Spring Clean Sweep At The Tonys
Great news for British theatre from the Tonys, with a super seven gongs for Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia and a double design nod for Bob Crowley. But the eight awards for the all-American musical version of Spring Awakening is especially pleasing as the enterprise is so fresh and youthful and the musical itself — a really neat, sexy and accurate version of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play — owes much more to Hair and Rent than it does to Sondheim or Lloyd Webber.
When I saw it on Broadway recently, it also attracted by far the liveliest and least “Middle American” crowd of all the shows I saw. The honoured librettist Steven Sater’s father is London-based Texan director Michael Rudman’s first cousin. The old boy cries with pride, apparently, every time he hears the show mentioned, so he must be flooding his street with tears this morning.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream did not disappoint in Regent’s Park on Friday night, but there was a bit of a mix up with the ticket allocation which nearly resulted in Rocky Horror author Richard O’Brien having to sit on my lap. Problem sorted, the show set a full house on a purr of pleasure. Des Barrit is happily recovered from his illness and busy again, and was enjoying a picnic despite his partner having forgotten the potato salad.
Director Ian Judge was paying his first Open Air visit since 1964! Even I only go back as far as 1967, when I sat in a deckchair (no proper auditorium in those days) to watch David Buck and Gabrielle Drake in Cyrano de Bergerac. Tom Hollander and Hugh Bonneville were having a jolly time, sharing a second act bottle of white wine. And I had the great pleasure of sitting next to Claire Carrie, retiring artistic director Ian Talbot’s delightful actress wife.
She even thought it was funny that Ian, playing his trademark Bottom, seemed to turn into Ken Dodd with his donkey’s ears, sticky-up hair and protruding teeth. Doddy once played a Sunday night in the Park and shared his grumpiness with the audience: “Forty years in the business and here I am, playing in the middle of a field in a theatre that can’t even afford a roof.” Ah,the pleasures of the Park, and the picnics to keep you going: spring onion awakening, I suppose.