Which Pimlott’s That, Then?
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.
This same snobbish point was all too predictably made to me over a drink in the National Film Theatre yesterday with Jack Bradley, the NT’s former literary manager who is now working with Sonia Friedman. (Jack admitted that In Celebration had been his idea and had been thrown together, probably ill-advisedly, in a few weeks.)
None of these aesthetic “purists” seem to understand that the West End is a marketplace with no “duty” towards drama (that’s the job of the NT, RSC, Almeida and so on, in short the subsidised sector); that brand name dramatists of any clout — Stoppard, Frayn, Bennett, Hare, Churchill, and so on — prefer to give their work to the subsidised theatres anyway; and that musicals at their best are an art form to be discussed as seriously by critics as they are preferred (as entertainment) by audiences.