Theatre News from The Stage
Voice of the people
Monday’s Guardian included a full page ad for the new Wildworks outdoor show Babel, being presented as part of World Stages London, containing critical quotes. “Heart-warming and uplifting,” says one. “Eye-opening and inspiring,” says another. Yet another claims, “loved it, incredibly impressive and uplifting.” And who wrote them? Tom, Dick and Harry, that’s who — or rather, Tom, Ambra and Hunt. As the tagline over the ad puts it, “The People Have Spoken!” Yet we have no idea at all who they are. It’s all reminds me a bit of...
Read more…
These are a few of my favourite theatres
Just the other day I was talking about drawing up lists of favourite things, and last week Michael Coveney provided his own list of his favourite UK theatres, in which he wrote, “I wonder if we’d ever all reach agreement on our top ten favourite British theatres. Here are ten of mine: Wyndham’s and the Haymarket in London, Theatre Royal in Brighton, the King’s in Edinburgh, the Glasgow Citizens, Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds, Theatre Royal in Stratford East, the Royal Court, the Wakefield Theatre Royal and Opera House,...
Read more…
Trampling down different theatrical boulevards and muddy fields
Theatre is a constantly evolving art form — from the top (of who makes it and where they make it) to the all-important bottom line of who receives it, i.e us the audience and how we see it (not to mention how we behave as we do so, as witness the controversy I ignited last week over the matter of Bianca Jagger’s appalling manners). Theatre, of course, doesn’t exist without its audience — as Steve Marmion, artistic director of Soho Theatre, said earlier this year, “Art is pointless without an...
Read more…
Short Shorts 34: Bianca-Gate Special - responses from Bianca, the Barbican & bloggers
It’s been an interesting week: I have been making headlines this week as well as writing them for a change. My blog entry here on Monday that recounted my encounter with Bianca Jagger at last Friday’s Barbican opening of Einstein on the Beach was picked up, in turn, by the Daily Mail’s Richard Kay column on Tuesday, the Guardian news pages on Wednesday, plus a banner trailer on the front page to a G2 feature tied into it on theatrical etiquette; two Telegraph stories posted online yesterday, from both the...
Read more…
It's our time, breathe it in; worlds to change and worlds to win
It’s always difficult picking favourites — but of course we all have them. One of the questions I’m asked most regularly is what my favourite show playing in London is, or to provide a list of the top three, by way of a shorthand recommendation for visitors from abroad. (And right now I’d say: Matilda for a new musical, Sweeney Todd for a brilliant revival, and One Man Two Guvnors for an uproarious comedy, but of course I’m not saying that this will work for everyone!) Starting the weekend after...
Read more…
Reading the Broadway tea leaves
In the week following the announcement of this year’s Tony nominations, the Broadway box office grosses for last week make interesting reading — and worrying signs for a few shows on the current Broadway slate. Receipts for Leap of Faith, for instance, which won a surprise nomination for Best Musical, actually saw receipts drop, from $224,539 the previous week to just $171,381 last week, with an average attendance of 72.9% (against the previous week’s 85.3%). But though the attendance percentage might not seem so bad, it can’t be read in...
Read more…
The attention-grabbing of a one-star review
Reviews come in lots of shades of grey. Thanks to the virtually all-pervasive system of star ratings across the reviewing landscape — though not, as I’ve pointed out before, in The Stage itself! — we’ve become trained, both as readers and reviewers, to reduce the judgements we read or make to a simple code; though as I’ve also said many times before, there’s no universally applied index to explain the calibrations that make up the differences between each register on that code. There is, however, at least a black-and-white sense...
Read more…
The spread of bad behaviour in the theatre (& a theatre that fails to police it)
I’m not often driven to rage in the theatre, but at Friday’s opening of Robert Wilson’s production of Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach at the Barbican Theatre I found my patience sorely tested, and I not only reached breaking point, I actually snapped. The amazing show — part art installation, part minimalist musical meditation, part dance spectacle — is an endurance test to begin with, not least on the bladder, even though a technical breakdown at a clearly shockingly under-prepared Barbican meant an unscheduled break afforded a pee break...
Read more…
Short Shorts 33: Misleading marketing images, critical feuds and bad musicals
Theatre marketeers and practitioners exist in different but obviously overlapping worlds; one is there to serve the other. Without an audience, a show is nothing, so the practitioners need the marketeers to help sell their wares. But marketing is essentially a parasitic industry; it doesn’t exist without a host to live off — and respond to.
Yet it is also full of creative people, who are making hopefully imaginative interpretations of what the art might be in creating the artwork for it. The trouble is that they are usually doing...
Read more…
Different kinds of theatre -- and theatre seating
I’ve had a few days of a different kind of theatre. On Monday morning, I had an 8.30am appointment at one — but no, it wasn’t the Edinburgh Fringe starting early in every sense. Instead, it was an operating theatre, to follow up on a back operation I previously had two Christmases ago. Since then I’ve had a few nights of armchair theatre — staying in at home. That’s an unfamiliar sensation for me, and it was all I could do to restrain myself from wanting to rush out, especially...
Read more…
One Man, Two Guvnors, Seven Tony nominations; Once Scores Eleven
37 shows opened on Broadway in the last season, and the nominations for the Tony Awards, announced yesterday, are always as much about what and who is left out as those who are in. And of course, at least from this side of the Atlantic, how the British exports and/or talent has fared. A staggering 30 of the eligible shows received at least one (or in some cases many more) nominations, suggesting that the Tony nominators — a group of roughly 30 industry insiders — decided to spread the bounty....
Read more…
Theatrical aggravation, saturation & constitution
Just the other day I added another example to the seemingly endless list of aggravations of going to the theatre fellow audience members, when I wrote about a woman sitting in the row behind me at a West End first night last week whose metal jewellery clanged loudly every time she moved her arms (which was every few seconds, it seemed). There are all sorts of behaviours that people get up to in the theatre that are entirely preventable, and sometimes inexcusable: last week, too, a woman spectator (who also...
Read more…
Short Shorts 32: Recycled reviews, technical breakdowns and rattling jewellery
Earlier this week, I mentioned how Variety, the once pre-eminent trade US paper, has cut back on its reviews to the point where it has twice recently merely reprinted ones from earlier runs of a show when it opened in London (a year earlier in the case of One Man Two Guvnors) and in LA (Clybourne Park) respectively instead of re-reviewing their Broadway transfers, and wondered aloud if the same thing would happen for the Broadway opening of Ghost, especially given that its leads were the same as the show...
Read more…
Success breeds success
Success breeds succes in the theatre as in other walks of life. There is currently, for example, no theatre with a better commercial record in the country than Chichester Festival Theatre: this week it brought its third transfer of the year from last season to town with its inspired, inspiring pairing of a new David Hare commission South Downs as a companion piece to Rattigan’s The Browning Version, following the transfer of two musicals, Singin’ in the Rain and Sweeney Todd, which could be described as the yin and yang...
Read more…
A Tale of Three Playwrights
The last two nights have seen openings in London of plays by three contemporary living playwrights, David’s Edgar and Hare and Robert Holman, and all in their 60s. Edgar’s latest, Written on the Heart, transferred from Stratford-upon-Avon (where his work has regularly been produced) to the West End’s Duchess, while Hare’s one act South Downs moved from Chichester’s Minerva to the Harold Pinter in the double bill with The Browning Version, the play it was written in response to. Both of them have also had their plays regularly produced by...
Read more…
