Piaf:
In Jamie Lloyd’s revival of this thirty-year-old play, scenes from Piaf’s humble beginnings, decadent career and subsequent decay fly by. The formidable supporting cast (notably Kingsley (Dietrich / assistant)) mostly play several characters and for a while it all seems somewhat of a blur. But perhaps this is how it was for Piaf herself as her career descended into drug use and tantrums. The clarity comes in the exquisite musical numbers by Roger, who seems to channel Piaf and adds her own emotional performance that is heartbreaking even if the French lyrics are not all understood. The Donmar design is sparce with trademark brick wall, but Austen’s lighting creates an absorbing illusion from street to cabaret and to boxing-ring. The play is imperfect and at times the direction and double-casting make it hard to follow what’s going on, but the performance and overall effect are enthralling and devastating.
Saturday 20 September 2008
Monday 1 September 2008
The Time Warp
In times of uncertainty nostalgia can be especially comforting. As summer approached, theatre producers in the West End must have felt they were facing particularly uncertain times. One after another new shows including “Dickens Unplugged” and “Gone With The Wind” (unsurprisingly) were posting closing notices; “Marguerite” was met with luke-warm critical response and looks unlikely to fulfil its initial six month run, let alone the hoped for six month extension. Longer running shows were faring no better with “Spamalot” and “Lord of the Rings” announcing their curtain-down dates with rumours abound that the reality-show-cast “Sound of Music”, “Joseph” and “Grease” are soon to follow. Only “Wicked” is said to be consistently turning in a profit.
So what better way to revive audiences than to dust off a revival or two… or three. All over London bemused audiences were faced with a musical memory lane. It began with the English National Opera’s new interpretation of Bernstein’s Broadway operetta “Candide”.
Based on Voltaire’s story of Candide and his eventful travels from “West Failure” (as it is renamed in this stylish production led by the Canadian director Robert Carsen) to the New World, this production is a collaboration between the ENO and La Scala, Milan and Le Chatelet, Paris and places Candide’s road trip firmly in 1950s America.
Toby Spence is well cast as the naïf optimist, and Alex Jennings makes a superb and confident narrator Voltaire and syphilitic tutor Pangloss. It was a disappointment that charismatic Tony Award winner Kristin Chenoweth had pulled out of playing Cunegonde; she was replaced with a safe choice in Anna Christy whose “Glitter and be Gay” was satisfactory, if not sparkling. Beverly Klein was an irritatingly exaggerated and at times incomprehensible Old Woman.
The concept and design were the real stars. There were a couple of less successful moments: some disappointingly two dimensional carry-on vessels; a purloigned, albeit successful, “Auto-da-fe” scene with dancing Ku Klux Klan members (“Jerry Springer The Opera” anyone?); narrative confusion caused by the decision both to start and finish the journey in what I would describe as the ‘New World’; and an amusing, if slightly out of place, nod to contemporary politics with world leaders including Blair and Bush cast as the exiled kings, floating on an oil slick. Overall however, the simplicity of multiple grand photographic back-cloths and video projections helped to maintain the pace of an otherwise rambling and lengthy story. Last year the ENO attempted to revive “Kismet” with disastrous results, and they had a previous hit with Bernstein’s “On The Town”. What’s next from the musical theatre repertoire?
Across the road, Covent Garden used a similar, if less slick, 1950s States pastiche setting for their production of Stravinsky’s opera “The Rake’s Progress” which was written only a few years before Bernstein’s first version of “Candide”. Here Robert LePage was the creative force responsible for Tom Rakewell being drawn to glitzy Hollywood rather than the seedy world of 18th century London in the Hogarth images which inspired the piece. LePage’s eye for spectacle rewards in some beautiful images, particularly a car journey with scarf flapping, a swimming pool on the stage and the extraordinary inflation of a caravan and an effective asylum scene. Unfortuantely for those (hundreds) of us in the cheap seats, many of these effects were less impressive when viewed from above than they appear on the publicity photos taken from stalls level. The piece was conducted drearily by Thomas Ades and none of the singers struck a chord.
Even the Young Vic fancied a trip down musical theatre memory lane. Their offering was a production of Kurt Weil’s “Street Scene” for which he won the first Tony Award for Original Score. This was a theatrical disaster. A flabby and insubstantial domestic drama set in a New York neighbourhood, played in what seem like real time over the course of a few hours, in this tale I could see the roots of recent successes such as “Avenue Q” and “In the Heights”, however here any humour or warmth of character was lacking due to appalling direction and casting.
It is surely unforgivable, especially in a studio space such as the Old Vic, to cast singers completely incompetent at conveying any emotion in their acting. The performances and direction had a really amateur feel – at times laughable – and it was impossible to appreciate the score with the distraction of cast members, for no clear reason, rolling and drawing with chalk on the floor, and children skipping by. It has to be a bad sign that the most entertaining thing on stage was a cameo appearance by a pug dog. A concert performance would have been more successful. Thumbs down to The Opera Group.
Ian Marshall Fisher’s Lost Musicals series at the Lillian Baylis Studio sets out to revive forgotten pieces from the archive, so perhaps it is wrong of me to include it in this list of this summer’s skeletons. However a concert staging of Noel Coward’s dated 1961 cruise comedy “Sail Away” proved an amusing distraction. It starred sixty seven year old Broadway veteran Penny Fuller as the perky and charismatic ship’s entertainment mistress with Henry Luxemburg (most recently to Hollyoaks viewers) gurning his way nasally through the role of her unlikely younger suitor. Coward’s amusing patter songs include “the passenger’s always right”, performed with cheery pomposity by the ship’s purser in the first act, and reprised as “the customer’s always right” in a politically incorrect and sinisterly amusing manner by a Arabic street salesmen in act 2.
Sadler’s Wells also received the fiftieth anniversary production of Bernstein masterpiece “West Side Story” in July with the original Jerome Robbins choreography recreated. The virtuosic music and frantic choreography were as vibrant now as when captured on film in 1961.
However this stage production was not without it’s faults. The creaking scaffolding set which intermittently swung into the centre stage from the wings, was a little clumsy and the Maria on the night I saw it didn’t have a singing voice to match her Tony, or the verbal clarity to convey the humour of Sondheim’s words. “Officer Krupke” was as amusing as ever, but “Keep it Cool”, contemporary and trendy at the time, now dates the piece firmly in the late fifties.
And to finish off a summer of theatre which might have been confused for a weekend on the Great White Way in the early sixties, the Royal Festival Hall decided to attempt to redeem itself for recent Musical Theatre efforts with a long run of the “Wizard of Oz” directed by the South Bank Centre (and London 2012) Artistic Director Jude Kelly. The last time I visited the RFH for a musical it was for a semi staged, semi rehearsed and hardly enjoyed performance of Sweeney Todd. I didn’t make it to “Carmen Jones” in 2007. But at least this “Oz” promised to be fully staged and had a fairly respectable cast. And isn’t this is a show that’s impossible not to love? After all, it’s spin off musical “Wicked” continues to be a worldwide smash hit.
Well. When presented with a stage version of the musical, you’re confronted immediately with the sparcity of music. Sure, there’s “Ding Dong…”, “We’re off to see the Wizard”… “If I only had a…” and the “Yellow Brick Road”, but actually there isn’t much else. It was a shame therefore that the “Jitterbug” song (cut from the film) was suggested briefly but then not followed through. The second act narrative, in the stage version, is a bit patchy and scenes fly by at the speed of a whirlwind.
The design for Kansas comprised sepia projections of farm scenes amid a substantial framework of ephemera. The budget for Oz however seemed to have been spent on the same faux naïve artistry as the Olympic 2012 logo. An overhead projection of a biro squiggle passed for a tornado – hugely disappointing – and at times, such as when Dorothy exclaims wonder at the Emerald City (another projected doodle), risible. The cast, clad in costumes deliberately swiped from the MGM movie, were confident and competent. Adam Cooper skips along as the Tin Man, and Gary Wilmot makes a jolly Cowardly Lion. Sian Brooke, I think, isn’t really a musical theatre performer, however she isn’t required to do much here other than recreate Judy Garland in a manner I’ve seen done in Soho by drag queens far less talented a dozen times. The ensemble of children as munchkins and acrobatic extras were enthusiastic and provided much needed bulk to an otherwise insubstantial production.
There was, however, a real star on stage: Toto – a genuine terrier who appeared whenever the other stage activity wasn’t going to be too scary for him and conspicuously carried off, often by Dorothy, and occasionally mid-sentence, when any of the frankly modest special effects were anticipated. The second of this summer’s shows to be cast with live animals and children.
Later this year we’ll have “Carousel” (1946) at the Savoy and the threat of a London transfer for the Chichester “Music Man” (1962). A recent trip to Edinburgh demonstrated that new musicals are being written (Broadway has had a fair share this year alongside a smattering of classics). Lets hope some of them reach the West End.
So what better way to revive audiences than to dust off a revival or two… or three. All over London bemused audiences were faced with a musical memory lane. It began with the English National Opera’s new interpretation of Bernstein’s Broadway operetta “Candide”.
Based on Voltaire’s story of Candide and his eventful travels from “West Failure” (as it is renamed in this stylish production led by the Canadian director Robert Carsen) to the New World, this production is a collaboration between the ENO and La Scala, Milan and Le Chatelet, Paris and places Candide’s road trip firmly in 1950s America.
Toby Spence is well cast as the naïf optimist, and Alex Jennings makes a superb and confident narrator Voltaire and syphilitic tutor Pangloss. It was a disappointment that charismatic Tony Award winner Kristin Chenoweth had pulled out of playing Cunegonde; she was replaced with a safe choice in Anna Christy whose “Glitter and be Gay” was satisfactory, if not sparkling. Beverly Klein was an irritatingly exaggerated and at times incomprehensible Old Woman.
The concept and design were the real stars. There were a couple of less successful moments: some disappointingly two dimensional carry-on vessels; a purloigned, albeit successful, “Auto-da-fe” scene with dancing Ku Klux Klan members (“Jerry Springer The Opera” anyone?); narrative confusion caused by the decision both to start and finish the journey in what I would describe as the ‘New World’; and an amusing, if slightly out of place, nod to contemporary politics with world leaders including Blair and Bush cast as the exiled kings, floating on an oil slick. Overall however, the simplicity of multiple grand photographic back-cloths and video projections helped to maintain the pace of an otherwise rambling and lengthy story. Last year the ENO attempted to revive “Kismet” with disastrous results, and they had a previous hit with Bernstein’s “On The Town”. What’s next from the musical theatre repertoire?
Across the road, Covent Garden used a similar, if less slick, 1950s States pastiche setting for their production of Stravinsky’s opera “The Rake’s Progress” which was written only a few years before Bernstein’s first version of “Candide”. Here Robert LePage was the creative force responsible for Tom Rakewell being drawn to glitzy Hollywood rather than the seedy world of 18th century London in the Hogarth images which inspired the piece. LePage’s eye for spectacle rewards in some beautiful images, particularly a car journey with scarf flapping, a swimming pool on the stage and the extraordinary inflation of a caravan and an effective asylum scene. Unfortuantely for those (hundreds) of us in the cheap seats, many of these effects were less impressive when viewed from above than they appear on the publicity photos taken from stalls level. The piece was conducted drearily by Thomas Ades and none of the singers struck a chord.
Even the Young Vic fancied a trip down musical theatre memory lane. Their offering was a production of Kurt Weil’s “Street Scene” for which he won the first Tony Award for Original Score. This was a theatrical disaster. A flabby and insubstantial domestic drama set in a New York neighbourhood, played in what seem like real time over the course of a few hours, in this tale I could see the roots of recent successes such as “Avenue Q” and “In the Heights”, however here any humour or warmth of character was lacking due to appalling direction and casting.
It is surely unforgivable, especially in a studio space such as the Old Vic, to cast singers completely incompetent at conveying any emotion in their acting. The performances and direction had a really amateur feel – at times laughable – and it was impossible to appreciate the score with the distraction of cast members, for no clear reason, rolling and drawing with chalk on the floor, and children skipping by. It has to be a bad sign that the most entertaining thing on stage was a cameo appearance by a pug dog. A concert performance would have been more successful. Thumbs down to The Opera Group.
Ian Marshall Fisher’s Lost Musicals series at the Lillian Baylis Studio sets out to revive forgotten pieces from the archive, so perhaps it is wrong of me to include it in this list of this summer’s skeletons. However a concert staging of Noel Coward’s dated 1961 cruise comedy “Sail Away” proved an amusing distraction. It starred sixty seven year old Broadway veteran Penny Fuller as the perky and charismatic ship’s entertainment mistress with Henry Luxemburg (most recently to Hollyoaks viewers) gurning his way nasally through the role of her unlikely younger suitor. Coward’s amusing patter songs include “the passenger’s always right”, performed with cheery pomposity by the ship’s purser in the first act, and reprised as “the customer’s always right” in a politically incorrect and sinisterly amusing manner by a Arabic street salesmen in act 2.
Sadler’s Wells also received the fiftieth anniversary production of Bernstein masterpiece “West Side Story” in July with the original Jerome Robbins choreography recreated. The virtuosic music and frantic choreography were as vibrant now as when captured on film in 1961.
However this stage production was not without it’s faults. The creaking scaffolding set which intermittently swung into the centre stage from the wings, was a little clumsy and the Maria on the night I saw it didn’t have a singing voice to match her Tony, or the verbal clarity to convey the humour of Sondheim’s words. “Officer Krupke” was as amusing as ever, but “Keep it Cool”, contemporary and trendy at the time, now dates the piece firmly in the late fifties.
And to finish off a summer of theatre which might have been confused for a weekend on the Great White Way in the early sixties, the Royal Festival Hall decided to attempt to redeem itself for recent Musical Theatre efforts with a long run of the “Wizard of Oz” directed by the South Bank Centre (and London 2012) Artistic Director Jude Kelly. The last time I visited the RFH for a musical it was for a semi staged, semi rehearsed and hardly enjoyed performance of Sweeney Todd. I didn’t make it to “Carmen Jones” in 2007. But at least this “Oz” promised to be fully staged and had a fairly respectable cast. And isn’t this is a show that’s impossible not to love? After all, it’s spin off musical “Wicked” continues to be a worldwide smash hit.
Well. When presented with a stage version of the musical, you’re confronted immediately with the sparcity of music. Sure, there’s “Ding Dong…”, “We’re off to see the Wizard”… “If I only had a…” and the “Yellow Brick Road”, but actually there isn’t much else. It was a shame therefore that the “Jitterbug” song (cut from the film) was suggested briefly but then not followed through. The second act narrative, in the stage version, is a bit patchy and scenes fly by at the speed of a whirlwind.
The design for Kansas comprised sepia projections of farm scenes amid a substantial framework of ephemera. The budget for Oz however seemed to have been spent on the same faux naïve artistry as the Olympic 2012 logo. An overhead projection of a biro squiggle passed for a tornado – hugely disappointing – and at times, such as when Dorothy exclaims wonder at the Emerald City (another projected doodle), risible. The cast, clad in costumes deliberately swiped from the MGM movie, were confident and competent. Adam Cooper skips along as the Tin Man, and Gary Wilmot makes a jolly Cowardly Lion. Sian Brooke, I think, isn’t really a musical theatre performer, however she isn’t required to do much here other than recreate Judy Garland in a manner I’ve seen done in Soho by drag queens far less talented a dozen times. The ensemble of children as munchkins and acrobatic extras were enthusiastic and provided much needed bulk to an otherwise insubstantial production.
There was, however, a real star on stage: Toto – a genuine terrier who appeared whenever the other stage activity wasn’t going to be too scary for him and conspicuously carried off, often by Dorothy, and occasionally mid-sentence, when any of the frankly modest special effects were anticipated. The second of this summer’s shows to be cast with live animals and children.
Later this year we’ll have “Carousel” (1946) at the Savoy and the threat of a London transfer for the Chichester “Music Man” (1962). A recent trip to Edinburgh demonstrated that new musicals are being written (Broadway has had a fair share this year alongside a smattering of classics). Lets hope some of them reach the West End.
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