December 2010 Archives

In A Chorus Line, one character sings, “Goodbye twelve, goodbye thirteen, hello love.” It’s time, meanwhile, for us to bid goodbye to 10, and say hello to 11. Critics invariably end the year with a round-up column of their own highs, lows, trends and wishes, and I duly filed mine for The Stage here and for the Sunday Express here.

Regular readers of this blog will, of course, know of some of my regular preoccupations, like the healthy differences of critical opinion you will find between those of us who report on the theatre for a living,

New York was blanketed by 20 inches of snow on Monday (and no, we’re talking the real stuff, not a Whitney Houston night out); but still the shows went on. One of the glorious things about New York is that it is a city that stops for nothing - clearly not for nature, nor even for Christmas. Last Saturday, Christmas Day, most Broadway shows played a two-performance day! (The night before was a different story, though: all but one was dark).

On the other hand, of course, a paltry four inches of snow at Heathrow the week before last brought the place to a complete standstill - and not just for a day or two, either. It turns out that BAA, now controlled by a Spanish run company who bought the place with a heavy debt, spent a laughable £500,000 on snow equipment last year - which as the Independent pointed out yesterday, is “barely half the 2009 salary and bonus of the chief executive, Colin Matthews.”

No musical has made the news more in recent times, maybe ever, than Spider-man - Turn Off the Dark, from its spiralling costs and endless delays to the repeated injuries being sustained by its company, most recently and disturbingly, an onstage, mid-performance fall from Christopher Tierney, playing one of the title character’s stunt doubles, that very nearly killed him.

Earlier this week, his father enumerated the injuries that his son had sustained to the New York Times, and commented, “My understanding is that Chris is fortunate to be alive.”

The show, now notoriously pushing the limits of everyone connected to it, is also starting to stretch the patience of the critics.

When I posted my blog on Monday about London’s unsung theatrical heroes, one of those I named wrote to thank me - but quipped, “Damn, I thought for a moment I’d made it onto your ‘best hung theatre personalities 2010’ list.”

Now I know that I recently wrote here about critics getting too personal in reviews, following the furore that engulfed Alastair Macaulay of the New York Times for his characterisation of the Sugar Plum Fairy in a New York City Ballet production of The Nutcracker having consumed too many sugar plums herself, but as Michael Coveney suggested in his blog on Tuesday, “A performer gets on a stage and performs. With heart, mind and body. All three are fair game for critics, and being rude or not simply doesn’t come into it. What an actor, or a dancer, looks like is what critics write about.”

And if a performer goes naked, it should, to follow this reasoning, be fair game for their particular attributes to be commented on, too.

Theatre has always been a place to take risks; it’s a world of make-believe, of course, but therefore a safe place in which to express extreme emotions. It’s the essence of Greek tragedy: a channel for the heart and soul of a society to find itself through, as it tries to make peace with itself and others.

So how did the theatre become an unsafe place in which to express limited cartoon emotions? That trajectory seems to be complete with the pursuit of mindless, vacuous spectacle that the Broadway musical has too often become, and in particular with Spider-man - Turn off the Dark.

After my blog yesterday on British theatre’s unsung heroes, today I’m turning to unseen shows - the list of shows that I’m missing by being temporarily out of commission.

I know I usually set myself an impossible task as it is - you can never see everything. As I wrote here last week, this is always the busiest time of the year in sheer volume of shows opening at the same time to make the deadline for the Christmas season.

Last Wednesday I went in for back surgery, and signed off from this blog for a while. But though I can’t get to the theatre for a bit - and I didn’t even see the inside of the operating theatre, either, as the anaesthetist knocked me out in an ante-room to it! - it doesn’t mean I’ve been out of the loop.

Far from it; I am having more time, if anything, to cast my net (and in particular my internet connection) far and wide. So I’m bringing myself back to the commentary table today, even if I can’t go near a theatre seat for a few weeks at least.

It has been a year for 80th birthdays: all year long, it seems, we have been marking Sondheim’s 80th (the Donmar even staged a Sondheim at 80 Festival); and more quietly, as befits the man himself, producer Michael Codron has also celebrated his 80th birthday (and marked it with the publication of a brilliant book, co-written with director Alan Strachan, about his career as a promoter of new plays in the West End).

Codron is obviously still with us, but the era of promoting new plays and playwrights in the West End that he exemplified has largely passed, with that duty now almost exclusively the preserve of the subsidised sector; the new plays that make it into the West End nowadays only arrive there after prior validation at the National, Royal Court or Donmar first (with the odd wild card of a place like Theatre 503 thrown in).

The first couple of weeks of December are invariably the busiest time of the theatrical year, at least in terms of how concentrated the openings are all over the country. That’s of course because everyone opens their Christmas shows more or less at the same time; there’s only a narrow window in which to make the deadline.

The last fortnight duly saw 39 shows listed in Theatre Record’s listings of future London openings, and 37 regional openings for which first nights were posted (but doesn’t include every single panto in the land).

Veteran New York theatre critic John Simon, now 85, was recently “let go” from Bloomberg News, just as he was “retired” before that from New York magazine, but has refused to go quietly on either occasion, and has made it clear each time that he is still available for work. Adam Feldman has just reported on his Time Out New York blog that he has duly found a new job writing weekly theater reviews for the online Yonkers Tribune and the print-and-online Westchester Guardian, as well as launching a personal blog.

Some critics just won’t go quietly into the night. As Adam Feldman also wrote when he was let go from Bloomberg, “John Simon means never having to say you’re sorry.”

There was a time when the first night really was the first night: critics would see a new show the moment it was unveiled to the public. It’s still, in fact, that way with most opera and ballet runs; there may be a free invited dress rehearsal beforehand so at least the creative team can see an audience reaction before they put it in front of a paying and critical one; but the show has to be ready to be judged right at the beginning of its life.

Nowadays, though, it has become standard for theatre productions to open to paid previews ahead of the official openings, some days if not weeks later. When I went to the first performance of Spider-man - Turn off the Dark on Broadway a couple of Sundays ago, the show was palpably unready; the producer even took to the stage beforehand to warn us that it might have to be stopped as it went, and he was right.

No, I’m not going to sing the praises, at least not today, of the unsung heroes of the theatre that help to make the magic happen - from follow-spot operators to ASMs, from wardrobe to front-of-house staff - who don’t take a nightly bow but for whom the work is its own reward.

In fact, I want to applaud the unsung heroes of The Stage, the publication that this blog is part of; we journalists at least get the reward of seeing our by-lines in print, but there’s a whole army of people behind the print whose job it is to make sure it appears.

The Stage is currently running a poll to determine the public’s choice of who is deemed to be Britain’s greatest stage actor, from a list compiled by polling an expert panel that included yours truly. The shortlist this produced is, needless to say, a highly subjective list, based on both the taste and experience of a wide range of people, but it’s still a useful exercise, as it made each of us think about the qualities that produce who we think of as great actors, and not merely good ones.

I have also written the essay in the current issue of The Stage promoting the talents of Mark Rylance, whom I single out for his “extra dimension of unpredictability” and his ability to seem to be a “complete chameleon”, changing physically as well as emotionally from role to role.

Tonight Howard Goodall and Stephen Clark’s Love Story transfers to open officially at the Duchess Theatre, after being premiered at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre in the summer, and however it is welcomed - and I hope it is - it’s also a distressingly rare event: the appearance of an original British-written musical in the West End. (It is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the first musical that Goodall has had in the West End for some 23 years). The only other British musical to have opened there this year, of course, is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies.

We’ve also had a West End try-out of the American-written Flashdance, and the imports of Legally Blonde and Fela!, but though the latter may have music that is unfamiliar to those outside the World music repertoire, it is in fact just another Jersey Boys, a jukebox compilation of a composer’s career to illustrate a show about his life.

We’re in the protracted awards season over here again that kicked off with last Sunday’s Evening Standard Theatre Awards. I managed to miss them, as I was in New York last weekend again; but before I went on Friday evening, I went that lunchtime to an even more significant gathering of the theatrical great and good: Drury Lane’s Grand Salon bar was the scene for the retirement party of Richard Pulford, the indefatigable, charming chief executive of SOLT/TMA, around whose eyes there always seems to play an air of mischief but never indiscretion.

What was abundantly clear from the gathering was not just the universal affection and respect he has commanded in this most sensitive of posts, but also his clever marshalling of an often divided theatrical community who he manages to bring together with such masterful tact.

No, that’s not my review of Love Never Dies, but a quotation from Glenn Slater’s lyrics in which Madame Giry introduced Coney Island in the show’s original prologue scene. One of the problems, though, was that it wasn’t really clear why we were there at all; and seeing the show last night again in the revamped version that started performances last Friday, it was good to see that this song, which instead of successfully setting the new scene as intended merely confused audiences, has been moved so that it no longer opens the show.

Instead, the decision has been wisely taken to open with the characters we have, after all, come back to see the future progress of: the Phantom is back with us straight away and still pining for Christine, starts the show with his thrilling aria of heartfelt yearning, “Til’ I Hear You Sing Once More”.

The two events are entirely unrelated, I’m sure, but just as the creators of Spider-man - Turn off the Dark will even now be going into overdrive to fix the problems that beset Sunday evening’s disastrous first preview that I was at and reported on here, so I am currently in “pre-hab” myself.

I should explain: when I was in New York on the weekend, a sciatica-like condition I’ve suffered from for the last few years flared up again, and by the time I flew home on Monday I could barely walk. I’m sure that being on a plane for 7 hours didn’t help, of course, but yesterday I was completely wasted, hence no blog entry appearing here. I immediately saw my consultant at the hospital yesterday on my return, and am now moving forward to the next stage of my treatment which will involve surgery in a fortnight’s time.