March 2012 Archives

Is there a more green place than Broadway when it comes to recycling, repacking and re-using old materials? I arrived in New York last night for my regular spring catch-up on the new season openers, and I’m not sure I can ever remember a time when I’ve seen more of the shows already.

Between mid-March and the end of April, there are 17 major Broadway openings, and I’ve seen eight of them already in the same productions, whether in London (One Man Two Guvnors, Ghost, End of the Rainbow, Evita), the US (from Once and Peter and the Starcatcher, which both originated at off_Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop, to Disney’s Newsies at Paper Mill Playhouse) or Canada (Jesus Christ Superstar, which I first saw in this production at Stratford, Ontario last summer).

Yet again the rules around first nights are breaking down irretrievably. On Tuesday, the new musical I Dreamed a Dream opened officially at Newcastle Theatre Royal, having begun previews just four days earlier, on Friday; but the Sunday Telegraph published a review, based on seeing the very first preview, on the weekend. Veronica Lee, the critic despatched by the news desk to do so, had simply bought a ticket and filed; the paper did the same thing last year when Shrek began previews at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

It’s interesting to see the Sunday Telegraph’s news pages paying so much attention to theatre, given that their actual review supplement Seven features the most deliberately contrary critic of the lot.

In the famous clip from Britain’s Got Talent that heralded the arrival in the world of Susan Boyle — or at least what turned into a global recognition of her arrival, after 47 years languishing in obscurity — she spoke of her greatest ambition: to be as successful as Elaine Paige.

Now, of course, she’s very much bigger; Paige, after all, has only starred in musicals, not been the subject of one. And last night Boyle did both, when I Dreamed a Dream — a bio-musical about her life — opened at Newcastle’s Theatre Royal, and she appeared in a post-curtain call appearance in it.


It was nearly 15 years ago that I first saw The Lion King on a Broadway stage, during previews for the show at the New Amsterdam Theatre. And as a giant elephant and rhino paraded down the aisle, the audience started roaring, and an overwhelming set of animals, from giraffes to gazelles, filled the stage, I realised straight away that an instant hit was being born.

As Ben Brantley wrote in his New York Times notice when the show opened a month later, describing “the transporting magic wrought by the opening 10 minutes”, he said that “the ways in which [Julie] Taymor translates the film’s opening musical number, ‘Circle of Life’, where an animal kingdom of the African plains gathers to pay homage to its leonine ruler and his newly born heir, is filled with astonishment and promise.”

There’s a lot of talk about the ever-approaching spectre of the Olympics, and whether or not audiences will actually materialise for the theatre as well as the sports events that will saturate TV coverage and the entire city. Not all of us, after all, are sports fans.

When Whatsonstage.com recently polled its users, it discovered that nearly 70% said they would attend as much or more than usual during the Games, and two-thirds of respondents predicted the Olympics would help increase London theatre attendance. But while that’s an interesting take amongst a group of people who already demonstrate their commitment to the theatre by their use of the site, I wonder how widely that will translate beyond it.

I was caught napping yesterday when the announcement came about the RSC’s appointment of a new artistic director — literally. I’d been up since 5.30am (my usual waking time, as it happens) and had already met three deadlines by 9am, so I did something I very rarely allow myself to do: I went back to bed.

By the time I woke up again around 11.22am, saw the press release and tweeted it (hence the precision with which I know what time I woke up!), the RSC was already trending on Twitter: that says something about the viral strength of Twitter as a medium for spreading news. Doran, of course, was the main rival to Michael Boyd getting the job last time around; and it is greatly to the credit both of Boyd in appointing him Chief Associate Director instead, and to Doran himself in staying on undaunted by the disappointment, that his turn has come now.

Sweeney Todd was the first Sondheim musical I ever saw in the West End, in the all-too-short-lived 1980 Drury Lane transfer of Hal Prince’s original Broadway production, and a lifelong love of Sondheim in general and this show in particular was born.

I can still vividly remember being alternately chilled and thrilled by its brooding, brilliant score and its terrifying dramatic trajectory so spellbindingly lightened by its dark, malevolent wit. It was also stunningly performed by a cast led by Denis Quilley as Sweeney and Sheila Hancock as Mrs Lovett. This was surely a theatrical masterpiece; and it was confirmed, naturally, by the short shrift given to it by London theatregoers in that original run.

Most commercial theatre producers conceive, develop and capitalise each show they work on afresh, starting from a blank slate. They may, of course, have favoured elements in place — a director/choreographer team, for instance, and a director may come with his or her own preferred designers. There may be a regular writing collaboration involved if it is, say, a musical. But each show is its own baby, and as the costs mount up, so do the pressures to reclaim that capitalisation in an actual production. So the timeline leads inexorably towards a big opening somewhere sometime, preferably somewhere soon.

In the subsidised theatre, by contrast, there’s more time for a show to work through its development: the National Theatre has an entire annex, the studio, devoted to doing just that. If a show isn’t ready to come to fruition yet, like for instance the Tori Amos project that was due to surface publicly this spring, it is delayed and sent for more workshops.

One of the highlights of this year’s expanded High Tide Festival in Suffolk in May is supposed to be the British premiere of Mike Daisey’s one-man play The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which according to High Tide’s website, “illuminates how the former CEO of Apple and his obsessions shape our lives, while telling the story of his own travels to China to investigate the factories where millions toil to make iPhones, iPods and iPads.”

The description of the show goes on to say, “Mike Daisey’s groundbreaking monologues weave together autobiography, gonzo journalism and unscripted performance to tell stories that cut to the bone, exposing secret histories and unexpected connections. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs has been performed around the world, and was instrumental in forcing Apple to open its supply chain to outside auditing.”

Some venues take getting used to. I’m sure that the National wasn’t universally loved when it first opened — and probably still isn’t. My partner routinely says it looks like a nice car park. I happen to think it’s my favourite theatre building in London, and quite possibly the world.

That’s not just a question of architecture or aesthetics, of course, but of experience: I love it because of all the good associations I have with what I’ve seen there over the years. But more than that, it is nowadays properly lived in: it feels inviting and democratic, with its foyer music and exhibitions, ample and comfortable seating scattered throughout, the lovely river terraces and views across to St Paul’s, all accessible for free and whether or not you have a ticket to see a show there.

At last Friday’s Critics’ Circle lunch to honour Stephen Sondheim, I was a little surprised (and even embarrassed) by several members who solicited autographs of him on various books, CDs and other memorabilia that they had brought to the event. I hope that they were merely increasing the personal value of the items, not doing so for future e-bay profits, but as Mrs Lovett herself would put it, “Times is hard”, especially for critics, so you never know.

I wrote to Mr Sondheim afterwards to apologise, saying, “You can take the critic out of the fan, but not the fan out of the critic!” Fortunately, he took it in good stead, replying, “I had a fine time, autographs or no.”

The insidious spread of star ratings attached to reviews (in almost every single paper except, interestingly, The Stage and The Observer of all the major outlets) is, no doubt, partly a reflection of our attention-deficit, time-poor priorities: we want a quick thumbs-up or thumbs-down nowadays even more than a full review. No wonder that I find my Twitter reviews gaining wider circulation than almost anything I write.

But star ratings are also a necessarily blunt instrument of judgement: they hardly allow for much shading or explanation in themselves. Every critic has a different way of applying them, too, so there’s no consistency or agreed standards about what constitutes a one-star review or a five.

The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner wrote last month, “In the second decade of the 21st century, British theatre is still predominantly white and middle-class, and its leading figures educated at elite universities,” mostly Oxbridge. It’s what she says Nicholas Hytner, Nicolas Kent, Erica Whyman, Tom Morris, Josie Rourke, Natalie Abrahami, Thea Sharrock, Rupert Goold and Dominic Dromgoole all had in common.

And it goes beyond the inner circle of those already in the top jobs: the future is also going to be drawn inevitably from it, too. As she also points out, “Since it was established in 1998, no fewer than five out of the 12 winners of the influential James Menzies-Kitchin award for young directors have been Oxbridge-educated. At least seven out of 30 of our regional theatres are run by Oxbridge graduates.”

On Friday I cited one example here of the new challenges presented by journalists like myself working on new or evolving media like Twitter, referring to a PR who had challenged something I had sent out there with an actor’s twitter account referenced in my tweet, as it meant that the actor concerned would find herself alerted to what I’d said so that it was like writing to her personally.

It’s a brave new world, of course, that has such wonders in it; and by coincidence last week I also attended and participated in a one day conference arranged by the Arts Marketing Association on the new challenges faced by their members in trying to negotiate themselves through this new minefield of operation.

Life is full of remarkable turns; and on Friday I had lunch at the Menier Chocolate Factory with Stephen Sondheim on my right and Maria Friedman on my left. Never mind Sondheim’s own ‘Ladies who lunch’; here it was more a case of lunching with legends.

The occasion was the Critics’ Circle Annual Award for Distinguished Services to the Arts, which was being presented to Sondheim following a vote of the entire membership of the circle, not just the drama section that had proposed him as our candidate, and I was co-hosting the lunch with Tom Sutcliffe, the circle’s current President, in my role as chairman of the drama section.

The sometimes tricky relationship between press and PRs is a recurring theme of this blog, and I am sure that journalists, myself included, have sometimes made unreasonable requests of PRs. I’ll never forget the utter bafflement of a press agent at the Young Vic when she ushered Nicholas de Jongh, then theatre critic for the Evening Standard, into his seat immediately behind me one opening night there, and he violently objected: “I do not like this seat”

She had to swap the seat she’d allocated to him with the one for Benedict Nightingale’s on the other side of the auditorium. When she returned, she said to me how she absolutely couldn’t understand it — she’d specifically called him and personally discussed precisely which seat he wanted. But what she’d failed to factor in, I replied, is to tell him where I was sitting!

Just yesterday I quoted Michael Billington saying of One Man Two Guvnors that the play “appeals to that appetite for the interactive that is all around us today. I have a theory that audiences have got slightly sick of sitting in the dark for two-and-a-half hours being ignored by the actors.”

And, it seems, audiences are also increasingly sick of sitting in the dark for two-and-a-half hours without being connected to the world as well as the stage: despite the constant reminders for people to turn off mobile phones before a performance begins, hardly a performance passes anywhere without one always going off. (The other week at a fringe theatre in North East London, I experienced a press night first: the phone that went off belonged to the lighting and sound operator!)

England and America, it was famously said by George Bernard Shaw, are two countries divided by a common language; and what is spoken in one country isn’t always understood in the other. Just the other day Michael Billington was wondering aloud if this might impact on the reception that One Man Two Guvnors receives when it moves to New York next month.

He noted, “The conventional wisdom used to be that nothing divided the Brits and the Americans so much as their taste in comedy”, and cited the respective receptions afforded to the plays of Neil Simon and Alan Ayckbourn away from their home territory in evidence.

The big winner at this year’s Oscars, the weekend before last, was of course The Artist, a delightful recreation of and tribute to the silent movies that revolves around the massive disruption caused in the careers of its stars by the arrival of the talkies and the emergence of new stars in their wake.

It’s precisely the same transition so memorably caught in one of the best movie musicals ever, Singin’ in the Rain, itself glorious transferred to the stage last year at Chichester and now deservedly in the West End.

Just as you should never judge a book by its cover, is it a mistake to judge a show by its audience, let alone its lighting plot? In his review for The Leisure Society which opened at the Trafalgar Studios 2 last week, Michael Billington wrote that “an air of glamour” surrounded it: “The cast, including ex-supermodel Agyness Deyn, is glamorous. The audience is glamorous.”

And later he adds, “Even the lighting, by ex-New Zealand cricket captain Jeremy Coney, adds to the atmosphere of glamour.” Somehow, I thought of the Emcee’s line in Cabaret, “Here life is beautiful… The girls are beautiful…Even the orchestra is beautiful!”

Michael Billington is currently in the middle of a blog series in which he is providing a A-Z of modern drama, and this week he got to L is for Lousy Plays. L could also be for lousy timing.

In his opening paragraph, he writes of the “virtual disappearance of the truly bad play”, and explains, “This has happened for a simple reason. Production costs are now so high that commercial theatre can no longer afford to mount the kind of rubbish that was a staple part of my early reviewing life. And why would anyone go out and see second-rate theatre when they can stay at home and watch second-rate television?”

Zach Braff may just be wondering what went wrong with the journey of his play All New People from a relatively acclaimed Off-Broadway premiere last year to a mostly panned West End opening this year.

Charles Isherwood last year called it “a slick and slight but lively new comedy” in his New York Times review, and wrote that as a playwright, he “invests this angst-fueled comedy with a perky sensibility that draws heavily on the relentless rhythms familiar from sitcom land, where he toiled successfully for several seasons in the zany-doctors series Scrubs.”