AUGUST 2011

ACTORS, TENORS AND SPHERICAL OBJECTS ...

and a new meaning to 'oink ' ...

with Adrian Wright

I've got nothing against actors, including musical actors. I'm one myself, and have an Equity card to prove it. And it may be menopausal that one finds oneself increasingly irritated. I think my own problem with actors talking about their work was highlighted by an interview on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour : an opportunity to interrogate a female star from the TV series Dr Who. On that occasion one learned absolutely nothing from what the poor creature had to say, which anyway was constantly interrupted by her mobile going off during the interview. The interviewer seemed to think this added to the larkiness of the whole enterprise, but only the fact that digital radios are expensive stopped me hurling the machine out of the window. And made me realise as I'd done many times before, but perhaps never with such force, that actors really should think twice before talking about acting, or the theatre. There is something to be recommended in vows of silence.

Let me give you an example. I recently enjoyed an excellent professional production of a little known play by a famous writer, revived for the first time having been a disaster when it was first played in London almost half a century ago. It was a commendable effort, beautifully directed and lit and staged and performed, and I was able to speak to some of the cast afterwards. Every one of them regaled me with facts about the play and its history that I knew to be untrue. 'It was her last play' more than one informed me. 'Oh no it wasn't,' I said very politely, because one doesn't want to appear to be a COMPLETE know-all. I noticed, by the way, that no-one said 'Go on then, what were the others?' (I could have named them all, with dates and casts and accounts of their various fates. WHAT a know-all!)

Then another member of cast informed me that the play had originally run for over 200 performances. This was getting difficult! 'Actually, ' I said (feeling even more like a know-all than ever) 'it was off within a month.' The cast member who had assured me this was otherwise fixed me with a cold stare. 'Who ARE you?' she asked. Her director had TOLD her. Oh dear, so the director didn't know the facts either. Knowing myself to be an opiniated nobody, I fled, wondering why it is that so often actors will insist on talking what we may decorously describe as spherical objects.

There is no end to this disease. Only this week I happened to hear Petroc Trelawny, that most welcome and nicest and gracious and intelligent of presenters (I know, he put up with me when he interviewed me on Radio 3) speaking to cast members of the American revival of South Pacific currently in London. Apart from the fact that the cast members who spoke gave the impression that this was one of the very greatest of all American musicals ever (fair enough) there was no hint of the fact that when it showed up in London for its original showing at Drury Lane Theatre in 1951 the critics were far from enthusiastic. Personally, I have always found it crushingly boring, but the songs are superb. There is no reason why the new eager cast of this revival should bother with such facts, but what I find especially irritating is actors immediately becoming experts, and trying to be interesting, as soon as they get lucky enough to get a job. In a few months they will go on to do a Pinter play or a Greek tragedy and - magic! - they will then regale you with everything you want to know about those as well.

Shall we kindly put it down to enthusiasm? Nevertheless, it's VERY irritating. Spherical objects on the radio, somewhat akin to having Peter Brough and Archie Andrews on the radio, or tap dancers on radio or bouncing balls on radio (but that's where we came in).

I haven't spoken to any of the actors involved in LEND ME A TENOR, which has only a couple of weeks ago vanished into the mist of forgotten London musicals. For all I know, they might have bounced those spherical objects around in enthusing about the show. All I can tell you is that it provided one of the most delightful evenings I have spent at any musical for years, superior in every way to a current London musical about a communicative pig of which I never wish to be reminded again. It gives a new meaning to oink.

Fortunately, there is always the great archive of British musicals to fall back on, and we are preparing some delightful new fare to set before our customers. Enjoy the remaining shreds of summer. And, you know, I bet those actors are still going round telling people that it WAS the last play, and that it ran 200 performances, or maybe just add another nought? ...

JUNE 2011

TAKE A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY! with Adrian Wright

I have had to turn away from British musicals for the past year because of a book I'm writing. It's been a voyage of rediscovery. Too many of the American original cast recordings I've dusted for years have not been near my turntable in living memory. There's something about the night-time, though. About eleven, when the neighbours are hopefully in bed or at least comatose. Fortunately, my neighbours couldn't hear anything anyway, but at eleven o'clock (sometimes, if the Horlicks is tardy, even later) a very beautiful looking LP is taken out of its sleeve and round and round it goes. This is such a great time of day for reuniting with an old favourite.

HELLO, DOLLY! is a good example. I've always had a fondness for the London cast recording, which seems to get overlooked or disqualified on the rare occasions anyone bothers to remember it. But there is something very strange about this particular recording, something almost ethereal, and so life-like that it still startles and thrills me every time I play it. Rewind almost half a century and remember the occasion. Jerry Herman's musical about matchmaker Dolly Levi was done at Drury Lane by what was essentially a touring American company. It happened that in the lead was the great Mary Martin, an artist who had a special relationship with London audiences. She had first played at the Lane just after the war, when Noel Coward had (unwisely) cast her opposite Graham Payn in his tropical operetta PACIFIC 1860. Not a happy experience for anyone concerned, and she and Coward didn't speak to one another for years (soon put right eventually by 'Darling! How lovely to see you!'). Martin's heart must have turned over when Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein asked her to play the lead in their SOUTH PACIFIC (that dreaded word again) but in London all was forgiven and Martin triumphed. So it was that in the mid-1960s Martin was in a sense coming home in a way that very few genuine American stars did.

By the time of HELLO DOLLY! Martin's voice was getting on. The edge is hard, and there's a fair bit of croaking going on - at least there was on the day they made this recording - but her performance seems to me to be almost incandescent. Hats off, too, to the engineers, for the record is as close to a stage performance as one could wish, and the sound is to die for. Even after fifty years, the effect is so immediate, and Side 2 is a parade of fantastic numbers. Here, Herman shows something like genius in the way each song suddenly piles on the effect: 'Before the Parade Passes By' followed by the cake-walking 'Elegance' (the quality of sound is superb) and then, of course, the show-stopper to stop them all, 'Hello, Dolly'. I can only say that this remains one of the most exciting numbers, and one of the most brilliantly recorded, imaginable.

Anyway, this voyage of rediscovery has brought many American shows back into my life. I urge you to think about taking a voyage, either to American or even (a rather more understandable recommendation from someone who runs a record company devoted to British musicals) British musicals. As for those American ones I've been playing and playing over and over, I'll wave another one in your direction: the British recording of CARNIVAL, with the glorious performance of Sally Logan as Lili. I'm still in touch with Sally, and I know she has heard the newly remastered CD of that half a century ago show. Listen to her singing of 'Mira ' - it's very fine. She has no artifice. I've also been playing the London cast recording of CAMELOT. Not Lerner and Loewe's finest moment, and it seems very odd that the critic Harold Hobson thought Laurence Harvey's Arthur one of the finest performances he had ever witnessed. Harvey sounds utterly synthetic to me, and I've never been convinced by that score. Your taste, however, may be much more refined than mine!

Happy Listening!

MAY 2011

CRITICS ... I ASK YOU!!

A heartfelt message ... to you ... from Adrian Wright

The power of the critics has been very much in our mind this week, having spent three visits to London theatres - three very different but strangely interconnected visits. Let me explain ...

In 1978 there was a British-American, or American-British, musical presented at Her Majesty's Theatre - BAR MITZVAH BOY. Its time on earth was troubled, and some time after it disappeared its book writer Jack Rosenthal wrote a play called SMASH! based on his horrendous experience of having worked on the creation of a new musical, not least with its legendary Broadway composer Jule Styne. It just happens that SMASH! is now running at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Happily, as you enter the attractive auditorium, you will hear some overtures of Jule Styne in the background, although - strangely - not one note of the overture to BAR MITZVAH BOY. The play is never less than interesting, and could hardly be more so to someone who is currently writing a book about the fate of American musicals in the West End, and Tom Conti's performance as the delightful but lost impresario is a total joy: he makes one believe in actors. One does wonder what the play means to those unlucky souls who did not have the privilege of actually seeing the musical about which Rosenthal's play is concerned. The play has the company reading absolutely dire reviews, but in fact the reviews for BAR MITZVAH BOY were not dire, more half-hearted (perhaps dire is better; people who read critics don't know what to do with half-hearted).

            The previous evening I was thrilled by THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (Gielgud Theatre). The film is a lifetime favourite, and one always able to reduce me to emotional rubble. I was aware that the critical reaction to this new production had been poor. Let's face it, there are hoardings outside the theatre along the lines of

          'I HAD A LOVELY AFTERNOON, AND WHEN WE CAME OUT IT HAD STOPPED RAINING'               

                                                             Mrs. H. Tinkler, Sudbury

            As it happens, I had a much better than lovely afternoon at what was a great production, beautifully performed, with imagination, skill and an eye to beguile. The show is closing. Thankyou Mr Critic. You have dissuaded a great number of people from an enchantment.

            And so on to the third and last of my theatrical trio, Cameron Mackintosh's new British musical BETTY BLUE EYES at the Novello Theatre. There can be few other people in the land more keen to see new British musicals than myself, but I found this a bitter disappointment. And there, to contradict me for ever and ever amen, are the ringing endorsements, four stars from the lot of them, by the British press. I must say that around me on its third night were rows of impassive faces, although the sort of whooping and yelling that seems part and parcel of an audience's reaction to modern theatre broke out in parts of the house at the end. How unutterably common!

            But as I wandered, not having been charmed, out into the Aldwych, I found myself wondering ... Why did someone think it a good idea to make a musical of Alan Bennett's fantasy about a pig in post-war austerity Britain? It's not exactly vintage Bennett and - surprisingly - not much of that special Bennett atmosphere breaks through. The sets are horrible (the farmshed looks like something out of a Barnsley pantomime, but then it must be difficult to design an attractive farmshed) and the lighting the worst I have seen in years. The opening newsreel failed to work (leaving the poor chorus to stare at the 'Apple' computer logo for three minutes), but at least provided one of the longest laughs of the evening. If modern musicals are to boast technical wizardry, let it be done right by five weeks into the run.

            The performances are patently artificial, but I felt sorry for such performers as Adrian Scarborough in a pig of a part as a meat inspector, at one stage prancing around with comic policemen, as if we are still dependent on laughing at coppers making fools of themselves. Come back The Pirates of Penzance! Indeed, the comic elements are tedious, and the evening exhausts itself long before Betty is wheeled on, safe and well, although not very impressively mobile, at the end.

            May I also suggest a test when you next visit a London musical? Close your eyes for a few minutes (there are usually moments when you may safely do so without losing anything important) and ask, 'Would I want to listen to this at home? With my ears?' Sarah Lancashire is an acceptable heroine, but she is I am afraid very much in the shadow of Maggie Smith's original tightly gathered in Northern wife, although she comes to life in a first act number. For me, the evening belonged absolutely to Reece Shoesmith, who outshines everyone on stage with a display that combines a seemingly natural charm with superb comedic technique. He makes the thing worth sitting through. Just.

           It will be interesting to see how the public takes to BETTY BLUE EYES, but the mammoth publicity machine trundled out for such enterprises will ensure a long run. In fact, I felt like doing a runner myself when I see that even Stephen Fry's recommendation has been used to sing this show's favour.

           I will let you know when I consider taking Stephen Fry's advice about what is or is not a good musical! I ask you! What a state of affairs ....!!