Selling the sizzle, Donmar delights
I see that only four Broadway shows are unavailable at the half-price ticket booth (Jersey Boys, The Little Mermaid, Mamma Mia! and South Pacific) which means that only four Broadway shows are selling out, which is four more than in the West End.
Mind you, I went past the Prince of Wales yesterday afternoon and the House Full sign was up. And that’s with most folk milling around seemingly en route to the movie version, judging by the brochures I saw in several dozen pairs of hands.
In London, you never know whether to believe what you’re told about audience figures, because there’s no rigorous public documentation of them, as there is in New York (in the pages of Variety), though the new Mel Brooks show Young Frankenstein is refusing to play ball. Which means only one thing: it can’t be doing that well.
Piaf at the Donmar, however, is completely sold out. But there are only 250 seats to fill. No wonder artistic director Michael Grandage is bursting at the seams to get into the West End with his Kenneth Branagh-led season next month.
Most shows in the West End are struggling even to fill half their seats and I learnt of another complaint the other day which might explain why. Some family friends in Yorkshire booked on-line for Marguerite, top price tickets, but could not choose where they sat; the booking process is not linked up to the seating plan. They didn’t like that. Nor were they impressed by the booking fee. And they didn’t like the seats they bought. They liked the show but they felt let down, made to feel unwelcome.
In other words, they won’t be rushing back, and they can well afford to. These are the sort of customers the West End needs, yet they find it easier to book at the Barbican or the National or the RSC. And they get better value.
On Broadway, too, the high ticket prices ($125 top price for South Pacific) are at least realistically calibrated to what the market is prepared to pay. Two thirds of Broadway shows are playing to 80 per cent capacity and over. Only one or two are genuinely struggling at under 70 per cent. Here, West End ticket prices are ludicrously out of step with what people are inclined to pay, even if they are made to feel excited about doing so.
It is interesting to see Simon Callow in today’s Guardian and Alan Strachan in his brilliant Independent obituary bigging up Simon Gray as a dramatist of greater significance than most drama critics would concede. Mmmm…Melon, anyone?
Still, you can’t help but agree that some of those Gray plays really connected with their audiences in a way that only the odd musical does today. And there was a fusion of creative spirit between Gray’s writing, his directors and actors, and his producers, usually Michael Codron in the earlier part of his career.
En route to the Donmar, I bumped into Alan Strachan, who is writing a biography of Codron and was on his way to Dress Circle to collect a rare CD copy of the revue that saved his (Codron’s) early bacon in the West End — Share My Lettuce starring Kenneth Williams and Maggie Smith. Its success settled his finances and paved the way for his West End presentations of Harold Pinter, John Mortimer, Michael Frayn (who wrote one lyric for Share My Lettuce) and, eventually, Alan Ayckbourn and Simon Gray.
Share My Lettuce opened at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in 1957 and was transferred to the Comedy and then on to the Garrick. “This must be the longest tour in town,” moaned Maggie Smith…who from that moment on knew nothing but success on the London stage until the unprecedented flop last year of Edward Albee’s The Lady from Dubuque.
But even before that play opened, its producer Robert Fox confided to me that it was really a play for the National Theatre. It’s not so much that the West End can no longer sustain serious drama all that easily: it’s merely that the audience for challenging and literate new plays is going elsewhere, and being made to feel more welcome when they get there, whether it’s the National or the Donmar, Hampstead or the Almeida.