50 Favourite Musicals: 19: TITANIC (1997) (Maury Yeston)

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: 1997, Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, NY

First seen by me: 2013, Southwark Playhouse, London

Productions seen: two

Score: Maury Yeston
Book: Peter Stone
Plot:  April, 1912: the 'unsinkable' RMS Titanic leaves Southampton to sail across the Atlantic Ocean to New York with a cross-section of society aboard.  It never arrived...

Five memorable numbers: GODSPEED: TITANIC, BARRETT'S SONG, LADY'S MAID, NO MOON, WE'LL MEET TOMORROW

There was a lot of raised eyebrows when it was announced that a musical was to appear on Broadway based on the sinking of the Titanic - it sounded like something from a comedy script; who would play the iceberg?  Was the stage going to tip up or would they just flood the theatre?  How would critics stop themselves from the obvious gags about the show going down with all hands etc.?  But then something rather odd happened... it opened and although there were some mixed reviews, there were also some raves including this from the New Yorker: "It seemed a foregone conclusion that the show would be a failure; a musical about history's most tragic maiden voyage, in which fifteen hundred people lost their lives, was obviously preposterous [but] astonishingly, TITANIC manages to be grave and entertaining, somber and joyful; little by little you realize that you are in the presence of a genuine addition to American musical theatre."  On the back of the positivity about it, I bought the Cast Recording and immediately fell in love with Maury Yeston's masterly score.  It takes in a wide range of contemporaneous musical styles of 1912: ragtime trots, Gilbert & Sullivan pastiches, stirring Elgar-esque themes, choral work, hymns, folk airs, all filtered through a traditional Broadway score of ballads and up-tempo numbers.  TITANIC found an audience on Broadway and ran for nearly two years - indeed, although James Cameron's film opened in December 1997, it actually helped increase the show's attendance rather than the reverse as was expected.  At awards time, it won each of the five Tony Awards it was nominated for including Peter Stone's sober book, Yeston's score and the big one, Best Musical.

Then something even odder happened: TITANIC became a much sought-after show for amateur dramatic companies, final-year student productions and international companies who all realized that the show's minimalist designs, recognizable name and possibilities for large casts made it ideal for them.  I had to wait 16 years until the Southwark Playhouse and director Thom Southerland took a chance on staging it and was completely won over by the show; I knew the score of course but loved how the late Peter Stone's book showed what could be achieved in storytelling within a musical setting and was struck how often he comes back to the fact that on Titanic everything depended on what class you were, even in the ultimate extreme of whether you lived or died.  Three years later, Southerland was made Artistic Director of the equally snug Charing Cross Theatre and it was great that his first production was a revival of his Southwark Playhouse TITANIC, giving more people a chance to see it and experience Yeston's breath-taking score.  Maury Yeston is represented by three musicals in my Top 50 - NINE (#39), GRAND HOTEL (#20) and now TITANIC (#19).  They are three scores that glow with excellence.  Now all together: "Sail on, Sail on / Great ship Titanic...."

There is a fair few TITANIC videos available on YouTube but they fall a bit short; the 1997 Broadway clips are not the best quality and most of the others are filmed amateur productions so I will stick to the trailer for Thom Southerland's Southwark production when it sailed over to the Charing Cross Theatre.

VIOLET at Charing Cross Theatre - Tesori's Travels...

Up until now, composer Jeanine Tesori has had a fairly low profile in the West End but recently it appears that Everything's Coming Up Jeanine.

First, her musical CAROLINE... OR CHANGE (2004) opened at the Hampstead Theatre then proved so successful it transferred to The Playhouse, closely followed by her Tony Award-winning musical FUN HOME (2011) opening at the Young Vic.  Although I think this is the better musical of the two, there does not seem to be any news as yet of a transfer.  We also - briefly - had a touring version of her 2004 musical of THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE.

And now - with a slight air of wagon-jumping about it - The Charing Cross Theatre is staging her 1997 chamber musical VIOLET in a production directed by the Japanese theatre director Shuntaro Fujita.  I would say her writing has got better but I find her a slippery composer at best.  I always leave a Tesori musical trailing the songs behind me and by the time I have got back home I usually cannot remember a single one.  Her songs usually seem to work while you are sitting in the theatre watching the show saying to yourself "ah this song fits well and is well-written" but turns opaque when thought of afterward - the only one where the score seemed to have left an impression has been FUN HOME.

As I said, her numbers occasionally strike me as interesting when I am facing the characters singing them, and she does have a particular knack of writing pastiche pop numbers - the children's bouncy pretend tv-ad song or Jackson 5-style family song in FUN HOME; the radio numbers in CAROLINE... OR CHANGE - but the main book songs tend to run into each other with no change in tone, as opposed to popping off the stage in contrast to each other.  Maybe the day she writes both songs and lyrics for a musical she will find a real sustained voice?  So to VIOLET... it is based on a short story by Doris Betts called "The Ugliest Pilgrim" and it feels it.  It has the air of generic Southern Gothic Americana, a bit like a cut-and-shunt job from Carson McCullers or Horton Foote.

1964: Violet is a young woman who was disfigured in an accident when a young girl, and is travelling on a Greyhound bus with a motley crew of other passengers from North Carolina to Tulsa in the hope that a brash televangelist will be able to perform a miracle on her face.  Because of her face, Violet is withdrawn and defensive of any curious people's attention but, despite this, she falls in with a poker game between two soldiers at a rest-stop in Tennessee.  Monty is a young corporal who enjoys poking fun at her while Flick, a black sergeant, is more respectful of her and obviously secretly is drawn to her.  After she takes umbrage at Monty's joshing, she sits apart from them but Flick seeks her out, attempting to boost her confidence.

The travellers stop-over in Memphis overnight and while out in a bar, Flick is angered when he sees Monty obviously trying it on with Violet.  Despite Violet calming him down, Monty later visits her room and they make love.  As the bus continues to Fort Worth where the soldiers will leave, Violet and Monty both rehearse how they will jilt the other but at the last minute Monty asks her to meet him at the bus station on her journey back.

Once in Tulsa she seeks out the televangelist who of course disappoints her in not taking her seriously, in her mind's eye she replaces the preacher for her father and rails at him for a lifetime of pain.  This catharsis makes Violet think that she has been cured and on the way back home, gets off the bus to find Monty and Flick waiting for her... who will Violet choose?

Sadly book and lyric writer Brian Crawley makes Violet such a chippy, miserable character that it is hard to feel any sympathy for her and, by inference, any of the other characters as they are mostly seen through her eyes.  Watching her '11 o'clock' ranting number at the Preacher and her Father, I just watched thinking "Ah you did this so much better in CAROLINE.. OR CHANGE", that time of course helped immeasurably by Sharon D. Clarke's titanic performance.

I was also precluded from any real involvement in Fujita's production by the fact that the sound was amplified so loud I was always aware that though the cast were singing only feet away on the in-the-round stage absolutely no sound came off them, everything blared out of the overhead speakers so by the end of the show I had convinced myself that they were all miming to a cd being played somewhere; in a space as small as the Charing Cross Theatre this is ridiculous.  I will give Shuntaro Fujita's direction a nod for making the pace fairly quick with it's minimal staging of tables and chairs being utilized well, it's just a shame that it held no real interest.

Kaisa Hammarlund, who played the narrator Allison in FUN HOME, certainly gave her all as Violet, it's just a shame that she could not make the character interesting.  There was good playing between Matthew Harvey as Monty and Jay Marsh as Flick, while Kieron Crook as Violet's Father and Kenneth Avery Clark as the Preacher also found moments to make an impression.

So there we go, another rather under-whelming production at Thom Southerland's Charing Cross Theatre, where in truth the only good productions have been his own of RAGTIME and TITANIC.  I am happy to have seen VIOLET but I don't think i will be getting on the bus with her again anytime soon.

DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY at Charing Cross Theatre - Time Out Of Life...

Thom Southerland's latest production as artistic director of the Charing Cross Theatre is the hitherto unseen 2011 musical DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY with a score by Maury Yeston and a book by Peter Stone and Thomas Meehan.  This follows on from Southerland's past success with Yeston's musicals GRAND HOTEL and TITANIC but sadly DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY is one of diminished returns.

After the success of TITANIC Yeston and bookwriter Peter Stone wanted a smaller canvas to work on and the release of the Brad Pitt turkey MEET JOE BLACK drove them back to that film's source material, LA MORTE IN VACANZA a 1924 Italian play which later became the Broadway success DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY and subsequent film starring Fredric March.

The musical took an astonishing 14 years from initial idea to stage and ironically one of the hold-ups was Peter Stone's death in 2003.  Yeston chose Broadway writer Thomas Meehan to complete the work but I felt this is reflected in the script which refuses to - um... - come to life.  Meehan's natural style is in musical comedy - ANNIE, THE PRODUCERS, HAIRSPRAY - so the existential drama of Death observing human reactions to him are an uncomfortable fit.

A rich Italian family are returning to their villa after celebrating their daughter's engagement but she is thrown from one of the cars as it spins out of the control, she is surprisingly unharmed from this accident.  A shadowy figure had been seen before the accident and the man later appears at the villa and reveals to the father that he is Death, still recovering from the exhaustion of his labours during the First World War and wishing to spend time with humans wanting to understand his effect on them and their dreams.

Disguised as a Russian prince, Death spends time with the family and guests but feels an unmistakable attraction for the daughter Grazia who is drawn to the mysterious stranger too, much to the anger of her fiancee Corrado.  Among the guests are the widow and best friend of Grazia's brother who was killed in the war and they both feel uneasy in the stranger's presence.  Nothing can stop Grazia's attraction to Death however, and as news filters through that no-one has died in the world since the week before, Grazia must decide where her future lies...

The allegorical source material is so unique that the chamber musical must hit the right tone and it is this that the production struggles with.  Southerland's direction and the cast are certainly po-faced but despite Matt Daw's atmospheric lighting and Morgan Large's economical but persuasive crumbling Italian villa, the production is let down by several ungainly performances and the downbeat, thin book.

Maury Yeston's score is certainly awash with doomy romance but too often it sounded like his TITANIC score: the solo number "Roberto's Eyes" sung by the dead son's friend as he describes a fatal plane crash was an almost note-for-note copy of TITANIC's "Mr Andrew's Vision" where the last moments of the ship are recounted.  The romantic ballads were too interchangeable and again a duet for an elderly loving couple only reminded one of the similar song for TITANIC'S Mr and Mrs Strauss.  Yeston is a good composer but bearing in mind how long the show took to write one would have hoped for more originality.

The cast with their cut-glass, stage school accents did little to suggest a Venetian family - Henley-On-Thames yes, Venice no.  There was also too little variety of performance across the quite large cast of 14, when they all crowded onto the set at times it made me think that a few characters could easily have been dropped to concentrate the attention more on the lead roles.

American actor Chris Peluso was a bit too lightweight to convince as Death as he hung around like a lovesick teenager at an ex's wedding but it was the performance of Zoe Doano as Grazia which made the production so earthbound, her shrill singing and showroom dummy performance did nothing to suggest Grazia's conflict in choosing life or death - she barely suggested if the choice was between red or clear nail varnish.  There were nice performances from James Gant as the butler Fidele, fearful of the new guest after finding out his secret, and Scarlett Courtney as a guest quietly in love with Grazia's fiancee but they shone only occasionally

There is a musical lurking within DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY but I suspect a few more years might be needed to get it exactly right, and certainly a new writer revisiting the source play.

Nice poster though... 

RAGTIME at Charing Cross Theatre - history keeps happening...

Director Thom Southerland is adept at choosing to direct musicals which might give other directors pause.  At the Southwark Playhouse, where he has worked most regularly recently, he has staged GRAND HOTEL, ALLEGRO, GREY GARDENS and TITANIC, four musicals that would never turn up in an established West End theatre; some need too big a cast or would be deemed too risky at the box-office.

His appointment to be artistic director of the previously troublesome off-West End Charing Cross Theatre this summer has given him the chance to revive his production of TITANIC (which has now won 6 off-West End theatre awards) and, after a hiccup with the cancellation of the second show - the nostalgic RADIO TIMES - Southerland has chosen another tricky musical as his next production, the Tony Award-winning RAGTIME.

Based on EL Doctorow's groundbreaking novel, which mixed fact and fiction to show the powder-keg of events in the New York of 1900, RAGTIME opened in 1998 which, although it ran for two years, did not recoup due to the blockbuster production costs.  The show has faults; Terrence McNally's book struggles at times with focus as he has to corral fourteen main and supporting characters throughout, there is certainly too much emphasis on the growing friendship of Mother and immigrant Tateh rather than the more powerful storyline involving black ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr.'s terrorist revenge attacks.

Although, as a whole, the score is a glorious explosion of turn-of-the-century pastiche numbers and tear-jerking ballads, Lynn Ahrens' lyrics sometimes overstate themselves in contrast to Stephen Flaherty's consistently excellent music.  But be that as it may, I have been a huge fan of the score since I first heard the original cast recording and again, it was fantastic to hear it 'live' on stage.

Sadly my main drawback with Southerland's otherwise hugely enjoyable production is the return of the dreaded "actor as musician" so we have the absurd directorial choice of Joanna Hickman as Evelyn Nesbitt singing her excellent solo "Crime of The Century" hidden behind a double bass and the only thing that the actor playing Harry Houdini wrestles out of is the accordion permanently strapped to his chest.  It was profoundly irritating, a hired band could easily have been stowed in one of the side balconies as the Donmar does when it stages musicals.

Among those not brandishing instruments were some very good performances: Anita Louise Combe was a wonderfully warm and sympathetic Mother and she literally rose to the occasion (while standing on a piano) to belt out the character's big belt song "Back To Before", the oddly angular Valerie Cutko, although physically wrong for the role, was very good as the communist firebrand Emma Goldman - who coincidentally said "If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution" which really should have been a title of a song for her.  I have always wondered how the communist anarchist Goldman would react had she known that she would feature in two Broadway musicals (the other being Sondheim's ASSASSINS)?

Ako Mitchell was an imposing presence as the vengeful Coalhouse Walker Jnr. but was sometimes a bit wonky in his higher notes however Jennifer Saayeng as his beloved and doomed Sarah was vocally very strong and gave a very centred and moving performance.  I liked Jonathan Stewart's Younger Brother who finally finds a purpose in blowing things up and there was a scene/song-stealing turn from Seyi Omooba (in her professional debut) who brought some serious church to the mournful "Till We Reach That Day".

Sadly for me two lead performances failed to really connect: Gary Tushaw as the Jewish immigrant Tateh was too overwrought (why did he think he was singing in the Albert Hall?) and Earl Carpenter was a touch too anonymous as Father, a shame as there is much to be mined in this character who refuses to acknowledge that his world has changed until it is too late.  A special mention too for Howard Harrison's atmospheric lighting design.

You have until December 10th to experience the majestic sweep of the Flaherty/Ahrens score - surely one of the greatest in the last 20 years - as well as Southerland's ingenious production.

Watching the show it slowly dawns on you that in these days of urban terrorism, distrust of immigrants, tawdry celebrity, America's questioning of itself and Black Lives Matter, the concerns of 1900 and RAGTIME are not that far away.  Highly recommended.

ALLEGRO at Southwark Playhouse - 69 years later, a London premiere...

The musicals of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II have received countless productions in the UK:  OKLAHOMA, CAROUSEL, SOUTH PACIFIC, THE KING AND I and THE SOUND OF MUSIC have all been frequently revived in London as well as countless touring versions and regional outings.  But nestled in between CAROUSEL and SOUTH PACIFIC, a musical was written and staged on Broadway which has had to wait 69 years for a London production.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ALLEGRO at the Southwark Playhouse...

If ALLEGRO is mentioned these days it's usually in connection with the fact that a teenage Stephen Sondheim was a gofer on the original production, secured through Hammerstein who was a father figure to the young Stephen as the son of divorced parents.

Sondheim has said that Hammerstein meant the show to reflect how he felt as the lyricist and book writer of two hugely successful shows namely that all the acclaim and glad-handing that followed OKLAHOMA and CAROUSEL took him away from his real love of writing.  Maybe so... but why choose such a hokey way of illustrate that problem?

Bless him, Oscar always wanted to push the musical form forward - this was the man who had been partly responsible for SHOW BOAT and then CARMEN JONES - so ALLEGRO initially was to tell the tale of a man from birth to death but that was scrapped early on but he stuck to the idea of an ensemble acting like a Greek chorus and also for dead characters to still be seen on stage, the fates who help the hero find his way back to the right road.

The trouble is that Hammerstein's Everyman story is just too un-involving and while Thom Southerland's cast give it their all, the idea to stage in a traverse production becomes deeply wearing after a while as the cast sweep from left to right to left to right to left with great purpose but little effect.  Table and chairs are press-ganged into other uses and a high moving platform gets moved left to right too but from where we were sitting it meant looking up the cast members' noses.

A son is born to a regional doctor and his doting wife who watch over his development with care - WARNING: little-boy-puppet alert - and after succeeding at college Joe jr. returns home and marries his childhood sweetheart Jennie.  All fairly standard but his mother and soon-to-be wife violently clash which results in the mother's death, and by the time we are into the second half, Jennie has become bored with country life and maneuvers Joe into taking a high-paid job in the Big Bad City.

Joe soon becomes swamped with rich hypochondriacs all demanding his time which makes him lose his focus on humbler patients but he is kept on-track by his practical (and secretly-loving) nurse Emily.  Both Joe jr. and nurse Emily are upset when a strike-leading nurse is sacked by the head doctor at the insistence of the hospital's main trustee, but how will Joe react when he realizes that Jennie is having an affair with the nasty trustee?

The character of Joe is too much of a cypher to become attached to and the sudden change of Jennie to being a soap-opera villainess is also too much of a contrivance so one latches onto nurse Emily in the second act thinking "finally, a character to root for" and she is played at Southwark with great verve by Katie Bernstein in the performance of the show.

Nurse Emily also sings the only really well-known song from the score "The Gentleman Is A Dope", the score is pleasant but slips by too easily; indeed, the only other song worth a damn was "So Far" which is sung by Beulah, a girl Joe dates for a night while at college who then vanishes from the plot completely!  Luckily the talented Leah West did not vanish from the show after singing "So Far" as she popped up again as the hospital trustee's utter bitch of a wife.

Thom Southerland has worked wonders with former Southwark Playhouse musicals like TITANIC, GRAND HOTEL and GREY GARDENS but with ALLEGRO it all stays fairly flat.

If he wants a little-seen musical to direct may I suggest Frank Loesser's THE MOST HAPPY FELLA, not seen in London since 1960?

TITANIC at the Charing Cross Theatre - Goin' down for a second time!

It's always nice when you see a musical staged that you never expected to see... it's even better when you get to see it again!

In 2013 I finally saw the musical TITANIC at the Southwark Playhouse.  I have been a big fan of Maury Yeston's wonderfully stirring score since first hearing the cast recording in 1997 when the show premiered on Broadway and just assumed that no London production would ever happen due to the risky prospect of the staging such a big show.  But the Southwark Playhouse seems to relish putting on shows that other West End producers might baulk at and although the show was naturally compromised by the size of the auditorium, cast and musicians, the quality of the show shone through.

And now the show's director Thom Southerland has been made the Artistic Director of the small Charing Cross Theatre and his lead show?  TITANIC - Yaay!  It's great that his fine production is getting another chance to be seen.  I am happy to say that the production has garnered some excellent reviews and it has been extended past it's closing date.

As much as I liked the original production there were one or two performances that pulled the focus in a bad way but I am happy to report that the cast here present a more unified whole.  There are quite a few of the cast returning from the original production and the new additions fit snugly in with them and like I said, they made a seamless ensemble - who also deserve much praise for the lightning speed in which they double and triple up in the character and ensemble roles they all have.

Of the new cast I liked David Bardsley's hissable Ismay, Helena Blackman's poised Lady Caroline, James Gant as the unflappable head waiter Mr Etches, Douglas Hansell's doomed Charles Clarke, Claire Machin's social-climbing Alice Beane and Peter Prentice as her exasperated husband Edgar.

It was a delight to see again Matthew Crowe's Harold Bride, the wireless operator who only lights up when talking about his machine, Victoria Serra as the vivacious (and secretly pregnant) Irish girl Kate McGowan eager to start a new life in America and Shane McDaid as her quick-thinking 'fella' Jim.

The ensemble singing again made the show thrilling as they belted out Maury Yeston's emotional score - GODSPEED TITANIC, LADY'S MAID and WE'LL MEET TOMORROW were all effortless tearjerkers. The late Peter Stone's book again stood out for what can be achieved in storytelling within a musical setting and I was struck how often he comes back to the fact that on Titanic everything depended on what class you were, even in the ultimate extreme of whether you lived or died.

David Woodhead's economical set fitted snugly onto the Charing Cross Theatre stage and again proved remarkably effective in changing locations aboard the ship - especially in the frantic action that takes place when the ship starts to sink.

Maury Yeston and Peter Stone's TITANIC is playing until the 13th August at the Charing Cross Theatre and, for me, it is currently the best show on in the West End.