March 2011 Archives

Talk about theatre! (And that’s what we were doing all day yesterday, thanks to Arts Council England’s announcement of who was here to stay, who have been knocked off their funding perches, and who was being newly embraced). There was more drama and tension, of course, between 7.30am and 10am yesterday - the hours when existing and prospective clients amongst the 1,333 who had submitted applications - were told their fate, than in most nights in the theatre.

And then at 10am the formal release went out from the Arts Council - and their website crashed, on cue - and a whole set of new questions and qualifications started forming.

Arts administrators from artistic directors and executive directors to financial officers will be watching their inboxes eagerly this morning: today is when the magic (or nightmare) e-mail will be arriving from their Arts Council England arts officers telling them the outcome of their grant applications. And we know already that there’ll be lots of unhappy people, because it’s a given that there simply isn’t the money to go around to everyone anymore, so hard choices have been made.

It will no doubt provide the theatre world with its own cause célèbre; and meanwhile, of course, Terence Rattigan’s final play - coincidentally called Cause Célèbre -opened last night in a production that wouldn’t have looked out-of-place at the National, with its massive cast of 19 actors.

One of the many reasons for the spread of jukebox musicals - apart from the timidity of theatre producers in putting them on instead of shows with new scores - is that audiences are also attracted to things they already know and love, and if they can go in whistling the tunes - and come out whistling the sets - they feel like they’ve had a good time.

So one of the challenges for a show that is breaking new ground by introducing an all-new score is how to get the audience familiar enough with (some of) it to want to spend their money to hear the rest. Andrew Lloyd Webber early on cottoned onto the concept album idea of releasing an entire score ahead of the production, so that by the time Jesus Christ Superstar, for instance, made it to the stage, it already had a following.

I have been playing catch-up this week on some of what I missed while I was away in Australia, as I mentioned here earlier this week; and amongst other things it has meant seeing matinees three days running.

One was at the National’s Cottesloe, which I always expect to be full anyway, but Ryan Craig’s The Holy Rosenbergs, a play about a North London Jewish family, was guaranteed to speak directly to a particular constituency of the theatre’s core audience. But the amazing thing was that my next two West End matinees - of two wartime classics, written and premiered a year apart in 1941 and 1942 - were also packed.

Critics usually see shows on first nights, when theatres can be both on their best and worst of behaviour: on the one hand, the host (in terms of the theatre owner/landlord, manager and producers) will usually be on hand to meet and greet and generally ensure that operationally, at least, the venue is running properly; on the other, they may not necessarily be able to exercise control over the invited audience who may not exemplify the best of traits in terms of their willingness to take their seats in the first place or stay in them at the end, when there’s a Pavlovian tendency to give everything a standing ovation (even if the show is The Umbrellas of Cherbourg).

So it’s revealing, as I’m doing this week, to go to shows on regular nights (and matinees) when venues and their managers are behaving more normally.

One of the perpetual agonies of going away, of course, is that life isn’t put on hold for you back home: the relentless tide of openings carried on, unabated, without me. So now I’m having to play catch-up, even as yet more new openings keep coming at us. Not that I’m complaining; it is one of the sources of perpetual amazement to my friends who are not in the theatre that there is simply so much to see and that I never run out of possibilities.

Last night I was duly back in the stalls for the first new opening since I got back, for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg at the Gielgud; and with a red carpet crush outside the theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, a little show was nearly drowned by a big opening.

There’s no question that the internet is changing the way we live, love, meet and work forever, and in ways that we do not necessarily fully understand yet. I first met my partner, for instance, online; and it’s where I meet you daily here on this blog (whether or not you actually show up!).

But just as there’s no substitute, in the end, for the live interaction - and is why theatre and live entertainment is actually thriving, not shutting down, in the midst of our increasing reliance on online communication - this means we can talk all we like in bulletin boards, on twitter and in blogs, but there’s also nothing like coming face-to-face to talk about how we got here and where we’re going.

I got back from Australia yesterday morning, landing at 4.55am after a journey of some 24 hours. And last night, a little bit of Oz landed on Broadway, as the stage musical version of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert landed at the Palace Theatre after a journey of some five years since its Australian premiere.

I actually saw that original production on my last trip to Australia in 2007, and stated in my Sunday Express review back then, “In the topsy-turvy world of being Down Under, things are familiar but different. While Priscilla Queen of the Desert - The Musical combines the West End trend for making both jukebox musicals out of old pop hits and adapting hit films for the stage, there’s also a unique Aussie sensibility (and a surprising sensitivity) to it that makes it the best show of its kind since Mamma Mia!”.

Theatre shows famously only exist when the curtain is up in the moment of their playing, even if shows like Wicked and Jersey Boys will look and feel identical whether they’re playing in the West End, on Broadway or respectively Brisbane and Sydney in Australia where I’ve been for the last two weeks.

But while we now live in an increasingly homogenised culture, where there’s a Starbucks on every corner whether you’re walking through the West End or along Circular Quay in Sydney (though in a curious state of affairs, what’s known as Burger King everywhere else is Hungry Jack’s here in Oz), what’s wonderful about the theatre is that shows travel but don’t necessarily always look the same.

No, I’m not in a holding pattern over JFK (yet) that inspired Peter Allen’s Oscar winning words, quoted in today’s blog headline, to the theme tune for the film Arthur, though I’ll soon be airborne again for the long return home from Australia to London this coming weekend (and then four weeks later will indeed be New York bound again).

But last night I was caught in the holding pattern of life itself. While The Wizard of Oz may be London’s latest musical hit, The Boy from Oz, which I saw in a new production in Sydney last night, is something else entirely, but arguably no less camp or iconic.

Neil Simon once wrote a play called 45 Seconds from Broadway, set in the real-life diner of the Edison Hotel on W47th Street (known to those in the know as the Polish tea room, where Broadway folk gather for terrific cold gazpacho and hot gossip, borscht and tears).

But right now I’m 9,935 miles from Broadway, and even if gazpacho isn’t on the menu, a Broadway-bound musical is simmering on the hot plate of producer John Frost (universally known to even those that don’t know him as Frosty), though it hasn’t quite come to the boil yet.

Australia may sometimes seem a little like a much larger Britain (on a continent bigger than North America) transposed to a warmer place and with accordingly warmer people, in every sense, living there. We’ve got a lot in common in terms of cultural references, history and origins; and as a fellow immigrant to Britain from another warm southern hemisphere place (I was born in the likewise heavily British influenced South Africa), I feel very much at home here.

But there’s another reason: for a comparatively small country with a population of less than 22 million, Australians have typically had a disproportionate impact on the arts in London, particularly when it comes to arts administrators and musical theatre performers! Aussies seem to be everywhere in these fields, so I feel like I know lots of them.

It was my own fault, of course, to be on the other side of the world as the Laurence Olivier Awards unfolded at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on Sunday night, but while visiting the Australian capital city of Canberra, I set my alarm for 4.30am on Monday morning so I could tune into the live Radio 2 coverage as it kicked off at 5.30pm back home the previous night.

Strangely cutting between the live ceremony and a press room where Paul Gambaccini held forth interviewing winners after their awards (and other assorted visitors), as well as having Matt Wolf on hand to provide the only expert voice, I had to cross-cut with Twitter myself (where @TheStage was providing rolling coverage to its 15K+ followers) to keep track of who was actually winning.

Bringing Spider-man Turn off the Dark to the Broadway stage was always going to be an ambitious idea, for sure; but if anyone could have turned myth into magic, of course, it was probably Julie Taymor, who had worked previously worked such imaginative wonders in turning a animated cartoon feature The Lion King into something far deeper, richer and utterly three-dimensional.

Comparing and contrasting it with the far flatter, more literal approach that Disney took to theatricalising Beauty and the Beast as their first theatrical venture - and the failure of such subsequent shows like Tarzan and The Little Mermaid to find a comparably exciting theatrical language that The Lion King had done — proved just how remarkable Taymor’s achievement really was.

There’s a lot of motion in the ocean, of course, down here in Melbourne, Australia that I am currently visiting, but there’s no sun in the sky, alas, at least not today or yesterday which are like dull London autumn days.

But there’s plenty of sunshine, at least, onstage at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre, where a vibrant, day-glo (or maybe that should be screen-glo) production of Hairspray is playing, and I saw last night.

What’s interesting about the show is that, while it preserves the Broadway artwork for the logo (and even one of my Sunday Express quotes on the advertising!), it is an entirely new staging of the musical that replaces 3D sets with a series of giant video screens that are kept in perpetual animated motion, turning the show into a live action cartoon show and amplifying the pastiche colours of the piece.

For all his global success - and frankly no composer of musicals of the second half of the 20th century matched it, commercially speaking - Andrew Lloyd Webber routinely inspires as much sneering as praising.

It’s an odd kneejerk reaction, possibly based on the ill-founded belief that nothing that popular can be that good; yet that is also to write off a body of work that has also been truly ground-breaking, like the sung-through oratorio of Jesus Christ Superstar that introduced a punchy new rock sensibility to musical theatre writing, Cats that used dance as a key part of its interpretive vocabulary to musicalise poems by TS Eliot, or The Phantom of the Opera that created a modern pop opera out of a familiar story to become Broadway’s longest-ever running musical.

But with fame comes infamy, too, and the fans can sometimes assert a sense of ownership that makes them feel proprietorial over what they’ve come to love that they feel betrayed when its creator decides to go in a different direction.

Is there a more in-the-moment, zeitgeist-y composer on the Broadway block than Jason Robert Brown? Catching up with him live in concert last night in Sydney, where he is appearing as part of a national tour that is visiting all the major Australian cities this week and into next, I realised that he has provided a touchstone for the last two decades of new musical writing; not because he has had a single stand-out hit, but more particularly because he hasn’t.

Here’s the finest musical dramatist of his generation who is able to write songs that are entire musicals in themselves in the depth of storytelling that they embrace, but he’s not been able to buck the system that Broadway now typically operates under: a disconcerting mix of the over-familiar and under-nourished, where spectacle has usurped content (Spider-man is guilty as charged on all three counts).

I last posted a blog entry here on Thursday morning as I passed through Hong Kong en route to Sydney, where I duly arrived on Friday morning local time, after nearly 24 hours travelling time (a 12 hour flight followed by a 9 hour flight, with a one-hour hold-over between the two; if you add the time getting to Heathrow on the one end and into Sydney from the airport on the other end, I in fact long exceeded 24 hours on the go in transit).

No wonder I wasn’t much inclined to head to the theatre all weekend; after all that time in a metal tube, all you really want to do is find a dark place (that isn’t a theatre) to crawl into and whimper. Fortunately, however, Sydney is so immediately, utterly entrancing, and lit by a flood of natural sunlight, that it actually provides another compelling reason for not wanting to go to the theatre, at least for matinees: it would mean having to go indoors.

I know I said I wouldn’t be blogging again until Monday, but I’m writing this somewhere over Mongolia; I’ve also just written a piece for this Sunday’s Observer that was commissioned about an hour before I left for Heathrow on Wednesday afternoon! That timing wasn’t great, as I thought I’d done terribly well on Wednesday in clearing the decks before I flew.

In order, I had written my usual review column for this weekend’s Sunday Express, that day’s blog entry (admittedly shorter than usual!), written up a big Michael Ball profile for next week’s edition of The Stage, and prepared my script for a session of Theatrevoice that I was hosting at lunchtime on Wednesday, with hospitality kindly provided by the National Theatre in a backstage studio of the Sound Department to record it in. (The usual reviewing panel, which compromises Charlie Spencer, Matt Wolf and David Benedict, with myself as host, were coincidentally covering the NT’s current production of Frankenstein, and Dominic Cavendish, the founding editor of Theatrevoice, was actually in the building, too, seeing the matinee of the same show, so was able to drop in on us and give us the recording equipment).

Last night saw the West End opening of The Wizard of Oz, and a bigger sure-fire hit it is difficult to imagine. There may have been previous stage versions of it, from the RSC’s in 1987 (with Imelda Staunton as Dorothy the first year, and then Gillian Bevan when it came back the next) to Jude Kelly’s rather dismal attempt at the Royal Festival Hall in 2008.

But nothing has ever been attempted like this, namely to give it a fully theatrical dimension that makes it about more than just putting the film onstage. A cinematic element is not entirely lost; there are some things that film can simply do better, and vivid projections are used to summons up the tornado, for instance.

Boundaries are forever being blurred nowadays, anyway, as to what exactly constitutes a review - let alone the protocols of timing under which they are written. Theatre critics are invited, of course, to specific performances, chosen by the management: that’s typically been the official opening night, and the timing is therefore clear; we can review the moment the curtain comes down.

For print journalists, this used to mean, of course, the next day’s papers; nowadays, it means that you can also find some of those reviews online on the websites of those papers before they even appear in print. (I’m not sure what time exactly they are posted, but I’ve found Michael Billington’s Guardian reviews online before now by 2am.)