July 2012 Archives


As theatrical models go, the example of a New York company called 13P, founded by a group of 13 “midcareer playwrights” seeking to break out of the cycle of “endless readings and new play development programs” by instead actually putting them on, is hugely instructive.

Not only does it reflect the genuine disenchantment and frustration that playwrights feel when they are put on the “development” treadmill that takes plays out of their own control and puts them into the hands of literary managers, dramaturgs and directors, but it also created a different kind of approach to the way the company was run.

The public editor of the New York Times Arthur S Brisbane, who deals with public complaints to the paper, recently wrote about the responses he’s had to deal with to the paper’s many critics, and referred to the steady flow of correspondence he receives: “never in a crescendo, always diffused across various themes, this muted chorus of discomfort swells when opinion cuts too deep.”

He proceeded to comment, “A certain backwash of discomfort is perhaps inevitable, given the scale of The Times’s body of work, which is poured out every day in the Arts sections and weekly in the Book Review. Approximately 40 people, staff and freelance, produce reviews, and that does not count the Book Review, which taps outside reviewers and is operated separately. We are talking about thousands of reviews every year.”



The last year or so has seen a number of women coming to the fore to take over the leadership of major venues, including the Donmar Warehouse (Josie Rourke), Tricycle (Indhu Rubasingham) and Royal Court (Vicky Featherstone, who succeeds Dominic Cooke next April).

But the surprise announcement last week of a brand-new role being created at the RSC by incoming artistic director Gregory Doran of a deputy artistic director — and the appointment of Erica Whyman to it — is significant for a number of reasons.

I may be on my honeymoon, but I’m inevitably still plugged into the theatre back home (whether in my main home of London or my new second home of New York).

Yes, I’m spending long days by the pool and on the beach in Provincetown on Cape Cod, and avoiding what passes for theatre here (mainly drag shows and tribute shows, with Naked Boys Singing making their inevitable annual appearance; as one handed me a card the other day on Commercial Street, I was tempted to say I’d come if he kept his clothes on, but restrained myself).

Twitter, of course, is one way that I maintain my connection to what’s going on, and what people are thinking and saying.

No, I didn’t walk into a chapel on Saturday to get happily hysterical at my own wedding; instead, as I said in my Short Shorts blog on Friday, my partner and I walked into a park instead — Central Park, to be precise, to tie the knot at a beautiful spot called (don’t laugh) the Ladies’ Pavilion, a little outdoor steel frame gazebo near the water’s edge of the rowing lake that’s a short walk down from the park’s 75th street entrance, with the skyline beyond Central Park South rising above the trees and water.

New York, New York is a city, of course, that you could define and understand through the songs written about it including, naturally, ‘New York, New York’ itself — ‘Start spreading the news, I’m leaving today, I want to be a part of it, New York, New York’ — and on Saturday I truly felt part of it.

You wait ages for one classy cabaret place to open, and then suddenly there are two in the space of less than two months on either side of the Atlantic: just last weekend I saw a preview performance, to an invited audience only, of Janie Dee in cabaret, the first act to play the new Live at the Hippodrome cabaret space at the newly-refurbished Hippodrome Casino in Leicester Square; and two nights ago I visited Studio 54, a new cabaret nightspot below the old Studio 54 nightclub (now a Broadway theatre), to see the opening night of Broadway veteran Ben Vereen’s cabaret set there.

The Hippodrome is the latest attempt to bring high-end cabaret to London, after previous attempts at the Cafe Royal and the Connaught rooms famously failed. We’ve mainly had to rely on pizza (and pizzazz) at places like the late, lamented Pizza on the Park, and its Pizza Express replacement, the Pheasantry on the King’s Road.

The countdown to the Olympics began, of course, on that now far-off day of July 6, 2006 when it was announced that London had won its bid to host the event this year; and one of the immediate fall-outs, just a day later, was the co-ordinated terrorist bomb attacks on the city. Seldom has triumph and anticipation turned to despair and dread so fast.

But now that we’re just 16 days to go before the Olympics begin — even if the countdown clock on the BT Tower seems to have given up the ghost a while back — the anticipation is building again; and so is the dread.

So another reality TV casting round for a live theatrical show is upon us, in which the public are being handed the power to choose the lead for a major role for a forthcoming live production — in this case, one that is already on sale and with the added security of big names already on board, in the case of Tim Minchin, Melanie C and, er, Chris Moyles.

Actually, the latter is symptomatic of the desperate chase for a ‘story’ above direct casting considerations: let’s have a celebrity at all costs and never mind the talent. Moyles may, of course, have been hiding his light under a (Gary) Bushel(l) all this time and may be a stunning actor; but what about all the real, full-time actors out there who’d kill to play Herod?


The publication last week of SOLT’s annual Box Office Data Report offers a comprehensive statistical breakdown on how revenues not only held up but shot up yet again in the 51 full member theatres under the SOLT banner — as of course did ticket prices to provide that sort of return, in a year when attendances actually went slightly down, with record earnings of more than £528m across the year.

It’s been a recurring theme of this blog to worry about ticket prices and the effect that they may or may not have on audiences; certainly the times they are a-changin’, as Dylan says.

It used to be clear: the West End ‘opening night’ was the night that the critics attended, so did the celebrities and investors, and the reviews duly appeared the next morning (hence the unseemly scurry of departing critics as the lights faded). Those were the days of real opening nights and real overnight reviews.

Nowadays, though, it’s got a lot more complicated — partly in the guise of making it easier for critics, and to control exactly when the reviews appeared. Critics are now often invited to a range of critics previews ahead of the official opening, as they are in New York, on the understanding that reviews are embargoed from appearing before the official opening itself. The opening itself somehow became re-branded the ‘gala’ night — the one at which the celebrities and investors could air-kiss (and kiss their investment goodbye in some cases).

Summer? What summer? Of course we’ve had press nights rained off at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park mid-performance (though I wasn’t there myself, fortunately); but nothing epitomises the dismal summer so far than the early July ruse of producer Howard Panter to treat critics to a pre-show fish and chips on the beach, beside the beautiful outdoor carousel, on the Brighton seafront before the opening this week of the new Theatre Royal Brighton Productions initiative — and to find us huddled on cold, wet metal chairs against the wind and damp.

Howard may be a deity of the West End and regional theatre — he and his wife and co-chief executive Rosemary Squire have been named the most powerful people in British theatre for the last three years running in The Stage 100’s annual survey — but he’s not quite God. Even he couldn’t fix the weather. But can he fix the problems of touring theatre with this project?

Theatre, of course, doesn’t officially know borders; it’s an international activity, and indeed one thing it can do is break down national (or even notional) boundaries between people. The exchanges of talent, naturally, is subject to the granting of work permits — American Actors’ Equity has been famously wary of allowing too many British actors the chance to work on Broadway, and a strange exchange scheme was put in place in the 80s, still operating today, between the two countries in which the rights of actors to work in the other country are ‘swapped’ for the equivalent amount of work weeks, unless someone is deemed to be a talent of international standing and no such restrictions apply.

But no such exchanges apply to plays and playwrights. Subject to the payment of royalties, a play can be performed anywhere, anytime. But all too often theatres and theatremakers close ranks and are inward facing: there’s enough new material to produce on our doorsteps, goes the thinking and often the practice, where the writer is actually nearby and to hand, than to have to import it from abroad.

We are in the midst of festivals season, from the annual ones like Brighton last month to Edinburgh next, the biannual ones like the current LIFT, or the one-off, ad hoc, and apparently all-embracing, London Festival 2012 that is wrapping up lots of things that are happening already, plus some that it has commissioned from scratch, under a festival banner to provide a cultural strand alongside the Olympics happening later this month.

That’s included lots of other festivals, large and small, within the festival, like the World Shakespeare Festival that’s saturating us in all things Shakespearean; and has itself spawned another festival within that festival, the Globe’s recent Globe to Globe initiative of hosting 37 visiting companies performing each play in a different language.

If plays are tricky to pull off successfully, musicals are famously even tougher: all the stars need to be in alignment, and I don’t just mean those with star billing. The fact is that musicals typically have many more moving parts than a play, from the number of personnel involved behind-the-scenes to their invariably larger scale.

So no wonder it’s a kind of miracle when all the elements coalesce, as they do for new shows like Matilda and London Road in London, or Once on Broadway: they’re so hard to make work that when they do, it makes the thrill even greater.