October 2011 Archives

Michael Crawford, of course, was already a firm family favourite, thanks to TV shows like “Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em”, his film role as the original Cornelius in the film version of Hello, Dolly!, and onstage as the original Barnum in the Broadway-to-West End import of that show to the London Palladium, when he came to create the role that has since come to define him as a global superstar of musicals: the title role of The Phantom of the Opera.

But the “brand” of Phantom has, like the brand of Wicked, created a following and a fan base that has meant that audiences have not only become strangely proprietorial around the piece, which I’ll come onto in a minute, but also meant that some of the iconic stardust of the show rubs off on those who play him, too, just as it does for those who play Elphaba in Wicked.

Today I’m going to round up some quotable quotes I’ve found in my online and paper reading. First of all, the bulletin boards, as ever, provide alternately inspiring and despairing notes and quotes on shows that are in preview that give an advance taste of what they might be like.

I try not to read them, by and large, as I want to be able to make my own mind up, but sometimes they prove impossible to resist, especially when I’m in New York (as I was last week) and trying to gauge whether or not to see an early preview of something.

This week saw the return the London stage of Death and the Maiden, a play that began life at Royal Court’s tiny Theatre Upstairs back in 1991, before transferring to the West End, then seeing a separate all-star staging on Broadway and a subsequent film version.

So the piece has shown its ability to exist in different forms already; but returning in a West End production headlined by a star who had never appeared on a stage before, some cracks began to show (and I don’t just mean in the auditorium plaster of the newly renamed Harold Pinter Theatre, formerly the Comedy, whose name may have been changed but whose faded charm remains entirely intact; let’s just hope the theatre doesn’t lose more performances, as it did back when The Children’s Hour was playing here earlier this year, when “emergency building repairs” had to suddenly be carried out).

The theatre industry - and it is an industry, but one whose business happens to be making art and money, not necessarily always in that order, together or at all - is made up of of a lot of disparate factions, who are inevitably subject to a lot frictions. Producers, for example, are forever in competition with each other for theatres to put their shows on in, for audiences to see them, and for recognition in the annual rounds of awards.

Yet someone needs to pull them all together around the same table from time to time to pursue matters of mutual interest, like labour negotiations with the relevant unions, co-ordinated publicity initiatives (and the avoidance of first night clashes) and managing things like the TKTS booths in Leicester Square and at Brent Cross to serve them all.

The Independent on Sunday ran its annual Pink List of the 100 most influential gay men and lesbians in the UK over the weekend, and there were, of course, some familiar theatrical names: John Barrowman (15th), Nick Hytner (32nd), writer Stella Duffy (34th), Mark Gatiss (40th), Matt Lucas (46th), Jonathan Harvey (48th), Derren Brown (50th), Dominic Cook (58th), Phyllida Lloyd (60th), Stephen Daldry (78th), Michael Grandage (84th) and Deborah Warner (97th).

I returned from my week in New York last night, but before I launch myself back into the London round of openings again from tonight with the West End opening of Death and the Maiden at the newly re-dubbed Harold Pinter Theatre, I’m filing a final report on my trip, which climaxed with two of the week’s highlights: seeing Betty Buckley at Feinstein’s, and Audra McDonald at Carnegie Hall.

There’s hardly a bigger contrast between the sizes of these two rooms — Feinstein’s is a tiny, extremely exclusive (i.e pricey!) cabaret boite inside the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, while Carnegie Hall is one of the city’s biggest and certainly most prestigious concert halls.

Just yesterday I was pointing out that Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop, which plays out a fictitious meeting in a hotel room between a powerful alpha male and a lowly maid, might have been more compelling if it had been about another more recent real-life hotel room encounter, when the former head of the International Monetary Fund found that he suddenly proved somehow irresistible to a maid he’d met only minutes before.

But if life and the theatre are both full of deja vu moments, shows often seem to inadvertently repeat themselves.

Just yesterday I was reporting on this blog on the 10th anniversary of Mamma Mia! at the Winter Garden Theatre the night before, and saying how very much I enjoyed it.

But it’s not a show to everyone’s tastes, as a comment posted below my blog suggests; and indeed one hugely established Broadway lyricist I was speaking to just the other day remembers seeing it and thinking it signalled the death of the Broadway musical as he knew it (and has spent a career writing).

Last night New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg took to the stage of the Winter Garden Theatre to issue a proclamation, designating yesterday October 18 as Mamma Mia! Day. It was, of course, the 10th anniversary of its Broadway opening, and has now become part of that informal roster of long-running shows there that have come to define the city, like live action versions of theme park attractions.

And it wasn’t, it turned out, the first time he’s been on a Mamma Mia! stage, either; earlier this year he donned bell-bottoms and platform shoes to join the cast of the show at an annual charity fundraiser for the Inner Circle, a group of current and former city political reporters.

LP Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, recently turned into a terrific new UK musical jointly produced by three regional theatres, famously begins with the line “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” It’s a line that can be easily paraphrased to show the differences between producing theatre and opera, too: For traditional theatre-makers, “the opera is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”



Last Thursday Michael Grandage became the latest high-profile theatre director to strangely flounder in the face of the massive creative resources — but paradoxically little rehearsal or stage time — of producing a brand-new production of a staple of the operatic repertoire for one of the world’s most famous opera houses, the Met in New York.

Walking around Broadway, it is bad enough, of course, that most musical titles are revivals (Anything Goes, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, Chicago, Follies and Godspell, which just began previews last week, with Porgy and Bess to come in December), pop franchises (Mamma Mia!, Jersey Boys, Rock of Ages) or the inevitable slew of film-to-stage translations (Billy Elliot, Mary Poppins, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Sister Act, Addams Family, Lion King).

The sole original entries - or at least original when they first opened - are The Phantom of the Opera, The Book of Mormon and Memphis (which coincidentally opened its national tour in Memphis, naturally enough, just last night), and of course Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark, which is really a franchise of another kind, best known from its cartoon strip.

How many marketing people does it take to meet and greet the press and hand out tickets on opening night? Private Lives features a cast of five, and the press desk at the opening night of a new production at Nottingham Playhouse this week had four people — three in-house and one outside consultant, employed from London whose job it is to deal with the nationals. (For the record, there were four of us national critics in attendance, and at least one told me of arranging tickets directly with the theatre).

It was also striking that at the usual press drinks reception that many theatres now lay on for critics, the private upstairs room was rammed with people claiming the drinks, while three of us four nationals sat huddled in a corner - the fourth didn’t bother to come up, and none of the theatre’s PR team came near us, either.

All critics need to start somewhere. Some trained as directors, like Kate Bassett; others, as actors, like David Benedict and Sam Marlowe. Some cross over, even now: sometime Guardian blogger Chris Wilkinson is also director Christopher Haydon, soon to take over as artistic director of the Gate; ditto Brian Logan, comedy and sometimes theatre reviewer for The Guardian, is now joint artistic director of Camden People’s Theatre.

But the more typical route to becoming a theatre critic remains via journalism, whether via broadcast and commentary like Libby Purves recently, parliamentary sketches like Quentin Letts or newspaper diary columns like Tim Walker (whose own donning of sunglasses through the brighter sections of the opening night of Backbeat the other night warrants a diary entry of its own).

On the one hand, you have to hand it to a critic who admits openly to his prejudices - and therefore vows not to go near a playwright’s work again, at least professionally speaking.

New York Times critic Charles Isherwood has just publicly declared that, having rapped the playwright Adam Rapp’s “knuckles enough for a lifetime”, he’d “like to hand the ruler to someone else next time.” Having recently called Mr Rapp’s latest play Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling “an empty farrago”, he also notes that Rapp probably hadn’t rushed to read it anyway: “By this point Mr. Rapp surely knows where I stand on his work, which is to say (perhaps from his point of view) jumping up and down on it.”

I’ve been thundering on (and on) about the absurd (and ultimately self-defeating, I fear) greed of producers trying to get an additional slice of the income pie by introducing premium pricing, on the basis that if that they can’t beat the touts, they might as well join them.

The phenomenon was started, of course, in New York, following the initial success of The Producers where demand so outstripped supply that they could charge whatever they wanted.

I’ve had a weekend of making connections. After seeing Michael Ball making his staggeringly transformative appearance in Chichester’s Sweeney Todd on Thursday - and hastily interviewing him on Friday about it for a feature that ran in yesterday’s Sunday Express — I saw his original Hairspray star Leanne Jones (and fellow Olivier Award winner for it) in a production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown at Chiswick’s tiny Tabard Theatre on Saturday afternoon.

There was another Sweeney Todd connection to that, too: when the Tabard’s revised version of the 60s Off-Broadway musical Charlie Brown was first seen on Broadway in 1999, with a cast that included a pre-Wicked Kristin Chenoweth as Sally (a role taken at the Tabard by the wonderful Hayley Gallivan), a post-Rent Anthony Rapp, Roger Bart and BD Wong, I went to see it there with Imelda Staunton (Michael Ball’s Mrs Lovett), her husband Jim Carter (pre-Downtown Abbey) and daughter Bessie.

There have been some intriguing first night shenanigans this week. At last Sunday’s 25th anniversary performance of The Phantom of the Opera I was seated in the 8th row of the arena: prime seats. But someone behind me was talking regularly during the show’s first twenty or so minutes, until I turned around and shushed him.

It was Matt Lucas. 

I was briefly embarrassed: I know Matt a bit, I’ve interviewed him and we follow each other on Twitter and occasionally exchange direct messages. But then I thought, ‘No, I would have shushed anyone who chatted.’ And Matt, to his credit, came up to me in the interval to apologise, saying that his guest didn’t know the show so didn’t know what was going on, and he was trying to explain. But having apologised, I was surprised when the chatter continued in the second act, too.

Last week, Billy Elliot played to 78% capacity on Broadway. That doesn’t exactly sound like a show in trouble; yet on Monday, it was announced that the show would close on January 8, 2012, after a run of just over three years and 1,304 performances.

Look a little closer at the grosses, though, which are published publicly every week, and you can see the problem: some 8,878 people saw the show last week, spending some $718,015 in the process. But the average price paid was $80.88, which with a regular top price of $151.50, suggests heavy discounting was at work.

I can’t help thinking that programming a play called Farewell to the Theatre when your own theatre is beleaguered is tempting fate. But perhaps the Rose Theatre in Kingston, which has failed to secure arts council funding and has been struggling to find audiences, is demonstrating an admirable sense of self-irony in staging the world premiere today of Harley Granville Barker’s First World War play.

Or it could be entirely inadvertent. (And yes, Barker really did write it, unlike Constance that the King’s Head is currently presenting under Oscar Wilde’s name, despite very serious doubts about its progeny). 

Certain horses run better on some courses than others; and the same is true of critics. We’re more receptive to some things than others, based on our own personal interests, tastes and in particular knowledge. It is probably not wise, for instance, to send the Sunday Telegraph’s Tim Walker to a play like Synge’s immortal Irish classic The Playboy of the Western World, probably one of the most famous of all contemporary Irish plays, if he thinks (as he did last weekend) that it’s a “frothy and largely forgotten work”.

And in the same column, he wonders aloud whether a “mandatory retirement age of 58 ought to be introduced for all playwrights”; where does that leave Ronald Harwood, 77 next month, whom Walker once declared Britain’s greatest living playwright?

This coming Sunday, The Phantom of the Opera celebrates the 25th birthday of its official opening in the West End at Her Majesty’s on October 9, 1986, but over the weekend it jumped the gun by a week with a special, three-performance only new staging at the Royal Albert Hall.

Last night’s performance was also broadcast to cinemas around the UK and the world - a friend even texted from the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York to say that he could see me, seated in the 8th row of the main arena floor in front of the stage.