*
What an extraordinary job theatre is. You go along for weeks seeing play after play, musical after musical, most of which are perfectly competent — well rehearsed, well acted — and yet you remain unmoved. This is when the coven of critics clutter the aisles, muttering about the lack of good writing and how we should give it up because there's nothing good to see any more. Then you hit a week — one single week in a whole season — when the stage lights up, when the performances are perfect, and when you're so grateful to be alive and able to be part of it, even as a member of the audience.
In just such a week I recently saw the best play of the London season, the best play revival, and the two best musical revivals of the year.
Here's my week.
Tuesday — I go to the Menier Chocolate Factory with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Why dread? Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along is the musical on offer and, despite its exquisite score, rarely works as a production. Also, because it is directed by a friend of mine — her directorial debut, no less — and I desperately want her to succeed, though with this show, I fear she may not. I need not have worried. Maria Friedman, a great singer much loved in the U.K. for her starring appearances in musicals, is better known in the U.S. for her cabaret appearances. She is not known on either continent as a director. Merrily is a story of a friendship that begins on a rooftop in 1957, where three recent college graduates gather to see Sputnik, the first satellite, a symbol of the bright future in store for them. It ends in disillusion and disappointment, the friends each in their own ways having failed to realize those bright futures. Beginning to understand why the show rarely plays well? If the depressing nature of life doesn't get to you, the structure of the show will — the story is played backward, so our first view of the protagonists is when their friendship has crumbled and they're confronting the mess they've made of their lives. All the joy in this show is in the second half, as they get younger.
Sailing out on a post-war tide of optimism, the characters begin to face the darkening events of Vietnam, Black Power, nuclear threat, race riots, and a world in constant turmoil. Slowly, as they get younger, these stumbling blocks, not yet experienced, disappear. This director has exposed the great play that was buried inside a great musical. (And Friedman has cast it properly.) Brava!
Photo by Simon Annand |
Early in Constellations, Marianne (Sally Hawkins in a performance of intense delight) explains to the boy she has just met (Rafe Spall, a mixed up bundle of non-cloying sweetness) that everything we are and everything we are not is contained within each of us. He has no idea what she is talking about but finds her irresistibly sexy. In return, he proposes by reading her a description he has written about the lifecycle of the honey bee. These simple scenes are repeated with slight variations as if to demonstrate the alternative realities of our lives. Each of the recurring themes exists in its own space. Time, Marianne tells us, is not the same for everyone. So, what is time? What is love? What is death? And do any of them really exist? Hawkins and Spall are so real, so loving and loveable, that they appear not to be actors at all, so fine is their acting, just two people on an empty stage, a couple trying to make sense of the universe.
Photo by Alastair Muir |
Photo by Johan Persson |
Photo by Helen Maybanks |
Photo by Paul Coltas |
To my amazement, having expected very little from yet another stage adaptation of a popular movie, I thoroughly enjoyed The Bodyguard, with Heather Headley as the rock superstar under threat from a stalker who hires a tough but attractive security guard who proves to be as much man as she can handle. The production is slick, the songs are inoffensive, and Headley is plain terrific. This show has to be Broadway bound.
(Ruth Leon is a London and New York City arts writer and critic whose work has been seen in Playbill magazine and other publications.)
Check out Playbill.com's London listings. Seek out more of Playbill.com's international coverage, including London correspondent Mark Shenton's daily news reporting from the U.K.