Welcome to today’s edition of ShentonSTAGE Daily, in which I look back on the last seven days of theatre news and reviews (including my own).
FRIDAY APRIL 14
The coronation of King Charles III will take place on May 6, and yesterday it was officially confirmed:
This, at least, is a practical name change. Many theatres on both sides of the Atlantic are regularly renamed: in the West End, we’ve now got the Gielgud, Coward, Pinter and Gillian Lynne (formerly Globe, Albery, Comedy and New London), while on Broadway the last couple of years have seen the renaming of theatres in honour of Lena Horne and James Earl Jones (formerly the Brooks Atkinson and Cort Theatres).
SATURDAY APRIL 15
Today I attended two back-to-back Broadway press performances — a post-opening matinee of CAMELOT at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre that I’ve already reported on here (https://shentonstage.com/shentonstage-daily-for-monday-april-17-more-from-new-york/), then a pre-opening performance of PETER PAN GOES WRONG that opens officially on Wednesday (April 19).
Mischief Theatre, who created the latter on the London fringe as they did their debut show THE PLAY GOES WRONG, now have two shows playing in New York, as the first one continues to run at off-Broadway’s New World Stages.
I first saw Peter Pan Goes Wrong when it made its West End debut in 2015; it was the first show I saw after hip replacement surgery, and I laughed so hard I was fearful that I was in danger of dislocating my new hip. (That’s exactly what I did do – but not because Mischief did me a mischief — after I had my other hip replaced, and I can assure you it is no laughing matter).
Seeing it again eight years later, now on Broadway, is to witness a delightful London fringe company, co-founded by people when they were students at LAMDA, propelled to the world’s most glamorous theatrical arena, and even as the show falls apart around them, as ever, more than earning their place there. As Tim Teeman notes in his review for the Daily Beast,
“There should be at least one special Tony Award for Mischief Theatre’s Peter Pan Goes Wrong – not just for its technical brilliance, and the raucous, daffy, side-splitting pleasures it delivers to the audience, but also as a badge of proof that the British may have finally, successfully exported pantomime to America.”
CAMELOT, by contrast, has long been a costume pageant, with the loveliest of scores but the deadliest of books. One of the best productions I’ve ever seen of it was at Newbury’s Watermill Theatre during the pandemic, when it was staged in their outdoor gardens to socially distanced audiences — with most of the book stripped out. Director Bartlett Sher — the resident wizard of Lincoln Center’s revival of historic musicals (he has previously revived South Pacific, The King and I and another Lerner and Loewe classic My Fair Lady here, all of which came to London) — has entrusted Aaron Sorkin with re-writing the book, but it is still a slog.
At least Philippa Soo as an enchanting Guinevere, and Jordan Donica as the dashing knight Lancelot she has an affair with (both pictured above), sing their songs gloriously, to the accompaniment of a gorgeous 30-strong orchestra.
SUNDAY APRIL 16
Today I caught up with SHUCKED, a new Broadway musical that opened earlier this month, and FAT HAM, that opened earlier this week.
SHUCKED is an inevitably corny musical (in every sense), set in a town where the corn crop is failing, but it is irresistibly likeable, often genuinely funny and performed with real warmth and zest. In a world of endless screen to stage musicals, it is refreshing, too, to find something more original.
The ferocious, audacious FAT HAM is a contemporary riff on HAMLET that’s an electrifying provocation on racial and sexual politics; it won playwright James Ijames last year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, and is full of twisting surprises.
The RSC should be bidding for the rights to present the UK premiere now. As it is, they’ve just opened their own new Hamlet-adjacent play, HAMNET, at the re-opened Swan in Stratford before an already-planned transfer to the West End’s Garrick, that imagines the circumstances and effect of the death of Shakespeare’s young son on the playwright.
MONDAY APRIL 17
My newsletter today wrapped up some of the shows I saw since arriving in New York last Wednesday; you can find it here: https://shentonstage.com/shentonstage-daily-for-monday-april-17-more-from-new-york/
CRITICS’ CIRCLE THEATRE AWARDS
Meanwhile, this year’s Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards were presented in London today, which I hosted for nearly a decade when I was chair of the drama section of the circle.
It was the biggest job of the year for me in that role, and as well as fronting the event on the day, it also entailed much of the organisation of the planning, voting and financing for it all, too.
Though there was a Covid-enforced break, it has now returned — under the auspices of Kate Malty as the section’s current chair — in a new venue (the brilliant new @SohoPlace theatre, which means more people can be accommodated than we used to be able to have in the theatre bar at the Prince of Wales).
Also this year, it saw the revival of, and integration of, the Empty Space Peter Brook Theatre Award, set up by Blanche Marvin in 1989 to celebrate independent and fringe studio theatre, which she ran until 2017
The indefatigable Blanche is now 98 and still going strong, as you can see here, and as a long-time judge on the original Empty Space Peter Brook Theatre Awards panel, I treasure the judging meetings we used to hold in her St John’s Wood apartment; this year we were invited to recommend nominees for the award, with the members of the Critics’ Circle voting on the winner, which this year deservedly went to the New Diorama, a theatre that is currently riding high with the transfer of BLACK BOYS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE to the West End that was developed and premiered there.
AHRENS AND FLAHERTY
Last November I came down to Classic Stage Company on east 13th Street to see a delightful production of Ahrens & Flaherty’s A MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE (and wrote about it here: https://shentonstage.com/shentonstage-daily-for-monday-november-14/); tonight I’m back at CSC for a gala celebrating the writing team’s 40-year musical partnership, titled MAKE THEM HEAR YOU (after a song from their 1998 masterpiece RAGTIME, long overdue a revival in London).
It began when they met as fellow students in the BMI workshops to promote new musical writers; tonight we heard songs from the unproduced BEDAZZLED to the upcoming KNOXSVILLE, with ONCE ON THIS ISLAND, ANASTASIA, RAGTIME, MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE and THE GLORIOUS ONES amongst the titles in-between.
Liz Callaway (who originated the title role of Anastasia on film soundtrack) and Christy Altomore (who played her in the Broadway stage version), and Brian Stokes Mitchell and Quentin Earl Darlington (who respectively originated the role of Colehouse Walker in the original RAGTIME and its Broadway revival) reprised songs from both. It was also glorious to hear AJ Shively, from last year’s Classic Stage production of A MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE, reprise “Streets of London”, one of my favourite of all Ahrens & Flaherty songs.
And the great Lea Salonga reprised “Human Heart” from ONCE ON THIS ISLAND that she sang in the 2017 Broadway revival of that show. (You can watch her doing so here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rNKkLJ)
TUESDAY APRIL 18
Jamie Lloyd’s remarkable, truly contemporary rendering of Ibsen’s A DOLL’S HOUSE was originally due to be premiered at London’s Playhouse in 2020, starring Jessica Chastain as Nora, but it was postponed by the pandemic and has now surfaced instead on Broadway.
It has been stripped back of all clutter and is chilly in every sense, not least because of ferocious air conditioning in the Hudson Theatre! Chastain’s Nora finds a bracing sense of self-discovery that is utterly of the here and now; the play could have been written today. She gives a spellbinding performance in a rivetingly taut and precise production.
Lloyd employs his now trademark techniques of approaching classics from Cyrano de Bergerac and The Seagull to now A Doll’s House with bare staging, minimal movement and amplified speech. He also pulls off a significant coup de théâtre at the very end of the show that I won’t spoil by revealing what it is, but suffice it to say that it brings the play onto the streets of New York in every sense.
WEDNESDAY APRIL 19
Today I caught up with the Broadway return of Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry’s PARADE — originally produced at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont in 1998, and giving Brown his first Broadway credit at the age of just 28, and a Tony win in 1999 for Best Original Score. That original production, like every subsequent Brown musical on Broadway, failed to reach 100 performances; but this limited run revival may finally break that ceiling.
I previously saw Michael Arden’s production at New York City Center, when it debuted there last November, and wrote about it here at the time; there was already buzz about a likely Broadway move then, and it has come to pass.
It’s a gorgeous production of an achingly gorgeous musical about a tough subject: the framing of a Jewish factory foreman for murder in 1915 Atlanta, Georgia, and his subsequently lynching and murder when his death sentence was commuted.
The first preview on Broadway was marked by an anti-semitic protest outside the theatre that showed that such prejudice is still alive and (un)well more than a century later.
We’ve come a long way, obviously, but not far enough, in addressing such matters; and THE THANKSGIVING PLAY is a valiant but sometimes preposterous attempt to detonate some of the efforts being made in theatrical circles to offer broader representation. The play is in fact an example of its own success in that regard, being the first play by a Native American woman, Larissa FastHorse, to be produced on Broadway, after previously being premiered (in a different production) at Off-Broadway’s Playwrights’ Horizons in 2018.
There’s a lot of meta-theatrical referencing and outright farce in Rachel Chavkin’s intentionally heightened production, as a group of four white people earnestly trying to devise and stage an inclusive play for elementary school audiences about the meaning of America’s annual thanksgiving festivities.
THURSDAY APRIL 20
I returned tonight to one of my favourite New York venues, 54 Below (last Thursday I saw two shows back-to-back there), for Charles Busch’s gentle new cabaret show MY FOOLISH HEART, in which the playwright/performer who has long specialised in drag theatre plays himself with tender grace, humanity and real wit (and a little grit, too).
The grit comes from his recent health concerns, which saw him needing a repair to heart surgery he first underwent over twenty years ago that nearly cost him his life then. Fortunately, as he says, the sequel was conducted by the same surgeon who did his original surgery — as with film franchises, he notes they’re usually more successful when the same director returns.
Charles knows how to tell a story — visit his Facebook feed for more — and, with long-time musical collaborator Tom Judson on the piano, knows how to sell a song, too, on limited vocal resources. This was a truly exquisite cabaret evening, in which you bathed in his warmth — and relief that he’s still with us to share his wisdom so beautifully.
SHOWS AHEAD IN LONDON, SELECTED REGIONAL THEATRES AND ON BROADWAY
My regularly updated feature on shows in London, selected regional theatres and on Broadway is here: https://shentonstage.com/theatre-openings-from-w-c-april-17
Updates added over the week include a new raft of productions at the National, including a new musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s THE WITCHES and Jamie Lloyd making his NT directing debut with a revival of Lucy Prebble’s THE EFFECT, plus a London season for SONG FROM FAR AWAY with Will Young reprising the performance he gave at Manchester’s HOME recently.
See you here on Monday
I will be back on Monday. If you can’t wait that long, I may also be found on Twitter (for the moment) here: https://twitter.com/ShentonStage/ (though not as regularly on weekends)