Seeing Lloyd Evans’s tennis play Grand Slam at the King’s Head over the weekend I was reminded that I’d mistaken him three days earlier for someone else entirely.

“Hello, Lloyd, why aren’t you at your own first night?” was my cheerful opening salvo at the Times Literary Supplement’s summer party. “Because I’m not who you think I am,” replied Paul Webb, a theatre historian who once wrote a useful but mildly irritating biography of Ivor Novello.

Now the interesting thing about this is that Lloyd doesn’t really look like Paul very much at all. But I think of them as identical twins. They are both averagely handsome, tall-ish, dark of hair, probably about the same age.

But it’s the eyes, the permanent slight tilt of the head, the unusual mixture of social confidence and critical wariness in their demeanours that does it. And they both sound pretty much the same. And then I spotted Clive James. Or was it Gene Hackman?

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Nine years ago, two musicals opened on the London stage within the same April week of each other: the irresistible Mamma Mia! at the Prince Edward and the problematic but brilliant Candide at the National Theatre.

This close conjunction of different types of musical theatre nirvana was dramatically compressed for me yesterday within a few hours: an early screening of the Mamma Mia! movie starring Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Julie Walters and Colin Firth, and the ENO premiere of the latest idiotic effort to make theatrical sense of Candide.

What is good about Mamma Mia! is that it makes no effort to get above itself, whereas Candide sinks under the weight of its own misguided pretensions. Cunegonde is Marilyn Monroe, for God’s sake, and a show that starts in the New Age America of JFK’s Camelot and Senator McCarthy’s witchhunt — excuse me, these were not contemporary phenomena — has nowhere to go after the interval: oh yes, back to America which is much nastier now. By then, I didn’t care. Glitter and be gay? Twitter and be damned.

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I had lunch yesterday with David Warner and we toasted our friend Pam Harris in mineral water. The former manageress of the Dirty Duck in Stratford-upon-Avon is in hospital for a gallstone operation, but is expected to be back and at it within a week or so.

Going to Stratford would simply not be the same without Pam. As a colleague said to me the other day, she exemplifies the spirit of the RSC before it became corporate. I am still recovering from the news that RSC employees, on stage and off, are banned from drinking alcohol at all times during the day.

Such a measure has no effect on Warner, who forsook alcohol many years ago. My favourite photo on the walls of the Duck shows him and Roy Dotrice supping pints in broad daylight. “Where is everyone?” Dotrice is saying;”They’ve gone home for breakfast,” replies the bespectacled Warner, legs dangling by the flower pots. We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.

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On Monday 23 June 2008 Whatsonstage.com hosted an Outing to see the English National Opera’s sparkling production of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide at the London Coliseum. Based on Voltaire’s satirical masterpiece, Candide follows the journey of a young man as he meets all of the world’s violence and hatred with an immense optimism, installed in him by his childhood tutor.

ENO’s co-production features a company and orchestra of over 100, including Toby Spence, Anna Christy, Marnie Breckenridge, Alex Jennings and Beverley Klein. Members of the Whatsonstage.com team were present in the luxurious surroundings of the London Coliseum’s foyer to greet Theatregoers and give out tickets, as well as free programmes and vouchers for a free drink in one of the theatre’s bars.

We were lucky enough to be present for the first night of previews for Candide, and we all wish it all success with the rest of its run. Why not be among the first to add a user review of the show? Click here to tell us what you think of the show.

Thanks to everyone who joined us last night. We have several other very exciting Outings coming up, click here to see full details.

Also, thanks to the staff at the London Coliseum and ENO.

Kate Jackson (Content Manager)

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.”

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The Abbey in Dublin has been quietly developing a relationship with Sam Shepard, thanks to the midwifery of actor Stephen Rea, who became a close friend of the playwright when he spent a few years in London in the early 1970s.

The Abbey has just announced that Shepard has written a new play, Ages of the Moon, specifically for Rea and his brilliant fellow Celtic thesp Sean McGinley for a world premiere by the Liffey next March. Meanwhile, Shepard’s Kicking A Dead Horse starring Rea heads for New York next month before fetching up at the Almeida in September. 

I was pondering the valour and intelligence of most actors I know after spotting a particularly crass remark by Andrew Gilligan in the Evening Standard the other day: something about what pleasure it always gave him to see an actor receive his or her come-uppance in the public arena.

It’s a very British media thing this, the resentment towards the despised “luvvies” whose preeminence in their field makes people like Gilligan seethe with envy and self-important superiority.

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Congratulations to Mark Rylance for his richly deserved Tony Award in Boeing Boeing on Broadway. And congrats, too, to Chiewetel Ejiofor and Don Warrington for their slightly less deserved gongs in the Queen’s birthday honours at the weekend — “for services to drama.”

Chewy and Don are fine blokes and excellent actors. They also happen to be black, which is neither here nor there, I suppose. But they surely receive all the public recognition they need from the audiences who pay good money or their license fees to watch them on stage or television. And you could hardly describe either actor’s career as dedicated to public service in either the subsidised sector or charitable good works.

The recognition factor is not high in each actor’s case, either. Jude Law, on the other hand, has a fine public profile, is a good actor and does a lot of unheralded work behind the scenes for organisations like the Young Vic and the National Youth Music Theatre. Yet he’s still plain Mr Jude Law, probably because his private life is a bit naughty. Will he get the nod after Hamlet, perhaps?

I see that Tim Walker on the Sunday Telegraph fell into the Jonathan Miller trap of denouncing the casting of “Dr Who” as Hamlet at the RSC in his column yesterday. I don’t know where Tim has done his theatre-going, but you’d expect a professional critic to know about David Tennant’s brilliant stage career before he was Dr Who, surely. 

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There was a great conference at the Soho Theatre on Friday, about theatre in primary schools, and primary schoolchildren in theatres. The conference was sponsored by John Lyon’s Charity, for whom I do a little light consulting, which dispenses money throughout nine London boroughs on a wide range of projects, and not just theatre.

Lyn Gardner of the Guardian and Tony Graham of the Unicorn both suggested that the cutting edge of British theatre was in work for the under-fives. Playwright David Wood reported a teacher saying to him that they had no more time for fun any more in schools — so where does that leave the government’s five hours of culture a week policy? 

And the teachers themselves said the key to it all was laying siege to the head teachers. Jacqui O’Hanlon of the RSC said that the primary schoolchildren who did a project on the Henry IV plays really flew when they realised Hal could say goodbye to Falstaff by saying he was going on to secondary school and had to get serious.

Flight was a theme sensationally taken up in a reading of a play from the Soho Theatre’s own under-elevens playwrighting scheme: in Imma Begum’s Teenage Troubles, a bird-obsessed school girl was bullied by her peers, then inveigled to the top of a church tower and pushed off. She flapped her arms and flew, and was free!

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It was fairly murky at the annual awards dinner of the Association of British Theatre Technicians. I asked lighting wizard Paule Constable if she could do anything about this and she suggested a flood of white light and candles on the tables.

But nothing happened. Just as well, perhaps, as comedian Arthur Smith, trotting out some comfortingly familiar jokes in his guest spot (actually, there was no spot, just a little light spill and lots of shadow), observed that this was one of the worst-dressed awards ceremonies he had ever been to.

What was the worst possible news for any technical worker in the theatre, wondered Arthur? “Ken Dodd’s here next week. He’s doing a three week season but it’s all in the one show.”

He also had a gag he should pass on to Neil LaBute, author of Fat Pig: “One out of three Americans weighs as much as the other two.” And then he went too far. He said that he personally kept fit by entering the Marathon; but he got chocolate peanuts all over his willy.

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Jonathan Miller is a genius and one of the most interesting stage directors of our day. But he’s completely off beam in his latest outburst, born of a fit of pique over star names in Hamlet at the RSC and the Donmar while his own modestly cast Hamlet for the Tobacco Factory in Bristol can’t find a West End home.

Like everyone else who missed it, I regret not seeing Jamie Ballard as the melancholy Dane in Bristol. But I’m certainly looking forward to seeing both David Tennant and Jude Law in the role in the West End, even though both are far too old for it (that might have been a more rewarding line of attack for Miller).

Sure, the West End is “obsessed with celebrity” in Miller’s phrase; the West End always has been, and producers need to make money, and actually Miller is the first to complain about the type of audiences the West End attracts anyway.

Does he have no residual pride in what he has achieved for the Tobacco Factory? Isn’t that good enough for him? The respect of his peers and the appreciation of an engaged local audience. Or is he, too, in it just for the money?

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