April 2012 Archives

Just the other day I added another example to the seemingly endless list of aggravations of going to the theatre fellow audience members, when I wrote about a woman sitting in the row behind me at a West End first night last week whose metal jewellery clanged loudly every time she moved her arms (which was every few seconds, it seemed).

There are all sorts of behaviours that people get up to in the theatre that are entirely preventable, and sometimes inexcusable: last week, too, a woman spectator (who also happened to arrive late, I noticed) at the spellbindingly intense Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me at Southwark Playhouse seemed more intent, during part of the first act, to be watching over her mobile phone instead of the play.


Earlier this week, I mentioned how Variety, the once pre-eminent trade US paper, has cut back on its reviews to the point where it has twice recently merely reprinted ones from earlier runs of a show when it opened in London (a year earlier in the case of One Man Two Guvnors) and in LA (Clybourne Park) respectively instead of re-reviewing their Broadway transfers, and wondered aloud if the same thing would happen for the Broadway opening of Ghost, especially given that its leads were the same as the show had in London.

In fact, they have re-reviewed Ghost again, and their review proves the necessity for re-visiting it. First of all they point out, “The score seems to have acquired one replacement since the London opening, a functional song for a stageful of ghosts called ‘You Gotta Let Go.’)”

Success breeds succes in the theatre as in other walks of life. There is currently, for example, no theatre with a better commercial record in the country than Chichester Festival Theatre: this week it brought its third transfer of the year from last season to town with its inspired, inspiring pairing of a new David Hare commission South Downs as a companion piece to Rattigan’s The Browning Version, following the transfer of two musicals, Singin’ in the Rain and Sweeney Todd, which could be described as the yin and yang of musical theatre — but never the yawn.

Only one of those — Singin’ in the Rain — is directed by Chichester’s artistic director Jonathan Church, but all of them are a testament to his remarkable programming skills, which not only seems to give Chichester audiences exactly what they want, but also, by the sheer excellence of its execution, also seems to give the West End what it wants, too.

The last two nights have seen openings in London of plays by three contemporary living playwrights, David’s Edgar and Hare and Robert Holman, and all in their 60s.

Edgar’s latest, Written on the Heart, transferred from Stratford-upon-Avon (where his work has regularly been produced) to the West End’s Duchess, while Hare’s one act South Downs moved from Chichester’s Minerva to the Harold Pinter in the double bill with The Browning Version, the play it was written in response to. Both of them have also had their plays regularly produced by the National, too — especially Hare, who was virtually the NT’s house playwright under Richard Eyre, and has continued to have his work regularly seen there under Trevor Nunn and Nick Hytner.

The King’s Speech my be stuttering to an early close in the West End, but there’s still room for the Queen’s English to be heard in serious plays and not just sung in musicals there. Just last night saw the transfer from Stratford-upon-Avon of David Edgar’s Written on the Heart to the Duchess: a bold, brave piece of producing, and one done with a certain amount of selflessness.

In the programme, lead producer Thelma Holt acknowledges the “sacrifices that everyone involved in this production, the creative team, the actors, the management in Stratford and indeed my co-producers have made.”

At the Olivier Awards a week ago, Rupert Goold was proudly telling me of his plans to abandon a formal press announcement for his Headlong company’s new season. Instead, they were going to let the world know via Twitter, Facebook and a youtube video.

“O brave new world that has such people in’t,” as Miranda says in a play that Goold once directed for the RSC in a production that relocated it to an Arctic wasteland. As Propero says in return, “Tis new to thee.” Headlong want to make headway in a new, interactive world of digital media to reach a global audience, but I’m wondering just where this will all lead — and where it will all end up. Is it part of an Arctic wasteland that the media is heading headlong for, too?

The onslaught of summer arts festivals is about to begin, with the Brighton Festival and its accompanying, ever-expanding fringe kicking off the usual candidates from May 5. But this year, thanks to the Olympics, we have a spread of new, one-off festivals to accompany them, with some confusing overlaps that may help to cross-publicise them, but also may create a perception that there’s more going on than there really is.

Mind you, there’s quite enough to be going on with, and that’s even without factoring in the usual West End, fringe and regional theatre activity.

Regular readers of this blog will know already just how much I bang on about the high cost of theatre tickets and the sorts of ways, both devious and more transparent, that theatre producers and owners use to earn yet more money from their face values, with an insidious spread of additional charges from restoration levies to booking fees, and the new rise of premium seating that has pushed top prices towards the £100 mark for many shows.

Naturally the theatre is both a luxury item and operates in a commercial market place, so it charges partly what the market will bear against the costs it incurs on making shows in the first place; and fortunately, that market has been pretty buoyant over the last few years, with SOLT recording year-on-year rises in revenues, so who’s complaining? 



The National Theatre’s production of One Man Two Guvnors tonight becomes its latest transfer to Broadway, joining War Horse which is already running there. Meanwhile, next Monday Ghost - the Musical, which also originated in London (by way of an out-of-town try-out in Manchester), also opens on Broadway, directed by Matthew Warchus, whose Olivier Award sweeping RSC production of Matilda the Musical is lining up for a Broadway transfer next year.

So that’s two shows for Britain’s subsidised theatre against one from its commercial sector; and while both End of the Rainbow and Evita that have already opened this season there were also commercial entries, it’s striking that their personnel includes so many talents nurtured by the subsidised theatre, including the directors of both, Terry Johnson and Michael Grandage.

I blogged yesterday about the nominations and judging process for the Olivier Awards, and about some of the results it produced. But as much as we can fret and argue about individual choices, there was one indisputable winner: the Awards themselves, which were a triumph of glitz, glamour and rigorous organisation.

From the moment I walked down the eerily quiet (and scarily long) red carpet soon after 5pm - which was a bit like walking on snow, producing no sound at all as you did so - until I emerged over five hours later to see the crowd barriers being packed away, here was an occasion that celebrated London theatre as no other.


In a Guardian blog last week, Matt Trueman asked if the Olivier Awards really represent London theatre, and he pointed out such apparent anomalies as the omissions from the nominations list of Michael Sheen’s Hamlet, Lisa Dillon in Knot of the Heart, Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins in Constellations, and the failure of most of London’s major new writing theatres to be even considered for their work in the best play category.

But that’s to miss the point: the Oliviers are, without denial or apology, presented by the Society of London Theatres, to recognise shows in its member theatres only. Sure, there’s some confusion caused by the notion of what it calls affiliate theatres (and has one, catch-all category to honour), but really, this is a pat on the back from a sector of London’s theatreland to itself, much as the Tonys fulfill the same function on Broadway.

If you love someone, goes the famous saying, you let them go.  On Wednesday, Andrew Lloyd Webber announced his plans to offload the Palace Theatre, the first West End address that he owned and original home to his first long-running West End success Jesus Christ Superstar; and according to the press release, the reason he gave was “I am selling the Palace Theatre because I love it.”

It was, according to “close associates” quoted by the Standard in its reporting of the sale, “a very difficult decision” for him, though its not the first time he’s tried to sell it.

I’ve just seen my third Lloyd Webber musical in a ten-day period: after Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita on Broadway, seeing the Manchester opening of the new touring The Phantom of the Opera on Tuesday night completes the trilogy of his theatrical masterworks for me.

I’d also make a case for Cats (at least in the vibrant dance theatricality of its original production that broke the British musical theatre mould so comprehensively, and also sent it truly global for the first time), and I love the score for Tell Me on a Sunday, too; but in terms of their near-perfect fusions of form and content, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita and Phantom of the Opera represent the composer at the height of his melodic and inspirational powers.

The British theatre regularly throws up an embarrassment of riches. In the last week, while I was away in the US, not one but two separate studio productions of Uncle Vanya opened to national attention: one at the rapidly rising Print Room in Notting Hill with Iain Glen and Charlotte Emmerson, the other at Chichester’s Minerva with Roger Allam and Dervla Kirwan.

Dominic Cavendish, reviewing them jointly in the Daily Telegraph, ends by writing: “go to either, go to both - go twice to each. They’re that good.” 



Over my last few days in the US from where I returned yesterday morning, I made an out-of-town trip to Arlington, VA, to see the first production of a brand-new musical Brother Russia, with a score written by a friend of mine Dana P Rowe and his co-writer lyricist and book writer John Dempsey, then I spent the weekend back in New York taking in preview performances for four new shows ahead of their Broadway openings later this month (and coincidentally ran into Dempsey at one of them — which interestingly wasn’t the musical on the list!).

In each case, there is good reason for me not to review or offer critical judgement: in the case of Brother Russia, there’s the conflict of interest case that the composer is a good friend; in the case of the previews, it’s too early, of course, to do so.

It’s an interesting fact that Andrew Lloyd Webber got a Broadway production before he ever got a West End one for one of his earliest shows Jesus Christ Superstar, and he does now also hold the record for the longest running Broadway show of all time in the still-ongoing Phantom of the Opera, thus eclipsing such homegrown Broadway greats as Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, or Stephen Sondheim.

And as I pointed out just yesterday, he once again has three shows running simultaneously here.

Tonight’s return of Evita to Broadway means that once again Lloyd Webber has three shows running concurrently here, along with the revival of Jesus Christ Superstar that opened a couple of weeks ago and the now-and-forever Phantom of the Opera (now the longest running musical in Broadway history). 



Two of those three shows, of course, were written with Tim Rice, who also has a third show on Broadway — he provided lyrics for The Lion King that’s also still running here. So once again this pair, whose first production of Jesus Christ Superstar actually opened on Broadway ahead of its West End premiere, are the kings of the Broadway musical.

In New York, the musical has long been king. But given just how many of them are routinely playing, there’s a lot of competition for audiences and a show usually needs to have an extra newsworthy feature to sell it ahead of others. 



Best of all, of course, would be the endorsement of a Tony Award (or nine, as was won by Book of Mormon last year), hence the annual mad scramble that we are now in the midst of to open ahead of the end-of-month deadline for eligibility for consideration for them. Last night the last of them, Leap of Faith, began previews at the St James, and will be the final show of the show to open when it does so on April 26.

Hampstead’s tiny New End Theatre may be no more — but a show born there over a decade ago opened on Broadway last night, with even the same star on board (though a new title). It’s been an amazing journey, not least for that star Tracie Bennett, who despite her two Olivier Awards at home for supporting roles, would never have expected to have seen her name in Broadway lights.

But there she is, on W44th Street at the beautiful old Belasco Theatre, giving the performance of her life in End of the Rainbow, a show whose current incarnation was born in Northampton a couple of years ago, eventually proceeding to the Trafalgar Studios, for which Bennett found herself in contention for the Best Actress Olivier last year (and not the Best Actress in a Musical one), which she lost to Nancy Carroll for the latter’s appearance in the National’s After the Dance.

Broadway, even more than the West End, is driven by star power — and no wonder. The costs of producing here so high that you need to build in some kind of guarantee to attract audiences, and a star name (or two) can provide that essential insurance.

The revival of How To Succeed in Business without Really Trying on Broadway, for example, recouped its initial investment thanks to the star power of Daniel Radcliffe — then consolidated it with a brief sold out run when Darren Criss (from TV’s Glee) took over. Now Nick Jonas is starring, with Beau Bridges also in the cast.