June 2011 Archives

Gay marriage was finally legalised last week in New York, though arguably there’s unlikely to be a gayer wedding than the one that already took place some years ago between Liza Minnelli and David Gest. (Unless, of course, Lady Gaga married George Michael…)

It was during the Gest years that Liza last appeared at the Royal Albert Hall in 2002 in one of her now seemingly regular rehabilitations, returning to the stage in Liza’s Back after a serious case of viral encephalitis had threatened to leave her wheelchair bound. On that occasion, she was a bloated version of her former self, but at least she was on her feet, sort of, and with Gest egging her on from the front stalls — you could almost see him pulling the strings — she made it through a sometimes uncertain set.

What’s the difference between a tweet, a blog, a review and a feature — and which one does an embargo apply to? I’ve been exploring the changing dynamics of the interactions between the theatre and the reviewing/reporting media, whether by professional paid writers or by unpaid
 enthusiasts, for some time now, and just yesterday was writing about how press releases now routinely follow the news, rather than actually break it, since Twitter so often gets there first.



I’ve also previously pointed out another obvious fact: that 
bloggers (and bulletin board posters) also don’t have to wait for an officially 
sanctioned date for when reviews can appear, since of course they buy their
 tickets and so don’t have to wait for the official first night. But the
 distinctions are starting to blur, and even collapse.

No job is forever (unlike herpes); but when you lose your job, you hope to hear it from your boss, not from reading the papers or Twitter. But that is precisely what happened to the company of Love Never Dies, when Baz Bamigboye recently confirmed in the Daily Mail what had been the subject of feverish speculation for a few weeks beforehand, that the show was closing and was being replaced at the Adelphi Theatre by a West End transfer for the National’s One Man, Two Guvnors. The company duly took to Twitter to express their dismay.

By contrast, the company of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, also co-produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Company, have been given ample notice, though not yet a specific date, that the show is likely to leave the Palace Theatre by the end of the year. And once again, members of the company promptly revealed as much on Twitter in turn.

I got back from Las Vegas yesterday after a trip that ended on a high — not, alas, a high-roller high (in seven trips there now, I am yet to gamble), nor even on that rollercoaster that passes above and through the New York, New York casino (which I am also yet to do). Instead, we took a helicopter flight into the Grand Canyon on Friday late afternoon — and landed at the base of it, near the Colorado River, for a quick champagne (or in my case, Diet Pepsi) snack before flying back as the lights came on over the city.

That meant that we didn’t see a show on Friday at all, before we took another, much longer flight home on Saturday night, landing yesterday at 10.30am. And of course, me being me, last night at 6pm I was already in a theatre, namely Holborn’s Cochrane for the fourth annual Tim Williams Award for new musical writing, featuring songs written to classical and established texts not originally intended to be sung.

For a capital of sin and sex, Las Vegas is surprisingly tame in the erotic department when it comes to stage representations of male and female sexuality. On the one hand, it is so prevalent that even Cirque du Soleil have a more ‘sensual’ show, as they euphemistically bill it, called Zumanity; and of course there are other revues for the boys (Crazy Girls, Fantasy, Crazy Horse Paris, The Viper Vixens, ‘X’ Burlesque) and the girls (The Chippendales, Men of ‘X’, Thunder from Down Under).

On a previous trip to Vegas, I found myself and a group of four other male friends at the Chippendales, courtesy of their Broadway press agents, and we were the only men in the room with our trousers on.

The thermometer is due to hit nearly 43C (108F) again today here in Las Vegas, as it did yesterday; even at midnight last night it was still nearly 35C (94F). So lying beside the hotel pool, as I did yesterday and plan to do again today, doesn’t exactly offer respite (though regular plunges into it do help); but the coolest show in town, of course, is Cirque du Soleil’s O, surely their signature show here and arguably their most distinctive and distinguished.

This is the one set in and above a giant lake that occupies the stage, constantly changing levels sand occasionally spraying a fine mist over the audience. That’s one of the unexpected bonuses on a very hot night, but actually this is the show that is refreshing in all sorts of other ways, too, reaching both physical and emotional depths (and heights) that few others do.

Call me old-fashioned, but I usually prefer to watch the show on the stage uninterrupted by distractions from my fellow audience members. But increasingly it seems - everywhere from the grand opera house to the most intimate cabaret room - it seems one has to do battle with fellow audience members.

Just last week the Daily Telegraph’s Mandrake column reported that David Mellor - former Tory Minister turned opera critic for the Mail on Sunday - has been seen remonstrating with an audience member at the Royal Opera House at a performance of Tosca.

From humble beginnings as Canadian street performers in the early 80s, Cirque du Soleil has become a global entertainment phenomenon - one that, according to a recent feature in the New York Times, will likely post revenues for next year of over $1billion for the first time, including ticket prices and the inevitable merchandise.

They now have some twenty shows playing across the globe that, say the New York Times, “annually sell about as many tickets as all Broadway shows combined.” That makes them surely the biggest single producer of live entertainment globally, but though their touring schedule includes an annual residency at the Royal Albert Hall and they have also recently begun previews on a new show Zarkana that it is also hoped will lead to an annual residency at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, there’s still more to achieve.

I first visited San Francisco in the mid-eighties, long before I became addicted to Armistead Maupin’s amazing, now eight-book, chronicle of a set of San Franciscan lives in his Tales of the City series.

The books map an emotional landscape of a ragbag collection of fictionalised local residents against a mostly realistic geographical one that beautifully bring the city and its people to life. (I say “mostly” realistic, because 28 Barbary Lane - Mrs Madrigal’s boarding house that provides a focal point to the proceedings - doesn’t actually exist, but the thoroughfare is said to be based on Macondray Lane that leads up from Taylor Street on Russian Hill, and I went in search of on Saturday but didn’t actually find, exhausted by climbing too many hills and too many stairs before I got there! But I went back yesterday afternoon and actually found it).

I can hear the gloating already from the mad “Love Should Die” lobby of Love Never Dies detractors, who have run their disgraceful campaign of intimidation and aggravation, lies and deceit, around the show since before it even opened. But now they are finally getting their wish with the announcement, sort of, today of the closure of the West End version on August 27.

I’ve had a troubled relationship myself with this troubled show, but at least I have seen it - several times - and am qualified to not only report on what I’ve seen as a result, but have also been able to document the serious work that has gone into it along the way.

While theatre is necessarily ephemeral, vanishing into the night the moment the curtain comes down, at least musicals can leave one part of themselves behind: the score can be released both as sheet music and as an original cast album. But the means of distributing both of them have changed so much in the last decade that it is an industry under severe threat.

As with every other branch of the recording industry, the free sharing of digital copies has meant that revenue streams for those that actually publish and produce these permanent records are vanishing.

There isn’t a Broadway show in the modern repertoire quite as audacious or more quietly overwhelming than Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s Follies, but neither is there a more seriously difficult to show to pull off. It’s as demanding of concept as it is of its casting.

Here’s a show that exists in exquisite tension between the present-day reality of a theatre that is about to be torn down and an evocation of the theatre’s past as a troupe of former dancers and singers who once performed there are reunited. It all acts a metaphor for their imploding relationships, as their past, present and possibly future lives are put under the spotlight in every sense.

A few weeks ago Ken Davenport - industry insider blogger and Broadway producer whose next big show is a revival of Godspell heading to the Circle in the Square in October - wrote a fascinating blog about when Broadway is at its lowest ebb in terms of average weekly box office grosses.

And he discovered, by analysing the weekly box office data over the last ten years, that one of the worst times of the year for Broadway is when it is at its peak in terms of productivity: the third week of April, the last week of April and the first week of May.

At last night’s 65th Tony Awards celebrating the best of the year’s theatre on Broadway - as well as some of its worst, with constant references to the problem-plagued Spider-man - Turn off the Dark that finally officially opens tomorrow - Broadway sent itself up rotten. In an outrageous opening number performed by gay host Neil Patrick Harris, he sang that Broadway is not just for gays anymore.

The song went on, “It’s not just for gays, the gays and the Jews
And cousins in from out of town you have to amuse.
And the sad, embittered malcontents who write the reviews.”

All human life is in the theatre (and my life is all theatre). It therefore comes with a lot of history: of itself, of my own experiences in it, and of the world in general. I am constantly learning and expanding what I know about thanks to the plays I see. But if my mind is constantly travelling, so is my body; and theatre again holds the key.

I go wherever the theatre takes me. Tomorrow I’m off once again, travelling to New York for the weekend that includes the press performances, at last, for Spider-man - Turn off the Dark ahead of next Tuesday’s final official opening (watch this space!). The weekend also culminates, of course, in this Sunday’s Tony Awards (and this year I’ll be watching them with friends at a party we’re holding, rather than subjecting myself to the horrible scrum of the theatre show); before I head on to Washington DC for a new production of Sondheim’s Follies, then San Francisco for the Scissors Sisters scored new musical version of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, then Las Vegas.

I really must stop reading reviews (and I know that it’s inevitably true that some think that some critics should also stop writing them, too, which I’ll come to in a minute). I missed last week’s opening of the West End edition of Much Ado About Nothing, as I was on a stage myself last week hosting a season of interviews with leading theatre personalities on behalf of the Theatrical Guild (which was founded in 1891 by Mrs Charles Carson, whose husband was the founding editor of The Stage, thus providing a neat link and proving that this publication’s theatrical roots run deep and philanthropically).

So I found out what it was like not through my own fresh first night eyes, but the way the majority of our readers do: second hand, through the reports of my colleagues on the daily and Sunday papers.

It’s the fate of playwrights to fall out of fashion during their lifetimes, but sometimes happily find themselves rediscovered again. Just tonight Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup with Barley returns to the Royal Court more than half a century after it was first seen there, and at the end of August The Kitchen will also be revived at the National.

Of course Wesker would probably prefer that some of his vast trove of unproduced plays were being staged instead in either place, but at least his place in theatrical posterity is assured, even if he never achieved true prosperity as a playwright. And he’s still here to see it.

Over the years we seem to have found out quite a lot about Rupert Everett’s pubic region. He is currently appearing at the Garrick Theatre in Pygmalion, but the last time he appeared there — some 22 years ago in The Vortex — a member of the public who complained about audibility problems with his performance was rewarded with a letter enclosing a lock of his pubic hair in return.

And in an interview in yesterday’s Sunday Times with Camilla Long, we learnt something more of the current state of his pubic hair, in which she writes: “He started to calm down a few years ago. He made a disastrous film with Madonna that put an end to all the Hollywood nonsense but was nevertheless so traumatic that his pubic hair turned white”. But he sets the record straight: “Actually, that was a lie. I got my first white hair when the reviews came out.”

The other day Libby Purves — celebrating her first anniversary in the hot seat as chief theatre critic of The Times after Benedict Nightingale’s retirement — wrote a piece in which she listed ten things she’d learnt as a theatre critic, such as the fact that anything written in pitch darkness is illegible (but the act of writing fixes things in your mind). I could have told her that before she began, but it’s the sort of thing you need to find out for yourself to actually believe it.

But it was her first entry that is even more obvious once you’re on the inside track, and difficult for those outside to really understand. “There are more opening nights, and more theatres, than you would believe possible.” She went on to point out that there are “twenty or thirty reviewing possibilities every week across the country”, and trying to keep “an accurate list is like wrestling an impulsive and garrulous giant octopus.”

Talking to the veteran West End producer Michael Codron last night, as part of the These Are A Few Of My Favourite Songs season that I am hosting at Jermyn Street Theatre this week, I was reminded of another age: one where a producer could premiere new plays by Tom Stopppard and Alan Ayckbourn, Michael Frayn and Simon Gray, Christopher Hampton and Ronald Harwood directly into the West End.



Codron produced his first play in 1956 and — in defiance of conventional practice — did a reverse transfer with it, moving it after its Shaftesbury Avenue run at the Lyric to the Lyric Hammersmith. It’s perhaps no coincidence that his emergence as a producer coincided with a burst of energy in new writing that was crystallized, and made iconic in theatrical legend by, the success of Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court in the same year.

My guest last night as part of the These Are A Few of My Favourite Songs season that I’m hosting at Jermyn Street Theatre this week was Bill Kenwright — probably the most prolific theatre producer in the world — and tonight it’s the turn of arguably the most venerable, Michael Codron.

Both are producers of the old school; though Bill has lately partnered on occasion with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Howard Panter, and Codron has sometimes been joined by Lee Dean, they have, through most of their careers, gone it alone, quietly working behind-the-scenes to make their shows happen.