A delighful near-hour long documentary which provides a general overview of the career of the quartet who sprang from the early 60s folk boom to be one of the most loved and still-relevant groups of the late 60s pop era.
With Cass long gone, the documentary features previously aired 1986 interviews with John Phillips, Michelle Phillips and Denny Doherty, by the 2004 filming for this documentary John had died, and Denny passed away in 2007.
The cracks that were there from the start of the group are referred to but the continual shifting aliances made them prone to drama - John's controlling nature led to Michelle having two affairs - one with Denny and one which led to her being fired for two months, Cass' unrequited love for Denny, and John and Cass's combustable relationship.
What remains is their glorious music and soaring harmonies and the pure timeless joy they made.
Shelf or charity shop? A defiinite shelf nominee... great footage of them singing together on tv shows with Cass and Denny larking about as they mime, a sweet segment on Cass' solo career and a glorious chance to wallow in the vocals of Denny and Cass, two of the most beguiling voices in pop.
A landmark of French New Wave cinema, LE QUATRE CENTS COUPS marked the directorial debut of Francois Truffaut, winning him the Best Director Award at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, remarkable as he had been banned from the 1958 festival for writing a swingeing critique on current French cinema.
Based on his own teenage years, Truffaut cast 15 year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud and they would make another six films together, four of them following Antoine becoming a man.
Parisian Antoine lives with his parents in a small flat. His father is amiable but his mother is emotionally cold. Antoine sees her kissing a man one day and she sees him, but neither mentions it.
Bored by school and draconian teachers, Antoine plays truant but his subsequent excuse is discovered and he starts a descent to being arrested, his parents disowning him and being sent to a youth detention centre.
Shelf or charity shop? I suspect this will be one ultimately for the charity shop but you cannot deny Truffaut's wonderful achievement or his excellent handling of his actors and in particular Léaud who ice-cold stare looks out at you from the famous freeze-frame ending - escaping from the detention centre, he runs to a nearby beach and turning away from the expanse of the sea, he looks into the camera... what does life hold for a boy whose only real crime is restlessness?
If you thought THE ROLLING STONES ROCK 'N' ROLL CIRCUS documentary was the longest between filming and release at 28 years, think again; AMAZING GRACE took 46 years!
In 1972, Aretha decided to record her first gospel album with Atlantic Records, recorded live over two nights at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in LA. with friend Reverend James Cleveland and his Southern California Community Choir.
Director Sydney Pollack filmed it for a documentary but his twenty hours of footage proved impossible to synch as no clapperboards had been used during filming so the sound could not be matched to the visuals. The footage was consigned to Warners' vaults.
Aretha's producer Jerry Wexler mentioned the film to fellow producer Alan Elliott in 2007; he contacted the terminally ill Pollack who allowed him to use the footage.
Aretha then stopped the film's release, but after her death, her estate allowed it.
Shelf or charity shop? A shelf candidate: as anyone who knows the album can tell, Aretha was in transcendent form with a soaring voice that finds the church in every song or hymn, what is remarkable is that she says *nothing* to the audience! The film shows how wonderfully the Southern California Community Choir surround her with marvellous choral work under the direction of the energetic leader Alexander Hamilton. In an audience that includes Aretha's preacher father CL Franklin, the gospel singer Clara Ward and Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts, there is only one star in the building...
Two
years after winning an Academy Award for MILDRED PIERCE, Joan Crawford's career was still on a high when she starred in POSSESSED, one of her most challenging
roles as a woman whose obsession love sends her deep into neurotic darkness.
POSSESSED was directed by Curtis Bernhardt whose Film Noir style is noticeable from the start as a woman
wanders in a daze in the early morning streets of LA, stopping strangers
asking if they are 'David'...
Confined to a hospital, through flashbacks we learn that Louise was a live-in nurse to the spiteful invalid wife of businessman Dean Graham; she is obsessively in love with his neighbour David Sutton but he rejects her. When Mrs Graham is found drowned, Louise draws closer to Mr Graham much to the suspicion of his daughter Carol.
But when David returns unexpectedly into their lives, Louise's mind starts to become slowly deranged...
Shelf or charity shop? One for the shelf as it's a solid Warner Brothers melodrama made more involving by the Film Noir cinematography and Crawford's committed performance as a woman pushed over the edge by dangerous love. But one wonders if Van Heflin really could inspire such obsession in anybody?
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. So here we are... a year and 10 months in the
making and we have reached the stage musical that is my favourite ever -
and I cannot name one out of the four shows that I have left to
consider.
I have tried every criteria, every angle and there is simply no way I
can say that one of the four is better than the other. So let's
go... my Top Four Number One's (in alphabetical order)
First performed: 1979, Uris Theatre, NY
First seen by me: 1985, Half Moon Theatre, London
Productions seen: ten
Score: Stephen Sondheim
Book: Hugh Wheeler
Plot: Sweeney Todd arrives back in Victorian London, rescued from a floating raft by young sailor Anthony, He visits the Fleet Street pie shop of the widow Nellie Lovett who recognises him as Benjamin Barker, the barber who worked above her shop fifteen years before. Barker was transported to Australia by the corrupt pair Judge Turpin and Beadle Bamford so the
Judge could rape Barker's wife Lucy. Mrs Lovett tells Sweeney his wife poisoned herself and his young daughter Johanna is now the Judge's ward who he intends to marry. Mrs Lovett presents him with his old razors and he starts to work again, plotting his revenge - and as the bodies pile up, Mrs Lovett has a solution...
Five memorable numbers: A LITTLE PRIEST, THE WORST PIES IN LONDON, THE BALLAD OF SWEENEY TODD, JOHANNA, PRETTY WOMEN
,
In 1973, while in London for the UK premiere of GYPSY, Stephen Sondheim
went to the Theatre Royal Stratford East to see Chris Bond's
version of the melodrama SWEENEY TODD. Sondheim enjoyed the Grand Guignol
atmosphere and how street songs were incorporated into the action but
what really excited him was how Bond changed the plot from a
penny-dreadful melodrama into a revenge thriller with Sweeney seeking
vengeance on Judge Turpin: an idea was
born. In 1979, SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF LONDON opened on Broadway starring Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury and, the following year, in London with Denis Quilley and Sheila Hancock and although audiences couldn't warm to the American take on a London villain, London has since taken the show
to it's heart as was Sondheim's original wish - the original production
(despite it's short run) won the Olivier Award for Best Musical and it has since won two further
Oliviers for Best Musical Revival.
Over time I realised I could happily watch a good production of SWEENEY TODD every day.
I have seen it ten times with only two productions I didn't like - a
ghastly am-dram one at the Bloomsbury Theatre in 1992 and the actor/musician John Doyle production that most loved but just got on my nerves. I think eight out of ten is a very
good batting average. The show is a good example of why Sondheim always gives praise to
his book writers. Hugh Wheeler's book for SWEENEY is a classic of
musical storytelling, there are nine main characters who are all vividly
drawn and it not only stands up to repeated viewings but the book
always throws up things I had never noticed before; despite the different directorial takes on it, it just *works*. Sondheim's score acts as an aural fog that whisps, curls and evelopes the characters through the plot, not only through the songs but the relentless underscoring that happens throughout the show, which gives the audience a feeling of foreboding... that all the characters are on a moving path to a very dark place. What I particularly love about the show is, after the introductory "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" which gives you a flavour of the ominous atmosphere of the show, you are pitched right into the action with Sweeney and Anthony arriving in London, having their first meeting with the Beggar Woman, and onto the visit to the Pie Shop and the first appearance of Mrs Lovett - all within ten minutes.
Then you are off on the wonderful runaway ghost train that is SWEENEY TODD, an unstoppable ride to it's shattering conclusion. As I have
often said, the final 20 minutes of the show - if done right - should be
one of the most relentlessly scary things you can experience, even if
you know the show It has an internal motor that if stoked properly
keeps gathering pace leaving dead bodies in it's wake and an icy, clammy grip on
the back of your neck. My first introduction to the musical was through the Broadway cast recording which, for me, is still is the definitive version of the score, capturing the remarkable performances of Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury. In 1981 the US tour was filmed in Los Angeles with Lansbury's outrageous, glorious turn as Nellie Lovett immortalised with George Hearn, partnering her perfectly as Sweeney. It's interesting that when first offered the role Lansbury hesitated - she pointed out the show was called SWEENEY TODD and was reluctant to play what she felt was a less-than-lead role. Sondheim 'auditioned' some of Mrs Lovett's songs for her and she realised that she was being given the chance to create from the ground up such a memorable character and she was onboard. My first experience seeing it live was at the long-gone Half Moon Theatre in 1985, directed by Chris Bond, the writer of the original play that Sondheim had seen 12 years before. It was wonderful to see it finally and to see the book and score working as one, and it starred Leon Greene's larger-than-life Sweeney. In 1989 I saw it again, this time on Broadway at the Circle In The Square, the first of many 'chamber' versions of the show, with Bob Gunton and Beth Fowler as the killer couple.
SWEENEY made a triumphant return to London in the National Theatre's production directed by Declan Donnellan in 1993. Staged again in a 'chamber' version, it was a wonderfully thrilling production with an excellent cast of Alun Armstrong as Sweeney, Adrian Lester as a charismatic Anthony, Barry James as Beadle Bamford and Denis Quilley, London's original Sweeney, now playing Judge Turpin. But they were overshadowed by Julia McKenzie's magnificent Mrs Lovett - a gin-soaked cockney harridan, hilarious and amoral. She deservedly won the Olivier Award for Best Actress and later, when the show transferred to the larger Lyttelton Theatre shared the stage with Quilley again, this time returning to the role of Sweeney, Sadly this was the last Sondheim role Julia played onstage. The production never had a cast recording issued but the Radio 4 full-length broadcast is available on YouTube. In 2000 the Bridewell Theatre - too close to Fleet Street for comfort - staged a prominade performance with a memorable Mrs Lovett from Jessica Martin.
In the 2010s I saw three contrasting versions: Chichester gave us Jonathan Kent's dingy between-the-wars version with Michael Ball as Sweeney and Imelda Staunton as Mrs Lovett. Imelda gave us an all-too-real Mrs Lovett, gimlet-eyed and itching to be respectable, while Michael Ball downplayed his natural exuberance to almost a monotone. I then saw the concert version at the London Coliseum directed by Lonny Price starring Bryn Terfel as Sweeney who of course sang the bejesus out of it and Emma Thompson finally onstage again as Mrs Lovett, playing up the comedy but also finding the step-up to the drama at the end. It's a key moment in the second act when, while singing "Not While I'm Around", Tobias realises that Sweeney killed his boss, and, attempting to distract him, Mrs Lovett joins him in singing that nothing's going to harm him; you have to feel the murdererous intent behind the grotesque comedy harridan at that point - it's always a chilling moment and the great actresses who have played the role such as Lansbury, McKenzie, Staunton and Thompson can manage that transformation with ease. The last production I saw was in 2016 in a final-year production by the Royal Academy of Music's Musical Theatre students, what made it special was it was at the Theatre Royal Stratford East where 43 years before, Sondheim first saw Chris Bond's original.
Again, a true wealth of video is available for SWEENEY TODD on YouTube - as I said, the full Radio 4 broadcast of Denis Quilley and Julia McKenzie in the NT's production is there - so I shall stick with that production and Julia's full-throttle "Worst Pies In London" from that year's Olivier Awards ceremony...
Then Bryn Terfel's Sweeney and Emma Thompson as Mrs Lovett delighting in her new receipe for meat pies in "A Little Priest"
and finally, the music-hall out-front performance of Lansbury, secretly laying her own plans by giving George Hearn's Sweeney only some of the truth in "Poor Thing":
I hope you have enjoyed reading about these 50 great musicals as much as I have blogging about them...
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. So here we are... a year and 10 months in the
making and we have reached the stage musical that is my favourite ever -
and I cannot name one out of the four shows that I have left to
consider.
I have tried every criteria, every angle and there is simply no way I
can say that one of the four is better than the other. So let's
go... my Top Four Number One's (in alphabetical order)
First performed: 1959, Broadway Theatre, NY
First seen by me: 1989, St. James Theatre, NY
Productions seen: four
Score: Jule Styne / Stephen Sondheim
Book: Arthur Laurents
Plot: Based on Gypsy Rose Lee's memoir and set against the decline of vaudeville, the unstoppable Rose travels around the country with the song-and-dance act featuring her daughters June and Louise. Rose is obsessed with making June a star - whether she wants it or not - while Louise is overlooked emotionally. However when June suddenly marries and quits the act, Rose switches her ambition... now Louise will be a star. But as she can't sing or dance, how can she become a star?
Five memorable numbers: ROSE'S TURN, YOU GOTTA GET A GIMMICK, EVERYTHING'S COMING UP ROSES, IF MOMMA WAS MARRIED, "GYPSY" OVERTURE
Despite being one of the greatest musicals ever written, there is one imbalance that every production confronts: the title character is not the one the show is built around, nor cast with a star. Arthur Laurents was faced with adapting Gypsy's memoir while she was still alive which might explain why the character of Louise seems slightly blank. However Louise comes into her own midway
through the second act and become a match for her mother towards the
end. This is a difficult ask as Rose is always cast with powerhouse
performers in a role that is proven to be one of the biggest in musical
theatre so whoever is cast as Louise has to be able to step up to this.
David Merrick produced the original Broadway show as a vehicle for Ethel Merman that was to be directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, his first musical since WEST SIDE STORY. But choosing a composer was more problematic: former Merman composers Irving Berlin and Cole Porter both declined saying they couldn't see how to approach it, so Robbins and Laurents asked their WEST SIDE STORY lyricist Stephen Sondheim as they knew he wanted to be the sole composer of a show. But Merman refused to trust an untried composer as her last Broadway show had been written by unknown writers and she disliked the experience intently. While happy for Sondheim to be lyricist, she asked for the music to be trusted to Jule Styne, composer of GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES and BELLS ARE RINGING. Sondheim wanted to quit as he did not want to just write lyrics but his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II advised he accept as it would be an ideal chance to write for a specific - and unique - star. As it turned out, Styne was ego-free and they collaborated well together. Like GUYS AND DOLLS, GYPSY is a seamless show where the score and book work in a perfect relationship, the songs springing naturally out of the action and always moving the plot forward. What GYPSY also has is one of the greatest overtures for any Broadway show, running at just over 5 minutes, it bounces you around the show's wonderfully varied moods, I particularly love the section where the gentle ballad "Small World" skips along only to be elbowed out of the way by the sleazy, strutting burlesque strip music.
The original production received 8 Tony Award nominations but lost them all to either THE SOUND OF MUSIC or FIORELLO! Of the five actresses who have played Rose on Broadway, all have been
Tony Award-nominated with Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly and Patti LuPone
winning. Lansbury also won the London
Critic's Circle Award for Best Actress, the first time it had been given
to a musical actress. For the last revival of GYPSY in London, Imelda Staunton rightly won both the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards. It is incredible to think that between Angela Lansbury in the London premiere and Imelda Staunton in it's first London revival it was a wait of 40 years... did no one think Julia McKenzie would have been a perfect Rose in the 1980s or 1990s? I first saw GYPSY onstage in New York when Tyne Daly made the show a personal triumph in her first theatre role after finding television fame in CAGNEY AND LACEY. I then saw Lynda Baron deliver an excellent performance in a production at Cheltenham in 1993 but then had to endure a long wait until 2008 when we saw Patti LuPone - oddly enough at the same theatre as Tyne Daly and with the same director, the book-writer Arthur Laurents. We saw her the Saturday after her opening night - it was a surreal experience to be seeing it so soon after the critics had ordained it as The show to see - the audience screaming and clapping at everything that moved, even the dog playing Chowsie. Patti LuPone is always an experience best seen onstage and she certainly took no prisoners, making no attempt to sugar-coat the monster in Rose, but ultimately she didn't surprise me... I got the performance I was expecting from her. Imelda on the other hand...
Under Jonathan Kent's direction, Imelda Staunton inhabited Rose from the inside out: her tenacious, terrier-like,
attack on the world to make one of her daughters a star, the
tough-as-nails exterior covering up a damaged child's vulnerability, it was all
there; at various points Rose is described as "always being in the middle of a sentence" and "a pioneer woman without a frontier" and that's what Imelda delivered. But truly hair-raising was how she took on the two act-closing
solos where any actress playing Rose has to go from 0-to-100 in as many
minutes. Discovering June has rejected
both her and the act, Rose switches her dreams
to unprepared Louise by declaring "Everything's Coming Up
Roses". Staunton's Rose was so
caught up in her vision that she hugged Louise to her only to cast her aside as she went for her scorching final note, button-holed
with her twirling her coat around, off to start her burning
new mission. Laurents' book really comes into it's own in the final section of the musical: Louise is now Gypsy Rose Lee, the top-billed star at Minsky's Burlesque Theatre, and Rose sneaks backstage where she is not permitted. They finally confront each other and when Rose angrily demands an answer to why she did all the fighting and pushing to get Louise her stardom, Gypsy coldly retorts "I thought you did it for me Mama". Alone on the empty stage, Rose finally releases her long-bottled-up
rage at all those who have walked out on her with the scorching "Rose's
Turn". This legendary number - a mental breakdown performed to a
bump-and-grind beat - is what the whole show has been building to and
any actress playing the role has to be up to it's tricky challenges. Imelda totally nailed it: the sarcasm, the anger, the despair and the
mania that she had hinted at earlier all came together in an
all-too-human performance. Resisting the temptation to chew the
scenery, Staunton kept it in check which made it all the more thrilling.
The remarkable thing about Laurents' book is how each of the major characters are nursing a dream: Rose wants her daughters to have the fame and stardom denied to her, Herbie wants Rose to marry him and give up struggling to achieve her dream, Louise wants stability and the attention she is missing, June wants to break away from her mother's tyrannical grip and live her own life - even Tulsa, the dancer Louise secretly has a crush on, has his dream of being a successful dancer onstage with a female dance partner. The only ones who don't are the three strippers Mazeppa, Tessie and Electra: they have done it all and they are past dreaming. But what they can do is educate Louise to the secret of being a successful stripper in the magnificent "You Gotta Get A Gimmick" I have yet to see a production where this number doesn't raise the roof. GYPSY is a musical that, like GUYS AND DOLLS, is a tribute to the Broadway musical's Golden Age and how a collaboration between genuine artists all working to a common goal can make a timeless classic.
Merman, Russell, Lansbury, Daly, Midler, Peters, LuPone, Staunton... I mean, I know someone is going to be disappointed. So I am going to go for the clearest video I can find which happens to be Imelda Staunton with Lara Pulver and Peter Davison in the whole last scene of Act I which leads up to "Everything's Coming Up Roses". Until I saw it within the context of the show I never realised that what sounds otherwise like a gung-ho song of optimism is actually a song of pure delusion on Rose's part - just watch the subtle shifts in Imelda's performance as she works through the song and her physical manhandling of Louise; Louise is just a prop for Rose to get her revenge on June who has abandoned her, It's a perfect example of Laurents' excellent book and Styne and Sondheim's perfect score serving each other to give us an unforgettable experience.
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. So here we are... a year and 10 months in the
making and we have reached the stage musical that is my favourite ever -
and I cannot name one out of the four shows that I have left to
consider.
I have tried every criteria, every angle and there is simply no way I
can say that one of the four is better than the other. So let's
go... my Top Four Number One's (in alphabetical order)
First performed: 1950, 46th Street Theatre, NY
First seen by me: 1982, Olivier Theatre, London
Productions seen: seven
Score: Frank Loesser
Book: Jo Swerling / Abe Burrows
Plot: Set in Damon Runyon's New York of gamblers, gangsters and showgirls. Nathan Detroit has nowhere to hold his all-night crap game, the cops have their eyes on him and he is fending off the growing impatience of his fiancee, cabaret singer Miss Adelaide, after an engagement of 14 years. Nathan finds a location but needs to raise an advance payment of $1,000. Desperate for the dough, he bets legendary gambler Sky Masterson the same amount that he cannot take strait-laced Sgt Sarah Brown from the local Save-A-Soul Mission to dinner in Havana. There's no way he can lose the bet... is there?
Five memorable numbers: SIT DOWN YOU'RE ROCKING THE BOAT, LUCK BE A LADY, I'VE NEVER BEEN IN LOVE BEFORE, ADELAIDE'S LAMENT, MORE I CANNOT WISH YOU
GUYS nearly lost out on a shared Number 1 spot simply because I have seen a few productions that I felt had
not done it justice but eventually I had to
overlook this as the first one I saw was definitive and I feel oddly protective of the show. GUYS AND DOLLS literally changed my life.
In 1950, producers Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin announced a new musical based on Damon Runyan's short stories THE IDYLL OF MISS SARAH BROWN and BLOOD PRESSURE and chose Frank Loesser to write the score, fresh from his debut Broadway success WHERE'S CHARLEY? and winning an Academy Award for writing "Baby It's Cold Outside" the previous year. The job of adapting the stories was given to Jo Swerling who was later replaced by Abe Burrows - however by that time, Loesser had nearly completed the score, so Burrows had the double chore of writing a new funnier script while also slotting in Loesser's songs. He succeeded wonderfully as GUYS AND DOLLS is judged to have one of the greatest books in Broadway history. The show was an instant hit when it opened, winning five Tony Awards and running for 1,200 performances. London first saw it in 1953 with Sam Levene and Vivian Blane repeating their Broadway roles of Nathan and Miss Adelaide. Two years later, Blane played Adelaide in the hit film version with Sinatra, Brando and Jean Simmons.
In 1971 Laurence Olivier was going to stage GUYS AND DOLLS for the National Theatre at the Old Vic with him as Nathan, Geraldine McEwan as Adelaide and Denis Quilley as Sky but his poor health at the time gave the NT Board a reason to cancel it; the thinking being should they really be staging an American musical? In 1982 when Richard Eyre was invited by Peter Hall to stage three shows at the National Theatre he still had to battle this opposition but successfully - and rightfully - argued that GUYS AND DOLLS was as much a classic of American Theatre as anything by O'Neill, Williams or Miller. He had the perfect team with David Toguri as choreographer, set designer John Gunter and lighting designer David Hersey's eye-popping sets featuring Times Square neon signs hanging over the stage and Sue Blaine's vivid costumes.
Before 1982 I went to the theatre to look at stars; Joan Collins, Elizabeth Taylor, Tom Bell, Cheryl Campbell etc. and that was exactly why I wanted to see GUYS AND DOLLS at the National - Ian Charleson was my new acting hero after CHARIOTS OF FIRE, Julie Covington was a heroine from ROCK FOLLIES and I loved Bob Hoskins from PENNIES FROM HEAVEN and THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY. Of course the show sold out from the off and I was clueless how I would get to see it. The NT then announced they would have a Bargain Night - all seats in it's three theatres at £2 each to personal callers on the day, I was up for the challenge. I arrived at 7am to join one of the longest queues I had ever seen and when they opened, I slowly shuffled to the door, sure it would be sold out - I walked away with two front-row seats! And so it came to pass that at 7:15pm on August 6th 1982, my life changed. I suddenly experienced the alchemy that can happen between an audience and a cast of extraordinary performers, they generated pure stage electricity which we returned with loud excitement. I went back countless times after that performance, even sleeping overnight outside the box office door with other front-row regulars which was a wonderful experience where I made new friends. I went back to relive that magical first time, sometimes it happened, but each experience made me realise that I was now a theatre fan.
'A good cast is worth repeating' was frequently seen at the end of old films so here they are - William Armstrong, Mark Bond, James Carter (equally memorable as Chicago gangster Big Jule and a Havana drag queen!), Ian Charleson (unforgettable as Sky, wry and laid back but singing in a glorious tenor voice), Sally Cooper, Julie Covington (a perfect steely Sgt. Sarah), Irlin Hall, David Healy (winning the SWET Award for Best Musical Supporting Performance as the jovial Nicely-Nicely Johnson), Fiona Hendley, Bob Hoskins (delicious as the exasperated Nathan Detroit), Rachel Izen (giving some serious face as a jaundiced Hot Box Girl), Julia McKenzie (winner of the SWET Award for Best Musical Actress as the definitive Miss Adelaide, hilarious but wistful, a real belter with a bawdy laugh), John Normington (touching as Sarah's protecting grandfather and always able to make me blub singing "More I Cannot Wish You"), Robert Oates, Bill Paterson (a great conniving Harry The Horse), Kevin Quarmby, Robert Ralph, Barrie Rutter (a shuffling Benny Southstreet straight off Runyon's pages), Bernard Sharpe, Belinda Sinclair, Imelda Staunton (a sour-faced Hot Box Girl and a hilariously short Cuban dancer), Harry Towb (a perfect blustering Lt. Brannigan), Larrington Walker, Richard Walsh, Norman Warwick and Kevin Williams (stealing each scene he was in). Stars all, some shining from afar now. This wonderful cast came together one last time in November 1990 to play a matinee and evening performance to honour the memory of both Ian Charleson and Norman Warwick who had both died in the past year: a very special memory.
Needless to say I have yet to see a production to match this although the subsequent revivals of Eyre's prodution gave us a sizzling Sky Masterson from Clarke Peters, Imelda's feisty Adelaide when she took over from Julia, Betsy Brantley's sweet-voiced Sarah and a memorable Nathan Detroit from Bernard Cribbins. The 2005 Donmar production that played at the Piccadilly Theatre couldn't really compete with the show ingrained in my mind but had nice performances from Jane Krakowski as a sexier Miss Adelaide and Jenna Russell as a dry-as-dust Sgt. Sarah. It ran for two years however, The recent 2014 Chichester revival and subsequent West End transfer directed by Gordon Greenberg made me happier though as did the neon-bright performance of Sophie Thompson as Miss Adelaide, Jamie Parker as Sky and David Haig as Nathan Detroit; I remember thinking as my fellow audience members in the Chichester auditorium lapped up Frank Loesser's classic score and Abe Burrows' great gags and sympathetic characters that hopefully there was a young theatregoer who would discover the magic of theatre through this glorious show.
There was only one choice for a video... THE SOUTH BANK SHOW did a profile on Richard Eyre and his company in rehearsal so here is a wonderful chance to savour the pure pleasure they gave me - Ian Charleson singing "Luck Be A Lady", the opening number "Runyonland", Julia McKenzie and the Hot Box Girls singing "Bushel and A Peck", Julie Covington singing "I'll Know" to Ian, Bob Hoskins with James Carter, Bill Paterson and Barrie Rutter in the crap-game scene, Ian singing "I've Never Been In Love Before" to Julie, and finally David Healy stopping the show as he always did with "Sit Down You're Rocking The Boat".
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. So here we are... a year and 10 months in the making and we have reached the stage musical that is my favourite ever - and I cannot name one out of the four shows that I have left to consider.
I have tried every criteria, every angle and there is simply no way I can say that one of the four is better than the other. One nearly lost the shared top place when I considered productions of it that I felt had not done it justice but, with that particular show, I simply had to overlook that, bearing in mind the first I saw was definitive. So let's go... my Top Four Number One's (in alphabetical order)
First performed: 1971, Winter Garden Theatre, NY
First seen by me: 1985, Forum Theatre, Wythenshawe
Productions seen: four
Score: Stephen Sondheim
Book: James Goldman
Plot: In 1971, onstage at the derelict Weismann Theatre on the eve of it's demolition, producer Dimitri Weismann holds a reunion of the stars and chorus girls of his "Follies" which ran between the World Wars. Old songs and routines are remembered, stirring up the ghosts of their younger selves. But for former best friends and chorus girls, Sally and Phyllis and their husbands, salesman Buddy and diplomat Ben, it becomes a night of bitter recriminations and the chance for lost love to be found again... what will the cruel light of day reveal?
Five memorable numbers: LOSING MY MIND, IN BUDDY'S EYES, WHO'S THAT WOMAN, I'M STILL HERE, ONE MORE KISS
In 1965, Sondheim and writer James Goldman wanted to collaborate on a project together and agreed on Goldman's idea of a murder mystery set at a
showgirls reunion. The murder plot stalled but
the showgirls reunion intrigued them especially how regrets for what
one did and more importantly didn't do, can haunt your life. Five years later, Sondheim was keen to follow up the success of his groundbreaking COMPANY with the show's producer/director Hal Prince and choreographer Michael Bennett and, when Prince heard of the reunion idea, he had an immediate visual reference: a 1960 Life magazine
photograph of a glamorous but fragile 61 year-old Gloria Swanson, standing in the
rubble of the Roxy Cinema in New York which had opened in 1927 with her film
THE LOVES OF SUNYA. Prince felt this captured the essence of the project
- the survivor, the glamour and the ruin.
Goldman and Sondheim brought in the bittersweet marital discord found in COMPANY and FOLLIES was born. Prince's 1971 production ran for 522 performances but lost over $720,000, due of huge production costs and audience
ambivalence - despite 'names' like film stars Alexis Smith and Yvonne de
Carlo, 1950s singer Dorothy Collins, Broadway star John McMartin and veteran performers Ethel Shutta and
Fifi D'Orsay, audiences found Goldman's book too downbeat. It won seven
of the ten Tony Awards it was nominated for but failed to win Best
Musical. Cult status grew through the original cast album but sadly
Capitol Records only released it on a single album meaning a lot of the score was abridged or not recorded. The show has had two further Broadway revivals in 2001 and
2011, but lost out winning the Best Musical Revival Tony Award both
times.
1985 was my FOLLIES year! To rectify the abridged 1971 recording decision, Herbert Ross staged two concert versions at Lincoln Center to be recorded
over both nights by Thomas Z Shepherd for RCA featuring the full score with a jaw-dropping cast of Barbara
Cook, Lee Remick, George Hearn, Mandy Patinkin, Elaine Stritch, Carol
Burnett, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, etc. which is the nigh-on definitive recording. But
before this, I had seen my first FOLLIES production in
Wythenshawe, Manchester, directed and choreographed by the under-valued Paul Kerryson and starring the wonderful Josephine Blake, The production swept me away, making me yearn for a London transfer.
However, when FOLLIES finally opened in London in 1987, it was with several new songs and a more upbeat ending; producer Cameron Mackintosh had asked the creators to 'revisit' the material to make it more optimistic - Goldman was happy
to, Sondheim less so. After seeing a preview, I was outside the Shaftesbury Theatre stage door
and Sondheim came out on his own. While he signed my programme, I told him I had seen the Manchester production; he
shot me a look and asked which I preferred. Cautiously I said that,
while loving Julia McKenzie, David Healy, Dolores Gray and Lynda
Baron in the new version, I felt that Manchester had the edge for being more true to the material. He replied that while shows
can always stand a revision, it was always possible to return to the
original. Point taken Steve...
In 2006, FOLLIES reappeared in the unlikely location of the Landor Theatre in Clapham which
seated a mere 48 people above a pub! But any lack of grandeur
was compensated with a cast guaranteed to make any 1980s musicals fan giddy: Sarah Payne, Claire Moore, Adele Anderson,
Rachel Izen, Carol Ball and Roni Page among others. This small production scored over the National Theatre's opulent 2017 version in one key element which was also there in 1971: then as at the Landor, the cast were chosen not only for their talents but also because to most of the audience, they would conjure up memories of seeing them in earlier shows back in the day. For FOLLIES to truly work I believe that an audience must have that nostalgic connection to the actors onstage - particularly for those who appear in the smaller but pivotal roles of the former Follies performers, then the audience can supply their own 'ghosts' for the performers; dimly remembered memories of them in previous shows.
It was with trepidation that I watched the National's FOLLIES for the first time in 2017 - I had longed for a production to be done on that stage for so many years, could it measure up? Yes it did - despite the lack of 'names' in the smaller roles, despite Tracie Bennett's mugging through "I'm Still Here" - I got the FOLLIES I have yearned for. Because when
it hit, it hit hard and with astonishing
performances wherever you looked: Imelda Staunton's despairing Sally, Janie Dee's bone-dry Phyllis. Philip Quast's crumbling Ben, but especially Josephine Barstow's tear-enducing "One More Kiss" - that the production managed to cast one of Britain's great operatic
divas for the small role was special enough, but within the short space of her
song, you could hear a pin drop as her voice soared around the
auditorium; in a score of
unstoppable great musical moments this was one to treasure.
The truly astonishing thing about FOLLIES is that Sondheim
floors you with one fantastic song after another. It was director Dominic Cooke's first musical and he gave his production a thoroughness of vision which allowed the
musical numbers to flourish while being equally as thorough at the emotional trauma the four main characters
inflict amid the nostalgia.
So... what video to pick? FOLLIES is well represented on YouTube through productions and one-off performances of songs from the score - and with a score so all-encompassing as this how do you pick a represenative song? How's about a few.. the stinging sophistication of "Could I Leave You" sung by Lee Remick at the 1985 Lincoln Center concert and then, from the same documentary, a fascinating clip of Barbara Cook rehearsing and then performing the pure emotion of "In Buddy's Eyes" and finally, from the NT Live screening of their 2017 production, Imelda Staunton's broken Sally. lost in her obsession, singing "Losing My Mind".
To celebrate Tennessee Williams' birth day I watched the greatest of the film adaptations of his works, Kazan's A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE which, nearly 70 years later, still grips like a vice.
Released four years after Kazan's original Broadway production, he was reluctant to repeat himself but relented and cast three of his original actors - Marlon Brando as 'Stanley', Kim Hunter as 'Stella' and Karl Malden as 'Mitch' - but had to replace Jessica Tandy with the more famous Vivien Leigh, who had played 'Blanche' onstage in London.
In retrospect, the casting was inspired: Vivien's 'outsider' status against the established bond between Brando, Hunter and Malden echoes the disturbing presence of Blanche in the working-class world of Stanley, Stella and Mitch.
Much has been made since of the opposing acting styles of Brando and Leigh with his gaining the more stature, but even he grew to respect her extraordinary performance.
Shelf or charity shop? Really?? You even have to ask? Tennessee Williams' extraordinary words, Harry Stradling's cinematography, Alex North's pervasive score, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden's multi-layered performances, the intensity of Kazan's direction, the electricity of Brando and of course, the gossamer, iridescent, quicksilver, haunting brilliance of Vivien Leigh.
