The sky's the limit
Closer to Heaven (Arts) The Shape of Things (Almeida)
Almost Like Being in Love (National)
Sheridan Morley
The new (and first) Pet Shop Boys' musical Closer to Heaven has considerably more going for it than you'd have guessed from some vitriolic overnight reviews elsewhere. First of all, it opens up at the Arts Theatre the kind of off-Broadway space for new scores which London has always sorely lacked, offering a nightclub intimacy rather than the usual vast, open stages of more familiar musical playhouses. Second, though I yield to nobody in my fervent loathing of the current rock and pop scene, Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys has long struck me as the most intelligent, comprehensible and even nostalgic of recent chart writers, and the score here includes a title song and at least two lyrical ballads of considerable energy and emotive power, even if they are played and sung at twice the necessary volume.
Third, there's the revelation of Frances Barber, a hitherto largely classical actress making an amazingly confident and starry West End musical debut as the mistress of ceremonies and indeed also of many of the men and maybe even women who hang around the nightclub that is Heaven. For Jonathan Harvey's admittedly fragile book is, like the plays that made his name, deeply bisexual, yet another scarred report from the battlefront where the sexes try to work out which (and who) they really are.
Closer to Heaven is not a classic or great or perhaps even very good musical, but it does achieve two important and thus far oddly unsung victories: for the first time in the 30 years since Jesus Christ Superstar (and intriguingly Lloyd Webber is now the producer here), it takes what could have been just another chart-topping CD and turns it back into a strongly staged event, thanks largely to the RSC director Gemma Bodinetz and some brilliantly tricksy, innovative choreography by Peter Darling of Billy Elliot.
The other victory is still greater: without suggesting any other comparison, Closer to Heaven does for the Soho of today, the Soho of gay-pub bombings and considerable urban and sexual disintegration and decay, precisely what Cabaret did for the Berlin of the Thirties, what Expresso Bongo did for the Tin Pan Alley of the Fifties, what Irma La Douce did for postwar Paris and West Side Story for the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the Sixties. It reflects, painfully and in all too accurate close-up, the immediate mood and feel of the innercity moment: precious few musicals on this side of the Atlantic have ever managed that. In the words of one of Tennant's best lyrics, this is a show about the impossibility of love in a world where sex is a cruel competitive sport, and all that's really wrong with it is down to theatrical inexperience, which could easily be fixed if the Boys are not now too discouraged to try again. If they are, we shall have killed off at birth one of the few really intriguing breakthroughs in the contemporary British stage musical.
Even in exile behind King's Cross station, the Almeida remains so cutting-edge a theatre company that you could do yourself a nasty injury just entering the foyer. But in Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things they have found themselves far and away the best new American play in the near-decade since David Mamet's Oleanna. And here again we are on the campus of a backwoods American university; here again there is a penultimate scene so breathtaking in its effect, yet so utterly faithful to what has gone before, that I am having a hard time keeping it a secret for you to discover.
The Shape of Things is Private Lives on speed, Betrayal with added benzedrine: it moves like lightning through a sequence of tightly structured scenes, chillingly well directed by the author, and involving two sets of criss-crossed lovers. LaBute has come up with a superb American response to Art: where that European long-runner remains a vague waffle around the subject of modern painting, The Shape of Things cuts to the very heart and quick of the action. In a strong, otherwise all-American cast, Rachel Weisz finally emerges triumphant from the endless Mummy movies and the worst Design for Living in living memory, even counting the one that has just closed on Broadway. She is, and none too soon, as good as her publicity.
And finally, the most richly resonant and remarkable performance currently to be found at the National is not on any of its three stages. Indeed you'll be lucky to find it at all; but if you take the glass elevator in the Lyttelton lobby to the second floor, you will come across a new, albeit well-hidden, National nightclub. And there, though only at weekends and at 11 p.m., is a rare celebration of the lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner entitled Almost Like Being in Love. As always, these songs are not nearly as 'lost' as they are advertised to be, and Hugh Wooldridge's lazy, clunking production and linking script does them no favours, especially when the great Sian Phillips is left reading aloud undigested wodges (and usually the wrong ones) of Lerner's memoirs to bridge the many gaps.
But, and this is a huge but, if you can overcome all that, plus choreography by Andrew Wright which looks Iike offeuts from an old Esther Williams movie, plus a set bizarrely consisting of a beach umbrella and more dead flowers than you would find in a bankrupt funeral parlour, you will find at the heart of the show one actor who started out 30 years ago in musical comedy but sadly has never returned to it until now. He alone has the full measure of Lerner's lyrics, he alone understands that if you just stand there and sing them, straight and simple and true, they are among the greatest ever written. His name is John Standing, and I can think of no major Lerner score which would not have been even better had he created it, or at least been the first to revive it; when Jonathan Pryce's contract for My Fair Lady at Drury Lane runs out, presumably around this time next year, if the management does not pay Mr Standing a small fortune (or preferably a large one) to take over as Higgins, we shall all be greatly the poorer and the show will be no better than it is now.
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