January 2012 Archives

Everyone wants to spend their lives doing what they enjoy, preferably with people they love; and having a career means being paid to do what you’d do anyway for free. Without wishing to be smug, that’s something that we lucky few manage to achieve by devoting our lives to the performing arts, whether writing about it (as I do) or being part of it as part of the creative team or cast. It’s the very definition of something being a labour of love.


And yes, sometimes it means giving it away - or working for very little. I thought of this on the weekend when I saw a wonderful cast of stellar West End talent bringing their hearts, souls and glorious voices to a one-night charity benefit concert performance of a musical Children of Eden that ran for less than 3 months during its original West End run back in 1991, but they restored to vibrant glory.

The Evening Standard Theatre Awards, presented back in November, are now a distant memory, and the Olivier Awards have slipped back to mid-April (but last week announced a transatlantic initiative which will see them relayed live to Broadway); but elsewhere we are in the midst of an awards season, and it’s one I feel personally part of.

Last Tuesday, as I’ve previously reported here, I hosted this year’s Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards in my capacity as chairman of the drama section. Of course, I voted for them, too — but out of the nine categories, my votes only coincided with the winners in three categories. That, however, is something to be celebrated; and I’m thrilled that there’s simply so much to choose from.

While SOLT is putting a brave face on the prospects of audiences holding up during the Olympics, whatever Andrew Lloyd Webber may say, it’s possible that one way of meeting the reduced demand will simply be to reduce the possible supply.

The house of cards is beginning to fall, and just this week two West End musicals announced an early closure: Crazy for You will depart the Novello on March 17, though it was originally booking through July 28; and Legally Blonde the Musical will leave the Savoy on April 7, though it was originally booking through Oct. 27, 2012.

The other day I hosted this year’s Critics’ Circle Awards, an event at which actors and artists meet the critics who nightly judge their work. Of course, we’ve come to praise them on this occasion, so it’s an afternoon where we treat each other with kid gloves; but there’s an underlying tension, of course. “So those are the bastards who write those things about us!”, you can feel some muttering.

And one even said it out loud: in collecting his award for Best New Play for One Man Two Guvnors, Richard Bean made an astonishingly aggrieved speech in which he recounted the true story of a relative upon whom a practical joke had been played, when he was inside a pub and his friends told police that he had a bomb; he came out and was shot dead. With friends like those, he said, who needed enemies? And that’s exactly how he said he felt being amongst critics who were giving him an award….

In a year when the Olympics may well be emptying theatres, the Critics’ Circle’s theatre section yesterday joined forces once again for our annual celebration of the shows that actually filled them — and our columns — last year with champion performances that yet again prove the undoubted excellence of our vibrant theatrical culture.

I hosted the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards, generously sponsored by Nyman Libson Paul, in my role as chairman of the Critics’ Circle, so I have to declare more than a passing interest in them, of course. But just as everyone’s now a critic thanks to the internet, so award ceremonies that lets the entire world vote for them has increased exponentially; by contrast, these are awards that actually mean something because they’re voted by critics whose job it really is to pass judgement on what they’ve seen.

Last Friday, I went to Leeds, a city I’ve been to on theatre-related business on many occasions, but always to see shows at the West Yorkshire Playhouse — a venue whose opening I can remember. This time, however, I visited a venue I’ve never been to before, even though it has been there far longer than I have, or even Michael Billington!

Yet as I sat in City Varieties — a venue that was built in 1865 and recently underwent a £9.2m refurbishment — reading the programme before the show began, Michael wandered down the aisle and told me that he’d not been there before, either!

The Broadway production of The Mountaintop closed yesterday, after a run of 24 previews and 117 regular performances, and just under the wire, it was announced last Wednesday that the show had managed the rare Broadway feat of actually recouping its entire initial investment.

That’s an acomplishment, of course, but first of all it’s interesting that it only happened so late in the day — the announcement came five days before the show actually ended — but even more compelling is the sum of that initial investment: $3.1m. 

That’s quite a lot of moolah for a play that only featured two actors. And quite a long way from the play’s origins at the tiny Theatre 503 in Battersea, where presumably the budget was more like £3.10 (or maybe £30,000 if I’m being generous).

Welcome to the first “short shorts” column of the New Year, a weekly round-up of notes and quotes that don’t fit into the blogs on individual subjects I file on the other four days of the week.

After the usual slow start to the year’s theatre activities which meant that Quentin Letts’s Daily Mail theatre page last Friday, for instance, comprised reviews of shows at three studio theatres from Jermyn Street to the Gate and Trafalgar 2, we’re back to the full tilt of multiple openings every night again: next Wednesday, for example, there are clashing openings at the Old Vic Tunnels and New Diorama, while on Thursday there are even more serious clashes between the Almeida, Southwark Playhouse and Soho.

A leading Australian website critic last week made an astonishing admission: she fled from the opening night of the Sydney premiere of Love Never Dies at the interval. Yet she reviewed as much as she had bothered to see nonetheless.

Apart from the gross discourtesy that her behaviour represents — she should be reminded that she’s a guest of the management, and having accepted the privilege of a free ticket and their hospitality, she had a duty to sit it out, however painful it was for her — it was even more so a discourtesy to those who bother to read her: I once heard it said by a critic that he saw the shows “so you don’t have to”, and on that basis, a critic needs to sit through the entire show to be able to do so.

Original casts of long-running musicals, of course, often make an invaluable contribution to the development of their shows, but they are typically unrewarded and uncredited beyond the original run.

A notable exception was the company who helped create the original production of A Chorus Line, who were awarded a small percentage of the show’s net profits for the rest of their lives (though for the most recent Broadway revival there was an attempt made not to pay this, with an argument being proposed that this was meant to cover only the original life of the first production on Broadway, not the performers’ lives; but their moral right prevailed, and they continued to receive the royalty).

It’s peak theatre season in Sydney at the moment, partly because its the height of the summer there, but mainly because of the avalanche of theatrical activity thanks to the Sydney Festival that’s running now all over the city through to January 29.

I just got back from there yesterday, and although I went cold turkey on going to the theatre for most of my time in Australia, I actually ended up extending my final week there last week by three more nights and cancelling my planned stop-over in Hong Kong on the way home, so that I could warm up — both literally in capitalising partly on some sunny days in Sydney (whereas the weather forecast was for a rainy weekend in HK instead, thanks to the remnants of a cyclone), but also so that I could get to a bit more theatre.


I am finally on British soil again today, after landing this morning on the first flight to arrive into Heathrow at 4.40am, following a 22-hour flight from Sydney (plus a brief stop-over in Hong Kong; we were originally booked to make it a three-night stop-over there instead of a one-hour one, but Sydney was so gorgeous at the end of last week we cancelled Hong Kong and stayed in Australia until Sunday instead).

During my five weeks Down Under, I came face-to-face (or at least face-in-water or face-to-rockface) with three amazing natural wonders of the world, from the Great Barrier Reef and the Daintree Rain Forest, both of which I swam in, to the great giant rockfaces of Uluru and Kata Tjuta in the Australian Outback.

Two of the biggest theatrical stories of the last couple of years have involved Love Never Dies, the West End premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-gestating but subsequently relatively short-lived sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, and Spider-man - Turn off the Dark, the Broadway spectacle that went through a record-breaking six-and-a-half months of previews before finally officially turning on the lights last June (and not before sacking its director of record Julie Taymor, though she’s getting the top billing in terms of Tony eligibility, at least, while her successor Philip William McKinney who re-staged some of her work has been ruled ineligible).

By coincidence I saw a new production of Love Never Dies and Julie Taymor’s production of The Magic Flute, first created for New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2004 and now being re-staged for Opera Australia at Sydney Opera House, on consecutive nights in Sydney earlier this week.

Annie is suddenly all the rage. Just a few weeks ago, I saw a splendid new production at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds (running to January 21, so you can still catch it), and the weekend before last, I saw another, slightly less gritty but far more scenically enhanced, production that has just opened at Sydney’s Lyric Theatre at Star City, a Vegas-like (or Vegas-lite) casino complex complete with a large modern theatre attached, where I’ve previously seen the original Australian run of Priscilla Queen of the Desert and a new musical version of Doctor Zhivago.

The three shows indicate a particular breadth to Australian musical theatre, which range from homegrown locally produced fare like Priscilla which has subsequently acquired an international reach with productions in the West End (that closed on New Year’s Eve) and on Broadway; a try-out for a new musical with a Broadway pedigree in the case of Dr Zhivago that has, as yet, not got any closer to Broadway; and a revival of a beloved Broadway classic in Annie.

Earlier this week I posted a blog on some of the shows I’m most looking forward to seeing this year in London; today it is Broadway’s turn. Broadway really is a circle of life (and quote often, sudden death), and not just in the song from one of its longest-established hits The Lion King.

The Broadway year there runs in cycles, and as the New York Times pointed out last week, they are currently in “one of the unhappiest seasons on Broadway, when struggling plays and musicals prepare to close once the tourists leave town.”

Never mind the staggering forecasts of economic gloom and even doom on the horizon. We’ve at least still got plenty to look forward to in the theatre; and even if a bunch of producers are exercising due caution in waiting until after the Olympics to show their hand, with new musicals like Viva Forever, Bridget Jones’ Diary and The Bodyguard only preparing to launch thereafter, there’s plenty happening this side of the Olympics and even during them to whet our cultural appetites.

I’ve already provided a full preview of the main impending happenings across London theatreland in last week’s post-Christmas issue of The Stage; but today I’m going to whittle it down to the shows I’m personally most looking forward to.