Willkommen (zurück), bienvenue, welcome

It was 37 years ago this May that the Edinburgh University Theatre Company put on a production of Kander & Ebb's Cabaret in the much-loved Bedlam Theatre. It had a huge impact on all of us lucky enough to be in it. Mary New (now Amorosino), my then soon-to-be flatmate, whom I'd known (but not really since we were juvenile chalk and cheese) from All Saints Banstead Choir days and still a close friend, incarnated Sally Bowles.

Living as she does in Washington, Mary wasn't able to make a wonderful reunion held in the Stockwell home of Sarah Macnee - then the designer, now Executive Director of Crying Out Loud. Our MC, the fabulous Leonard Webster, also lives in the States, having performed the role professionally (in Leicester, I believe) since those student days. But it was still quite an assemblage.

Some of the folk in this photo - courtesy of Kerry's man Dom (more about her below), since though I was on the staircase snapping alongside him, my shots are less sharp - weren't in the production, but all had some kind of involvement with the Bedlam. So I'll add parentheses where relevant. From left to right, Eleanor Zeal (two-time Fringe First winner and co-godparent of beloved goddaughter Rosie - Rosie's  mother being our equally beloved and never forgotten late friend Nell Martin), Pat O'Connell (music director), Kerry Richardson (uncharacteristically distant, but we'll see her in a moment recreating her Fräulein Schneider), Antonia Giovanazzi, half of Simon Bell (Clifford Bradshaw, and still my best mate), Claire Hicklin (Bedlam queen when I arrived to audition at the theatre in Freshers' Week 1980, and I was always a bit intimidated by her impossibly glammy former self, all Stockbridge charity shop fur coat and smoke from pungent Gauloises; if only I knew what an eerie little person she was inside, she told me), John Stalker (director, Bedlam supremo and now big-cheese producer, predictably enough), Peter Forbes (Herr Schultz, and another big cheese, just wowed everyone as Buddy Plummer in the National Theatre Follies - back then always The One Most Likely To, despite his modesty), Gabrielle Firth (as she then was; she must forgive me for not having recognised her from those days) and Sarah.

That's Peter as Buddy, pictured for the NT by Johan Persson. I'd previously seen him as Malvolio, Max Reinhardt's business manager Rudolf 'Katie' Kommer in Michael Frayn's Afterlife - a play I liked a lot more than most - and Balvenie, Earl of Douglas in Rona Munro's magnificent James Plays, but who knew he could sing quite as stunningly as he did at the National? Herr Schultz required only a kind of crooning, but still he conveyed all the necessary quiet pathos, and Kerry made me weep every night with her rendition of 'What would you do?' I'm so glad she's become a good friend in the past few years, too. I knew I wanted the 'older couple', closer in years now to their roles, to recreate this pose.

And gamely they did - there's a whole string of diverse, fun posturings, but this one comes closest. Peter seems to have reincarnated his pose, laugh apart, more accurately than Kerry.

What filled me with a long-lasting delight about the evening was that everyone present seemed - so far as one could tell - sorted and happy. Sure, there had been some divorces and past troubles, but - touch wood - we all seemed on an even keel, contented with our lot. So very different from Follies. And John - I asked him if he still thought our Cabaret was good, and he told me he'd seen many since, and yes, it was in his view the best - would be happy to help with a 40th anniversary sing-through of the show. Maybe more (a special script?), maybe on the Edinburgh Fringe, who knows? Let's get organising, and hope no-one dies in the meantime... The extra body in the photo below, by the way, is Sarah's partner Walter, meeting and chatting to whom was another huge plus (he's a staunch and active Remainer).

Liza and the cockroaches

What on earth could they have in common? Only one thing, according to Minnelli's co-performer the singer/pianist Michael Feinstein: when the world ends, they'll both still be here. It's one of a  hundred pithy comments in one of the best interviews with any artist I've read, written by Marcelle Bernstein for, of all things, Saga Magazine.

There are two special reasons to welcome the interview. One is that it's very close in time to the nearly-67-year-old's unforgettable appearance in the Southbank's The Rest is Noise festival on Saturday, an occasion which I'd viewed with some apprehension but which turned out to be one of the great showbiz testaments to an indomitable spirit (the only other evening I can remember quite like it was Nina Simone's appearance in the same hall back in 1999). I count myself very lucky to have got in via The Arts Desk, for which I duly raved; I wouldn't have risked £40-£100 on a ticket*, though as it turned out the event would have been worth every penny.

The other reason is that the interview contradicts all the press baloney about a tragic life. It's been a tough one at times, no doubt, but the only real sadness I can see here is of an artist who, like her mother, is loved by everybody she touches but not, as she deserves, by one single person. But that's showbiz: the devouring, slightly vampiric fans demand all, and boy, do they get it. Minnelli's torch song should surely be Sondheim's ' I'm Still Here'. He wrote new lyrics specially for Barbra; why not do the same for Liza? For the sake of the truth, I have to say she no longer looks like she does in the above photos, but it was amazing to see the years fall away as Friday night's show hit ever new highs.

What I had to pinch myself most about was that I was hearing that very same Americanized Sally Bowles whose screen renditions of 'Life is a Cabaret' and 'Maybe This Time' had become so legendary singing those very same songs, with different inflections but just as much meaning and vitality, possibly more. 'Liza's at the Palace', filmed a couple of years ago, is as close to our night as I think film will provide, though her delivery of the key song was not quite the same. I thought I'd put up the original film version

and the Palace's 'Life is...' revisited. Stick with it because the Elsie sequence is both much more poignant than the original and shot through with an earthier humour.

If you got to the end of that, you'll understand why I've ordered up the DVD.

Bob Fosse's film of Cabaret came out when I was 10 years old. There was no possibility of seeing it then, but I remember walking past the big cinema in Sutton wondering why it was X certificate and why a man as well as a woman in the photos on the wall was wearing so much make-up. Later it coincided with a golden time in the summer term of my first year at Edinburgh University when we all revelled in a fortnight of working on a production of the stage musical, so different from the film.

I've written about this in the Bedlam Theatre 30th birthday tribute way back, but I can't resist a recropped shot of our dear Mary New (now Amorosino and living in Washington with husband Roberto and two of their three wonderful children - Alexandra, the eldest, has followed her ma to Edinburgh University) as Sally Bowles.

If truth be told, she was of course much closer to Kander and Ebb's (and of course Isherwood's) Sally, this vicar's daughter who sidled up one evening to the Rev (by then Canon) Tom New, sitting at one of the beer barrels, with the 'Don't Tell Mama' song-lines, 'you can tell my papa, that's alright, 'cos he comes in here every night'. Well, those of us who were in it will never get the nostalgia for such a time out of our systems. But by any standards the movie is a classic, probably the musical I'd choose in a list of top ten films. Evviva Liza!

It was quite a weekend of experiencing divas in spheres other than the operatic: Liza on Friday, 'anarchist cabaret performer' Meow Meow as Jenny in The Threepenny Opera on Saturday - not a patch on Allison Bell's Polly, though she looked extraordinary - and singer-songwriter Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond  as Anna in The Seven Deadly Sins on Sunday. This last concert had an only-connect programme which also included necessary - though dreary, if mercifully short - dodecaphonic Schoenberg and wonderful Hindemith: hardly box-office nectar, you'd have thought, and yet the audience was packed with young people. Clearly The Rest is Noise festival on the Southbank must be marketing itself well.

Diva and devotion combine in the only Bach cantata of this Lenten season. For Oculi Sunday,  we have only one specimen, for alto and strings without so much as a concluding chorale, 'Widerstehe doch der Sunde', BWV 54. The soloist's low notes, like the F sharp to which 'übertünchtes Grab' ('whitened sepulchre') descends in the recit, sound much more butch coming from a real contralto rather than a countertenor.

 
Besides, Nathalie Stutzmann is another of those truly great artists who stand out in any crowd of soloists. We haven't seen nearly enough of her in the UK recently.  The recorded performance I heard, with John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Pilgrimage team in one of England's most beautiful churches, Norfolk's Walpole St Peter (reverenced on the blog via two visits, briefly here and more extensively here), reminded me that I ought to go out of my way to see her when the opportunity arises.

'Eyes' Sunday gets its name from the first word of the psalm introit for the day, oculi (Vulgate Psalm 24 verse 15: 'mine eyes are ever towards the Lord'). The New Testament reading from St Luke deals with Christ's words on the casting out of devils. Holbein's woodcut was the only image I could find on the subject.

Georg Lehms' text for this Weimar cantata is one of Bach's crappiest: what's this about being felled by a curse for violating God's majesty? How very Old Testicle. Never mind: there's originality as usual in Bach's five-part string writing (divided violas). I don't, unlike Gardiner, hear dissonance in the opening chord (dominant seventh over tonic pedal), only a novel suspension which means postponing E flat major until the eighth bar. The chord pulsing seems to me calm and confident rather than evangelical; though there's darkness and dislocation in the middle verses' veering to the minor.

Stutzmann makes more of recitative than any of the other singers I've encountered in my own Bach cantatas pilgrimage so far; and in the final aria she echoes the strings' chromatic fugue subject so nobly. We'll have to make do on YouTube with a jaunty Andreas Scholl (low notes not as full as Stutzmann's, of course) and Herreweghe's Collegium Vocale, but that's not a bad second best.

*Nothing for an event like this. To indulge his daughters' love of total crap, one father forked out £400 for three tickets to see Justin Bieber the other night. They were rewarded by the cute but anodyne star's turning up two hours late, way past most of his audience's bedtime.

Happy 30th birthday, COE

Three stills from a publicity film by Alexandru Gherman - reproduced with thanks - were all I could muster to accompany a little paean for the Chamber Orchestra of Europe’s vivacious birthday concert at St John’s Smith Square the other Monday (bit of a hobby-horse of mine, about musical organisations not engaging photographers for special events: can you believe there were no shots for the Bell-Frank-Zimmermann-Denk-Isserlis team at the Wigmore’s 110th birthday bash on Wednesday?)


Anyway, a joyous event the COE concert turned out to be, and though my speculation that Abbado was going to be the mystery guest conductor proved wildly out, it was fascinating to see how far these crack players could go without a stick-waver at all. Mozart’s 29th and Figaro Overture I could understand – even there, a maestro might have been helpful for the occasional upbeat – but surely they weren’t going to attempt Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony by themselves? But wait – there was Vladimir Jurowski sitting down in the stalls. In fact he was drafted in for the encore, a lovely touch: 30 years ago at the inaugural concert James Judd pulled mover and shaker Abbado out of the audience to conduct Rossini’s overture to La Cenerentola, and here it was again, blissfully crescendoed and nuanced beyond belief in those perky little bittersweet woodwind solos I love so much.

But the Classical was rather magical, too – bright and clearly articulated, like the rest of the programme. How could one not be reminded of the conductorless orchestra who played it when Prokofiev made his first visit to the new Soviet Union in 1927, Persimfans (= Perviy Symphonicheskiy Ansambl' bez Dirizhora= first symphonic ensemble without a conductor). It did well, but hardly lasted long. They even played the Scythian Suite. Co-founder Arnold Tsukker wrote a book about the first five years which I'd like to get hold of - but not at the online asking-price.


Anyway, on Monday there was – to my ears, at any rate – a radical rethink about the Bach Double Concerto; you could forget that famous slow-movement image of two planes in a clear blue sky. But the partnership of founder-leader Marieke Blankestijn and Lorenza Borrani, who wasn’t even born when the orchestra kicked off, with their fellow strings couldn’t have been more exhilarating.


Good, too, to see some familiar faces including cellist Willie Conway, whom I knew vaguely from Edinburgh days, horn-player Nicholas Thompson, double-bassist Enno Senft and, in the audience, that fabulous oboist (and not at all bad conductor) Douglas Boyd. Now all we need is to see more of them here - which, at last, we can do when Haitink conducts two all-Brahms Proms with Ax as soloist in the piano concertos.

Finally, happy 30th birthday to me and the bigger stars of the Bedlam/Edinburgh University Theatre Company production of Cabaret, the rehearsal period for which I recall as the happiest time of my youth (not of my life, of course). I wrote all about it quite prematurely at the beginning of the year, and used up most of the production photos then - the one of Andy Beale as Hitler youth I really can't justify, for fear it might end his distinguished medical career - so how about a truly embarrassing reminiscence for Sally Bowles and Fraulein Kost (real names withheld, but I love them both dearly)? Cramond beach party during Cabaret fortnight, May or June 1981, fashions - Simon Bell's jacket and the trainers dishonourably excepted - courtesy of the second-hand clothes shops in Stockbridge.

No fooling with Maurice

When friends Lars and Jan bought tickets for a pub-theatre adaptation of E M Forster's coming-out classic - J's battered but treasured old paperback copy, not long after publication, is illustrated above - I was wary. Some of the worst productions I've ever seen have been above or below the bar: sub-student Genet at the White Bear in Kennington, some nightmare the name of which I forget at our local, the Curtain's Up, in which Nazis stagily pondered the Final Solution in a dank basement (Sara Kestelman was in it, for the playwright's sake, and did her charismatic best to dignify the whole farrago). At least the latter was where we first met our now great muse and Djenne Djenno doyenne Sophie Sarin, having been asked to take her to something to cheer her up at the time. Well, we laughed, but for the wrong reasons.

Pleasantly surprised, then, by our visit to the Stag in Victoria, though, and at times amazed. Roger Parsley and Andy Graham had taken all the significant one-to-ones from the novel and, not stinting on the intellectual name-dropping, given them space to breathe. So, for a start, there was naturalistic dialogue for the actors to get their teeth into. Which they did with varying success; but there could be no doubt about Adam Lilley's hero. A bit of an everyman, by no means unattractive, this Maurice grew convincingly from wide-eyed schoolboy to priggish student to real man.


He had some fine actors to spark off. Not so much Rob Stott's Durham (pictured left above - all production photos by Derek Drescher), who looked the intellectual-nervous type but didn't quite sound it, though he cried convincingly; oddly, the scenes with Persia Lawson's very touching sister Ada had more fire.


There were two consummate cameos from Jonathan Hansler, giving the audience confidence in the start and popping up as the soft-spoken hypnotist Mr Lasker Jones who gets the most famous line ('England has always been disinclined to accept human nature').


And the Scudder did not let us down, unless you're fixated on Rupert Graves's cute young thing in the Merchant-Ivory film (I'm not). Bright-eyed and responsive, fight man Stevie Raine's gamekeeper seemed plausible enough on first acquaintance


and in a sweet bed scene, rather less raunchy than I suspect the Above the Stag Theatre regulars are accustomed to seeing.


Intelligent use of music, practical costuming and adaptable lighting in Tim McArthur's seamless production added to the pleasure of the close-up experience, though if this Maurice transfers - and I hope it will - it'll need a better backdrop than the boarding-house walls. The show's been completely sold out and there aren't even any tickets left for the extended run, which ends on Saturday. I wish it a bright future, especially as these excellent actors can't have made much money even with full houses of 60 or so every night.

Had a bit of a shock last night, apropos of our Bedlam Theatre nostalgia trip. Remember how I apologised to director David Bannerman, wherever he might be, for dissing the second-week revue which helped us young things to bond in mirth agin him? Well, where he was last night was on the telly, being snapped at by Paxman on Newsnight as he spoke up for the risible UK Independence Party. So this one-time would-be man of the theatre and scriptwriter who back then sported a dodgy moustache is now one of those 'fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists', as even Cameron denounced them back in 2006; more than that, he's the right-hand man of Nigel Farage, so embarrassing in his recent European Parliament attack on the president of the EU Council. It's official, then: for the Edinburgh class of 1980-84 Bannerman (who's added 'Campbell' to his surname thanks to a distant connection with the more famous liberal) IS Widmerpool from Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time.

On which note, and by no means unconnected to the English prejudices exposed in Maurice, let me leave you with a gem, Dan and Dan's 'Daily Mail song'. You'll need to go over to YouTube to see 'both' Dans, but the essential visuals are leftscreen. Enjoy.