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’m relieved to report, too, that normal service should be soon restored to my website: an upgrade that went wrong has knocked it out of service for nearly three weeks!
FRIDAY MARCH 24
I landed at Gatwick at 5.30am after an overnight flight from New York, and after managing to get home and a few hours sleep, I headed up to London to catch AKHNATEN at ENO.
I’ve seen Phelim McDermott’s ENO/Met Opera/Improbable co-production of this opera several times during its previous outings here, but tonight I’m haunted and hypnotised afresh by Philip Glass’s gorgeous meditative music, given an amazing visual accompaniment by McDermott’s thrilling production with its troupe of onstage jugglers (listed as “Skills ensemble” in the programme).
It’s wonderful to see the house full signs up outside the Coliseum for this uncompromising evening (they’re also up outside the Duke of York’s Theatre across the street, where Sheridan Smith is playing the title role of Shirley Valentine).
And as delighted as I was to be able to see Akhaten again, I only wish I’d been able to extend my New York stay a few days, so I’d have been able to catch the return of McDermott’s solo show, Tao of Glass, which begins a short run next Thursday (March 30) to April 8, in which he performs a storytelling tapestry set to Glass music.
SATURDAY MARCH 25
Also sold out is the penultimate performance of STANDING AT THE SKY’S EDGE that I attended today at the National’s Olivier Theatre, where this 2019 Sheffield Crucible production belatedly arrived last month. I reviewed it at the time for Plays International here.
Seeing it again today confirms that, like SYLVIA (which ends next Saturday at the Old Vic, and I revisit on Tuesday, see below), we are standing at a new frontier of theatrical innovation and exhilaration in British musical theatre: where musicals sound modern, invigorating and new.
It’s one of the great British-originated musicals of the century so far — up there with Tim Minchin’’s MATILDA (with Dennis Kelly) and GROUNDHOG DAY With Danny Rubin), Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee’s JERRY SPRINGER THE OPERA and Howard Goodall and Gurinder Chadha’s BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM.
SUNDAY MARCH 26
On Broadway they have already locked up mobile phones of audience members at shows like the recent revival of Richard Greenberg’s baseball drama TAKE ME OUT that features extensive male nudity, using pouches supplied by a company called Yondr; you place your phone in one that is then sealed and you keep in your possession. (No one says what happens if you leave the ringer on and it starts ringing; you won’t easily be able to silence it, unless the pouch acts as a silencer, too).
But even this didn’t stop nude pictures being taken of its cast and published online. As Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who starred in the play but wasn’t one of the baseball players who took a naked shower in it, tweeted,
And this week in the UK, pictures of James Norton, who appears nude in A LITTLE LIFE that is now previewing at the Pinter Theatre, were posted by the disreputable news website Mail Online (though subsequently taken down; it’s publishers recently ironically sought privacy in the High Court for its journalists involved in its hacking scandal that it apparently denies its victims, and of course Norton).
The Guardian reported on this on Friday, with Alistair Smith, editor of The Stage, quoted as saying:
“I’d be very surprised if this latest incident doesn’t act as a trigger for it to become the norm for audiences to have to put their phones in lockboxes at shows starring famous people or with musical numbers that people want to film.”
Academic and researcher Dr Kirsty Sedgwick, who has previously argued passionately for different audience behaviours to be indulged and actively embraced, also drew a firm line under this event, stating that the taking of such photos was an “absolute violation of the unwritten contract between audiences and performers”.
On Time Out’s website, theatre editor Andrej Lukowski debates the necessity for a ban on mobile phones in the theatre and points out:
“In fact, two big London productions – The Burnt City and Cabaret – already enforce a phone ban. While both of those shows have notionally artistic reasons for doing so, there’s no getting around the fact that if one was introduced for A Little Life it would specifically be to guard the privacy of James Norton’s penis. But that’s where we are as a society – why pretend otherwise? If there’s a naked celebrity in it, lock that phone away and throw away the key until after the curtain call, because London theatregoers are simply not to be trusted around a willy.“
MONDAY MARCH 27
It is World Theatre Day today, and my favourite tweet marking the day comes from actor Gina Beck, who posted this picture of her child onstage.
As someone pointed out on Twitter, “I think I sort of saw that kid in South Pacific?”
Gina was famously pregnant during that run two summers ago at Chichester Festival Theatre, so we all saw the bump if not the child itself!
TUESDAY MARCH 28
Understudies have long been the unsung heroes of the theatre, not least during COVID, where they have kept shows open. This afternoon, I attended an understudy run for Ian Hallard’s Abba-themed play about long-term gay friendships, THE WAY OLD FRIENDS DO, currently running at the Park (to April 15).
This was a free performance where the invited audience came specifically to see the understudies, who comprised 50% of the cast; and the wonderful thing is that you couldn’t really tell who were understudies and who were full-time cast members (though two of the latter were its lead players, Sara Crowe and playwright Hallard himself).
I also revisited the Old Vic musical SYLVIA this evening, where the role of Emmeline Pankhurst, usually played by Beverley Knight, was being played by first cover Hannah Khemoh; Knight’s absence was scheduled in advance, so I wasn’t expecting to see her anyway. Knight, of course, is a firebrand performer with a killer voice, but Khemoh is no less thrilling.
Meanwhile tonight also saw Amanda Hadingue standing in for Kathryn Hunter for the delayed press night of Complicite’s new adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD. The critics were already in their seats a week earlier when the performance was cancelled owing to Hunter’s sudden indisposition.
In a review for Time Out, Andzrej Lukowski writes, “The implication is that Hunter will return later this week (and I suspect the show will return), but for the rescheduled press performance her understudy Amanda Hadingue took on the lead role. And what a monumental role it is. You can see why Hadingue couldn’t just be plonked on as a last-minute press night replacement. ‘Lead actor’ scarcely does justice to the gargantuan part of Janina Duszejko, an aging lady from rural Poland who serves as the antagonist to Tokarzuk’s exhilaratingly wild story, a heady mix of noir-ish murder mystery, haunting eco-thriller and more. The three-hour play is, in essence, a fantastically souped-up monologue.”
WEDNESDAY MARCH 29
Waking up to the news of the passing of Paul O’Grady — Liverpool legend of the gay drag circuit turned TV personality and national treasure — aged just 67 is yet another reminder of how unexpectedly death can arrive for any of us.
And of course O’Grady made it his life’s mission to surprise — to charm and disarm us in equal measure. HIs cross-over from back of the pub entertainer, honed in long residencies at places like the Royal Vauxhall Tavern and Camden’s The Black Cap, to mainstream talent, filling the Palladium, was a joy to behold.
I was at his first Palladium appearance in 1993, at which he shared the bill with Victoria Wood (and somewhat stole the show from her, an act of theatrical larceny that she was not happy about, O’Grady told me when I interviewed him in 2004 when he appeared in a production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the Victoria Palace Theatre; he’s pictured above in CINDERELLA at the London Palladium in 2016).
I, alas, missed O’Grady’s earlier outings at the Vauxhall Tavern, where in 1987 he was onstage when the police raided the venue, wearing rubber gloves for fear of contamination from HIV/AIDS which was then widely feared.
As he subsequently told it, “I was doing the late show and within seconds the place was heaving with coppers, all wearing rubber gloves. I remember saying something like, ‘Well well, it looks like we’ve got help with the washing up’.” And when asked to give his name to the police, he replied “Lily Savage.” When the officer pressed for a ‘real’ name, he replied, “Lily Veronica Mae Savage.”
THURSDAY MARCH 30
I’m relieved that I no longer get invited to the Olivier Awards — they’re invariably a long night to sit through — which take place this Sunday at the Royal Albert Hall. Weirdly, a live visual stream of the ceremony is only available to viewers outside the UK — home viewers have to wait for the edited highlights package on ITV at 10.15pm that evening.
If you’re really keen though, you can tune in to a live radio broadcast on Magic FM from 6pm.
This year’s ceremony is staging a first, with a specially commissioned original song to open the event, performed by lead presenter Hannah Waddingham (pictured above) and others, just like the Tony’s do. It is composed for the event by Pippa Cleary – currently represented in town by her scores for The Great British Bake-Off Musical and My Son’s A Queer (But What Can You Do).
There will also be performances from The Band’s Visit, Standing At The Sky’s Edge, Sylvia and Tammy Faye (the four titles nominated for Best New Musical) as well as the revivals of Oklahoma! and Sister Act, amongst others.
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)