Clive Davis

HITS, MISSES

One of the more dubious aspects of West End theatre-going - apart from the overpriced tickets, cramped seats, crowded bars and interruptions from mobile phones - is the time-honoured tradition of quoting critics' reviews out of context in publicity material. By wrenching the words around, producers regularly make a silk purse out of a pig's ear. But, as Stage blogger Mark Shenton reports, an EU directive is winging its way towards Shaftesbury Avenue. Max Bialystock, your days are numbered.

BAD NIGHT OUT, GOOD NIGHT OUT

My favourite critic, Terry Teachout, has a grim time at the new Broadway musical The Pirate Queen: "It starts out dumb, then gets dumber." But then the show's from the same people responsible for that tedious mega-spectacle, Les Miz, so what else can you expect? Like Norm, though, Teachout's co-blogger, Our Girl In Chicago, was much more impressed with the much talked-about German film, The Lives of Others:

While it's fantastically illuminating of the endlessly variegated ways of being a loyal or a skeptical subject of the state, its main achievement is a personal portrait of a soul in flux. That portrait sits quietly alongside the sometimes noisy melodrama involving the other characters, a drama in which it's certainly implicated but from which it's essentially separate. I left the movie theatre with E. M. Forster echoing in my head: Only connect.

I haven't seen it yet. Can't wait.

CORRECTION: I originally credited the film review to TT as well. Sorry about that.

A KREMLIN CHORUS

Admit it, you thought I was hallucinating when I mentioned that Cole Porter song called Siberia. Well, here, at last, are some of the lyrics from the musical, Silk Stockings [scroll down to song 11]. Enter the commissars, putting on the Ritz:

When we're sent to dear Siberia,
To Siberi-eri-a,
When it's cocktail time 'twill be so nice
Just to know you'll not have to phone for ice.

When we meet in sweet Siberia,
Far from Bolshevik hysteria,
We'll go on a tear,
For our buddies all are there
In cheery Siberi-a...

And so on. The Soviet equivalent, you might say, of Springtime for Hitler.

[Hat-tip: Rich]

JUKE BOX - WEST SIDE STORY

Arguably the greatest post-war musical of them all turns fifty this year. I don't mind admitting that whenever I hear America I still get tears in my eyes. How many baby-boomers had their first feverish glimpse of New York life, warts and all, courtesy of this song?

Was the show an instant popular favourite? Well, it ran for nearly a thousand performances on Broadway, and there were all those Oscars for the film version a few years later. But Meryle Secrest's biography of Bernstein's lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, presents a much more mixed picture of the early response:

If West Side Story had never become a film, its score would have languished in obscurity because, despite the reviews, the musical was not successful, as [Hal] Prince and Sondheim have testified. "It got excellent critical press and people left in droves," Sondheim said. That, he thought, was because people did not go to musicals expecting experimental work. They went for an evening's diversion, and when a musical did not meet those expectations, audiences felt cheated. Sondheim recalled standing at the side of the aisle during the second night. "And I was so proud, you now, of my first show on Broadway. I'd been savaged and/or ignored in the reviews, but nevertheless I had a show on Broadway! So I'm standing on the side, the curtain goes up, there are six guyson stage." He started snapping his fingers and humming the opening bars of the Prologue. "About two minutes into the number I see a guy in the rear of the orchestra, "Excuse me, excuse me." And I think he's going to the bathroom, but he has a coat over his arm. "Excuse me, excuse me." And he came out to the aisle and caught my eye. He knew I must be connected with the show, because I was standing there instead of sitting in a seat, and he just said, "Don't ask."

BTW, I don't know whether it's easy to get tickets - they tend to sell out pretty quickly - but if you happen to be a show tune person, a new run of Ian Marshall Fisher's invaluable series, The Lost Musicals, starts at Sadlers Wells on April 1, continuing on each Sunday for the rest of the month. The idea is brilliantly simple: exhume a show that hasn't been in seen in London for decades (sometimes never, in fact), gather a group of actors on a stage with the scripts, no sets and a pianist, and then let rip. Next up is Cole Porter's Can-Can. (Silk Stockings, his re-working of Ninotchka, came magnificently to life last summer.) The perfect antidote to Lloyd Webberisms. As for where the new British musicals, if any, are coming from, critic-blogger Mark Shenton has been eavesdropping.

And now, here come the Jets...

NOT SO ENTERTAINING

After all those raves from the critics, how could I not enjoy myself last night at the Old Vic revival of The Entertainer? Well, somehow I managed to spend the evening in a state of mildly irritated boredom; by the time the second interval arrived I had to admit defeat. The much-discussed parallel between Iraq and Suez is pretty thin, the dimensions of the venue seem to take all the bite out of the family quarrels (I can imagine things may have been very different at the tiny Royal Court fifty years ago.) And, sorry, Archie Rice just didn't seem a remotely plausible character. Maybe it would have been different if Olivier had still been around to do his song-and-dance routines and the rest of it, but I have my doubts.

THE VIEW FROM THE STALLS

Donning her public service blogging hat, Madame Arcati delivers a first-hand account of Daniel Radcliffe's much-hyped in-the-buff scene in Equus.

LIMELIGHT

Very sad news about the death of critic and author-about-town Sheridan Morley, although it would be nice to think he's chuckling over the Gielgudisms recounted in the Telegraph's obituary. (Morley published a biography of the actor in 2001.) The theatrical knight was, you see, a great one for saying the wrong thing:

John Gielgud once telephoned Morley with urgent news: "You'll never believe this: in America they are actually about to name a theatre after a drama critic." Then, remembering whom he was talking to, Gielgud exclaimed: "Oh my God, you are one!" and slammed down the receiver.

This is even better:

One Sunday in 1939, with Europe on the brink of war, Gielgud returned to a friend's home carrying the newspapers and wearing a devastated look. When asked if war had been declared, he  responded: "Oh, I don't know anything about that, but Gladys Cooper has just got the most terrible reviews."

Then there's this gem:

Morley recalled an occasion in the 1980s when, walking along Piccadilly with Gielgud, they spotted Margaret Thatcher, then at the height of her powers, coming towards them. As they both knew her slightly, they stopped. Gielgud asked where she was now living. "No 10, Downing Street," replied the Prime Minister with some surprise. "Oh, you women!" exclaimed Gielgud, full of admiration. "Always so clever at buying the right kind of property!"

Oh, and I can't resist this story about another giant of the stage, Noel Coward:

Once, crossing Leicester Square, Morley and Coward saw a poster for an adventure movie starring Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde entitled The Sea Shall Not Have Them. "I fail to see why not," Coward remarked. "Everybody else has."

STAGE & SCREEN

Terry Teachout compiles a list of the five best theatrical biographies, Prick Up Your Ears among them, and indulges in some afterthoughts on his Commentary essay about Hollywood and the art of making serious films:

The reader in question invited to put my money where my mouth was by naming what I thought were the best sound films made in Hollywood prior to the coming of the New Wave. That’s a good question, and an impossible one, but I decided to try to answer it anyway.

I seem to recall that the Geek took umbrage at the original article. I wonder what he'll make of Teachout's choices.

THE LAST WORD ON RACHEL CORRIE

There is an old-fashioned word for this mentality, the kind of earnest temporary do-goodism that is likely to do harm: the word is slumming."  Cynthia Ozick has been reading My Name is Rachel Corrie, the story, as she puts it of a "piteous, pointless, heartbreaking death." No one should gloat over Corrie's demise; those few people who did should be ashamed of themselves. Yet nor is there any escaping the fact (wished away by impressionable West End critics) that the young American was far from being a heroine for our times:

She is twenty-three years old. Though she hopes to become a writer, even a poet, much of what she writes is a facsimile. Her "poetic" passages are an amalgam of Bob Dylan and diluted-to-the-third-generation Allen Ginsberg. Her thinking runs to slogans and robotic abstractions. At ten (her fifth-grade "Conference on World Hunger" speech is reproduced), this formulaic voice is already in training, the boilerplate language already ingrained...

A young woman has journeyed from one continent to another to enter a history of which she is uncommonly ignorant. This is not the ignorance of naïveté. It is wilful, and wilful ignorance is indistinguishable from false witness.

All too true. Can the anti-Israeli Left now please find a more interesting role-model?

A YAWN ON BROADWAY

Just the thought of sitting through another of David Hare’s lectures dramas about contemporary politics gives me a migraine. He's now taken his soap-box to New York, where his post-Iraq opus, The Vertical Hour, has had its world premiere. (The National didn’t get first bite because the anti-Establishment playwright – that’s Sir David to you, buddy - felt the management exhibited a lack of respect for his towering genius.) The Indy’s critic – who’s normally a fan – was disappointed this time:

We need a play that burrows deep into the nervous system of a bright person who sincerely thought that the invasion of Iraq amounted to "liberation". We need a play that sees Western indulgence through the eyes of someone from the West who is more of a Muslim cast-of-mind than she knows. We need a play that says the knee-jerk antipathy to everything that America has done in the past five years could do with some vigorous questioning. But the toxic combination of George Bush and Tony Blair engender a crudity of response.

Not much has changed, then. Incidentally, I’m glad to discover that I’m not alone in thinking Stuff Happens was a load of, er, stuff. Critic Brian Logan takes a few pot-shots here.