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Magic Goes Wrong – Vaudeville Theatre One of the reasons those old movies with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney work so well is that we actually believe they’re going to “put on a show right here” so, when they do, we love it but we’re not surprised. More or less the same thing happened when a bunch of drama students studying at LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, one of Britain’s powerhouse drama schools) decided to turn their improv studies into a show. They already knew enough about the theatre to know all the things that can go wrong when you’re putting on a show and they knew that, carried to the extreme, those things are funny. So, just for a bit of fun, they made a show “right here” and called it The Play That Goes Wrong. They called themselves the Mischief Theatre. They still do. There is no way to predict what will happen when a group of people get together. Sometimes, without warning, the group coalesces and becomes, for example, the Beatles or Man U. More usually, after a few false starts, the members of the group go their separate ways, with or without rancour. Mischief Theatre, with its original members, plus a few more, are still together after 11 years and they’ve built their student bit of fun into a worldwide franchise – The Play That Goes Wrong, Peter Pan Goes Wrong, The Comedy about a Bank Robbery, Groan Ups, and, now, Magic Goes Wrong – and they’re still friends as well as collaborators. There are three main writer/performers but the entire ensemble contributes to the final play although, unlike in their early days when they did everything themselves from building the sets to selling the tickets, they now have a professional team doing all the fiddly bits. Now they perform in proper theatres on Broadway and in the West End rather than in drafty halls and, on one occasion, in a wardrobe, but the shows, because they are all about stuff going wrong, still look as though the cast is making it up as they go along. Believe me, they’re not. I’m not going to describe Magic Goes Wrong because it is indescribable, except to say that it was cowritten with the world’s most famous magic team, Penn and Teller, and you should go and see it, with or without the children. I started laughing at the opening curtain and was still laughing when I climbed into bed that night. Everybody knows that magic is mysterious and nothing ever goes wrong. Right? Sondheim Theatre Do you remember the old Queen’s Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue? Sure, you do. It was the tatty one on the corner which had been bombed during the War and then rebuilt, sort of, in 1959 in the forgettable style of 1950s architectural utilitarianism. Despite its provenance as a 1907 Sprague masterpiece, during that magical age where WGR Sprague and Frank Matcham competed to design nearly all the great commercial theatres in London, it had definitely fallen on hard times, and they don’t get any harder than being reduced to rubble by a random German bomb. Enter a fairy god-father in the person of Ur-producer, Cameron Mackintosh. The most successful entrepreneur in the history of musical or any other kind of theatre, Mackintosh had the money, entirely self-made, and the taste, entirely self-generated, to buy most of Shaftesbury Avenue, and a lot of other theatres besides, and refurbish them back to their original glory but with modern amenities and technology. It’s a dazzling feat, one worth stopping to appreciate every time you go into a Mackintosh theatre (actually, they’re called Delfont Mackintosh Theatres but that’s another story I’ll tell you some other time) and send up a little prayer of thanks to the man who started as a stagehand at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and has gone on to achieve such wonderful things. Do I make that sound like an obituary? Sorry, Cameron, my bad, as the Americans might say. He is very much alive, and was last week bounding about what was the old Queen’s, demonstrating, with justifiable pride, what he, and his team of architects and designers, have wrought to turn it into (drum roll) the Sondheim Theatre, named for Mackintosh’s friend and inspiration, for his 90th birthday. Some birthday gift. The old tatty Queen’s is no more. Unlamented, it has morphed, by the lavish application of time, artistry, historical integrity, contemporary business sense, and, yes, money, into a beautiful new/old theatre that retains many of the features imagined by Sprague and then destroyed by Hitler. There was very little left after the bomb, and after the ministrations of the 1950s builders, but what was there has been repurposed and what was not has been reimagined in the style of 1907. In fact, the auditorium has been reshaped into a curve to make sightlines better and two new boxes have been added, one labelled, ‘Maggie Smith’, the other, ‘Judi Dench’. Sprague certainly never thought of that. Les Miserables – Sondheim Theatre In 1985, when my late husband and I were engaged, I was living in New York, he was in London. One morning he called me at my office. “Get on a ‘plane, darling, and come to London, there’s something you’ve got to see.” He was the best theatre critic on either side of the Atlantic and if he was this excited, I didn’t question that there was indeed something I just had to see. I grabbed my coat and headed for JFK. I got to the Barbican just as that famous vamp was starting, boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ‘Look Down, Look Down’, and I was immediately engulfed in one of the most extraordinary theatre experiences of 30 years of regular theatregoing. It wasn’t that Les Miserables was the best musical I’d ever seen, it was that it was so different, so new, in the same way that Hamilton is different from anything that had gone before. It was an amazing show. It still is, although inevitably it has lost its shock value. Then, its sweeping anthems, its unwillingness to decide whether it was a grand opera or a musical or a pop entertainment, its political overtones and undertones, its Parisian misery, and its grandeur, were irresistible and new. Now, in the production which its producer Cameron Mackintosh has retooled for a previous tour and now for its grand reopening in London, it is not as startling as it was. The John Napier-designed grand revolve is gone, replaced by some beautiful projections taken from the paintings of Victor Hugo. This Eponine is vocally strong but she’s no haunting waif and although it is not fashionable to mention it, it can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that Eponine is a white child of white parents in the first act who unaccountably turns into a black adult in the second. The singing is strong throughout from the entire cast, especially where it has to be, from Jon Robyns as Jean Valjean, Bradley Jaden as Javert and Ashley Gilmour’s blond Enjolras. They are all clearly marked to move on in Cameron Mackintosh’s revolving repertory company, all good, but not too good to stand out the way Colm Wilkinson did in the original cast, so they can be deployed in other roles in other Mackintosh productions. Most importantly, Les Miserables is still thrilling, still stirs the imagination, with Claude-Michel Schonberg’s music telling you at every moment what is really happening and Herbert Kretzmer’s lyrics still dazzling. I’m not sure I’d cross an ocean for it today but I’d certainly cross Shaftesbury Avenue. The Tyler Sisters – Hampstead Downstairs I am blessed with a sister I love, who loves me. She’s older than I am so I’ve had her all my life and never questioned the relationship. I accept without question that this is the only unbreakable bond in my life, closer than parents, who died before us, closer than husbands and partners who, not having grown up with us, don’t share our earliest memories, closer even than our children, who arrive on the scene after we have become whatever we’re going to be. Siblings have a depth of shared past that no other relationship has and, as such, is irreplaceably precious. It never occurred to me, until I saw The Tyler Sisters last week, that there are sisters whose communications are fractious and filled with misunderstandings. But these three sisters, sorry, but they are three sisters, don’t seem to have anything much in common except parents (and I guess there might be some question about that since one of the actors is mixed-race) and seem to bicker constantly about everything. The play consists of very short scenes depicting the sisters’ relationship over 40 years and I believe is intended to show their individual development as women and as sisters over that time. Yes, one comes out as gay, another becomes a successful businesswoman, the third makes an unfortunate choice of husbands, but I couldn’t discern any great revelation or growth in any of them. Maybe this is the playwright’s point, that as we age we just get more so, more of whatever we were all along. These three are still as prickly and unsympathetic with one another in their 40s as they were when they were children. What a pity, and how lucky I am.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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