Bad Idea for Bad Girls
Bad Girls — The Musical opened last night in the West End, but you won’t read any reviews until tomorrow. That’s because the producers, in their so-called wisdom, wanted the critics to experience “a real audience” on Press night, while the “gala guest night” — full of phoneys, pseuds, minor celebrities and hangers-on, as opposed to “real people,” I suppose — goes full steam ahead tonight unhampered by scruffy critics in their bad haircuts, plimsolls and Tesco bags.
Unfortunately, the “real audience” was rather thin on the ground last night. You could have shot a stag in the back section of the stalls. And as a “real audience” is untutored in the strange rituals and palaver of a Press night, many of them turned up half an hour late and started banging around in the auditorium just as the prison girls started to get down and dirty.
I’m sorry to say that the Critics Circle caved in and co-operated with this arrangement. The Circle is really a toothless organisation with no powers of jurisdiction or appointment, but one of the few really worthwhile achievements of the drama section was the securing — and then sustaining through a tricky period in the 1980s — of the early 7pm Press night start to enable overnight reviews to be written in a little more than five minutes (though of course any critic worth his salt can write a review in five minutes; you’ve either got something to say or you haven’t).
The critics shot themselves in the foot, and weakened their position with managements, by not maintaining overnight reviews in later editions as a matter of course. But the principle still holds, and it’s a good one. Once you start staggering review coverage, chaos will ensue. London is not like New York with about one worthwhile Broadway opening a month for the critics to write about.
Tonight, for instance, in London, the critics will be reviewing a new production at the Young Vic and hoping their newspapers find room tomorrow for both that play and the held-over Bad Girls review. But there is likely to be a squeeze on space and the end of the week is not a good time to have a backlog. Result? Less coverage for Bad Girls, and a whole lot of free non-publicity. How dumb can you get?
I love the Garrick Theatre. In my youth it was one of the last theatres in London where you could put out a stall in the alleyway to reserve your seat in the gallery. For some reason the two shows I most remember from that period are John Hurt in Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs (it ran for only a fortnight, but the Beatles, Laurence Olivier and I all caught it before it closed) and Raymond Huntley in a courtroom thriller, Difference of Opinion.
But I tried to see everything at the Garrick, not least because once you rushed up the stairs to your place in the gallery, you would find there a most marvellous usherette with a huge blonde bun of hair, red lipstick and a frilly apron, toting a tray and crying the ineffable invitation to buy “Programmes, ices, orange drinks” in a voice pickled in what sounded like gin and glass filings over many centuries. I hope there are enough “real people” at Bad Girls to pack the place to the rafters and encounter the ghost of the girl I loved there up in the gallery.