SIMON SAYS

June 24th, 2009

It’s long been one of the abiding amazements of the British theater that not only can its practitioners do what they do to a generally very high standard, but they can also explicate their craft – make that  art – with unerring eloquence and grace.

All of which helps to explain a packed house on a recent Sunday morning for the 2009 Ernest Jones lecture at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Bloomsbury. “You should all be in bed,” came the opening quip from the day’s speaker, Simon Russell Beale, whose talk, “Without Memory or Desire: Acting Shakespeare,” was remarkable, whether or not you had extensive experience of this performer’s singularity on stage (as not everyone in attendance did).

As if to forge a direct link between one’s humanity and that same person’s gifts, Russell Beale impressed time and again as someone, in his own words, gone “softer at the edges,” so as to fully view his characters in the round, free of the florid bells and whistles that he often applied to his performances when he was starting out. (The turning point: His shattering Konstantin in The Seagull for the director Terry Hands in 1990/1.)

It was fascinating, of course, to get Russell Beale’s take on his near-definitive Leontes in the Bridge Project version of The Winter’s Tale, now at The Old Vic, in which one witnesses a king infantalized by a jealousy that becomes pretty well synonymous with psychosis. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the landscape of forgiveness better or more succinctly expressed than was the case here.

Indeed, the actor was at his most fascinating as he anatomized many of the more difficult, often least likable Shakespearean figures he has played – whether Thersites, Richard II, or Iago, the last of whom ends up inhabiting what Russell Beale aptly described as a death-in-life in significant contrast to the accumulation of actual corpses piling up around him.

It’s a testament to Russell Beale that the audience coupled a hefty turnout from the psychoanalytic community with quite a few other theater critics in addition to myself, as well as National Theatre artistic director, Nicholas Hytner, who last year oversaw the star’s transforming performance – a lower voice than usual included – in Major Barbara.

Russell Beale spoke of his own acquaintanceship with death – including the loss of both a mother and a sister – as fuel for his genuine “sweet prince” of a Hamlet but admitted to looking forward to jauntier assignments, too, which will surely include London Assurance for the National next year and, following that, Deathtrap in revival on the West End. (Looks like the word “death,” at least, is not so easily escaped, even if Ira Levin’s thriller is not exactly Hamlet.)

Later the same day,  I found myself very much part of a hyper-adrenalized live audience at the Shaw Theatre surviving the shrieks and hollers of her highly specialized fan base to savor the transformation of West End musical star Kerry Ellis (Wicked, We Will Rock You) into a golden-haired rock chick of a fairly formidable sort.

At show’s end, Ellis was joined on stage by the wild-haired (dark this time, not golden) guitarist  Brian May, of Queen renown, who brought an already frenzied crowd roaring once more to their feet.

A defining Shakespearean actor at his movingly reflective best and Sting and Snow Patrol, among many others from Ellis’s British songbook, sent scorchingly through the roof,  all in the same day? Only in London, folks. And believe you me, I mean that as a compliment.

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TOTALLY F***ED

May 14th, 2009

Well, that got your attention, I trust.

The reference, of course, is to a song title from the multi Tony Award winning musical Spring Awakening, which this week confirmed news that had been making the rounds for some time now: the West End transfer to the Novello Theatre is closing May 30 after barely two months, thereby adding this particular show to the long list of Broadway-to-London musical flops that includes City of Angels, The Full Monty, Contact, Movin’ Out, the Scott Ellis revival of She Loves Me (notwithstanding its Olivier Award sweep):  the list goes on and on.

At present, the verdict is out on the eventual West End profitability, for instance, of Broadway financial gusher, and 2009 Olivier Award winner, Jersey Boys.

Indeed, one might be better off citing those productions from New York that have crossed the Atlantic successfully: The Lion King, the revival of Chicago, Wicked, Hairspray. Caroline, or Change, hardly a Broadway world-beater in economic terms, did just fine in London, and won copious awards, but the Tony Kushner/Jeanine Tesori collaboration arrived under the state-funded protection of the National Theatre for a limited run. Left to fend for itself in the commercial marketplace, one shudders to think whether so demanding a work would have even lasted a month.

There’s a point here that extends beyond a mere naming of names, which has to do with an essential paradox of the theater culture in the U.K.: For all that London remains arguably  the leading city in the western world for classical music and opera, and offers via the annual Royal Albert Hall summertime Proms an immersion in that repertoire on an order simply unknown elsewhere,  that same acumen and avidity on matters melodic (or sometimes not), don’t translate to musical theater.

Think of it: who are the new composers from within the U.K. whose latest works excite the chatterati in the way that, say, the merits of the Next To Normal or [tos] scores are debated on Broadway chatrooms. Aside from the team of Stiles and Drewe, it’s hard to think of any — and even they have had far less commercial exposure than one might have assumed from their prominence within the industry.

Put another way, without the Sherman brothers’  leg to stand on as far as adding new songs to Mary Poppins on stage, these gifted collaborators’ shows generate scant commercial heat in the way that even Grey Gardens, say, did for some of the time in New York, however much money that production ultimately lost during its much-laureled run.

At the time Grey Gardens closed on Broadway, there was immediate talk of remounting the show in London, and Julia McKenzie was even cited as a possible English inheritor of Mary-Louise Wilson’s Tony winning role as Big Edie. But despite the investigative trawl made around various London venues by several of the musical’s creative team,  any such British premiere has yet to happen – and the failure of the arguably  far more accessible Spring Awakening won’t advance its cause.

Spring Awakening’s quick collapse is of interest, as well, given this city’s pop and rock wealth of activity, within which one might have thought the indie pop stage musical contributions of Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik might at least have counted for something. I have no idea how heavily Michael Mayer’s production was promoted to the NME/Mojo-reading crowd, but therein might have rested at least some degree of commercial salvation. Or at least rather more of a degree than one is ever likely to get from the mainstream critical contributions of, say, Quentin Letts in The Daily Mail, who helpfully informed us in his review that “I nearly parked my supper [during] some contrived gay snogging between two sticky little Herberts straight out of central casting.” Sticky, eh?

In fact, “sticky” is a good word to describe the dilemma faced by any New York musical of any degree of success that wants a London run away from the not-for-profit arena. Sure, Parade knocked ‘em dead at the Donmar a season or two ago, but that was in a venue about one quarter, or less, the size of Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre, where the Jason Robert Brown musical was first seen in a separate incarnation.

Or maybe Spring Awakening’s best bet is to take a leaf from the ongoing success of Terry Johnson’s revival of La Cage Aux Folles – a sizable London flop when the show first played the Palladium during the 1980s – and wait 20 or so years, so it can be reborn at the Menier Chocolate Factory, as La Cage was, before transferring in triumph. (Either that or cast your leads off – heaven help us – reality TV.)

By that point, Aneurin Barnard (Melchior)  and  Charlotte Wakefield (Wendla) can return to the piece playing the adult authority figures. In the meantime, I wish them all exceedingly well.

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TONY TIME

May 5th, 2009

So, the nominations for the 63rd annual Tony nominations are now out there, and once again they speak with a distinctly British accent – as will many of the likely recipients June 7 in what may well be, and hardly for the first time, a love affair between Broadway and the theatrical motherland.

You thought Alan Ayckbourn was all but a goner on the New York stage? That, happily, is far from the case in a race that saw all but two of the cast members of twice-nominated director Matthew Warchus’s Old Vic ensemble make the shortlist – though it must be mildly amusing for the wonderful Stephen Mangan to find himself cited for featured actor when he’s on stage for the lion’s share of seven hours per three-play cycle and does, after all, portray the title character.

On the other hand, one’s heart goes out to Ben Miles and Amelia Bullmore, whose omission from the nominated ranks speaks yet again to the need for a Tony category for Best Ensemble – which might in turn have been one way of dealing with the non-nominated Ian Rickson’s Broadway ensemble of The Seagull. Let’s hope Kristin Scott Thomas isn’t wasting too much time pondering why it is that she missed out this year on both a Tony and Oscar nods, despite considerable speculation that she would come away with both. (Her Arkadina in London, of course, win the Best Actress Olivier early in 2008.)

Elsewhere, I seem to be more or less alone, which is fine by me, in my dismay at the failure of the director Simon McBurney’s All My Sons to figure even once in the nominations, the belated set-to between John Lithgow and Patrick Wilson arguably the most exciting single moment I saw on Broadway all season.  It will be interesting too see how that very production fares in Britain if and when it crosses the Atlantic, the word for now being that everyone is a game for a UK transfer except, alas, Wilson, who is about to welcome into his family a second child so quite forgivably has his hands full at home.

Looking elsewhere, I’m pleased Harriet Walter and Janet McTeer were both recognized, given that only one of Mary Stuart’s two grandes dames (Walter) walked away with an Evening Standard Theatre Award in London while both ladies lost the 2006 Olivier for best actress to Hedda Gabler’s Eve Best. That category – actress in a play – is unusual in featuring five women of very real distinction, any of whom in a lesser year could emerge triumphant.

And so much for my  powers of prophecy, which would appear  to be nil. There  I  was tipping Desire Under the Elms’s Carla Gugino to end up with the prize, and she was’t even nominated. Maybe she,  Scott Thomas, and Tovah Feldshuh can go out for a consolatory drink.  (Or,  perhaps with an eye toward next year’s Tony race, move on posthaste to Three Sisters.)

Cheers and cheers again to Zach Grenier, whose wild-haired Beethoven in 33 Variations is managed robustly, eloquently, and without an iota of scenery-chewing camp, and to absolutely everyone connected with the glorious Hair, whose surpassingly smart director, Diane Paulus, just might manage the impossible by stealing the director of a musical prize from Stephen Daldry. Unless, of course, the Billy Elliot juggernaut proves unstoppable, as would appear to be the case from the nod given David Bologna for featured actor, a nod I didn’t see predicted anywhere.

Tony nomination day is always an odd time for this New York theater animal to be back in London, where such awards increasingly count for less and less and pass generally unremarked by both the public and the mainstream press. (I heard not a single  expression of surprise, for instance, when The Norman Conquests’ Ritter was the sole member of that astonishing collective to get an Olivier nod; one feels in London that the principal surprise is being summoned to the ball to begin with.)

On the other hand, if the players seem an ocean away today, at least the plays don’t. What’s the biggest opening on the West End this week – indeed of the entire month? You guessed it: a certain Samuel Beckett benchmark text by the name of Waiting For Godot.

As for what will it be like when he arrives tomorrow night at the Haymarket, well,  watch this space.

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A LOTTA NIGHT MUSIC

April 26th, 2009

What do you do on a Saturday night - not in any way alone, as the Stephen Sondheim song lyric has it, but in the company of what would seem to be half the West End? Last night, at the Prince of Wales Theatre’s subterranean Delfont Room, the answer was obvious: hear Hannah Waddingham sing.

Life, as it turns out, has been a bit of a cabaret for me of late, what with very happy New York forays to Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley at Feinstein’s At the Regency (bliss) and then Kelli O’Hara at the Cafe Carlyle (ultrabliss). Upon my return to London just after Easter, I caught Manhattan-based Tony DeSare on his last night at the Pizza on the Park in Knightsbridge: a likable if not terribly distinctive presence who was at his best when rocking out to numbers like Johnny B. Goode.

Waddingham was something else again, not least because the late-night atmosphere at the end of an eight-performance week meant that the audience was every bit as ready to let their hair down as was Waddingham, who quickly set the tone by shedding a pair of fairly daunting heels so that she could perform unencumbered.

And what a performance! It’s the great joke of the current Trevor Nunn-directed revival of A Little Night Music, at the Garrick Theatre, that it has in Waddingham the first Desiree Armfeldt in my experience who is a full-on vocalist; indeed, the role was famously written for a non-singer in the late Glynis Johns and was superlatively inherited at the National Theatre during the 1990s by Judi Dench, who once told me (in a now often quoted remark) that she sings the way she speaks. Most poignantly, as well.

But you don’t expect Send In the Clowns to go to an erstwhile Lady of the Lake, the Spamalot mock-diva assignment that brought Waddingham an Olivier nod several years back and whose vocal swoops were much in evidence during a cabaret debut that, interval included, ran well over two hours. The sense of partying till dawn was to the delight of a crowd that included her Night Music colleagues, co-star Alexander Hanson seated front-and-center with his actress-wife, Samantha Bond, so that he could leap up to partner Waddingham as one of several very game, hugely talented guest artistes.

That lineup included Waddingham’s boyfriend (a relatively new addition to her life, one gathers), as well as various novelty acts that took the show into a quasi-surreal direction, and then, best of all, a firepower version of the great Peggy Lee number, I’m A Woman, with Waddingham joined by Anna-Jane Casey and sisters Gina and Mazz Murray, both of whom are currently on the West End (Gina in Chicago, Mazz in We Will Rock You). The ladies’ formidable lung power brought a chatty, increasingly bibulous audience immediately to its feet as, earlier, did a duet from Lakme that Waddingham performed with her mother, who has long been an ensemble member of the English National Opera.

I liked the breadth of repertoire that swung easily from Burt Bacharach to Crystal Gayle, from Faith Hill’s contribution to the film Pearl Harbor (There You’ll Be) to two numbers from erstwhile Waddingham starrer, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Beautiful Game, that came with a few aptly snarky comments on that composer’s over-fondness for what Waddingham termed “the money note” – a note, incidentally, that the singer has no trouble hitting dead on.

Often, musical theater performers can struggle in cabaret settings to decide upon a persona, and I felt some brief concern at the start that some unfunny, if deliberate, mangling of her surname was going to render the entire performance in quotation marks, British irony everywhere at the ready. In fact, once Waddingham opened up, she and an adoring crowd loosened up and the affection between both parties simply intensified as the show went on.

I don’t know what Waddingham will do for an encore once Night Music comes to the end of its limited run. But this much was clear on this particular Saturday night: the blonde means business.

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CRACKING THE WHIP

March 22nd, 2009

Britain has some very brave senior actors, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it if you followed the British critical community. On March 18, Judi Dench, now 74, opened on the West End for the first time in three years to play the mother of the title character in Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade. General exultation from the ranks? Uh, not quite, the overnight reviews for the florid but far from dull play having been equalled in severity only by several of today’s Sunday papers, the female critics if anything more damning to that rare show populated entirely by women than their male confreres had been. Oh, if only this Michael Grandage production had followed on from Ivanov and Twelfth Night and given us another golden oldie, glisteningly done, on which to feast, went the general drift of reactions to Madame de Sade. Well, I for one applaud Grandage for taking a risk in programming this third of four mostly canonical texts in the Donmar’s yearlong residency at Wyndham’s. And while we’re at it, may we have a second season, please?

Back to Dench, who has come in for some rather rude suggestions that (a) the greatest classical actress of her generation is no judge of scripts and (b) that her ankle injury – resulting in the star’s absence from a spate of performances soon after opening – may have been a ruse to get her out of a play she didn’t like and in which she could not always remember her lines. Sound familiar? Similar aspersions (minus the memorisation bit) beset Dench’s great friend and exact contemporary Maggie Smith when Dame M. returned to the London theater two years ago after an even longer absence to star in Edward Albee’s scorching The Lady From Dubuque, at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. That play was fairly roundly trounced and, against all expectation, did disappointing business, making negative waves as the first Smith venture anyone could think of not to recoup costs. Read the rest of this entry »

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MOURNING BECOMES NATASHA

March 22nd, 2009

Appreciations of the late Natasha Richardson continue to pour in, the British ones focusing understandably
on the film work of the 45-year-old actress who died suddenly and tragically earlier this week and on her dynastic status as perhaps the most shining of numerous heirs to the Redgrave talent. New York, meanwhile, has commemorated Richardson in quite a different manner, as has been seen by footage of the quite extraordinary encounters in which Richardson’s mother, Vanessa Redgrave, and husband, Liam Neeson, did a theater district walkabout in order to pay thanks to friends, colleagues, and fans for their expressions of love and support.

The fact is, Richardson was that rare London talent who gave herself over pretty entirely to the Broadway theater and left a grateful American public in thrall to her every stage appearance – and in very real mourning now. Lots of British performers triumph on Broadway, scooping up Tonys on the way. But how often have Pauline Collins, Stephen Dillane, Jeremy Irons, and Janet McTeer, to name just a few, returned to Broadway since they made their marks and won their prizes? In the case of the first two, not once, while Irons and McTeer are only back on Broadway this season, in Irons’s case a full quarter-century since he stormed 45th Street in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. Read the rest of this entry »

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GOING GOING GONG!

March 15th, 2009

If the Laurence Olivier Awards are handed out and no one is around to hear them, do they make a noise? That thought kept occurring to me during the 34th annual gong-giving knees-up March 8, a great evening that will remain the largely exclusive preserve of those who were there. Some of those involved were perfectly happy not to have the inevitable tension inbuilt at such occasions broadcast for all to see. “It doesn’t feel like a televised event,” Steven Hoggett, the somewhat surprising winner of best theater choreographer for the night’s big winner, Black Watch, told me in the Great Room of the Grosvenor House, immediately following the ceremony, “so it has its own integrity. As [best actor winner] Derek Jacobi put it, it only happens in this room: we were here; we saw it.”

And that is so. Whereas the Oliviers were once televised to BBC audiences who numbered in the vicinity of seven million, that long ago ceased to be the case, London’s nearest equivalent to the Tonys looking on as the show was alternately truncated, delayed for transmission until a later slot (or even a subsequent night), and, eventually, dropped altogether, viewership by that point having slipped below the psychologically crucial threshold of one million. Read the rest of this entry »

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MUCH ADO ABOUT DURHAM

March 8th, 2009

It was the National Theatre’s inestimable artistic director, Nicholas Hytner, who quite rightly advised theater critics several years ago to get out more, by which he meant, Go to the opera and ballet, see films and listen to music, since all these activities inform our weekly immersion in the theater. How right he is. But there’s another imperative, less frequently heeded, that, I think, makes a difference, as well: taking a chance on the new generation of practitioners who with luck will become the subjects of professional critical scrutiny and analysis over time. By that, I don’t mean forays into amateur dramatics (or, as the British call it, AmDram) — though I have had fun cheering on my great friend Helena in numerous endeavours, from Noel Coward to Shakespeare to panto, courtesy her enterprising local theatre troupe in the Hampshire town of West Meon. (We’ll pass politely over the version of The Elephant Man that I was once dragged to somewhere in the wilds of north London, in which a work colleague at the time was playing the title role.)

But it was with a view towards seeing tomorrow’s exciting theatrical prospects today that I seized the opportunity the other week to spend four days as one of that same number of adjudicators (three American, one British, London impresario and Durham Univ. graduate Giles Ramsay) at the 34th Durham Drama Festival in the ceaselessly stunning northern English cathedral town. Well, that and the prospect to relive however briefly my own university days, since Yale itself utilises the very system of residential colleges found at Durham and, well before that, at Oxford and Cambridge, the scholastic elder statesmen that pioneered this particular collegiate model. Read the rest of this entry »

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GENDER SPECIFIC

March 8th, 2009

I’m the first to nod in agreement when women directors chafe at articles that inevitably lump them all together. We are directors who happen to be women, they are quick to reply, not Women Directors (capital letters mine). And yet, I couldn’t help but feel that gender makes a discernible difference – and thrillingly so – as regards the newly opened Old Vic revival of Brian Friel’s luminous Dancing At Lughnasa, which is directed by a woman, Anna Mackmin, whereas Tony winner Patrick Mason directed the play the first time around.

Telling of five spinster sisters inhabiting the same tumultuous Ballybeg, Co. Donegal, household in 1936, Lughnasa indeed benefits from the careful attention afforded it from Mackmin, who is quietly growing into one of Britain’s most confident and compassionate directors: her West End incarnation last year of David Eldridge’s Under the Blue Sky was one of the glories of 2008, its absence from the year-end handing out of gongs puzzling to this day. Read the rest of this entry »

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