The 12th Annual Chrissies: ...and the envelope please...

Here we go... eyes down for the 2018 Chrissies, now in their 12th year... I should get funding for this.

BEST DRAMA (Original/Revival)

THE INHERITANCE - Matthew Lopez (Noel Coward)

Nominees:

THE HUMANS (Hampstead) / THE LEHMAN TROLOGY (Lyttelton, NT) /
LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (Wyndhams) / OTHELLO (The Globe)

* 
BEST MUSICAL (Original/Revival)

  THE KING AND I - Richard Rodgers / Oscar Hammerstein II (London Palladium)

 Nominees:

CAROLINE, OR CHANGE (Hampstead, Playhouse) / COMPANY (Gielgud) / 

 FUN HOME (Young Vic) / HAMILTON (Victoria Palace)

*

BEST CLASSICAL PRODUCTION

 SWAN LAKE - Matthew Bourne (Sadler's Wells)

Nominees:

MANON / MAYERLING / THE NUTCRACKER / SWAN LAKE (all Covent Garden)

*

BEST ACTOR (Drama)

SIMON RUSSELL BEALE - The Lehman Trilogy (Lyttelton, NT)

 Nominees:

REED BIRNEY (The Humans) / JONATHAN PRYCE (The Height of The Storm) /
MARK RYLANCE (Othello) / KYLE SOLLER (The Inheritance)

*

BEST ACTRESS (Drama)

LESLEY MANVILLE - Long Day's Journey Into Night (Wyndhams)

Nominees:

EILEEN ATKINS (The Height of The Storm) / PATSY FERRAN (Summer and Smoke) / 
  LAURA LINNEY (My Name is Lucy Barton) / SOPHIE OKONEDO (Antony and Cleopatra)

*

BEST ACTOR (Musical)

GILES TERERA - Hamilton (Victoria Palace)

Nominees:

MARCUS BRIGSTOCKE (Barnum) / PATRICK PAGE (Hadestown) / 

KEN WATANABE (The King and I) / JAMAEL WESTMAN (Hamilton)

*

BEST ACTRESS (Musical)

SHARON D. CLARKE - Caroline, or Change (Hampstead & Playhouse)

 Nominees:

KAISA HAMMARLUND (Fun Home) / EVA NOBLEZEDA (Hadestown) / 

KELLI O'HARA (The King and I) / MEERA SYAL (Annie)

*

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR (Drama)

  SAMUEL H. LEVINE - The Inheritance (Noel Coward)

Nominees:

ADAM GODLEY (The Lehman Trilogy) / JOHN BENJAMIN HICKEY (The Inheritance) /  

PAUL HILTON (The Inheritance) / JONATHAN SLINGER (Fanny and Alexander)

*

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Drama)

VANESSA REDGRAVE - The Inheritance (Noel Coward)

Nominees:

ADJOA ANDOH (Julius Caesar) / HAYDN GWYNNE (The Way of The World) / 

  JAYNE HOUDYSHELL (The Humans) / PENELOPE WILTON (Fanny and Alexander)

*

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR (Musical)

 

MICHAEL JIBSON - Hamilton (Victoria Palace)

 Nominees:

ANDRE DE SHIELDS (Hadestown) / RICHARD FLEESHMAN (Company) / 

DAMIAN HUMBLEY (Spamilton) / JASON PENNYCOOKE (Hamilton)

* 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Musical)

  PATTI LUPONE - Company (Gielgud)

Nominees:

RACHEL JOHN (Hamilton) / ABIONA OMANUA (Caroline, or Change) / 

JENNA RUSSELL (Fun Home) / CELINDE SCHONEMAKER (Barnum)

*

BEST CLASSICAL MALE

LIAM MOWER - Swan Lake (Sadler's Wells)

Nominees:

ALEXANDER CAMPBELL (Manon) / JAMES HAY (Manon) / 

STEVEN McRAE (Mayerling) / MAX WESTWELL (Swan Lake)

*

  BEST CLASSICAL FEMALE

 ZENAIDA YANOWSKY - Elizabeth (Barbican)

 Nominees:

SARAH LAMB (Winter Dreams) / LAURA MORERA (Mayerling) / 

AKANE TAKADA (Manon) / AKANE TAKADA (Swan Lake)

*

BEST DIRECTOR

STEPHEN DALDREY - The Inheritance (Noel Coward)

Nominees:

MARIANNE ELLIOTT (Company) / RICHARD EYRE (Long Day's Journey Into Night) / 

JOE MANTELLO (The Humans) / SAM MENDES (The Lehman Trilogy)

*

BEST DESIGNER

  BOB CROWLEY - The Inheritance (Noel Coward)

 Nominees:

ES DEVLIN (The Lehman Trilogy) / ROB HOWELL (Long Day's Journey Into Night) / 

MICHAEL YEARGAN (The King and I) / DAVID ZINN (The Humans)

*

BEST LIGHTING

  JUSTIN TOWNSEND - The Humans (Hampstead)

Nominees:

JON CLARK (The Inheritance) / JON CLARK, LUKE HALLS (video) (The Lehman Trilogy) / PETER MUMFORD (Long Day's Journey Into Night) / BEN STANTON (Fun Home)

*

BEST CHOREOGRAPHY (Musical)

  ANDY BLANKENBUEHLER - Hamilton (Victoria Palace)

Nominees:

CHRISTOPEHR GATTELLI (The King and I) / REBECCA HOWELL (Barnum) / 

DANNY MEFFORD (Fun Home) / DAVID NEUMANN (Hadestown)

*

BEST CHOREOGRAPHY (Classical)

  SIR FREDERICK ASHTON- Les Patineurs (Covent Garden)

Nominees:

MATTHEW BOURNE (Swan Lake) / KENNETH McMILLAN (Manon) / 

 KENNETH McMILLAN (Mayerling) / LIAM SCARLETT (Swan Lake)

 *

and a Special Performance Award to the fantasic Bianca Del Rio for BLAME IT ON BIANCA DEL RIO at Hammersmith O2 - yes, that's me in the circle!

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.