July 2011 Archives

As regular readers know (but not, it seems, some people looking for coverage here), this blog is usually themed around particular subjects, not a bulletin board for random bits of PR or other examples of so-called journalism. (I leave that to others, like a ‘blog’ series I saw this week that didn’t even take the trouble to write something new but merely re-posted a collection of tweets from a festival). But not every subject needs developing to the length of a full blog entry, though they require more than a tweet, so I’m turning ‘Short shorts’ into a regular Friday series.

Of course it’s the job of PRs and solo producers to gather as much PR momentum as they can, so you can’t blame them for trying anything and everything, but some steps are surely counter-productive. There’s one prolific fringe writer who e-mails journalists regularly — he seems to have a new play opening every few weeks — who earlier this week sent out this message: “I can’t believe that in this day and age of cuts, greed and corporate manipulation, you lot won’t even give my organisation one millimetre of press coverage - let alone the time of day.”

I got a bit ahead of myself just yesterday, posting a tweet about looking forward to seeing the opening of Betwixt last night with “Dompy” (to use her Twitter name), a former West End company manager and now a full-time carer for her ill mother, to celebrate her birthday. Both the ever-vigilant press agent Kevin Wilson and “Dompy” (Deborah de Moll) herself panicked: was I really going last night, since the opening was in fact tonight (and so is her birthday).

But I’d just managed to lose Wednesday entirely and thought it was already Thursday; and it was one of those sorts of days, or at least mornings, you wish you could erase, as I managed to lose a cup of coffee, too, all over the inside entrance wall as I arrived at the office. But I was not the only person getting ahead of myself yesterday, which also marked exactly a year before the Olympics begin.

Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd was born on Broadway in 1979; but it is these days equally at home in an opera house as it is in a theatre. I’ve previously quoted Stephen Sondheim’s response to whether it is a musical or an opera being 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. (He also went on to amplify that with opera audiences generally what matters is the sound, whereas the theatre audience goes for drama. And there was no doubting which side of the fence Sondheim preferred to sit on). 



But do shows need to be defined in particular categories at all? Some shows, in fact, defy them. Fela!, equal parts a kind of jukebox musical revue of the repertoire of Fela Kuti and dance show based around his life, created by modern dance choreographer Bill T Jones, originated on Broadway (after an earlier off-Broadway try-out), but is far from a typical Broadway musical.

We’re in the midst of the festival season, of course, with Edinburgh - the granddaddy of them all — rapidly approaching, and the Manchester International Festival recently ended (and stealing a march on Edinburgh in every sense, but especially in the strength and variety of its theatre commissioning programme). Then there are the year-round theatres that come into their own as producing entities in the summer like Chichester and Bath, who at other times act mainly as receiving houses.

Chichester has, in fact, become arguably the single most important producing theatre in the country outside of London on the strength of its summer season, and yesterday formally launched a festival-within-the-festival as it opened the first two of its productions marking Rattigan’s centenary year.

I did a lot of repeats on the weekend — I saw Rufus Wainwright’s still amazing Rufus Does Judy! concert again at the Royal Opera House on Friday night that I’d previously seen him do at the London Palladium; I saw a mostly new cast of principals in Love Never Dies on Saturday afternoon, before it closes next month; and I re-visited the National’s current smash hit One Man Two Guvnors again on Saturday night, before it goes on tour and then arrives at the West End’s Adelphi Theatre to coincidentally replace Love Never Dies in November.

And apart from the fact that each was for pleasure instead of work, it was interesting to sit amongst “real” audiences instead of press night ones, who were out for entertainment themselves, not purely to pass professional comment or cheer on friends and family.

Last week I experimented with a blog entry based not on a single theme but a collection of short thoughts. And now I’m going to make it a weekly feature to collect up things that may not warrant a blog entry on their own, but together can make one up!

That still doesn’t mean this blog is a bulletin board for random bits of publicity: nothing infuriates me more than press agents (and sometimes friends) who ask for a mention of a project they’re involved with here, which clearly means that they do not read it in the first place, since if they did it would be perfectly clear to them that it is not a news release forum, even though there may be news contained within it. I’ll leave the recycling of news in blogs to other people, and indeed myself but on other outlets where that’s specifically what I do, like Twitter or Playbill.com.

Just yesterday I was talking here about the importance of good producers as captains of the ship for new musicals to steer them safely into port. While too many cooks may spoil the broth, the fact is that many are required to staff the kitchen, but there needs to be a chef in overall charge: the man, woman (or increasingly corporate boss) who raises the financing, appoints the creative staff (including the writers), and manages the marketing.

Plays, however, are different, arguably more fragile things. Though it still takes a director, designer and actors to give it physical life, all things begin with the writer, though they may not necessarily end there. The writer should stay in charge, and the entire creative cycle of a play should revolve around supporting that writer and serving their vision. So it’s a different kind of producer that’s usually at the helm, and that’s the artistic director of the venue who has agreed to put it on.

Only a couple of weeks ago I was saying here that “Musicals, as Stephen Sondheim once said (and Andrew Lloyd Webber now knows), aren’t written, they’re re-written. And you could say, too, that sometimes they’re not just re-written, they’re re-titled, too.” I was referring, of course, to the latest incarnation of Sondheim’s Road Show, now receiving its European premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory, which has gone through various previous versions and titles, from Wise Guys and Gold (unproduced) to Bounce and now Road Show.

And Lloyd Webber, too, has seen some of his more recent shows, from Whistle Down the Wind and Sunset Boulevard to Love Never Dies, go under various overhauls (and sometimes leading ladies, in the case of Sunset Boulevard) before settling on a final version.

For anyone who earns their living, such as it is, from journalism (such as that now is), the rapidly unfolding events in Hackgate have raised hackles all around. It has also put the hack into hacks, a term nearly as derisive as calling actors luvvie but is now fully deserved, in every sense. And while, as I’ve already reported here before, it has put at least one theatre critic so far out of a job — yes, the News of the World had one — it has also given the rest of us pause: with the kind of lack of integrity from newspapers to police and politicians that is being uncovered daily, are we finally seeing the beginning of the end of newspapers?

For years some of us — or at least me — have been anticipating the death of print journalism as we know and love it, as readers remorselessly migrate online, but perhaps it’s not the internet that’s going to kill it, after all, but itself.

I wasn’t at Suffolk’s Latitude Festival over the weekend, but if there was a sense of everyone being at a party that you somehow weren’t invited to, at least I see that Lyn Gardner wasn’t there, either. And, over an intermittently squally weekend in London, I had a sense of overwhelming relief, too, that I wasn’t there every time the heavens opened.

But then there’s so much happening everywhere else, as Lyn also points out in her wonderful weekly Guardian round-up of theatre tips for theatre trips, you can also take comfort in the fact that you simply can’t be everywhere (not to mention it being the opening weekend for the new Harry Potter, too, which is where I was last night at the Barbican cinema, stumbling out at 10.15pm into the arriving pajama clad patrons for Duckie’s sleep-over slumber party Lullabye in the Pit next door: one of those wonderful cultural juxapositions that only an arts complex like the Barbican can create. And I certainly wanted a good night’s sleep after Harry Potter).

Just a few short thoughts today. First and most importantly, should gay actors come out? In the current issue of The Stage, I’ve interviewed the lovely (and successful) Ben Daniels, who’s currently got three films on the go inbetween two major theatre projects, having just returned to the stage after a two year stint on UK’s Law and Order, and told me, “I would never advise anyone to stay in the closet to further their careers - I’m sure it leads to big fat gay ulcers.” 



Yet that’s precisely the advice that Rupert Everett did issue, as I previously wrote about here. And others are still telling young actors the same thing: young Hollyoaks actor Kieron Richardson is the cover boy for the new August issue of Gay Times, and in the opening paragragh he says, “I’ve had so many people say to me I’ve ruined my career because I’ve come out.” Yet he says he has no regrets, and adds, “Let’s just see if I can make a difference. And in 10 years time, stick my fingers up and go, ‘Fuck you!’”

We’re used now, sadly, to paying top whack for seats for West End and Broadway shows, where ticket price inflation has now spiraled out of control nearly as fast as the Zimbabwe dollar. But, just as in Zimbabwe, there’s a whole alternative economy that operates beneath the official one, and top prices are really only paid by either the unwary or uninformed, or for a tiny proportion of shows that are actually doing sell-out business like the current David Tennant/Catherine Tate Much Ado or Kevin Spacey Richard III (which I walk past regularly and always see a returns queue at from mid-afternoon onwards).

But in the regions, where there’s considerably less choice and competition, some theatre producers are clearly taking the opportunity of hoping that demand outstripping supply for some shows to make up the profits they’re failing to make in town.

I’m a serial repeater myself, who has been known to go back to the same show time and time again for pleasure: I saw the original production of Spring Awakening once off-Broadway, then three times on Broadway, three times at the Lyric Hammersmith, and at least three more times at the Novello — I lost count! — and this year have seen it three times again, twice in the ArtsEd production and once in the tour that came to Greenwich. I saw the recent Broadway musical Next to Normal nine times. All of which makes several steps away from normal myself, I realise, but they are, I feel, the first two great Broadway shows of the century, and going to see them again is simply my treat to myself.

But critics routinely see the same productions of the same show again and again, too, and I’m wondering if there are sometimes diminishing returns, not to mention the fact that by seeing the same production again and again we are wasting valuable evenings we could be seeing brand-new shows that are crying out for coverage.

What’s the single thing that would improve my professional life more than anything else, but also (since I don’t want to be entirely selfish about things here!) the theatregoing experience more generally?

No, not more nights in the week, before you suggest it; to be honest, I go to the theatre far too much as it is, and even though there’s always one more request from one more PR or theatre director to see their show, I really don’t need to see more than I already do, and probably need to see a whole lot less. (I’ve been chasing my tail playing catch up for the last fortnight since returning from the US, and I finally officially see the last two of the shows I missed while I was away - and still want to see — today, with the National’s Emperor and Galilean this afternoon and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead tonight).

Next month’s Edinburgh Fringe promises to be the biggest-ever, with some 2,542 shows announced in the programme (memo to self: I must start looking through it to work out what to see during the two brief trips I’ve planned).

But at least there’s not much in the way of competition, theatrically speaking, from the official festival, where the theatre content comprises precisely four shows: two versions of Shakespeare (a one-man King Lear from Taipei, and a Korean Tempest), the world premiere of an adaptation of a Japanese novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and a dramatisation of the Arabic stories One Thousand and One Nights, presented in two parts in an international collaboration of actors, musicians and creative personnel from Europe, North Africa, Syria and the Lebanon.

A long, if not necessarily fine, era of British journalism comes to an abrupt end this weekend, with the ceasing of publication of the News of the World after a 168-year history. Like many a corrupt regime, the seeds of its own destruction have been sown for years, if not decades, but the end has come very suddenly indeed; and it seems appropriate that it was on Twitter — a brand new, or at any rate five year old, tool of citizen journalism — where much of the discussion immediately erupted yesterday afternoon.

I was oblivious to the news breaking as I was catching up with a matinee of the wonderful Royal Court production of Arnold Wesker’s masterpiece about a Jewish family and its own political engagement across a 20 year period of mid-20th century Britain, Chicken Soup with Barley, and of course I came home, as I routinely do, to post some mini-review tweets on what I’d just seen.

Musicals, as Stephen Sondheim once said (and Andrew Lloyd Webber now knows), aren’t written, they’re re-written. And you could say, too, that sometimes they’re not just re-written, they’re re-titled, too.

Sondheim’s latest show Road Show received its European premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory last night, some 58 years after he started writing it as The Legendary Mizners in 1953, but abandoned it. He finally returned to it in 1999 when Wise Guys was staged by Sam Mendes at New York Theatre Workshop. It then became Bounce, in a revised version that played in Chicago and Washington DC, but never reached Broadway.

A big theatre is like a big ship: it has a very big turning circle, and unlike a London cab, for instance, it can’t be expected to execute a 180 degree turn when hailed to do so, but has to plan its moves more carefully. And it needs a strong captain at the helm with steady hands to plan and then hold its new course, especially in the stormy weather that may have caused it to change routes in the first place.

Even then, having come out of one storm, there’s always the prospect of more bad weather ahead. The captain has be ready to make some more changes to the routing, or be able to steer through the eye of it. But of course, too, the captain doesn’t do it alone; he’s also got a strong crew around him, who are all behind him.

The Friday before last I was in Las Vegas when the heroic news came through that gay marriage had finally been legalised in the state of New York — fully equal under the law to heterosexual marriage in name as well as status, without the weird compromise status that we get here with civil partnerships. By coincidence, it was also Gay Pride weekend in New York that weekend, and I thought that at least they have something real to celebrate.

It was Gay Pride in London on Saturday, and I didn’t go. Now that it has turned into one giant Soho street party — a chance to get your tits out and more importantly off — it seems to me that it’s something you can do any night of the week there, and many do. Besides, there’s not too much left to shout and fight for.

Fringe theatres can be downright smelly, we know, and so can some audiences. So perhaps the title of Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse’s 1964 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd has an uncommon prescience, especially when performed in the tiny upstairs room of a pub in Earl’s Court, where the actors are close enough to smell the audience and vice versa, though there’s not much of an audience to provide the requisite crowd, even when packed to capacity (less than 40).

On a hot summer’s day, I expected the smell to be amplified; but wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, the Finborough now has air conditioning. I always vowed that my first donation after a lottery win would be to achieve this; I’ve not won the lottery yet, but fortunately someone else clearly has and they’ve just got installed Leopold (yes, the theatre has even named him), with the current brochure proudly proclaiming, “Now fully air conditioned”, which are surely the most welcome words in the English language after “90 minutes no interval”.

Theatre is always a form of time as well as geographical travel: I see the world, across the generations, from the (dis)comfort of a theatre seat. But sometimes travelling to that theatre seat takes me to new places, too.

Last month, for instance, I paid my first-ever known visit to Walthamstow Central at the end of the Victoria line, to visit a pub theatre that was presenting a new production of Howard Goodall’s Girlfriends for the first time since it was seen briefly in the West End in the late 80s. I’ve always said I’d go to the ends of the earth for a Goodall musical, and now I nearly have.