Not Only A Winter's Tale

Having only recently been a little concerned at the lack of new musicals on the scene suddenly four appear on the trot. Firstly we have The Picture House opening next week at Lost Theatre in Wandsworth, then in November we have A Winter's Tale at the Landor Theatre and Boy Meets Boy at the Jermyn Street Theatre. I guess you might also be able to include The Hatpin, an Australian musical which is having its UK premiere at the lovely Blue Elephant next month. I shall also be checking out Gap Year - The Musical, running for two performances only at the Leicester Square Theatre.

Add to this productions of Call Me Madam, Hot Mikado, Victor Victoria, Marguerite and the return of the Above The Stag panto Call Aladdin it looks like there will be plenty to warm our spirits as Winter well and truly sets in.

Soho Cinders

George Stiles and Anthony Drewe are in a very strong position in the West End. They are prolific new musical theatre writers who have worked hard over the years and have developed a solid reputation although if truth be told they have arguably never scored a popular hit. Their greatest success to date has been adding additional material to the already popular score of Mary Poppins. Their appeal however has never really stretched to a successful long run despite a number of amiable, smaller shows such as Honk! The Ugly Duckling and Just So, their recent Betty Blue Eyes was a damp squib that failed to attract popular attention.

Their reworking of the Cinderella story, Soho Cinders had been in development for some time with various workshops and a well-received concert version taking place last year. The problem is that the plot of Soho Cinders feels as if it has been written by a couple of sixth-form school boys out to shock. The Soho they depict is more rose tinted than pink, with rent boys who don't have sex, closeted politicians with astoundingly understanding wives and strip-club managed by sexually frustrated, overweight women.

The daft thing is that it could have been so much better. The Cinderella story is a rich multi textured tale that has been used again and again through the years. It is the most filmed story in the history of movie-making not to mention ballets and of course the countless pantomimes that exist. So where did they go wrong? I am wont to believe that it was partially to do with the development of fairly unlikeable and unlikely heroes. Rather than have their Cinders as a reluctant sex-worker, forced unwillingly to go on the game to help fund his further education, our hero is given the 'vanilla' option and we are asked to believe that the sex never really takes place. As for the new Prince Charming, making a politician the hero is always going to be a stretch, especially one who is in the closet whilst engaged to a charming and intelligent woman.

On the plus side, Robbie’s (the Soho Cinders of the title) step-sisters are a great pair of comedy grotesques and thankfully Stiles and Drewe draw on them for many of the lighter and invariably more successful moments in the show. There is also the villainous political advisor William George to add conflict into the narrative and the sweet Velcro, the Soho Cinders version of the Buttons character – d’ya get it?!

Stiles and Drewe have many other irons in the fire, not least an adaptation of one of my favourite movies Soapdish – based on a Sally Field, Kevin Klein vehicle from the early 1990’s. Hopefully, it will capture the public’s imagination and give them the popular hit they so richly deserve.

The Good Gatsby

On the subject of musicals, a few weeks ago I was at a performance of Vieux Carre at the Charing Cross Theatre where I bumped into that prolific theatre director and sometime theatre reviewer Phil Wilmot. I have had the pleasure of seeing a number of Phil’s productions over the years and I was particularly impressed with his King John at the Union earlier this year for which he has been nominated as Best Director in the 2012 Off West End Awards.

We spoke of musicals and in particular The Great Gatsby Musical, which I had seen the previous week. I mentioned that I had not been expecting much from it but found it a pleasant surprise. I also mentioned that a colleague had vehemently disagreed with me on it arguing that it was easily one of the worst musicals he had ever had the displeasure to witness.

I had previously written here in May about the subject matter of musicals. The underlying problem with any musical treatment of The Great Gatsby is that the source work dwells on characters who are generally unsympathetic. In order to create a satisfying musical version, something of the nihilism of the source work has to be adapted.

Adaptations of great novels are indeed that, adaptations and historically compromises are made all the time to suit the nature of the medium. Lionel Bart's Oliver! removes vast swathes of the plot to Dickens' Oliver Twist to create his popular masterpiece and Boubil & Schoenberg's epic Les Miserables is still practically a York Notes version of Victor Hugo's classic. In the same way unsympathetic characters are altered to suit a purpose. Sweeney Todd is allowed to slaughter but not mindlessly, so Sondheim assures us that he has a very good motive for doing so.

What The Great Gatsby Musical gave me was a sense of the period, a workable plot and some decent, evocative musical numbers that coloured the piece. It was not by any means perfect and there were vast stretches of dialogue and denouement that screamed out for musical treatment, but as an early draft I felt that the show had legs. If producers Ruby In The Dust think they have a polished piece of musical theatre on their hands then they need to think again. Composer and lyricist Joe Evans needs to go back to the drawing board and take another look at his work and consider the old adage 'Great musicals are not written, they are re-written.'

I think I managed to leave Phil with the impression that I felt that musicals have to be light, nonsense filled with pretty or formulaic characters. I certainly don't think that - but I do feel that writers of new musicals can sometimes ignore the basic elements of structure and characterisation when working in the medium.

The Problem With Musicals

The Off West End Awards, of which I am one of the judges, has always been eager to support new writing. Indeed there are three separate awards available that lay testament to this namely Best New Play, Most Promising New Playwright and Best New Musical. The first two awards have, for the past two years, garnered plenty of nominations but the Best New Musical Category has always been slightly more difficult to fill.

In 2010, Silence! The Musical at Above The Stag, Britain's Got Bhangra at Theatre Royal Stratford East and Porn – The Musical at Theatre503 all made the running with Porn – The Musical taking the trophy. 2011 saw Burlesque at the Jermyn Street win the award, beating off rivals La Ronde at the Rosemary Branch and latecomer Little Women at the Lost Theatre.

This year, at the beginning of August, there was still not a single nomination for Best New Musical posted. The London Fringe is certainly not afraid of musicals and indeed is awash with revivals of classics such as Mack & Mabel, Carousel and the forthcoming Call Me Madam, not to mention countless revivals of operettas from Merrie England to an average of three Pirates of Penzance a year.

If the classics aren’t your thing – no matter how re-imagined - then there are also plenty of contemporary revivals such as Rent, Spring Awakening and The Drowsy Chaperone to pull in punters. However it is not just revivals out there vying for a share of ticket sales. There is also a healthy contingent of premieres of Off-Off Broadway, Off Broadway and even Broadway shows making their first appearance in the UK in tiny theatres above pubs, like the wonderful production of Kander and Ebb’s Curtains recently at the Landor.

No, when it comes to musicals the London Fringe offers more variety than the West End. Sadly it is new musicals with decent runs that we are seeing less and less of. At the judges debate last year, the question of the relevance of the category arose and I pointed out that I felt it was our duty to support new musicals with the same passion as we support new plays. When judging new musicals I tend to take a much broader view of the production. They seldom arrive upon the Fringe as finished, polished pieces of work. I expect them to flawed and judge them more on their potential, more than upon their production values.

By the time I saw Burlesque in November 2011, I was despairing at the dearth of new musicals that had come my way. I had seen Bed and Sofa, 1888, Slay It With Music and La Ronde, with only the latter making enough of an impression for me to concur with its nomination. Then along came Little Women – The Musical in December, with nowhere near as good production values as, say Bed and Sofa, but a far more impressive musical in terms of composition, structure and ultimately popular appeal. Sadly, with 15 days left before judging closed and at only 10 days before Christmas not many people actually saw it.