Whatsonstage.com has signed up as the exclusive media partner for this year’s Perfect Pitch, the event established in 2006 for the development of new homegrown musical theatre.

Launched as a platform to help new British writers and creatives present their work to both an industry and public audience, Perfect Pitch 2006 proved highly successful, with several of the musicals moving to further development and productions. The 2007 event – which will once again be held at the 128-seat Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate – will take place from 15 to 28 October 2007. Submissions are now being considered for inclusion in the showcase.

Commenting on the new media partnership, Perfect Pitch producer Andy Barnes said: “I am absolutely delighted that Whatsonstage.com has come on board to support this event. This shows their commitment to musical theatre in the UK, and I look forward to working with them to develop this event to become a hunting ground for the musicals of the future. Whatsonstage.com and What’s On Stage Magazine have become vital resources in the theatre industry, and as I have similar aspirations for Perfect Pitch, it seemed a natural partnership to form.”

(more…)

Perfect Pitch - an event for new musicals - ran for the first time in September 2006.

The festival, designed exclusively for British writers, ran for two weeks at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, a fringe theatre in Highgate that has a flexible black box studio space and an unusually high capacity of 128 seats.

The event was produced by Andy Barnes, an independent musical theatre producer, in association with Ovation (the company that runs the venue) and MTM:UK run by Chris Grady (Head of Licensing at Cameron Mackintosh Ltd). The material chosen was selected by this panel, all of whom have vast experience in new musical theatre writing.

Due to the outstanding success of the event the producers are now collaborating on Perfect Pitch 2007.

Please browse the website where you can find more information about Perfect Pitch 2006 and the proposed future of the event, listen to audio and dvd samples from some of last year’s chosen pieces and view media response and testimonials from industry professionals.

An eminent crossword compiler was once asked for his favourite clue. “Cinderella’s midnight music,” he replied. Seven letters. That’s, right : RAGTIME.

Well, it was glad rag time at Glyndebourne yesterday when I did what I never thought I’d do all summer: sit on the lawn with friends and enjoy a picnic.

It was sheer delight, made sheerer by the show: Peter Hall’s exquisite, acidic production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola. Cinderella’s late-afternoon music was a feast of elegance, melody and vitality.

I love Glyndebourne. And I love the new house as much as I loved the old house, where I saw Hall’s magical production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream many years ago. At that time, Hall seeemd to be in a lull of inspiration at the National; his soul was hovering over the Sussex Downs.

His Cinderella (first seen two years ago) belies any suggestion that the old maestro may be slowing down. Reports of his Pygmalion at Bath corroborate this impression.

(more…)

Watching the brilliant new film of the so-so new musical of the campy old movie cult classic Hairspray, you can’t help wondering about the iconic succession in the mother role of Divine, Harvey Fierstein, John Travolta and Michael Ball.

The first two underground drag artists breached the mainstream, while Travolta represents an arc from teen fave in Grease to grandma’s delight in Hairspray, which is where Michael “Grease” Ball is presumably positioning himself right now.

Hairspray is bafflingly (to me) still packing out on Broadway, where the film has only increased interest in the stage show; but I bet the opposite happens here.

The kids are so terrific in the film, and Christopher Walken so funny and touching as Dad, it’s hard to see where the West End show can make any improvements or indeed satisfactory substitutions.

The one thing really going for Hairspray is the accidental topicality of vote rigging on television phone-in talent shows. But will that, and the transatlantic obsession with the pre-Beatles and Stones 1960s before they became “Swinging” be enough? The film movingly implies the start of the civil rights movement and the first short flush of the Kennedy presidency.

(more…)

Lunch with my old friend Peter Ansorge, formerly editor of Plays and Players, film producer and television mastermind behind such top series as The Boys from the Black Stuff and Traffic.

He’s written a play about the on/off love affair between German philosopher Martin Heidegger and American (German-born) political theorist and critic Hannah Arendt.

They both died thirty years ago and represent a mainstream European intellectualism. divided by Hitler, that will doubtless have today’s arts editors and feature writers saying “who”, “why” and “so what.”

I hope they don’t. The play sounds like a cracker and I gather Alan Rickman and Juliet Stevenson have both read it with interest.

It’s important that some sort of cultural historical continuum prospers in the theatre and too few plays have any reverberation for anyone who remembers anything beyond last week’s episode of Big Brother or EastEnders.

Which is why, Ansorge tells me, he can only read Philip French in The Observer among the current crop of film critics with anything like relish. If you see a film like Moliere and don’t care about (or don’t know) Tartuffe or The Misanthrope, what on earth will you make of it, beyond taking it as some kind of superficial costume drama?

Ansorge’s play has been picked up by producer David Aukin and may well be directed by Aukin’s wife, Nancy Meckler, before the end of the year, or early next. Rickman would be perfect as Heidegger. Stevenson would be a good Hannah, but maybe not Jewish enough. What’s Zoe Wanamaker doing after Much Ado, I wonder?

The new aviation musical Take Flight may have got stuck on the runway at the Menier last night, but there was no shortage of optimism in the departure lounge.

Big shot agents mingled with Broadway royalty while New York Times critic Ben Brantley — the Greta Garbo of reviewers — maintained his untouchable independence by burying his head enigmatically in his book.

Brantley did surface briefly in the interval to exchange pleasantries with Variety critic David Benedict, who tells me that Dublin stringer Karen Fricker is moving across to London to help lighten his load. What load is that, exactly? “I wrote 134,000 words last year,” says David, grandly. “That’s a novel and a half.”

National boss Nicholas Hytner reveals that Michael Billington’s new book about post-War theatre, due out in November, is really rather good. Which is why he, Hytner, is discussing it with the author at an NT platform.

Hytner’s guest is Sam Barnett from The History Boys. “The great thing about that show,” says Hytner, “is that it’s given me a whole new extended family of friends. But I never want to see it again!” (He will do, though, when it goes out on tour yet again.)

(more…)

Birthday Blues
Oh dear, I just got a year older. One of my best friends thought I’d reached a zero benchmark, but I’ve just fallen short.

Bless the Guardian for registering this fact, listing me alongside other genuine early Leo notables such as the brilliant jazz rock musician Barbara Thompson — an early Andrew Lloyd Webber associate — the violinist Ruggiero Ricci (he’s 89, now, for God’s sake!) and my special friend Ruth Mackenzie, 50 today, and hosannah-ed generally as the first general director of the Manchester International Festival.

Ruth and I always say we’ll have a birthday lunch but we never do. That’s how life is. And then you’re gone, and then you’ll miss it. And you’ll not have had your special lunch, either.

But on days like these you reflect on the fires you’ve been through together, the great moments of theatre from here to eternity, the blaze of new talent, the shock of the new. Ruth’s a beagle, true bred, and I’m proud to share a birth day with her. Even if we never get round to having that lunch.

(more…)

Those of us fortunate enough not to have had to bale out our houses or swim for help over the weekend were making the most of a few hours of sunshine over the high summer weekend. Things started off well enough on Thursday night when the delightful Lady be Good opened in Regent’s Park.

The irrepressible Su Pollard, last seen in Menopause the Musical, and not a whit abashed, was in the stalls, cheering up the rest of us and cheering on the cast. In fact, she had to be more or less restrained from running onto the stage to embrace the band.

On Friday, I took my friend and neigbour, the actor William Hoyland, to the Test Match at Lord’s. It rained until mid-day then got serious with a dramatic monsoon. The old red pavilion evaporated in a smoky mist and a small lake formed in front of the Mound Stand.

Miraculously, the outfield was drained, play started, and we had five hours of eventful cricket. Bill, who has played many a silky prosecutor in the series of tribunal plays at the Tricycle, has lately completed a new film with Angelina Jolie, A Mighty Heart. He confirms that Angelina is indeed covered in tattoos from head to foot. How does he know this? He avoids this question by confirming that he is “Jolie” good friends with Brad Pitt, too! We can see the film in September.

(more…)

Good to see the Evening Standard editor Veronica Wadley turning up at so many first nights these days, but she may want to have words with the author of her third leader yesterday which ascribed the production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Coat to Ben Pimlott instead of Steven.

Both Pimlotts, alas, are now deceased, but even though Ben the historian and politician wrote many fine books and did many fine things, producing musicals was not one of them.

One could hardly imagine any comparable Standard in-house confusion, say, of theatre critic Nicholas with the doughty old silent movie pianist Florence de Jongh, or epicene art critic Brian with his beefy thespian namesake (now, sadly, also deceased) George Sewell.

Nicholas, incidentally, in his review of the show, reiterates the British critical orthodoxy about musicals: “For those of us, aged ten and over, who do not take musicals seriously…” which is also reflected in recent articles about the West End being overrun with the dread musicals instead of challenging new drama.

(more…)

Announcing the recruitment of Sian Phillips to replace Michael Ball (overweighed with commitments, and lots of pies) on the Theatre Book prize judging panel, we were told that this fine actress was “no stranger to boos.”

We should have been told, of course, that she was “no stranger to books” — as she’s published three volumes of autobiography. But the hastily corrected misprint is already one of my favourites, if not one of hers.

No Stranger to Boos, might indeed be a good title for Sian’s fourth volume, along the lines of Diana Rigg’s No Turn Unstoned, in which she cheerfully reports John Simon’s review of her performance in the nude scene of Abelard and Heloise: “Diana Rigg is built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses.”

Ah, those were the days, when insults had good witty provenance and an air of majesty. Rigg’s book is a wonderful repository of the best of them, but it doesn’t include Groucho Marx’s message to a writer friend: “I saw your play last night in adverse circumstances. The curtain was up.”

It does, though, include Clive James’s droll summary of a television Shakespeare: “The Winter’s Tale was worthily done, but one gets uncomfortable for the actors when they are surrounded by cubes and cones. You can’t quell the fear that if one of them sits on a cone instead of a cube, then the blank verse will suffer.”