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Last night 100 theatregoers joined us for our Whatsonstage.com Outing to the Menier Chocolate Factory’s sold-out production of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. (more…)

The Critics Circle Awards ceremony at the Prince of Wales yesterday was the usual mix of back-slapping, veiled insults, false modesty and gushing compliments. And that was just the critics. The recipients fought back gallantly, but Derek Jacobi simply admitted defeat and said virtually nothing.

How could he possibly follow the gargantuan Ian Shuttleworth looming ironically over the enormous Ella Smith from Fat Pig? Not so much who you know, as sumo you know.

Or Georgina Brown — “our very own leggy bird of paradise” host and drama section chair Mark Shenton called her, in a  link from La Cage aux Folles’ triumph — opining in such unbelievably posh tones that family life in Wolverhampton was more serene than in Oklahoma (setting of best play winner August:Osage County)?

Not to mention retiring Time Out theatre editor Jane Edwardes pulling a few funny faces (I think they were supposed to be funny) in calling up Jacobi. No wonder he fell curiously silent.

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I see that the West End is reporting record box office takings of over £480m last year, but how are these figures arrived at? Unlike Broadway, the West End is notoriously secretive about its financial affairs, and attendance figures (almost 14m last year, it’s claimed) are as likely to be random numbers as rough estimates.  

No disrespect to Richard Pulford, the executive director of the Society of London Theatre, Solt, and a really nice guy, but he seems to me to be head of a secret society that has no teeth and too many vested interests in ticket sales and self-promotion to be a reliable, dispassionate arbiter of the way things are.

So we should take these figures with a pinch of Solt, at least until producers and theatre owners publish their weekly returns and audience figures as Broadway does in Variety.

At least we know that London theatre is a going concern. I’ve just spent a few days in Florence, flower of the Renaissance, heartbeat of European art, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and there’s no theatre going on there at all.

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Well, well well. What an action-packed evening at the Apollo theatre last night as over 70 Whatsonstage.com Theatregoers attended our Outing to Lisa Kron’s Well. It was followed by a Q&A with the whole cast - Sarah Miles, Natalie Casey, Oliver Chris, Jason Rowe, Maggie Service, Zara Tempest-Walters and director Eve Leigh. (more…)

Although the Young Vic has announced its May collaboration with Sadler’s Wells on Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition, poet James Fenton, who is scripting the dance theatre piece, is playing down its chances of success.
 
He was almost disclaiming any involvement at all at last night RSC opening of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Novello, though to be fair his mind was elsewhere. Today is the funeral of fellow poet Mick Imlah, and Fenton is deeply upset about it. He is also down to read an upsetting Tennyson poem, so he beat a hasty retreat from the Novello at the interval. 

Imlah, a fine poet, was only 52 when he died of motor neurone disease. He was a good sportsman, too, and devilishly handsome. Fenton said that women fell in love with him, men fell in love with him and he, Imlah, fell in love with women. James volunteered a rueful smile about this. I could think of nothing to say, so tried, “That’s the way the cookie sometimes crumbles.”

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My neighbours Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod of Cheek by Jowl are back from a holiday in South Africa looking tanned and prosperous. Declan hailed me on the edge of Hampstead Heath yesterday, vastly amused by my warm-down exercise and stretching routine after a short jog. I had no idea I appeared so hilarious to the public at large.

He wanted to know what was up. I told him about Oliver! “Good to see the West End musical theatre striding confidently into the future,” he quipped, still visibly smarting over his Martin Guerre experience with Cameron Mackintosh many moons ago.

He ands Nick are taking a sabbatical but planning a new Macbeth later in the year. He’d lost touch with recent developments at the Old Vic with Kevin Spacey. But he recalled my review of his first Cheek by Jowl Macbeth twenty-five years ago: “Horrid zips!” 

Whatever the problems afflicting Spacey’s new production of a play called Complicit (very confusing when you see it advertised on tube escalators next to posters for Complicite), where the Press night has been postponed by nine days, Spacey can at least breathe a sigh of relief over today’s New York Times review of The Cherry Orchard in New York.

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I’ve just seen two virtuoso solo turns: today, Nick Hytner announced that the NT would broadcast “live” performances by satellite into cinemas around the country and abroad (America, Canada, probably Scandinavia, possibly Australia) starting with his own production of Racine’s Phedre starring Helen Mirren on 25 June.

And this news wasn’t even contained in the printed Press release for yesterday’s meeting with the media.

Cool as a cucumber, and unfazed by a gang of schoolboys pulling faces and yah-booing through the windows of the “cathedral” Olivier foyer, Hytner dropped his bombshell while simultaneously confirming the new Alan Bennett play about W H Auden and Benjamin Britten (Bennett has given Hytner two titles and the director prefers the first but hasn’t yet told the author) and Mark Ravenhill’s adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s new desert island novel Nation.

And last night, hot on the heels of the sensational performance of Adrian Schiller in the Ian Dury celebration at the Leicester Square Theatre, I caught Nina Conti with her hand up her monkey in the basement venue of the Barcode club in Archer Street.

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Well, at least we now know who is writing the lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new song for Eurovision: Grammy-award winning American songwriter Diane Warren, author of so many hit songs for Celine Dion and Michael Bolton that I can’t remember a single one of them.

This is all very confusing. I thought this was a patriotic exercise. So what has Diane Warren got to do with a British entry for the contest? Surely Andrew could have drafted in Don Black or Charles Hart or, failing them, Tim Rice.

ALW still doesn’t know what sort of song he’s going to write, though I would put good money on us ending up with a power ballad for Jade, sexed up with dancing girls and a big fruity orchestration.

Saturday’s episode of Your Country Needs You whittled out the lounge singer, Damien, which was rather a shame, as he had a nice sand-papered voice and a modestly louche manner that could have been developed.

Which leaves us with the ingratiating Emperors of Soul, the cry baby twins from Sheffield, smiley Mark from the Bromley pantomime and sweet seventeen year-old Charlotte whose pronounced lisp magically disappears when she sings. Yes, it’s gonna have to be Jade, folks, but I hope she doesn’t turn into Shirley Bassey in a couple of weeks.

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I was quite enjoying not going to the theatre for a few days but now I can’t wait to get back. The television’s to blame. First, I’ve been catching up with a boxed set DVD of The Wire, the American drug cop series set in West Baltimore, and it’s hugely disappointing, despite the presence in the cast of Dominic West and dear old Clarke Peters.

But The Wire is The Sopranos compared to Lynda La Plante’s latest two-parter, Above Suspicion, starring Kelly Reilly and Ciaran Hinds, two of my favourite actors, which aired on ITV earlier this week.

Ponderous, badly shot, implausibly plotted and hysterically acted, it made one yearn for an average night at the Finborough or the Old Red Lion.

Obviously aiming for a new Prime Suspect, the cop series that catapulted Helen Mirren to renewed film stardom, La Plante seemes to have gone badly off the boil this time, and Kelly Reilly as the rooky detective spent most of the two hours pouting like Lolita and pretending the men — notably Hinds — weren’t transfixed by her figure-hugging schoolgirl blouse. 

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What a fantastic way to start the new year! On Tuesday 6 January (twelfth night itself no less), Whatsonstage.com was joined by a whopping 250 Theatregoers for our three-times sold out Outing to Twelfth Night at the Wyndham’s Theatre, followed by a fantastic Q&A session with director Michael Grandage and cast members Victoria Hamilton, Derek Jacobi, Samantha Spiro, Alex Waldmann, Indira Varma, Zubin Varla, Ron Cook and Guy Henry.

Edited highlights of the Q&A will appear in the news section of the site shortly, and are well worth a read as all our participants were happy and willing to chat about topics as far ranging as tackling the great bard, working with the fabulous Michael Grandage, and individual future plans. Derek Jacobi even revealed that he feels he might be around the right age to try to take on the role of King Lear. (more…)