Like everyone else, I’m looking forward to the opening of Jersey Boys next month, easily the best ever pop song compilation show — and there isn’t even a song until twenty minutes in — and I include the deliriously enjoyable Mamma Mia!

The songs of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons are better than Abba’s, for a start. And they date from the start of the quality pop era in America between Elvis and the Beatles. They were still onstream from the days of Frank Sinatra.

Such thoughts are prompted by a nice Radio 4 documentary this morning about girl groups and, as always happens when I hear music I really love, I think it’s the best music there is. Three songs in this programme are among my all-time favourites: “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” by the Shirelles, “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes and “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-las.

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Why do we feel such a pang of nostalgia and sadness when a favourite landmark closes its doors for good? There is no sight sadder in the West End at the moment than the bleak emptiness that is now Manzi’s Restaurant on Lisle Street.

Manzi’s was more than a fish restaurant, it was an institution, and somewhere that guaranteed a sense of everything being all right with the world even if it wasn’t. The waiters were rude and the food was ordinary. But it was Manzi’s, and it was part of the ritual of going to the theatre, as Bertorelli’s and Chez Victor once were.

It also had a secret saucy side to it. A publisher once told me that there were salons privees upstairs that you could hire for romantic purposes after a good, or at least merry, lunch. How did she know? She blushed to answer and we ordered our coffee.

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[Show as slideshow]

On Monday night Whatsonstage took 175 Theatregoers to the Comedy Theatre for the sell out Outing to The Lover/The Collection. The West End double bill features two dark and funny plays from Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter. Both plays sizzled with sexual tension as they twisted and turned through the dark and often bleak world that Pinter creates.

All of our Theatregoers were treated to a free programme and interval drink as they watched the show from their top price seats. After the show everyone was invited to a post show Q&A which was well attended by all. We were thrilled to welcome all four cast members, Gina McKee, Timothy West, Richard Coyle and Charlie Cox. Roger Foss led the discussion which covered a variety of topics, including how to tackle Pinter, how to handle the infamous Pinter pauses, and how to work together as a cast. Gina McKee discussed her role as the only female in the production and addressed the problems arising from performing plays written in a different era. Timothy West discussed Pinter’s popularity and appeal.

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Everyone seemed to enjoy the Whatsonstage awards concert on Sunday night, not least the many redoubtable theatregoers who really make these awards so very special. The celebrity turn-out was phenomenal, too, and the concert top notch.

The two most heavily represented winning shows were Hairspray and All About My Mother. Dame Diana Rigg led the latter crowd, although Mark Gatiss was vying for attention with his sensational parti-coloured silk striped suit.

I discussed this garb with Dame Di in the VIP lounge during the interval: “Yes, I’ve issued a few notes,” she said. “I think dark trousers with the striped jacket would have been a wiser style choice and really quite enough in the circumstances.”

Dame Di herself was at the centre of our one major offstage panic: she lost her handbag. We all ran everywhere for a few minutes before Tom Cairns, All About’s director, found it backstage in the wings. Phew! Gathering herself magnificently, Dame Di then swept off to dinner at the Wolsey with her daughter, Rachael Stirling.

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In between shows, it’s been a “bumping into” and “catching up with” sort of week for me, with many charming encounters and one serious session with my old friend Petroc Trelawny, the smooth, uncombative classical music presenter on Radio 3.

Over both snooker and lunch tables in his preferred Savile Club bolthole, Petroc continues to give me the impression that he might well succeed Roger Wright as head honcho of the station one day. We are both aboard the Lenten wagon but I fear for his resolve as he has a highly social few days planned soon in Dublin.

He was keen to hear of my dash to Limehouse to try and persuade Sir Ian McKellen (happy to be known as both “Serena” and “Damian” these days) to attend our Whatsonstage awards concert on Sunday; but the triumphant King Lear award-winner is bound for Venice with some of his pals in the cast for a weekend jolly.

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One of my most treasured opera experiences is attending a dress rehearsal of Donizetti’s Elixir of Love in a small theatre in Parma a quarter of a century ago. I’d never heard Donizetti live before. I nearly died of delight. I’ve loved his music ever since.

The new ENO Lucia di Lammermoor — an opera I always think of as Brigadoon with mad scenes — has been given a marvellously sinister makeover by director David Alden, translator Amanda Holden and conductor Paul Daniel. The piece really does sound like a work of musical genius, and it looks like a Victorian horror story, with an infantilised heroine and an incestuous brother.

The first night foyer was buzzing with buffs and bores exchanging notes on Joan Sutherland and June Anderson (I admire the first on disc  and adored the second at Covent Garden), and then an ENO apparatchik pre-empted the overture and craved our indulgence for Anna Christy’s bronchial condition.

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Most theatregoers using Southwark tube station on the Jubilee Line turn right on exiting towards the Old and Young Vics. That way lie Spacey and Goldblum bopping bodiciously in the Mamet play and Colin Morgan trembling angelically in the Babe play — American theatre a-go-go — with the glittering champagne atmosphere of the Old Vic (despite the worn-down interior and the dangerously threadbare carpets on the circle stair) and the ambient music and trendy buzz of its little sister venue.

Turn left, however, along Union Street, and you enter a different world of “real” South London pubs and fringe theatre of the impoverished and jolly sort, the brick wall and beermat job you even have trouble finding on the Edinburgh fringe these days.

The theatre I mean is the Union Theatre, operating these past ten years (and this was my first visit!) in an abandoned warehouse underneath a rumbling railway bridge. Black drapes and old cinema seats define the acting area.

And the play on the stage is a rough, raw piece of gutsy poetic writing by an ex-con, Dean Stallham, who now works for the admirable Koestler Trust, bringing prisoners and art into contact with each other. 

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One of the side issues in Scarborough at the Royal Court Upstairs is that of where to look. As the audience shares the same space — a dingy seaside B&B — as the actors, it’s hard not to notice how successfully one’s fellow voyeurs survive the ordeal of perching on dressers or squatting on side-tables.

On Press night the chap from Time Out, Robert Shore, sunk comfortably into the one easy chair while Michael Billington arranged himself on a window sill. Robert made himself more uncomfortable for the play’s second act — attaboy, Bob; we were asked to sit somewhere different by the stage manager — while Billington drew his second short straw, rump half spread on a sideboard.

When the rules of this arrangement are contravened it’s always unsettling. Nicholas de Jongh, who suffers from a slipped disc, insisted on a hard chair being provided for him, thus violating the show’s design. And when one actor’s agent rushed from the space because she felt sick or over-heated, we worried more about her state of health than the show’s outcome.

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On Wednesday night (13 February 2008) Whatsonstage.com hosted an Outing to Speed-The-Plow at the Old Vic. The event proved extremely popular, with tickets selling out within a matter of hours. The Old Vic’s production, headed up by artistic director Kevin Spacey along with Jeff Goldblum and Laura Michelle Kelly has proved to be a hot ticket with very few spaces remaining for the run.

Our Whatsonstage.com Theatregoers were treated to a free drink in the Pit Bar and a free programme as part of their Outing package. As they settled into their top price seats all of our Theatregoers were able to enjoy high energy performances from three fantastic actors.

Following twenty four hours in the lives of two film producers and their assistant, Speed-The-Plow looks at the ups and downs of the movie business. This revival of David Mamet’s play had its press night on Tuesday (12 February) and received fantastic reviews from critics across the board, including a four star review from our own Michael Coveney.

 http://www.whatsonstage.com/index.php?pg=207&story=E8821202897909

You can add your own comments about the event either here or on the main Discussion Forum. You can also add your verdict on Speed-The-Plow to our User Reviews for the show –
http://www.whatsonstage.com/index.php?pg=206&action=users&show=L1866472063

I hope to see you all at the next Outing!

- Kate Jackson

There were two original cast members of West Side Story in the Shaw Theatre on Saturday night, one on the stage, one in the stalls. Chita Rivera, to put it mildly, was on the stage.

Watching in amazement and delight, along with the rest of us, was Riggs O’Hara, who first came to London with West Side fifty years ago as the baby in the company and stayed here to work as a dancer, actor and, most importantly, partner and amanuensis to the late John Dexter, director of the Wesker trilogy, and the first, definitive productions of The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus.

Riggs looked pretty amazing and tells me he’s moved to Hastings. To say Chita looked pretty amazing, too, would be an understatement. To say she looked good for 75 would be insulting. To say she burned up the stage and gave a performance of consummate grace, unquenchable fire and technical perfection would just about serve as a summary.

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