’s what I’ve just done, returning from New York this very morning. I’ve managed to leave both my mobile phone and diary there, fortunately in a friend’s apartment, but meanwhile I’ve got to now try to reconstruct where I am supposed to be this week from memory.

So bear with me while I get my bearings! Coming back from a week away always puts my life out of synch for a bit anyway; first of all, of course, there’s what I’ve missed to catch up on.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I hardly ever take a night off at home, let alone when I’m on a theatre jaunt to New York. As Hugh Bonneville, the star of TV’s recent Downton Abbey and an old University pal of mine, recently tweeted me to ask, “Out of interest, do you ever sleep?” And I have to admit that the answer is usually “Not enough.”

It is, as I write, just 5am in New York, and I’m already at my computer before I head to the gym, then breakfast with a friend who is over from London. But then New York is a city, of course, that never sleeps, so neither should I.

I got a message from someone on Twitter the other day: “If you’re not back already, we may soon have to recall you. Clearly having too much fun out there!” Some days in New York can be like that, and yesterday was one of them.

After filing my blog, as I do every day, it began with an 8am trip to the gym, where Roger Rees was working out with a trainer beside me; then a 9.30am breakfast with one of Broadway’s leading power brokers, or at least a newly published list on a website called broadwayspace.com thinks so, placing him at joint number 20; and then, since it was a Wednesday matinee day, I saw two shows in a row, with a real treat inbetween (and I don’t mean Junior’s cheesecake, though their Devil’s Food version - an outrageous concoction of chocolate layers on either side of a cheesecake filling, all encased in rich chocolate - came afterwards, after the second show of the day).

Broadway may be the holy grail of American theatre, or at least the American commercial theatre, because it is where the real money is to be made. Just the other day, when it was being reported that Rent is set to return to off-Broadway next year (where the show had famously begun its life in 1994 at New York Theatre Workshop, before transferring to the Nederlander Theatre in a matter of weeks afterwards), there was an amazing statistic: during its 14 year Broadway run of some 5,124 performances, a show that had cost $3.5million to put on grossed nearly $300m.

But just as Rent’s progress has shown, off-Broadway is still often the seedbed from which Broadway hits are grown. Of the 24 musicals currently playing on Broadway, six came directly from Off-Broadway, sometimes via a subsequent regional run first.

Sometimes, some say, God has other plans. It there is a divine plan - and even if I wish, as I wrote here yesterday, that mine hadn’t included seeing The Divine Sister — my current trip to New York has been full of last-minute (re)-scheduling glitches.

Sunday night, for instance, should have been the official indoor Broadway opening of the Public’s summer production in Central Park of The Merchant of Venice, but a last minute announcement last Wednesday pushing it back, owing to the fact that Lily Rabe - who is playing Portia - would be “out of the show for the next several performances for personal family reasons.”

No, I don’t take what I do for granted: I know I’m lucky to be me. But actually Lucky to be Me was the title for a New York City Opera all-star tribute to the music of Leonard Bernstein, whose opera A Quiet Place they are also currently presenting (and I am seeing this Friday).

It was the New York marathon yesterday, but I began my own theatrical one the night before at NYCO’s wonderful Bernstein night, and my New York week could not have got off to a better start.

So it has finally opened - on time but not, alas, it seems, in full working order. The day after reports from Broadway of both the probable postponement of the beginning of performances for Spiderman - Turn Off the Dark as well as the delay of the official opening of Al Pacino’s Merchant of Venice (scheduled for this Sunday, but now postponed owing the sudden unavailability of co-star Lily Rabe as Portia), a new musical version of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown has opened at the Belasco Theatre.

I have already blogged here, just three days into its previews, on the instant hostility, for the most part, of bulletin board posters to the show. The thread on Broadwayworld.com now runs to a staggering 38 pages - just before the curtain went up last night, one person posted that “there are 944 postings and 201,809 views of this thread”.

In a week in which I have regularly addressed the subject of financial remuneration in the arts as it pertains to the public sector — where to run the Royal Opera House is to be rewarded with a salary of £390,000, while the National’s Nick Hytner is on a mere £165,000 a year - I’ve not mentioned yet the commercial sector, where of course the financial opportunities are, by contrast, limitless.

That’s particularly the case, of course, if you are lucky enough to produce, write or direct a hit musical: with royalties earned on the gross box office (i.e before capitalisation costs are met or weekly running costs once it is), you start earning from the get-go and whatever the commercial prospects turn out to be.

Theatrical fashions come and go; but good plays last forever. They’re just waiting to be rediscovered, as witness last week’s amazing fresh reclamation of Men Should Weep at the National, Ena Lamont Stewart’s beautiful 1947 portrait of 1930s Glasgow tenement life, brought to searing, detailed life by director Josie Rourke. But she didn’t, in fact, get there first: it was an earlier production by Giles Havergal in 1982 at Glasgow Citizens’ that had brought it back into the repertoire, but it somehow didn’t stick.

It may have been voted amongst the NT’s Millennium poll of the Top 100 plays of the 20th century, and may be taught in Scotland as part of the Higher Scottish drama course, but seeing it at the National now was like discovering a brand-new play. If that’s how we treat the 100 best plays, God help other playwrights.

The arts are often seen as a calling as much as a job: one you would be prepared to do for free. But should you be prepared to do it for free? When I tell people what it is I do, I’m often told just how lucky I am. And yes, I agree: my level of theatregoing - an addiction, really! - would be simply unsustainable if I had to pay my own way through it, so it’s nice to not only get the majority of my tickets for free, but also to get paid for the words that I write about it. (Not, I hasten to add, that my life is one entire free ride: I went to both performances of Merrily We Roll Along at the Queen’s on Sunday, for instance, and paid both times - but it was money well spent!)

Just the other day I was seated at the opening night of Men Should Weep beside a farmer’s wife who didn’t even realise it was a first night, and as it dawned on her that she was surrounded by critics, asked if I was one and then said simply, “I’m envious!” And recently on Twitter, someone I don’t know posted a message to me: “What a fantastic job you have, nights out at the theatre and columns in newspapers, you must have been good in a past life!”

Good parents often say that they don’t have favourites amongst their children; but honest parents will sometimes admit to a character(istic) they prefer. It’s the same with Sondheim musicals - it’s difficult to choose favourites between them, and I usually think that the one I’ve seen most recently is my favourite, since every single one has something in it that has a favoured moment in it. But Merrily We Roll Along, his notorious 16-performance 1981 flop, really does contain my favourite score.

That doesn’t mean it’s my favourite of his shows - there’s something too sour, cynical and dispiriting about its portrait of adult compromises and unravelling friendships, told back-to-front so that the layers of disillusionment are gradually stripped back to arrive at a finally hopeful conclusion that we know to be entirely false, since we know how they in fact turned out from the beginning of it.

But there is also plenty that is heartstoppingly beautiful and achingly poignant about that journey.