WALKING IN A WEST END WONDERLAND

WALKING IN A WEST END WONDERLAND

PART 2

Today, let's return to the fabulous West End where I have spent many wonderful afternoons and evenings at the theatre. From the musical classic that ushered in the era of the modern musical to the worldwide sensation set amidst Parisian barricades to a play that celebrates in dialogue and music the life of one of the world's most evocative singers to a lesser effort by an accomplished playwright that achieved initial fame due to its somewhat unorthodox casting, there's something for everyone. 

January, 2001. Playwright and, in this case, director Richard Nelson is a Chicago native who achieved fame with his plays Some Americans Abroad, Two Shakespearean Actors, and The General from America, all initially produced by the RSC at their Stratford home. This memory play, with some "The Graduate" flavor, is not quite the slam dunk of success that the initial London reviews would lead you to believe. This is a story about a 15-year-old American student who finds himself alone in the Paris flat of one of his teachers, an attractive, single woman in her 30s. During the course of the play, they talk about art and music and literature and tumble into bed and the boy discovers sex and the next door neighbor comes in for some, actually, quite funny comic relief and it's all a bit messy and a bit creepy. The highly-regarded, and, based on her performance here, well-deserved regard, French actress Irène Jacobs, in her West End debut, played the teacher with a bracing authenticity and Madeline Potter was excellent as the neighbor. But the actor who put bums in seats was a twenty-year-old Macaulay Culkin making his stage debut as the young boy (and, framing the play on both ends, his older self). I kid you not. While I wouldn't call his performance riveting, he did a competent job and was able to hold his own on stage. I seem to remember a flash of naked Culkiness; Bob believes there was no nudity. Nudity or not, it was pleasant enough without being especially memorable. - at the Vaudeville Theatre, London

February, 1981. Australian Curly? Check. English Laurey? Check. Very English chorus? Check. How all-American can this all-American musical get? Okay, so the accents didn't exactly ring with middle America authenticity, this loving revival was wonderfully acted, beautifully sung (with one exception) and energetically danced with Agnes De Mille's groundbreaking choreography recreated by Gemze De Lappe. The one vocal exception was Rosamund Shelley's Laurey. Acting-wise she nailed the part, but it seemed, at least to my ears, that she was more mezzo than soprano and her songs didn't sound as effortless as they should have. John Diedrich was a handsome and sexy Curly (we'd see him years later as Billy Flynn in Chicago in Sydney). Featured as Ado Annie was Jillian Mack, a delightfully funny gamin who is now perhaps better known, despite a successful West End career, as Mrs. Tom Selleck. Also featured was a young Alfred Molina as Jud and a mighty fine Jud he was. Interestingly, the cast recording for this revival was recorded live during performances at the Palace Theatre. Highly theatrical. - at the Palace Theatre, London

May, 1980. Pam Gems' mesmerizing play with music about the life of Edith Piaf was, for me, one of those truly memorable evenings in the theatre. Jane Lapotaire's electrifying Piaf set the standard for all future portrayals of this complex person. (She would win the Tony for her performance when the play crossed the Pond.) Zoe Wanamaker was also memorable as Piaf's best friend, Toine. Songs were interspersed throughout the evening with a mini-concert near the end of the play. My friends and I were thrilled, along with the rest of the capacity audience. Everything was just right…the design, the direction, the music, the performances by a large and skillful cast. But in the end, it was Jane Lapotaire who flung this evening into the theatrical stratosphere. Brava, Mlle. Lapotaire, brava! - at the Piccadilly Theatre, London

March, 2006. The Donmar is one of London's most prestigious venues. An intimate space, it features top-name actors in challenging original works or stunning revivals. (The acclaimed Roundabout Theatre revival of Cabaret started here.) We didn't know anything about this play when we bought our tickets, but with Sir Ian McKellen heading the cast, what do you really need to know? As it turned out, this was a disturbing, quasi-political piece centered around a mysterious procedure called the Cut, which was presented in a way that offered multiple interpretations (I thought it was a super-lobotomy), administered against dissidents of a unnamed regime in an unnamed country and one of the leading administrators of the procedure (McKellen). Positively chilling, especially the second scene - a domestic scene between McKellen's character and his wife. Production values were spot-on perfect. Michael Grandage's direction was invisible. The acting was superlative from the entire company, but most especially from Sir Ian and Deborah Findlay as his wife. With the great divisiveness currently prevalent in the United States, this play is even more relevant than it was seven years ago. - at the Donmar Warehouse, London

October, 1987. True story. I bought the CD of the London original cast on a Thursday. One of Steve's days off was Friday. The next day he called me at work and exclaimed with great excitement, "You have to hear this!" and put the phone next to one of our stereo's speakers and played "I Dreamed a Dream," sung by the original Fantine, Patti LuPone. He then went on for the next several minutes about how wonderful the entire CD was. This may not seem like a big deal, but Steve, although he liked going to the theatre, wasn't nearly as devoted to it as I am, so this unexpected and unqualified rave was a bit out of the norm. (His other big favorite was Follies, showing his good taste.) So, when we planned our October trip to London (his first), Les Misérables and Follies were the two shows we saw. What we didn't plan on was the Great Storm of 1987 ravaging London and the surrounding area as our British Airways flight was enroute from Chicago. We were later told that our flight was one of the first to land after Heathrow Airport had been reopened. Mayfair was a mess, but the Savoy Hotel was open for business and, as everyone knows, the show must go on, so off we went to the Palace Theatre to see Fantine and her pals. Ms. LuPone had long gone, but this replacement cast was excellent, with Kathleen Rowe McAllen singing and acting the crap out of Fantine and solid performances by Craig Pinder (Valjean), Martin Smith (Marius) and Clive Carter (Javert). Steve, along with the entire audience except, apparently, me, sniffled and quietly sobbed through the more emotional moments. Unlike a lot of people, I don’t consider Les Misérables to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it has a great theatrical score and, at least in John Napier and David Hersey's original scenic and lighting design, a wow physical production. Worth noting… Broadway has seen both the original and revival productions come and go. The original London production is still running nearly 28 years after its opening night (as of this writing in August, 2013). Obviously the creators have done lots of things very, very right. - at the Palace Theatre, London

August, 1995. Alan Ayckbourn is, for lack of a better description, the UK answer to Neil Simon, though even more prolific than Mr. Simon with nearly 80 plays to his credit. Although several of his plays have been produced on Broadway, Ayckbourn has a distinctly British sensibility that makes his works far more accessible to UK audiences than to American audiences. (Likewise, Mr. Simon's works have an American flavor to them which is why he's more popular here than across the Pond.) The somewhat convoluted storyline concerns a dominatrix, two murdered wives, a crooked businessmen, his evil henchman and communicating doors in a London hotel suite that work as a time machine. People switch decades willy-nilly changing the course of the future as they do so and it all works itself out in the end. It was often quite funny and I enjoyed it, though not as much as the rest of the audience who howled to my titters. The reason for going was to see I-will-see-her-in-anything Julia McKenzie and she did not disappoint. Smartly acted, smartly designed and smartly directed, this was an agreeable enough way to spend the afternoon. - at the Gielgud Theatre, London

May, 1980. My friend Gordon and I picked the Thursday matinee performance because, for reasons that completely escape me now, we wanted to see Stephanie Lawrence, the alternate Eva, and logically thought, at least in our minds, the alternate would play the matinees. It never occurred to us to ask at the box office when we got our seats. We were, therefore, a bit disappointed to discover that the "regular" Eva, Marti Webb would play the role that afternoon. No need to be disappointed. Ms. Webb did a thoroughly fine job as did the rest of the cast. Evita is a show I have grown to like and admire. Before this performance, I saw Patti LuPone tear up the stage at the Broadway Theatre in the original NYC production a few months after it had opened. Ms. LuPone tends to be a rather intense performer, so the entire performance was played at a fevered, though very exciting, pitch. The characters were thrillingly portrayed, but the show itself got a bit lost. In London, Ms. Webb and her cohorts were a bit more subdued than their NYC counterparts which let me focus more on the production itself and allowed me to enjoy and truly appreciate Harold Prince's and Larry Fuller's remarkable direction and staging and fully appreciate the subtlety, focus and even complexity of Tim Rice's lyrics, the best of ALW's collaborators. The recent London-then-Broadway revival was very good in its own right, but for sheer theatricality and excitement, the original can't be beat. For the record, Ms. Webb continues to perform as I write this (August, 2013) and has had a very successful career in the UK. - at the Prince Edward Theatre, London.

May, 1994. This is the only show Andrew Lloyd Webber has written to date that can truly be called a star vehicle. Steve and I saw this a few weeks after Betty Buckley took over the role of Norma Desmond from its originator, Patti LuPone. She looked great and sounded terrific, but she was a bit too perky for a faded and forgotten movie queen and not imperious enough for a screen legend used to getting her way. (She would grow in her portrayal as evidenced by a superb performance Bob and I saw in New York after she had replaced Glenn Close.) This was a big show in all respects. It was sumptuously designed, lit and costumed. It had a big orchestra to play the big score. It had a big and talented cast. Yet for all that and despite the iconic pedigree of the Billy Wilder film, the musical adaptation seemed, well, flat and one-dimensional. Spectacle won out over depth of character and that's a shame. The story is terrific, but it's really quite an intimate one and with all the bells and whistles of this production, it sometimes simply faded into the background. John Barrowman, yes that John Barrowman, played Joe Gillis and he did a damn fine job of it, too. Face it, the man's talented. The gay lads sitting next to us were positively in a frenzy over the show and as the lights came up for the interval, one of them turned to me and breathlessly asked, "Oh, my God!! Can you believe this? What do you think?" To which I replied, "The house goes up; the house goes down." - at the Adelphi Theatre, London 

August, 1995. Despite my initial, uh, restrained opinion of Sunset Boulevard, I found the show strangely irresistible and returned for a repeat visit during my "Lick My Wounds" tour. The main impetus was the chance to see the much admired and loved Elaine Paige, who, at the time, arguably was the top musical theatre star in the UK. (I say arguably because, frankly, I think Julia McKenzie is more talented.) My friend, Rob, bless her heart, couldn't for the life of her figure out why I would spend good money to see, in her words, not mine, that "shrieking suburban midget." (Not PC, I realize, but those were the words used.) But then Rob doesn't get musicals, so it was rather pointless to try to explain it to her. This time around a very handsome Alexander Hanson (we would see him years later, still handsome, in the Broadway revival of A Little Night Music with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury) played Joe Gillis in a nicely performed turn. The mechanics of the show continued to frequently dwarf the story, but it was still gorgeous to look at and listen to. As for Ms. Paige? Well, frankly, she was quite good, yet I wasn't all that impressed. She is very short and the costumes just looked far too big on her, almost like she was a little girl playing dress up. It was a bit disconcerting. She's noted for her big voice, yet I found it strangely subdued. The two main songs for Norma should have the audiences going crazy, but, though Paige got hearty applause for both and was note-perfect, she lacked an excitement. Maybe she was having an off performance. Maybe, because it was a matinee, she was saving her energy for the evening show. And it wasn't just me. The guy sitting next to me and I were chatting it up during the interval and he also felt Paige's performance was not at 100%. It happens, I guess. Over the years, Sunset has become a guilty pleasure and I would love to see what could be done with a more intimate version of the show. - at the Adelphi Theatre, London

Treat yourself to a play or musical this week!

Til later....