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.

The dress circle overhang cuts you off from any involvement and just to make you feel really not at home, there are bits of black wire hanging down, too, like stray leads in a telephone engineer’s cubby hole.

So thank you once again Ambassador Theatre Group for for the warm welcome extended in your theatre programme (I wonder what theatre manager Juliet Hayes actually does to ensure “the enjoyment of all our customers”) and thank you ATG executives for so brilliantly, and ironically, reinforcing your hard won reputation for dynamic West End hospitality.

I suppose Howard Panter and co can just say they hired out the venue. But I don’t invite people round to my house, charge them for entrance and leave a dinner of slops on the table and a sham welcome note on the door mat while I go away to do something else. 
 
Too Close to the Sun would have almost certainly been better off as a bad play than a bad musical. Instead of which, it ends up being both. The orchestrations by Conor Mitchell are only signs of vestigial talent in the whole thing.

Conor, as it happens, was sitting in another very bad seat — that’s OK, he was fully entitled to it – with playwright Mark Ravenhill.

As the the curtain rose on the second act and we all slumped again among the glamorous first night crowd of misdirected tourists and bemused Filippino nurses — that’s the other thing: there’s never been such a dull crowd at a West End opening, and we were all so much duller by the end — I said to him, “Why didn’t the producers sack the composer and hire you instead?”

He was too gracious to reply. Or perhaps he was just ignoring me. But as everyone knows, I can’t take a hint, so on I whispered, as people all around me urged me to keep on spoiling the show for them, some of them joining in bravely by unwrapping boiled sweets and snoring loudly.

“Why, Conor old chap, doesn’t anyone put on your stuff?”

Ravenhill turned round decisively, not to tell me to shut up, but to say that he and Conor were working on something right now that would soon change the world. Well, I hope they’re quick about it, otherwise the world will have lost interest completely in new musical theatre.

By this time, the show was making Gone with the Wind look like Wagner’s Ring. Someone on stage said: “Guns never killed anyone: bullets do!” And Ernest told his secretary that writing was a lonely business without a drink.

Not as lonely as sittting through this tosh without a drink, though. And why the old bastard didn’t just shut up and kill himself long before the final scene became one of the great unsolved mysteries of the modern theatre.
 
The really good bad musicals — Bernadette, Matador, The Fields of Ambrosia (”where everyone knows ya”) and Which Witch — at least fail with crash and burn intensity because their ambitions have outstripped their talent.

But with Too Close to the Sun you have something that is so puny to start with that it has nowhere to fall from. Without a destination, the journey is not even divertingly awful, just tedious. And old Ernie speaks for the show itself when he confesses that his chances of survival are very low.

Not even as high as very low, I’d say. And it was my birthday on Friday, too. Someone somewhere must be taking the michael, and paying ATG to put the stamps on the envelope.  
  
 

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 7:22 am 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.