Brits on Broadway
Sheridan Morley
The tills of the West End may be alive with the sound of musicals new and old, but the Brits on Broadway are remarkably well represented at a time when theatre in New York is still suffering a delayed downturn from the after-effects of 9/11. It is indeed some indication of a renewed faith in Broadway, and a reborn interest in straight plays which we could do well to copy, that David Hare is about to première his The Vertical Hour (with Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy, as directed by Sam Mendes) in New York rather than London, having recently triumphed there with his Iraq talkfest Stuff Happens. Additionally, Tom Stoppard’s epic three-play The Coast of Utopia, first seen four years ago at the National and dealing with the birth of Bolshevism, is about to open at the Lincoln Center with an all-star American cast headed by Ethan Hawke and Billy Crudup.
Then again there are major revivals of Simon Gray (Nathan Lane in Butley) and Bernard Shaw (Heartbreak House), while recent award-winners from this side of the Atlantic have included Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, the Ralph Fiennes–Ian McDiarmid Faith Healer and the Rufus Norris–David Eldridge Festen. All that and Siân Phillips in a new Paul Rudnick comedy, while the talk for the spring is of Ian McShane in Pinter’s The Homecoming.
On the jukebox front, we even got Shout, billed as ‘a salute to London in the Swinging Sixties’ and featuring some fairly implausible lookalike-soundalikes of Petula Clark, Lulu and even the late Dusty Springfield. And for those of you still missing the Four Seasons (the guys, not the Vivaldi), the most likely London import over the next few months, in the wake of Buddy, looks like being Jersey Boys, a slickly packaged celebration of the group with a star turn from John Lloyd Young as Frankie Valli. Not much pretence of a book here (though both Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice are credited), just a concert recreation of all the hits you hoped you’d forgotten. From the West End, Cameron Mackintosh has twin triumphs: an expanded Mary Poppins in which a ‘jolly holiday’ becomes just that and Gavin Lee repeats his London chimneysweeping triumph, and a scaled-down Les Misérables which gives us the show in powerful close-up where we have long been accustomed to the long-shot. What Mackintosh is now doing, ironically enough (with this double as with Cats and Phantom of the Opera, the longest-running musicals in New York history), is showing Broadway precisely how hit shows used to be built, from the production drawing-board rather than a CD concert collection. Also from Britain, from the Watermill in Newbury to be precise, the director John Doyle, who specialises in intimate restagings with the cast also playing all the instruments of the non-existent orchestra, and whose Sweeney Todd won several awards on Broadway last year, now has a similarly rethought Company, also of course by Stephen Sondheim.
But the two most interesting new musicals I saw in a crowded week could hardly have been more different. One, in far too large a theatre, is The Drowsy Chaperone in which one of the authors, Bob Martin, plays an old showbiz queen-fan pining for the golden age of Gershwin and Cole Porter. What follows is straight out of Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend: the recreation of a Twenties musical in all its ludicrous over-the-top grandeur, but constantly interrupted by Martin as a kind of combined narrator and stage manager, desperate to make sure that the audience understands his obsessive enthusiasm for long-lost feelgood shows. Though underdeveloped, his character and his idea are oddly touching, never more so than when we are briefly brought up-to-date with his lonely real life.
Far and away the best show I caught, and also I hope soon for here, is Grey Gardens, loosely based on what was originally a TV documentary and telling the extraordinary story of Jackie Kennedy’s aunt and cousin, a mother and daughter both named Edith Bouvier Beale and both played by Christine Ebersole, who will, if there is any justice, clean up at next year’s Tony Awards.
We first meet the Beales in the 1941 prePearl Harbor setting of Grey Gardens in East Hampton, Long Island, a setting which makes that of High Society look positively underprivileged. But by Act Two we are in 1973. Grey Gardens is reduced to a crumbling wreck, and its two remaining occupants are living as recluses in indescribable filth and chaos, surrounded only by an army of cats.
Brilliantly directed by Michael Greif and scored by Scott Frankel and Michael Korie, with a book by Doug Wright, Grey Gardens is a bittersweet show which puts the drama back into the American musical and is highlighted by a stunning double performance by Ebersole: hopefully she will cross the Atlantic with the show.
Sheridan Morley is drama critic of the Daily Express.
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