Going to the theatre

[DownInTheGround]

From The Times on Friday:

Every critic has had the experience of seeing their words tweaked for the purposes of an advert – and many of us have seen them ruthlessly taken out of context. I once ended a review of Saturday Night Fever by saying: “If it’s an all-out retro romp you’re after, this only fitfully delivers.” It reappeared in the show’s publicity as “an all-out retro romp!”. Which was only a step away from changing “whatever you do, don’t see this show” to “see this show!”.

Theatre producers need brisk, brash quotes to help to sell shows. To some extent, fair enough. Unless reviewers restrict themselves to barking out no-grey-area utterances such as “codswallop!” or “Michael Crawford proves himself our greatest performer since Churchill!”, there will always be some gentle tweaking to the production’s advantage.

But if theatregoers are offered opinions edited to the point of a 180-degree change of meaning, it’s a rip-off, plain and simple. When the critic David Benedict reviewed Gyles Brandreth’s musical Zipp! for the Independent on Sunday, he wrote: “If schoolboy innuendo is your bag, book now.” The edited version for the theatre hoarding? “Book now – The Independent on Sunday”. “I was fairly furious,” says Benedict, “because as a critic your opinion is what gives you currency. If someone goes and sees a show because they think you’ve recommended it, and it turns out to be junk, that’s very damaging.”

This month The Daily Telegraph critic Dominic Cavendish reviewed Joe Penhall’s play Landscape with Weapon at the National Theatre. “If anyone was going to produce a scorching, blinding, lacerating play about the arms industry, I’d have put smart money on that someone being Joe Penhall,” wrote Cavendish, before mourning the fact that this show doesn’t actually pull it off. The quote as the National run it? “A scorching, blinding, lacerating play about the arms industry.”

[philipchevron]

This tomfoolery is by no means restricted to the theatre business. I remember an unfavourable NME review of Patti Smith's second album in which the critic (was it Nick Kent?) lamented, in conclusion, that all things considered, and given that her debut was so magnificent, this was a major disappointment. But the reviewer did not sign off before bitterly predicting "It'll probably sell a million". I leave you to guess which part of the review the record company used in the publicity.

[philipchevron]

On The Town by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jerome Robbins (London Coliseum)

From its dreary "dream ballet" to its Our Boys In Uniform Get Their Oats optimism, it could only be a Broadway show from 1944, and there is some frisson in seeing it at the Coliseum - the big Broadway shows that crossed the Atlantic in the 40s and 50s played the Coliseum when they did not play the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. But in truth, it's very much a second division masterwork of the Golden Age, helping to point the way forward but delivering little of originality itself, except the moments when Bernstein's music soars over the mundaneness of it all. This show reveals that when it came to single numbers, Bernstein was actually quite capable of writing some stinkers, and even the dance music is only occasionally thrilling, when it foreshadows the miracles of West Side Story over a decade later.

All that said, On The Town does include two of the most exquisite single numbers that decade, moments when American Musical Theatre served notice that it would soon have to be considered an art form as well as a mode of populist entertainment - "Some Other Time" and "Lonely Town". Director Jude Kelly struggles to lift much else on the massive Coli stage but is helped by lively performances from Caroline O'Connor, Joshua Dallas, June Whitfield, Lucy Schaufer and Janine Duvitski.

[philipchevron]

Coriolanus by W. Shakespeare (Yukio Ninagawa Company at the Barbican Theatre, London)

Magnificent.

Everything about this production - Ninagawa's direction, Toshiaki Karasawa's Coriolanus, Kayoko Shiraishi's Volumnia, Masanobu Katsumura's Aufidius, Kotaro Yoshida's Menenius, Yasuhiro Kasamatsu's music, Tsukasa Nakagoshi's epic set, Masahiro Inoue's sound design and not least Masahiro Kunil's extraordinary, stylised, precisely timed fight choreography helps lift this into the all-time great Shakespeare productions. The company manage to combine elements of Japanese and Elizabethan theatre with Modernism to produce a moving and stately parable, almost a Samurai story. Memorable.

[philipchevron]

Fallujah by Jonathan Holmes (The Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London)

Outside in Brick Lane, home to successive immigrant communities since the Huguenots first arrived, the warm spring evening air is scented with the almost unbearably tasty aromas of fried spices from the most congested Bangladeshi restaurant enclave in, perhaps, the world. Go there. Be hungry. Eat. And enjoy the vibrancy of the young, hip, smart Bangla-British crowd that calls the area home these days, one of the happier afterglows of Empire.

The almost carnival atmosphere in this community is in sharp contrast to the play taking place in the converted brewery that is now an arts centre. In there, actors (including Harriet Walters and Imogen Stubbs) are mingling with and finding paths through the promenading audience (including Trevor Nunn and Yasmin Alibai-Brown) as they play a succession of roles - the smug academic turned unelected policy-maker Condaleeza Rice, British and American generals and grunts, journalist embeds, Red Cross/Crescent workers and the ordinary people of Fallujah. The mendacious rhetoric of Rice and the neo-Crusade words of the American Lieutenant (in both cases taken verbatim from actual speeches, as with the entire play) strikes a harsh note in such an environment. The predominantly Muslim denizens of Brick Lane are not the people of Fallujah, but you get the point forcefully. They could be.


LIEUTENANT: "There's a picture of the Twin Towers hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my Kevlar. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think, "They hit us at home and now it's our turn." We're going out where the bad guys live, and we're going to slay them in their ZIP code. It's payback time. People have said we confront a faceless enemy. But I say the enemy has got a face, the enemy has a name. He's called Satan. He's in Fallujah and we are going to DESTROY HIM!"

Of the many crimes perpetrated by the American military on the Iraqi people in the name of the Bush Administration and therefore of 50% (and sinking fast) of the American people, the destruction of Fallujah has been by some distance the most monumental so far. No fewer than seventy separate articles of the "quaint" Geneva conventions have been breached repeatedly and with impunity. What is almost as criminal is how quickly the battles of Fallujah have evaporated from public consciousness, something this piece of theatre goes some small distance to correcting. If the people of the United States and the people of Britain have forgotten about Fallujah, it's safe to say the people of Fallujah have not, and nor will their sons permit our children to overlook it so easily.

As the putrid, lingering afterburn of Condi Rice's (again verbatim - and only semi-literate) final speech in a Midwestern Presbyterian Church ("Among American leadership, there are an awful lot of people who travel in faith. It's a remarkable thing and I think it probably sets us apart from most developed countries, where it is not something that is appreciated quite as much in most of the world"), assaults the ear, it is a relief, a mercy, to escape back into Brick Lane, where there is actual, living breathing humanity.

[philipchevron]

By the way, anyone know what the ZIP code for Fallujah actually is?

[Eckhard]

By the way, anyone know what the ZIP code for Fallujah actually is?

31002.

Seriously.

[philipchevron]

By the way, anyone know what the ZIP code for Fallujah actually is?

31002.

Seriously.

Holy shit.

[Eckhard]

By the way, anyone know what the ZIP code for Fallujah actually is?

31002.

Seriously.

Holy shit.

I did some research on Iraqui zip codes when I was working on a short story.
I was and am still both pretty amazed as well as irritated by the fact that as early as May 2004 in a war-torn and chaotic country a new zip code system was installed.

[philipchevron]

By the way, anyone know what the ZIP code for Fallujah actually is?

31002.

Seriously.

Holy shit.

I did some research on Iraqui zip codes when I was working on a short story.
I was and am still both pretty amazed as well as irritated by the fact that as early as May 2004 in a war-torn and chaotic country a new zip code system was installed.

If Truth is one of the first casualties of war, Bureaucracy is one of the last. Mundane things like ZIPcodes create the illusion (to the invaders, if not the invaded) that things are returning to normal. It doesn't much matter if your house is a pile of rubble as long as you know which freakin' ZIPcode it's in.


http://www.ica.org.uk/Fallujah+13308.twl

[Eckhard]

By the way, anyone know what the ZIP code for Fallujah actually is?

31002.

Seriously.

Holy shit.

I did some research on Iraqui zip codes when I was working on a short story.
I was and am still both pretty amazed as well as irritated by the fact that as early as May 2004 in a war-torn and chaotic country a new zip code system was installed.

If Truth is one of the first casualties of war, Bureaucracy is one of the last. Mundane things like ZIPcodes create the illusion (to the invaders, if not the invaded) that things are returning to normal. It doesn't much matter if your house is a pile of rubble as long as you know which freakin' ZIPcode it's in.

Hey, as long as you have a zip code Amazon can deliver

But seriously: Bureaucracy is a weird thing. In small doses it can be pretty helpful, but when overdosed...
Professionally I do have to cope with bureaucracy - it's part of the job. Germany has thousands of laws. Everything is regulated.
I do have that vision that after a nuclear holocaust someone builds a shed from the rubble and somebody from the city council appears and asks if he does have a building permit.
And such things as zip codes are highlights of bureaucracy: Helpful, sure, but hillarious when reinstalled in the aftermath of war.

[Behan]

Mr. C! Have you seen the Broadway revival Company yet? Are ever planning on seeing it?

[philipchevron]

Mr. C! Have you seen the Broadway revival Company yet? Are ever planning on seeing it?

Raul Esparza is, along with Adrian Lester (London 1996) the best Bobby I've seen - it's a tough role, so passive, it's hard to seem engaged with it, but Esparza stays convincing throughout.

For those unfamiliar with the convention, this production of Steve Sondheim's Company is the latest in a small series of productions of classic musicals in which the actors are also the orchestra and the scores are reduced accordingly. It is not a new practice but in recent years, led mainly by British director John Doyle, the practice has been applied more intelligently to shows which might dramaturgically improve from it. So the standard-bearer is Doyle's version of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, which moved from a small theatre near Reading to the West End and finally to Broadway where it starred Patti LuPone and Michael Cerveris. Doyle set the show, essentially, in the mad asylum which is otherwise only an episode in the original mammoth-scale production. The inmates tell the story and play the music. It was hugely effective and it's now almost impossible to imagine Sweeney on the (literally) industrial scale of the original production. Now everyone wants to do their own "Teeny Todd" including, I see, the Gate Theatre, Dublin, which is eminently suitable for chamber productions.

Not all Doyle's experiments have worked - his version of Jerry Herman's Mack And Mabel, again cast with actor-musicians, did not shed any additional light on the material and Herman's work may well be Doyle-proof anyway, as Jerry is the last of the big Broadway Irving Berlin type songwriters - there's not a great deal of subtext going on in the music, terrific though it is.

My problem with this version of Company is that, of necessity, it dumps the original 1970 orchestrations but this is not something this show can afford to do. Jonathan Tunick's original charts were so 1970, still Broadway, but acknowledging that the Sixties had happened in pop and rock music. The orchestrations of Company are, for me, part of the work, part of the zeitgeist of the show. They could not have been written any time except 1970.

So, while everyone acquits him or her self very well as both actor and musician in this new production, I will always be forced to lament the missing ingredient. All that said, there is one aspect in which the content and John Doyle's method align to create genuine theatre. I will just say that Raul Esparza is the only actor excused musician duty in the show, as to reveal more would be to steal away the moment of theatre if you do go see it. Which I hope you will. For all that it does not quite gel as Sweeney Todd did, it is still one of the most sophisticated shows on Broadway, and that's not an idle boast at the best of times.

[Behan]

Thanks for the info Phil. Actually, the fiddle player of a New York based Irish rock band is one of the lead stars in this most recent production. That's why I asked you about this. You would be the one who would know. I'm possibly recording with the band real soon, so hopefully the payoff would be some free tickets.

[Shaz]

Damn. I want to see the Sam Shepard. Wonder if I can get over for a weekend. Do you know how long it's on for, Philip? And thank you for the review.

It closes next Saturday.

http://www.abbeytheatre.ie/whatson/deadhorse.html

Drat, shan't make it over in time. Thanks for the link, Philip. I try to organise trips to Dublin round what's on at the Abbey Theatre, so will hope for better luck later in the year.

It's coming back, Shaz!

http://www.abbeytheatre.ie/whatson/deadhorse.html

Yay, brilliant! Thanks for the link, Philip. I need to wangle some holiday for then.

Been AWOL for the past week or so, so have had a very pleasant time catching up on this thread.