If you love theatre and you’ve a week to spare, even a long weekend, it’s always a treat to hop on a plane to Manhattan; the guys are great, the bars and scene are welcoming and of course the theatre is world class. A ticket to a Broadway show isn’t cheap but at this time of the year you’ll find good deals at the tkts booth in Times Square where you can pick up discounted tickets.
Alternatively there’s Off Broadway where you can see slightly fringier work in smaller and cheaper theatres. Each October musical theatre writers try out their new musicals for 5 or 6 performances in many of these spaces, refining the work and hoping a producer will invest in a full production. One of the best of these recent try-outs is a wacky, homo-sexy version of Scooby Doo called THE GAY BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. It hilariously sends up all the conventions of teen horror films, giving the protagonists free reign to explore their sexuality before it’s wrapped up in a frantic finale that means you’ll never think of Shaggy and the Wolfman in the same way again! Hopefully we’ll see this fun show in a full production in New York and London before too long. But you heard about it here first!
Of the latest big Broadway offerings, at time of writing neither the musicals of MEMPHIS or FINIAN’S RAINBOW have been reviewed yet so I thought I’d check them out for you and give you a sneak preview.
FINIAN’S RAINBOW is a revival of a crusty old show from 1947 that’s unlikely to find much favour over here - you may remember it from a movie version starring Fred Astaire and Tommy Steel. It requires you to patronise all Irish as charming little leprechauns, tricky for us as their next-door neighbours, but the Yanks have always had a more romantic long-distance view of Ireland. When an Irish father and daughter arrive in a rural U.S southern community baring leprechaun gold and singing about rainbows the whole place is soon in love with them as they solve poverty and racism with a little blarney. It should be nauseating yet somehow clever director, Warren Carlyle, keeps things childlike and charming rather than twee and I was amazed to find myself falling for the romance of it all. But the big reason for seeing this production is out gay Broadway leading man Cheyenne Jackson (pictured) who is quite possibly the sexiest man alive - tall, handsome, strapping (check out those thighs – did they have to get those jeans tailored?) and with a beautiful voice. And if you like old fashioned musical theatre songs this score is beautiful.
MEMPHIS is the other new musical in town, and it’s commendably brave to launch a big production of a new show based on an original story, with original songs and no stars. Apparently lots of people imagine, as I did, that it’s about Elvis. Instead it tells the story of how black music, interpreted here by Bon Jovi’s white pianist David Bryan, moves from the back-street bars of Memphis to find mainstream success. It seems to suggest this was predominantly thanks to a white local radio DJ, the eccentric Huey. Actor Chad Kimball plays him in a kind of hyper Robin Williams style which isn’t to everyone’s taste but wow can this cast sing! This is a foot stomping, barnstorming, roof raising show. Director Christopher Ashley beautifully balances the light and dark elements of the plot, the songs are so good they sound like classics already and the script and lyrics by my friend Joe DiPietro (who wrote the recent gay West End hit Fucking Men) are sharp and funny. The packed audience went crazy for it and it deserves to be a big success for everyone involved.
Of the Broadway long-runners New Yorkers will send you to an award ladened musical called NEXT TO NORMAL about a “mom” with bi-polar disorder - no, honestly! New Yorkers think it’s profound; they were blubbing into handkerchiefs all around me. The music’s great, the direction’s slick and the cast contains another much lusted after Broadway hottie, Aaron Tveit. But this is a shallow, high gloss, treatment of a serious subject and I found myself increasingly irritated as the actors belted out inane lyrics about finding the real you deep inside yourself and walking into the light… or some such guff.
There’s a new revival of classic New York comedy BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS, about working class Jewish family life in the 1930s. It’s a darker interpretation then usual with the family’s financial problems topically to the fore but it’s definitely worth a look for quintessential Broadway. Otherwise I recommend the stage musical of SHREK for a big budget staging of a feel good show.
Whilst I’ve been enjoying the Big Apple it seemed appropriate to send New Yorker Tom Couto to see the National Theatre’s OUR CLASS in my place. It’s been much admired for its exploration of a wartime atrocity when half the population of a polish town, all Jews, was murdered, many of them burnt alive in a barn. But were the Nazis entirely to blame? Tom’s report -
“It centers around ten Polish classmates (6 Catholic and 4 Jewish) and follows their lives through to the end of the war, the Soviet occupation followed by the Germans. It’s done as a piece of storytelling, the set is a simple rectangular floor and ten chairs, and most of the wartime atrocities are explained (thank goodness) rather than dramatized. Even so it was unbearable brutal and grim. Hard to take for more than three hours, although the acting and directing are top notch.”
-Phil Willmott