Double your fun…

Or, two (almost) perfect theatrical experiences in a single day.

I can’t say that The Glass Menagerie has ever been my favourite play, and it’s difficult for me to read it without thinking of For Whom The Southern Belle Tolls, Christopher Durang‘s brutal parody, and dissolving into giggles. Sometimes, though, it’s the actors who pull you into the theatre rather than the play they’re appearing in, and so it is here: I’d never seen Cherry Jones in a play, I had a (very rare) free afternoon in London, and Today Tix had a whopper of a special offer (stalls seats for £15). So I booked.

It didn’t completely change my mind about the play, but the production is more or less perfect. There’s no escaping that this is a memory play: Bob Crowley’s stylised set, which suspends the Wingfields’ apartment above a reflecting pool into which characters onstage occasionally peer, combines with stylised entrances (Laura makes her first entrance and her last exit through the back of a sofa) and Steven Hoggett’s falling-through-space movement in the transitions between Tom’s narration and the flashback scenes to make it very clear that we’re watching a recollection rather than a naturalistic scene set in the characters’ present. John Tiffany’s staging is flawless, Nico Muhly’s music is shimmeringly lovely, and everyone involved gets the tone exactly right. This is material that can teeter on the edge of self-parody; make the performances half a shade too big, or make Laura half a shade too childlike, or push Amanda half a shade too far towards the stereotype of the flightly Southern Belle, and it can easily become (inappropriately) hilarious, which is the reason that Durang parody is so devastating. This is an acknowledged classic, but it’s also a very easy play to ruin.

Here, fortunately, all four performances are exceptional. Michael Esper conveys Tom’s anger and restlessness, but also the odd codependency in his relationship with his mother. Kate O’Flynn’s Laura is childlike at times, but never childish; she’s horribly vulnerable, but it’s always clear that if the right doors opened, she could find a way to live in the adult world, and Amanda’s hopes for her do not, here, seem entirely delusional. Her scene with Brian J. Smith’s gentleman caller is truly lovely – a far more hopeful take on the conversation than is often the case, and again there is the sense that if things were different, if he wasn’t already going steady with the unseen Betty, there would be a real possibility of a future for them. And Cherry Jones’s Amanda is sublime – a straight-backed, dignified, practical woman who has engineered her family’s (financial) survival through the Depression despite her husband’s absence, and who clings tenaciously to the past but does not live there. I went mostly to see Jones, but I’m glad I saw all four; these are very, very fine performances indeed, and they’re surrounded by an exceptionally strong production.

And then, in the evening, something completely different: an informal concert by the (deservedly) much-lauded American actress and singer Audra McDonald, accompanied by Seth Rudetsky on the piano, with a guest appearance from Will Swenson, Ms. McDonald’s husband, who came out and sang two songs while she went backstage to tend to their six-month-old baby. To say the performance was a joy from beginning to end would be a serious understatement: Ms. McDonald is one of the greats, and very few people can put a song across as well as she can, but she’s also a warm, funny, thoroughly down-to-earth presence, and she doesn’t carry even the slightest hint of the diva (take note, Ms. LuPone).

She also – I’m starting to gush and I don’t care – knows her way around the repertoire, and her choice of material extends far beyond the parade of gold-plated standards we’ve all heard every single musical theatre actor who ever lived sing a thousand times. So yes, we got I Could Have Danced All Night – but she encouraged the audience to sing along, including the big substitute high notes at the end, and we also got Go Back Home from The Scottsboro Boys, Adam Gwon’s wrenching I’ll Be Here from his musical Ordinary Days, Jason Robert Brown’s Stars and the Moon (which Ms. McDonald was rather too young to sing when she recorded it way back in 1998), and Bock and Harnick’s glorious When Did I Fall In Love? (from Fiorello!). Ms. McDonald is a Juilliard-trained soprano, and her voice is exquisite, but she’s also a superb actress and a formidably skilled interpreter of song lyrics (three things that by no means always go together), and to hear her sing from a distance of about twenty feet is about as pure a theatrical high as you’ll ever find.

The evening’s informality helped: Mr. Rudetsky proved a genial host, the chatter between songs was spontaneous, genuinely illuminating, and sometimes very funny, and if you haven’t heard a Juilliard-trained classical lyric soprano impersonating Billie Holiday singing I Dreamed a Dream and A New Argentina then trust me, you haven’t lived (and I’ll certainly be back in London later this year to see Ms. McDonald play Billie Holiday at Wyndham’s). Mr. Swenson’s two songs were great fun – I’d have said I don’t really need to hear Stars from Les Misérables out of context, but few people can have sung it better, and his Pirate King was hilarious. It was, as I said, simply an absolute joy to be there.

So, two perfect productions, plus one wonderful catch-up with an old friend I hadn’t seen in the best part of two decades between them. A perfect day? Not quite. It wouldn’t be me if there wasn’t some kind of wrinkle. The show was sold as a 90-minute performance with a start time of 8.45pm; from Leicester Square, that leaves plenty of time to make the 11pm train home from Euston, right? The tickets, furthermore, were unequivocal about punctuality:

You can guess what happened. We got to the theatre about twenty minutes before the published start time to find a long queue of people snaking up the street into Chinatown. The theatre’s front-of-house staff didn’t start letting us in until a couple of minutes before showtime, and the performance started around fifteen minutes late, which isn’t good news when you’ve got a train to catch, particularly when you’ve got to travel about two hundred miles and there isn’t a later one. An usher, when I asked, told me it was a ninety-minute performance and it would definitely be over by ten-thirty. It wasn’t, and I had to dash out of there during the bows and skip the encore. Much as I hate to be that person who rushes up the aisle towards the exit during the curtain-call, this time I had no choice. I made my train, but just barely. In a city where theatres draw from as wide a catchment area as they do in London, it’s not really good enough for a house management to delay a show without explanation, particularly later on in the evening, and doing so may well force people into making a run for it before the show is completely finished. Don’t get me wrong, the show was a wonderful experience and I wouldn’t have missed it – but thanks to the late start, I also got slightly less than I paid for, in that I didn’t get to hear Ms. McDonald’s whole performance.

So – not quite a perfect day, but close. A great play, a collection of great songs, a handful of great actors, one of the great musical theatre voices of our time… and a mad dash up the Northern Line at the end. You can’t win ’em all.