There’s a full page advert for Into the Hoods in today’s Guardian which is a first on two fronts: it doesn’t say which theatre the show’s on at (it’s on at the Novello); and it carries a recommendation (”The most exuberant, imaginative dance musical since Cats”) from that theatre’s owner — and producer of Cats — Cameron Mackintosh.

I look forward to other theatre bosses following suit, so that the whole debate about selectivity of critics’ quotes is rendered irrelevant.

Nicholas Hytner, for instance, could turn things around on behalf of Michael Frayn at the box office, surely, by declaring that “Afterlife is a bloody good play, despite what you’ve read, the most intelligent and entertaining piece about a great theatre director since I last wrote about myself.”

Or Nica Burns could try and save the under-subscribed Deep Blue Sea revival with, “I have not been so thoroughly immersed in a great event since I slipped over in the bath and found my rubber duck.”

The Into the Hoods ad does carry a telephone number, but doesn’t list times of performances, or ticket prices, or who’s in it, or indeed who wrote it! And then theatre producers wonder why nobody’s going to their shows and the theatre’s dying!
 
Undaunted, I rang the number given, which was a Delfont Mackintosh central booking number. The number connected and played me some hideous airport lounge music.

Eventually — I might have decided to do something else altogether by now if I was an ordinary punter — a nice young man came on the line and told me there were tickets available for virtually every performance (I’m not surprised) and that prices ranged from £39.50 down to about sixty tickets a performance at £15, which sounds fair enough if the show is aimed at a young audience, which much at least was seriously implied by the aforesaid advert.

He then dealt the death blow. There was a £1.50 booking fee — per ticket! What is that fee for, exactly? Maybe it will go towards hiring a competent advertising agency. But my new box office pal was having none of that. Why was the theatre’s address left off the advert, I asked him. “It must have been the newspaper people,” he said. “They’re all absoluteley hopeless.”

Well, maybe they are. But if the ad includes another recommendation from that well known drama critic Steve Coogan — “Take your kids and be a cool dad for a couple of hours” — it might be a good idea to advise dad where exactly to take them to.

Or is the idea to be subliminal about the show? Plant a seed, reap a harvest. Who knows. I haven’t yet seen Into the Hoods. Or put it another way, I saw Into the Hoods in an early form at the Edinburgh Festival a couple of years ago and it was so dire, so terrible, so witless, noisy and bum-numbingly awful that I fled the fringe venue after twenty minutes. 

The title trades on a reference to Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim, but it has nothing at all to do with that wonderful show. It’s hip hop urban teeny bopping time in hoodie-ville and, according to another quote on the ad, “a fantastic life-enhancing take on multicultural London” (Liz Hoggard, a journalist on the Evening Standard but not a drama critic).

So I fully intend to go along and see where and why the show has improved beyond all recognition. That’s if I can remember the address of the Novello, and the damned thing’s still on when I get there.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.