The show goes on
Sheridan Morley says that New York is once again a theatre town N.w York, New York, it's a wonderful town; what's up is up, and what's down is down.' The admittedly very tentative beginning of some bad-taste showbiz joke suggests that, almost eight weeks after the events of 11 September (now commemorated on a million T-shirts at five dollars each, or ten if you want them stamped 'God Bless America') made the unthinkable into the unbearable, Manhattan is once again a theatre town. To stand, as I recently did, at the centre of where the twin towers once were is to understand why the nation feels as though it has been raped. Pearl Harbor happened almost exactly 60 years ago (I should know: I was born that weekend), and it was then an offshore island, not even a state but merely a territory. Those who died were mainly serving sailors and, moreover, the rest of the world was already at war.
Nobody thought this kind of aerial raid could ever happen again; not least because no fighter jet could carry enough fuel to cross the Atlantic or Pacific, attack America and fly safely home again. Nobody thought about suicide pilots any more, and the word I picked up from an admittedly retired four-star general in Aspen last weekend was that of the terrorists involved only the four actually flying the planes knew they were on a kamikaze mission; all the others thought it was just to be a routine hijack. albeit more murderous than most.
Believe that or not as you like, but never doubt that New York still functions theatrically in a way that London never has, even in wartime. Once, during the worst of Vietnam, I asked the usual Ukrainian cab-driver at Kennedy airport how Broadway was being affected. As usual, he had to be helped to find 68th Street, but could easily answer my query: 'One hit musical', he announced confidently, 'will turn this town around tomorrow.'
What he knew, without ever having been to one, was that the right kind of smash hit would be great news not just for the cast involved but for hotels, restaurants, cabs, bars, museums, shops and dozens of other nearby industries. Try asking the average London cab-driver or hotel porter which are the white-hot West End hits and it is unlikely he will either know or care, not least because over here, disgracefully enough (and this is yet another campaign I have waged alone and without success this last quarter of a century), theatre managements are allowed to keep their box-office figures secret from the public, and sometimes even from the cast and the backers.
In New York, all the weekly profit-andloss figures on Broadway shows are published in Variety every Monday morning and even, or especially in times of crisis, the centre of Manhattan takes its temperature by those figures alone. At the moment, two hit shows from London, Mamma Mia (known locally as 'Swede and Low') and Noises Off, are doing sellout business, as of course are The Producers and 42nd Street. But so too are Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren in Dance of Death — not exactly the show you'd choose for a cheerful night out in wartime, which is probably why the poster has the stars looking as if they are appearing in a rare classical revival of Hello Dolly.
Then again the Ayckbourn-Lloyd Webber By keves has run into a little local difficulty with some critics, despite offering tea and biscuits free on the sidewalk and promising 'No dancing Nazis or old Swedish pop songs', while Susan Stroman, the golden-girl choreographer, has her first real flop in years with Thou Shalt Not, a deeply if faithfully gloomy musical of Therese Raquin with a score by Harry Connick. As for naked greed and wartime profiteering, that award goes unchallenged to the producers of The Producers: having established the $100 ticket, they are now offering 50 on the day at $480 each, on the dubious grounds that if ticket touts can do it, why shouldn't they? Other sell-out musicals will doubtless follow suit, but never has the real-life trade of producer seemed more tacky or reprehensible.
Likely imminent hits include a new Neil Simon, 45 Seconds From Broadway, which brings him back joyously to his old vaudeville wisecracks in a comedy somewhere halfway between The Sunshine Boys and Broadway Danny Rose, with Marian Seldes just wonderful as the Madwoman of Manhattan, and the February arrival of Oklahoma! from the National Theatre, which should restore Stroman's fortunes and line her up, like Seldes, for yet another Tony Award in June.
When Rodgers and Hammerstein's first hit opened in 1943, the poet Carl Sandberg wrote of it 'smelling of new-mown hay on barn-dance floors' and this was above all the show which reminded America what it was fighting for overseas — the birth of a state and, by extension, of the States themselves. War history is about to repeat itself and, even if it doesn't, there's still Broadway's last surviving diva in a solo turn memorably advertised as 'Constructed by John Lahr and Deconstructed by Elaine Stritch'.
However, back in London, the box-office is a lot shakier. The last time American tourists stayed at home, unless you count those who earlier this year became hysterically and hilariously convinced that they could catch foot-and-mouth rather as they could Aids, was during the Libyan crisis, when my wife Ruth Leon and I made a film about absentee tourists for US television which we called Chicken America. It did not exactly endear us to several million of them. This time it's even worse: last week alone, both Antarctica and Mahler's Conversion closed abruptly, with several other straight plays including Over the Moon looking distinctly dodgy. Not even Kiss Me Kate, more's the pity. can apparently turn this town around.
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