Going to the theatre

[Heather]

The Ladykillers,
Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool
Saturday 12th November 2011, 2pm.

This is my last visit to the Playhouse this year. I'm not in my usual seat in the stalls, I had to book a seat in the Gallery as the play sold out very quickly. It is very steep, I suffer from vertigo, I'm not happy. I slowly make my way down what can only be described as a mountain and take my place in seat B9, one row and four seats behind seat A5, the haunted seat, haunted by the ghost of a Victorian cleaning lady, Elizabeth, why she haunts this seat is anyone's guess as she got hit on the head by the safety curtain. The seats are quite cramped, you couldn't swing a cat in here, if you wanted to, and I'm not the only stalls dweller who is up here, there are loads, the couple next to me are on the Theatre First list but didn't get notification when the tickets went on sale. On the good side, however, I've picked up the new Playhouse book I ordered, written for the theatre's centenary and signed and dated by the author.

The Ladykillers in this incarnation has been adapted for stage by Graham Linehan, writer of Father Ted and directed by Sean Foley. It stars, Marcia Wren (Mrs Louisa Wilberforce), Peter Capaldi (Professor Marcus), Harry Peacock (Constable Macdonald), James Fleet (Major Courtney), Stephen Wight (Harry Robinson), Clive Rowe (One-Round), Ben Miller (Louis Harvey) and Beverley Walding (Mrs Jane Tromleyton). It is the story of a gang of robbers who commit a robbery while living in the house of a little old lady. Once she finds out, she insists they go to the police. They realise that the only way that they are going to escape is to kill her, but can they do it to such a nice kind old lady? Well, in the end they don't, they end up killing each other until there is only one left and he ends up getting run over by a train. The old lady tells her story to the Constable who thinks she is quite dotty. He ends up telling her to keep the money from the robbery because quite frankly he does not believe her. The old lady ends up rich.

A witty play which I quite enjoyed, vertigo aside. The Playhouse has great acoustics and you can here every word up in the Gallery, no need for microphones here. OK, obviously the music, when there was music was over loudspeakers, but not the dialogue. I had a slightly restricted view of the stage and had to lean over a few times, on the way out I realised that it may have been a good idea to book a seat nearer the back as the view appears to be a little better. That is if I ever sit up there again. Chances of that are nil.

Runs until 19th November 2011 and moves to London.

[winn-dixie]

Hi Phil,

Sorry I couldnt private message you it kept denying it as spam
I just found out that you are FINALLY coming to Australia! you probably wouldnt remember but i posted on here back in 2006 that i went to see a concert in NYC and ended up being drugged, missing the concert, and waking up in a hospital on a drip with no recollection of the night. You said to get in touch if you were in my neck of the woods so here i am! still a huge fan and psyched to see you in Sydney!

Cheers
Alice Winn-Dix


Subject: saddest day ever

Alice, please remind me again - preferably over in the OZ 2012 thread - at the start of April and I'll be happy to arrange this for you and a companion.

Phil that would be AMAZING! Turns out i will be in melbourne then so i'll message you closer to the time! So excited!

[aljaM]

Als ich tot war (When I was dead) by Ernst Lubitsch
SNG Drama, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Thursday 17th November 2011, 7:30pm

De Brea will direct an adaptation of the film When I Was Dead, which the great German director made at the very beginning of his film career in 1916. Starring Lubitsch himself, the film is a burlesque, and had been long considered lost. It was rediscovered in Slovenia in 1994—among materials from the WWI Isonzo Front period—by Silvan Furlan and Lilijana Nedič, both staff members of the then-new Slovenian Cinematheque.The restored film was first screened the following year at the Silent Film Festival in Pordenone, Italy. When I Was Dead is based on the story of a husband who announces his suicide but then disappears; then he reappears, disguised as somebody else. In this burlesque film the plot develops differently from, for example, Pirandello’s famous novel The Late Mattia Pascal. Lubitsch’s hero is a frivolous bon vivant who likes to sneak out in the evenings to go to clubs to play chess amongst men.This annoys his wife, but bothers his mother-in-law even more. One day (actually the middle of the night), she locks him out and the unfortunate husband has to spend the night in the hallway on the uncomfortable staircase.The next day he announces his intention to commit suicide and disappears. But instead of dying, he goes out to taste again the freedom of the bachelor life. However, while “the widow” is in mourning, the husband also becomes tired of idling about. He returns to the wife he still loves disguised as a butler. But his mother-in-law is already looking for a new husband for her daughter; she even brings one home.The false butler does everything to spoil the efforts of the suitor, to mock him, to seduce his wife again, and, finally, to get rid of the annoying mother-in-law. Unusual situations, expressive acting, accentuated facial expressions, gags, and title cards are standard elements of silent burlesque movies. On stage, however, they take on a completely new appearance.We expect that they will be just as amusing as they were in the era of silent films.

[philipchevron]

Touch Me by David Bolger (Project Arts Centre, Dublin) November 16

The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live. With the tidings that make such an Ireland possible, St. Patrick came to our ancestors fifteen hundred years ago promising happiness here no less than happiness hereafter. It was the pursuit of such an Ireland that later made our country worthy to be called the island of saints and scholars. It was the idea of such an Ireland - happy, vigorous, spiritual - that fired the imagination of our poets; that made successive generations of patriotic men give their lives to win religious and political liberty; and that will urge men in our own and future generations to die, if need be, so that these liberties may be preserved. One hundred years ago, the Young Irelanders, by holding up the vision of such an Ireland before the people, inspired and moved them spiritually as our people had hardly been moved since the Golden Age of Irish civilisation. Fifty years later, the founders of the Gaelic League similarly inspired and moved the people of their day. So, later, did the leaders of the Irish Volunteers. We of this time, if we have the will and active enthusiasm, have the opportunity to inspire and move our generation in like manner. We can do so by keeping this thought of a noble future for our country constantly before our eyes, ever seeking in action to bring that future into being, and ever remembering that it is for our nation as a whole that future must be sought.

- Eamon DeValera (Taoiseach), March 17, 1943

It's been, one way or another, a troubled 70 years since Ireland's arch-reactionary delivered his creed to the Irish people but if a recording of its broadcast (on Raidió Éireann, now RTE) now raises guffaws of derision when played close to the start of David Bolger's new work for CoisCéim Dance Theatre, it's also a painful reminder that it was on the watch of DeValera's Soldiers of Destiny (the Fíanna Fáil party) that the country's most recent economic and moral implosion took place.

All the same, Bolger has set out to explore just where the people actually do stand right now. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Bolger's taped voxpops, bookended by the choreographer's questions "What makes you sad?" and "What makes you happy?" [David is understandably delighted, in a programme note, by how many people give the answer "Dancing" to the latter query] is how uncertain people are initially. Now that the codswallop of nincompoops like DeValera are no longer heard except ironically, it's like there's a dawning realisation that now "the Ireland we dreamed of", as prescribed by patrician fascists, is off the table and, just like U2, we have no option but to "dream it all up again", this time taking full responsibility for the outcome.

Though the movement and dance is, as ever with Bolger, witty and thought-provoking and sometimes inventive, the result is not as coherent as some previous pieces, like Dodgems. Bolger knows this: "In some ways, Touch Me is not a comment, but rather a response through choreography to the accordion of emotions experienced daily...........my journey was one of enquiry, rather than that of statement".

In other words, it sheds light with humilty without pretending to have all the answers, in contrast to the balderdash quoted above. And all the better for it, especially when you consider that much of Dev's agenda may yet end up having more in common with true Irish values than he could possibly have imagined with his proto-Stalin, quasi-Hitler doctrine, with its "athetic youths" and "happy maidens" and "sturdy children", all blissed out and "joyous with the sounds of industry".

[philipchevron]

Three Days in May by Ben Brown (Trafalgar Studios, London) November 19

This slight play dramatises real events that took place just yards down the road from the theatre in the War Cabinet at No. 10 in May 1940. Neville Chamberlain's Prime Ministership has been fatally compromised by Hitler's invasion of the Sudetenland, in violation of the Munich Agreement secured by the PM in 1938 - the "peace for our time" declaration. He has resigned but he remains in the Cabinet of Churchill, who has been PM for less than three weeks as does Chamberlain's fellow "appeaser" Lord Halifax, They are joined in this Wartime Coalition by Atlee and Greenwood from the Labour Party. Britain is alone in the war: France has capitulated to Hitler, neither Russia nor the USA has yet joined the fun. There have been massive casualties at Calais and troops are stranded at Dunkirk. Things are not looking great for Britain and the War Cabinet spends three days of intense debate about what to do next. Churchill is, of course, gung ho for fighting the Germans to the last butter knife in the cutlery drawer, a position in which he is broadly supported by both the Labour Party and, we hear, the British people. The Tory grandees, like so many in the upper class, are in favour of peace terms with HItler which are likely to involve some surrender of dominion. Churchill is of the view that Munich showed conclusively that Hitler can't be trusted, as Chamberlain must know very well, and there's no guarantee Germany might agree terms of peace and then invade Britain anyway.

These sort of plays suffer because we it is seldom possible to retain inherent drama in a situation whose outcome is so well known. One glorious exception is the late 60's Broadway musical 1776 in which, almost to the last scene, Peter Stone's book makes it seem implausible that these men could ever possibly arrive at a Declaration of Lunch, much less of Independence. Brown's play can boast no such achievement. Not only is the outcome always foreseeable, but the writer indulges in that most scoundrellish of devices, the ironic foreshadowing of later historic events. It would not really be much of a surprise if Jock, Churchill's young secretary who acts as chorus and narrator, suddenly piped up with "Prime Minister, shall we be fighting them on the beaches, d'ya think?"

So, bog-standard writing but, it must be conceded, not a great deal of public scrutiny has been afforded this episode in our history and Brown must be applauded for his research if not his wooden dramaturgy. The performances are fine, under the circumstances, though Robert Demeger's Chamberlain and the Lord Halifax of Jeremy Clyde [of Chad and Jeremy fame, pop fact fans!], comparatively unfamiliar historical figures, do better than Warren Clarke manages with Churchill. Despite gallant efforts, there's no getting away from the fact that actors are first obliged to impersonate the War Leader and then, if there's time, do something to illuminate the character too.

But the abiding takeaway thought of this play is worth noting. Chamberlain and Halifax fought their appeasement corners to the bitter end until, in the play's best moment, Churchill wins his predecessor to his cause. Would that such reasoned argument and joint Cabinet responsibility had prevailed in the weeks and months leading up to the Iraq War in 2003, by which stage the War Cabinet had beconme, effectively, the prime minister's informal sofa.

[philipchevron]

Patricia Routledge: Facing the Music Ms Routledge in conversation with Edward Seckerson (Charing Cross Theatre, London) November 20

Sometimes when the work has innate merit, that counts for more in the long run than its initial commercial fortunes. Music critic Edward Seckerson sums it up well. A distinguished musical theatre career which may well be the best kept secret in show business. Taking her through that career, interspersed with cast album recordings of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Follow That Girl and The Duenna and Darling of the Day and Virtue in Danger and Little Mary Sunshine and the rest, the evening is an unexpected pleasure, with the star by turns gracious, witty, funny and informative and, at all times, sharp as a pin and blessed with a great memory for detail.

Best known across the globe as Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping up Appearances, a role in which she craftily sent up her own lack of success as a soprano by depicting an enthusiastic but painful-sounding amateur, a woman for whom the greatest fear of her next door neighbour's brother, a music teacher, is that she will "sing at me". But in reality, Patricia Routledge was one of the top theatre sopranos of her era. It is undeniable that she ended up in more "floperoos" as she calls them, than hits but, with a different shake of the dice, she could easily have had the careeer of her contemporary, Julie Andrews. She was highly regarded too, as her Tony Award for the shorlived Jule Styne/Yip Harburg show Darling of the Day illustrates (not even Andrews won a Tony).

But ending up is so many flop shows has at least left her with plenty of "if only" anecdotes to share and she relates them beautifully. She is especially good on the misconceived Leonard Bernstein/Alan Jay Lerner bicentenary Broadway musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976): "Lenny thought he was writing an opera for posterity, Lerner believed he was writing a Broadway musical.........." will resonate with Bernstein fans who despair of the profesional vanity which fatally darkened Bernstein's career until even he had to acknowledge, albeit late in his career, that West Side Story and On The Town and Wonderful Town had actually been pretty good shows. But it did not take his later reshaping of the piece as "A White House Cantata" for the concert hall to make the wonderful "Take Care of This House" a modern classic and a standard. Routledge reminds us that, in 1976, the song, a secular hymn invoking protection of America's democracy, had a special resonance in the post-Watergate era. She doesn't add, though I will, that having it sung by one of musical theatre's greatest limey performers, playing no fewer than eight first ladies, brings another layer. None of which could prevent the show closing after only its seventh performance.

[Christine]

I just realised that the Old Vic's Playboy is coming to an end this week. So if any of you still have the chance this week, I hope you can go! Myself, I finally caught up with Jerusalem but enough has been said about its brilliance here already.

[firehazard]

I just realised that the Old Vic's Playboy is coming to an end this week...

No chance of a tour, is there? Just hoping...

[philipchevron]

I just realised that the Old Vic's Playboy is coming to an end this week...

No chance of a tour, is there? Just hoping...

...........and if so, will Shane be there?

...............and will it play the Essoldo, Little-stoat-upon-the-weir?

[firehazard]

...............and will it play the Essoldo, Little-stoat-upon-the-weir?

That's a brilliant little venue. Though one needs to be wary of the creatures that crawl out from the Fens when it gets dark.

[philipchevron]

The Playboy of the Western World by JM Synge (Old Vic Theatre, London) November 22

With Niamh Cusack as the Widow Quin at the Old Vic and Sinead Cusack playing round the corner at the National as Juno Boyle in Juno and the Paycock and Sorcha Cusack just finished starring in Stephen Poliakoff's otherwise lame My City at the Almeida, this must be the first time all three of the elder Cusack sisters have simultaneously been starring in major London theatres. Unless, that is, you count the momentous 1990 production of, yes Three Sisters, at the Royal Court [and the Gate in Dublin] alongside their father Cyril as Chebutykin.

Cyril Cusack (1910-1993) had a career spanning most of the 20th century, starting as a child actor in melodrama in Ireland, then in early silent movies, before going on to become one of the Abbey Theatre's most famous players on the international stage. In a lifelong movie career, his heyday was undoubtedly the 1960s and 70s, when he became one of the most familiar character actors in European arthouse movies, including Truffaut's iconic Fahrenheit 451 (1966).

The following year he unwittingly played a major role in my life when he starred as Conn in the Abbey Theatre's legendary hit revival of Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun: though I had already been privileged to see great performers like the late Jimmy O'Dea on stage in Dublin, and though I had even seen the magnificent and then very young Donal McCann, no less, in the Abbey's traditional Irish-language pantomime the previous year [Fernando agus an Ríon Óg - some codswallop concerning a mythical Irish princess, a swashbuckling Spaniard, Agent 99 and Maxwell Smart from "Get Smart" and a yellow submarine, quite possibly the Abbey's psychedelic period, but as Gaeilge, so that's alright then] my real theatrical baptism came with that production of The Shaughraun - I decided then and there I was an Irish writer, God help me. Cusack was magical, charismatic, provocative, hilarious and in that production almost singlehandedly rescued from the stage-oirish scrapheap the tradition of the nationalist Irish melodrama of his own boyhood. (He did not live to see the Abbey's 2004 travesty of the play, lucky man). I didn't know all this stuff at the time, but I did know I was witnessing great theatre, and I had never before been so alive, so vibrant, so aware of my world as I felt in that Damascean moment.

Dr. Cusack had, of course, played Christy Mahon in The Playboy many times, including on a famous LP recording of the play (opposite Siobhan McKenna) which he also produced. In 1976, he played Fluther Good in the Abbey's 50th anniversary production of The Plough and the Stars and though by then he had already picked up the strange dithery inflection by which his dominance over the text appeared to come in and out of focus - nobody could ever quite account for this new tic which alternatively gave the impression of vagueness and an actorly choice to ride the text as though the character he was playing had a limited attention span - he was still utterly compelling.

I had dinner with him a couple of times in London in the early 1980s, when he held court at table for myself, Ted Carroll and Roger Armstrong, who were launching a spoken word label (Dalkey Records) devoted to Irish writers and wanted Cyril and Anna Manahan to star in the first release Gas From A Burner, a collection of James Joyce pieces. He was a wonderful raconteur and though we never did get round to launching the record label, for one reason or another, we had some memorable meals.

Now that it's in its final week, seeing this production of The Playboy has become something of a melancholy business - the sense that all of those favourite moments are about to disappear forever into the storied walls of the 200-year old theatre. Never again will I see that actor give that line reading and nor, after 9.50 pm on Saturday night, will anyone else. Ever. So tonight I collect the most valued moments on this final viewing, as is my custom. And though the company members have all remained consistently good throughout the run, and though it has been a joy to watch, in particular, Ruth Negga (Pegeen Mike) and Robert Sheehan (Christy Mahon) continue to find themselves and each other in their onstage interaction, almost all the moments I'm keeping in my heart and head belong to Niamh Cusack.

Working with her has been, from the start, one of the greatest pleasures of this assignment. Some of this is about how she sees it as part of her job to make a major contribution to the morale and well-being in the rehearsal room in an infinite number of ways, but more than that, she has seldom lost her solid grasp of the elements that makes Synge work in the theatre. Nobody has luxuriated in the pure relish of his language more than she. Synge is as distinctive as Shakespeare and, as with the Bard, the clues, the emotions, the motivations are all there in the text but, until I heard Niamh talk about "contriving in my garden" or make "shearing sheep" sound lilke the promise of 1001 Arabian nights, I had only small grasp of the extent of Synge's subversiveness. Synge wrote it, Cusack speaks it and in so doing she simultaneously makes you guffaw at the Widow Quin's sly bawdiness and break your heart at her lonesomeness.

Ends Saturday, as they say in the real reviews.

[philipchevron]

The Last of the Duchess by Nicholas Wright (Hampstead Theatre, London) November 23

".........reminds me of something that Edward Bond once said to me, which was that all the characters in a play ought to meet all the others, because people change depending on whom they're interacting with. So it's wasteful (his word) for them not to meet as many people as possible, because the more versions of them you see, the better you and your audience will get to know them" - Nicholas Wright interviewed by Hampstead Theatre Literary Manager Will Mortimer.

Though in many ways this echoes the folksiness of Will Rogers invoking Native American philosophy in defence of his "I never met a man I didn't like" credo, it remains a useful rule of thumb for a playwright and it is, without a doubt, something that even Mr Shakspear himself would second, considering that he started it all in the first place. Wright, in this instance, uses it like a lifeline in his dramatisation of journalist Lady Caroline Blackwood's book about the final days of Wallis Simpson's life in the apartment in the Bois de Boulogne she had shared with her husband Edward Windsor, the former King of England. Wright adds Blackwood herself to this gallery of grotesques and gorgons acting as gatekeepers to the reclusive and dessicated Duchess in 1980. Here, the alcoholic Anglo-Irish journalist (best known as the model and muse of Lucian Freud, the first of her three husbands; there Diana Mosley, Mitford gel and fascist but also one of the few people genuinely concerned for the best interests of the ailing and delusional socialite above in the bed; a pair of faithful retainers who may or may not be co-conspirators in a plot to rob the old biddy blind; most of all there's Suzanne Blum, a formidable and feared French-American entertainment lawyer whose obsession with Wallis goes well beyond the usual client-lawyer relationship, enough to rouse suspicion in Lady Caroline and in an effete young man called Michael Bloch who, though he too has his doubts about "Maitre" Blum, seems as devoted to her as Blum is to Wallis Simpson.

Phew! But trust me, All About Eve this is not. The playwright covers so many interlocking and overlapping areas - anti-Semitism; the ageing process; the louche decadence of the British aristocracy in the early Thatcher era (before working class boys like Spandau and Duran et all appropriated that ennui for fun and profit); the cult of Celebrity and its attendant "spin", both as old as the hills but whose meaning got rebooted by Post-Modernism; the nature of patriotism, loyalty and nationalism - and that's just for starters - that he certainly could not be accused of failing to look at these characters from multiple angles. In the process, like Shakespeare as early as the Henry VI plays, he never permits us to alight at a stop of our choice in order to pass judgment. Take Mosley - she and Oswald married in the sitting room of the Goebbels in Berlin, with Adolf Hitler in attendance: she was, without question, a nasty old bitch. Yet, when you see her casually tell Blackwood she didn't hate the Jews personally, you realise it just never occurs to any of these women, not Blum, Simpson, Blackwood or Mosley, to challenge their public perception because clearly, the public are all scratching apes whose "perception" of them gives them no pause whatever! People are, after all, more complex than that.

I'm rather partial to Nicholas Wright's work. I admire how he uses the stories of real-life characters to explore matters of identity and human nature that go well beyond the merely narrative, the simply biographical. When he strikes gold, as he did with his Van Gogh play Vincent in Brixton and in Cressida , his marvelous play about a Fagin-like procurer of Elizabethan boy-actors, the "squeaking cleopatras" of the Rose and the Globe, he is unmatched. Here, topped with two towering performances by Sheila Hancock (Maitre Blum) and Anna Chancellor (Caroline Blackwood) is another one to add to the treasure trove.

[philipchevron]

Eugene Onegin by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Libretto by the composer and Konstantin Shilovsky (Coliseum, London) November 23

After the Bolshoi's revelatory new production, seen at Covent Garden last year, replacing a creaky 60-year old production wrenched from the hands of the Russian public like a child refusing to part with a favourite, though undeniably moth-eaten and potentially hazardous Teddy Bear, it was never going to be easy for English National Opera to follow with its own new entry. But fair winds have been at ENO's back of late and the combination of Ed Gardner in the pit, Deborah Warner at the director's table and risen star tenor Toby Spence as the poet Lensky, ensures a more than acceptable result. If it errs a little on the dusty side (it's a co-production with the Met in New York, whose reactionary old clientele expects real blood to flow in the duel scene, at the very least) Warner gets extra integrity points for locating the essential melancholia of the piece and staying with it.

Pushkin's story involves ruddy ingenue Tatyana pouring out her feelings in a letter to the rakish Onegin who snootily and condescendingly rejects her. Years pass and paths diverge and, inevitably, when they reconnect, Onegin ends up falling hopelessly in love with the silly girl only to have her reject him, not least because she has since become the wife of a Prince. Remarkably, something very similar happened to Tchaikovsky during his setting of Pushkin to music, when he became the recipient of imploring missives from a young woman whose threat to end her life if he ignored her, led them to the altar together. The composer, homosexual of course, and therefore no stranger to unrequited emotions, undertook this marriage only having laid out all the facts before his future wife, including the one that he did not, could not, love her. Nevertheless, the marriage was a hopeless and unhappy mess from the very outset and the sadness and empathy and longing bleeds from ever note of this, Tchaikovsky's masterpiece.

[philipchevron]

Godspell by Stephen Schwartz (music, lyrics) and John-Michael Tebelak (book) (Circle in the Square Theatre, New York) November 24

The counter-culture truism that positions Woodstock as some sort of unwieldy iconic apex of the hippy era and Altamont as its inevitable comedown is fallacious and glib is so many respects that we need not enummerate them here. But it's probably fair to say that one could, if so inclined, argue over all possible alternative polarities too. And if you were there, generationally, you were probably too stoned or too pox-ridden to be a reliable witness anyway. I wasn't there, having emerged towards the end of the Baby Boomer years. But I knew my pop music. And, more to the point, I knew my showtunes too.

So when, in 1970, a pair of former public schoolboys whose self-declared favourite "rock n rollers" were Cliff Richard and the Shadows turned Jesus Christ into a Superstar and surrounded him with a hideous a-wailing and a-sweating and a-grunting soundtrack, a form of prog rock that could only have emerged from the British public school system and would very soon quietly die there too, once Bolan and Bowie had found the antidote, I knew that the flower power jig was over, the hippy game was up. Psychopathic Hell's Angels were not required in this kid's cultural reference book.

Jesus Christ Superstar initiated a fleeting genre of rock musicals which appropriated some of the more whimsical and marketable aspects of the counter-culture to tell the Gospel story, a death knell to both wounded parties, if ever there was one. The more secular Hair certainly influenced this mini-trend but, as its recent revival showed, Hair had a bit more about it than trite homilies or pseudo-agonised emoting. I say it was a fleeting trend but in fact it seemed to go one for years because both JC Superstar and Godspell, its Broadway counterpart both had unbelievably long runs and both were then made into terrible motion pictures. In Dublin, Colm Wilkinson played Judas and Luke Kelly played Herod in the Lloyd-Webber/Rice confection, which at least made it collectable, if not necessarily sufferable.

At the time, I never saw the big lopsided "Sesame Street" meets "Playschool" grin that was Godspell but its hit song "Day By Day" was ubiquitous, so it wasn't easy to shake off either. Soon, every Fr Brian Trendy in Ireland would be picking out a few basic chords (none of which were actually in "Day By Day") on an oul acoustic and, surrounded by altar boys banging tambourines (or maybe I nightmared that last bit), giving us his "Day By Day" and rejoicing in how the sixties revolution had finally dropped into the sacristy for a cup of tea and a brownie. Fuck's sake.

So now, forty years later, I brace myself for this long-threatened first major Broadway revival of the first hit show by the man who went on to write the appalling but mega-successful Wicked, in the hope that because it's Thanksgiving Day, it will be a comparatively benign experience. It isn't.

What makes this so especially awful is that this cast of youngsters have grandparents who missed Woodstock and Altamont. All the cultural connections, such as they are, are replaced with that unbearably positive affirmational style these kids have picked up from the worst aspects of "Glee", which would be quite a good TV show if the truly crappy processed music, unfeasibly white teeth, buffed-to-within-an-inch-of-their-lives torsos and homogeneous vocal chords didn't keep getting in the way. American musical theatre has in recent years wholeheartedly embraced that pointlessly incontinent melisma that passes for "soul" singing on "X-Factor" type TV shows and this revival misses not a single opportunity to wallow in elongated vocal lines that Bobby Bland would have houghed up with his early morning phlegm, a mercy to be rid of them before the serious business of singing got underway for the day.

Dramaturgically? Am I going there? OK, I'm going there: Godspell doesn't work because the central character is so relentlessly upbeat and can-do and Kumbaya that, by the time he is hoist on a cross, announcing "Oh God, I'm bleeding.....Oh God, I'm dying.......Oh God, I'm dead.....Long live God", you find yourself genuinely puzzling what on earth he could have done wrong to have merited so sticky an end.

Maybe God too knows a good showtune when he hears one.

[Frances]

Hair had a bit more about it than trite homilies or pseudo-agonised emoting.

Sure does.
We used to play the Hair and Cabaret LP's as kids, always turning up our noses at Sketches of Spain.
"Initials" is amazing. I love it.