After the drab turn-out for the opening of the Hemingway suicide musical — brilliantly dubbed by one of our readers as “Ernie Get Your Gun” — the stars came out again for Rachel Weisz at the Donmar last night.

Well, the star producers, anyway, led by a deeply tanned and healthy looking Cameron Mackintosh, with Nica Burns schmoozing Judy “Mamma, Mia!” Craymer, Nick Allott telling Nica he needed a few minutes with her, Andre Ptaszynski of RUG keeping cool with an iced coke in plastic, and Nick Salmon and George Biggs smiling benevolently at no-one in particular.

I love, incidentally, Andre’s list of hobbies in Who’s Who (I always have to check his name when I start to try and spell it): mountain trekking, fell-walking, cycling around London, reading, and giving free advice to other motorists.

Tom Erhardt, Williams’s agent here, introduced me to glamorous Lynne Meadows of the Manhattan Theatre Group, and I wanted to ask her what she thought of the dodgy New Orleans accents.  The production would be slaughtered if it went anywhere near Broadway, but perhaps I’m wrong about that… 

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Luckily for me, I didn’t sit too close the the stage for Too Close to the Sun on Friday night. To have and have not a good seat wasn’t the question: it was farewell to charms, and the no shows of Kilimanjaro.

Yes, folks, the new Ernest Hemingway musical has opened to almost predictably shocking reviews and the management decided to make things as gloriously uncomfortable for me as possible by sitting me right at the back of the stalls by the sound and lighting board.

Dammit, I could have pulled the plug before the first dreadful song — which was about twenty minutes into the debacle.

Instead, I pondered the plight of regular ticket-buying theatregoers in the cheaper (ha-ha) stalls seats at the Comedy for whom watching the stage is like looking through a letterbox.

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It’s bad enough everyone trying to fit everything in without the producers themselves making a mess of Press night coverage, as Sonia Friedman and her colleagues are about to do with the opening early next year of the Legally Blonde musical.

They’ve designated five Press performances for the show next January with an embargo (how can they possibly enforce this?) on reviews appearing until one week after the first one.

If I’m a newspaper editor, and my critic’s in the theatre, I want his or her report the next morning, thank you very much, or not at all, and certainly not a week later.

I can see the dodgy thinking behind this New York experiment. The newspapers themselves have let the “on the night” coverage slip to a sad, incompetent degree and the Sunday broadsheets — whom this arrangement is particularly designed to accommodate — treat arts reviews like magazine features and want copy in by the middle of the week latest.

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Peter Pan, JM Barrie’s enduring family classic came to life last night in Kensington Garden’s specially commissioned Theatre Pavilion which boasts a 360-degree scenic projected design. One can’t help but be swept away in this well known tale of the boy who didn’t want to grow up as Peter and the Darling children soar above you and the London skyline flies around your head.

I am sure that our 250 theatregoers, ranging from 6 to 60 will be able to tell you their favourite part whether it be the versatile but simple set which pirates, lost boys, indians, mermaids, fairies, grown ups and children climb in and out of with ease, or the amazing puppet work, naughty tinkerbell, dashing Peter or dasterdly Captain Hook. (more…)

Two very different plays, one American, one British, are dealing this week with racial tensions in the community. The two-hander The Mountaintop, at the Trafalgar Studios, about the last night of Martin Luther King in his Memphis hotel, is powerful, informative and above all highly theatrical.

The Black Album by Hanif Kureishi at the National, which charts the agitation among young British Muslims leading to a book burning similar to that in Bradford in 1989, when Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses had brought him a fatwa, in effect a death sentence, is, by contrast, trite, unengaging and theatrically banal.

The chemistry of good theatre is a remarkable thing, never predictable, impossible to define. You just know when it happens.

Both pieces at least demonstrate how theatre at the moment is buzzing with contemporary application and what is sometimes called, alas, relevance. But how Kureishi and his director Jatinder Verma have contrived to come up with such a dud of a show from so rich and rollicking a novel is almost beyond comprehension.

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A second fantastically exciting Test Match is unfolding at Lord’s, where the Australians could strike a historic victory today by winning from a seemingly impossible position and posting the highest ever match-winning second innings.

And if England take the last five wickets, they will beat the Aussies at Lord’s for the first time since 1934. Either way, the outcome will be truly historic, to quote Michael Winner. 

We need a fairytale after the crushing disappointment of Tom Watson falling at the last fence in the Open golf championship at Turnberry. The 59 year-old with an artificial hip messed up his last hole putting then faded in the play-off.

As if that wasn’t enough, I caught the irresistible all-male production of The Pirates of Penzance at the Union on Friday night and lost count of the people around me who said quite simply they wanted to come right back and see it again.

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Having enjoyed at least 24 hours of relatively good weather, the heavens opened once again this morning setting the scene for a soggy final day. But the conditions bring with them certain advantages - most notably that crowds tend to dive into the nearest tent and experience acts that wouldn’t normally be on their agenda.

Directly after the madness that was Grace Jones (hats off to anyone who can huluhoop for 10 minutes straight while singing the finale to a rainsoaked headline festival set) I fought my way in amongst the swarming masses to see the RSC’s Latitude show, Here Lies Mary Spindler. The fire-safety officers would have had a field day had they seen the number of people squeezed into the theatre arena - I enjoyed the show from a small patch of grass behind a pillar, my face and knee pressed against a wooden pew, my body twisted to allow room for all the other people who hadn’t made it to the banked seating. This show was certainly hyped; fortunately it didn’t fail to deliver. (more…)

Yesterday evening, in a conversation marred only by its proximity to the loos, I heard from Kirsten Turner, stage manager for Nabokov theatre company, about the four shows they’ve been doing across the festival site this weekend.

Nabokov are keeping you pretty busy this weekend; tell me about the shows. 

We’ve got four shows here: Is Everyone OK?, which is by Joel Horwood, which is about a group of 30-somethings going through a mid-life crisis, all monologues and duologues; (more…)

Just emerged blinking into the evening sun after a marathon session in the Theatre Arena. Started off with Osip Theatre’s Stab in the Dark, a series of interlaced monologues on the subject of losing your virginity. Nicely performed by the company (fighting against a strange and penetrating growling noise coming from the tent next door!), if a little predictable. (more…)