June 2012 Archives

Of course it’s all for the TV cameras and photographers. And the people that serve this hungry mob. PR folk seemed to virtually outnumber actual journalists at the publicity launch for Viva Forever! at the St Pancras Hotel earlier this week; but then big musicals like this are Big Business.

Never mind that the show hasn’t even begun rehearsals yet, or that a cast has not been formally announced; it’s all about the spin. Just as Apple do an annual new product launch, this was all about selling the sizzle — as the video that accompanied the event was mysteriously called more than once by producer Judy Craymer while introducing it.

Theatre is all about how much it touches us each personally. We measure it in the depth and range of our own responses, but the curious thing about the art of theatre criticism is that those of us who do it for a living channel write them up in a forum that then becomes part of the public narrative about a production. Readers, of course, can make up their own minds in return to what we have written — and can often participate in the conversation via online comments threads attached to those reviews.

Or they can just start a blog and give themselves and their own opinions a platform to share them from. Theatre without an audience, as I’m fond of quoting Soho Theatre’s artistic director Steve Marmion saying, is just masturbation; and the same could be said of the myriad, mostly unread, blogs. As it is often said, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

No, I don’t have a crystal ball, unfortunately. But the other day I saw the return to London of a ground-breaking musical, The Fix — first premiered in the UK, at the Donmar Warehouse in 1997 in a co-production with Cameron Mackintosh — to the Union that itself broke lots of ground then, and personally meant a lot to me as it also introduced me to someone who subsequently became a very good friend, its composer Dana P Rowe, so the show became part of my own future.

The Fix — which concerns a fierce American political family’s attempts to promote a wayward son towards high office — has a song in which he tries out his political speechifying: ” I see the future, /I see the path we must try, /I see tomorrow, I see us striving for the sky,/ I see us waking up one morning to a song we’ve never sung,/ I see the future….”

When I left home on Sunday morning to head to this year’s West End Live, things weren’t looking promising: there was a sudden windy downpour. But by the time I arrived in Trafalgar Square for the second day of this year’s giant theatrical Glastonbury or Isle of Wight Festival (without, of course, the mud), the sun was out, the square was packed, and the cast of Rock of Ages were on the stage. Well, as I tweeted at the time, you can’t win them all.

Joking aside, the few minutes presented from the show were an ideal showcase of that show’s few pleasures: at least you didn’t have to endure the feeble book but could just enjoy the energy of the cast pumping out some contemporary rock classics.

I keep expecting the Edinburgh Fringe bubble to burst — but every year it proves me wrong and gets ever bigger. This year’s programme, which runs to 376 pages plus covers and is the size of a phone directory, features some 2,695 shows.

Of course the numbers will change a bit as some shows drop out and new ones get added, but at the point of publication, comedy remains the most dominant genre, with 36% of the overall shows and some 964 shows. There are also 757 theatre productions, 357 music shows and a new spoken-word section to the programme, with 41 shows. 


I have just sent out my 10,000th tweet — and this is my 40th Short Shorts column here, a weekly round-up in which I collect up shorter items that don’t warrant a full blog entry on their own. I only mention these landmarks because nowadays we seem to get a press release for everything that doesn’t matter — but often no press releases for things that do.

A brand-new theatre is being shown to the press today in Victoria, the St James - and when I told the PRs that I would not be able to make it to the event but that I’d like to see the release, they told me that they were thinking of not issuing it for another week, when public booking opens. Yet the artistic director is going to announce his programme today, so the news will be out there, release or not.

New plays in the West End are thinner on the ground than ever. In fact, there’s only one play currently there that originated there under commercial auspices: The Mousetrap, and that, of course, first opened in 1952 (after a prior pre-West End tour), all of 60 years ago.

Of the rest, The 39 Steps came to the West End via runs at Leeds and the Tricycle and The Woman in Black via Lyric Hammersmith, or are transfers from the National (War Horse, One Man Two Guvnors), the Royal Court (Posh), Chichester (South Downs in its double bill with The Browning Version and the return, yet again, of Yes Prime Minister) or Hampstead (Chariots of Fire, beginning performances at the Gilegud tomorrow).

I’ve lately felt myself going mad. The theatre takes me to so different places every night that could it induce a sense of displacement and schizophrenia, not to mention occasional bouts of paranoia; but in the last month or so it has repeatedly taken me to the same place: the inside of a mental institution.

That’s been the case for the madhouse capers, in every sense, of Joe Orton in What the Butler Saw, now at the Vaudeville, where the shrinks appear madder than their charges; then there’s the imaginary 6 foot rabbit that is the title character of Mary Chase’s delightful, surreal Broadway comedy Harvey, that I recently saw being sweetly revived at Broadway’s Studio 54, which the psychiatric home try to free its lead character of; and an asylum is also the setting for Durrenmatt’s ’60s Cold War angst-driven drama The Physicists, now at the Donmar, that I caught this week.

Twitter has many purposes, not least to provide a fast forum for the spread of news and reactions to it, so that it has become a truly interactive channel in which news is owned not just by those making the announcement but absorbed and processed by those to whom it is made. News consumers are, in this model, no longer merely passive receivers of information, but reactive receivers who in turn help to distribute it, often putting their own spin on it first before passing it on.

But there’s a downside to all this free chatter: people are equally free to put out opinions there that are not exactly what others want to hear. That’s precisely the problem with free speech: people can speak their minds. And some of it may be personal. But if you read it and engage with it, you may have to be prepared to read things that you don’t want to hear.

We are, of course, already beholden to the subsidised theatre for most of the creative wealth in every area of our theatrical life, from the talent — actors, directors, designers, writers and other personnel — trained, nurtured and supported there, to the audience development that it constantly forges, too, building relationships with its audiences that establishes and feeds a theatregoing habit that then spreads far beyond it.

Some of the West End’s biggest hits, from Les Miserables and Matilda - the Musical to War Horse and One Man Two Guvnors began there — the first two at the RSC, the latter pair at the National.

Rain stopped (the) play at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park at Monday’s press night for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it hasn’t stopped (some of) the reviews from appearing. Michael Coveney, reviewing it here for The Stage and Libby Purves for The Times both reviewed as much as they managed to see before the theatre was forced to abandon the performance.

In the process, they partly turned into reporters of the weather as much as of the show: as Libby noted, “Open air theatre is always an heroic risk, and the weather had no mercy on the opening night of Regent’s Park’s most traditional play…. This is an experience to warm the heart: it is not often that a mere critic gets to help the Lord Mayor of Westminster to manoeuvre a crackly plastic poncho over her chain of office and velvet cloak and insignia. And it was good to see the soaking audience cheering the players, and the cast applauding us back, when an hour in, the Met Office promised still worse rain. To cries of aaaaahhhh! the second half of the performance was cancelled.”

One of the joys of theatre is that it is constantly evolving: there is no ‘fixed’, final cut, as in a movie when it is ready to be released. Instead, every single performance can be, and often is, different from the ones that preceded it. Often this is especially the case with press nights, where — charged by pressure from the critics in the house on the one hand and the over-eager friends and investors on the other — a show may not be seen at it’s best.

But there are other changes possible, too. At Tuesday’s opening for the Menier Chocolate Factory’s new production of Torch Song Trilogy, for instance, David Babani told me beforehand that until that night the audiences had been more gay than straight and roughly 70% male. On opening night, the audience was far more mixed — and he worried aloud to me how this might affect the show, with laughs landing in different places and so on.

I recently wrote about a few of my favourite leading ladies and leading men in West End musicals, and now that I just returned yesterday from my Tony week on Broadway, it’s a good opportunity to think about some of my favourite performers over there.

This Tony year has deservedly honoured my long-time favourite Broadway leading lady of them all: the incandescent Audra McDonald, who won her fifth Tony for Porgy and Bess, and is the singer whom I seriously regard to be the greatest to be born in my theatregoing lifetime.

Yesterday I reported on the results of the Tony Awards, which I’d experienced first hand by attending the Sunday morning rehearsal at the Beacon Theatre so I had at least seen the show first, then live via the live telecast that evening.

But the live part wasn’t quite as engaging for me, partly because I was trying to simultaneously engage elsewhere: as an experiment, I was running a live twitter feed from my Shentonstage account. And of course I was far from the only one: one follower in London moaned aloud to me that he’d been barred by tweeting too much (twitter has a capacity threshold for the number of tweets you can send per hour).

So the Tony Awards are over for another year, with the presentation of Broadway theatre’s biggest prizes to itself held last night at the Beacon Theatre — not a Broadway house, though it has an address on it (but way up between 73rd and 74th Street, and much bigger than any Broadway house, with nearly 3,000 seats), which is just the first anomaly amongst the ones that inevitably and ritually occur every year.

I was there yesterday morning for the invited run-through dress rehearsal (thanks to Heather Hitchens, the new executive director of the American Theatre Wing, co-presenters of the awards with the Broadway League). I then watched the live telecast at a private Tony party in a friend’s apartment — which can be more fun than actually being there, since we ordered pizza in and I’d already bought two amazing cherry and apple pies earlier in the day (the things that really matter in life)!

Broadway has often been described as a fabulous invalid, a moniker taken from a 1938 Kaufman/Hart play that ran for less than two months in 1938 — and as a sign of another era of theatre entirely, had a cast that featured no less than 73 actors!

But the term nowadays is appropriated to refer to an industry that seems to lurch from crisis to crisis, but keeps rising again from the ashes. There’s certainly no shortage of shows always lining up to take the theatres vacated by shows that have flopped. And for an invalid, it does pretty well in boosting the New York economy.

On Tuesday I attended the most remarkable and celebratory of all the annual awards ceremonies that proliferate in New York at this time of the year: the Theatre World Awards, presented in the name and under the auspices of the annually published book, founded by the late John Willis, that provides a running archive of all the shows that open in New York every year.



It’s a shame that London has no equivalent publication (and I hereby publicly volunteer to start one!), but the amazing thing is that it’s not the only one here in New York: Playbill (publishers of the free programmes that are distributed in most Broadway houses, and also a website for which, to declare an interest, I am the London correspondent) also publishes a Broadway yearbook, and there’s also the superb Best Plays Theater yearbooks that’s been oldest of them all, in existence since 1920.

It’s awards week in New York, where I am right now — last Sunday night it was the turn of the Drama Desk Awards, with the Tony Awards to follow this coming Sunday, while today sees the presentation of the Theatre World Awards (which recognises only newcomers to New York theatre, whose winners include West End veteran - and double Olivier Award winner — Tracie Bennett).

Each of them have different nominating processes with different criteria for inclusion: the Drama Desk spreads its net further afield than the Tony’s, pitting Broadway against off-Broadway, whereas the Tony’s are Broadway only.

This is the final weekend of the Shakespeare’s Globe’s massive Globe to Globe project, in which 37 different companies were invited from all over the world to come to perform the full set of Shakespeare’s plays, each in a different language, from IziZulu and Maori to Bangla, Gujarati and Juba Arabic.

I’m afraid I saw just one — The Winter’s Tale in a production from Nigeria that was played in Yoruba. But it was fascinating to see not just a production that so miraculously embodies the spirit of the play in re-telling its plot in broad brushstrokes, but also to experience first-hand something I’ve been told about all season: that the Globe has been attracting an all-new audience to the place for it. An amazing average of 80% of those coming across the season have been new to the venue; I’d be amazed if there’s a better example of outreach work in British theatre.