The Chrissies... And the nominees are...

So an exciting year in theatre-going comes to a close; 2018 provided an excellent year for exceptional productions and performances.  This can only mean one thing - it's nearly time for Theatreland's most eagerly awaited award ceremony...  The 2018 Chrissies.  It has been hard to limit some nominations to just five but here they are:

Best Play / Best Actor / Best Supporting Actor x3 / Best Supporting Actress / Best Director / Best Design / Best Lighting

Best Musical / Best Musical Actor x2 / Best Musical Supporting Actor x2 / 

Best Musical Supporting Actress / Best Choreography

Best Play / Best Actor / Best Supporting Actress / Best Director / Best Design / Best Lighting

Best Play / Best Actor / Best Supporting Actor / Best Director / Best Design / Best Lighting

Best Musical / Best Actress / Best Supporting Actress / Best Lighting / Best Choreography

 

Best Musical / Best Musical Actor / Best Musical Actress / Best Designer / Best Choreography

Best Play / Best Actress / Best Director / Best Design / Best Lighting

MANON

Best Classical Production / Best Male Classical Performer x2 / Best Female Classical Performer / Best Classical Choreography

Best Musical / Best Musical Supporting Actor / Best Musical Supporting Actress / Best Director

Best Musical Actor / Best Musical Actress / Best Musical Supporting Actor / Best Choreography

Best Classical Production / Best Male Classical Performer / Best Female Classical Performer / Best Classical Choreography

 

Best Classical Production / Best Male Classical Performer x2 / Best Classical Choreography

Best Musical Actor / Best Musical Supporting Actress / Best Choreography

 

Best Musical / Best Musical Actress / Best Musical Supporting Actress

SWAN LAKE (Scarlett)

Best Classical Production / Best Female Classical Performer / Best Classical Choreography

Best Supporting Actor / Best Supporting Actress

Best Actor / Best Actress

 

Best Play / Best Actor

and one nomination each for:

ANNIE (Best Musical Actress) / ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA (Best Actress) / ELIZABETH (Best Female Classical Performer) / JULIUS CAESAR (Best Supporting Actress) / LES PATINEURS (Best Classical Choreography) / MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON (Best Actress) / THE NUTCRACKER (Best Classical Production) / SPAMILTON (Best Musical Supporting Actor) / SUMMER AND SMOKE (Best Actress) / THE WAY OF THE WORLD (Best Supporting Actress) / WINTER DREAMS (Best Female Classical Performer)

The awards will be announced in the New Year... book now!

SWAN LAKE at Sadler's Wells - Bourne Again...

I last saw Matthew Bourne's iconic SWAN LAKE in 2013 and in the intervening five years - thanks to Wayne McGregor's WOOLF WORKS for the Royal Ballet - I have had a wider exposure to both classical and modern ballet, mostly at Covent Garden.  So it was with added excitement that I took my seat - K row stalls of course - to see again this very special production.

This was my fifth time seeing Bourne's SWAN LAKE in the theatre and it never fails to move me emotionally in it's dying moments; other Bourne productions may now seem too much style over content - EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, DORIAN GRAY - but SWAN LAKE taps into the emotions and always delivers.

Bourne has re-visited his masterpiece and now has Paule Constable as the lighting designer and added video images by Duncan McLean, it was delightful to see the little touches that kept it fresh.  Lez Brotherston's designs are still wonderfully atmospheric and the excellent Bourne dancer Kerry Biggin has re-staged the show wonderfully.

Bourne's scenario stays the same: A lonely Prince has a distant relationship with his mother The Queen while surrounded by the soulless life at court.  Attempting to elude the plotting of the corrupt Private Secretary - who has paid a silly blonde to be his girlfriend - The Prince runs off into the night determined to drown himself in a lake. Once there he is surrounded by a bevy of swans and he instantly becomes enraptured by their leader, an imperious, mysterious Swan who guardedly returns the Prince's friendliness until they share a romantic pas-de-deux.  The Prince runs off exultant.

However the appearance of a dark and dangerous stranger at the Palace ball throws the Prince into a mental tailspin when the Stranger - who seems to embody the same magnetism as The Swan - jeers at the Prince and is determined to seduce the all-too-willing Queen.  When the Prince pulls a gun on the couple, all hell breaks loose, the girlfriend is shot trying to shield the Prince and he is dragged away.  Alone and delirious, his salvation appears with the arrival of the Swan but the bevy of jealous swans surround them wanting blood...

It's a production that just immerses me in it's tragic plot and as I said, in it's final moments I was again blinking back the tears.  The performances across the cast were as strong as always: Bourne favourite Liam Mower was a wonderfully fluid Prince, his smallest movements were tremulous and full of pain, making his final breakdown all the more heartbreaking; he really invested the character with an aching solitude.

Katrina Lyndon was a brittle yet lusty Queen and Freya Field found all the laughs in the clutzy girlfriend role while Glenn Graham was fine as the Private Secretary; the ensemble all gave committed performances and the four cygnet dancers got a huge and deserved ovation for their wonky, flapping set-piece.  The Swan / Stranger was commandingly danced by Max Westwell, making his debut with the New Adventures company, and he rose to the challenge of the two roles well.

So there we are... SWAN LAKE is back and brighter than ever.  All Sadler's Wells dates are sold out but it is then going on an extensive UK tour from January to May, visiting Milton Keynes, Birmingham, Southampton, Dublin, Glasgow, Bristol, Canterbury, Norwich, Liverpool, Wimbledon, Hull, Woking, Newcastle and Sheffield - check for availability by clicking here

Swans: Now and Forever...

LES PATINEURS / WINTER DREAMS / THE CONCERT at Covent Garden - light and shade...

My last visit to the Royal Ballet this year was to see another of their mixed programmes, curated to celebrate three great choreographers: Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan and Jerome Robbins.  As usual it was also a perfect opportunity to show the breadth of talent across the Royal Ballet company.

First was Ashton's LES PATINEURS which debuted in 1937 and is set to music by the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, a composer whose operas have fallen out the repertoire but his themes were wonderfully arranged by Constant Lambert into a fizzing, whirling delight.  At only 35 minutes it's an almost perfect cameo of ballet pleasure.  The Royal Ballet are still using the original designs by William Chappell and it almost took your breath away when first seen - a glorious Victorian Christmas illustration come to life, each colour popping off the stage.

A group of 15 dancers dance/skate across the stage in various combinations: a group of eight dancers in red and blue give way to three couples in reddish-brown, blue and white and a solo male dancer in blue, whose effortless spins and leaps supposedly were inspired by Ashton's admiration of another Fred, Mr. Astaire.  It was utterly captivating and is going to be revisited hopefully again sometime.  The ballet was a tribute to Ashton's dazzling vision and style - effortlessly elegant but with a grounding in pattern and technique.  The company were excellent but special mention to Luca Acri as the effervescent boy in blue.

The mood changed dramatically with MacMillan's WINTER DREAMS which uses Chekhov's THREE SISTERS for inspiration.  The ballet had it's first performance in 1991 and MacMillan said he did not want to do a literal ballet adaptation of the play but to use it as a template to explore the emotions of loneliness and longing.  MacMillan originally staged it as a pas-de-deux for Masha and Vershenin as part of a gala for the Queen Mother's 90th birthday and expanded it to make a full 55 minute one-act ballet.

It's been quite a while since I saw THREE SISTERS so I was a bit shaky as to who was who but the central theme of the isolation of the three sisters was palpable and they were danced beautifully by Itziar Mendizabal as Olga, Sarah Lamb as Masha and Yasmin Naghdi as Irina with fine support from Gary Avis as Kulygin and Vadim Muntagirov as Vershenin; he and Lamb danced the central pas-de-deux wonderfully.  As with all MacMillan's finest work, WINTER DREAMS had an ominous air of sadness about it and it's duel scene towards the end reminded me of MAYERLING with it's guns and figures under umbrellas.  I think however I would have liked to have seen it grouped with other ballets as the wrench from the gaiety of the Ashton piece to the MacMillan was a bit too jarring.  The ballet is set to music by Tchaikovsky and it sounded wonderful shared between Russian stringed instruments and Robert Clark's piano.

The last ballet was Jerome Robbins' THE CONCERT first performed by NY City Ballet in 1956.  Set to music by Chopin, a fussy concert pianist - Robert Clark proving to be a right trooper - plays to a small audience who spend more time fidgeting and daydreaming than they do just listening.  Their various personal thoughts are interrupted by the arrival of six ballerinas who attempt a pas de six but end up facing the wrong way or with the wrong arm raised etc.

It's a slight piece but made up a pleasing sandwich with LES PATINEURS for the more weighty WINTER DREAMS, and it was well performed by the company who communicated a sense of delight in being able to do comedy. 

The art of curating a mixed programme is a tricky one but I was delighted to have seen these three ballets in one sitting and see some favourite dancers in new roles.

Onto the 2019 season...!

50 Favourite Musicals: 31: ASSASSINS (1990) (Stephen Sondheim)

The 50 shows that have stood out down the years and, as we get up among the paint cards, the shows that have become the cast recording of my life:

First performed: 1990, Playwrights Horizons, US
First seen by me: 1992, Donmar Warehouse, London

Productions seen: four

Score: Stephen Sondheim
Book: John Weidman

Plot:  In a funfair, a shooting-range proprietor calls eight men and women to try their luck at his stall.  They are revealed to be eight misfits who attempted - and in some cases succeeded - in assassinating United States Presidents.

Five memorable numbers: EVERYBODY'S GOT THE RIGHT, THE GUN SONG / THE BALLAD OF CZOLGOSZ, UNWORTHY OF YOUR LOVE, THE BALLAD OF BOOTH, THE BALLAD OF GUITEAU

The collaborations between Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman always give us the unexpected: the coerced opening up of Japan to Western trade in PACIFIC OVERTURES, and the ways to make and lose fortunes in early 20th Century America in ROAD SHOW; but their most avant-garde and controversial musical remains ASSASSINS, a show that challenges it's audience to at least understand four Presidential assassins and five would-be ones.  Short dramatic and black comedy scenes are glued together by Sondheim's score which encompasses styles of Americana music to devastating effect.  Weidman's book presents the assassins' warped manifestos and expose them to be disenfranchised loners who realized that if someone has power and fame then a way to get some of that is to be the person who kills them.  They gather together from across history: John Wilkes Booth, Giuseppe Zangara, Leon Czolgosz, Charles Guiteau, John Hinckley, Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme and Sarah Jane Moore.  Weidman gives two non-musical scenes to the insane rantings of Samuel Byck, on his way to fly a hijacked plane into Richard Nixon's White House and - in the musical's most chilling scene - the assassins emerge from the shadows of the Texas School Book Depository to make Lee Harvey Oswald realise his destiny  Sondheim's score constantly surprises with it's musical sang-froid - Hinkley and Fromme sing a Carpenters-style love song but with a chilling aspect as they are singing of their deranged love for Jodie Foster and Charles Manson; Guiteau performs a minstrel-style cakewalk as he capers up the scaffold stairs; a Souza march is utilized to counterpoint the bitter ravings of Zangara from the electric-chair that there are no photographers present; a barbershop quartet harmonize over their guns; and the show's narrator, The Balladeer, sings a tongue-twisting bouncy song to illustrate Czolgosz's shuffling progression to the head of a queue to shake hands with William McKinley - and shoot him.  Interestingly The Balladeer presents an echo of Sondheim's previous musical INTO THE WOODS as three-quarters through each show, the characters turn on their narrator, disagreeing with his version of events - here the result is the barnstorming "Another National Anthem" as the assassins show their actions as warped versions of searching for The American Dream.  With it's small cast, minimal set and relatively small number of songs, ASSASSINS has been seen in a few fringe revivals in London - not all of them successful - but my fondest memory is of Sam Mendes' UK premiere production at the Donmar, with excellent, idiosyncratic performances by David Firth (Booth), Louise Gold (Moore), Ciaran Hinds (Byck), and Henry Goodman, unforgettable as the insane Guiteau.  Interestingly, it was for the Donmar production that Sondheim added a song after the Lee Harvey Oswald scene "Something Just Broke" which gives a voice to ordinary people at their shock and sadness of Kennedy's killing; an attempt to re-balance the show which I can understand but think it rather undercuts the show's ominous power.  Those fringe revivals that felt too obvious is why ASSASSINS is placed lower than it ideally should be in my list.

Here is the show's final number, performed by the 2004 Broadway cast including Neil Patrick Harris, Michael Cerveris and Denis O'Hare, at the Tony Awards where it won five awards.  The song, a reprise of the opening number "Everybody's Got The Right" is the most Broadway-sounding song in the score but reiterates Sondheim and Weidman's contention that the assassins' saw their actions as being some sort of unalienable right...  The original 1991 cast recording remains sublime.

DVD/150: MOMENT TO MOMENT (Mervyn LeRoy, 1966)

Jean Seberg's films are so rarely available that it is a pleasure to finally see one that she was the main star in, Mervyn LeRoy's 1966 thriller MOMENT TO MOMENT.

Yes it's a vehicle that would have fitted any 1960s actress but Seberg brings warmth and intelligence to it and is well partnered by Honor Blackman, fresh from GOLDFINGER.

Kay lives on the Riviera with her psychiatrist husband and son, and is friends with divorcee Daphne.  During one of husband Neil's absences, she befriends Mark, an American ensign.

She tries to keep Mark at arm's length but one night they make love, but when Kay tells him they must never meet again, his violence results in him being accidentally shot.

Kay and Beryl dump his body but when Neil returns home, the police ask him to interview a sailor recovering from a shooting but now amnesiac...

Hollywood hokum but watchable...

Shelf or charity shop?  An oddly unthrilling thriller but it's a keeper for radiant Jean, looking wonderful in Yves Saint-Laurent.

50 Favourite Musicals: 32: ME AND MY GIRL (1937) (Noel Gay, Douglas Furber & L. Arthur Rose)

The 50 shows that have stood out down the years and, as we get up among the paint cards, the shows that have become the cast recording of my life:

First performed: 1937, Victoria Palace, London

First seen by me: 1985, Adelphi Theatre, London

Productions seen: one

Score: Noel Gay, Douglas Furber & L. Arthur Rose
Book: Furber, Rose (Stephen Fry/Mike Ockrent: 1984 revision)

Plot:  The 1930s: Cockney barrow-boy Bill Snibson is discovered to be the sole heir of the title of Earl Hareford.  A clash of class cultures ensues with Bill being expected to become a proper gentleman before he acquires the title, but can he say goodbye to his roots and his sweetheart Sally?

Five memorable numbers: ME AND MY GIRL, THE SUN HAS GOT HIS HAT ON, THE LAMBETH WALK, THINKING OF NO ONE BUT ME, TAKE IT ON THE CHIN

I must admit I was tempted to go down to Chichester this year to see their revival of Noel Gay's classic British musical ME AND MY GIRL but I stayed my booking hand as I wanted to hang on to the memory of the late Mike Ockrent's glorious production which made a home at the Adelphi Theatre for an amazing eight year run, improbably making nearly 50 year-old chestnuts like "Leaning On A Lampost", "The Sun Has Got His Hat On" and "The Lambeth Walk" popular again. This gender-reversal of MY FAIR LADY was given a zinger-overhaul by Stephen Fry and was blessed with a terrific cast who brought new life to some fairly hackneyed stereotypes; anyone who has seen 1930s British films will recognize them all: cheeky cockney, sensible girlfriend, posh man-eater, old codger, formidable dowager, upper-class twit, etc.  What Ockrent did was keep the show moving with peppy choreography by Gillian Gregory, who gave "The Lambeth Walk" a new shine and sent the actors out with it into the auditorium to close the first act, and to cast it with performers who knew how to connect the material to the audience.  Robert Lindsay found Bill a role perfect for his abrasive persona and went on to win both the Olivier Award (then called the SWET Award) and Tony Award when he transferred to Broadway with it.  ME AND MY GIRL gave me my first exposure to Emma Thompson - then known as an alternative comedian - and was lucky to meet her several times through a friend who was a huge fan of the show.  She had a delightful quality on stage - a great chemistry with Lindsay - she was funny of course but with a touching vulnerability when singing her big number "Once You Lose Your Heart"; she has recently been disparaging about having to be so relentlessly upbeat onstage for the length of her run which I think is rather churlish.  I must also mention the delicious Susannah Fellows who played the role of the vampish Lady Jacqueline with a brittle high-comedy elegance and a crystal-like singing voice. Maybe if a West End revival happens I might go - I think the time is right for some true escapism - but when you have seen the best..

Here are that original cast on the 1984 Royal Variety Performance negotiating the dull stage set while giving a curtailed version of "The Lambeth Walk".  Still, great to have as a memory...

DVD/150: REBECCA (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

Hitchcock ended his British career with the misjudged JAMAICA INN based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier and his Hollywood career began with another, REBECCA, and it remains one of his greatest - his only film to win the Best Picture Oscar.

Despite producer David O. Selznick's interference, Hitchcock's film is a triumph of sustained mystery.

A timid orphan, a paid companion to an overbearing American, is befriended in Monte Carlo by the suave widower Maxim de Winter who proposes to her; although he is occasionally remote, she accepts.

At his mansion Manderley, she finds everywhere the oppressive presence of Maxim's first wife Rebecca who drowned a year before.  Her nemesis is the disdainful, obsessed housekeeper Mrs Danvers who keeps Rebecca's bedroom as a shrine to her beloved mistress.

Vivien Leigh lobbied for the lead role but was considered too forceful a presence, leaving Joan Fontaine to triumph in it.

Shelf or charity shop?  An absolute keeper, for Hitchcock's masterly storytelling as well as Franz Waxman's swooning score, and the performances of Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, the wonderful Judith Anderson as Mrs Danvers, sexy George Sanders as Rebecca's cousin and lover, and delightful support from Gladys Cooper, Nigel Bruce and Florence Bates.

Redux: CAROLINE OR CHANGE at Playhouse / THE NUTCRACKER at Covent Garden

Now we are at the end of 2018 it was interesting to be able to look back at productions previously seen which are now revived: the Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori musical CAROLINE, OR CHANGE which transferred from Chichester to Hampstead earlier this year and is now shouting out at the Playhouse Theatre and also the Royal Ballet's evergreen - or ever-snowy - THE NUTCRACKER with choreography by Peter Wright.

It was good to see CAROLINE, OR CHANGE again and I found it again to be a musical that resists the urge to make it easy for it's audience, with five characters all locked in their own private mental spaces and who find connecting to be fraught with suspicion and defensiveness which makes for a difficult first act as it's hard to see where the audience's sympathies should lie.  However the second act reveals cracks in the characters' carapaces giving them the possibility of  connecting: mother to daughter, stepmother to stepson.

Sharon D. Clarke is still playing the Louisiana single mother Caroline Thibodeaux who supports her daughter and two sons by being the 'daily' for the Jewish Gellman family.  Caroline spends most of her time in the basement service room with the washing machine, the dryer and the radio - unsurprisingly the creators have these appliances personified and they sing songs that illustrate and comment on Caroline's situation.

Caroline is a defensive, guarded woman, quietly angry at the world and finds it hard to accept affection from any quarter, while her eldest daughter Emmie is quietly angry with society's attitudes and her mother's inability to accept change, Stuart Gellman is a widower still grieving for his dead wife although his has since remarried, his new wife Rose is growing more and more unhappy with her distant husband and his guarded son Noah who is himself still grieving for his dead mother and who constantly tries to engage with Caroline who is amiable but keeps him at arm's length. In the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, the characters all have to face up to change and all the implications of their actions.

Practically all the original cast have transferred to the Playhouse and the performances have grown with their exploration of the deeply woven characters: Lauren Ward and Alastair Brokenshaw as Rose and Stuart Gellman, Teddy Kempner as Rose's firebrand father from New York and Naana Agyei-Ampadu as Caroline's more outgoing fellow domestic Dotty. There is also stand-out support from Me'sha Bryan as the bubbly Washing Machine and Angela Caesar as the ever-watchful Moon.

Abiona Omonua is marvellous as Emmie who yearns to break free from her mother's demands to be submissive and to stay in her place; she has a lovely singing voice and has a vital presence on stage.  However the show is dominated by the mighty Sharon D. Clarke as Caroline, her solitary pain burns off the stage and you are on the edge of your seat waiting for her eventual explosion and indeed when she breaks and sings the searing "Lot's Wife" Clarke releases a tsunami of pent-up anger and pain that hits hard.  With this role, Sharon D. Clarke ascends to being a true theatre great, and her recent tv appearances in the new DOCTOR WHO will surely bring her a much-deserved wider fame.

Nigel Lilly's music direction brings Tesori's challenging score to vibrant life, Fly Davis' set and costumes look fine in their new home, Ann Yee's choreography is still thrilling and Michael Longhurst's direction holds the whole production together, quite the more remarkable for this being his first musical.  CAROLINE, OR CHANGE is booking until 6th April and I recommend it highly.

In a different world totally to Caroline and her basement is Peter Wright's glorious version of Tchaikovsky's THE NUTCRACKER at Covent Garden.  This was our third time seeing it but it is so magical it is always worth a re-visit. I don't think I can improve on what I blogged in 2015 after my first visit to it:  "The production is simply enchanting, radiating warmth and goodwill like a particularly large glass of mulled wine.  Helped immeasurably by the late Julia Trevelyan Oman's designs, Wright's take on the story has the magician Drosselmeyer mourning that his nephew has been transformed by an enemy into a nutcracker, as you do!  His chance to undo the spell comes with a Christmas invitation to a family where he gives the nutcracker to the young daughter Clara."

Clara and the newly-restored nephew have adventures before visiting the court of the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Prince and also experience the the divertissements organized by Drosselmeyer, and all danced to Tchaikovsky's magical score which features some of ballet's greatest hits.

We were spoilt in 2015 as we saw Francesca Hayward as Clara, Alexander Campbell as The Nutcracker, Gary Avis as Drosselmeyer, Iana Salenko as The Sugar Plum Fairy and Steven McRae as her Prince, a truly memorable cast which has not been replicated since, this year we had Emma Maguire as a vivacious Clara, Luca Acri as an athletic Nutcracker, Christopher Saunders as Drosselmeyer, Yasmine Naghdi as Sugar Plum and Ryoichi Hirano as the Prince.  They were all fine but lacking the star wattage of the 2015 cast, however we were lucky to have the wonderful Itziar Mendizabel as the focal point of the Arabian dance, sinuous and statuesque.

Christopher Carr staged it wonderfully again and the ROH Orchestra made Tchaikovsky's score flood the auditorium to the rafters under the baton of Barry Wordsworth.  If you have never experienced this production you really are missing a magical experience: all performances appear to be sold out for the rest of the run but it does get revived occasionally on cinema screens and the DVD of the production is also available.