The cross-fertilisation of London and New York theatre

Simon, Billington reports, once told him “that he spent more on London hotel bills than he ever earned in British royalties.” Similarly, he cited a famous story of Ayckbourn’s American producers “trying to reverse the order of the second and third acts in Absurd Person Singular because they thought a play should build to a comic crescendo.”

But Billington ends up more confident that Broadway will warm to One Man Two Guvnors: “It 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.”

One Man Two Guvnors is just one of a bunch of West End shows that are heading to Broadway in the next couple of months, including also Michael Grandage’s 2006 London revival of Evita, the West End musical version of the film Ghost and Tracie Bennett recreating her performance as Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow.

Last weekend the Sam Mendes-led Bridge Project bowed out, after five productions that played at both the Old Vic in London and BAM in New York, with the final performances of Richard III starring Kevin Spacey at the latter. In a New York Times feature, Charles Isherwood offered a post-mortem on the enterprise, and putting his teacher’s hat on, concluded, “If I were to grade the Bridge Project’s achievement in terms of aesthetics, I’d give it a solid B. (With an asterisk: I missed The Winter’s Tale.) Mr. Mendes, who directed all five productions, and Mr. Spacey deserve much credit for bringing respectable and handsomely mounted classical theater productions not just to New York and London, but also to such far-flung places as the ancient theater of Epidaurus in Greece, Istanbul and Singapore.”

And then he added, a little more ominously, “But not one of the productions was fully distinguished.” Amongst the anomalies he identified: “Generally speaking it seemed to me that the Americans involved played less substantial roles than the British actors did, excepting of course Mr. Spacey’s star turn.”

He went on to say, “That’s nothing new. New York theatergoers have also become accustomed to seeing mixed American and British casts on Broadway, but the stars center stage are usually British, while the Americans are the supporting players: think of Mary Stuart with Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter, with an excellent cast of Americans playing their courtiers, or Boeing-Boeing, with Mark Rylance presiding over a supporting cast that included Christine Baranski and Gina Gershon.”

Those are slightly unfair examples: McTeer, Walter and Rylance were, after all, reprising their West End performances in direct transfers of those productions, much as, say, Idina Menzel led the cast of the West End transfer of Wicked or Tyne Daly is currently doing with Master Class.

But then he also makes a larger claim: “The National Theatre in recent years has led the way in bringing Americans to London, importing the original casts of both August: Osage County and Fela! for significant runs. But there remains a trade imbalance between the two cities when it comes to theater: Broadway imports more from London than the West End imports from New York.”



How does this claim stack up? The current and imminent future schedule on Broadway has, or will have, a total of nine shows that have been seen in the West End, if not always originated there: Priscilla Queen of the Desert began in Sydney before a West End run en route to Broadway, and Sister Act began in the US before receiving a West End production that has now returned it to Broadway. So, apart from the four new shows mentioned above (One Man Two Guvnors, Evita, End of the Rainbow and Ghost), that leaves three long-runners on the Broadway boards that came from London: Mamma Mia!, Mary Poppins and The Phantom of the Opera. Total: seven, excluding Priscilla and Sister Act.

By comparison, Broadway shows like Chicago, Jersey Boys, The Lion King and Wicked are long-running West End fixtures; newer kids on the block are Shrek and Rock of Ages, while Legally Blonde is currently winding down to shutter next month. Then there’s Master Class and All New People (imported from Off-Broadway, with the same director and creative team in charge, but re-cast to include author Zach Braff). Total: eight. If we throw in American-originated work, albeit in new British-led productions, like Long Day’s Journey into Night and Sweeney Todd, the Broadway influence on the West End is even more pervasive.

Mind you, such number crunching is hardly likely to appease Stephen Sondheim, who in an interview in The Times last weekend was dismissive of most of it, in either place: “There is an anodyne homogeneity that governs Broadway musicals, so I don’t see many. There’s nothing wrong with having a lot of commercial crap as long as you have something else. You want a supermarket. Unfortunately, nearly everything on Broadway is commercial crap. The same is true of the West End. When I scan what’s on, my heart sinks into my boots.”

He isn’t too hopeful of the future, either. “Commercial theatre will only get more narrow as time goes on. There are so many forms of entertainment, theatre is becoming more marginalised. It’s become ‘an event’: you see Wicked on your anniversary. I don’t think commercial theatre can fulfil a function as a constant feeding ground for emotions and thoughts.”