April 2011 Archives

No sooner did I get land from New York on Tuesday morning at 7am than by lunchtime I was on the road again, driving to Stratford-upon-Avon where, as I reported here yesterday I was seeing the first new production in the overhauled, reconfigured Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

And then I stayed overnight so that I could also see the re-opening last night of the Swan Theatre, too, itself originally launched in 1986 with Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s collaboration on The Two Noble Kinsmen and now, 25 years later, hosting a theatrical rehabilitation all of its own not so much on a theatre (which has only been re-seated, not rebuilt) but on an entire play.

The new Stratford main house of the Royal Shakespeare Company, built within the shell of the old “jam factory” of Elisabeth Scott’s 1932 building that had itself replaced the original 1879 theatre, finally saw the premiere last night of the first production to be created there, with Michael Boyd directing Macbeth.

Although reports of colleagues who re-visited King Lear and Romeo and Juliet when those two productions opened the reconfigured Royal Shakespeare Theatre last month were good - “It works,” declared Michael Billington in The Guardian - there’s nothing like seeing it for yourself, and seeing a production that has been created for it.

There are currently 38 productions playing on Broadway (though one of them, Spider-man - Turn off the Dark, is on a temporary hiatus as it has gone back into rehearsal after five months of preview performances, prior to being re-launched and previewing again, prior to a possible official opening, at last, in mid-June). While there’s an inevitable clutch of long-runners (The Phantom of the Opera, The Lion King, Chicago, Jersey Boys, Mamma Mia!, Wicked etc), the majority of the productions now playing are new to this 2010/11 season: some 23 in all. (Until yesterday, there was a 24th, but the tidal wave of March/April openings claimed its first casualty with the closure of High, a new play starring Kathleen Turner, that opened last Tuesday but hasn’t survived the week of its opening).

And of those 23 new shows have opened (or at least begun performances, since Spider-man is yet to open) in the 2010/11 season that draws to a close this week with the Thursday night cut-off for eligibility for this year’s Tony Awards, some 20 of them opened in March and April alone.

Oscar Wilde is famously credited with saying “Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language”, and in theatrical terms that though the West End keeps a keen eye on Broadway and vice versa, not every show that’s a hit in one city necessarily replicates that success on Broadway.

You only have to think of Enron or Coram Boy that travelled from London to New York trailing great reviews at home and huge expectations for Broadway, only for both to collapse even before the Tony Awards; and in the other direction, ditto for Spring Awakening and the most recent Broadway revival of Hair (itself being revived on Broadway this summer as a filler at the St James after its current US national tour).

Just yesterday I was writing here about Broadway being overrun by pop music, so perhaps the next step is for Broadway to find another outlet for its wares and work, namely the protected environment of the opera house.

Of course, there’s nothing new to opera companies getting in on the musical act; English National Opera regularly does G&S, which is operetta really, but have also done Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures and (disastrously) the Broadway Borodin musical Kismet. I’ve also seen Sweeney Todd everywhere from the West End and the fringe to the Royal Opera House and New York City Opera (NYCO) at Lincoln Center, and asked if it’s a musical or an opera, Sondheim has replied that if it’s done in an opera house it’s an opera and if it’s done in a theatre it’s a musical. I’ve also seen A Little Night Music at NYCO, too; ditto Candide.

There are currently 23 musicals running on Broadway (though one of them, Spider-Man - Turn off the Dark is actually on hiatus so that it can comprehensively overhauled, and another, American Idiot, closes this coming weekend). And while there are still more shows with original scores than not, over a third of them now feature scores of recycled pop songs, and a further four shows are scored by pop writers crossing over to write musicals.

That’s 12 shows in all, so over half of Broadway’s current musicals have a specific pop pedigree. The tipping point, in other words, has officially arrived, as Broadway not only catches up with pop that long ago usurped it as the dominant provider of popular music, but is now overtaken by it.

I’m in New York this week (hence the late hour, for London at least, of this posting, although its only 8am here!), but I very nearly didn’t get here at all last Friday. I hardly ever take the tube in London, living centrally as I do (though I always take the subway over here), but on Friday morning I made the mistake of trying to get to the airport via the Piccadilly Line.

All was well until we got to Northfields, at which point the train terminated owing to severe signalling problems in the Heathrow area, and we all got booted off the train and left to our own devices to complete our journeys somehow.

As a critic, I like giving praise where praise is due. Nothing pleases me more, in fact, than to be able to be a supporter and a champion of events like last Sunday’s Perfect Pitch celebration of something very close to my heart, namely British musicals and the talents that both write them and perform them, as I duly did here.

But it’s also my job to stir it up from time to time, too, to be a voice of conscience (or at least of my own) about things that matter, whether to consumers of theatre, reporters of it or makers of it. We’re all in this together, on both sides of the footlights - and indeed what happens on the other side of the footlights (not to mention the account books) matters very much as to whether I will ultimately have anything to write about, let alone enjoy as an audience member, both now and in the future.

Just last Friday I wrote a blog here about my own experiences of working on the fringe last year, and no sooner was it posted than the news emerged of the offending theatre’s total shutdown, following a health and safety inspection from the local council that revealed that not only was the venue operating without a proper licence but was so ill-equipped to get one that there was no alternative but to close down immediately.

Of course, scruffy, ad hoc conditions are often de rigueur on the fringes of the fringe, as is operating on a wing and a prayer. But passion and commitment on the part of an artistic team count for nothing if the administrative nuts and bolts are not attended to, and it would seem that the most basic requirements to operate legally were ignored here.

Just yesterday I was blogging here about the village-like life of the West End, and had an interesting response suggesting that in making the comparison I took a rose-coloured portrait of the real village life the commentator had been brought up in. “There were huge interrelations - I still couldn’t tell you how I was related to half the people I was supposed to call auntie because we were related (as against auntie because she was an adult). There were also huge rivalries some permanent, some temporary. Most of the time half the village wasn’t talking to the other half and no-one would have hesitated to blacken the name of their temporary or permanent enemy.”

Actually, both those points sound just like the West End. There are huge interrelations and cross-breeding in the theatre, too, as witness the generations of the same family all working there, whether it be acting dynasties from the inevitable Redgraves to the Wests (Timothy’s dad was an actor, too, and now so is Tim’s son Sam), or directors following in their father’s footsteps, whether it be Edward Hall or Dominic Dromgoole.

The West End, it’s always famously said, is a small village; and the villagers can’t help talking to each other. So it’s impossible to keep a lid on gossip doing the rounds, and that’s been accentuated in the age of Twitter, which is really just a channel for gossip to go viral.

Only the other day I wrote here about how quickly the news spread about the intended closure of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and quoted Michael Coveney commenting how “the news pre-empted a producer’s announcement thanks to an actor’s tweeting and was gleefully seized upon by bloggers and tweeters who regard ‘joining the conversation’ as a substitute for checking facts and abiding by proper journalistic practice.”

British musical theatre - or at least musical theatre originated in Britain, which is a slightly different thing - dominated the genre in the 80s, thanks largely to two men: Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh, whether working together (Cats, Song and Dance, The Phantom of the Opera), or separately (Les Miserables and Miss Saigon for Mackintosh, Starlight Express and Aspects of Love for Lloyd Webber), all of whose shows went to Broadway.

But though both men have continued to work prolifically in the two decades since, neither have really matched that run. Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard and The Woman in White may have both transferred to Broadway, but were not the big successes of their predecessors, while Whistle Down the Wind was aborted after its Washington DC try-out over there before being revamped here, Beautiful Game didn’t travel at all, and Love Never Dies, of course, more recently cancelled its projected transfer that was booked in for last November, though it may yet get there in a revamped version, either by way of its imminent Australian production or a planned Toronto staging.

The other day I wrote a blog here in which I mentioned that when I produced a play on the fringe last year, I “made sure that my actors, at least, were paid a proper weekly salary, which I raised via sponsorship instead of the box office.” I was immediately challenged on Twitter by a comment that was later posted on the blog as well, asking me, “It concerns me you mention your ‘actors at least’ got paid. Do technicians and creatives not deserve a decent wage too?”

It was a very valid point, and I have to admit it pulled me up short. Not that I’d not thought of it before, or indeed at the time, but the fact of the matter is that the show would have been impossible to put on, at least where we were putting it on, if everyone had to be salaried. Instead, we relied on the usual fringe model for the rest of us which operates as a trade-off of labour for experience, and the (usually illusory) notion of profit share.

Thank God theatre is still a major talking point, or I wouldn’t be here writing this blog; but can there be more chit chat around than is good for us? Just the other day, I blogged here about the news of the closing notices being posted for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg had spread over the weekend on Twitter (via the postings there of cast members who had been informed on Friday night).

Michael Coveney replied on his own blog the next day, “The news pre-empted a producer’s announcement thanks to an actor’s tweeting and was gleefully seized upon by bloggers and tweeters who regard ‘joining the conversation’ as a substitute for checking facts and abiding by proper journalistic practice.”

There’s no performer quite like Michael Feinstein: he’s made it his life’s mission to preserve, promote and perform the Great American Songbook, and in the process has simultaneously become its leading custodian as well as a major exponent of it, too.

Feinstein, who began his career in piano bars and as a behind-the-scenes archivist to Ira Gershwin, has managed a journey from secretary to the stars to become a star in his own right, who has appeared everywhere from cabaret boîtes like the Algonquin and the founding of a cabaret club in his own name on Madison Avenue, to Carnegie Hall and several solo Broadway seasons. (Last year, however, he teamed up with arguably the world’s most successful living solo performer Barry Humphries for a show on Broadway that quickly tanked.)

I always like to add to my collection of venues visited. Although my parents have lived in the Wembley/Harrow area for exactly 32 years now - and I lived there myself for part of that time, including buying my first flat in the shadow of (the original) Wembley Stadium back in the day - I have never, until last night, managed to visit the Harrow Arts Centre.

This imposing former school building has seen its beautiful main hall been rather perfunctorily turned into a large 400-seater theatre, while rooms elsewhere are pressed into use for various classes, workshops and other community activities. And it is here, somewhat incongruously, that Birmingham Rep’s annual small-scale studio touring show was playing a single date last night, hence my visit.

In the age of Twitter and Facebook, there are no secrets anymore; news spreads like wildfire, and on Friday night the internet - or rather a tiny corner of it - was ablaze with the news that the cast of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg had been told that their show was being given notice, with a closure date set for May 21. How did we know? Some members of the cast tweeted it, that’s how.

But that’s not the only thing that’s unusual about this news, or the method of its rapid distribution. It’s also an unusually long lead time; producers are merely obliged to give two weeks’ notice to their employees of their intention to close a show, and indeed that stated date could therefore change in the coming weeks. If the producers choose to, they could invoke a two-week notice period and bring the closure forward. But presumably the hope is that, by announcing the closure early, they can rally support for the remaining weeks of the run so that the show sprints rather than limps to the finishing post and starts to recoup some of its losses.

My bookshelves are, inevitably, full of books celebrating the theatre’s successes; but I have one shelf dedicated to one of my favourite subjects: books about theatrical flops. One of the most irresistible books of backstage disaster was written by James Kirkwood, the playwright best known for co-writing the book to A Chorus Line, about touring his play Legends across America; called “Diary of a Mad Playwright: Perilous Adventures on the Road with Mary Martin and Carol Channing” that is simply hilarious and devastating, all at the same time.

No less horribly compelling - especially for their merciless self-revelation - are the series of books that Simon Gray wrote about getting his plays to the stage, including ones on the failure of the original production of The Late Middle Classes to reach the West End at all and the sudden defection of Stephen Fry from Cell Mates soon after the reviews appeared that brought that run to a premature end, too.