Brits Big On Broadway
So far in New York, I’ve only seen “real people” on stage: Frankie Valli, Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill, Joan Didion and Angela Lansbury. Of course the last one’s a cheat: Angela Lansbury is not appearing as herself, but as
an old tennis champion in Terrence McNally’s Deuce, alongside the sainted Marian Seldes. But to most people in the audience she is really Jessica Fletcher, star of Murder She Wrote.
It is over thirty years since she appeared on the New York stage as Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd and Mama Rose in Gypsy. The latter performance came to London and was an unforgettable triumph. Now 81 years old, she still displays the elegance of thought and gesture she did back then, but McNally’s play is thin stuff. She and Seldes were once doubles champions, and they chew the fat on changes in the game – sponsorship, prize money, open sexuality – while watching a match in the Open Championship at Flushing Meadow. The stadium is miraculously evoked in Michael Blakemore’s production (design by Peter J Davison, lighting by Mark Henderson) with a filmed crowd following every ball.
As Joan Didion, Vanessa Redgrave seems certain to win the best actress Tony. She is simply magnificent in The Year of Magical Thinking, based on Didion’s remarkable memoir. Once the coughing and whistling audio loops had died down at Saturday’s matinee, there was another, less familiar sound filling the auditorium as Redgrave spoke of loss and grief and the suddenness of being alone: that of uncontrollable sobbing. Redgrave’s beam is so strong, her concentration so intense, she is simply reducing the audience to a wobbling emotional jelly. And what a superb production this is by David Hare, with simple, stunning design by Bob Crowley and lighting supremo Jean Kalman.
At dinner in Angus McKindoe’s with Peter Tear, who runs the East 59th Theatre and its current fourth annual “Brits on Broadway” season, the talk is of yet more possible exchanges between our two theatre cities; Terry Hands has just had a big success with a production from his Theatre Clwyd, so has Will Adamsdale and Nina Raine’s Rabbit, with its original London cast opens next week, followed by Alan Ayckbourn’s Intimate Exchanges from Scarborough.
But what an impact Redgrave and Lansbury (whose father was a leading Labour politician in the post-war British government) are making here. And as if to underline the point, right on cue, in walks Michael Sheen, feted in his own right but more “real” as David Frost. Sheen, unlike Lansbury and Redgrave, is not nominated for a Tony, but his star is in the ascendant, and he’s loving every minute in New York.
I first saw Sheen, fresh from Rada, playing a Greek pianist in a West End play, When She Danced, by Martin Sherman, about Isadora Duncan. Isadora was played by Vanessa Redgrave. Now he is next door to her on Broadway. Even he is excited about this, and tells us that on his first night, Vanessa sent him a huge bunch of flowers with love and best wishes. The Brits have arrived (again). And they’re sticking together.