And the winner is… nobody

A pair of mediocre American actors warbling showtunes. A wincingly unfunny script. Weird camerawork. Bizarre editing. Inexplicable guest performances. Terrible sound. The complete absence, apparently, of anything resembling a point.

No, I haven’t started watching ‘Glee’ again, and season two of ‘Smash’ doesn’t go out here for a while yet. This was ITV’s seemingly ironically-billed broadcast of the ‘highlights’ from this year’s Olivier Awards ceremony. For lovers of really, really, really awful television, it was a feast to savour. For anyone else, particularly anyone who actually likes theatre, it was a waste of time dressed in a parade of dinner suits and posh frocks. How bad was it? Well, put it this way: last night I watched Showgirls, which I’d never seen before, and found that it was executed with a level of wit and style that this year’s Oliviers broadcast could not hope to match.

It was, in fact, quite difficult to work out what the makers of this programme – allegedly directed by one Stuart McDonald, who seems to have been responsible for, among other things, twenty-six episodes of Strictly Come Dancing – were trying to achieve, given that they seemed determined to shove most of the actual awards as far into the background as possible. In a slot of only ninety minutes on a major network – even at 10pm on a Sunday – I don’t particularly have a problem with showing at least some of the technical/supporting awards via a photo, a caption and a voice-over. Yes, set and lighting and costume designers do brilliant work, often under tremendous pressure, and yes, they deserve to be recognised, but if you have to squish the show down to half its actual length to fit it into a TV programme, something has to give, and the tech awards are not what’s going to keep people watching. Unfortunately, the supporting acting awards were relegated to 10-second clips as well, along with the awards for directing and choreography. Given some of what we were shown, that’s a little harder to defend. At least – credit where it’s due – the major award recipients were not limited to 30 seconds for their acceptance speeches; nobody abused the privilege, and the speeches we saw were generally funny, modest and charming. And as an added bonus: I didn’t notice anybody thanking God, which is an awards-show trope that generally sends my eyebrows shooting up into the stratosphere.

Otherwise, though, the show mostly seemed to either miss the point or shoot itself in the foot. No, that’s not quite fair: sometimes it  managed to do both at the same time. Surely the whole point of putting the Oliviers on television in the first place is to put a celebration of/commercial for the best our theatre has to offer in front of as wide an audience as possible? IF that was the aim – and it should have been – then the show was largely a miserable failure. We saw nothing at all of any of the nominated new plays, even though at least some of them are still running, and nothing at all (on the broadcast, at least) of some of the nominated musicals. We saw nothing at all of any of the winning performances, beyond a photograph of the actor in costume. All of the nominated shows, without exception, will have shot some kind of promo footage (quite a lot of it seems to end up on youtube), but we didn’t see any of it. The broadcast included musical numbers/medleys from ‘Top Hat’ and the current revival of ‘A Chorus Line’ (the latter’s number – ‘One’ – cut to under two minutes), and they both looked pretty good, once you learned to look past the bizarre camerawork and came to terms with the terrible sound. For ‘The Bodyguard’, Heather Headley gave a very, very self-indulgent (and, towards the end, surprisingly pitchy) rendition of ‘I Will Always Love You’, in which she managed to stretch the song’s first two lines out for what seemed like half an hour. We were also – oh joy – treated to a reprise of Will Young’s un-performance in ‘Cabaret’, for which he was inexplicably (yes, even in a very lean year) nominated for best actor in a musical. For those of us who had already paid to sit through it, that was just cruel.  Other nominated musicals (both new and revivals) didn’t get a look-in. Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton – two of the biggest names we’ve got – actually won their categories, and didn’t get to perform, presumably because their show closed months ago. There are clips of their (stunning) performances that would have been available, but they weren’t used here.

And, actually, that might have been OK if they’d genuinely been excluded because of time constraints, but they weren’t. Of course co-presenter Sheridan Smith had to have an opening number – she’s warm, funny, absolutely charming, has charisma to burn, and is a genuine, old-fashioned musical comedy star, even though she’s perhaps not the absolute greatest singer or dancer out there. Whatever it is, she’s got tons of it (and she’s also done plenty of TV, which means the people at home know who she is, which isn’t always the case these days with actors with a musical background), and seeing her vamp her way through ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’ was fun, even if the song wasn’t improved by the terrible sub-Sunday Night at the London Palladium arrangement or the equally terrible miking. Given the special award for Gillian Lynne, the closing medley from ‘Cats’ was also entirely appropriate, and again, it was very well performed, even if it wasn’t well filmed or miked. Elsewhere in the show, however, there was a lot of filler. The clumsy jumps back and forth to the ‘public’ stage outside in the Covent Garden piazza didn’t work at all, and the material for the presenters went on for too long, and was so badly written that even Smith and Hugh Bonneville couldn’t sell it. These two actors are capable of being very, very funny indeed; they died up there, it wasn’t their fault, and they should probably put a contract out on whoever wrote their links.

Better – worse? – still were the guest performances. Petula Clark looks great, never mind considering she’s 80, but wheeling her out to sing ‘With One Look’ was a mistake – while she looks great, her voice is gone, and she struggled with the song to the point where it was almost embarrassing to watch. And then we had Idina Menzel and Matthew Morrison, both imported from across the Atlantic for no particular reason to deliver lengthy musical solos. Menzel paid tribute to Marvin Hamlisch by wailing and screeching her way through ‘That’s How I Say Goodbye’  as if she was at a karaoke night on a slightly downmarket cruise ship – because, apparently, no British actor has sung a Marvin Hamlisch song onstage, ever.  And Matthew Morrison gave us a blandly-sung, badly-choreographed solo medley from ‘West Side Story’ that climaxed in a gloopy cheesy-listening arrangement of ‘Maria’ with a power-ballad drum-beat underneath. Well, I say ‘climaxed’ – there might have been more, but that’s when I hit the fast forward button.

It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with having random actors sing showtunes on TV. I like showtunes on TV, and have the DVD collection to prove it. Aside from the fact that so much of this broadcast was just plain bad to begin with, though, I do have a problem with half of the most prominent solo performance slots in a broadcast that should be celebrating and promoting the best of British theatre being given over to American performers who have not done any theatre in this country this year, and whose television show is not even available in every household here, at the expense of performers who were actually nominated and shows that are currently running. Come to that, if the point was to plug the theatre industry on national television, then perhaps the casts of ‘Once’ and ‘The Book of Mormon’  and maybe ‘Merrily We Roll Along’, among others, should have been included in the broadcast, rather than a couple of  actors who’ve been on ‘Glee’, even though those productions opened after the cut-off for nominations. As it stands, as a promotional exercise, this was a wasted opportunity.

The thing is, unbelievable as this may seem, it’s about a decade since the Oliviers – this country’s highest-profile theatre award – have been on television at all, other than via webcasts or the red button. The Tony Awards, on the other hand, are telecast every year – on a major network, yet, and far earlier in the evening than this was – and while they parcel up the tech awards in an hour-long pre-show that airs on PBS, they generally do a reasonable job of celebrating each Broadway season and promoting the nominated shows, and the telecasts, while not perfect, tend to be executed with orders of magnitude more conviction than was on display here. They also – and this is important too – manage to stay on the air in a primetime slot (albeit on Sunday night) despite ratings that are usually lukewarm. It’s a positive step to have the Oliviers back on a mainstream network this year, but if it’s going to be worth keeping them there, ITV are going to have to up their game.

Bluntly, this programme was incompetent. It didn’t work as a celebration of the last year of theatre in the West End, and that might not have mattered if it had, instead, worked as a piece of television, but it failed there as well. It was a badly-conceived, badly-made, badly-scripted parade of pointlessness that, taken as a whole, resembled nothing so much as the arse-end of an under-rehearsed Royal Variety Performance in a really bad year. Given that we produce, in this country, a range of theatre that rivals anything you’ll find anywhere in the English-speaking world, I’m afraid, that just isn’t good enough.

Mormons!

I do my level best to avoid Mormon missionaries. If I see them coming, I cross the street, and if they try to continue talking to me after the first polite rebuff, I tend to ignore them; to me, there is something quite offensive about the idea of going up to a complete stranger and, essentially, telling them that your belief system is better than theirs – not to mention that if you really want to try to make the world a better place, there are plenty of more constructive ways to do it than hanging around on street corners and at bus stops pestering complete strangers about a myth. The Book of Mormon, a new musical by the co-creators of South Park and one of the writers behind Avenue Q, is thankfully far more entertaining than your average encounter with a pair of Mormon missionaries (not difficult, so are most migraines), and it’s arrived on this side of the Atlantic trailing clouds of hype (and ticket sales) that are hard to dismiss. Everywhere it’s played so far, it’s received ecstatic reviews, and everywhere it’s played so far, it’s been formidably difficult to get a ticket. Ticket sales in London are heading in the same direction – best availability is several months from now, and preview performances were almost sold out within days of going on sale – but does the show itself live up to the publicity?

In a word, yes, which makes a nice change. Unlike the last show that was touted by the Broadway critics as the second coming of musical comedy – The Producers, which was never as successful anywhere else as it was on Broadway, and which suffered in the absence of its two original stars – The Book of Mormon appears to be a durable enough show to succeed without the original Broadway cast. In London we have a pair of leads imported from the States – Gavin Creel and Jared Gertner, neither of whom is the originator of their role – as Elders Price and Cunningham, two Mormon missionaries who are sent to try and convert the people of Uganda, alongside an entirely local ensemble. They’re all great – this cast is giving as smart, sharp, and funny a set of performances as you could ever hope to see – but none of them are stars (although all of them probably should be), and it doesn’t matter in the slightest. When they’re replaced – which they will be, the London production is going to be around for a while – the show will play just as well with whoever is next, provided the resident directors and stage management run a tight ship.

The reason is simple: this show is flat-out funny. It’s also gleefully, lethally rude, taking deadly aim at an extraordinarily broad range of targets from the absurdity of the Book of Mormon itself and religious dogma in general, through Western colonialist attitudes to the developing world (in the second act, Bono gets a well-deserved kicking), to The Lion King, with healthy doses of profanity and gross-out humour along the way (it contains, among other things, a rectal insertion joke that has to be seen to be believed, and which made me laugh so hard that it caused me actual physical discomfort). No stone remains unturned, and no sacred cow goes unmolested – but there’s also a point, and the writers pull off a difficult trick: despite the barrage of satirical/scatological humour, this is at core a surprisingly sweet show that has something quite surprising to say about the power of faith. To say too much more would be to give too much away, and the show is certainly loudly and consistently critical of rigidly dogmatic religious leaders, but it’s a far cleverer piece of writing, in terms of the stance it takes towards its subject-matter, than you might expect. For that matter, it’s also a far cleverer piece of writing than Parker and Stone’s South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut or Team America: World Police, both of which – while undeniably very, very funny – are firmly rooted in the blunt-instrument school of satire. Here, while nobody is above making scrotum jokes, there is something a bit more thoughtful going on, although there is never (thank God) a “but seriously though, folks” moment anywhere in the script, and the payoff at the end of the show is surprisingly touching.

How good is it? Well, I think the last musical that made me laugh as much was City of Angels, coincidentally at the same theatre, and that was twenty years ago (omigod, I’m getting old) – and that show, unlike this one, backs itself into a plot corner in the second act and relies on a not-very-convincing deus-ex-machina to get out of it. The Book of Mormon isn’t a perfect show either – while the direction (by co-writer Trey Parker and Casey Nicolaw) and choreography (by Nicholaw) are both blissfully sharp, the physical production (sets by Scott Pask, costumes by Ann Roth, lighting by Brian McDevitt) tends towards the functional, despite a few very clever visual-comedy flourishes. And the score, while always tuneful and always entertaining, peaks early, in that the opening number (‘Hello’, a piece of extended counterpoint in which the would-be missionaries practice their spiel) is better than almost anything else – this might be one of the all-time funniest musicals, but it’s not one of the all-time great scores, although the cast recording is enormous fun. The pace flags a bit, too, in the first half of the second act, but I saw a preview, and it could very well be that that will change as performances are adjusted in the run up to the press night.

Those are minor quibbles, though, and I’m picky: the biggest thing wrong with The Book of Mormon is simply that top-price tickets are priced north of £60 and it’s sold out for months, which means it’s going to be a while before I get to see it again. The best musical comedies – and they are few and far between – leave you walking out of the theatre feeling as though you’re floating on air. On that count, The Book of Mormon unquestionably delivers.

It’s still backwards.

A little over twenty years ago, I saw Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along for the first time – the Leicester Haymarket production, directed by Paul Kerryson and starring Michael Cantwell, Evan Pappas, and Maria Friedman. Back then, I was roughly the same age the three central characters are at the end of the show. This weekend, I’ve seen the Menier Chocolate Factory‘s exceptionally fine new revival, which is also Friedman’s professional debut as a director (she had previously directed a student production at the Central School of Speech and Drama). Now, I’m roughly the same age the three central characters are in the opening scene. Yes, it’s still backwards – but it has possibly never worked as well as it does here.

This is, of course, a show with a famously chequered history. The original Broadway production, in 1981, played more than three times as many previews as performances; during previews, the choreographer and the leading man were both replaced, and all the original costumes were thrown out, so that the show opened with the actors wearing coloured sweatshirts emblazoned with their characters’ names. It was a catastrophic flop, but it yielded a cast recording (recorded the day after the show closed); that recording reveals a score that, while patchy, is sometimes glorious, and that contains some of Sondheim’s most exuberant music.

Sondheim and Furth subsequently made several significant cuts and changes to the show, culminating in the 1992 and 1993 revivals in Leicester and off-Broadway, both of which were recorded. The Leicester production – I saw it twice – made a good case for the show as a problematic but playable piece that, while not perfect, was better than its reputation, despite a book by Furth that is never quite as penetrating or as witty as it thinks it is. It also had good performances from Michael Cantwell and Evan Pappas, and a phenomenal one from Maria Friedman as Mary Flynn, the novelist and critic whose unrequited love for her best friend drives her to alcoholism. That production, too, yielded a cast recording – almost unheard-of from a British regional production that didn’t transfer to London – and while it, like the show itself, is not perfect (not all the performances come across as well on the recording as they did in the theatre, and the percussion is far too high in the mix, and sounds like it’s being played by a Muppet on meth), I’ve listened to it a lot over the past twenty years.

And now it’s been revived again (there was a 2000 revival at the Donmar Warehouse; I was living abroad at the time, so I missed it). This time around, although the script is essentially the same as the one used twenty-one years ago in Leicester, the surprise is the extent to which Friedman and her brilliant cast have made the piece’s inherent difficulties disappear. This is possibly as good a production of the show as you will ever see.

Merrily, at heart, is a show about friendship gone wrong. Sondheim and Furth follow twenty years in the lives of Franklin Shepherd (a composer who sells out to Hollywood), Charley Kringas (a would-be playwright and Frank’s lyricist) and their friend Mary Flynn (a novelist and critic who carries a secret torch for Frank). We first meet them – Frank and Mary in the first scene, Charley in the second – in bitter, alienated middle age; as the show progresses, we slowly go back in time towards the night of Frank and Charley’s first meeting with Mary, and we gradually get to see how the friendship between the three grew and waned, and how Frank and Charley’s writing partnership went off the rails.

The reverse chronology makes it a formidably difficult show to cast; the original production used fresh-out-of-college twenty-year-olds, who by all accounts were not at all successful in the brittle, angry early scenes in Act One. Friedman goes in the opposite direction; she’s cast actors who read at the upper end of the play’s age range, and as the performance progresses they have to gradually age down in front of the audience. Not at all an easy thing to do, particularly in a tiny theatre, but this cast manage it triumphantly – in the final scene, you never, even for a moment, feel you’re watching adults playing kids. Friedman uses a simple framing device (the graduation scenes that originally framed the action are cut from the version of the show that’s now standard) . At the top of the show, as the title song begins, Frank is alone onstage holding what looks like a script; the script turns out to be the two one-act plays Charley wrote in college, and the final image is Frank, costumed as he was in the opening scene, holding the same script. Essentially, then, the show is middle-aged Frank trying to work out where his life went wrong.

To that end, the opening Hollywood party scene is brutal. Mark Umbers’s Frank is clearly not riding the crest of a wave. He’s stretched to breaking-point and full of self-loathing, even as he smiles for his guests; when he finally explodes at Jenna Russell’s Mary, it’s because her barbs have hit him where it hurts. Russell, for her part, makes Mary a truly mean drunk, but you see and feel the genuine hurt underneath her bitterness (it helps, too, that Russell is one of those people who can get a laugh and break your heart on the same beat). In the following scene, Damian Humbley, as Charley, delivers ‘Franklin Shepherd, Inc.’ with devastating force.  It’s a diatribe that clearly comes from years of frustration, and it’s riveting. Throughout the show, Friedman and her cast do an exceptional job of locating the emotional undercurrents between this central trio; even in the very, very bitter opening scenes, you see flashes of their charm, and all three are absolutely compelling. As the show progresses, their charm only increases – ‘Bobby and Jackie and Jack’, which is far from the best thing in the score, gets probably as good a performance as it’s ever had, helped by a wagonload of props and Tim Jackson’s clever choreography – and the final scene is very moving indeed. Their singing, too, is impeccable; in these hands, the glorious ‘Our Time’ soars. These are three phenomenal singing actors, and they’re all giving phenomenal performances.

The good news doesn’t end there. Glyn Kerslake is drily funny as producer Joe Josephson (a role that was played by Jason Alexander, later of ‘Seinfeld’ fame, in the original Broadway production), and Josefina Gabrielle makes man-eating Broadway star Gussie, Frank’s second wife, into a more fascinating figure than you’d ever guess was possible from the script – sexy, materialistic, ambitious, calculating, and far more intelligent than she lets on. She’s matched by Clare Foster’s Beth, who finds all the hurt in ‘Not a Day Goes By’ – in lesser hands, one of Sondheim’s most overly lugubrious ballads – in Act One, and is quietly radiant in the second half. Friedman knows the show backwards (forwards?), and she’s treated it, essentially, as an extended character study; the performances supply most of what’s missing in the book (which, even in this revised version, is not Furth’s best work), and the emotional payoff at the end is substantial. The tiny venue (and stage) helps; you can see into the actors’ eyes, and the intimacy really works for the show.

It’s not quite a perfect production. David Hersey’s lighting is terrific, but while Soutra Gilmour’s unit set – a ‘Mad Men’-era interior whose window opens onto either a swimming pool or the Manhattan skyline – is fine in the opening scenes, it’s too clean a space for the later ones. Her costumes, though, do an excellent job of keeping us aware of when we are in each scene. And giving the final transitional reprise of the title song to the kid playing Frank Jr. is a step too far – it doesn’t really work, although Noah Miller, the child at the performance I saw, was perfectly charming and sang it nicely. There are some rookie mistakes in the blocking – whatever the configuration, the Menier is a tricky space, but a little more attention should have been paid to sightlines.  And while the nine-piece band, under the direction of Catherine Jayes, are terrific, I wish they hadn’t cut about half the overture.

Those quibbles aside, though, this production is a major achievement, and – for Friedman – an astounding directorial debut, despite a couple of caveats. Without resorting to flashy staging flourishes, she’s taken a very, very difficult show – one which has never entirely worked in any previous incarnation – and she’s delivered a reading of it that probes deeper into the material’s heart than you would imagine possible. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Like, total drag.

Or, some reflections on the experience of attending Wednesday’s matinée performance of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert at the Opera House in Manchester:

It’s fun, sometimes relentlessly so. The film was fun too, but it also had a surprising emotional depth. There’s far less of that in evidence here.

This is very definitely a touring production. While it doesn’t lack spectacle, it’s considerably less elaborate than the Sydney, London and Broadway incarnations of the show, at least judging by the production photographs from those cities.

There’s a bus, but it’s more skeletal than it was, and several larger set-pieces have been cut down, or are simply MIA. The costumes, though, are still incredibly elaborate and often very funny, and the smaller, cheaper set does at least come to us with smaller, cheaper ticket prices attached. And the show plays well enough even with some of the candy-wrapping taken out.

It’s a jukebox musical, meaning there’s no original score. Instead, there’s a nearly nonstop parade of every camp disco classic you’ve ever heard, plus Pat Benatar’s ‘We Belong’ and a couple of ballads. And I never, ever, EVER need to hear Pat Benatar’s ‘We Belong’ again.

This show does, though, do a more intelligent job than usual of making the grab-bag of pop and disco hits fit the plot – even, improbably, in most of the more ‘serious’ scenes. Much of the show’s vocal load is carried by a trio of ‘Divas’ who deliver their numbers in elaborate disco outfits, suspended above the stage. Here, they’re Emma Kingston, Laura Mansell, and Ellie Leah, and they are great, both individually and as a group.

‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’, though, is a misstep. It’s a great song, but it’s used in the funeral scene near the top of the show, it’s given inappropriately silly choreography, and it reduces Bernadette’s very real grief to the level of camp clowning. It’s as if the show’s creative team are afraid of slowing down and Being Serious less than ten minutes into Act One, and it’s a choice that seriously short-changes both the actor playing Bernadette and the show as a whole.

All the lines you remember from the film are present and correct, but they’re all played more for laughs than they were in the film, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. That’s not to slight the cast, all of whom do as well as they possibly could with what they’ve been given. Richard Grieve does particularly strong work as Bernadette, despite a stage script (co-written by Stephan Elliott, the film’s screenwriter) that stubbornly refuses to let anyone hold on to a serious emotion for longer than about three seconds before the next glittery production number begins. He can’t quite sell the funeral scene, but I doubt anybody could; elsewhere, he’s funny, touching and believable, and he makes it his own. Given Terence Stamp’s indelible performance in the film, that’s quite an achievement.

As Tick, Jason Donovan redeems himself here for the one other time I’ve seen him onstage – a dreadful 1996 revival of ‘Night Must Fall’ (it’s a dreadful play, it was a dreadful production, and he was dreadful in it). His singing voice, these days, is a little worn around the edges, but that works for the character; he’s really good in the role, and – like Grieve – he manages to land the laughs and supply as much depth of feeling as the stage version allows.

Yes, there are ping-pong balls, accomplished via theatrical sleight-of-hand. It’s a clever conjuring trick, and Frances Mayli McCann’s Cynthia is raucously funny.

The film wasn’t afraid to show moments of realism and grit – compare the stage’s happy-shiny-drag-show opening with the very dark first scene in the film – and it was all the better for it. The stage version, too often, plays like a brightly-coloured fairytale. Given that the heart of the show is three queer/transgendered people trying to find some accommodation with a world that usually does not treat them kindly, that’s a problem. Despite the best efforts of everyone in this cast, the overall effect is sunnier and ultimately less moving than the film, and the stakes don’t seem nearly as high. But hey, there are dancing cupcakes in ‘Macarthur Park’, so who cares about depth?

It’s not that it’s a bad show, the funeral scene aside. There’s plenty of spectacle, even in this cut-down touring production, and the production numbers are energetic and imaginative, and it’s packed with funny lines. It’s big, loud, slick and very entertaining – but it could have been much, much more.

And I’m afraid that once again, the behaviour of some of the audience at the Opera House didn’t add to the show at all. In front of me in act one, there were two ladies who talked constantly and loudly, occasionally breaking off to swig from bottles of wine – not miniatures, either – that they’d brought in from the Tesco across the street. Their charming response to being asked to quieten down? “You can’t tell me what to do, shut your face!”. The house management very kindly found me a different seat for Act Two, so I didn’t have to listen to them during the rest of the show – but that, of course, ducks the problem somewhat, in that they didn’t take any effective steps to protect the other audience members in that section who hadn’t complained. These two ladies were disruptive enough that a competent house management would have thrown them out; it is simply not acceptable to expect an audience who have all paid non-trivial sums of money for their tickets (prices for this show are far lower than they were in the West End, but that doesn’t mean they’re cheap) to put up with the performance being disrupted by people who don’t know how to behave in a theatre. Unfortunately, the Opera House is an Ambassador Theatre Group venue, and ATG are not exactly known for their stellar customer service. The house manager I spoke to was pleasant, apologetic, and very helpful to me, but she was clearly unwilling to take any action that would involve  directly asking these people to tone down their appalling behaviour, and that, I’m afraid, just isn’t good enough.

Oh yes, one more thing: the show, in Manchester, is being presented under ATG’s increasingly fatuous Manchester Gets It First promotional banner. That’s first, in this instance, after Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London, Toronto, New York, Sao Paulo,  Minneapolis, Cleveland, and St. Louis. And all of those venues got a more elaborate physical production than we did. Aren’t we lucky? We’re the first to get the cheap version. Big whoop.

All misérable, all the time!

Several hours ago, I saw the movie adaptation of Les Misérables. I am still waiting for sensation to return to my buttocks.

That makes it sound like it’s a terrible movie, I know, and it isn’t, although it isn’t perfect either. It is, however, very very long. OK, it’s about twenty minutes shorter than the stage version – but the stage version has an intermission. After an hour and a half, you can get up, use the bathroom, walk around, stretch your legs, or do ANYTHING other than watch people sob in tune about how downtrodden they are then get killed. In the film, after an hour and a half, there’s still well over an hour to go before you can move, and that break is missed. If you’re going to get full value out of spending pushing three hours watching people suffer and die to music, some respite, however brief, helps. A lot.

It’s not as if I didn’t know about the length going in. It’s a long time since I first saw the musical on stage, and I’ve seen it several times (in fact, three times in London, twice in Manchester, twice in Toronto, and once each in Paris, Prague and New York). I’ve seen the Royal Albert Hall and O2 Arena concert versions on television, I own a number of cast recordings from stage productions (although I only really ever play the ones in French), I’ve read the big glossy hardback book that was sold a couple of decades ago as a tie-in to the stage production. I am, in short, as familiar with the material, probably, as anyone who doesn’t identify as a ‘fan’ of the show could possibly be, and while I certainly wouldn’t describe myself as a ‘fan’, and can point out all kinds of shortcomings in the material, I enjoyed it on stage very much. I enjoyed it on film as well – but not quite as much as I usually do on stage. Tom Hooper’s film, I’m afraid, makes two things abundantly clear: one, that Herbert Kretzmer’s English-language lyrics for the show are dismally predictable, and two, that Trevor Nunn and John Caird’s thrilling, exceptional direction (still, I think, the best work either has done on the musical stage) was more responsible than you might think for the show’s impact in the theatre.

Here, unfortunately, we don’t have Trevor Nunn and John Caird. We have Tom Hooper, a large budget, brilliant art direction, sets, props, costumes and all the rest of it, and a lot of quick-cutting any time anyone sings counterpoint. ‘One Day More’ is a stirring piece of music, but on stage, when it’s sung well, it’s spine-tingling – and the film, I’m afraid, makes it crystal clear that that’s at least partly because of the stage picture, and the fact that, as the number progresses on stage, all of the various participants are right there in front of you, sharing the same space. You don’t just hear their counterpoint, you see it as well. Hooper can’t replicate that in the film, so he just keeps cutting between the different members of his cast, and the result, unfortunately, just doesn’t have the same impact. Because the sequence, as beautifully produced and designed as it is, is less thrilling than it was in the stage production, you pay more attention to the lyrics, and in this material that’s not a good thing (there is a reason I usually listen to the French recordings rather than the English ones – both French texts are much, much better); they tend towards the banal, and you’re usually two or three steps ahead of the rhymes. The material is what it is, and the stage show has been so extraordinarily successful that major changes were never going to be made – but film is a more literal medium than theatre, and this material’s flaws are far more obvious on screen than I’ve ever found them on stage.

Hooper’s best move, in fact, is his much-discussed decision to have his actors sing live on set, rather than pre-recording their musical material in the studio then miming their songs when the cameras roll. It’s a very definite stylistic choice, and it mostly works to the advantage of a principal cast who do not all by any means sing at the level that has usually been required of their counterparts in the stage show. The singing is often startlingly conversational, and all the better for that; these actors are all simply playing their scenes in song, rather than facing front and Delivering A Big Number. This is an enormous film, but it’s often, paradoxically, almost uncomfortably intimate; solo numbers are delivered as soliloquies, often in extreme close-up, and the singing, even from the strongest singers, is often somewhat ragged around the edges, because everyone involved is working within an aesthetic that privileges acting over purity of musical tone. I wasn’t sure I’d like this, but it works, and mostly works well.

Having said that, even given this very definite aesthetic choice, not all of the singing is unimpeachable. Hugh Jackman delivers an absolutely superb, thoroughly compelling acting performance as Jean Valjean, but his singing voice isn’t always the best fit for Valjean’s music (he’d never have been cast in the role in a stage production). He makes most of it work for him, but he’s defeated, I’m afraid, by the formidably challenging ‘Bring Him Home’, which sits in the least comfortable part of his voice, and which should have been transposed down for him. Amanda Seyfried’s Cosette is radiantly pretty and absolutely charming, but the music really demands a proper soprano, and she isn’t, and when she moves into her head voice her vocals are thin to the point of wispiness.

And then there’s Russell Crowe’s Javert. I know Crowe can act because I’ve seen him do it before, but it seems sometimes he simply chooses not to. Obviously, this is one of those times. He acts like he’s constipated, sings like he needs a good night’s sleep and a big dose of Sudafed, and in his hands Javert’s two big solos are by far the worst things in the film. It’s as if his adenoids showed up every morning and the rest of him stayed home.

Fortunately, Crowe’s is the only completely duff performance. Eddie Redmayne brings real fire (and a very strong voice) to Marius – not easy, since Marius in the musical is frankly a bit of a drip – and his fellow insurrectionists, led by Aaron Tveit’s Enjolras, are terrific. Samantha Barks is possibly even better as Eponine. It’s no surprise that she sings beautifully – she’s already played the role on stage – but she’s the only person who, in negotiating the film’s very particular aesthetic choices, manages to turn in a performance that’s completely satisfying musically as well as dramatically. Sacha Baron Cohen (an actor I usually very strongly dislike) and Helena Bonham Carter are a very welcome surprise as the Thénardiers – they don’t, thank God, fall into the trap of playing the comedy too broadly, they’re properly threatening when they need to be, and their ‘Master of the House’ is a sly, insinuating triumph.

Which leaves Anne Hathaway, whose work in the film has probably generated more column inches (and awards buzz) than everyone else put together. It’s a tiny role – maybe twenty minutes of screen time – but she grabs it with both hands and doesn’t let go, pulling a full-on Charlize as she charts the destitute Fantine’s descent into prostitution, and her eventual death from – well, something nasty and probably sexually-transmitted. She’s painfully thin, we see her getting all her hair cut off, and she has her teeth pulled (only the back ones, though, because she’s Anne! Hathaway! so we can’t make her look too ugly), and she sobs and gulps her way through ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ – the show’s most overplayed song – in a single, mesmerising take. It’s an absolutely compelling performance – although, in common with many of her colleagues, her rendition of her music is probably not the one you’ll want to take home and listen to on your iPod – and it’s undeniably moving, at least up to a point, but it’s also absolutely calculated, and blatant Oscar-bait. It’s the film’s showiest supporting turn, but Barks and Bonham Carter do more subtle, more interesting work, and other actresses, in stage productions of the show, have generated more emotional fireworks through this song via less overtly demonstrative performances.

William Nicholson’s screenplay shifts some scenes and musical numbers around and makes a few judicious trims, and does a generally effective job of translating the material into a form that makes sense on screen. There’s a new song – ‘Suddenly’ for Valjean, sung as he carries Cosette away from the Thénardiers’ inn, and it’s pleasant enough but not terribly memorable, although it’s one of Jackman’s better musical moments. Hooper does an efficient but not always inspired job of the crowd scenes, and does not spare the blood towards the end of the lengthy barricade sequence. And the crowd scenes, actually, provide one of the film’s greatest pleasures: this is through-sung pop opera, and the bit parts are luxury-cast with a who’s who of British musical theatre over the past 20 years. From Les Mis itself, we have Colm Wilkinson (original Valjean) as the Bishop of Digne and Frances Ruffelle (original Eponine) as a whore, and they’re both wonderful; beyond them, we have one-or-two-line turns from Daniel Evans, Hannah Waddingham, Marilyn Cutts, Bertie Carvel, Adrian Scarborough, Linzi Hateley and God knows how many others. The supporting/bit-part performances – and there are a lot of them – are consistently spot-on.

The film as a whole, though, is perhaps slightly less than the sum of its parts. It’s certainly enjoyable, and parts of it are tremendous, and the closing tableau of the dead and living mounting the barricade for a final rousing chorus of “Do You Hear The People Sing?” is as effective on film as it was in the theatre – but not everything preceding it is as effective on film as it was in the theatre, although the creative personnel involved here have all made consistently intelligent choices in adapting the stage production for a medium that makes a very different set of demands. Claude-Michel Schönberg’s music works well enough in the cinema, and stands up to the more conversational, less declamatory approach taken by the film’s cast. Yes, it’s all a bit relentless, and yes, a couple of individual performances aside, it has roughly the subtlety of a steamroller, but it works. It isn’t perfect, and the film’s soundtrack certainly won’t replace any of your cast recordings, but this is probably as good a film as could have been made from this material, and it’s head and shoulders above several recent-ish big-screen adaptations of hit stage shows. Yes, Hairspray and Phantom and Rent, I mean you. All of you. It also seems to work for people who aren’t ‘fans’ – at least, I saw it with a friend who has never seen the stage show, and he enjoyed it, albeit with some caveats.

Just take a cushion, or spring for the premium seats. Trust me, your buttocks will thank you.

My Fair Lady

 

No question, it’s one of the greatest musicals ever written, but My Fair Lady has never been one of my favourites. It’s got a glorious score, and an impeccably well-constructed, unusually literate book, but there’s something slightly uncomfortable about the show’s treatment of its working-class heroine (I have the same difficulties with Pygmalion), and about the central assumption that faking upper-class speech and manners will make Eliza a better person than she is at the beginning of the show (we all know the story, I’m not going to write a synposis here). I also, I’m afraid, have a long-standing aversion to chirpy dancing cockney costermongers, to the extent that if someone starts tap-dancing with their thumbs up I’m liable to break out in a rash. I admire the show very much, but I’ve never quite warmed to it.

That is, until yesterday afternoon, when I saw Daniel Evans‘ glorious revival at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. No, he hasn’t cut the chirpy cockneys, and no, he hasn’t changed a word of the script, and the things that make me slightly uncomfortable are certainly still there. He also never directs his actors to act around the material, which is how, for example, the National Theatre solved the problem of the final scene of Lady in the Dark. Instead, he’s done something far more interesting: via clever casting and an unusually intelligent approach to the text, he’s given us a My Fair Lady in which Eliza, by the end of the show, is every bit Higgins’ equal. This is the only version of My Fair Lady I’ve ever seen, on stage or on film, in which a continuing relationship (marriage) between Higgins and Eliza after the end of the show is not only plausible but believable.

A great deal of credit has to go to his two leads. Dominic West is a little younger than Higgins is usually cast, which helps; he’s also a formidable stage actor with a surprisingly durable singing voice which helps him to provide Higgins’ mostly talk-sung songs with some additional (and very welcome) light and shade. More importantly, West’s Higgins is essentially a slightly spoiled, overgrown public schoolboy, an upper-class intellectual geek who has difficulty relating to anyone other than other upper-class intellectual geeks. There’s a childishness to his petulance that makes him surprisingly appealing; when Eliza walks out, he crumbles, and his “I’ve Grown Accustomed to her Face” is extremely moving. He’s giving a very, very fine performance.

He’s matched – and surpassed – by Carly Bawden’s extraordinary Eliza. Bawden is equally convincing as cockney guttersnipe and princess, negotiates Loewe’s demanding music with magnificent ease – her rapturous “I Could Have Danced All Night” alone is worth the cost of the ticket and train fare to Sheffield – but she, too, finds something more interesting than usual in her role. As Bawden’s Eliza learns, she grows in stature, to the point where by the end of the show she is every bit Higgins’ equal in intellect, if not in book-learning. When she confronts Higgins after the Embassy ball, she brings real fire to the scene, and she follows through with a blazing “Show Me”.  And in the final scene, when Higgins again asks for his slippers, she stands opposite him, not moving, imitating his stance, as if to provoke him. This is an Eliza who, from that moment on, is going to give every bit as good as she gets. Bawden is a relative newcomer – though she was also memorably good in Kneehigh’s staging of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg last year – but she’s a name to watch. She has a glorious voice, comic timing that seems to be guided by laser, and enormous presence, and her work here is dazzling. If there’s any justice, this is a star-making performance, and it deserves a far wider audience than a five-week run in Sheffield.

But then, all the performances are terrific, from Anthony Calf’s good-humoured Pickering to Louis Maskell’s gloriously sung Freddy. There’s a cast of twenty-two – huge for a regional production – and they do an impeccably tight job of Alastair Little’s witty choreography. It would have been nice to have more than twelve musicians in the pit, but reduced orchestrations are inevitable in a regional theatre, and these are done tastefully enough. Paul Wills’ deceptively simple set offers only two basic settings – Higgins’ study, and a colonnaded space that can be Covent Garden market, a ballroom, a street, or Mrs. Higgins’ conservatory, depending on how it’s dressed – but the sumptuous costumes and Tim Mitchell’s subtle lighting combine to ensure that this is always a handsome production to look at.

Remarkably, it’s Daniel Evans’ first major musical as director; it won’t be his last, because this is a tremendously assured debut. It’s a difficult show with two formidably difficult central roles, but this My Fair Lady is an absolute triumph.

Sound and fury, signifying…

Or, a list of things I learned at last Friday’s matinee performance of American Idiot at the Palace Theatre in Manchester:

1.  The show is loud.

2.  I mean, really really loud. I like rock musicals, and rock musicals should be loud, but this one is LOUD.

3.  Although not loud enough to drown out the two women sitting behind me who talked all the way through, but it would probably have taken an apocalypse to shut them up.

4.  This is exciting music, more varied than you expect, and it works well in a theatre…

5.  …particularly when paired with Stephen Hoggett’s restless, jagged choreography, which is the best I’ve seen in a musical in years.

6.  And that’s a good thing, because Billie Joe Armstrong’s lyrics for the show are mostly shallow, whiny, tedious crap sung by barely-two-dimensional characters, and they do not, in this presentation, add up to anything resembling a play.

7.  The bad lyrics are better than the brief dialogue sections written by Mr. Armstrong and Michael Mayer, the production’s director. Neither Mr. Armstrong nor Mr. Mayer should quit their day jobs.

8.  Michael Mayer’s staging, on the other hand, is so stunningly good that it almost made me forgive him for the horror that was Thoroughly Mechanical Millie. But only almost.

9.  Almost equal credit for this should go to Christine Jones, Andrea Lauer, Kevin Adams, and Darrel Maloney – respectively, the set, costume, lighting and video/projection designers. They’ve created a deceptively simple, sharply witty physical production that provides, particularly in its very clever use of video, a great deal of the bite that’s lacking from Armstrong’s generically disaffected lyrics. This show is a visual knockout in ways you won’t expect.

10. The onstage band is terrific, and so are Tom Kitt’s orchestrations and vocal arrangements. 21 Guns, in particular, is quite stunning.

11. The entirely American cast are entirely superb – sang, danced, acted magnificently well, and their energy was astonishing. They’re young, they’re great, they’re worth the cost of a ticket in themselves, even though you’ve probably never heard of any of them, and they all deserve every success.

12. The finale, in which the entire cast line up across the stage, playing acoustic guitars, to sing Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life), is ridiculously charming, and the show’s musical highlight.

13. These UK tour dates add an intermission to the show (which was a one-act on Broadway), basically to let the punters go to the bar, which should tell you everything you need to know about how committed Work Light Productions and the Ambassador Theatre Group are to maintaining the integrity of the shows they present. Shoehorning in an intermission did not help the show, which would have played better as a 95-minute one-act.

14. Two of the three plot strands don’t really work very well – the drugs plotline has been seen before in about a thousand movies-of-the-week on the True Movies channel, and the idea of an addict having a glamorous alter ego who tempts him to get high is neither particularly original nor particularly interesting, despite an absolutely compelling performance from Trent Saunders as the alter ego in question. Yes, we get it. Doing smack a lot really fucks you up. That’s pretty much all the show has to say on the subject, and it’s not enough.

15. The army subplot is far better executed, thanks at least partly to stunning video projections and choreography. The Extraordinary Girl/Before the Lobotomy sequence, in particular, is jaw-dropping – with no thanks to the lyrics, which (again) are thuddingly bathetic.

16. When it was revealed that the young soldier had had his leg amputated below the knee, one of the mouthy women sitting behind me burst out laughing. Laughing at that particular moment, obviously, more or less has to make her stupid on a level that calls Darwin into question, but the fact that she had that particular response at that particular point in the show suggests that the production had not quite succeeded in providing an emotionally gripping narrative to go with the loud music and thrilling visuals.

17. And that’s an understatement. Mayer et al present the show’s three plot strands with exceptional clarity, but the terrible lyrics and (occasional) terrible dialogue mean that we very rarely feel much emotional engagement with the characters onstage. The show is often exciting, but it’s also never moving.

18. It’s very sweary, too, and not particularly suitable for younger children – something which hadn’t quite filtered through to some parents in the audience, who’d brought children considerably younger than ten to see a show that contains all manner of sex, drug use and violence, both stylised and not. I don’t have a problem with any of this content – but I’m forty, and I would not take a nine-year-old to see this.

19. The flying sequences are superb.

20. In the end, it’s probably best to approach the show as a kind of balletic collage set to the music of Green Day, rather than a rock musical. The show’s visual presentation is frequently extraordinary, and the video projections and choreography, in particular, have a grim wit that’s almost entirely lacking in the lyrics. In some ways, American Idiot is an absolute triumph, but the text, in places, is very, very underpowered indeed, despite some excellent music. You’ll get a dazzling show – more or less literally in a couple of places, depending on where you’re sitting – and it’s certainly well worth seeing, but you won’t get much in the way of emotional engagement. There’s a reason it only lasted a little over a year on Broadway while a number of other rock musicals with lesser music (leaving the lyrics entirely out of the equation) have run longer: thrilling visuals and choreography aren’t enough to make up for trite lyrics and a clichéd plot, even with a winning cast. This is as strong a physical production of a musical as I’ve ever seen – but unfortunately, along the way, Mr. Mayer and Mr. Armstrong forgot to write a show to go with it.

Sex with the light on

“The first few performances are like sex with the light on. They’re fun, but you might see some things you don’t want to.”

I might have paraphrased slightly  – I wasn’t taking notes – but that was Jeff Calhoun, the director and choreographer of the UK tour of the Dolly Parton-scored musical 9 to 5, addressing the audience at the Opera House in Manchester this afternoon during an unscheduled break caused by a scenery malfunction at the show’s second public performance. Apparently they’ve yet to make it all the way through the show without stopping, although this afternoon they got further than they did last night. This afternoon, during the big Act Two production number “Change It”, part of a drop caught on another piece of scenery and threatened to fall down; the stage was cleared, the safety curtain descended, Mr. Calhoun came out to talk to the audience (he was charming, and very funny, and the audience loved him), and the show continued a few minutes later.

It’s live theatre, and it happens. I knew when I bought the ticket that I would be seeing the second public performance of a brand new production, it’s a complicated staging with a lot of moving furniture and drops, and it wasn’t exactly surprising that they had some technical problems. It certainly didn’t spoil anyone’s enjoyment of the show. However… when a show opens in the West End or on Broadway, the first performances (for a big new musical, anything up to the first three or four weeks or performances, in fact) are advertised as previews, which is essentially an admission that you won’t quite be seeing a finished piece of work. When you’re getting a piece of theatre up on its feet – any piece of theatre, but especially a big musical – there is work that cannot be done until there’s an audience present. Previews are when performances get adjusted, the writing is tweaked, and technical problems get resolved. Yes, sure, there are endless tech rehearsals before previews begin, but in a tech rehearsal you can always stop and start a scene again – you don’t have the pressure of having to get through the whole show without a break, which is what you have to aim for as soon as there’s a paying audience watching.

Once upon a time, not all that long ago (meaning within my memory, and I’m not that old), preview performances were sold at a discount. It’s still, I think, the case in the West End and on Broadway that discount codes are more often than not available online for preview performances – at least, if you know where to look. They are, at least, invariably labelled as preview performances in the show’s advertising and on ticketing websites, and instances where they are not have drawn sharp criticism in the press from theatre journalists.

You might have guessed that the Ambassador Theatre Group, which operates the Opera House in Manchester, didn’t bother with any of that. While it is certainly obvious from the tour schedule that the Manchester performances are the production’s first, when I booked the ticket there was no indication anywhere on their booking site that I would be seeing the equivalent of something that, in the West End, would be labelled as a preview, never mind any hint of early performances being sold at any kind of discount. Now, I’ve seen a lot of theatre, I figured it out for myself, and I went ahead and bought the ticket anyway (the Manchester run is not long, later performances here did not work for me, and it’s going to be a good while before the show is playing at any other venue that would be convenient), but it still leaves a faintly nasty taste when something that would, elsewhere, be clearly labelled as work in progress is put on sale at full price as a finished product. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me, given that the Ambassador Theatre Group’s commitment to customer service is not exactly outstanding (really – an almost twenty-minute queue to pick up tickets an hour and a half before the show began  this afternoon, no facility to print tickets at home, a somewhat lackadaisical attitude towards dealing with customer complaints), but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the standards that apply in the West End to apply here too, particularly given that a top-price ticket to this afternoon’s performance, with fees, would have cost over £40 (cheaper than the West End, true, but still not cheap). If it’s a preview, call it a preview. Let the audience know what they’re buying. If the show’s only in town for a week and a half, they’ll come anyway.

All that having been said, when they’ve worked out the kinks – there were a couple of other noticeable flubs, a very obvious misplaced prop which the actors covered beautifully (the phone cord that Doralee is supposed to use to tie Hart up was not where it should have been, and Amy Lennox had to go offstage to get it), and reflections in odd places near the top of the set that suggest there’s still work to be done on Ken Billington’s otherwise fine lighting – it’s going to be terrific. It’s already a very, very entertaining show, albeit one with a few significant flaws that, at this point in the show’s slightly chequered history, are not going to go away. Dolly Parton, of course, starred in the movie (along with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin); for the musical, she’s supplied a score that’s often great fun. No, this is not one of the great contemporary musical theatre scores, but this is an appealing and effective collection of songs, and the good stuff – particularly an extended opening sequence woven out of the movie’s theme song – is really good. True, nearly all of the music sounds like it comes from a Dolly Parton album – she doesn’t really manage to subsume her own distinctive musical voice and write in character – and some of the lyrics clunk, but unlike other recent musicals-adapted-from-films that have passed this way, this score never sounds like musical wallpaper (I’m looking at YOU, Ghost and Sister Act and Legally Blonde). The show flopped in its initial Broadway outing, and the version that’s being performed here reflects the US touring production, which was somewhat revised; the order of songs in Act One has been slightly tweaked, the three separate revenge fantasies have been conflated into a single extended musical sequence (called, of course, ‘Sexist, Egotistical, Lying, Hypocritical Bigot’, which is possibly the film’s most famous line), and two songs – ‘I Just Might’ and  ‘Always a Woman’ – have been cut. The book – like the source film’s screenplay, by Patricia Resnick – is fast and funny, albeit more cartoonish now than the film was; if the denoument currently seems a little breathless, it’ll probably settle down a bit once the actors have a few more performances under their belt.

And the actors, it has to be said, are this production’s biggest asset. In Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Parton and Dabney Coleman, the film fielded a formidable quartet of leads (in the right role, Parton can be a terrific screen actress); the biggest compliment I can pay their counterparts here is that they made me forget their predecessors. Ben Richards is a strong-voiced, hilariously sleazy Hart, Amy Lennox is an adorable Doralee (and has the hardest job, in that she’s playing the Dolly Parton role, and Parton herself – in the form of projected film – narrates the show’s opening and closing sequences and actually comes right out and says that Doralee is her role), Natalie Casey is pretty much perfect as downtrodden Judy, and Jackie Clune’s sassy, sardonic Violet just about walks away with the show. All four have strong singing voices, great presence, and laser-sharp comic timing; none of them are quite ‘stars’ (in the above-the-title, their-name-sells-tickets sense), but all of them should be.

And then there’s Bonnie Langford as office supervisor Roz. It’s a second-banana role with a few scenes, a mediocre song in Act One, and a reprise of the title-song in Act Two, but she cleans up. She takes ‘Heart to Hart’ – a frumpy-secretary-has-the-hots-for-the-boss number that’s just about the least interesting thing in the score, and effortlessly turns it into the production’s biggest showstopper. It helps that she’s given terrific, funny choreography (by Calhoun and Lisa Stevens), but the energy, killer belt and ingenious comic timing are all her own. She’s great, and somebody needs to write her a big old-fashioned musical comedy to star in, stat.

The rest? The ensemble have tons of energy, the bit-parts are all impeccably filled, Kenneth Foy’s witty set (drops, office furniture on castors, Hart’s bedroom) moves fluidly and affectionately mocks ugly late-70s ‘good taste’ (the bright costumes are great too, but – oddly – nobody owns up to them in the programme), the eight-piece band are impeccably tight (the sound design, though, is often muddy, and in the ensemble numbers the bass is turned up way too high – that, again, is something that tends to get worked out in previews), and Calhoun’s slick staging never lets the pace flag. It’s good now, and it’ll be better a few weeks from now. Everyone onstage is clearly having a wonderful time, and that sense of fun spills across the footlights; the writing isn’t always magical, and this performance was rougher around the edges than you’d expect from something that was not sold as a preview, but the cast’s enthusiasm is absolutely infectious, and for once the (more or less obligatory at a big musical at the Opera House) standing ovation did not feel forced.

So yes, it’s well worth going – but if you see it over the next week in Manchester, be aware that they’re still working. It’s great fun, but – as of right now – it isn’t quite finished.

Are we there yet?

I’ll give the answer first: no, not quite – but with a few fixes tweaks, this could turn into something really wonderful. There are a lot of wonderful things in it already.

If you read anything about theatre in the British press, the chances are that at some point over the past couple of months you’ve read something about Finding Neverland, the new musical that’s currently playing a tryout run at Curve in Leicester. Based, of course, on the 2004 film about the friendship between J.M. Barrie and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, the production has attracted a great deal of media attention due to the celebrity of the lead producer, Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. Although future dates have yet to be announced, the show clearly has ambitions that stretch way beyond Leicester; it’s produced on a scale that would simply be unaffordable for any British regional theatre, and it has a score by Scott Frankel and Michael Korie, whose musical adaptation of Grey Gardens found critical acclaim on Broadway in 2006. The thrust of most of the press coverage has been ‘Hollywood Comes to Leicester!’ – there were even wild rumours at one stage that Gwyneth Paltrow would play Sylvia – and that’s only partly accurate: Weinstein, yes, is Hollywood through and through, but the other major creative participants – bookwriter Allan Knee, director/choreographer Rob Ashford, designer Scott Pask and orchestrator Bruce Coughlin – are mostly drawn from the New York theatre scene. Leicester, then, is not precisely the first place you’d expect to find them putting the finishing touches on a new musical.

Except… actually, it makes sense. While it went shockingly over budget, Curve is an undeniably impressive facility with technical resources that rival or better any major regional theatre in Britain (not to mention a large proscenium stage, which is a rarity in modern institutional theatres). It also, under the artistic directorship of Paul Kerryson, has very quickly developed a name as one of the UK’s most exciting musical theatre venues. It’s become a destination, with an audience that is willing to travel a considerable distance to see their shows. I’m one of them; seeing a show at Curve, for me, involves a round-trip of a little over 200 miles. From where I live there’s no direct train service – it’s actually slightly quicker for me to get to London, which is more or less exactly twice the distance from here – and yet I seem to find myself back in Leicester at least a couple of times a year. So far, it’s always been worth the trip.

And it was certainly worth the trip this time. Although no West End or Broadway dates have been announced for the show, this is very definitely a tryout run, meaning that we’re not quite seeing a finished product; wherever the show ends up, it will more or less certainly have been somewhat revised from the version that’s on show here. That’s no bad thing, because the show as it stands definitely needs a little work; it has, though, terrific potential, and some of it is already quite wonderful.

It’s long enough since I saw the film that I can’t say with any certainty how closely the musical follows the screenplay; I’m not an expert on Barrie either, but I know enough to know that this is not a precisely accurate slice of his autobiography (for a start, Barrie’s acquaintance with the Llewelyn Davies family began some years before the death of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies’s husband, which is not the scenario we see in the musical – here, when Barrie and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies first meet, Arthur Llewelyn Davies has been dead for a year). That doesn’t particularly matter; what matters is that the story the musical tells us feels true. Allan Knee’s commendably economical book sketches a relationship between Barrie, Sylvia and her boys that is absolutely convincing and ultimately very touching indeed; the timeline of the growth of this relationship, the creation of Peter Pan, and Sylvia’s illness and death is (necessarily) compressed, but that’s not a problem – this is a musical, not a documentary. Frankel and Korie’s score is often very attractive indeed, and the Act One finale – “Set Sail”, an extended musical sequence in which Barrie invents Captain Hook – is genuinely thrilling (and has the most memorable tune in the show). The pre-opening preview clip of the climactic duet between Barrie and Sylvia, “In the Blink of an Eye”, presented a contextless performance of the song that, frankly, seemed rather wet; in context, though, it’s absolutely ravishing, and it’s gorgeously sung by Julian Ovenden and Rosalie Craig.

In fact, everything is gorgeously sung. This is very much Ovenden’s show – he’s almost never offstage, and he’s never less than superb – but everyone else, including the children, is working at the same level. The physical production is also very impressive – Scott Pask has provided a set of translucent panels and drops that, with the help  of Jon Driscoll and Gemma Carrington’s witty projections and Neil Austin’s subtle lighting, can move from a park to a drawing-room to the front of a theatre to an out-and-out fantasy sequence with dazzling speed. They’ve clearly spent a lot of money, and you can see where it went, but the spectacle, dazzling as it is, is always in the service of the story, even when we’re looking at a pirate ship that fills nearly the entire stage, or a full-size motor car driving through Richmond Park, or a kite-flying sequence that spills out above the audience.

And yet, and yet… the show isn’t quite there yet – but that, of course, is what a tryout run is for. Towards the end of Act One, Barrie gets a number called “Shadows and Fog” that’s everything you would expect from the title and less; it’s lugubrious and meandering, not to mention too long, and it doesn’t really work. There’s a confrontation duet between Barrie and young Peter Llewelyn-Davies early in Act Two that feels too self-consciously complex, both musically and lyrically; it’s impeccably staged and performed, but the lyrics are awkward and do not sit well on the rapidly-shifting, highly chromatic music, and the moment would be better served by something a little simpler. Later on in Act Two, there’s an opening night sequence at the theatre that feels flabby; the scene clearly needs to be a comic tour-de-force, and at the moment it isn’t. These are not fatal flaws; working through these issues is what a tryout run is for, and the show’s highlights – “Set Sail”, yes, but also a lovely, tentative duet between Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and Barrie’s wife Mary, a cricket match sequence, and a swaggering, swashbuckling tango for Barrie, Captain Hook and a band of pirates (two of whom enter by climbing down the chandeliers in Barrie’s study) – demonstrate that the show is very definitely on the right track. There are, here and there, a few moments in Knee’s book in which British characters are forced to deliver lines whose American idiom sounds jarringly wrong – Arthur Conan Doyle suggests going in to dinner by saying “let’s go eat”, and Sylvia tells Barrie that she would be pleased if he would “stop by” – but these, again, are minor fixes. This isn’t a show that requires major surgery. It’s a good show that, with a few tweaks, has the potential to become a great one.

Wherever it ends up, though, they need to keep Julian Ovenden on the payroll. There are many wonderful things in Finding Neverland already, and he towers above them all. He’s already giving a great performance, and he’ll only improve as the show continues – and he’s backed by an intelligent, experienced, hugely talented creative team, and there’s every reason to expect that they’ll make this show soar. Is it there yet? No, not quite – but I’d put money on them getting it right. Finding Neverland is already hugely entertaining; one day soon, it could be magnificent.

Mediocrity loves company

On Wednesday afternoon, I went to the Lowry in Salford to see a production of Cabaret. It was a bit of a mixed bag – a lot of things I liked very much, and two central performances (Will Young as the Emcee, and Michelle Ryan as Sally Bowles) that didn’t work for me on any level. I came home, wrote a review – in which I explained in some detail what I liked and what I didn’t, and why – and put it up on this blog, then went to bed.

That’s when the fun began.

Now, OK, I certainly didn’t mince my words in the review. What I saw, I’m afraid, was a mostly very strong production, with several excellent supporting performances and one – Sian Phillips as Fraulein Schneider – for which there are not enough superlatives, but whose two above-the-title stars – Mr. Young and Ms. Ryan – delivered work that wasn’t just poor, but barely of a professional standard. Mr. Young is a pop star, and a very good one, and he sang well and hit all his marks,  but he basically delivered a learned-by-rote imitation of the actor who originated his role in this production’s previous incarnation, and it just wasn’t very interesting to watch. Ms. Ryan was far worse – her un-performance was a stilted, wooden, dead-behind-the-eyes horror of epic proportions. She hit all her marks and most of her notes, but she wasn’t believable at all, and the excellent work from the supporting actors and the ensemble made her seem even worse in comparison. So yes, I came in for the grand slam – but I spent more time talking about the things I actually liked about the production.

Then the emails and comments started coming. I’ve left a couple of relatively mild comments up, although I closed comments on the post (I don’t like doing that, but I got to a point where enough was enough) – they’re childish (‘totally biased’, ‘biased, almost hateful’, ‘this person clearly has an agenda’ – because, obviously, anyone who strongly dislikes something you like must be bitter or biased or possessed of some kind of ulterior motive), but they don’t contain any direct insults, although the spelling and grammar are entertaining. The ones that just said ‘loser’ or ‘hater’ went straight in the spam file.

And then there were the tweets (none of which were from people who follow me) and the emails. A dozen or so of each, each more hilarious than the last (and, later, one polite, friendly, calm message from a lady named Rosemary who, while she didn’t agree with my assessment of these two performances at all, made her case without resorting to cheap namecalling – I enjoyed writing back to her, and it was an interesting conversation). Again, the words ‘hater’ and ‘loser’ and ‘biased’ were regular features; one enterprising individual suggested I should write Mr. Young a personal apology, another charming person suggested I was a ‘fucking idiot’, a couple used the word ‘cunt’, and one particularly hysterical (I assume, I didn’t read beyond the first line) email was headed “Who the FUCK do you think you are?” These messages, of course, were all deleted, and I used the ‘block’ feature in Twitter more in a single afternoon than I think I have in the past two years.

When I looked at the blog stats, I saw something interesting: that particular post had had significantly more readers than I’d usually expect to get on a given day (there are all sorts of things I could do to try to get more readers, I suppose, but that’s not really why I write here). A significant number of them had clicked from a Will Young fansite – BabyDevoted, an unofficial site which, the front page clearly informs you, has no connection to Will Young (if the obnoxious emails I received are any indication of what the people who post there are like, he’s probably quite relieved about that). I certainly never posted a link to the review there – anyway, their forums appear to be closed to visitors. I put it up on Twitter and Google+ (public) and Facebook (in my case, not public), but didn’t post the link anywhere else.

Now, of course, once you post a link anywhere online, it can travel, and you don’t have any control at all over where it might end up – and that’s true even if you post it on a Facebook timeline whose privacy settings are fairly tightly locked down. And, certainly, I imagine that anyone who identified themselves as a Will Young fan would be less than delighted by what I wrote about his awful performance in ‘Cabaret’. But, really – ‘hater’? ‘loser’? ‘fucking idiot’? ‘cunt’? Some people need to get a sense of proportion. Particularly given that, in this case, one or some or all of these people must have looked for this review that they found so upsetting. It’s childish of me, I know, but I keep seeing this picture of a gaggle of foaming-at-the-mouth Will Young fans sitting in a circle passing round the smelling salts. If they get this upset over a review, God knows how they’d cope if they were faced with any kind of actual crisis.

The thing is, I enjoy interacting with people here - most of the time. Some interesting conversations, and a few really great Twitter/Facebook friendships, have come out of responses to stuff I’ve posted here, and I’m really happy to have met those people, if only online. And, honestly, I’m more amused by all of this than anything – really, I have no influence. None at all. I’ve been (albeit briefly) on both sides of the theatrical fence, and it’s certainly no fun getting a bad review, but getting bad reviews is part of the deal, including from people whose writing has far more reach than mine does. I do also get – really – that sometimes you read something annoying online and a red mist descends – but there’s a fair distance between a red mist descending and sending a complete stranger an email with the F-bomb in the header. At least, there is if you’re over the age of about twelve.

I’m not a professional theatre critic. I don’t get press comps (I have, in the past, reviewed for a website and received press comps, but not in this country, and not for a while now). I pay for the tickets for the shows I see, and I make my choices carefully – theatre tickets are not cheap, and I don’t get out the plastic and pay for a ticket unless I’m reasonably sure I’m going to enjoy the performance. In this particular instance, I wrote an angry review of two performances (in a production, don’t forget, which I otherwise liked very much) very specifically because tickets are not cheap and the work these two actors delivered was not worth the money, and because – rightly or wrongly – I perceive a certain amount of cynicism in the increasingly common practice of casting TV actors and pop singers in touring productions of musicals in the hope that their C-list celebrity will draw in the punters, with little regard as to whether they are capable of giving a competent account of their roles. It’s not, actually, that I have any problem per se with pop stars or TV performers getting big roles in stage musicals – I’ve seen people from both arenas do very, very well on the musical stage (Vanessa Olivarez in the Toronto production of ‘Hairspray’, Marcus Brigstocke in the UK tour of ‘Spamalot’). I simply have a problem with spending a chunk of money on a ticket and seeing crap.

Another common theme of the first couple of lines of the emails (I didn’t read much further) was that the review was ‘subjective’. Well, duh. Whether they’re written by a blogger, or Michael Billington, or Ben Brantley, or God, that’s what reviews are. It’s one person’s opinion, that’s all – nothing more, nothing less. And that, actually, is what makes this whole petulant hissy-fit from some of the more childishly extreme members of Will Young’s fan community so hilarious: Michael Billington or Ben Brantley, if they write an unfavourable review, might have a noticeable effect on a production’s box-office performance. I don’t. I know how many readers I get here, I do this for fun (and, when I write about theatre, to keep some record of the shows I’ve seen), I’m not particularly looking for a wider audience (at least, not here), and I’m certainly not under any illusion that I’m delivering some kind of Big Objective Truth for an adoring readership. I react to what I see, I hope people are entertained by what I write here if they find it (and I certainly don’t expect everyone to agree with everything I have to say, here or anywhere else) – but it is, in the end, just one opinion. It simply isn’t worth getting that upset. It certainly isn’t worth getting worked up to the point where you send a complete stranger an email calling him a cunt.

And, really, if you object to something someone writes online, the best way to bring them around to your way of thinking probably isn’t to send them a badly-spelled, rambling email in which you call them names and swear at them. That, I’m afraid, is pathetic, and it will have precisely one effect: it will just make the recipient laugh. At you. A lot.