The Week in Review(s)
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).
I am just this morning back from five nights in New York, some of which you can read about below.
FRIDAY MARCH 17
Today’s week in review(s) column solicited an immediate response from one of the people mentioned in it. I referred to press agent Kevin Wilson’s anger at me for objecting to the Union Theatre, a client of his, paying the company of its new production of BETTY BLUE EYES (beginning performances next week, from March 29-April 22) just £250 each — not per week, which would be bad enough, but for an entire 6 week contract including rehearsals and a 21 performance run.
He tweeted:
Weirdly enough, I was contacted before he’d even tweeted this by one of his clients to say how much they admired my position on the Union. And another assured me I would still be more than welcome at press nights for their venue — one that does actually pay its actors.
As I don’t go to theatres or support productions that don’t do so as it is, it isn’t much of a problem to be blacklisted by this particular PR. He has boasted before of bringing 80 or 90 “critics” to his openings before, but the vast majority are “influencers” with barely any influence.
As for the few clients of his they actually pay their actors and not just their PR, I’m more than happy to buy a ticket if I want to see something so I can actually help support that payment.
SATURDAY MARCH 18
I fly to New York today for a quick catch-up, ahead of a longer trip next month, to squeeze in press performances for the coming week’s three big openings.
But it starts badly on the planning front: tickets for this weekend’s press performances for BAD CINDERELLA (which I was seeing tomorrow afternoon, ahead of Thursday’s official opening) were rescinded owing to a Covid illness affecting an unspecified principal actor, but then I was moved to Wednesday’s matinee.
The bad news for this show didn’t stop there: today, too, a press release was issued saying that Lloyd Webber would not be attending the opening, as his oldest son Nicholas had been admitted to hospital and is critically ill with cancer.
Then came news — while I was mid-air — that Josh Groban has been out of SWEENEY TODD for a few performances this week, citing a sinus infection. I’m due to see it on Wednesday (ahead of an official opening tomorrow week, March 26), so I was anxious about a possible postponement there, too, but in fact it wasn’t, and he returned to the show in time for the press performances to go ahead.
At least my first show tonight goes ahead as planned too — the final preview of Bob Fosse’s DANCIN’, ahead of its official opening tomorrow. I wrote about it in my newsletter on Tuesday.
SUNDAY MARCH 19
Today I went off the Broadway grid to catch the penultimate performance of the Encores run of Jerry Herman’s 1969 flop musical DEAR WORLD at City Center. This is an extraordinarily eccentric musical about oil speculation and greedy capitalists seeking to mine it from beneath the streets of Paris. I previously saw it when the late director/choreographer Gillian Lynne staged its UK premiere at London’s Charing Cross Theatre in 2013.
In that production, Betty Buckley was well cast as the madwoman of Chaillot, here named Countess Aurelia, but for Encores, the ever-astonishing Donna Murphy (pictured above) brings her usual star power and graciousness to the part (and party) that is totally winning. The musical is still a creative oddity though!
I then saw the last night of the stage version of Disney’s HERCULES at Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. We’re unlikely to see this closer to Broadway anytime soon, though I’m sure schools and summer stock may yet license it if/when it becomes available. Disney’s track record with stage musical versions of its properties has been patchy, to say the least; though they hit the jackpot with THE LION KING (now the single most financially lucrative production of all time), other shows have been less imaginative (Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin) or failures (Tarzan, Little Mermaid).
This one has some nice tunes, to be sure (music by Alan Menken, lyrics by David Zippel, who later this week is also responsible for the lyrics to BAD CINDERELLA), but it feels more pageant than a musical.
MONDAY MARCH 20
Alexander Zeldin’s LOVE, transferred to Park Avenue Armory from the National Theatre, is one of the most desolate and saddest plays I’ve ever seen, humanising the dehumanising plight of homeless people being housed in temporary accommodation. The cast are utterly extraordinary in their overwhelming sense of documentary-like realism.
I was seated next to a middle-aged white woman who invested in theatre shows on Broadway; before the show she told me she read the Wall Street Journal, and self-identified as a Republican — hard to find in New York, and harder still in the theatre. After it, she turned to me and said how much she had actively disliked the play, and would have walked out if she could have!
As a wealthy Republican, she clearly lacked the empathy that would have moved her if she’d had it; I imagine she couldn’t understand why they simply didn’t themselves a room at the Plaza Hotel if they were homeless.
It was wonderful to catch up with my friend NIck Holder (who is shatteringly good in this) after the show, who has changed my life not once but twice in real-life; as the song in Wicked goes, sometimes people come into your life for a reason.
Our relationship transcends the theatre, though I will see him in anything. This summer he’ll be virtually on my doorstep in West Sussex, starring in a new production of ASSASSINS at Chichester Festival’s Minerva Theatre.
TUESDAY MARCH 21
Tonight I saw another show off-Broadway: the New Group’s new staging of THE SEAGULL/WOODSTOCK NY, a riveting, frequently hilarious contemporary adaptation of Chekhov full of current references from Terrence McNally and Bryan Cranston to David Sedaris and an all-female True West that is also true to the original.
It wonderfully acted by a cast led by Parker Posey (as Arkadina, here renamed Irene), and also featuring Nat Wolff as her son Konstantin (now Kevin), both pictured above, as well as a wonderfully brittle Hari Nef as Masha (now Sasha).
WEDNESDAY MARCH 22
I’ve got musicals by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim back-to-back today, with press performances for BAD CINDERELLA this afternoon, then SWEENEY TODD tonight. (Today also happens to be the birthdays of both: ALW turns 75; Sondheim would have turned 93).
The Andrew Lloyd Webber show, of course, was the one that dared to open, against considerable odds, in the midst of the COVID crisis, and the composer/producer himself referred to as having been a “costly mistake” when it closed after less than a year’s run at the Gillian Lynne Theatre last year.
Taking it to Broadway now may prove an even costlier mistake; when the reviews appeared on Friday, they are almost universally damning, in a way that the London ones were not (you will find some of them quoted outside the theatre, see above) — as Jesse Green notes in his review for the New York Times, “That this is the supposedly improved version of the musical that opened in London in August 2021 beggars the imagination. Then simply called Cinderella, and welcomed with indulgent warmth by critics who were perhaps rusty after more than a year of lockdown, it has here acquired the adjective “Bad,” as if to dare headline writers with an easy mark. A more accurate adjective might have been “Unnecessary” — except perhaps for Lloyd Webber himself, whose unbroken 43-year streak of shows on Broadway, beginning with Evita in 1979, would otherwise end with the closing of The Phantom of the Opera in April.” (Those critics who were indulgently warm towards it in London did not include me).
SWEENEY TODD, meanwhile, opens officially on Sunday, and I will write about in my newsletter on Monday.
THURSDAY MARCH 23
After 23 years as a movie critic for the New York Times, during which time he has penned some 2,293 reviews, A.O. Scott is leaving that beat behind him and returning to reviewing books instead for the paper.
In a farewell interview that he conducted with himself, he wrote of one of the perils of the job: fandom, and people who disagree as a result with his opinions.
“I’m not a fan of modern fandom. This isn’t only because I’ve been swarmed on Twitter by angry devotees of Marvel and DC and (more recently) Top Gun: Maverick and Everything Everywhere All at Once. It’s more that the behavior of these social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies. Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity and mob behavior, and its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life.”
Though theatre doesn’t have the same numbers of crazy fans, these days there’s a sense amongst some theatre people that critics aren’t there to criticise but to slavishly “build up” the industry only. It’s why so many so-called theatre PRs nowadays seem to actively prefer bloggers to critics, who can be depended on to gush on demand.
Real critics like A.O. Scott, however, are to be treasured.
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)