The rumour mill is busy at the moment on where the Royal Shakespeare Company might finally come to rest in London after all the confusion of its West End seasons, short bursts at the Young Vic and Soho, and the forthcoming blockbuster history cycle at the Round House.

A little bird whispers that the oddly situated New London, half way along Drury Lane, is hot favourite. It’s either going to be that, or be turned into a car park. So is it to be the RSC or the NCP?
 
The theatre has served the Trevor Nunn RSC productions of King Lear and The Seagull very well. It’s a big epic stage and fits ideally with the open thrust nature of RSC Shakespeare in the temporary Courtyard and indeed the new Stratford house when it opens.

It’s just such a horrid place to turn up at, reeking of conference centre greyness, with confusing foyers and unfriendly bar areas.

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I started my weekend on Friday night by joining the fray at the Shaw Theatre for Michael Feinstein’s final concert with a six-piece band. What a treat he is, with his song book of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim and Jerry Herman. He’s a living repository of the Broadway musical, and a stylish singer/pianist to boot.

I bumped into lyricist Don Black wearing a wonderful new coat from Bloomingdale’s in New York. The rest of the audience — with the exception of my colleague Roger Foss and I, of course — were less stylishly attired, and rather old.

They reminded me of the folk who turn up loyally from Hendon to see Ian Marshall Fisher’s Lost Musical curiosities on Sunday afternoons. And one or two of them shouldn’t have been allowed out at all.

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How soapsud soft does Melvyn Bragg’s South Bank Show have to become before someone finally calls a halt? Last night Kevin Spacey was allowed to “big up” his youth programme at the Old Vic and bask in his own glory as an actor on the make, on Broadway and in masterclass with students while Bragg grinned compliantly and assumed all was going triumphantly well.

Oddly, there was no mention of Sally Greene, the Old Vic’s chairman and chief executive, nor of David Liddiment, the former chief executive recently demoted to mere “associate,” nor of the controversial artistic policy.

Instead, Spacey ruled the roost with a controlled air of menace. His association with the plays of Eugene O’Neill was fairly interesting, and it transpires that he only got to audition for Jonathan Miller (whose feeble interview was a waste of his analytic powers) by stealing an invitation to a reception from a sleeping old lady at a Miller lecture in New York.

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That’s your lot for this Christmas. In a spirit of New Year seriousness I took myself down to Tate Modern this morning to catch the gloomy Louise Bourgeois show (give me Millais at the Tate Britain any day) and was feeling down in the dumps after viewing her roomfuls of plump sexual organs, tedious tapestry sculptures and prosthetic limbs when — oh joy, oh rapture — I turned a corner and ran straight into a procession of medieval mummers in tatterdemalion costumes and bright face make-up.

Two of the company greeted me rather too cheerfully, I thought. They turned out to be a couple of actresses-cum-producers who share office premises with my wife in St Martin’s Lane, Dorothy Lawrence and Rosalind Cressy.

Dot and Ros hardly looked the part of serious theatrical producers — they have the touring rights to Briony Lavery’s disturbing child abuse play, Frozen — in their garish attire, but hell, this was Twelfth Night and soon we’ll go no more a-wassailing.

I’d discovered the Twelfth Night festival mounted annually by the Lions Part company, an outfit run by former RSC actress Sonia Ritter. This explained the swelling congregation around the Globe, where a bloke in tights, striped jerkin and stovepipe hat was banging a drum to welcome ashore another chap covered in holly from head to toe, borne to the bankside in a bobbing rowing boat.

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The history of The Phantom of the Opera has always been slightly confused and now it’s getting more so. Just as news hots up that Andrew Lloyd Webber is certain to launch his own Phantom sequel next year — reverting once again, after a serious falling out, to the novella of The Phantom in New York by thriller writter Freddie Forsyth — we hear that another Phantom musical is heading this way from, of all places, Portugal.

How brazen can you get? The composer is Peter Raben, who died a year ago and is best known for writing the scores for the kinky movies of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The international tour of Phantom of Paris takes in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Australia before fetching up in the West End in 2009 or 2010.

No doubt, to confuse the matter further, someone will revive Ken Hill’s Phantom of the Opera, the Stratford East show that Lloyd Webber first planned to produce — using an already composed pastiche operatic score — as a vehicle for his then new wife Sarah Brightman.

Instead, egged on by Cameron Mackintosh and Jim Steinman, he composed his own new score and the rest, as they say, is history.Except, of course, it’s not history. It’s still running. (more…)