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This one's for you:
Why are we snooty about musicals?
The cost is staggering, the queues off-putting, but here it is: I was curiously moved by Lloyd Webber
Andrew Lloyd Webber's new musical, Love Never Dies, has had some stinging reviews: "this poor sap of a show" (New York Times); "misses on all fronts" (Jewish Chronicle); "lacks psychological plausibility – worse, it lacks heart" (London Evening Standard). The poor reception hasn't been quite universal – Michael Billington in the Guardian was more generous – but for Lloyd Webber devotees it has tended to add weight to Sheila Hancock's recent complaint that critics, as well as may of her fellow actors, have "an incredibly grand attitude" towards musicals, which pack many West End theatres that would otherwise struggle to fill 1,500 seats every night.
Hancock isn't a disinterested witness. She's in the musical Sister Act, yet another stage adaptation of a Hollywood film, and soon she'll be appearing on the BBC as a judge in yet another Lloyd Webber talent contest. Still, she could be speaking a truth. I examine my own conscience: am I and most people I know (let's call ourselves Guardian readers) … are we, in her word, "snooty" about musicals? At first glance, the historical record looks pretty good. Beginning with Sigmund Romberg's Desert Song, as performed by the East Kilbride Operatic Society, my list of the seen and enjoyed would include My Fair Lady, Kiss Me Kate, A Chorus Line, most of Rogers and Hammerstein, quite a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan and a fair few Sondheims. Spamalot on Broadway and Anything Goes in Drury Lane are among my favourite nights in a theatre ever.
A second glance shows a bias towards comedy. A third glance suggests neophobia – a respect for the canon but very little new stuff. Until this week, the one and only Lloyd Webber musical I'd seen in a theatre was Evita, more than 30 years ago. Soon after, in the 1980s, musicals took on their present form. In the words of Billington they became "Thatcherism in action", both in their stories of individual triumph and in their ability to make loads of money from long runs and franchises. Because a musical costs a lot to put on – singers, actors, orchestras, sets – the seats cost a lot to sit in; the paying customer, therefore, wants value for his money and translates value as spectacle. Billington said he mourned the passing of the smaller-scale "convivial" musical: "The form has been undermined by money and spectacle. What you surrender to is the sense of the event."
Millions of people have surrendered, but somehow I missed Cats, Les Miserables, Miss Saigon and The Phantom of the Opera, which has been playing in London since 1986 and is now the longest-running show in Broadway history. Snootiness probably played its part. The queues waiting for returns looked much the same as the interminable lines outside Madame Tussauds and the Tower of London: coach parties, boys and girls from Stuttgart and Minneapolis. Musicals were just another feature of the tourist trade. To those of us reared to a peculiar reverence for the stage, it seemed almost sacrilegious to fill it with special-effect helicopters or waterfalls – but that, of course, is to misunderstand theatrical history. Revolving stages and orchestra pits exist to be used – and they certainly are in Love Never Dies.
I took my 17-year-old daughter. Two tickets for the stalls cost £135; a programme, £3.50; three orange juices and a small white wine, £13.80. We haven't had a good experience of London theatre recently, and when that happens the price of things looms especially large. Leaving Enron – a simple-minded play mysteriously over-praised – we wondered about the £120 it had cost the three of us. A night at the opera was even worse; £145 for two – a birthday treat – for a production ruined by director-itis, where a brother commits a finger rape of his sister, stage front, to suggest an incest that neither the story's original author nor its composer (Sir Walter Scott and Donizetti) could have possibly conceived; but then neither could they have foreseen a Scottish feudal feud transposed to a centrally heated Kelvinside villa c1880. Bah, psychological implausibility, etc, which was pretty well my mood as I collected our tickets at the Adelphi theatre in my new role as the Rip van Winkle of the British musical theatre.
I'll get the worst things over first. As the sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies has had a long and complicated history, not musically but in terms of plotting, characterisation, dialogue and lyrics – "the book". The novelist Frederick Forsyth had a crack and then Ben Elton took over, working with the composer and the lyricist, Glenn Slater: four hands rather than two, and it shows in a muddled first half. Then there was the audience. The house was sold out, but the row immediately in front of us remained strangely empty until, two or three minutes after curtain-up and the action begun, half-a-dozen big people bumped down in their seats. The fact that all of them were drinking from plastic cups ruled out a rush from a delayed train or congestion on the M25.
Who were these tipplers, fidgets and whisperers? At the interval, two scarlet-liveried attendants led them from and to their seats.
"We're Lord Lloyd Webber's butlers," one said when I asked about the scarlet.
"So these would be Lord Lloyd Webber's guests?" I said, emulating Hancock's "incredibly grand attitudes" and indicating the jolly charabanc crowd.
Yes, the attendant said, but my daughter didn't believe her, having noticed from an advert in the theatre that "Grand" and "Luxury" experiences of Love Never Dies were available to those "celebrating a special occasion or entertaining clients" and prepared to pay at from £125 to £195 a head for the private dining room and the champagne.
As for the rest of the evening, there was nothing to dislike about it and a lot to be enjoyed. Lloyd Webber may be dismissed by some as a second-rate Puccini, but at its best his music can summon feelings in an audience without necessarily cheapening them, and the cast sang strongly and clear. There are one or two sweet melodies that pass the hum-as-you-leave-the-theatre test, and some of the stage effects are transfixing; all the way back on the tube we puzzled over the extra who had real legs and the torso and head of a skeleton. Amazing! How had it been done?
By the end, quite a few in the audience were in tears, or standing on their feet and cheering, or both. This is what they've come for – "ecstasy, some key, transcendent moment", as Billington told me earlier, adding that the seat prices made them determined to find such moments. The professional critic's role here can be redundant, or at least very difficult, when so many online amateurs get directly to the heart of Lloyd Webber's appeal. "I absolutely loved it. Gave me goosebumps, made me cry – just what you want from a night out at a cracking good theatre show," says a post on the Love Never Dies website. I might not go that far, but we were glad that we went.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/mar/20/ian-jack-on-musicals
Why are we snooty about musicals?
The cost is staggering, the queues off-putting, but here it is: I was curiously moved by Lloyd Webber
Andrew Lloyd Webber's new musical, Love Never Dies, has had some stinging reviews: "this poor sap of a show" (New York Times); "misses on all fronts" (Jewish Chronicle); "lacks psychological plausibility – worse, it lacks heart" (London Evening Standard). The poor reception hasn't been quite universal – Michael Billington in the Guardian was more generous – but for Lloyd Webber devotees it has tended to add weight to Sheila Hancock's recent complaint that critics, as well as may of her fellow actors, have "an incredibly grand attitude" towards musicals, which pack many West End theatres that would otherwise struggle to fill 1,500 seats every night.
Hancock isn't a disinterested witness. She's in the musical Sister Act, yet another stage adaptation of a Hollywood film, and soon she'll be appearing on the BBC as a judge in yet another Lloyd Webber talent contest. Still, she could be speaking a truth. I examine my own conscience: am I and most people I know (let's call ourselves Guardian readers) … are we, in her word, "snooty" about musicals? At first glance, the historical record looks pretty good. Beginning with Sigmund Romberg's Desert Song, as performed by the East Kilbride Operatic Society, my list of the seen and enjoyed would include My Fair Lady, Kiss Me Kate, A Chorus Line, most of Rogers and Hammerstein, quite a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan and a fair few Sondheims. Spamalot on Broadway and Anything Goes in Drury Lane are among my favourite nights in a theatre ever.
A second glance shows a bias towards comedy. A third glance suggests neophobia – a respect for the canon but very little new stuff. Until this week, the one and only Lloyd Webber musical I'd seen in a theatre was Evita, more than 30 years ago. Soon after, in the 1980s, musicals took on their present form. In the words of Billington they became "Thatcherism in action", both in their stories of individual triumph and in their ability to make loads of money from long runs and franchises. Because a musical costs a lot to put on – singers, actors, orchestras, sets – the seats cost a lot to sit in; the paying customer, therefore, wants value for his money and translates value as spectacle. Billington said he mourned the passing of the smaller-scale "convivial" musical: "The form has been undermined by money and spectacle. What you surrender to is the sense of the event."
Millions of people have surrendered, but somehow I missed Cats, Les Miserables, Miss Saigon and The Phantom of the Opera, which has been playing in London since 1986 and is now the longest-running show in Broadway history. Snootiness probably played its part. The queues waiting for returns looked much the same as the interminable lines outside Madame Tussauds and the Tower of London: coach parties, boys and girls from Stuttgart and Minneapolis. Musicals were just another feature of the tourist trade. To those of us reared to a peculiar reverence for the stage, it seemed almost sacrilegious to fill it with special-effect helicopters or waterfalls – but that, of course, is to misunderstand theatrical history. Revolving stages and orchestra pits exist to be used – and they certainly are in Love Never Dies.
I took my 17-year-old daughter. Two tickets for the stalls cost £135; a programme, £3.50; three orange juices and a small white wine, £13.80. We haven't had a good experience of London theatre recently, and when that happens the price of things looms especially large. Leaving Enron – a simple-minded play mysteriously over-praised – we wondered about the £120 it had cost the three of us. A night at the opera was even worse; £145 for two – a birthday treat – for a production ruined by director-itis, where a brother commits a finger rape of his sister, stage front, to suggest an incest that neither the story's original author nor its composer (Sir Walter Scott and Donizetti) could have possibly conceived; but then neither could they have foreseen a Scottish feudal feud transposed to a centrally heated Kelvinside villa c1880. Bah, psychological implausibility, etc, which was pretty well my mood as I collected our tickets at the Adelphi theatre in my new role as the Rip van Winkle of the British musical theatre.
I'll get the worst things over first. As the sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies has had a long and complicated history, not musically but in terms of plotting, characterisation, dialogue and lyrics – "the book". The novelist Frederick Forsyth had a crack and then Ben Elton took over, working with the composer and the lyricist, Glenn Slater: four hands rather than two, and it shows in a muddled first half. Then there was the audience. The house was sold out, but the row immediately in front of us remained strangely empty until, two or three minutes after curtain-up and the action begun, half-a-dozen big people bumped down in their seats. The fact that all of them were drinking from plastic cups ruled out a rush from a delayed train or congestion on the M25.
Who were these tipplers, fidgets and whisperers? At the interval, two scarlet-liveried attendants led them from and to their seats.
"We're Lord Lloyd Webber's butlers," one said when I asked about the scarlet.
"So these would be Lord Lloyd Webber's guests?" I said, emulating Hancock's "incredibly grand attitudes" and indicating the jolly charabanc crowd.
Yes, the attendant said, but my daughter didn't believe her, having noticed from an advert in the theatre that "Grand" and "Luxury" experiences of Love Never Dies were available to those "celebrating a special occasion or entertaining clients" and prepared to pay at from £125 to £195 a head for the private dining room and the champagne.
As for the rest of the evening, there was nothing to dislike about it and a lot to be enjoyed. Lloyd Webber may be dismissed by some as a second-rate Puccini, but at its best his music can summon feelings in an audience without necessarily cheapening them, and the cast sang strongly and clear. There are one or two sweet melodies that pass the hum-as-you-leave-the-theatre test, and some of the stage effects are transfixing; all the way back on the tube we puzzled over the extra who had real legs and the torso and head of a skeleton. Amazing! How had it been done?
By the end, quite a few in the audience were in tears, or standing on their feet and cheering, or both. This is what they've come for – "ecstasy, some key, transcendent moment", as Billington told me earlier, adding that the seat prices made them determined to find such moments. The professional critic's role here can be redundant, or at least very difficult, when so many online amateurs get directly to the heart of Lloyd Webber's appeal. "I absolutely loved it. Gave me goosebumps, made me cry – just what you want from a night out at a cracking good theatre show," says a post on the Love Never Dies website. I might not go that far, but we were glad that we went.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/mar/20/ian-jack-on-musicals