February 2011 Archives

Last night, of course, was the night of the glitziest of all entertainment awards ceremonies, namely the Oscars, with a British film The King’s Speech sweeping the boards but which ironically might have once trod them: it was born as an unproduced play, an early reading of which was given at North London’s fringe Pleasance Theatre. And yesterday, too, saw the birth of a rather more informal but possibly no less significant ceremony, the Offies, celebrating work at venues like the Pleasance (though it wasn’t itself shortlisted for any awards, alas).

I should declare an interest straight away: I was part of the Critics’ judging panel that decided the winners, alongside my colleagues Matt Wolf, Ian Shuttleworth, Roger Foss, Dominic Cavendish, Daisy Bowie-Sell and The Stage’s own Paul Vale. But although we made the final decisions, we were part of a diligent process that had been put in place to ensure that as many productions as possible were considered for eligibility.

Last night Ruby Wax opened her new show Losing It at the Menier Chocolate Factory, which I in fact saw last weekend as I was in Sheffield yesterday for two of their three play David Hare season. Both Wax and Hare deserve a blog each, but my reviews of all three shows will be posted here on The Stage website later today, so I’ll let those speak for their work, and meanwhile speak for myself here.

Of course it is always impossible when assessing any theatrical work to take yourself out of the picture entirely - there’s no such thing as total objectivity when it comes to reviewing, and indeed it is part of the pleasure of reading critics that we often come to discover something about themselves as part of what has coloured their response.

I think nothing, of course, of seeing the same production more than once, as regular readers of this blog will know: I saw Next to Normal, for instance, nine times on Broadway in all. That made me, quipped one wag, an investor rather than a critic, as I bought my tickets more than they were given to me.

But in that case I found a particular affinity and resonance with the show that meant that it spoke to me; I went partly for the pleasure of a beautiful piece of theatre, but also for the pain of what it dealt with. (As it happens, Ruby Wax visits similar territory in her new autobiographical Losing It, accompanied with songs by Judith Owen, that opens at the Menier Chocolate Factory tonight; I went in early to see that last weekend, and my review will be appearing on The Stage website tomorrow).

Everyone likes a pat on the back; no wonder there’s a proliferation of award shows. There’s a ceremony for everything, from this Sunday’s Oscars to the British Soap Awards. (There’s even a ceremony called the Hookies in New York, which honours those who do good service, in every sense, in the gay male escort industry).

That London is more or less taken for granted as the world centre of English speaking theatre means that those who work in it are similarly taken for granted, and we’ve never really stepped up to the mark on the Awards front as we come to honour them.

One of the pre-requisites of being a writer is a facility with words and being able to spell them, although in these autocorrect and predictive text days, the latter isn’t presumably as essential as it once was. I won’t tell you what word I was trying to type into my iPhone the other day, but it came up with the far more polite “Cynthia”; all I’ll say is that there are a lot of Cynthias around.

My colleague Henry Hitchings from the Evening Standard isn’t, I hasten to add, a Cynthia, but an altogether good guy. He lives more or less across the street from me (his flat is actually above the gym I go to, though he doesn’t), so I frequently give him lifts home after visits to far-flung places (Islington, Hampstead, Hammersmith, that kind of thing).

And last night he proved himself to be an altogether good sport, too, when he was conscripted into appearing onstage for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee to appear as part of a spelling competition.

Theatre critics partly have our diaries dictated for us; there’s a certain hierarchy to the openings (not to mention to the critics, but that’s another story). We never miss anything at the National, for instance, and will turn out en masse for anything at the Donmar.

But beyond that, there’s also a certain amount of freedom, especially if, like me, you are writing for a Sunday paper. While the dailies may spread the load between lead and deputy critics, and publish more reviews overall as a result, there’s no expectation that Sunday critics will be able to see or include everything, though God knows I sometimes try!

At the world premiere last night of Anna Nicole, a new opera commissioned by the Royal Opera from composer Mark-Anthony Turnage with a libretto by Richard Thomas, the massed chorus sing early on, “It’s an original story so you won’t be bored”.

But even if they were tempting providence by providing a review in advance of us actually seeing it, they were in fact dead right; it was quite thrilling to sit in this hallowed hall watching this musical biography of the late, former lapdancer and Playboy centrefold model Anna Nicole Smith, who famously married a rich man of 89, some 62 years her senior, had a massive legal battle with his family over his fortune when he died without leaving a will, lost her adult son when he died of a drug overdose in her bed, and subsequently died herself, aged just 39, also of a drugs overdose.

One of my favourite features in the Sunday Times every week - and yes, I still buy a copy, even though I also pay to get behind The Times paywall online - is the “Life in the Day” column at the back of the magazine, where you find out how people, famous or not, spend a typical day; though I sometimes suspect that some choose an atypical day, since no one can live as full a life as some of them seem to.

But then yesterday I had a day full of life that sometimes feels typical for me, though truthfully things like this don’t happen every day. It started with me finding I’d been quoted in Michael Riedel’s New York Post column: normally I’m the one quoting him, so this made a change, but he was talking up the Broadway prospects for the current West End production of The Children’s Hour, and highlighted a line from my review in which I called it “commercial theatre not just at its most pricey but also best.” And Riedel goes on to point out that, “With a top ticket price of nearly $140, The Children’s Hour is the priciest nonmusical in West End history.”

Julia McKenzie has a big birthday tomorrow; according to her entry on Wikipedia, she’ll be 70. It’s difficult to believe — not that she’s done a Felicity Kendal and is all nips, tucks and frozen features, as she hasn’t at all but is full of natural lines that are far, far more beautiful - but because she has a wonderfully youthful, forever modest, yet motherly spirit.

For those of us who love Sondheim, she is one of our patron saints - not just that she’s a patron, in fact, of the Stephen Sondheim Society (which, in an earlier life, I co-founded), but because she has been so closely associated with his work in this country.

In the West End and on Broadway, shows come and go (though some, of course, stay far too long, it’s a relief to hear yesterday’s news that Dirty Dancing is at last vacating the Aldwych). But the theatres they are in usually stay, in various states of (dis)repair.

Just last night the new West End hit production of The Children’s Hour had to dramatically cancel its performance due to what were called “emergency building repairs.” No one is saying specifically what these are, though one report suggested it was believed to be “structural” to do with the area above the stage rather than the auditorium, but they must be pretty serious to have had to cancel what is now London’s single most expensive night out for a play, as I was writing here only last week. Perhaps they’ll be forced to spend some of the money they are taking on the theatre itself now.

We now have a dedicated fringe opera house, with the re-branding of the King’s Head as “London’s Little Opera House”, whose in-house OperaUpClose company will be fighting it out with the big boys of ENO and the Royal Opera House for Best New Opera Production at this year’s Olivier Awards. Its Olivier nominated version of La Boheme, which originated at the Cock Tavern two Christmases ago, is currently on its second Soho Theatre run, and will subsequently join the rep at the King’s Head.

But since the demise some years back of the Bridewell Theatre Company, we still don’t have a single fringe theatre dedicated to musical theatre. There is no theatre in the country, in fact, dedicated to the promotion and development of new musicals; even the National, which has in the past few years only imported a couple of existing Broadway hits in Caroline, or Change and Fela!, hasn’t done any, though it is promising to make good next year with a new show that it has developed with a score by Tori Amos.

Theatre is, by its nature, happily unrepeatable: no two performances are ever utterly alike. Productions may travel along established grooves, but minor, or maybe even major, adjustments happen every night: even poor, doomed Spider-man, Turn off the Dark on Broadway, now an international joke, manages to break down in different places all the time.

So reviewing, too, is inevitably a snapshot of a particular performance on a particular night, and a snapshot, too, of the combination of the energy the audience brings to the piece - including yourself - as well as that fired up by the actors.

A new record was set last night for the regular “top” price for a play in the West End, with the opening of The Children’s Hour at the Comedy Theatre which has, at a stroke, moved the threshold up from around £50 to a stonking £60, which is fast approaching, if not even in some cases exceeding, a big West End musical. And that’s before you even factor in the promotion of so-called “premium” seats, being sold at £85.

I’ve railed against the latter previously here, especially since when The Children’s Hour was first announced and it looked like the vast majority of the stalls seating had been designated as “premium”, with only a scattering of seats on the fringes of the stalls (extreme sides, back and front) at the “regular” price. Then, a couple of weeks later, a mysterious change occurred: the premium seats (originally marketed at £75) were suddenly reduced in number, but upped further in price (to £85).

After last year’s interminable Laurence Olivier Awards ceremony, held in the vast basement chamber of Park Lane’s untheatrical and also curiously unglamorous Grosvenor House ballroom, I wrote in the pages of The Stage that they “go on forever; so long, in fact, that you’d be excused for thinking that Trevor Nunn was directing operations.”

As I went on to describe, I was there for nearly six hours. “The ceremony itself - wedged on either side of a swiftly-served fish supper in between - trundled on endlessly through some 25 categories, plus 2 special awards tagged on at the end, so no wonder that by the time Maggie Smith stepped forward to receive her richly deserved lifetime achievement award, she kept it short, saying, ‘You must be very tired’. She was speaking for all of us by then. By contrast, when I hosted this year’s Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards, they were despatched in little over an hour.”

And I vowed not to waste another night of my life attending the event in person until the whole thing was overhauled.

I’m not making this up: after landing (mercifully ahead of schedule, at 7.28pm last night after taking off from New York’s Newart airport at 8.11am local time yesterday morning), I turned on my mobile phone as we reached the gate to check for messages, and it rang even before I got off the plane. BBC Radio 4 wanted to do a report on Spider-Man - Turn off the Dark for their nightly news programme, the World Tonight, and wondered if I was available to come in?

I’m no Spider-man myself, so couldn’t exactly fly there, though my progress through Heathrow was fortunately expedited thanks to the fact that I did not have to queue for an hour and a half to clear immigration, as I had done at JFK only four days before, and the fact that I had wisely travelled with hand luggage only. I was at Heathrow’s tube platform just over 20 minutes later, and reached Holborn by 9pm.

I’ve been in New York for the weekend - I flew out on Friday, and am returning today on the day flight, so I’ve really only had two full days here, plus Friday afternoon once I once I finally got out of JFK. I was here for what should have been the press performances for Spider-Man - Turn off the Dark over the weekend, before what should have been tonight’s opening night - but the very day after I booked my non-refundable flight last month, it was postponed yet again, and is now scheduled to open on March 15.

But I decided to come anyway, since I couldn’t change my flight - and there’s been a gathering sense, anyway, that the New York critics are finally losing patience with a production that has been previewing since November 28, selling tickets at full price (and more), to help it overtake Wicked one recent week to the top grossing spot on Broadway, without critical scrutiny.

Critics, as I regularly point out here, often play a different tune to each other, and that’s always a healthy thing: how boring it would be if we all liked the same things. And there wouldn’t be any need for a multiplicity of critics, either: we could simply have one single arbiter of taste and judgement, as the New York Times used to be (to some extent) in New York, but fortunately that grip is slipping.

But every now and then there are productions around which a prevailing wisdom collects, and then - if you’re still banging your own drum when everyone else is playing violins in unison - you can stand out if you do.

Owing to a Tuesday press night clash between the Barbican’s Antonioni Project and the National’s premiere of Greenland, I wasn’t able to go to the latter till last night. Inevitably, it meant I had seen yesterday’s somewhat chilly overnight reviews for it, including three two-star reviews (Libby Purves, Fiona Mountford and Michael Coveney) and one three-star review (Michael Billington).

In the Evening Standard, Mountford was even moved to declare: “This is the sort of punishingly earnest venture that gives the green lobby a bad name. If you’re still awake by the time the animatronic polar bear pitches up, well done.”

It’s easy for a critic to say, I know, not being on the receiving end (for the most part) of criticism but instead the giver of it, but it is, as I am always saying, only one person’s opinion, and there are as many opinions as there are critics. And the more extreme, individual or quirky the work is, the more likely it is to polarise that opinion.

The other day I went to see Mercury Musical Development’s revue Beyond the Gate, a composite show made up of the work of a number of its members at the Gate Theatre. I tweeted quickly after, “Some of Beyond the Gate is gorgeous; one or two bits awful (wonder why they are always Conor Mitchell); & it is staged with simple elegance.”

Regular readers will know how hard it is for me to keep out of the theatre; but sometimes, it seems, the theatre keeps me out…. and not just me, apparently. A few weeks ago, as regular readers will also know, I had a major round of back surgery, and all is - or rather was - happily on the mend… until I went to The Stage’s annual New Year’s party last Friday, where I seem to have overdone it on the standing front, and by the time I limped out of there, realised I’d been standing for three hours solid.

It means that my recovery has been set back as a result, and I’m now in quite a bit of pain again. My brother (who is a vet but basically the same principles apply to humans as to animals) tells me it is most likely an inflammation from overdoing it, so I’m hoping that I recover quickly.