I said when it came out that Tim Burton’s film of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sweeney Todd was his best for a long time. Maybe I got carried away in the moment. A couple of years on, I’m coming round to the view that most of what impressed me was down to Sondheim and not Burton.
I didn’t know the show at all before I saw the Burton film and I’d always been somewhat prejudiced against the whole Sweeney Todd thing. I was scarred by my experience of a dreadful schools’ musical version of the tale (I’m Sweeney Todd the bar-ber, An evil soul I har-bour, I run a little business cutting hair and other things) with which we occupied a couple of ‘music’ lessons in the third year. The few songs that I’d heard sounded difficult and discordant, full of tricky rhythms and rhymes. ‘The Worst Pies in London’ is not a song that makes a whole lot of sense shorn of context and live performance. Continue reading Sweeney Todd→
Lissy Lovett: I go to the theatre quite a bit, maybe once or twice a week on average. I’m lucky enough to see a lot of different kinds of things, Big West End musicals, straight plays in the subsidised sector, fringe productions, but I have only ever been to the opera twice. Once was to see some modern thing that I didn’t understand one bit at the Coliseum a few years ago, and then I went to see La Traviata at the Royal Opera House at the end of last year.
The first thing that struck me about the whole experience, is that in venues of that massive size, I’m used to see lights & speakers everywhere. We were sitting in the Amphitheatre right at the top, and if I squinted a bit I could almost believe that it looked exactly as it would have done in 1858. The proscenium arch was completely clear of lighting bars & speaker stacks. Which meant, I guess, that the orchestra & singers aren’t amplified at all? Is that the case? Because if so that’s really amazing. I’m not used to seeing singers who can sing that loudly! In your average West End musical everyone will have their own radio mic. I guess thinking about it that must be a modern-ish innovation, but it’s completely standard in theatre now. I’m finding it still quite hard to get my head around one voice being able to fill a space that large.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s animated TV series, South Park, first hit our screens in 1997, about the same time as domestic internet access was beginning to take off. It was the first TV show I can remember being widely, let’s say, distributed across the web, a factor that probably contributed towards its rapid worldwide success. (It certainly didn’t hurt that in those days of 28k modems, a South Park episode looked so rough already that it could be brutally squished into 30-odd Mb of Real Video without any visible degradation.)
Parker and Stone apparently appeared out of nowhere, but the technology of the web also gave fans like me a method of tracking down their earlier work. There were a couple of crude South Park prototypes, Jesus v Frosty and The Spirit Of Christmas: a curious in-house short for Universal called Your Studio And You: and further back than those was their first proper film, the unholy marriage of Rodgers and Hammerstein with Lucio Fulci that was Cannibal! The Musical.
Cannibal! was made in 1993, which means that Trey and Matt have been getting away with this shit for nearly two decades now. And their 2011 smash hit Broadway musical, The Book Of Mormon, is the perfect synthesis of everything they’ve done over those two decades. Continue reading MostlyFilm’s Best of 2011 – The Book of Mormon→
Hero Bradley on a pantomime for people who think they don’t like pantomimes.
James Corden (l), James Corden (r)
The National Theatre’s One Man, Two Guvnors begins its previews at the Adelphi Theatre tomorrow. Earlier this year when it opened at the National Theatre, there were quite a few reviews which mentioned a humus sandwich being offered to James Corden by a member of the audience. Therefore when I finally saw the show the other week on tour and someone in the front row proffered up a sandwich to Corden, I knew full well that this was no surprise to anyone. Despite knowing all this however, my suspension of disbelief in that moment meant that I laughed just as hard as if I’d believed every word.This whole sandwich section was, by the way, played completely straight. There was no wink at the audience like we were in on the joke. We were expected to think that this was the first ever time that James Corden had encountered a humus sandwich during the run of the play, and I’d hazard a guess that the majority of the audience there that night would have been surprised to find out that the sandwich owner was a plant.
In the coming couple of months exactly the same trick will be played on audiences up and down the country as part of the UK’s annual tradition of Christmas pantomimes. Continue reading One Man, Two Guvnors→
I was watching Legally Blonde a few weeks ago on TV and it seemed like it was missing something. It took a little while to work out what it was but then it hit me – there weren’t any songs. Legally Blonde: The Musical opened at the Savoy Theatre in London a good year and a half ago, and although the critical and commercial response was good overall, there was a certain amount of snobbery in there too. It was viewed, along with Dirty Dancing, Grease, Sister Act and others, as just another way to entice middle-aged women into theatres. The argument runs that women of a certain age (surely the biggest spenders in the West End) remember the original films fondly, and head to the shows in droves to try to recapture their youth, bringing their friends and families with them.
So here we have a class of musical that’s commercially successful and very often fabulously well staged, acted and sung, which is nevertheless dismissed by many people writing about theatre. The most often expressed reason for this dismissal is that the musicals are not original: they are based on films, and crowd-pleasing mainstream films at that. Dare I say it, but I think they are sometimes also discounted for being based on films that tend to be popular with women, and often “things women like” is synonymous with “things we look down upon”. From time to time there will be an article in The Stage or in The Guardianwhere the number of “original” shows and/or straight plays is compared with the number of remounts and film adaptations, either between the West End and Broadway or between now and 50 years ago. The subtext of these lists is always that having a greater number of brand new shows is better, and a higher number of straight plays something to be proud of. The list writers suggest that musicals and film adaptations are not as good as brand new work and plays where no one sings. The articles will say things like, did you know that in the 1950s, The Entertainer starring no less than Sir Laurence Olivier was playing at the Palace Theatre, instead of – gasp! horror! – Priscilla Queen of the Desert? Golly, everyone must have been so much more clever and cultured then than they are now. Continue reading Legally Scorned: Films as Musicals→
Graffiti spotted on Tib Street, Manchester, Saturday July 2nd (and crudely painted over by Sunday July 3rd)
Like the song says, Manchester is wonderful: and since 2007, we’ve been able to add a fourth item to the list of reasons why. The Manchester International Festival rolls up every two years, presents a whole array of world premieres across the entire artistic spectrum, and then leaves London to spend the next 24 months picking up the leftovers. Currently in its third season (until July 17th), it doesn’t take over the whole city the way that, say, the Edinburgh Festival does: but you get the impression that Alex Poots and his staff would take quality over quantity any day.
Mostly Film will be devoting a pair of articles to MIF 2011: this one will be concentrating on the music-based performance events, or at least the three that The Belated Birthday Girl and I managed to catch during a weekend visit to my old home town. Continue reading MANCHESTER INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL 2011: CHOON!→
Cameron Mackintosh must be a confident man. Exit the theatre after a performance of his latest production, Betty Blue Eyes, and you’re accosted by the front-of-house staff trying to flog you tie-in merchandise. Red t-shirts bearing that suddenly ubiquitous wartime slogan ‘Keep calm and carry on’ amended to spell out quotes from the show. ‘Sexual intercourse will be in order’ and something I didn’t quite make out about pork. Surely it took years for the likes of Cats and Phantom to build up that kind of cultural capital. Betty Blue Eyes is only just out of previews.
It’s all a bit redolent of the way the show itself feels like a marketing exercise. An adaptation of the 1980s Alan Bennett-scripted film A Private Function, it concerns the efforts of Yorkshire townsfolk to overcome the privations of austerity Britain in order to celebrate the upcoming royal wedding. ‘Sound familiar?’ the posters ask, somewhat archly. Well, yes.
MostlyFilm 